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She had never noticed. Never realised.
But then she had never noticed that everything she had thought true about Xavier Lauran had been a lie.
It had been staring her in the face, and she had never realised.
I thought it was chance that brought him to the casino. I thought it was desire that made him want me. I thought—
She broke off. She must not think. That was forbidden to her now. Nor must she feel. That, above all, she must not do.
She hefted the suitcase off the carousel. Then she trudged towards the customs exit to make her heavy, dead-footed way down into the Underground station. All around her, familiar English voices told her she was back in Britain.
On the train she sat in a near empty carriage, huddled in her seat like a wounded creature. Mortally wounded.
As she emerged into the glaring sunlight from the bleak South London tube station, the outer skin of her life slid back over Lissa like a glove she had scarcely removed. The unlovely streets of this poor district were still the same as they had always been. Her dingy flat had not changed, merely looked dingier than ever. The trains still rattled along a few yards from the rear windows, the curtains were still shabby, the mismatched furniture was still cheap and chipped.
It was as if she had never left.
There was one more task to be done before her old life closed over her again completely.
Dully, with leaden fingers, she got out her mobile. It would be early still in the States, but she could not help it. This was something she had to do. She had no choice. Xavier Lauran had given her none.
Slowly, heavily, she tapped out Armand’s number.
Xavier was travelling.
Paris, Munich, Vienna. Then Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Manila. On to Australia, New Zealand. Back to Cape Town, Jo’burg, Nairobi, Cairo.
He did not stop. Did not pause. Three continents in three weeks before arriving back in Europe. And still he did not want to stop.
‘He must needs go that the devil drives.’
Who had said that? He did not care. The devil was driving him. An army of devils, driving him on, on, with whips of red-hot wire. He worked—filled his mind with work, with business, with meetings and reports, figures and facts, surveys and budgets, plans and forecasts. It did not matter what. It mattered only that he did not think, did not feel about anything except work, business.
He saw no one. No one outside those colleagues or business associates it was necessary to see. On his travels he lived in hotel rooms, accepting no invitations, going nowhere except on business.
He cut himself off from everyone outside his work. Friends, family—above all family.
He did not contact Armand. All communication with him in respect of XeL he left to others. Armand was in America still, and that was all that was important. That and the fact that Lissa Stephens had made no attempt to join him. His security reports on her—reduced to the briefest comment ‘no movement beyond London’—assured him of that. What she was doing, so long as she was not with his brother, he did not care.
Would not care.
Because she had ceased to exist. Ceased as absolutely as if she never had existed. Had never sat beside him, looking like a cheap tart, while he deliberately lost money at the roulette table. Never stood in the rain on a wet London street, waiting for a bus he had deliberately made her miss. Never dined with him at a hotel for an evening he had deliberately engineered.
And never left that breathless, garbled message for him telling him that she was now free to have an affair with him.
Never made a fool of him—the fool to end fools.
His hands clenched, spasmed and painful. Forcibly he made them untense.
How had he let it happen? Let her make such a fool of him?
She had been so convincing. Letting him think that whatever had happened between her and Armand it was all over and she was free. Free to let him take her with him, to spend that time on the island—that false idyll that had, for her, merely been filling in time until Armand proposed to her.
He told me he would, and he did.
And she had accepted. Without a moment’s hesitation or pause. Without the slightest sign of compunction or guilt that, even as she gave him her happy assent, her lover was in the bed she had just vacated.
Xavier’s face contracted.
