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She stared at him with mounting frustration and the longer the silence stretched, the angrier she became. He might be the puppet-master but there were limits as to how tightly he could jerk the strings! She foresaw long, cosy conversations with his mother when her only response to any questions asked, aside from the most basic, would be a rictus smile while she frantically tried to think of a way out. She would be condemned to yet more lying just because he was too arrogant to throw her a few titbits about his past.
‘I don’t care what happened between the two of you. I just want to be able to look as though I know what your mother’s on about if she brings the name up in conversation. Why are you so...so...secretive?’
Damien was outraged that she had the nerve to launch an attack on him. Naturally there was a part of him that fully understood the logic of what she was saying. Undiluted time spent with his mother in front of an open fire in the snug would be quite different from more or less supervised snatches of time spent next to a hospital bed during permitted visiting hours. Women talked and it was unlikely that he could be a stifling physical presence every waking minute of the day. That said, the implicit criticism ringing in her voice touched a nerve.
Bill paid, he stood up and waited until she had scrambled to her feet.
‘Are you going to say anything?’ She reached out and stayed him with her hand. ‘Okay, so you’ve had loads of girlfriends. That’s fine.’
‘I was going to marry her,’ Damien gritted.
Violet’s hand dropped and she looked at him in stupefied silence. She couldn’t imagine him ever getting close enough to any woman to ask for her hand in marriage. He just seemed too much of a loner. No...it was more than that. There was something watchful and remote about him that didn’t sit with the notion of him being in love. And yet he had been. In love. Violet didn’t know why she was so shocked and yet she was.
‘What happened?’ They were outside now, heading back towards the hospital. Her concerns about going to Devon had been temporarily displaced by Damien’s startling revelation.
‘What happened,’ he drawled, stopping to look down at her, ‘was that it didn’t work out. I didn’t share the details with my mother. I don’t intend to share them with you. Any other vital pieces of information you feel you need to equip yourself with before you’re thrown headlong into my mother’s company?’
‘What was she like?’ Violet couldn’t resist asking. In her head, she imagined yet another supermodel, although it was unlikely that she could be as stunning as the one on the cover of the magazine.
‘A brilliant lawyer who has since become a circuit judge.’
Well, that said it all, Violet thought. It also explained a whole host of things. Such as why a highly intelligent male should choose to go out with women who weren’t intellectually challenging. Why his interest in the opposite sex began and ended in bed. Why he had never allowed himself to have a committed relationship again. He had been dumped and he still carried the scars. She felt a twinge of envy for the woman who had had such power over him. Was he still in touch with her? Did he still love her?
‘And do you bump into her? London’s small.’
‘Question time over, Violet. You now have enough information on the subject to run with it.’ Damien’s lips thinned as he thought of Annalise. Still hovering in the wings, still imagining that she was the love of his life. Did he care? Hardly. Did he bump into her? Over the years, with tedious and suspicious regularity. There she would be, at some social function for the great and the good, always making sure to seek him out so that she could check out his latest date and update him on her career. He never avoided her because it paid to be reminded of his mistake. She was a learning curve that would never be forgotten.
Violet saw the grim set of his features and drew her own, inevitable conclusions. He had been in love with a highly intelligent woman, someone well matched for him, and his marriage proposal had been rejected. For someone like Damien, it would be a rejection never forgotten. He had found his perfect woman and, when that hadn’t worked out, he had stopped trying to find another.
What they had might be a business arrangement, but everything he had ever had with every woman after Annalise had been an arrangement. Arrangements were all he could do.
‘I’ll get some appropriate clothes,’ Violet conceded. ‘And you can text me with the travel info. But, at the end of the week, it’s over for me. I can’t keep deceiving your mother.’
‘By the end of the week, I think you will have played your part and I will officially guarantee that your sister is off the hook.’
‘I can’t wait,’ Violet breathed with heartfelt sincerity.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE HOUSE THAT greeted Violet the following evening was very much like something out of a fairy tale. Arrangements for Eleanor’s transfer had been made at speed. Her circumstances were special, as she was the principal carer for Dominic, and Damien, with his vast financial resources, had made sure that once the decision to transfer was made, it all happened smoothly and efficiently.
In the car, Violet had alternated between bursts of conversation about nothing in particular to break the silence and long periods of sober reflection that the task she had undertaken seemed to be spinning out of control.
She was travelling with a stranger to an unknown destination, removed from everything she knew and was familiar with, and would have to spend the next few days pretending to be someone she wasn’t. If she had known what this so-called arrangement would have entailed, would she have embarked on it in the first place? Regrettably, yes, but knowing that didn’t stop her feeling like a sacrificial lamb as the powerful car roared down the motorway, eating up the miles and removing her further and further from her comfort zone.
While Phillipa was taking time out in Ibiza, doing very little in a tapas restaurant and no doubt enjoying the attention of all the locals as she wafted around in sarongs and summer dresses, here she was, sinking deeper and deeper into a situation that felt like quicksand, all so that her sister could carry on enjoying life without having to pay for the mistakes she had made.
‘Maybe she should have had her stint in prison,’ Violet said, apropos of nothing, and Damien shot her a sideways glance.
Locked in to doing exactly what he required of her, he could sense the strain in the rigid tension of her body. She would rather be anywhere else on earth than sitting here in this car with him. Naturally, he could understand that. More or less. After all, who wanted to be held hostage to a situation they hadn’t courted, paying for a crime they hadn’t committed? Yet was his company so loathsome that she literally found it impossible to make the best of a bad job? She was pressed so tightly against the passenger door that he feared she might fall out were it not for the fact that the doors were locked and she was wearing a seat belt.
There had been times over the past week and a half when some of her resentment had fallen away and she had chatted normally to him. There had also been times when, in the presence of his mother, he had touched her and his keenly attuned antenna had picked up something—something as fleeting as a shadow and yet as substantial as jolt of electricity. Something that had communicated itself to him, travelling down unseen pathways, announcing a response in her that she might not even have been aware of.
‘You don’t mean that,’ he said calmly.
‘Don’t tell me what I mean! If it weren’t for Phillipa I wouldn’t be here now.’
‘But you are and there’s no point dwelling on what ifs. And stop acting as though you’re being escorted to a torture chamber. You’re not. You’ll find my mother’s estate a very relaxing place to spend a few days.’
‘It’s hardly going to be a relaxing situation, is it? I don’t feel relaxed when I’m around you.’ When she thought about seeing him for hours on end, having meals in his company, being submerged in his presence without any respite except when she went to bed, she got a panicky, fluttery feeling in the depths of her stomach.
Without warning, Damien swerved his powerful car off the small road. They were only a matter of half an hour away from the house and the roads had become more deserted the closer they had approached the estate.
‘What are you doing?’ Violet asked warily as he killed the engine and proceeded to lean back at an angle so that he was looking directly at her. In the semi-darkness of the car, with night rapidly settling in around them, she felt the breath catch painfully in her throat. Apprehension jostled with something else—something dark and scary, the same dark, scary thing that had been nibbling away at the edges of her self-control ever since he had told her about Devon.
‘So you don’t feel relaxed around me. Tell me why. Get it off your chest before we reach the house. Okay, you’re not here of your own free will, but there’s no point lamenting that and covering old ground. It is as it is. Have you never been in a position where you had to grit your teeth and get through it?’
