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‘He was the only person I could trust in those early days. He was my friend!’ A true friend.
She gathered up the breakfast dishes with an angry clatter and dumped them on the drainer, her back to him as she snapped out, ‘Without his monumental kindness I’d have backed out of the whole thing. Without his patience and expertise I would have frozen rigid the first time the cameras pointed in my direction!’
She turned the hot water on with a savage twist of her wrist. ‘And I’d have missed out on the opportunity to give Mum an easier life, provide her with the things she’d never been able to afford to have.’ She swiped their uneaten food into the wastebin. ‘And because when Dad was with us we were always moving around Evie’s education had been as patchy as mine. So we could then afford a private tutor for her, right? And first-rate secretarial training later. So I owe all that to Guy. Right?’
She was angry enough to do him physical damage. She skittered round on her heels and faced him. There had been no need for him to use that sarcastic tone. What had Guy Maclaine ever done to him? She had already countered his wretched suspicion of an affair between them. Or didn’t he believe her?
The absence of trust had ended their marriage, but it hadn’t ruined their reconciliation because there hadn’t really been one. Just a cruel slaking of lust on his part and the obliteration of a stupid dream she’d had no right to indulge in on hers.
Or didn’t trust really come into it as far as he was concerned? When he’d found her with Guy on that dreadful night, might it have been the escape route he’d been looking for? Had he grown tired of her? Bored?
She spat the new and hateful suspicions at him, her hurt at the way he’d used her love for him last night not letting her hold anything back. ‘You want to believe I had an affair with Guy! It gave you the excuse you’d been looking for, didn’t it? You never questioned what he was doing at our apartment that night, did you? You just called me a vile name and walked out!’
‘If I’d stayed I wouldn’t have trusted myself not to wring both your necks!’ He was on his feet now, black eyes slits, tormented by the memories of the thing he was trying so hard to come to terms with. ‘I came back when I’d cooled down. You’d gone. Not to him, of course; he was still married. The note you left told me our marriage was over. I had to accept that—it made sense, after all.’
Bella stared at him, the pent-up emotions inside her making her shake. So little faith, and no trust at all.
She could have told him exactly why she’d been wrapped up in Guy’s arms, but she wouldn’t demean herself by offering explanations he wouldn’t believe. Possibly because he wouldn’t want to believe them.
‘Believe what the hell you like—I’m beyond caring!’ she ground out untruthfully, and, snatching her coat from the peg on the door, she walked out into the bright dawn of Christmas morning.
Jake forced back his instinct to go after her. She needed time to calm down. There was no doubt about it, he had a tigress on his hands.
There was a hidden emotional depth that he had never taken the time to plumb—that was going to change. If she’d agree to start over, he’d spend the rest of his life getting to know her. The real Bella, not just the fantastic face and body that had bewitched him from the moment he’d first seen her.
Keeping a watchful eye on her ferociously stamping progress up and down the cleared track, he methodically cleared up in the kitchen and lit a roaring fire. She’d come back inside when she’d got rid of all that fury.
And he’d treat her like s
pun glass, so gently, win her back to him.
The sensation of being at peace with himself at last flooded through him. He believed now that Evie had meddled with Bella’s life in a big way for the second time, with the help of his own sister this time. But that didn’t matter—or only inasmuch as he was back on course, trusting her not to lie to him.
What really mattered was the way he’d finally and suddenly come to terms with her infidelity.
He could easily understand how the affair had begun. Maclaine was attractive to women, and she’d been very young when he’d met her. And she’d been grateful to him for helping her to achieve the financial security she and her family had never known.
And later his own long absences, his dedication to his work, his thoughtless prevarication when she’d mentioned babies, telling her they’d discuss all that some time in the vague future, had eventually driven her back to her former lover—the man who, or so it now seemed, had given her one hundred per cent of his attention.
His shoulders were broad enough to carry all of the blame, and in the future—if she’d give them a future—he would provide her with everything she craved for. He’d sort that out as soon as they got away from here.
But until he could show her that his good intentions were more than the hot air and vague promises he’d carelessly tossed at her in the past, and could offer her the solid physical proof that everything had changed, he’d walk as if he were treading on eggs. He wouldn’t use their physical need for each other to blackmail her into being part of his life again.
The release from the canker of bitterness and anger was exhilarating. It had been nudged out of sight by the one great constant in his life—his love for her.
He crossed again to the window. Halfway down the track her slender body was dwarfed by the icy immensity of the snow-clad mountains. His heart surged with the determination to make their future as perfect as it could possibly be, keep her close to him, as much a part of his life as she was a part of his heart.
He prayed to God she’d give him a second chance.
When Bella walked back in, the scene was festive. Leaping firelight, sherry and two small tulip glasses side by side on the coffee-table, Jake fixing a strand of multicoloured fairy lights on the tree.
She felt as if she were on the outside looking in, a kid with her nose pressed to the window pane watching yearningly something it could never be part of.
‘You forgot to use the lights.’ Carefully Jake gave her the most casual glance, the smallest smile. He wouldn’t give her so much as a nudge towards the decision he was determined she would make when he’d put his own life in order.
‘I didn’t know how to fix them.’
If he wanted innocuous conversation she’d give it to him. Right now she felt too weary to fight him. She’d walked the rage out of her system and, although it would probably come back—trailing hurt and the feeling of being used and discarded—she was too drained at the moment to cope with anything other than the superficial.
