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There was a small silence. She caught a sharp glint of blue as he turned his head. ‘Unfortunately I didn’t have one on hand. It was on the list of optional extras, but I chose a submersible and a jet ski instead.’
Their eyes met and the intimacy of years earlier branched out, blossoming effortlessly, just like it had on the deck ofThe Argentum. She felt her heart thud inside her chest and wondered what would happen if she took his hand and told him that she didn’t want to talk any more. That there were other things they did better.
And then his eyes flicked away, and she wondered if she was losing her mind.
‘Seriously, you don’t need to worry. It’s what’s known as a quiescent volcano. That means it’s not active, but it’s still registering seismic activity.’
A bit like the man standing beside her, she thought, remembering that ripple of deep anger beneath the flare of frustration and resentment. Which made her either stupid or unhinged. After all, what kind of person went anywhere near a volcano, quiescent or not?
He guided her towards the stocky off-road vehicle that sat at the edge of the runway. As they walked towards the waiting car his fingers brushed against hers and she felt her skin pop, but if Gabriel noticed he gave no sign.
There was no traffic on the road, and soon they were climbing into the green hills. But it didn’t seem to matter how high or in which direction they went, the mountain still cast its vast triangular shadow across them.
For the next twenty minutes she forgot everything but the view from her window. Up close, the landscape looked almost extra-terrestrial, with its rippling outcrops of long-since cooled black magma. Then they swept round a corner and there was a crater-shaped lake, edged with swathes of delicate ferns the colour of parakeets and strange-looking trees with swollen, crepey trunks. She felt her heartbeat accelerate. It was the first time she’d had a sense of what the planet might have looked like before humans had begun to dominate it.
‘They’re called dragon trees.’
She frowned. ‘Is that because their trunks look like dragon’s legs?’
‘Good guess...’
His eyes rested on her face and she felt the darkness in the pupils shudder all the way through her.
‘But I’m afraid the truth is a little more far-fetched—as is often the case. Supposedly they got their name when Hercules killed the hundred-headed dragon guarding the garden of the Hesperides. Everywhere the blood spilled a dragon tree grew. Or so the myth goes.’
Hearing him speak, she felt that same dark magnetic pull as earlier. It was no wonder she had fallen for him. Fallen for his stories. This was a man who could make a tree sound sexy. And she was here with him, on a clump of volcanic rock, with nothing but hundreds of miles of sea in every direction. And there was nothing she could do about that now.
The road gave a tiny, sharp twist to the left and she felt the car slow. It was too late to do anything. They had arrived.
She stared in silence at the rugged grey stone house in front of her. Oaklands, her childhood home, was beautiful, but like most big country houses in England it was designed to be the jewel in the crown of its parkland setting. This house was different. It looked as if it had been birthed from the land, with the mountain soaring into the clouds behind and in front the wild green curves of vegetation tilting away to the Atlantic.
Inside, the Quinta dos Louros had little in common with Oaklands’ chintzy, antique-filled interior. Someone—possibly Gabriel, more likely some expensive designer—had decided to let the scale of the rooms and the light seeping in from the ocean speak for itself, and the result was a masterclass in sophisticated simplicity that was as beautiful and cool as its owner.
His housekeeper was waiting in the hall, and after a quick meet-and-greet—her name was Sara—Gabriel took her on a brief tour of the house, including her bedroom. Finally, he led her back downstairs into a sitting room the size of a tennis court.
She turned a slow, admiring three-hundred-and-sixty-degree circle. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said truthfully.
Everything felt balanced, calm and comfortable, so that she had the oddest feeling—almost as if she had come home. Although she had never once felt like that walking into Oaklands, she thought with a jolt. There was always an edge inside her whenever she went home—a pulse-skipping apprehension about whether she would find Oscar and Olivia sniping at each other over the dining table or her mother weeping alone in her bedroom.
Just thinking about it made her spine snap to attention. She’d hated everything about those rows. The weave of tension beforehand. The sickly swell as the accusations and counter accusations had started, building to the actual row itself. Mostly pointless. Often vicious. Always exhausting. And then, the worst part of all, the terrible aftermath when all the things that shouldn’t have been said lingered in the shadows.
Now, as her eyes flicked to the sunlit corners of the room, she realised that she had no idea how long she had been standing there in silence, and that Gabriel was staring at her, the blue in his gaze bright and sharp in a way that made it hard to breathe.
‘Take a seat,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve asked Sara to bring us some coffee.’
Gabriel waited until Dove had sat down on one of the pale green linen sofas, then dropped into his favourite armchair—the one which offered up an uninterrupted view of the Atlantic. But today his eyes were resting on Dove’s face, because even an ink-coloured ocean that covered twenty percent of the earth’s surface seemed to fade into insignificance beside her pearlescent beauty.
She looked tired and on edge, he thought. A week ago that would have pleased him immensely. But a week was a long time in business—particularly, it turned out, when you were working with the woman who had broken your heart. Long enough for the countless things he had taken for granted to become not quite so cut and dried.
Some, he’d discovered, were simply not true. Having worked alongside her for five days, he knew now that she wasn’t the talentless, entitled heiress to the family firm he’d imagined her to be. She was diligent, disciplined, and good at her job. In another lifetime he wouldn’t have hesitated to offer her a job with the Silva Group.
But it was the past—their past—that seemed to be shifting before his eyes like the shards of mirror and glass in a kaleidoscope. Only how was that even possible? The past was history. Unchangeable, fixed, immutable.
And yet this morning he’d felt himself waver. Just for a moment he’d let her get inside his head, and for a few half-seconds he had questioned what he knew to be true. Even questioned himself. That was why he had agreed to talk to her—so that he could pin her down, refute every single one of her lies and exorcise her from his blood once and for all.
Of course, that didn’t explain why he’d needed to bring her all the way here.
Gritting his teeth, he ignored that little voice inside his head, just as he ignored the flicker of heat that danced across his skin every time she walked in or out of a room. Every day he was ignoring more and more. Soon he would be like one of those sightless creatures that lived in the darkness of the Mariana Trench.
