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You’re being paranoid.
They walked towards her bungalow but when they reached it Bess stopped, caution—or fear—feathering her spine. She didn’t want Jack in her suite. She knew he’d take up all the space, not to mention his presence lingering later when she tried to sleep.
On impulse Bess turned aside, taking an unlit path towards the water. Jack followed the few metres until they reached the edge of the beach. It was breathtakingly beautiful, the stars bright in the velvety sky and the shimmer of the moon reflected on dark water.
It seemed sacrilege to mar the peace of this place with the ruin of their marriage but it had to be done. ‘You haven’t responded to my lawyer. Why?’
Under the trees his face was too shadowed to read but she felt the graze of his scrutiny. ‘You can’t really expect me to agree to a divorce without any discussion.’
Bess took a half step back, coming up against a palm tree. She anchored her hand against it.
‘Discussion won’t get us anywhere. We’ve already talked about what we want from marriage and I can’t go on the way we were.’
‘So you just walked out.’
Indignation warred with an undercurrent of guilt. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
She’d been tempted to leave Jack sooner except the night of their argument, their first and only real argument, he’d collapsed, running a high temperature as he succumbed to a virulent flu.
Yet she’d left as soon as he was well enough to care for himself. Because she was worried he might persuade her to stay if she lingered?
‘It felt like that. One minute you were feeding me paracetamol and hot drinks and fussing about whether I was comfortable. The next you announced you’d had enough and left. I didn’t even have the energy to follow.’
Her throat caught. ‘You’d have followed me?’
She hadn’t allowed herself to imagine that. It was the sort of thing a man would do if he reallycared. Jack wasn’t cruel but she’d increasingly come to realise, and he’d actually spelled it out to her, that theirs was no more than a transactional relationship. She would always be a commodity to him, an asset.
‘Of course I’d have followed. You’re my wife.’
The timbre of his voice was warm chocolate, lush and tempting.
He moved towards her, a creature of silver and shadow, a man so elementally attractive she felt a twist of arousal deep in her pelvis. Her nipples budded against silk as her breasts seemed to swell.
Excitement merged with despair at her instinctive reaction.
‘I missed you, Elisabeth.’
He’d missed her?Bess’s eyes widened.
It wasn’t something she’d imagined hearing from him.
He stood so close the balmy night grew warmer from his body heat. Or perhaps from the arousal flooding her body. She swallowed hard and leaned back, palms against the trunk of the tree behind her, trying to ground herself.
‘You don’t believe me?’
She shook her head, not because she doubted his word but because he’d astonished her. ‘I didn’t think you would.’
She’d expected him to be angry. Apart from anything else, he planned everything and for her to disrupt his life would be infuriating. But she’d convinced herself that while she’d been valuable to him she was hardly indispensable. He didn’t really need anyone to help him. People thronged to him, eager to be part of whatever he was involved in, and it seemed his new ventures were highly successful.
Jack’s eyes locked on hers. ‘Then you don’t know me as well as you thought. I had investigators combing Europe, looking for you.’
Bess saw he was serious. Of course he was, he’d never lied to her. On the contrary he’d always been honest, brutally so sometimes.
‘I wasn’t in Europe.’
She was so stunned at the idea of him searching for her she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She’d assumed he’d wash his hands of her. Especially once her lawyer contacted his about a divorce.
‘So I found out, much later.’
