He caught up with her just as she had reached the bottom of the steps.
‘So, what are your types!’ Sarah swung round to glare at him, hands on her hips.
‘Types? What are you talking about?’
‘These women you go for?’
‘That’s irrelevant.’
‘Not to me it isn’t!’ Sarah stared up at him. She was shaking like a leaf, and she didn’t know why she was getting hung up on that one detail. He was right. It was irrelevant. What did it matter if he went for tall brunettes and she was a short blonde? What mattered was that he was dumping her. Throwing her out like used goods. Tossing her aside as though she was just something insignificant that no longer mattered. When he was everything to her.
She literally shied away from the thought of waking up in three days’ time in an empty bed, knowing that she would never lay eyes on him again. How on earth was she going to survive?
‘You need to calm down.’ He shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair, sweeping it back from his face. God, it was like an oven out here. He could feel the sweat beginning to gather on his body.
‘I’m perfectly calm!’ Sarah informed him in a shrill voice. ‘I just want to know if you’ve had fun using me for the past three months!’
She swung round, began heading towards the central clearing, where the circular reed huts with their distinctive pointed roofs were used as classrooms for the twenty local children who attended every day. Raoul didn’t teach. He and two of the other guys did brutally manual labour—building work in one of the communities further along, planting and harvesting of crops. He gave loads of advice on crop rotation and weather patterns. He seemed to know absolutely everything.
‘Were you just making the best of a bad job out here? Sleeping with me because there was no one else around to your taste?’
‘Don’t be stupid!’ He reached out and stopped her in her tracks, pulling her back to him and forcing her to look up.
‘I know I’m not the most glamorous person in the world. I know you’re probably accustomed to landing really gorgeous girls.’ She bit her lip and looked away, feeling miserable and thoroughly sorry for herself. ‘I knew it was odd that you even looked at me in the first place, but I suppose I was the only other English person here so you made do.’
‘Don’t do this, Sarah,’ Raoul said harshly. He could feel her trembling against him, and he had to fight the impulse to terminate the conversation by kissing that lush, full mouth. ‘If you want to know what kind of women I’ve always gone for, I’ll tell you. I’ve always gone for women who wanted nothing from me. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, but it’s the truth. Yes, they’ve been good looking, but not in the way that you are …’
‘What way is that?’ Sarah asked scornfully, but she was keen to grasp any positive comment in these suddenly turbulent waters. She realised with a sinking heart that she would be willing to beg for him. It went against every grain of pride in her, but, yes, she would plead for him at least to keep in touch.
‘Young, innocent, full of laughter …’ He loosened his fingers on her arm and gently stroked her. ‘That’s why I should have run a mile the minute you looked at me with those big green eyes,’ he murmured with genuine regret. ‘But I couldn’t. You summed up everything I wasn’t looking for, and I still couldn’t resist you.’
‘You don’t have to!’ Before he could knock her last-ditch plea down in flames she turned away brusquely and walked towards the clearing, adopting a position on one of the fallen tree trunks which had been left as a bench of sorts.
Her heart was beating like a jackhammer and she could barely catch her breath. She didn’t look at him as he sat down on the upturned trunk next to her.
The night was alive with the sounds of insects and frogs, but it was cooler out here than it had been in the stifling heat of the bedroom.
Eventually she turned to him. ‘I’m not asking you to settle down and marry me,’ she said quietly—although, really, who was she kidding? That was exactly what she wanted. ‘But you don’t have to walk away and never look back. I mean, we can keep in touch.’ She threw him a watery, desperate smile. ‘That’s what mobile phones and e-mails and all these social networking sites are all about, you know.’
‘How many times have we argued about the merits of throwing your personal life into a public arena for the world to feed on?’
‘You’re such a dinosaur, Raoul.’ But she smiled. They’d argued about so many things! Light-hearted arguments, with lots of laughter. When Raoul took a stand it was impossible to deflect him, and she had enjoyed teasing him about his implacability. She had never known anything like it.
‘And you’d be happy to do that?’ Raoul thought that if she were the kind of girl who could be happy with that kind of distant, intermittent contact then they wouldn’t be sitting here right now, having this conversation, because then she would also be the kind of girl who would have indulged in a three-month fling and been happy to walk away, without agonising about a future that wasn’t destined to be.
For a fleeting moment he wondered what it would be like to take her with him, but the thought was one he discarded even before it had had time to take root. He was a product of his background, and that was something he was honest enough to acknowledge.
Deprived of stability, he had learnt from a very young age that he had to look out for himself. He couldn’t even really remember when he had made his mind up that the world would never decide his fate. He would control it, and the way he would do that would be through his brains. Foster care had honed his single-minded ambition and provided him with one very important lesson in life: rely on no one.
Whilst the other kids had been larking around, or pining for parents that failed to show up at appointed times, he had buried his head in books and mastered all the tricks of studying in the midst of chaos. Blessed with phenomenal intelligence, he had sailed through every exam, and as soon as he’d been released from the restrictions of a foster home had worked furiously to put himself through college and then later university.
Starting with nothing, he had to do more than just be clever. A degree counted for nothing when you were competing with someone who had family connections. So he had got two degrees—two high-powered degrees—which he intended to use ruthlessly to get where he wanted to go.
Where, in his great scheme of things, would Sarah fit in? He was no carer and never would be. He just didn’t have it in him. And Sarah was the sort of soft, gentle person who would always need someone to take care of her.
Heck, she couldn’t even bring herself to answer his question! When she spoke of keeping in touch, what she really meant was having an ongoing relationship. How responsible would he be if he told her what she wanted to hear?
Abruptly Raoul stood up, putting some vital immediate distance between them—because sitting next to her was doing crazy things to his thoughts and to his body.
‘Well?’ he asked, more harshly than he had intended, and he sensed her flinch as she bowed her head. He had to use every scrap of will-power at his disposal not to go across and put his arms around her. He clenched his hands into fists, wanting to hit something very hard. ‘You haven’t answered my question. Could you keep in touch with me with the occasional e-mail? When you should be moving on? Putting me behind you and chalking the whole thing up to experience?’
‘How can you be so callous?’ Sarah whispered. She had practically begged and it hadn’t been enough. He didn’t love her and he never would. Why should she waste her time lamenting the situation? He was right. E-mails and text messages would just prolong the hurt. She needed to cut him out of her life and leave no remaining bits to fester and multiply.
‘I’m not being callous, Sarah. I’m sparing you the pain of building false hopes. You’re young, with stars in your eyes …’
‘You’re not exactly over the hill, Raoul!’
‘In terms of experience I’m a thousand years older than you, and I’m not the man you’re look
ing for. I would be no good for you …’
‘That’s usually the coward’s way out of a sticky situation,’ she muttered, having read it somewhere and thought that it made sense.
‘In this case it’s the truth. You need someone who’s going to take care of you, and that person is never going to be me.’ He watched her carefully and wondered if he would ever again be in the business of justifying himself to another human being. Walk alone, that was what he had taught himself, and you don’t end up entangled in situations such as this. ‘I don’t want the things that you do,’ he continued softly.
Sarah would have liked to deny that she wanted any of those things he accused her of wanting, but she did. She wanted the whole fairytale romance and he knew it. It felt as if he knew her better than anyone ever had.
Her shoulders slumped as she struggled to look for the silver lining in the cloud. There always was one.
‘I’m not equipped for playing happy families, Sarah …’
She eventually raised her eyes to his and looked at him coldly. ‘You’re right. I want all that stuff, and it is better for you to let me down so that I can have a fighting chance of meeting someone who isn’t scared of commitment.’ Her legs felt like jelly when she stood up. ‘It would be awful to think that I might waste my time loving you when you haven’t got it in you for the fairytale stuff!’
Raoul gritted his teeth, but there was nothing to say in response to that.
‘And by the way,’ she flung over her shoulder, ‘I’ll leave your clothes outside the bedroom door, because I’ll be sleeping on my own tonight! You want your precious freedom so badly? Well, congratulations—you’ve got it!’
She kept her head held high as she covered the ten thousand miles back to the house. At least it felt like ten thousand miles.
Memories of their intense relationship flashed through her head like a slow, painful slideshow. Thinking about him could still give her goosebumps, and she hugged herself as she jogged up the flight of stone steps to the front door.
In the bedroom, she gathered up some of his clothes and buried her face in them, breathing in his musky, aggressively male scent, then duly stuck them outside—along with his cases.
Then she locked the bedroom door, and in the empty quiet of the bedroom contemplated a life without Raoul in it and tried to stop the bottom of her world from dropping out.
CHAPTER ONE
CAUGHT in the middle of crouching on the ground, trying to get rid of a particularly stubborn stain on the immaculate cream carpet that ran the length, breadth and width of the directors’ floor of the very exclusive family bank in which she had now been working for the past three weeks, Sarah froze at the sound of voices emerging from one of the offices. Low, unhurried voices—one belonging to a man, the other to a woman.
It was the first time she had been made aware of any sign of life here. She came at a little after nine at night, did her cleaning and left. She liked it that way. She had no wish to bump into anyone—not that there would have been the slightest possibility of her being addressed. She was a cleaner, and as such was rendered instantly invisible. Even the doorman who had been allowing her entry ever since she had started working at the bank barely glanced up when she appeared in front of him.
She could barely remember a time when she had been able to garner a few admiring glances. The combined weight of responsibility and lack of money had rubbed the youthful glow from her face. Now when she looked in the mirror all she saw was a woman in her mid-twenties with shadows under her eyes and the pinched appearance of someone with too many worries.
Sarah wondered what she should do. Was there some special etiquette involved if a cleaner come into contact with one of the directors of this place? She hunkered down. In her blue checked overalls and with her hair scraped back under a matching scarf, she figured she might easily have passed for a heap of old clothes dumped on the ground, were it not for the elaborate trolley of cleaning materials by her side.
As the hushed voices got closer—just round the corner—Sarah put her all into the wretched stain on the carpet. But with a sinking heart she was aware that the voices had fallen silent, and the footsteps seemed to have stopped just in front of her.
In fact, sliding her eyes across, she could make out some hand-made Italian shoes just below charcoal-grey trousers, sharply creased, a pair of very high cream stilettos, and stockings with a slight sheen, very sheer.
‘I don’t know if you’ve done the conference room as yet, but if you have then you’ve made a very poor job of it. There are ring marks on the table, and two champagne glasses are still there on the bookshelf!’
The woman’s voice was icy cold and imperious. Reluctantly Sarah raised her eyes, travelling the length of a very tall, very thin, very blonde woman in her thirties. From behind her she could hear the man pressing for the lift.
‘I haven’t got to the conference room yet,’ Sarah mumbled. She prayed that the woman wouldn’t see fit to lodge a complaint. She needed this job. The hours suited her, and it was well paid for what it was. Included in the package was the cost of a taxi to and from her house to the bank. How many cleaning jobs would ever have included that?
‘Well, I’m relieved to hear it!’
‘For God’s sake, Louisa, let the woman do her job. It’s nearly ten, and I can do without spending the rest of the evening here!’
Sarah heard that voice—the voice that had haunted her for the past five years—and her mind went a complete blank. Then it was immediately kick-started, papering over the similarities of tone. Because there was no way that Raoul Sinclair could be the man behind her. Raoul Sinclair was just a horrible, youthful mistake that was now in the past.
And yet …
Obeying some kind of primitive instinct to match a face to that remarkable voice, Sarah turned around—and in that instant she was skewered to the spot by the same bitter chocolate eyes that had taken up residence in her head five years ago and stubbornly refused to budge. She half stood, swayed.
The last thing she heard before she fainted was the woman saying, in a shrill, ringing voice, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, that’s the last thing we need!’
She came to slowly. As her eyelids fluttered open she knew, in a fuddled way, that she really didn’t want to wake up. She wanted to stay in her peaceful faint.
She had been carried into an office and was now on a long, low sofa which she recognised as the one in Mr Verrier’s office. She tried to struggle upright and Raoul came into her line of vision, taller than she remembered, but just as breathtakingly beautiful. She had never seen him in anything dressier than a pair of jeans and an old tee shirt, and she was slowly trying to match up the Raoul she had known with this man kneeling over her, who looked every inch the billionaire he had once laughingly informed her he would be.
‘Here—drink this.’
‘I don’t want to drink anything. What are you doing here? Am I seeing things? You can’t be here.’
‘Funny, but I was thinking the very same thing.’ Raoul had only now recovered his equilibrium. The second his eyes had locked onto hers he had been plunged into instant flashback, and carrying her into the office had reawakened a tide of feeling which he had assumed to have been completely exorcised. He remembered the smell of her and the feel of her as though it had been yesterday. How was that possible? When so much had happened in the intervening years?
Sarah was fighting to steady herself. She couldn’t believe her eyes. It was just so weird that she had to bite back the desire to burst into hysterical, incredulous laughter.
‘What are you doing here, Sarah? Hell … you’ve changed …’
‘I know.’ She was suddenly conscious of the sight she must make, scrawny and hollow-cheeked and wearing her overalls. ‘I have, haven’t I?’ She nervously fingered the checked overall and knew that she was shaking. ‘Things haven’t worked out … quite as I’d planned.’ She made a feeble attempt to stand up, and collapsed back down onto the sofa.
In truth, Raoul was horrified at what he saw. Where was the bright-eyed, laughing girl he had known?
‘I have to go … I have to finish the cleaning, Raoul. I …’
‘You’re not finishing anything. Not just at the moment. When was the last time you ate anything? You look as though you could be blown away by a gust of wind. And cleaning? Now you’re doing cleaning jobs to earn money?’
He vaulted to his feet and began pacing the floor. He could scarcely credit that she was lying on the sofa in this office. Accustomed to eliminating any unwelcome emotions and reactions as being surplus to his finely tuned and highly controlled way of life, he found that he couldn’t control the bombardment of questions racing through his brain. Nor could he rein in the flood of unwanted memories that continued to besiege him from every angle.
Sarah was possibly the very last woman with whom he had had a perfectly natural relationship. She represented a vision of himself as a free man, with one foot on the ladder but no steps actually yet taken. Was that why the impact of seeing her again now was so powerful?
‘I never meant to end up like this,’ Sarah whispered, as the full impact of their unexpected meeting began to take shape.
‘But you have. How? What happened to you? Did you decide that you preferred cleaning floors to teaching?’
‘Of course I didn’t!’ Sarah burst out sharply. She dragged herself into an upright position on the sofa and was confronted with the unflattering sight of her sturdy work shoes and thick, black woollen tights.
‘Did you ever make it to university?’ Raoul demanded. As she had struggled to sit up his eyes had moved of their own volition to the swing of her breasts under the hideous checked overall.
‘I … I left the compound two weeks after you left.’
Her strained green eyes made her look so young and vulnerable that sudden guilt penetrated the armour of his formidable self control.
In five years Raoul had fulfilled every promise he had made to himself as a boy. Equipped with his impressive qualifications, he had landed his first job on the trading floor at the Stock Exchange, where his genius for making money had very quickly catapulted him upwards. Where colleagues had conferred, he’d operated solely on his own, and in the jungle arena of the money-making markets it hadn’t been long before he’d emerged as having a killer streak that could make grown men quake in their shoes.
The Secret Sinclair Page 2