by Julia James
Emotion flashed in his eyes. ‘You ask why? Did you think I wouldn’t want to track you down—find you—after your solicitors had been in touch with me?’
She was trying to get control back but her mind was all to pieces. She was speaking without thinking, without conscious volition. All her consciousness was on Leon’s presence here.
So close …
Every sense was leaping in her body, overwhelming her.
I thought I’d never see him again.
But he was here—now—dragging her gaze to him so he dominated her vision, and she could see nothing else at all except Leon. She could feel her heart going like a sledgehammer, her legs weak with shock. With more than shock.
His face was stark, his cheekbones etched like knives.
‘You gave me Harford.’
His words fell into the silence. A silence she could not break. She could only stand there frozen, immobile, incapable of speech, or thought, or anything at all other than a reeling of her mind that he was here. Leon was here …
‘Why?’ His question bit into the air. ‘Why did you do it, Flavia?’
She took a ragged breath. ‘I had to do it.’
His face darkened. But she did not let him speak.
‘I had to do it because it was the only thing I could do. All I could think to do.’ She took another shuddering breath, her eyes anguished. ‘To try and make amends to you for what I did. For deceiving you. Using you. I behaved unforgivably—I know I did. And I am more sorry for my behaviour than you can ever know.’ She could hear her voice catch dangerously, and knew she had to plunge on. ‘Gifting Harford to you seemed to me all I could do to attempt to make amends,’ she said awkwardly. ‘It wasn’t actually much of a gift, because of the debts on the property, but I knew you would clear something once they’d all been paid, and … and I didn’t have anything else to give you.’
‘Debts?’ His voice was blank.
‘Yes. I knew the taxman would want his share for death duties.’ She took a difficult breath. ‘And that the other claimant would have to be paid back, too.’
His dark eyes were levelled on her. Still expressionless. She bore their weight pressing down on her, trying not to collapse beneath it. She could feel the pulse at her throat throbbing.
Why had he come here? What for? She’d done what she could—all that she could!—to show him how much she regretted what she’d done to him at her father’s behest. So why had he tracked her down. Just to get her to spell it out to him like this?
‘The other claimant?’ His words echoed hers, but heavily, like stones. He paused. ‘You mean, of course, your father?’
Her lips pressed together again. ‘Yes, my father. I’m sorry about that, Leon, because it was a vast amount of money I owed him. But there was nothing I could do. The loan agreement was watertight. I had it checked, and there was no way I could get out of having to repay that final sum because of the rate of interest.’
‘The one set by your father?’ The same blank, heavy voice.
She nodded, swallowing. ‘Yes. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re sorry?’
He seemed to be echoing everything she said—echoing it as if each word weighed a ton.
‘Of course I’m sorry! That debt to him ate into the value of the house hideously.’
‘Yes, it did.’ He paused, and she felt the world still for a moment. Then he spoke again. His voice sounded distant, remote. ‘One might wonder,’ he said, ‘just why your father should have set such a rate of interest in the first place. Considering the loan was to his mother-in-law.’
‘He didn’t care for her,’ said Flavia.
‘So one might surmise, from the terms and conditions of the loan,’ Leon commented. ‘Had she done something to injure him that he set such terms?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘But there was no love lost between them.’
‘Evidently.’ Leon’s voice was dryer than the Sahara. ‘And yet one might think it reasonable to suppose—’ his voice was deadpan now ‘—that once his own daughter had inherited Harford that ruinous debt would be instantly lifted. Why would he want his own daughter to owe him money like that? What father would want that? What devoted, loving father? Because he is devoted to you, Flavia—he’s told me so himself! Several times! So devoted, he assured me, it was his money that kept Harford afloat!’
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His eyes were like weights on her, crushing her into the ground.
‘Except that it didn’t, did it? In fact it almost sank like a stone. That debt was hanging round your neck like a lead weight! The house you’d inherited after the death of your grandmother—who died, Flavia, forty-eight hours after you left Palma, whose funeral was the day I confronted you at Harford after what your father had told me—’
His voice was no longer dry. It was no longer expressionless. It was filled with a black, murderous rage.
‘You,’ he bit out, ‘are now going to tell me the truth! Finally and comprehensively. And you are not going to escape this—do you understand me? Because I have been through months of hell trying to find you, and I will not go through one more hour! Not one!’
She was staring wide-eyed, stricken. ‘Leon, please …’ Her voice was strained, low-pitched. ‘I’ve done what I can to make amends—it’s all I can do. I did what I did and I can’t undo it. I know it was unforgivable, and I hate myself for it, but giving you Harford seemed to me the only thing I could do! It was because of Harford that I did what I did, and handing it over to you seemed the only way to try and show you just how sorry I am that I behaved as I did! It was shameful and despicable and dishonest, and you didn’t deserve it!’
He was looking at her. ‘And you did—you did deserve it? Is that what you’re telling me?’
There was something in his voice that told her he was keeping himself on a very tight leash. Then he shook his head, giving a short, rasping sound in his throat.
‘God Almighty, Flavia—why didn’t you just tell me?’ The question burst from him, tearing into his throat.
She could only go on staring, open mouthed. ‘Tell you what?’
He swore—she couldn’t understand the words, only hear the angry emotion.
‘Tell me just why you got back in touch with me after you’d left London! Tell me how your father was threatening to foreclose on you and sending over an estate agent to scare you! Tell me—’ his voice shook ‘—that you’d been nursing your grandmother, and how frail she was, and how you got called back from Palma because she was near death! That’s what you didn’t tell me—and I don’t know why the hell you didn’t!’
He took a sharp, biting breath. ‘And I don’t know why in hell you thought you had to gift me your home because you felt you owed it to me!’
She forced herself to her feet, forced her mouth to open. Forced herself to tell him. Spell it out for him.
‘Leon, I deliberately and calculatingly started an affair with you because I wanted to save Harford. Nothing can make that not true! Why I had to save Harford doesn’t matter! How can it? I used … sex—’ she stumbled over the word but made herself say it anyway ‘—to stop my father foreclosing on that nightmare loan he’d made to my grandmother, which he was using to make me do what he wanted: use sex to keep you sweet, just as you accused me of doing! He wanted the rescue package from you. He didn’t want anything jeopardising it—so if you wanted me in your bed, my God, he’d see to it that it happened!’
Her face worked but she made herself go on. Forced herself.
‘I told myself I didn’t have a choice! That I had to do what he wanted because I knew how devastated and distressed my grandmother would be, in her frail mental condition, if she had to leave Harford. So I got back in touch with you and let you take me out on dates—let you … let you take me to bed! And I knew it was wrong—knew my father was pimping me out to you—but I went along with it! I used sex to get what I wanted!’ Her voice rasped bitterly. ‘And to think I used to despise Anita for doin
g that—I was doing exactly the same thing!’
He was looking at her strangely. ‘That’s what you think, is it? That you’re as bad as Anita?’
‘Yes! How could I be any different from her?’
‘How about,’ he said tautly, ‘because your motivations were somewhat different from hers? You wanted to save your home and you didn’t want your grandmother to lose hers! The home your own father had saddled with iniquitous debt just so that he could blackmail you into doing what he wanted!’
He stopped, his eyes resting on her. Implacable. Drilling into her. Giving her nowhere to hide.
‘And there’s another difference between you, isn’t there? Isn’t there, Flavia? Don’t try and deny it to me! Don’t try and pretend to me that what we had together from that first night, our whole time on Santera, was only because you wanted to save your home!’
She closed her eyes in anguish, unable to bear that merciless gaze drilling into her.
‘That made it worse,’ she whispered. ‘Agonisingly worse! To be so blissfully happy with you and yet to know that I was with you only in order to save Harford! I felt so guilty about it—but I couldn’t tell you. How could I? Because I wasn’t brave enough! I couldn’t bear to have you look at me and know what I’d done, what I’d stooped to! And it wasn’t only you I felt guilty about.’
Her voice dropped even more, became even more strained. ‘I felt so guilty about my grandmother! There I was, so blissfully happy with you on Santera. I’d just abandoned my grandmother! When I got that phone call from her carer, telling me she’d had a sudden deterioration and was sinking fast, it was like a knife in my heart! While I was with you my grandmother had given up the last of her will to live—I’d abandoned her when she was at her weakest! I was with you and my grandmother was dying! If I had stayed at home with her she might never have deteriorated like that—’
Her eyes flew open. ‘Guilt—guilt—guilt! It’s all I could feel! About you, about my grandmother—however I twisted and turned. Guilt, guilt, guilt!’ She gave a long, exhausted sigh. ‘When you arrived at Harford the day of her funeral, and threw in my face what my father had said to you, I couldn’t defend myself. I was exactly what you said I was. And there was no way out of it. No way.’
She inhaled heavily, lifting her head to look at him. ‘Except to try and make amends to you in the way I did. It had been trying to save Harford that had made me do what I did. So giving you Harford was the only way I could try and clear up the mess I’d made—salve my conscience. Absolve me from the guilt I felt.’
She fell silent, just staring at him. Drained. He went on standing, just looking at her.
‘Guilt,’ he said. ‘That’s a word you use so much. But I am amazed …’ He paused, then continued. ‘Amazed you even know what the word is. His eyes were resting on her, completely unreadable. ‘It’s a word that seems totally and completely unknown to your father!’
His eyes flashed suddenly, and Flavia felt herself reel at the fury in them.
‘My God, I always knew the man was unscrupulous—his business dealings showed me that! But to do what he did to his own daughter! And then—’ his voice twisted in disgust ‘—to prate to me and pretend he doted on you!’
She gave a painful shrug. ‘It was part of the act he always put on when he got me to go up to London—he’d lent me money for a hip operation for my grandmother, and in return I had to go and stay with him sometimes, act as his hostess and all that. I hated it!’
‘That’s why you were so hostile and prickly all the time?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Especially to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because your father had made it clear you were supposed to be “nice” to me?’
‘Yes.’
She was answering monosyllabically because it was all she could do. She could feel the tension ratcheting up in her. Feel his dark eyes resting on her. Unreadable—so unreadable. She wanted out of here. There was no purpose now—none at all—in being here any longer. She’d said everything to him—confessed everything to him. He was free to go now—surely he was free to go? There was nothing more to confess.
Nothing more?
She felt the accusation swirling inside her—whispering, dangerous.
Liar …
No! There was nothing more she was going to confess to him! Dear God, she’d laid bare everything—the sordid truth of her relationship with her father, what he had got her to do and how he’d got her to do it. Told him about how twisted up she’d felt about her grandmother—about the time she’d spent with him on Santera! There was nothing else to confess to him—nothing!
But still that voice inside her whispered—liar …
He was speaking again, the words brushing like acid against her defenceless flesh.
‘And so had it not been for your father’s manipulation of you—had it not been for your concern over your grandmother—you’d never have had an affair with me? Even if your grandmother hadn’t been old and frail and dependent on you, you’d never had had an affair with me? Would never have had anything to do with me? Would have been totally indifferent to me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Liar.’
Who had said the word? Him or her? She stared at him.
‘Liar,’ Leon said again softly. ‘If you had met me with no connection to your father, and if you had had no responsibilities towards your grandmother, what would you have done?’
His voice was changing, sending ripples of electricity trickling along the endings of her nerves. She could feel her pulse beating—insistent, strong.
‘I’ll tell you what you would have done, Flavia.’
He stepped towards her, cupped his hands around her face. She could feel her skin flush with heat.
‘This,’ he said.
His kiss was soft. As soft as velvet. His lips caressed hers and she could feel her limbs dissolve, feel her heart leap. Her mouth opened to his, her arms wound around him, clinging and clinging and clinging to his strong, hard body.
Oh, dear God, it was bliss—bliss to have him kiss her again. Leon—her own Leon—the way he had before—the way he was doing now.
He tore his mouth away, his fingertips pressing into her skull, holding her, gazing down at her. His eyes were lambent.
‘This is the truth, Flavia! This is what you could never deny—and this is what absolves you! Just as the fact that you did what you did not for yourself but out of love and care for your grandmother! You couldn’t hide the truth about this—what there is between us—whatever the foul machinations of your father, whatever your sense of guilt about yourself! When you left me, and when your father had fed me his poison about you, it gutted me to think that the time we’d had together had been based on nothing more than an attempt to use my desire for you for your own venal ends! I saw you then as what I’d feared you were when I first met you—a pampered, idle female who was happy to live off her father’s wealth. On Santera I thought I’d got that completely wrong—because you truly seemed happy in such a simple place, happy only to be with me! Then afterwards I thought that was the lie—and it gutted me! Gutted me because I’d thought—’
His voice choked suddenly, and Flavia could feel her arms tightening around him instinctively, protectively.
‘I’d thought you were feeling about me what I had come to feel about you.’ His gaze, dark and glowing, poured into her. ‘But that time on Santera was true—wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? That was the true time between us—away from your father’s machinations, away from your concerns about your grandmother—just you and me together. Happy. Blissful.’ He used the word she’d used fondly, smilingly.
Lovingly.
That was what she could see in his face now. Impossible to deny—impossible to hide.
As impossible for him to hide it as it was for her …
‘I made such a mess of things,’ she whispered.
He shook his head. ‘It was an impossible situation.’ He took a
heaving breath. ‘I only wish that you had told me on Santera about what your father was truly like, about how you were the carer for your grandmother, about the way he was holding that debt over your head—I just wish you had told me all that.’
‘I didn’t dare to. I was scared you might be so angry you would call off the deal with my father, and then in revenge at my spoiling things for him he’d foreclose on that debt anyway! And my grandmother would still have lost Harford! So I didn’t dare tell you—I didn’t dare!’ She took a shaking breath. ‘And I didn’t want to tell you—didn’t want you looking at me knowing I’d let my father pimp me out to you.’
He shook her—gently but angrily. ‘You did it for your grandmother! Did you think I would condemn you for that?’
‘I was scared you might! And I didn’t want to lose what we had because … because I knew it couldn’t last. I knew I had to go back to my grandmother, that I wasn’t free to have a relationship with you. So I … I just blotted it all out, blanked it all out.’
He kissed her softly. ‘Never again. You understand me, Flavia?’ he said admonishingly. ‘From this moment on you trust me—you trust me with everything! I can’t go through again what I’ve been through—wanting you from the first moment I saw you, being endlessly rebuffed by you, then you bolting from me and leaving London the way you did, having to tread on eggshells to win you, and then—dear God—losing you again after Santera and all the hell that came afterwards. Missing you, mistrusting you, accusing you and hurting like hell every moment of that time!
‘And then the bombshell of the title deeds of your home landing on my desk! Telling me, once I’d found out from your solicitors, not just about the ruinous debt your father held over you, but about how you’d been your grandmother’s devoted carer and how recently she’d died—all that slamming into me like punches to my gut. I’d been totally, totally wrong about you, about my accusations! I set off to try and find you after you’d yet again disappeared off the map! Hell, Flavia—nothing but hell! Right up till today,’ he said feelingly, ‘when I phoned this place and finally tracked you down!’