‘Looking for absolution, Mr DeSanquez?’ she asked. ‘You won’t get it, you know,’ she warned him. ‘All you will do is discover that you are just like the rest of the human race—rarely looking beyond what you’re expecting to see.’
‘And you with your carefully prepared persona did not aid that deception?’ he countered.
Annie’s shoulders moved in a careless shrug. ‘I am in the business of selling things,’ she reminded him.
‘Using your notoriety to do it.’
‘A commodity you weren’t above exploiting yourself to help sell your precious collection. Which,’ she added before he could say anything else, ‘I accept entirely as part of my job. But it never occurred to you to look beyond the façade to the real person beneath.’
‘It wasn’t merely the false image which made you the woman I saw you to be, Angelica,’ he argued. ‘There were other, far more convincing factors which did that. Alvarez, for instance,’ he prompted quietly.
‘Alvarez’, she noted. Luis Alvarez had suddenly become the detached ‘Alvarez’ instead of the more familiar ‘brother-in-law’.
She almost smiled at the irony of it, only her stiff lips would not stretch to it. Instead she reached down to gather up a handful of pebbles from the side of her rock, then told him grimly, ‘I am not going to bare my soul to you just because you’ve happened to discover my darkest secret.’
‘It was not a dark secret, Angelica,’ he countered gently. ‘It was a sad one.’
Sad. A moment’s moisture spread across her eyes then left again.
It was more than sad. It was pathetic, she thought bitterly as her mind flew back to that dark period in her life.
At sixteen years old she had to have been the most naïve female alive. A child actress with a fresh-faced, angelic image that had made people sigh when they’d seen her on their TV sets playing a role that had grown from a single ad for breakfast cereal into a three-year-long concept of how every parent would want their teenage daughter to look and behave.
The first ad had begun simply, with her sitting in a homely kitchen with the morning sunlight beaming down onto her pale gold head. She had been dressed for school in a neat lemon and white striped uniform and her face had shown the horrors that the voice-over had explained she was experiencing with the onset of her first day at a brand new school.
‘Eat up,’ her TV mother had commanded gently. ‘Things won’t look half so bad on a full stomach.’
Reluctantly she’d pulled the bowl of crunchy flakes towards her, dipped in her spoon and forced the first mouthful down; the next had not been quite so slow, the one after that almost eager. By the time she had finished the whole bowl her face had firmed, her small chin lifting determinedly, her thoughts—via the voice-over—having become more positive with each mouthful.
The next episode had shown her coming home again, buoyant, alive, rushing into the kitchen to tell her mother about her first exciting day, and all the time she’d chatted the bowl had been coming off the shelf, the crunchy-flake box out of the cupboard, milk from the fridge. Then had come the blissful silence as she’d eaten, blue eyes shining, the voice-over explaining her instant success at her new school as she’d replayed it to her bowl of cereal.
Over the next three years her crunchy cereal, via the voice-over discussions she’d had with it, had solved all her teenage problems with a lesson well learned at the end of each ad, which had earned her the nickname ‘The Angel’.
The ads had been thrown up at other teenagers as perfect examples of good moral behaviour. She had been kind to animals, old people and small children. Parents had loved her, grandparents had loved her, small children had loved her—teenagers had hated her. Which was why she’d had so few friends of her own age—that and the fact that she’d lived with an aunt who had kept her strictly to heel when she had not been working or at school.
Losing Aunt Claire at the vulnerable age of nineteen had been like losing the linchpin that had held her unnatural life together. It had also preceded her spectacular fall from grace—a fall which had left her with two options only. Either she crawled away to hide in shame or she lifted her chin and outfaced everything that her critics had to throw at her. She had chosen the latter. And, with Todd’s support, countless surprise offers had flooded in to Lissa, her agent, for the kind of work which must have made her aunt turn in her grave.
It was only as César’s hand reached out to cover her own that she realised she was sitting there pressing damp pebbles between two tense palms as if she were trying to grind them into dust.
She looked down at that hand—big and dark, and seeming to promise so many things that she had learned not to trust. A hand that now knew her more intimately than any hand. The hand that had drawn from her a woman she hadn’t known existed inside her.
The hand of contempt, now the hand of consolation.
She pushed it away.
There was a moment’s silence, in which they both stared bleakly out to sea. Then, on a soft sigh that revealed an until now banked-down frustration, he requested brusquely, ‘At least tell me what Hanson is to you.’
‘Todd?’ She turned a glance on him, seeing for the first time how his shattered illusions had scored deep grooves of strain into his lean, dark face. He was not so calm and composed, nor was he finished with guilt and remorse, she added as his eyes caught hers and held, the sombre glow of regret dulling the usual incisive greenness. ‘Well, he’s not my lover, that’s for sure,’ she drawled with mocking irreverence, watched him wince, then turned her face away again to stare back out to sea.
‘He’s my half-brother,’ she announced.
Well aware that she had just delivered the biggest shock she could have done she selected one of the tiny pebbles in her hand and threw it into the ocean.
‘We share the same father,’ she extended, launching another pebble. ‘Though I didn’t find out about him until my aunt died.’ She paused, then added, tight-lipped and flatly, ‘Only she wasn’t my aunt. She was my mother.’
Another stone was launched into the clear blue water while she gave those few pertinent facts a chance to settle in the stunned air now surrounding them. Then she quietly began relating a story that she had never told anyone in her life before—though why she suddenly chose to tell this man was beyond her ability to understand.
‘Not once during the eighteen years I lived with her did she ever let me know that interesting little fact,’ she told him. ‘I had to wait until she was dead to discover our true relationship—via letters sent from Todd’s father to her, laying out ground rules for the lump sum he settled on us both which involved hear holding her silence about his name. Why she decided to include herself in that silence I don’t know.’ And will never know now, she added bleakly to herself. ‘But discovering that far from being the orphan I’d always believed myself to be I’d had not only a mother but a father as well sent me a little crazy for a time.’
‘You were hurt,’ he defended her gently.
‘And the rest,’ she said, and huffed out a sound of scorn. Hurt, angry, bitter, betrayed.
She hunched her body over her knees, a fresh handful of pebbles clenched in her fist.
‘I stormed into Giles Hanson’s office and began shrieking at him like a maniac,’ she went on after a moment. ‘I accused him of just about everything I could accuse him of, then set about telling him what I thought of him as a man.’
The word ‘man’ emerged with enough contempt to make any man wince. César winced.
‘I had just got to the part where I was telling him how I was going to reveal to the world how he and my mother had treated me when Todd came into the room.’
She turned to look at him then, her gaze skimming over his set, sober face. ‘Your eyes are the same colour as Susie’s,’ she remarked—quite out of context. ‘I should have made that connection a lot earlier than I did. And I’m surprised now that I didn’t.’
He glanced at her frowningly, not really understan
ding what she was getting at. ‘We have nothing else in common,’ he said, almost as if he was defending himself against a suspected insult. ‘The eyes are the only legacy.’
‘You think so?’ Her expression was curious and damning at the same time. But she didn’t elaborate, returning to the original subject instead. ‘I took one look at Todd and saw myself,’ she said. ‘The hair, the eyes…We are so similar, in fact, that I am amazed that no one else has ever made the connection.
‘Still—’ she shrugged ‘—I didn’t give a hoot about what he looked like then as I slammed into him as well as his father. He was shocked.’ She grimaced, remembering that look of pained horror on Todd’s face as clearly as if he were standing in front of her right now. ‘Shocked enough for me to realise through my rage that he, like myself, knew nothing about his father’s past indiscretion.
‘But it was he who calmed me down, he who shut his father up when he began spitting all kinds of threats back at me about what would happen if I did open my mouth. And it was Todd who led me out of there, took me to his apartment, let me pour out the whole dirty story all over again, then set about convincing me that I would do no one any good by making it all public, but could actually do a lot of harm.’
Her mouth tightened, eyes glinting at some bitter memory of then that could still hurt her now. ‘His mother really does suffer from a chronic heart problem,’ she said huskily. ‘And finding out about me would surely have killed her because she so foolishly believed that she had a marriage made in heaven.’ Her cynicism was so tight and bitter that even Annie wanted to wince when she heard it in her tone.
‘Todd didn’t care what the scandal could do to his father. But he did care about his mother. So did I, funnily enough,’ she admitted. ‘Having known what it felt like to be betrayed by just about everyone who should love you, I had no wish to put a sick woman through the same kind of hell. So—’ another of those expressive shrugs ‘—I found myself shut out in the cold again.’
‘Hanson shut you out also?’ César said in surprise.
‘I shut him out actually,’ she amended. ‘He had his loyalties, which did not include me or my feelings, so as far as I was concerned right then he could go to hell with the rest of them. I told you I’d gone a little crazy,’ she reminded him. ‘Anger, hurt, bitterness—you name it—’ she grimaced ‘—he got the lot since his father had delegated responsibility to his son.’
‘You say “his” father,’ César remarked. ‘But he was your father also.’
‘Not so you’d notice,’ she said. ‘Not so you’d ever notice,’ she then added tightly. ‘He died last year never having so much as mentioned my name. Ironic really,’ she tagged on ruefully, ‘that he should precede his ailing wife to the grave after all he had been prepared to do to me to protect a slowly dying woman from more pain.
‘Still—’ another shrug ‘—perhaps that was the price he had to pay for being such a callous, devious swine. I don’t regret his going, and I can’t say I have any regrets now that he never acknowledged me for what I was to him. He was just a man—’ again that contempt for men in general slithered into her tone ‘—like all the rest of them—vulnerable to his sexual urges but unwilling to accept the consequences of his weakness.’
‘So you paid him back for his rejection of you by becoming someone he could never acknowledge even if he did change his mind.’
‘The notorious Annie Lacey, you mean?’ A soft laugh that fell nowhere near humour left her dry lips. ‘Oh, no,’ she denied. ‘That honour goes to someone much closer to your home, Mr DeSanquez.’ She turned her cheek on her arms to look directly at him. ‘Luis Alvarez did that.’
He flinched but did not protest, and for a moment she studied the tight line of his profile, wondering how far ahead of her his mind had already taken him. It had to have skipped some way ahead on the simple knowledge that last night had given him. But how far he was willing to use his intelligence to work out the rest, she didn’t know.
He was proud—too proud for his own good, probably. That pride might not be willing to take the full brunt of all of this without him at least putting up a token objection—like that of sacrificing her feelings for that of his family.
She knew all about that kind of thing, had experienced it before. She turned away, deciding that it was up to him to indicate whether or not she continued this. The trouble was, she accepted as she launched another stone into the clear blue sea, that what she said was going to make him appear as gullible as a babe in arms, and she had a feeling he knew that too.
‘Please continue.’
He was going to take it all on board. Annie smiled grimly to herself.
‘I was nineteen years old,’ she reminded him, with the first hint of a wobble in her voice. ‘And until my aunt—stroke mother,’ she added deridingly, ‘died I had been kept pretty much to heel by her overprotection and the kind of job I did alongside normal schoolwork.’
Her hands wrapped themselves around her legs again, shoulders hunching in as if to protect her from some unseen evil. ‘And, as I told you, discovering all that dirt about myself sent me a little crazy for a time—discos, parties, anything to keep the bitterness away. Then I went to your party. It was your party, wasn’t it?’ She partly asked him, partly accused him.
He sighed heavily in answer, a nerve clenching at the side of his jaw. ‘I was in London on business,’ he explained. ‘I happened to see you on television—playing a cameo role in a big period drama…’
Annie nodded, knowing exactly what drama he was referring to. It had been the first real acting role she’d been offered—and it had turned out to be the last, because her life had blown apart not long after that drama had been shown on TV.
‘You were so beautiful,’ he murmured gruffly, ‘that I wanted to meet you. I knew the director. He promised to bring you to a party I was giving at my apartment.’
‘You weren’t there,’ Annie stated with an absolute certainty. She would have known, she was sure of it. She would know if this man was in the same hemisphere as herself.
‘I was called away on urgent business,’ he said, confirming his absence. ‘My sister and her husband were staying with me at the apartment. They offered to play host to my guests in my place, but Cristina was taken ill early on and apparently took to her bed, leaving Luis to play host alone.’
‘Which is why I met him there instead of you.’ She swallowed thickly, and lowered her face to watch her hand grind tiny pebbles in her palm again.
‘You were starving for affection.’ He turned his head to look at her with dark and sombre eyes. ‘He offered it. You grabbed at it desperately with both hands.’
About to throw her fistful of stones, Annie paused to stare at him. ‘You are joking, of course,’ she gasped. ‘He was old enough to be my father!’
César nodded. ‘The father-figure you had been deprived of all your life.’
That made her laugh, not humorously but with a wincing mockery. ‘He was a dissolute slob,’ she derided with contempt, ‘who tricked me into that bedroom then proceeded to attack me!’
She was on her feet suddenly, wiping her damp palms down her thighs in a tense, agitated kind of way that said she was reliving that dreadful moment in her life.
‘He would have succeeded in raping me too,’ she added thickly, ‘if his wife hadn’t walked in the room!’
And suddenly she was shaking, white-faced, the whole length of her slender frame from the top of her head to her curled toes trembling with a painful mixture of anger and sickening repugnance.
‘But if this is true—why did you not tell someone?’ He made a sharp, uncontrolled gesture of pained disgust that brought him jerkily to his feet. ‘Call in the police?’
For that Annie turned a withering look of contempt on him. ‘Are you really that naïve about your family?’ she cried. ‘Your sister was there, for goodness’ sake!’ She angrily drove home the point that he seemed to have ignored completely. ‘But did she care about me and
what I was being subjected to? Did she hell!’ The words scored across his steadily greying face. ‘She was too busy screaming in hysterics while the rest of your damned guests were falling over each other to get into the room to see what was going on!’
He muttered something beneath his tight breath, but Annie didn’t hear it; she was reliving her worst nightmare and it held her stiff and shaking.
‘I was labelled a cheap little tramp before I left your apartment.’ Her breasts heaved up and down on a forced breath. ‘No one bothered asking me for my side of the story. They just saw what they wanted to see,’ she said bitingly. ‘A nice juicy scandal where supposedly sweet Angel Lacey of all people was caught red-handed with another woman’s husband!’ She shuddered, feeling sick. ‘They saw what they wanted to see,’ she repeated thickly.
‘I’m—sorry,’ César dropped grimly into the throbbing silence.
She didn’t acknowledge him. ‘All I wanted to do was try to forget the whole ugly episode,’ she went on after a while. ‘Then the next thing I know I’m being cited as the other woman in your sister’s divorce and my name is being splattered all over the place! Who was going to believe my side of the story then, Mr DeSanquez?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘Two months after the event, who was going to believe that I was near-as-damn-it raped?’
His stark expression gave her the answer, and Annie grimaced bitterly. ‘So the sweet Angel Lacey fell swiftly from grace,’ she concluded, ‘and I became the notorious Annie Lacey instead—fit to be used for anyone’s convenience—including yours.’
He flinched; she accepted it as her due. ‘Now, if you don’t mind,’ she said more calmly, ‘I would like to leave here as soon as it’s possible.’ With that she turned to walk away.
But he stopped her, not by touch but with words. ‘Susie,’ he bit out grimly. ‘Why does Susie not know about your true relationship with Hanson? They have lived together—shared the same bed for six months! Surely some kind of trust should have evolved in that time?’
The Morning After Page 9