‘Why didn’t you tell me about these?’ she asked shakily.
He had his hands stuck in the pockets of his grey trousers. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was right behind him, but she saw a broad shoulder lift and fall in a lazy shrug. ‘There never seemed to be an—appropriate moment,’ he replied very drily, referring, she presumed, to the fact that they’d started fighting almost from the moment he’d come into the room. ‘Do you still want to leave here?’ he asked suddenly.
She shook her head, tears blurring out her vision.
‘Good,’ he replied, but his tone was oddly flat and reserved. It held her back from running to him as she wanted to do. And there was a decided reticence about the slow way he straightened himself then came further into the room.
‘Those pictures are the reason I was away so long,’ he explained. ‘I had to go to London. To see your half-brother. We—talked,’ he said, after a small pause which suggested that they’d done a whole lot more than just talk. ‘About you, mainly. But also about the Cliché launch.’ Another pause, and again she received the odd impression that he was telling her all of this with constraint.
Was he still angry because she’d rejected him a few minutes ago? she wondered. Was he waiting for her to apologise, beg forgiveness?
‘Hanson had those mock-ups done for his first issue, but if you don’t want it splattered all over the world then we won’t do it.’ Another shrug and he had reached the end of the bed. ‘But…’
Ah, Annie thought, and stiffened, the cynical side to her nature recognising that there was usually a big ‘but’ to most things.
‘I had trouble convincing him of a few—provisos of my own before I would give permission.’
‘What provisos?’ she asked warily. She didn’t like this—she didn’t like any of it. She had just experienced the absolute beauty of discovering that the man she was in love with loved her too, yet the whole thing was being so thoroughly dampened by his manner that she was already beginning to doubt what her own eyes had told her those photographs claimed!
‘There are two envelopes on the table, Angelica,’ he pointed out.
‘Two?’ She glanced back at the table, then made a sound of surprise. He was right, and there were two! She hadn’t noticed.
‘It has to be sheer fluke that you opened the right one first,’ he then said drily. ‘Or I don’t think you would be standing there eating me with your beautiful eyes as you have been doing.’
Sarcasm, dry and taunting. It hurt.
‘Open it,’ he commanded.
She shook her head. She didn’t want to. There was going to be something horrible in that other envelope, or why else would he have said what he’d just said?
‘This is it, Angelica,’ he stated quietly. ‘The point where you learn you were right not to trust me. Open it,’ he repeated. ‘Open it.’
Reluctantly she pulled the other envelope towards her. Lips dry, fingers shaking, she opened the flap then slid the contents out.
No mock-ups this time, she noted on a sickly hot wave of disenchantment, but glossy seven-by-nines. Professional photographs—of Susie. Susie in white, wearing rubies. Susie in gold, wearing emeralds. Susie in black, wearing the most beautiful diamonds…Tears flashed across her eyes as slowly, shakily, with the silence growing thick all around her, she looked at each photograph in turn—a half-dozen of them in all.
‘No sapphires,’ she murmured finally.
‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘No sapphires.’
Hurt blue eyes flicked around to search out his. ‘Why not?’
There wasn’t a hint of emotion showing in those steady green eyes. ‘They’re yours,’ he reminded her quietly.
That was all he said, and, swallowing thickly, she looked away from him again. ‘Did you ever intend using me for this shoot?’
‘No.’ Just as quiet, just as lacking in emotion. She flinched.
‘You see, I promised Susie years ago that the next time I put a collection together she could show it,’ he explained in that same quiet, flat voice. ‘It isn’t her fault that I decided to use the Adamas name as bait to hook you, Angelica. That was my decision. Those pictures were taken weeks ago—well before Hanson made his decision to use you instead of Susie for his launch. I made that promise to her in good faith and I couldn’t, in all fairness, break it simply because I had made the damned thing so complicated.’
Which was why he had tried so hard to talk her round that day before he’d left, Angelica realised. And at last began to understand the full tangle that this web of conspiracy had got into.
‘She loves Hanson, dammit!’ he suddenly exploded when she showed no sign that any of what he’d said had got through to her. ‘And she believed that he loved her! On the strength of that love she’d constructed this great plan where he chose her to launch Cliché and she came up with the biggest scoop for his first issue he could possibly hope for! I’d even gone to London specially to be there when she did it!’ A sigh rasped harshly from him. ‘Have you any idea how deeply he hurt her when he chose you instead of her?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, because she was feeling a little of how that hurt felt herself right now. ‘Has Todd seen these?’ she then asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘He’s seen them. I took them with me to try to make him see some sense about Susie. He didn’t,’ he clipped. ‘The man is—’
Hurt, Annie put in silently when César cut the rest of the sentence off. Not that ‘hurt’ was what César had been going to say, she noted from the angry look on his face.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’ve offered him a deal whereby he can launch Cliché with our wedding—hence the mockups—’ he indicated them with his hand. ‘So long as he fronts Susie and the Adamas collection in his second issue.’
She said nothing, her blonde head bowed over the two different sets of photographs scattered on the table.
‘I’m sorry if you feel I have forfeited your feelings with this decision,’ he went on heavily after a moment. ‘But, being faced with the dilemma I had made for myself, I saw no other way out without hurting someone, and…’
My feelings were easier to hurt than Susie’s, she silently finished for him when he stopped, shrugging eloquently instead.
‘And Todd agreed?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He is considering my offer as we speak and is due here in a couple of days with his decision.’ Another sigh, and the atmosphere in the sunny room thickened a little more. ‘He already had a fair idea of what has been going on here, Angelica,’ he informed her. ‘We were caught by a Press photographer in that tight embrace when I poured the champagne over you the first night we met. The picture appeared in the paper the next morning.’
More bad publicity, she thought, and shuddered.
‘Hanson recognised me as the same man who had let him discover the Adamas identity that same night,’ he went on. ‘Almost immediately my real name DeSanquez struck a chord in his brain, connecting me with the Alvarez affair, and since then he has been tearing his hair out trying to trace where you’d been taken. He was worried about you,’ he huskily confessed. ‘Frightened because he had to suspect me of planning the whole thing for the purposes of revenge and…’ His expressive shrug acknowledged how accurately Todd had put the full picture together. ‘So I had to do some quick thinking if I was going to stop him from guessing the rest.’
‘And said—what?’ she asked, turning coolly to face him.
He was half leaning, half sitting on the edge of the dressing table, outwardly perfectly relaxed—if you didn’t notice the tell-tale nerve working in his jaw.
But his eyes were studiedly impassive as he continued. ‘I told him the truth,’ he answered simply, then almost immediately qualified that remark. ‘Or the truth as far as it was necessary, anyway.’ And the smile that played briefly around his mouth hinted at just which part he had left out. The big love scene—their big love scene. The one that had ripped a gaping hole in the Annie
Lacey persona. ‘Then I showed him the pictures of our wedding day and let them speak for me.’
‘And did they?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He smiled. ‘They speak loud and clear to anyone who looks at them, don’t you think?’
She refused to take him up on that one; there was still too much left to be said. ‘And Susie?’ she prompted. ‘What did you tell him about Susie’s involvement in it all?’
‘I told him that Susie knew nothing of what I had planned for you here,’ he stated flatly.
But her sceptical look made him sigh with impatience.
‘It’s the truth,’ he insisted. ‘Susie knew nothing! Which is why it is so unfair for her to pay the price for my sins. She loves Hanson!’ he declared. ‘And whatever slant you want to put on it your relationship with him did look suspect! She had a right to feel jealous, used, unfairly treated!
‘And, yes,’ he added before Angelica could say it herself, ‘she hated you for being what she saw as the woman who was wrecking her life on both personal and professional counts. But her hatred stopped short of plotting with me against you. I didn’t need her help to plot,’ he then said drily. ‘I am cunning enough to manage without the need of an accomplice.’
‘You threw that champagne over me deliberately,’ she pointed out.
His wry half-nod acknowledged it.
‘It was Susie who took great delight in telling Todd all about the embrace which followed,’ she added. ‘She knew exactly who you were.’
‘And that part, I concede, was a set-up. But only in as far as I promised to get you out of the way so she could talk to Hanson. As to the rest—she was then and still is totally in the dark!’
Did she believe him? Annie shifted restlessly. She wanted to believe him. It was easier on her pride to believe that Susie knew nothing of what had been planned on this island for her arch-rival Annie Lacey.
‘So, why are you telling me all of this?’ she asked carefully.
‘Because,’ he said quietly, ‘I need your support when Hanson gets here. I need you to help convince him that Susie is the innocent party in all of this, and that you really don’t mind that Susie has taken the Adamas scoop from you.
‘It’s important to her, Angelica,’ he added roughly, when her cool face gave him no hint at all as to what she was thinking. ‘It is important to Hanson that he is offered a way to—give a little where she is concerned! He is in love with Susie, but, as you once told me yourself, he is capable of never forgiving her if he truly believes she collaborated with me against you.
‘Please,’ he appealed, ‘in the face of what those mockups tell us, show a little compassion for someone less fortunate in love than yourself and back me up in all of this.’
She moved at long last, shifting out of her cool, still stance to turn back to the array of photo work littered across the table. Her fingers flittered across those of Susie and settled on one of César and herself. It was one in which the photographer had captured the moment when César had slid the rings onto her finger. His dark head was bent, his lean profile taut, his mouth straight and flat and grim. But the eyes were alive—looking at her while she looked at the rings—alive with a burning, helpless—
‘No…’ she whispered, beginning to gather up with trembling fingers every mock-up lying there. ‘I d-don’t care what you do with the Adamas thing. Susie can keep it. It doesn’t matter a jot to me. But—’ she turned, clutching the mock-ups possessively to her chest ‘—I won’t allow you to publish these, César. I won’t,’ she warned him defiantly. ‘I won’t let you make a public spectacle out of these!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘“A SPECTACLE”?’ César’s lean body came out of its casual resting position to shoot stiffly to its full, impressive height in affront. ‘What do you mean, “a spectacle”?’ he demanded. Then he added icily, ‘Are you saying that you look on our marriage as a joke?’
‘No!’ she sighed, wondering how a man with all his arrogance could be so damned touchy sometimes! ‘But look at these, César!’ she pleaded, her hand coming out shakily to offer the mock-ups. ‘Look how beautiful they are. How—special!’ she cried. ‘Too special to have them made a public mockery of!’
‘A mockery?’ His frown was dark, his face an angry map of puzzled indignity as he looked from her anxious face to the mock-ups then back again. ‘I don’t understand. Why should anyone want to mock them?’
‘Because out there I am still Annie Lacey the notorious man-eater!’ She spelled it out rawly. ‘And they’ll be shocked that you of all people would marry me!’
‘Who?’ he demanded. ‘Who, in your estimation, is that crass-minded?’
Her eyes closed briefly on a tense, tight sigh. ‘The Press,’ she said. ‘They can be so vicious when they get their teeth into someone—you know that! They’ll slay you the moment they see these photographs!’ Her chest heaved on a wretched indrawn breath.
‘Then they’ll dredge it all up again, replay the whole Luis Alvarez nightmare again. They’ll mock Todd for printing the wedding pictures of his long-term on-and-off lover—and you for being stupid enough to take me on! Th-then they’ll mention your sister,’ she concluded thickly, ‘and wonder how you could marry the woman who wrecked your own sister’s marriage!’
‘So you would prefer to hide our marriage away like some dark secret rather than face the world with what those pictures show as the truth?’ Sighing tightly, he came to take the mock-ups from her and tossed them contemptuously aside. ‘Is this your novel way of telling me I have misread our whole relationship?’ he said in a clipped voice.
‘No!’ She groaned at the interpretation that he had put on her words. ‘Our marriage was a very special moment in my life! Those pictures make it special because they say so much to both of us!’ Her eyes burned into him with a dark blue appeal. ‘You’re special to me,’ she told him achingly. ‘I’m thinking of you! I want to protect you! Not myself,’ she dismissed. ‘I couldn’t care less about what they want to throw at me. But—’
He laughed! He was scornful, but he actually laughed. ‘Do you mean,’ he enunciated in choking disbelief, ‘that you’re making all this fuss—for my sake?’ His hand snaked out, capturing hers so that he could tug her up against him. ‘Look at me, Angelica,’ he commanded grimly. ‘Look into this face and tell me what you see.’
She looked, her eyes pained with love and bright with the unshed tears of her own uncertainties.
‘Does this look like the face of a man who worries about what other people say or think about him?’ he demanded. ‘Does it?’
No, it did not. It looked like the face of a man hewn from the hardest, smoothest rock—a man as invincible as his Adamas trade-name implied him to be. The Spanish conquistador. The Apache chief. The face of arrogance personified.
The man she loved.
‘But your sister isn’t hewn from the same invulnerable mould as you, is she?’ she pointed out wretchedly.
‘Cristina?’ He frowned, then bit out, ‘To hell with Cristina. I’ve already spoken to her—told her the truth. She accepted it—painfully,’ he acknowledged on a small, tight grimace that said that the truth had not been easy to take. ‘But Cristina will be no problem to us. Unless,’ he then added with a sudden sparkling wry humour, ‘you allow for the way her guilty conscience will probably have her hounding you for the rest of her life—looking for her own redemption.’
‘You’re sure?’ she murmured uncertainly.
‘I am very sure,’ he huskily confirmed.
Her soft mouth quivered. ‘Then let go of my hand.’
‘Why?’ He frowned.
‘I need something.’
Reluctantly he let go. Instantly she stepped closer, her fingers sliding over his muscled shoulder and around his strong neck, searching for, finding and curling around his tail of hair, then she buried her face in his warm throat and sighed as if she’d just been saved from drowning.
He muttered something and gathered her possessively in. ‘
What made you suddenly do that?’ he asked tensely.
‘Do what you like with the pictures,’ she whispered into his taut throat. ‘Give them to Todd—don’t give them to Todd.’ Her lips slid a sensual caress across his skin. ‘I don’t care,’ she said. ‘You’re Adamas. Invincible. My rock. I’m marooning myself.’
‘Ah,’ he said, relaxing as he caught on. ‘So you are relinquishing all responsibility to me?’
‘That’s right.’ Her lips moved on to taste his chin. He needed a shave, so she stopped caressing and bit sensuously instead. ‘You say you don’t care what they throw at you, so—prove it. Publish and be damned, Mr Adamas,’ she challenged. ‘Let them throw the lot at you—you can take it.
‘I can just see the world headlines—SUPERMODEL ANNIE LACEY LANDS VENEZUELAN OIL BARON IN GRENADINE LOVE COUP!’ she quoted. ‘“The price for exclusive rights to her body, a five-million-dollar sapphire and diamond-encrusted necklace from the Adamas collection, no less!”’
‘Oh, please,’ he drawled, the sound deep and sensually amused. ‘GREAT GENIUS ADAMAS! I will not be upstaged by your supermodel status.’
She grinned, then stopped grinning to look seriously into his warmly laughing eyes. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ she asked softly. ‘That they’re going to have a field-day with all of this?’
‘Do I look as though I mind?’ he murmured lazily.
‘No,’ she pouted. ‘You look—’
She didn’t manage to finish that sentence because the look was transformed into action—an action that had them tumbling onto the bed and into a wild, hot, passionate morass of sensual rediscovery.
* * *
‘You were very rough on him,’ Annie remarked a few days later as they stood together on the lower veranda, watching the helicopter that had brought Todd to the island that morning take him away again.
Todd had arrived in a belligerent mood, still unforgiving of Susie and determined to get the exclusive on Annie’s marriage to César—without having Susie wearing the Adamas collection included in the deal.
The Morning After Page 16