His interest had only really perked up when he discovered that she was going to marry Tony; then he’d jumped in quickly to stake his claim and try to break them up. It was terrible to think that he only wanted her because someone else did, but she couldn’t come up with anything better.
In letting Matt get close to her again, it wasn’t only a second dose of hurt she was inviting; there was something else. Could she honestly contemplate letting a decent man like Tony go, a solid man who would give her a good and durable marriage, in favor of some short-term sparkle? It was true that Tony was still Matt’s paler reflection, lacking his strength of character, but he was young yet, only a year older than she was herself. In another ten years, who knew but that he wouldn’t match up to Matt in every way.
Her thoughts ran back to the accusation that Matt had flung at her, about playing with fire when she got involved with Tony, saying that she had only been drawn to Tony because she had hoped Tony would lead her back to him. She had denied that emphatically, but had she been right to do so?
She might have been attracted to Tony because he looked a lot like Matt, but that was another matter entirely and totally acceptable. People did tend to go for the same kind of looks and coloring in their search for a partner. Women were said to have a preference for men who resembled their fathers. Her father had been dark-haired, like Matt and Tony. And fair-haired men had never appealed to her much.
She found herself harping again on Matt’s debasing allegation that she had only encouraged Tony because she’d thought the relationship would bring her in contact with Matt again. She couldn’t shrug it off; she wasn’t going to have any peace of mind until she’d worried it through to the end. It was as distasteful to her as thinking that Matt only wanted her now because Tony did, yet she couldn’t say there was no truth in it, even if only at a subconscious level. It cast her in a most unfavorable light; she wouldn’t have thought herself capable of such underhanded dealing. But that apart, was it something to bother about? Even if Matt had been on her mind when she had first encountered Tony, she had come to like and love Tony for himself, and surely that was all that mattered.
Love was gentle and caring. Infatuation could outshine it every time. She had to be strong about this. She couldn’t let the feelings she experienced with Matt dazzle her out of her senses, blind her to something precious and lasting. Nature could be very cruel. In the same way that the brightest and most attractive berries were often poisonous, it wasn’t fair that something so beautiful, that gave her life a special sparkle, should be a sham.
* * *
The next morning Zoe woke up to another beautiful day. She pulled on her lightweight cotton robe, flung open the door leading out onto the long balcony, and stepped outside, as had been her custom since her arrival.
There wasn’t a cloud in the burning blue sky. This early in the morning she would have been shivering back home, even on England’s hottest day. This air was blissfully warm, clear, and light, with a strange luminosity that Zoe was only just getting used to and that brought the colors more vividly to life. It was like taking off smoky glasses and seeing a richness of foliage that she had never imagined. She could never have believed that there were so many shades of green or that red could be so red. The sun-saturated stone of the buildings ranged from glaring white to a glowing, living gold and hurt eyes that were unaccustomed to it.
She was lucky enough to be enjoying a holiday on the French Riviera. She had a wonderful hostess and a kind and compatible fiancé. Was she going to let all this be spoiled for her by the dark intrusion of a figure from her past who had no place at all in her current well-ordered life?
The unmistakable fragrance of coffee hit her a second before Matt’s deep voice announced, ‘Good morning, Zoe. I knew instinctively that you would be an early riser, and I had the forethought to instruct Yvette to bring a spare cup. Come and have breakfast with me.’
Zoe choked on her despair. The past she was so valiantly trying to deny was too forcefully in the present for her liking. A memory was easier to stamp out than a living, mocking reminder. She had forgotten that, as Matt had a room farther along the passage from hers, he would also be sharing the balcony. Monique and Pierre were also on their level, so it wasn’t as if they were completely isolated, but the old couple’s quarters were at the back of the house. Sharing a balcony with Matt was an intimacy she could have done without.
‘I haven’t brushed my teeth yet,’ she said.
A dark eyebrow arched in cruel amusement at the flimsiness of that excuse for not sharing his table. ‘Then run along and brush your teeth, if you must. But hurry, or the coffee will get cold.’
She nodded mutely but remained rooted to the spot. Her leaden feet somehow wouldn’t obey the command of her brain. She didn’t so much want to run along and do his bidding as run away. But running away had never solved anything. It would be unrealistic to go ahead and marry Tony while there was the tiniest suspicion of Matt’s dark shadow lurking in her heart. She must face up to him and somehow push him out, not let him affect her in this way. She didn’t feel very proud of herself. It was shallow to let Matt move her as he did.
He was already dressed in the second-skin jeans he’d been wearing the morning she’d called to see Tony. Standing there, unable to move, devouring him with her eyes and not being able to do a thing about it, she felt skinned, her jumping nerve ends, the warmth of her feelings for him, exposed for his cruel observation. To complement the jeans he wore a sky blue shirt that flapped open and showed off that tantalizing V of tightly curling hair. Her fingertips still prickled as she wondered if it would be coarse or silky to the touch.
His smile slashed deeper and more mockingly, as if he had intercepted that thought, and that gave her the impetus to move.
She brushed her teeth and rinsed her face. She combed her hair but decided to remain in the cotton robe, which gave adequate, demure coverage and allowed her to be back in a minimum of time. She didn’t want him to think that she was nervous at returning to be in his company, or that she was taking her time to doll up for him.
As well as the coffee, there were orange juice, croissants, and a cherry preserve that Zoe pronounced as delicious on taking the first bite.
After demolishing his roll Matt reached out to the flat basket where the hot croissants were piled on a snow-white napkin, transferring one to his plate and covering it with a large portion of the preserve. This task done, he inquired lazily, ‘What were you thinking about earlier to put that look on your face?’
‘What look?’ she asked carefully, feeling a painful prickling in her cheeks.
‘Before I made my presence known you were lost to the world—just staring as if you’d never seen a blade of grass, a tree, or a flower before.’
She smiled, softening toward him. For a moment she’d thought he was referring to the way she had looked at him. There must have been some kindness in him that he had mentioned one and not the other. ‘It’s as if I never have seen any of those things before, at least not in their true perspective. I don’t quite know how to put. this, but a kind of wonder hit me, as if . . .’ Her brow furrowed in concentration. ‘Perhaps this sounds crazy. I’ve never been in a hospital and had a serious operation, the kind you don’t know if you’re going to come out of in one piece or not. But every morning when I wake up I have to rush out and stand on this balcony. The feeling I get is as though I’ve just come out of a deep anesthetic which I went into not knowing if I would ever see this lovely world clearly again, and when I come out I appreciate it more than ever, and it’s better than ever. I rub the blur of sleep from my eyes and I can’t believe the clarity of things, the brilliance of the colors and the sharpness of the focus. Can you understand at all what I’m getting at?’
She couldn’t understand why it was important for him to know what she meant any more than she understood why the silence before he answered was like a cold finger touching her heart. There were many kinds of silences. Thinking silenc
es. Golden sharing silences. Silences that hummed as sweetly as a song. And ominous silences that carried some deep dread warning. And no silence she had ever encountered before had been as ominous as this one.
‘Yes, I do.’ The warmth on his face was replaced by bitter understanding. For a moment, a moment so brief that she could have imagined it and probably had, because she couldn’t think what she had said to put him out, his face was a carved mask, except for the living pain in his eyes. His heavy lids dropped. When they lifted he was wearing another mask, one that was all too familiar. He had on the mocking, taunting look which she had come to hate and wanted to scratch away with her long fingernails. Scratch it to the bone and never have to see it again. ‘What are you considering doing today? Or haven’t you got any plans except to sit and hold your fiancé’s hand?’
‘I happen to find Tony’s company enchanting; I like to be with him. But I’ve never been to this part of the world before, so it’s natural that I should want to do some exploring. And that’s what I’m going to do today. Tony is very unselfish about it. He can’t accompany me, but he doesn’t stop me from going out.’
‘I take the hint. Unfortunately, I’ve got other things to do today. Sorry about that,’ he drawled.
‘I didn’t mean—’ She frowned, biting heavily on her lip. He had read something in her words which she had never intended. She didn’t want his company. She would rather dance all day with a snake than spend five minutes alone with him! Yet what had she meant, if she hadn’t been angling for Matt to take her somewhere?
Back in her room, her simmering anger cooling as she took her morning shower and considered what to do, she told herself firmly, almost convincingly, that if she had wanted Matt to take her somewhere it was for his services as a guide and not for his infinitely disrupting presence. She supposed she could have bought this service by taking a conducted. tour. But although she was a born tourist, delighting in walking medieval ramparts, snapping her camera at Roman ruins, and generally reveling in antiquities, she didn’t like to go in a crowd or to the fashionable places and tourist traps, preferring to wander off the beaten track on the whim of the moment.
Looking delectably cool in an easy-to-wear, lemon-ice shirtwaist dress and a large cartwheel sun hat, Zoe went to seek Tony out and let him know her intentions.
He was reclining in his usual lounger in the garden; it was positioned by a small, ornamental fountain, and she felt a rush of compassion for him, because even though he was lucky to have such a fantastic spot to rest up in, and he was getting more adept at getting around on his crutches, it was still sad that he couldn’t swim off one of the incredibly lovely beaches or take advantage of the surrounding countryside.
‘If you don’t want me to go for a walk, I’ll stay with you,’ she volunteered.
‘No, take your walk. You look . . . sort of restless. Is anything wrong, Zoe?’
‘No.’
‘There is,’ he persisted.
‘Yes, there is,’ she acknowledged. ‘Actually, that’s why I want to get away for a while—to think.’
‘Not having second thoughts about us?’ he asked with such anxiety in his eyes that it squeezed her heart.
‘No, Tony. But when I tell you what I should have told you when we first started going out together, you might have second thoughts and want to break it off.’
He lifted a finger and placed it across her mouth. ‘I don’t want to hear your guilty confession . . . presumably about the men in your life before you met me. You’re not nineteen anymore. It would be downright stupid of me to think there hadn’t been someone before, or . . . other things. I don’t much care whether you have or you haven’t, or who the man is, providing it’s dead and in the past. I don’t want your past, just your future. So you don’t have to tell me a thing.’
‘That’s very generous of you, Tony. Why did you choose the age of nineteen? Why didn’t you say eighteen or twenty or twenty-one? Why nineteen?’
‘I don’t know. It was just an age I picked on. Why the fuss about that?’
‘I’m not fussing. It’s just that I was nineteen when I knew him.’
‘What have I just told you?’ he chided gently.
‘You said you didn’t want to know if it was dead and in the past. I want to be very honest about this, Tony. I owe you that. It’s not in the past; it’s turned up to haunt me.’ She lowered her head to hide her eyes, which were filled with the painful truth. ‘If something can haunt you it isn’t dead.’
‘I see.’
‘How can you see?’ she said, irritated by his placid acceptance and calm understanding. ‘You don’t know who the man is! Do you?’ she challenged.
It was odd the way he took his time in replying. He either knew or he didn’t know. Perhaps he wasn’t as unruffled as she thought; perhaps underneath his façade of calm he was seething and wanted to take her by the shoulders and give her a good shake and was fighting to control himself and his tone.
‘No, I don’t know,’ he said eventually.
‘It’s Matt.’ She looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I owe you an apology. I should have told you at the beginning. I didn’t because I didn’t think we would get serious, and then when we did, it was too late. And you didn’t seem, all that friendly with Matt, despite working for him. So I foolishly let things ride.’
‘You said it isn’t dead. What do you mean by that?’
‘Matt is a very physical man. When I saw him again, I felt the old pull. If you still want me, I’ll need your understanding and your support to fight it.’
‘If I still want you!’ Just for a moment there was a bright gleam of triumph in his eyes that sickened her. It was as if he was crowing over his victory, but then the look faded into one of incredulity. ‘You’re saying that you’ll stick with me in preference to Matt?’
‘Yes, that’s what I’m saying.’
‘You sound very sure.’
‘I am. And I’ll tell you why. I want to get it all off my conscience. I was heartbroken when Matt left me five years ago.’ She hated saying anything against Matt, but her first loyalty had to be to Tony if she was going to carry this through. ‘It was cruel the way he finished it between us. He had a big haulage job on the Continent. He promised to get in touch with me the moment he got back. He didn’t. He left me in suspense, wondering, without a word.’
‘You didn’t get a whiff of anything? No possible hint why?’
‘What makes you ask that?’ Zoe questioned, puzzled. Perhaps there was a reason, after all, something that Tony knew about, and when he told her it would clear everything up, somehow making things right.
It was a fragile hope to pin her future on, and it splintered as Tony said in a funny, strained voice, ‘I just wondered, that’s all. Why do you suppose he acted like that?’
She shrugged away her keen disappointment. ‘Who knows? Perhaps he met someone else. Or it just came to him that I bored him.’
‘His bad taste is my good fortune. I’ll make you happy as he never could. You wouldn’t be happy with someone you couldn’t trust. You’d always wonder if he’d do the same thing again.’
‘That’s very true. I phoned the depot, you know.’
‘Did you? No, I didn’t. How could I?’ he said, a slight edge to his voice.
‘The woman who answered insisted on knowing my name before she’d answer my inquiry about Matt.’ She laughed wryly. ‘I had this stupid notion that he might have been involved in an accident and couldn’t contact me. But when I told her my name she said in a very icy voice, “I’m sorry, Miss Fortune, but I am instructed to say that Mr. Hunter is not available.”’ She swallowed back her hurt and gripped Tony’s hand. ‘I think you’re being fantastic about this. I couldn’t blame you if you booted me out at this very moment.’
‘I’ve no intention of doing that. I’m going to marry you. You don’t know what that will mean to me. Now, go for your walk, darling. Why not ask Monique to pack you a picnic lunch, then you won’t have to hu
rry back.’ He indicated the lounger next to his. ‘I’ll save your place for when you get back.’
Having a place saved for her sounded warm and reliable to Zoe. ‘M’m, I like the idea of a picnic lunch’. The response was light, despite the heaviness of her heart.
The hard, triumphant glimmer which Zoe had caught a brief glance of returned to Tony’s eyes, belying the softness of his tone as he said, ‘Enjoy your walk, darling.’ But having already turned to go back into the house, Zoe didn’t see it. As she paused to turn and wave, the correct smile was back in place.
* * *
Zoe walked in a circle, arriving at the meandering old part of the town by way of a small promenade with a pebbly beach on one side and pavement cafés on the other. The cafés attracted more locals than tourists, the latter being more inclined to head for the livelier spots. An older Frenchman with a brown weathered face and the type of beret favored by the older generation of locals winked at her and surreptitiously followed her progress. A younger, quite attractive Frenchman ogled her openly. She had thought about stopping for a coffee but decided against it when she saw that she might have company. Two men in her life provided more than enough complications. Instead she sat for an enjoyable while on the low harbor wall, watching the softly breaking water wash across the white pebbles and the aquamarine ripples made by the rhythmic bobbing of the fishing boats. The whispering slap and splash was oddly soothing. The same kind of charm and serenity and timelessness was to be found in the old town with its winding, narrow streets and high, shuttered windows.
She climbed out of town and up a zigzag path through a resinous pine forest, punishing her legs with the effort as if to pay for any pain she might have caused Tony. She wouldn’t have believed that anyone could be so kindly and understanding. Not one word of recrimination had crossed his lips. All that had seemed to concern him was the fact that she wasn’t leaving him for Matt. He must love her very much, more than she’d thought, and it made her treatment of him seem shabby by comparison.
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