‘The old Samantha would have just gone ahead and done it.’
But the old Samantha died on a road in Devon, Samantha thought bleakly. And the new one was still struggling to evolve from what was left. ‘Please, go on,’ she invited stiltedly.
‘There is very little left to say,’ he murmured with a shrug. ‘We came to an agreement where I would do as he asked. But because I had my own pride to consider here, I refused to take possession of the hotel until you and I were officially married—hence the date on the documents you were given,’ he defined. ‘It helped me to justify what I was doing.’
‘Beginning our marriage with lies,’ Samantha inserted.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
But it wasn’t enough, because it was hard to forgive someone— No, she then amended that. It was hard to forgive the two people she’d loved most in the world for deceiving her the way they had.
‘Was I so weak, so pathetic that you both felt you had to protect me from the ugly truth?’ she asked painfully.
‘It was the deal.’ He looked away. ‘I couldn’t in all honour break it.’
‘So instead you broke the vow to honour that you made with me,’ she concluded. Then she remembered that André had actually suspected she was a party to her father’s deal.
A silent conspiracy. She smiled bleakly at the idea. Even her father’s will had been carefully worded, with a simple one-liner leaving everything he’d possessed to her. André had dealt with the details. She had never thought to question him. He probably saw that as further proof of her involvement.
Oh, what a tangled web, she mused emptily, and came to her feet. ‘If that’s it,’ she said huskily, ‘then I think I’d like to go now.’
‘Go where?’ he asked.
‘Back to the house,’ she told him. ‘To pack.’ Pack and leave the open way this time, the calm way. ‘I don’t think there is anything left to be said.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he countered gruffly. ‘We haven’t even touched the tip of the iceberg as far as explanations are concerned… And if you think I am going to stand by and watch you walk out on me again, Samantha, then think again.’
‘You never watched the first time.’
‘Raoul,’ he breathed. ‘It always comes back to Raoul.’
Raoul, yes, Raoul, Samantha agreed wearily. Who’d come to live with them in London only weeks after their wedding. Raoul who had played adoring half-brother while secretly resenting André for everything. His wealth, his power, his new English wife. Raoul, the poor relation, born to the wrong parent, he’d used to call himself—out of André’s hearing, of course. He had wanted to be a Visconte but had had to make do with being a Delacroix.
‘He’s sorry, if it means anything to you.’
‘Sorry?’ Looking up, she sent him a huff of scorn.
‘Deeply ashamed of himself.’ He extended.
The fizz of anger began to rise again. If she could have stopped it she would have done, because she knew, by now, that she had taken more than she could safely manage to deal with.
‘He abused my hand of friendship, my hospitality, my marriage and me,’ she spelled it out coldly. ‘I hope he will live with his shame for the rest of his life.’
‘He will,’ André confirmed.
‘And you want me to pity him for that? Is that what your expression is saying?’
‘Pity is better than bitterness, cara. And I should know,’ he added heavily. ‘Look what my bitterness did to us.’
So he was actually admitting that he had believed her to be a party to her father’s overall plan? ‘I think I hate you,’ she breathed, turning away.
‘Only think?’
‘Go to hell, André,’ she incised. And with that she walked, shaking, limping—hating herself for that limp because it ruined an otherwise precise exit.
Out on the mezzanine the chandeliers had been lit. As she walked down the stairs she could see the whole ambience of the foyer had begun to pull on its evening cloak. If the piano suddenly began playing behind her she knew she would be truly done for.
‘He went to Australia,’ a deep voice said quietly, stopping her as her foot made the foyer floor. ‘I thought you’d gone with him, so I chased after the pair of you. I went to kill him,’ André admitted. ‘Then I was going to strangle the lovely life out of you. Or at least,’ he added, ‘that was the plan.’ Samantha sensed rather than saw the accompanying grimace. ‘It didn’t quite work out like that. I found him hiding out on a cattle station in God knows where because he knew I would be coming after him.’ He released a short sigh. ‘But it was really you I’d gone for. Except you weren’t with him. So instead of killing him I broke down and wept like a baby… Does that help ease your pain to know that, cara?’ he questioned levelly. ‘It made a man out of Raoul, as twisted as that may seem. He broke down and wept right along with me. Then he told me the truth about what he’d done, and while I was trying to come to terms with the bloody mess I’d made of everything he disappeared again, leaving me alone to deal with the lousy, rotten truth of what the pair of us had done to you.’
Australia. At last she managed to recall where she had heard Australia mentioned before. Stefan Reece had seen André there twelve months ago. ‘You were in Australia when I had my accident.’
‘For two months.’ His voice was coming closer. ‘It took me that long to track Raoul down. And thirty seconds to realise what an unforgivable fool I had been. By the time I got back to London your trail had gone cold, and between wishing you in hell for leaving the way you did, and wishing you would just call me to let me know you were okay, I—lived—I think.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t remember much about the long, empty months in between. Then Nathan Payne called me in New York with news about you, and my life suddenly kick-started again.’
‘And Raoul?’ she asked.
‘Still in hiding in the outback, waiting for redemption to ease his guilt. I hear from him now and then, but nothing that says he has come to terms with the man he discovered himself to be.’ His breath touched her nape and she quivered slightly.
‘You’ve forgiven him.’ She realised.
‘After I had learned to forgive myself.’
‘Don’t touch me,’ she said jerkily, hearing him move behind her. When he touched her she lost touch with her common sense.
‘I’m not going to,’ he replied—because he already knew what his touch did to her, and he was now trying to play fair. ‘I just want you to consider forgiving Raoul some day, even if you cannot bring yourself to forgive me.’
And forgiveness was an essential part of her own healing process; that was what he was trying to say.
Funny that, she mused hollowly. But she had already forgiven André for some though not all of what he’d done—though she hadn’t realised it until now. As for Raoul? She could now feel sorry for him, she discovered. But forgive? He’d scared her, seriously scared her, when he’d pushed her onto his bed. And it was the lies he’d told André about her, in an effort to save his own skin, she couldn’t forgive. Those lies had helped to ruin her marriage—her trust in the one person left in the world she’d felt she could rely on—and had ruined her in a way.
‘He gave me the copies of your deal with my father to hurt you too, you know,’ she murmured.
‘I know,’ André confirmed, and didn’t attempt to justify what Raoul had done.
A throb began to pound at the back of her eyes. A deep, pressure ache, which was trying to tell her she just couldn’t think any more right now. On a slow, weary sigh her shoulders drooped, her body losing the will to want to her upright any more.
‘You’ve had it,’ André murmured huskily. ‘Come on, let’s get you home.’
Home, Samantha repeated silently, and didn’t try to argue. She stepped forward; he followed, still maintaining his no-touch policy, she noticed.
The headache became so bad on the way back to the house that she could barely walk unaided up the stairs. Yet still André did
n’t attempt to help her. It was as if it had become a point of honour for him to make no physical contact without her permission.
But he remained right behind her all the way into the bedroom, and only left again when he’d watched her swallow two of her painkillers he’d produced from his pocket. After that, she pulled off her clothes and slipped beneath the duvet, frowning slightly because she had only just realised that the pills should have been in her bedside drawer; so how had he got hold of them?
She fell asleep thinking about the attractively innocuous puzzle.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ANDRÉ was sitting behind the desk in his study. Head back, eyes closed, bare feet propped on the desk top, and the soft light from a single table lamp just managing to diffuse the hardness from his weary profile. Since leaving Samantha to sleep away some of the strain of the day he had been working steadily, using it as his way of putting their problems aside, for a short while at least.
But now he’d had enough. Work could go to hell. It was his marriage that really mattered right now, and if he felt like wallowing in his own misery for a while then…why not? Across the room somewhere, Puccini’s La Bohème was quietly filtering through the silence. His mood suited the music’s dark mood, and one set of long brown fingers were idly rotating his black fountain pen to a rhythm he had unconsciously picked up.
But the fingers went still when he heard the first soft tread on the stairs.
His eyes slid open, but he didn’t move. Lounging there, he stared at the gap in the half-open door, listened and waited to find out what she was going to do.
Go right past the door or step into the room? She had to see the light, hear the music. She must know he was in here. The new Samantha was as unpredictable as the old one, but he would lay heavy odds on the old one being unable to pass by that door without putting her head in here—no matter how reluctant she might be to do so. It was a point of pride—of defiance, if you like—not to turn away from potential confrontation. She had done it only once in his experience, and that had been the time she’d left here one night a year ago, without hanging around long enough to have the whole ugly scene out with him.
Nothing happened. She hadn’t moved towards the kitchen; she hadn’t moved towards the front door. The muscles encasing his stomach began to tighten, trying to urge him to get up and go and check what she was doing out there. But he refused to give in to it. This was Samantha’s move. He would wait here to see what that move was, even if it was killing him to do it.
The annoying, provoking, beautiful witch.
A sound at last. His heart stopped beating. His fingers curled around the pen. The door began to swing wider. Dressed to go or dressed to stay? he asked himself as a tingle that began at the back of his neck spread out to infuse his whole system with a state of readiness to move like lightning if she was dressed to leave.
Then she appeared in the opening, and he had to narrow his eyes to hide their expression as relief turned the tingle to liquid until his bones felt like wax.
She looked as she’d used to look in the mornings, all warm and soft and still a little sleepy. She was wearing one of her old short silk wraps in a soft shell-pink the same colour as her warm, bare toes, and her hair was lying in an unbrushed silken tangle about her face and shoulders.
‘Hi,’ she murmured awkwardly. ‘I’m going to make myself some breakfast, if that’s okay.’
‘It’s nine o’clock in the evening,’ he said, frowning down at his watch.
‘I know.’ She offered a tense little lift of one shoulder. ‘But I fancy porridge with honey… Do you want some?’
He shook his head. ‘No, thanks,’ he murmured, only to immediately wish he’d answered differently when she just nodded and disappeared again.
The first real invitation she’d offered him and he’d turned it down. What a bloody fool, he cursed himself. Now he had no real excuse to go after her. No excuse to get close, get warm—since he hadn’t felt warm all day thanks to this wretched war of nerve ends they were waging on each other.
Closing his eyes, he relaxed back into the chair, cursed himself some more and managed to stay like that for all of five minutes, thinking of her wandering around the kitchen in that thin little wrap, and with nothing on her feet, and—
With a growl of frustration, he gave up trying to be strong, slid his feet to the floor, got up and went looking for her. She was standing by the microwave, watching a bowl of porridge rotate.
‘Your father would disown you if he could see you making porridge that way,’ he remarked lazily.
She looked up, smiled briefly, then looked away again. ‘He thought he got his porridge the old-fashioned way every morning, but he didn’t, the poor, deluded soul.’
‘Found the honey?’
‘Not yet.’
He went off to hunt it down in a cupboard, saw the kettle was coming to the boil with the teapot standing at the ready beside it. ‘I’ll have a cup of that, if you don’t mind,’ he said lightly.
‘Sure,’ she replied, and moved to pour boiling water onto the tea bags, took the pot to a ready-set table, before going back to get her porridge from the microwave.
Finding himself a cup, he sat down. She sat down. He loosened the top on the honey pot then set it down in front of her. She picked it up and took the lid off completely, then picked up her spoon.
And because he couldn’t help it, he started grinning. ‘Finishing the day as we started it.’ He explained the grin.
‘One hell of a lot went on in between,’ she dryly pointed out.
‘How is the headache?’ he queried belatedly.
‘Gone,’ she said. ‘The sleep gave my head a chance to put its filing system in order, I think.’ Twisting a spoonful of honey out of the jar, she then let it spiral its way down onto her porridge.
His mouth began to water. He didn’t know why, but the warmth suddenly heating certain parts of his body told him that his mouth wasn’t watering because he fancied the look of the honey!
It was the woman and what she was doing that was making him feel—
‘You were right about something you said today,’ she murmured.
‘Only one thing? I must be slipping.’ He grimaced. ‘What was it?’ he asked, lifting his eyes, up to her eyes to find them watching him from underneath her long dark gold-tipped lashes.
She licked the honey spoon. It could have been deliberate—but probably wasn’t. Whatever, he felt his body stir, his own eyes darken in response.
‘Bitterness hurts almost as much as the reason for it,’ she said. Then she licked the darned spoon again with the full flat surface of her pink tongue.
‘So you’ve decided to do what?’ he prompted from somewhere way at the back of his overactive hormones.
‘Try to put it to one side, I suppose.’ She shrugged. She dipped the spoon into the porridge now, and began eating it.
In dire need of something casual to do, André picked up the teapot and began pouring. Then he thought, To hell with it, and threw caution to the wind.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking too,’ he said, pushing a cup towards her. ‘Has it occurred to you that if you hadn’t had your accident and lost your memory you probably would have come back here eventually?’
‘I know it.’ She surprised him by admitting it. Then surprised him again with an impish smile. ‘Got the memory back,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s telling me all sorts of things I’d forgotten about.’
Meaning what? He wanted to ask, but didn’t dare in case he didn’t like the answer. So he stuck doggedly to the point he had been trying to make. ‘Well, don’t you think that if you had come back we would have gone through more or less what we have been doing for the last few days? Only, you would have been angry instead of frightened and bewildered,’ he added. ‘And I would have been digging my own grave by maintaining my lofty position as victim, because pride would not have allowed me to accept I was in the wrong when it would have meant my grovelling at your beautif
ul feet.’
‘Would you have done—eventually?’ She looked really curious to know.
‘Haven’t I been doing that in one way or another?’ he countered ruefully.
‘When?’ Putting down the porridge spoon, she replaced it with the teaspoon from her saucer. ‘When have you actually got down at my feet and grovelled for forgiveness for anything?’ she demanded, calmly using the teaspoon now to dip into the honey pot again.
His loins began to tighten in anticipation of another round of sensual torment. The porridge was gone, which meant there was only one place that spoonful of honey was meant to go. His eyes suddenly felt as hot as the rest of him.
‘Put that spoon in your mouth and I will give you a full demonstration of how a man grovels.’ He growled at her.
The spoon became suspended halfway between honey pot and her parted mouth. The air began to sizzle. His body was infused with that tight tingle of readiness to move like lightning if she forced him to. All it needed was for that spoon to finish its journey and there was no way, now, he could back away from a challenge he had thrown down without thinking it through first.
Spoon in mouth, I go for her. Spoon laid down, I stew in my own damned frustration.
Her eyes began to glow. His began to burn. The spoon went into her mouth. He was around that table before she had a chance to do more than drop the spoon and shriek, ‘André, no!’
‘André, no—you little liar,’ he gritted, lifted her to her feet and kissed her hotly.
She melted as the honey had melted into the hot porridge. Slow and smooth, sensual and sweet. She couldn’t even hold herself upright. His arms tightened around her; his mouth lifted free. He tasted of honey, she tasted of honey, the air swirled with its seductive scent.
‘You’ve been gunning for this reaction since you came down the stairs,’ he accused, his voice like gravel.
‘That isn’t true!’ she protested.
‘No? Then, why the skimpy robe?’ He challenged. ‘Why are you wearing nothing beneath?’ Her cheeks grew hot. He grinned like a tiger with his prey all neatly tied up and ready to eat. ‘You knew I was sitting down here worrying about you. You knew I’d be waiting like some slavish lap-dog for you to give me permission to leap. So I’ve leapt,’ he gritted. ‘Now let’s see if you like what the lap-dog turns into when he’s aroused.’
The Unforgettable Husband Page 15