Afraid to wipe them away in case he noticed, she stayed as still as a statue.
Perhaps it was that very stillness that alerted him, because he suddenly glanced up. Rising to his feet in a single, swift movement, he came to stand by her side.
As she sat mute and mortified, he caught a single bright teardrop with his index finger.
She flinched away as though he had struck her.
‘Why the tears?’
‘I was thinking about the Gracedieu estate,’ she lied desperately.
‘Really?’
Though it was obvious he didn’t believe a word of it, she found herself babbling, ‘I was disappointed that you never had any intention of buying it.’
Resuming his seat, Zander drawled, ‘My, but you do take your job seriously.’
Feeling a little easier now he wasn’t looming over her, she shook her head. ‘In this case it’s not just a job. I fell in love with the place at first sight, and I hate the thought of possibly having to sell it off piecemeal.’
‘There, now! That just shows how wrong one can be. You were worrying about Gracedieu, when I could have sworn you were thinking about the past.’
‘I try not to think about the past.’ Without intending to, she found herself adding bitterly, ‘It hurts too much.’
His eyes darkened to a deep, cloudy jade. ‘No matter how much it hurts, the past has to be faced sooner or later.’
Seeing her white, set face, the misery in her eyes, he decided it would be better to skirt the main issue for the moment. He said more gently, ‘Why not tell me what happened after our quarrel?’
So long as she left out the one thing she couldn’t bear to talk about, she could tell him the rest, Caris thought.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, she began, ‘When you’d left for the office I packed my things.’
‘Yes,’ he said bleakly. ‘It wasn’t until I discovered they’d gone that I truly believed you’d leave me without a word. Where did you go?’
‘At first I didn’t know where to go or what to do …’ Her voice shook and she stopped speaking as she recalled the feeling of utter desolation that had gripped her.
As soon as she could trust herself to go on, she continued, ‘There was no way I could keep on working for my father. His anger and disapproval, his “I told you so” attitude, would have made my life a misery—so I urgently needed to find another job and somewhere to live.
‘I decided to get right away from Albany.’ Her worst fear had been that she might run into Zander if she stayed. ‘In the end, I made up my mind to go back to England, to Aunt Jo. I hired a car to drive to JFK, and as soon as I got there I booked a seat on the first available plane to London.
‘While I was waiting for the flight to be called, I rang Aunt Jo to tell her I was on my way. She came to the airport and met me with open arms.’
Remembering just how much her aunt’s warm welcome had meant to her that dreadful day, Caris had to stop and wipe away the tears.
‘Then you were living in Spitewinter right from the word go?’
‘Yes.’
He sighed. ‘I ought to have had more sense than believe her.’
Caris was about to ask him what he meant when he went on, ‘That night when I got back and found you’d gone, I was devastated. After I’d tried all the local hotels without success I went to see your father. I didn’t expect you to be with him, but I thought he might know where you were.
‘Even before he knew the reason for my visit he was somewhat less than cordial, and when he did know he really let
rip. He said that in his opinion you’d been a complete fool to take up with me in the first place, and it was a great pity you’d come to your senses too late. He added with some venom that it had probably ruined both your life and your career prospects.
‘When I refused to get into a verbal fight, and simply emphasized that I needed to find you without delay, he told me scathingly that I’d get no help from him. He didn’t know where you’d gone, and if he had known he wouldn’t have told me. That said, he practically ordered me out.
‘Then it occurred to me rather belatedly that you might have gone back to the apartment you’d once shared with Miss Mitchell. But when I went round I could get no answer, and the next-door neighbour told me that the young lady who lived there was still away on a course of some kind.
‘I was racking my brains over what to do next when I remembered you mentioning living with an Aunt Jo while you were at university in England. I didn’t know her surname, however, and all I could recall was that she lived in a vicarage somewhere on the borders of Cambridgeshire.
‘I decided to approach your uncle, but when I called in at the Belmont offices he refused point-blank to see me or give me any information, and ordered his secretary to show me out.
‘In desperation I tried your old apartment again, and this time Miss Mitchell was home. She said she hadn’t seen you and had no idea where you were. But she was able to tell me your aunt’s surname and where she lived. I got on the next plane to England in high hopes that you might be with her, or that she would be able to tell me your whereabouts.
‘However, when I arrived on her doorstep she swore she hadn’t seen you since you finished university and went back to the States.’
Knocked sideways by what he was telling her, Caris protested weakly, ‘It wasn’t like Aunt Jo to lie. Usually she was the most truthful of people and kindness itself.’
‘Oh, she was kind, all right,’ Zander agreed wryly. ‘She said what a shame it was that I’d had a wasted journey, and promised to let me know if she heard from you. She added that, if it was any help, you’d always wanted to live in New York City and she thought it more than likely that you’d gone there. But I presume you already knew most of that,’ he ended bleakly.
Feeling as if she had been stabbed to the heart, Caris shook her head. ‘I had no idea you’d been over. She never said a word to me.’
She went on unsteadily, ‘But I believe I know why she didn’t tell me. She must have been trying to protect me from any more unhappiness.’
With a kind of urgency, Zander asked, ‘Would it have made any difference if she had told you?’
The question tightened round her throat like a silken noose. Would it have made any difference if she had known Zander was actively looking for her?
She tried to tell herself it wouldn’t have. But she couldn’t be sure …
Don’t be an idiot, she silently adjured herself. She couldn’t have let it make any difference. Nothing could alter the fact that he had never intended their relationship to be permanent, had never really loved her. Shaking her head, she answered sadly, ‘No, it wouldn’t have made any difference.’
His voice cold as winter, he said, ‘I guess I was a fool to expect anything else.’ He went on heavily, ‘But at that time I still had hopes that I could find you and put everything right, so I hired a firm of detectives to keep looking. Because of what your aunt had said, they focused on New York. But New York is a big place with millions of people, and it was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
‘They were still looking when I saw the article about Gracedieu being for sale and knew the search was finally over …’
So he had been trying to find her for three years? ‘After the appointment to view the place had been safely made, I tried to possess my soul in patience while I waited to see you, but the days in between seemed endless.’
Her thoughts were all over the place; she asked, ‘If you wanted to see me so badly, why didn’t you simply come into the agency?’
‘Because we had a lot of things to talk about and I wanted time and privacy, somewhere we could be quite alone, where we wouldn’t be interrupted. That’s why meeting you here seemed ideal.’
Filled with trepidation, she asked, ‘But why go to so much trouble to try to dig up the past? Surely you had nothing to gain after all this time?’
‘That’s just where you’re wrong. I have a great de
al to gain.’
‘Such as?’
‘Some answers to my questions and, hopefully, peace of mind.’
Scared of where this was going, she stayed silent.
‘You’ll never know how many sleepless nights you caused me. Nights when I lay awake wondering where you were and worrying about what was happening to you. Nights when I longed to hold you in my arms again and make love to you …’
There was so much passion in his voice, so much pain, that Caris felt as if she were drowning in it.
But why were his feelings so intense now? After those first happy months together, he had seemed to change completely, and during the final few weeks of their relationship it had been only too clear that he’d no longer cared—if he ever had.
When Karl had tired of her she had emerged from the affair relatively unscathed, apart from hurt pride and an abiding sense of shame. Her heart and her deepest feelings had been untouched.
But with Zander she had given her heart and everything else she had to give, and the consequences had been catastrophic.
Watching her catch her underlip in her teeth, and realizing that she might be wavering at last, he urged, ‘Tell me why you ran as you did. Talk to me, Caris—make me understand.’
He had said it was time she stopped running and faced the past, and maybe it was.
She had thought of their relationship—an enchanted, whirlwind love-affair—as untouchable, inviolate, built on a foundation of caring so strong that it would last a lifetime.
It had been almost impossible to believe that anything could go wrong. Then real life had taken over and the whole magical edifice had collapsed, crumbled into dust, leaving her abandoned in the ruins of her cherished hopes and dreams.
She had closed in on herself, bottled things up, endeavoured to shut out the past. But in spite of all her efforts it hadn’t really worked.
Perhaps if she talked to Zander—voiced all her pain and disillusionment, looked the past in the face—it would allow her to come to terms with the failure of their relationship, so that the failure no longer had the power to hurt.
It was worth a try.
Though there was one thing she might never come to terms with. One thing that would always hurt to some extent. One thing she was desperate to keep from him at all costs.
Pushing that thing to the back of her mind, she drew a deep breath and took the plunge. ‘I went because I couldn’t bear to stay with a man I knew no longer wanted me.’
He looked taken aback. ‘You were completely wrong. I never stopped wanting you.’
She shook her head. ‘It had been obvious for some time that you were bored to death with me.’
‘I was no such thing.’
‘Why bother to lie? It got so that I scarcely saw you from one week’s end to another, and you hardly ever made love to me …’
‘I’m only too aware that I neglected you, and I very much regret it, but I had to be away a great deal. I didn’t want to be, but circumstances left me no alternative.
‘Where I did go badly wrong was in expecting you to cope without giving you the reassurance you needed. But I was under a great deal of stress myself and not really thinking straight when it came to personal matters.
‘I ought to have realized how you felt—talked to you more, made you understand—instead of shutting you out.’
Caris’s pansy-blue eyes were sad when she said, ‘You hardly talked to me at all; you never had time. When you weren’t actually away you were always busy at the office or in some meeting.
‘If I needed you for any reason I could never get hold of you. You were hardly ever home; on the very few occasions you were, you were distant, preoccupied.’
‘I told you why.’
‘You told me hardly anything, and what you did tell me sounded very much as though you were just trying to make excuses.’
‘I never made any excuses I told you the simple truth—that my father was ill, and I was up to my neck in work.’
Impatient now, she brushed aside his words. ‘Though at first I tried hard not to believe it, I knew in my heart of hearts that you’d grown tired of me and found another woman.’
‘I’d done nothing of the kind,’ he stated categorically. ‘There was no other woman. There never has been since I met you.’
‘There’s really no point in denying it.’ With quiet certainty, she went on, ‘I happened to see you with her one lunchtime.’
Watching him frown, she continued, ‘I’d been having lunch at the Dorset with a client and we were just on the point of leaving when I caught sight of you in the foyer. There was a woman with you. You had an arm around her and you were standing close together deep in conversation. There was something about the pair of you, a kind of intimacy that made it plain you were more than just friends.’
‘What was this mystery woman like?’
‘Tall, blonde, very nice looking, smartly dressed … I saw her kiss you, so don’t tell me you can’t remember her.’
His face cleared. ‘As a matter of fact I remember her very well and, yes, she kissed my cheek.’
Caris was hurrying on, ‘You didn’t come home that night. I presume you were with her?’
‘Yes, I was with her,’ he admitted. ‘That is, until she left to catch a late plane back to Boston to join her husband.’
‘Her husband?’
‘Matthew was part of some delegation or other and they were going on to San Francisco the following day, so Isobel had seized the chance to make a flying visit to Albany to see her father … Who happened to be my father too.’
Feeling hollow inside, Caris said, ‘You mean it was your sister?’
‘You must have heard me talk about Bel? You and she had never met because she and her husband—an ardent politician—lived in Washington and were always rushing off somewhere on some campaign or other. If I had got back home that night I would probably have mentioned seeing her.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, I was with my father. He’d had a stroke the previous night. That’s why Bel came—it was his second. The first had seemed to be a relatively minor one, but the second was a great deal more serious, and he was admitted to a private nursing-home.’
Though she had only met him a couple of times, Caris had liked James Devereux. Shocked now, she said, ‘I knew he was ailing, but I never for a moment imagined it was quite that serious. Why didn’t you tell me? Why let me go on thinking he just wasn’t well?’
‘I couldn’t see the point of worrying you.’
‘You mean you didn’t think I’d care?’
‘I don’t mean anything of the kind. I know you liked my father and he liked you.’
‘Then you should have told me!’ she cried passionately. ‘Instead of shutting me out as though I was a stranger.’
‘I didn’t mean to shut you out—but you were so overworked, pushed to the limit by that father of yours, and I didn’t want to add to your concerns. After all, there was nothing you could have done.’
Close to tears, she said, ‘At least I could have been there for you.’
She saw by his face that that cry from the heart had touched a chord. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I see now how wrong I was. I guess I just wasn’t used to handling a relationship like ours. I’ve always been a rather private person where my deepest emotions were concerned. I’ve tended to keep them to myself, and old habits die hard.
‘My father once admitted that emotionally he’d been a loner too. That is, until he met my mother and she taught him how to loosen up and share his innermost feelings, how to lean on her as she leaned on him.’
Regretfully he added, ‘The one thing she never managed to teach him was how to stop being a workaholic, how to relax and delegate. He devoted all his adult working life to Devereux Hotels and was only satisfied when he had a firm grip on the reins.
‘After my mother died, he drove himself even harder, trying to run the company single-handed, working all hours when probl
ems arose, barely stopping to eat. That burden of work and worry was too much for any one man, and I firmly believe that the stress helped to make him ill.
‘After his second stroke I had no choice but to shoulder the lot, at least until I could find one or two good men to help me run things. So, what with the workload and the need to visit my father, I had very little time. When he became critically ill and seemed in danger of slipping away, I very often stayed the night.’
She moistened dry lips. Feeling a tightness in her chest, she asked, ‘What happened to him?’
‘He died a short time after you left.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I just wish you’d told me how bad things really were.’
‘In retrospect, I wish I had. But because of the Devereux company rules I wasn’t at liberty to divulge just how ill he was. I was even forced to warn Bel not to talk about it. If the news that he was at death’s door had got out, it would have made the Devereux share prices drop dramatically and caused widespread panic-selling—which was the last thing the company wanted.
‘You see, after his first stroke my father had made several serious errors of judgement. Errors, we discovered too late, that had provided Emorna—a rival hotel chain who for some time had been trying to buy us out—with just the opportunity they’d been hoping for.
‘In consequence they’d been secretly buying up shares in Devereux Hotels and were just waiting their chance to make a hostile takeover.
‘I intended to tell you everything the minute the attempted takeover had been defeated …’
With a sigh, he went on, ‘If only you’d stayed to thrash things out rather than running as soon as my back was turned. Why did you do it, Caris? I thought you loved me.’
‘I did love you.’
‘But you didn’t trust me.’
She couldn’t deny his charge, and she felt shocked and ashamed that he had had to shoulder such a burden of work and worry on his own while she had believed the worst of him.
‘Was that why you left as you did?’
Remembering her own despair, her humiliation, the feeling that her pride and self-respect had been trampled into the mud yet again, she said unsteadily, ‘I suppose it was, in a way.’
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