by Miranda Lee
But he was impressive, sitting there behind his long shiny black desk, looking breathtakingly handsome in a superb three-piece grey suit. His crisp white shirt highlighted his deeply tanned face, his wavy black hair slicked straight back with a little gel. He looked sleek and sophisticated and incredibly sexy. Leah despised the way her eyes automatically ate him up, the way her heart and stomach lurched at the sight of him.
‘I haven’t changed my mind about you,’ she threw at him, self-disgust putting some added sting in her voice. ‘I still think you’re a cold-blooded bastard. But I’ve grown up since leaving you, Gerard. And grownups don’t run away from life’s problems. Which is what you are. A problem. Or should I say…my unfortunate marriage to you is the problem. I want a divorce. And I don’t want any nonsense. I intend to get myself a decent lawyer, so if you’re planning on making any trouble for me, then think again!’
‘A divorce,’ he repeated, arching his eyebrows before sliding forward on his chair, his eyes dropping to scan the papers on his desk. He began sorting through them, no longer looking at her. ‘Very well, Leah,’ he said offhandedly. ‘A divorce you will have, then. And without any trouble. Is that all?’ he asked, glancing up from under his dark brows, his blue eyes coldly expressionless. ‘Or is there something else you want? Money, perhaps?’
‘Not from you,’ she snapped. But suddenly she did want to hurt him, as much as he had hurt her. My God, she would not be dismissed without giving him something to think about. Infuriated, she strode over to the front edge of the broad black desk and leant against it, leaning over so far that she was barely inches from his startled face.
‘I’ve found a man who loves me. Who really, truly loves me. Who can give me all the things you could never give me, for all your damned money. He’s just as good a lover as you are, Gerard. In fact, better, because when we make love it’s a two-way thing, not master and slave, which was the only role you wanted me to play. Slave to your ego, your incredibly arrogant, insufferable ego. The man I’m with now is sweet and sensitive. A giver. A sharer. I love him so much I can hardly bear to be away from him for a minute. And the ironic thing is you know him, Gerard. Can you guess? Can you possibly guess? No? I’m not surprised. You really can’t see beyond your classically sculptured nose, can you? Well, it’s G—’
She broke off abruptly, her own nose finally registering the unmistakable scent which was coming from her husband’s body. It wasn’t sandalwood. It was…
‘Pine,’ she choked out, her eyes flaring as wide as her nostrils.
‘What?’
‘You smell of pine. Oh, my God… Oh, no…no…’
Leah staggered back from the desk, one hand on her throat as though to stop any nausea from rising past that point. Her devastation was cataclysmic. Total. It crashed through her like a great wave, washing away all her new hopes and dreams like so much flotsam.
For there was no such person as Gareth! She’d been right the first time. Gerard didn’t have any brother, let alone a twin. The man who’d claimed he’d fallen in love with her at first sight, the man who’d convinced her he was everything his brother was not, the man who’d inspired her to such stunning intimacies was none other than her husband, Gerard.
The magnitude of his pretence was so great—the quality of acting so good—it was almost worthy of some admiration. But, dear heaven, the perfidy of it all.
‘That bloody smell,’ he muttered darkly, and lifted a pained face to her appalled one. ‘Will you listen if I explain? Will you try to understand?’
Leah could not believe his blind stubbornness. His stupidity!
‘Listen?’ she managed in strangled tones, her face twisted into an anguished grimace. ‘Understand? What kind of monster are you? Do you have any idea what you’ve done? Are you so blind to the feelings of others that you honestly think you can still find some way out of this…this fiasco?’
He stood up and started walking around his desk towards her, his face determined. My God, she thought despairingly. He’s not going to give up!
Panic-stricken, she retreated till the backs of her knees came up against one of the large leather chairs facing the desk. ‘Stop!’ she ordered him before he could close the distance between them. ‘If you come any closer, I’ll scream!’
He stopped, his eyes full of a very real desperation. ‘You must let me explain, Leah.’
‘I don’t have to do any such thing! And I’m not going to. God, but I despise you, even more than I did before. Your arrogance takes my breath away. Your lack of sensitivity is beyond description! What you did was not only dishonest, it was cruel. You created an illusion and you made me believe in it, made me fall in love with it. But the last laugh is on you. Because Gareth finally cured me of you, Gerard. I no longer love you. It’s Gareth who has my love, body and soul. Yet Gareth doesn’t exist. He’s a myth, a make-believe man. A…a joke!’
‘No!’ Gerard blazed. ‘He’s not! He does exist. He’s me, my better half, the man I was before my father died, the man I might have been if I hadn’t closed my mind to the concept of love. I banished it from my heart, exiled it from my soul because I’d seen what it had done to Dad, and I knew how much I was like him, in looks and sensitivity.
‘Love seemed so uncontrollable, and I hated that. So I trained myself to remain emotionally distant from everyone, to make every decision with my head and not my heart. I drew up a mental blueprint for the sort of girl I wanted to marry and when I met you, you seemed to fit that blueprint perfectly.
‘You think I fooled you, Leah, but it was myself I fooled. For I did love you…from the very first moment I walked down that pier and set eyes on your sweet self. I just didn’t realise it till you left me. My God, I almost went insane from missing you. And from remorse. You have to believe me, Leah. I do love you!’
Oh, he was good, she thought bitterly. So incredibly good. A conman extraordinaire. But not good enough! If he’d loved her, he would have come cap in hand and his heart on his sleeve with honest apologies and a million means of retribution. But, no, he’d come with even more deception, more lies, more manipulations.
All Gerard believed in was having his own way. She’d always known down deep that he would not let her go easily, that he would move heaven and earth to get her back. She’d fitted his bloody blueprint perfectly and he wasn’t about to let such a prize get away, not when she was so malleable, so damned gullible!
But even she would not have guessed he would go to such ridiculous lengths. One reason she’d believed in Gareth’s existence was that she could not find a logical reason why Gerard would do such a thing.
She stared at him now and wondered what he had possibly hoped to achieve, both in Broome and here today. It seemed that his act here in this office—before she’d realised who he was—had been designed to send her back to Broome as quickly as possible, back into the arms of his alter ego. But for what purpose? How long did he think he’d have been able to sustain the act? Surely he would have had to confess in the end.
‘Why?’ she groaned, clutching onto her sanity by a thread. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Good Lord, Leah, isn’t it obvious?’
‘No. No, it isn’t obvious. I can’t imagine what you thought could be gained by such trickery. When were you going to tell me the truth? Surely you didn’t think you could get away with pretending you were Gareth for ever!’
‘I did try to tell you. That night on the boat. But then you…oh, hell…’ He raked his hair back from his face with frustrated hands, spinning away from her to pace angrily across the room then back again. ‘I’d just dig my own grave further if I told you why I changed my mind at that point in time.’
Leah flushed at the memory of the intimacies she’d engaged in with him that evening. All in the name of love. All without protection.
‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped, an awful penny dropping. ‘That’s what your plan was! To get me pregnant. That’s what this was all about here, earlier on. You wanted me to go back. To
Gareth. You wanted me to keep sleeping with him till I conceived. And then you would have had an extra lever, because you thought I’d come back to you if I had our child growing in my womb.’
‘That wasn’t my original plan,’ he growled. ‘It just happened that way. For pity’s sake, Leah, try to look at it from my angle. You would never have listened to me if I’d come to you as myself. You would never have believed me if I said I loved you and needed you.’
She was shaking her head at him. ‘Do you wonder why? Oh, God forgive you, Gerard. You’re even more wicked than I thought. You’d do anything, anything to achieve your selfish ends, wouldn’t you?’
Her distress reached overload and she burst into tears. When Gerard went to take her into his arms, she struck out at him violently, slapping him around his face, his shoulders, his chest, calling him all sorts of horrible names.
He just stood there taking it, not bothering to protect himself. Finally the horror of what she was doing sank in. She staggered back, eyes wide on the vicious red marks on his cheeks, the blood oozing from the corner of his mouth.
‘Oh…’ she groaned. And, whirling, she fled.
A startled Enid rose from her desk as Leah raced past. ‘Leah, wait!’ Enid called out.
‘Let her go, Enid,’ Gerard said in wearily defeated tones. ‘It’s hopeless.’
But Enid did not let her go. She hurried after her employer’s distraught wife, joining her in a thankfully empty lift, pressing the ‘close doors’ button before Leah could protest.
‘I don’t want t-to t-talk to you,’ Leah sobbed, tears streaming down her face. ‘You lied to me when I rang you the other day. You said Gerard was in Brisbane and he wasn’t. He was in Broome. And so was Nigel. That’s how Gerard got back here so quickly. Because his jet was parked at Broome airport. You told Gerard I was coming today.’
‘I did lie to you the other day, something which I found very difficult. But you took me by surprise and I really had no option. On top of that, at the time, I thought a little white lie was in your best interests. But I didn’t lie to you today. I didn’t tell Gerard you were coming. Only the Concorde could have got him from Broome to Brisbane quicker than you could jet down from Darwin. He flew out of Broome just after you.’
Shock had a way of focusing the attention, and drying tears. Leah sniffled and blinked, frowning her puzzlement. ‘Then who told him?’
‘Your boss did.’
‘Alan? I don’t believe you. My God, was he paying Alan to spy on me?’
‘No, of course not,’ Enid said, exasperation in her voice. ‘You really do have an exaggerated opinion of Gerard’s dark side. Believe me, I do understand that what he did looks bad. But once he thought of it, nothing could sway him. He’s a man, you see. And men are given to action rather than words. He didn’t seem to appreciate the pitfalls of such a pretence. He just saw a way of redeeming himself in your eyes and grabbed it with both hands.’
Leah’s curiosity was beginning to override her devastation. ‘How did he find out I was in Broome in the first place?’
‘One of your brothers told him. Pete. He rang up one day out of the blue, said it was time you either got divorced or talked things through.’
Leah sighed. She’d never told her brothers the full story. She simply said the marriage hadn’t worked out and she had to get away for a while. She’d made them promise not to tell anyone at all where she was while she was overseas and they’d agreed. They’d probably thought that promise no longer applied once she was back on Australian shores.
‘Once Gerard knew where you were, he wanted to go straight to you, but he was worried sick over how you’d receive him. Then he came up with his famous twin plan. I warned him it wouldn’t work but he just wouldn’t listen.’
‘He told you his plans?’ Leah said with a mixture of surprise and suspicion. It came to her suddenly that Enid was looking a lot smarter these days, not the same dowdy middle-aged woman of six months before. She was dressing better and looking much younger.
‘He did,’ Enid admitted.
‘Isn’t that a little odd?’ Leah said stiffly. Gerard had never been one to give confidences.
‘There’s no need to concern yourself about your husband and me, Leah. Gerard loves you and only you. But our relationship has changed somewhat since the accident, I have to admit. There again, he’s changed. A lot.’
‘I presume you’re talking about the car accident with the truck?’
‘Yes. It happened a week after you left, the day the private investigator reported he’d been unable to find any trace of you. Up till then, Gerard had been hard as nails, pretending to me that your leaving him was just a temporary hiccup in your marriage, putting round a silly story that you were unwell, cancelling social invitations on that pretext. But he seemed to suddenly see that you meant what you said, that you were never coming back to him. He broke down. It…it was quite terrible. You have no idea. I tried to stop him driving home that night. I asked him to come to my place. But he wouldn’t. He said he had to be alone. To think. According to the accident report, witnesses said he ploughed straight into that truck. It wasn’t the truck driver’s fault.’
‘Oh, no! You mean he…he…?’
‘No, I don’t think it was a suicide attempt. I think he was just…distressed and distracted. Nevertheless, he nearly died from a ruptured spleen.’
‘Nearly died!’ The words took a few seconds to sink in, but when they did, Leah went white. The thought of Gerard dead was horrendous…as was the reason behind her horror.
‘You still love him, don’t you?’ Enid said.
Everything inside Leah welled up to deny it. But in the end she could not. For Gerard was Gareth, and Gareth she did love. Impossible to love one side of a person without loving the other.
‘Yes,’ she said resignedly. ‘Yes, I guess I do.’
‘Then go back and tell him so.’
‘No!’
‘Leah, don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Gerard has learned a lot from your leaving him. He’s a changed man. He even contacted his mother. Er…do you know about her yet?’ Enid asked hesitantly.
‘Yes, Gareth tol—’ Leah broke off, frowning as she recalled all Gerard had told her as Gareth. She remembered how he’d hoped she would be more understanding of his so-called brother’s behaviour after she knew his background. But all she’d done was spout more hatred towards him.
Leah’s heart turned over at the thought of her husband sitting there, listening to her vicious vow never to forgive him. It was no wonder he’d felt she would not listen to any explanations he had to offer as himself.
‘Yes,’ she admitted unhappily, ‘I know about his mother.’
‘That’s good. Well, she flew over straight away with her husband and they had a lovely long stay together. She really opened his eyes, I think, to his many misconceptions about women and love. Whatever, I know for a fact that he’s missed you terribly. And he has changed, Leah. Give him a chance to show you how much.’
Leah looked into Enid’s honest face and began to appreciate what she was saying. The fact Gerard had gained his secretary’s liking and respect was something. She’d seen the way Enid had once looked at him behind his back.
‘Yes,’ Enid said, nodding slowly. ‘He’s won me over. And he’s wept on my shoulder. More than once.’
Leah’s eyes rounded. Gerard…weeping? It was an unbelieveable concept.
‘Not that he’d appreciate my telling you that. But a man who can weep for the woman he loves is a man worth going back to, I think. Not that you should make things too easy for him. You must never let men like Gerard take you for granted.’
Enid smiled encouragingly at Leah as she lifted her hand off the button which had been keeping the lift doors shut. They whooshed open, still at the top floor.
Leah hesitated.
‘Go on,’ Enid urged. ‘Go to him.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HE WASN’T in his office. He was in the adj
oining sitting room, slumped in a corner of the chesterfield, a glass of whisky cradled in his hands.
‘Gerard,’ she said, from where she was hovering hesitantly in the open doorway.
He didn’t look up, just swigged back half the amber-coloured liquid. ‘Go away, Leah. I’ll give you a divorce. And a generous settlement. But for now, just go away.’
‘No. You wanted the chance to explain. You wanted me to try to understand. Well, here I am, and I’m prepared to listen this time. So damn you, Gerard Woodward, you’re going to try to explain!’
His eyes jerked up to stare at her, his wretched face holding a touching mixture of surprise and hope. ‘You really mean that?’
Straightening her spine, she strode into the plushly furnished room, crossing the deep-pile carpet to the granite-topped bar in the corner where she poured herself an even bigger whisky than Gerard was downing. ‘You’d better believe it,’ she said.
He frowned when she lifted the glass to her lips. ‘You don’t like whisky.’
‘How do you know? I’ve changed a lot in the last six months. I’ve been a lot of places. Done a lot of things. Tried a lot of things. I’ve moved on from just Chardonnay these days.’ To make a point, she took a deep swallow of the whisky, not flinching when it burnt a fiery path down her throat.
In truth, she had never drunk whisky before, but Leah agreed with Enid on one score. If she and Gerard had a future together she had to take a firm stand and make him see she wasn’t prepared to go back to being the amenable little wife type. Or the silly romantic fool who’d been taken in by his super-sweet super-caring alter ego.
Maybe there was some of Gareth in the new person Enid claimed her boss to be, but there was still a lot of the old Gerard. A true Gareth-type person would never have perpetrated such a deception in the first place. That was a Gerard course of action.
‘I’m waiting for you to begin your explanation,’ Leah said as she prowled around the room, sipping her drink.
‘Then for Pete’s sake sit down,’ he ordered.