He hadn’t asked for love from her, had he?
But he had insisted that both Piers and Madeleine were kept out of their marriage, she grimly reminded herself. And him being with Madeleine was a betrayal of the trust she had placed in him to keep his side of that vow.
‘Are you going to leave him?’
Leave?
Panic swept through her. A terrible, terrible panic that filled her with a sickening horror that turned her flesh to ice.
Oh, God help me! she prayed, when she realised just how far she had fallen. ‘I can’t think now,’ she whispered, pushing trembling fingers to her burning eyes. ‘I need some time—some space to—’
‘What you need, Shaan—’ Jemma cut in with a blistering impatience ‘—is to get those damned blinkers off! Wasn’t it bad enough when you wore them all the time Piers was around, without you doing the same thing with his thankless brother?’
Shaan’s head came up. ‘W-what do you mean?’ she gasped at the angry outburst.
Jemma glanced away, her eyes flashing with a bitter disdain that literally shook Shaan to her very core. ‘Piers made a damned mockery out of you from day one,’ she bit out tightly. ‘Everyone else could see it—see those charming smiles of his and that easygoing manner was all just an act. But you, you fell for it all like the trusting little fool you are, and got well and truly hurt for it! Now you’ve been doing the same damned thing with his brother!’ she sighed out angrily. ‘So do yourself a favour, Shaan,’ Jemma finished huskily, ‘and get out from under it all before the damned Danvers brothers really tear you apart!’
Too late, Shaan thought tragically. They’ve already torn me apart.
‘What do you think they were doing, coming out of that hotel in the first place?’ Jemma questioned suddenly.
Oh, my God! Shaan stood up, unable—just unable—to cope with the obvious answer to that one. ‘I h-have to go,’ she murmured shakily.
‘No, Shaan!’ Jemma’s hand, grabbing hold of hers, stopped her from moving, her eyes full of a pained remorse because she knew she had just cruelly hit Shaan below the belt ‘I’m sorry I said that. Please!’ she pleaded. ‘Sit down again while we discuss this! You’re in no fit state to go anywhere just yet!’
No fit state.
She was still in no fit state by the time she let herself into Rafe’s house over an hour later.
She should have gone back to work, but she hadn’t been able to. What was the use when she could barely think, barely walk, barely do anything with any intelligence, she felt so utterly frozen inside.
But neither did she want to be alone in this house, she realised from the very moment she entered it. It had begun to feel like home over the last few blissful weeks; now it was back to being the most alien place this earth had to offer her.
And as she stood there in the middle of all its polished wood luxury her mind flicked towards another home, a real home—not a place built around an illusion.
The only home she wanted to be in at this precise moment in her life…
* * *
When the doorbell started ringing around eight o’clock that night, Shaan was expecting it, but still found it took a concerted effort to make herself get out of the chair she had been sitting on the edge of while supposedly watching television. But she had really been waiting for this.
A showdown with Rafe.
Dry-mouthed, her face composed but very pale, she made herself leave the sitting room and walk down the hall towards the front door. She could see his tall, dark bulk superimposed against the leaded glass in the door, felt his anger reach through the barrier as he gave another impatient stab at the doorbell, and she ran decidedly shaky hands down the sides of her faded jeans.
She hadn’t worn these jeans since she’d left here—her aunt and uncle’s house—almost two months ago—or the simply knitted waist-cut blue top she had on. Both were part of the hodgepodge of personal items she had left behind here and never quite got around to coming to collect.
Now it was Rafe’s house where clothes of hers had been left hanging. In fact, she hadn’t brought anything with her, had not been able to bear the thought of walking into the bedroom they’d always shared to go and pack them.
So all she had done was go into his study so she could write him a note which she had sealed in an envelope along with her beautiful engagement ring. Not her wedding ring—she felt her official status as his wife compelled her to continue wearing that—but as for the rest…
She had taken nothing from that house—nothing—leaving her set of house keys and the envelope on the hall table so he would see them the moment he came home.
The note was short and to the point—by necessity—because she needed to finish this with at least some semblance of pride left intact, and the only way she could do that was by not telling him that she had decided to leave him only because she had discovered that he had betrayed her first.
So, ‘I can’t go on living a lie like this. I’m sorry’, was all she had written.
And now here he was, as she had expected, come to make her face him with the whys that she had no real answers to if she wanted to conceal the truth.
The truth. My God, she groaned inwardly as the full, wretched truth of it all went washing through her on a wave of utter misery.
You’re a fool, Shaan, she told herself grimly as her shaky fingers fumbled with the door lock and slowly drew the door open. You stupid, gullible fool.
Then her heart quivered, the morass of pained emotions all tying themselves into knots just as they had always done from the moment she had ever set eyes on this man.
He was standing there in the same clothes he had been wearing when she saw him with Madeleine. The same iron-grey suit he had crushed the other woman against when he’d bent down to kiss her. Same bright white shirt, same striped blue tie—only the fine silk had been yanked loose about his tense, tanned throat and the top few buttons on his shirt had been impatiently tugged free.
His face wore the grim, tight mask she recognised from somewhere, but at the moment she was just too strung out to want to recall where. His grey eyes were flat as they searched her set pale face for a sign that this was all just some kind of very bad joke.
But it wasn’t, and he seemed to accept that it wasn’t. ‘May I come in?’ he requested quietly.
With her long dark lashes flickering downwards to cover her too-revealing eyes, she took a small step sideways in silent permission for him to enter.
He did so, making her heart stop beating altogether when he came to a halt directly beside her. Her fingers tightened into a white-knuckled clutch on the solid brass door lock. And for a moment they continued to stand there like that, locked into a circle of unbelievable tension, while the full power of his magnetic presence bombarded her with all the weak reasons why she should not be doing this.
Then his hand came up, making her stiffen in silent rejection because she thought he was going to touch her and she couldn’t bear him to touch her. Because she knew that the whole roller coaster of emotion would spring free from the tight band of control she had it trapped in. And if that happened she would fall apart—she was sure of it!
But all he did was carefully take the door from her clutching fingers and quietly close it before moving off towards the sitting room. Leaving her standing there trembling and shaken, needing to take a few more moments to pull herself together again before she found the courage to go and join him.
CHAPTER TEN
RAFE was standing in the middle of the room, jacket pushed back, clenched hands resting on his hips in a posture that could only be read as aggressive.
‘Now you’d better explain to me what this is all about,’ he said. ‘And it had better be good, Shaan,’ he tagged on warningly. ‘Because I am tired and I’m jet lagged and I’m in no mood for any of this.’
She could see that. She wasn’t a fool. She could see that he was angry—pulsing with it, actually. Throbbing. ‘I told you—in my note,’ she s
aid. And looked down and away from him—simply because it hurt too much to look upon that big, lean body and that hard, handsome face, look upon the man who, somewhere along the line, she had allowed herself to imagine really did belong to her.
And that had been her biggest mistake, she realised now—forgetting how they’d begun all of this and believing the illusion.
‘About living a lie? Is that what you think we’ve being doing, living one big lie?’
‘Yes.’ It was that honest, that simple. She didn’t even need to expand on it.
But neither could she continue to just stand here, loving him—hating him. Wishing she had never seen him with Madeleine.
Because all she could see now was him holding Madeleine. And it hurt—hurt so damned much that she had to do something, anything, to override that vision.
It was then that she noticed the television set talking away to its lost audience, and she used that as her excuse, moving stiffly across the room to reach down and switch it off—then almost immediately wished she hadn’t when a new kind of silence began throbbing in the laden atmosphere.
‘So you leave me, just like that,’ Rafe pressed into that thickened silence. ‘No discussion. Without even the slightest hint that you may feel like this. You just wake up this morning deciding that we’ve been living a lie and calmly walk out on me?’
His anger and contempt and derision cut into her like a knife, and she responded instinctively. ‘What would you have preferred me to do?’ she turned to flash back at him. ‘Continue pretending until you’d had enough?’
That shocked him, the real bitterness in her tone hitting him on a raw spot that expanded his wide chest in a sharp intake of air.
But it also made him look at her—really look at her—which in turn made her wish she had held her tongue. Because she knew he was now seeing the strain in her face, the pallor, the black orbs of pain that would remind him of another time when he had witnessed her hurting as badly as this.
Sure enough, his eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘There’s something else going on here,’ he decided. ‘I’ve done something, haven’t I?’ His perception stunned her. ‘I’ve unwittingly done something that offended you so badly you just walked out on me!’
Shaan’s heart contracted. ‘Isn’t it enough that we’ve spent the last two months living out a lie together?’ she shot back defensively.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he grimly denied, starting towards her. And she had o steel herself not to back off, there was so much latent anger in his manner. ‘Because what we share every night in our bed is no lie, Shaan, and you know it!’
‘There’s more to a marriage than basic sex, you know,’ she denounced as he reached her.
‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘There’s a thing called sharing—the good and the bad things. And another called talking.’ His hand came up, cupping her pale cheek. ‘As in discussing our problems and trying to resolve them.’
‘I’ve already resolved mine,’ she snapped. ‘By leaving.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve told you why!’ Angrily she slapped his hand away from her cheek before she did something stupid like turning her hungry mouth into it.
He simply put it back again. ‘Then try again,’ he suggested. ‘And keep on trying until you come up with something I can accept as the truth. Because if yon expect me to believe, Shaan, that you can’t stand me touching you, then you’re a fool, and, worse, must think me a damned fool!’
And to prove his point his other hand snaked round her waist to pull her against the solid heat of his body. It was awful. She couldn’t even control the sharp intake of air into her lungs as the sweet, hot sting of awareness shivered through her.
‘It was wrong, Rafe!’ she burst out in sheer desperation. ‘I did tell you from the beginning that what we were doing felt wrong to me!’
“‘Wrong.’” His eyes began to burn. ‘Four nights ago you lay in my arms with your legs wrapped around me and your eyes drowning in my eyes while we shared the most—perfect experience we have ever shared. And you dare to tell me it was wrong now?’
Oh, God. She closed her eyes, swallowing as a dry lump of pain lodged itself in her aching throat because she was suddenly seeing him lying with Madeleine like that, and she couldn’t bear it—she couldn’t!
‘I never said the sex wasn’t good!’ she responded wretchedly.
‘Then what are you saying?’ he persisted relentlessly. That it isn’t enough any more?’
‘It was never enough!’
Not for either of them, obviously! Or he would not have needed to have secret meetings with Madeleine, would he?
Once again she tried to tug free of his grip.
Once again he refused to let her go. ‘OK,’ he murmured. ‘Then tell me what it is you do want and I’ll do my best to give it to you!’
And his voice was tense—dark and tense—roughened by a bone-melting urgency that almost had her believing that he must care more than she thought he did.
Then she saw him with Madeleine and it all fell apart. ‘You can’t give me what I want,’ she whispered bleakly.
There was silence while he absorbed the full, brutal thrust of that, a long, taut, agonising silence while she stood against him and throbbed with the agony of her own unrequited love for him.
‘My God,’ he breathed then as a sudden thought hit him. ‘It’s Piers, isn’t it?’
‘What?’ Shaan frowned in confusion. ‘I don’t—’
‘Shut up!’ he cut in, and suddenly let go of her, spinning away, a hand going up to rake through his hair before it clamped itself around his nape and stayed there while he glared down at the floor beneath his feet. His big shoulders, body—every part of him—was locked in a rigid pose of tension that held her breathless and silent.
Then he let out a soft, angry huff of laughter. ‘I should have guessed straight away,’ he muttered, more to himself than to her. ‘The bastard arrives back in London on Monday and you’ve left me by Wednesday!’
‘But I haven’t even seen Piers,’ she denied, not seeing that he was offering her a way out of this ugly scene until it was too late and the denial had already been made.
It didn’t matter, because he didn’t believe her. ‘Liar,’ he sighed, unclipping the hand from his nape so he could clench it into a fist which he pushed to his brow. ‘Of course you’ve damned well seen him.’
Had he come to that conclusion because of his own clandestine meeting with Madeleine? she wondered. And would have laughed at the irony of it—if she had been up to laughing.
But she wasn’t because she was closer to weeping. Then he let out another of those laughs, as if he too saw the bitter irony in the whole wretched mess. ‘What did he do?’ he flashed sourly at her. ‘Shoot hotfoot round to see you at the first opportunity he had, knowing I was out of the country which therefore made the weasel feel safe enough to bare his soul to you and beg forgiveness?’
Well, that’s rich, Shaan thought, coming from the man she had seen with her own eyes begging something from Madeleine! And in an act of sheer defiance she lifted her chin, her mouth flattening into a tight little line in an outright refusal to answer him.
So he made up his own answer. ‘The bloody worm,’ he gritted. ‘How long did it take him to slither his way back into your heart, Shaan?’ he taunted jeeringly. ‘A couple of minutes? An hour, playing the poor, confused lover?’
‘You’re beginning to sound jealous, Rafe,’ she hit back tightly.
It had the most unbelievable effect on him.
His eyes changed, turning almost as black as her own, and heat poured into his face as if she’d just exposed some terrible, dark secret that forced the top off his barely held anger. And it was the sight of that anger which had her stumbling back a step in real alarm in an effort to avoid the hard hand that suddenly shot out towards her.
But she was too late to stop it from curling around the back of her neck and tightening as he yanked her up against him. Then his mouth landed on her
s, hot, hard and merciless.
And everything special she had ever felt for him dropped like a wounded bird to the pit of her stomach and lay there quivering as he proceeded to plunder her mouth with a ruthlessness that utterly reviled everything they had ever shared before it.
By the time he let her go she was actually sobbing, her tear-filled eyes almost filling her whitened face.
‘Get your things out of my house,’ he gritted as he spun away from her. ‘I don’t want to find a single sign that you’ve ever been there by the time I get home tomorrow night—got that?’
Got it? Oh, she’d got it, all right, Shaan acknowledged with a blistering fury of her own as she watched him stride angrily for the door through a bank of hot, stinging tears.
What was OK for him was unacceptable for her!
‘And just for the record,’ he added tightly as he reached the door, ‘you can warn Piers from me that if he hurts Madeleine with all of this then I’ll personally sort him out.’
Ah, thought Shaan with a strange little smile pulsing across the fullness of her kiss-swollen lips. So we come to the nitty-gritty of all this aggression. Poor Madeleine. We must not upset Madeleine.
‘You utter hypocrite,’ she derided.
It stopped him mid-stride, turned the full blast of his black fury back on her as he spun to face her. ‘What was that supposed to mean?’ he demanded.
‘I saw you with Madeleine!’ she flung at him accusingly.
‘What?’ It was his turn to frown in confusion. ‘When?’
‘Today.’ Why, she wondered jealously, have there been other occasions when you’ve met up with her? ‘On the steps of the Connaught.’ On a flash of shaking contempt she continued, ‘So don’t you dare stand there taking the moral high ground over Piers and me when you are no better yourself!’
Then instantly she wished she had held her stupid tongue when she saw his expression take on a sudden and radical change as all that dark, angry violence was replaced by a sharp, shrewd intelligence.
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