eyes were huge, her face stark, skin stretched over bones, white as alabaster.
It gave her an unearthly beauty …
Anger rived through him again. Anger that she should look so beautiful.
It was a beauty he could never possess again … barred to him for ever.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was all a set-up.’ He paused—a fatal pause. ‘Nothing more than that.’
Nothing more than that …
The words tolled in his head like a funeral bell. Killing everything.
She was staring at him, still as a whitened corpse.
Nausea rose in her throat. ‘Get out—’ Her voice was a breath, a shaking rasp.
The steel bands bit into him, constricting like a crushing weight around him. He had more he had to say—must force himself to say.
‘This is what you will do.’ He spoke tersely, without emotion. Because emotion was far too dangerous. He had to crush it out of him. ‘You will sever entirely all relations with Ian Randall. You will have nothing more to do with him. You will stay out of his life—permanently. Give him whatever reasons you want—but be aware that if you do not part from him—permanently—then I will give him a reason to sever relations.’ He paused—another fatal pause. ‘He will know what you have been to me.’
She swallowed. She could feel nausea—more than nausea—climbing in her throat. She fought it down—had to fight it down. Had to.
‘Do you understand?’ he demanded harshly. ‘Is that clear?’
She nodded. He would not go, she knew, until he had obtained what he had come for.
What he had always planned to obtain …
No! She must not think of that—must not let the realisation of what he’d done to her explode in her brain. Not now—not yet. She stood very still, holding herself together. She was beyond speech, beyond everything.
He exhaled a sharp breath. He had done what he had set out to do. He had done it and now there was nothing else for him to do. Nothing but to do what she had told him to do—to go.
‘I’ll see myself out.’ His voice was clipped, back in control.
He turned and walked towards the door, seizing up his suitcase from the hall beyond. His hand closed over the handle to the front door. For a moment, the barest moment, he seemed to freeze—as if … as if …
Then, abruptly, he yanked open the door and was gone.
Behind him, Marisa went on standing. Staring at where once he had been. Then slowly, very slowly, she sank down upon the sofa.
Burning with pain.
Athan strode down the corridor. His face was closed. His mind was closed. Every part of him was closed. Shut down like a nuclear reactor that had gone into meltdown and was now so dangerous only total closure could keep it from devastating all around it.
He must keep it that way. That was what was important. Essential. Keeping everything closed down.
As he descended in the lift, walked across the lobby, out into the road, reached for his mobile phone to summon a chauffeured company car to take him back to his own apartment, words went round in his head.
It’s done.
That was all he had to remember.
Not Marisa at his side, his arm wrapped around her shoulder as they walked along the beach at sunset, the coral sand beneath their bare feet, the foaming wavelets washing them as they walked, and the majestic blaze of the sun sinking into the gilded azure sea.
Not Marisa beneath the stars, her beautiful swan neck stretched as she lifted her starlit face, her hair cascading like silk down her back, as he pointed out constellations to her. Not the sudden tightening in his loins as he framed her face with his hands, cupping her head, lowering his mouth to hers, lowering her body to the waiting sand beneath …
Not Marisa with her arms around him, her beauteous naked body pressed to his, crying out in ecstasy …
He wrenched his mind away, his hand around his suitcase handle clenching like steel.
He went on walking, with the biting winter all around him.
Inside him.
Marisa was packing. One suitcase was packed already. She’d packed it on another continent, in another lifetime. The suitcase she was packing now was a new acquisition—one she’d bought that morning, from the nearest shop that sold luggage. Methodically, unthinkingly, she opened drawers, took out clothes, folded them into the suitcase. It didn’t matter what order they went in—any order would do. It mattered only that she went on folding and packing. Folding and packing. Once the drawers were empty she moved on to the closet, performing the same office with its contents.
There were some other things as well as clothes, but those could follow later. She would box them up and have them sent on. Things like the pretty ornaments she’d acquired during her time in London, souvenirs, books, CDs. Bits and pieces.
Everything else stayed with the flat—all the kitchen goods, all the furniture, all the bedding. All she was taking were her clothes and her personal effects.
And memories.
She couldn’t get rid of those. They were glued inside her head. With a glue that ate like acid into her brain.
But they were false memories. Every one of them. False because they had never happened. Because the man in the memories was not the man she had thought he was.
Her throat convulsed. Whatever her wariness over him, over what he wanted of her, she had thought she was at the least a romantic interlude for him—someone to while away a Caribbean idyll with, share a passionate affair with, enjoying their time together however transient. But she hadn’t even been that. Not even that.
A lie—the whole thing had been a lie. A lie from the moment he’d asked her to keep the lift doors open for him. A set-up. Staged, managed, manipulated. Fake from the very first moment. With no purpose other than to bring her to the point she was now—cast out of Ian’s life.
Because there was no going back—she knew that. She could never be any part of Ian’s life now. Not even the fragile, insecure part that she had once so briefly been.
His wife is Athan’s sister … Ian is his brother-in-law …
She hadn’t known—hadn’t guessed—hadn’t suspected in a million years. And obviously Ian had not thought it necessary for her to know that his wife’s brother was Athan Teodarkis, because it would mean nothing to her—why should it?
But it didn’t matter, she thought tiredly. It didn’t matter who had known or not known who was what to whom. All that mattered now was that Athan Teodarkis—Ian’s wife’s brother—knew about her—knew what she was to Ian.
Anguish
