long friendship with mine—how she supported my mother through so many unhappy years. Even when my father threatened your parents’ marriage with his troublemaking.’ He took another mouthful of wine, as though he still needed it. ‘Marisa’s mother wasn’t the first of his mistresses and she certainly wasn’t the last. But she was …’ He paused, and now he reached his hand out and slipped it comfortingly around Marisa’s wrist. ‘She was the only one who made the terrible mistake of falling in love with him.’
Marisa spoke. Her voice was low, and she couldn’t look at Eva—let alone Athan. Above all not Athan.
‘I don’t exonerate her. She knew he was married. But she told me that he always said it was a marriage wherein both partners understood—’ her voice twisted ‘—understood that it was primarily about business and property, preserving wealth and inheritance and so on, and that he had never married for love.’ Marisa took another breath, lifting her eyes this time and they were filled with a bleak, sad pity for her foolish, trusting, self-blinded mother. ‘She chose to believe him. He pursued her relentlessly because she’d said no to him.’ Her voice twisted again. ‘He wasn’t a man who liked women to say no to him, so he told her whatever he considered effective in getting her into bed. He told her his wife had met someone else and asked for a divorce.’ Her voice became tight. ‘When she had yielded to him, and subsequently found herself pregnant, he suddenly didn’t want to know any more. And she realised far too late how stupid she had been.’
She took a heavy breath.
‘He gave her a lump sum—enough to buy the cottage I was brought up in—and a small income to go with it. He got her to sign a document waiving all claims to official child support from him. She was too devastated to refuse, and she went along with being bundled out of his life and kept quiet. She moved to Devon and disappeared. I grew up having no idea who he was—only that he was “the great love of her life,” as she used to say. After she died I came to London to try and find him. But I had no name and nothing to go on but a photograph my mother had kept—’
‘Which is how she found me,’ Ian interjected. ‘It was total, absolute chance. Marisa took a job at a cleaning company and my office was one of their contracts. One evening I was working late. She saw me, stared at me—and that’s how we found each other.’
‘Of course,’ Eva said slowly, comprehension dawning. ‘Ian looks the image of his father … and presumably the photo was of a man around his age?’
Marisa nodded. She could say no more.
‘It’s extraordinary,’ Eva breathed. ‘To have absolutely no idea that you had a sibling.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Athan, imagine not knowing you even existed—it would be dreadful.’
He didn’t respond. Then, abruptly, he got to his feet.
‘Excuse me. I must—’
He stopped. There was nothing he ‘must’ do except get out of there.
‘Athan?’
Eva’s voice was bewildered, but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t help anything right now. He just had to walk out.
Without another word he left the room, ignoring Eva’s astonished rush of Greek at him, asking what on earth he was doing. Like an automaton he strode to the bank of lifts, jabbing at the button, willing the doors to open and let him escape. Leave. Get away. Away from her.
Away from what he’d done to her …
Inside the private dining room Eva was still staring, nonplussed, at her brother’s empty place.
‘What on earth—?’ she began.
Her bewildered gaze came back to her husband, then moved on to Marisa. She started to speak, but Marisa spoke instead.
‘I’m sorry—I have to—’ Her voice was staccato and she couldn’t finish. All she could do was get to her feet, roughly pushing back her chair, seize up her clutch bag and leave the room.
She could hear her half-brother call her name anxiously, but she ignored it.
Outside, the hotel corridor was deserted.
All except for the tall, dark figure standing by the elevator.
Sudden slicing memory knifed through her. Herself emerging from the elevator on her way back to the apartment Ian had leased for her, seeing the tall, dark figure striding towards her, asking her to keep the doors open for her.
A set up. That was all it had been. A calculating, carefully timed set-up with one purpose only.
To snare her. Captivate her.
Seduce her.
Seduce her away from the man he’d assumed she was having an affair with. A married man. His own brother-in-law.
Emotion buckled through her—hot and nauseating. Icy and punishing.
‘Wait!’
Her voice carried the length of the deserted corridor, made him turn instantly. His expression froze. She strode up to him. The anger she’d kept leashed so tightly inside her while she’d sat at the table and told of her relationship with Ian, leapt in her throat. She stopped dead in front of him. Of its own volition her hand lifted, and she brought it across his face in a ringing slap.
‘That’s for what you thought I was!’
Then, in a whirl of skirts, she pushed past him into the lift that was opening its doors behind him, jabbed the ‘close’ button urgently.
But he made no attempt to follow her—made no movement at all. Only turned very slowly and watched her as the doors closed and the elevator swept her up to the bedroom floors. Her heart was pounding. In her vision seared the image of his face. Like a dead man’s, with a weal forming across his cheekbone. Livid and ugly.
Marisa was walking. She did a lot of walking these days. Miles and miles. All over the moor. But however far she walked she never got away from what was eating her. Consuming her.
Destroying her.
Round and round the destructive thoughts went in her head. Over and over again she tumbled them.
How could she not have realised what it was that Athan thought about her? How could it not have penetrated through her thick, stupid skull that he had jumped to the conclusion about her that he had?
With hindsight—that most pointless and excruciating of all things—it was glaringly, blazingly obvious that that was what he had assumed all along
She’d replayed every line of that conversation—their ugly, utterly misbegotten conversation—where she had completely failed to understand just what he’d meant about her relationship with Ian.
I assumed he meant he’d discovered I was his sister. I never dreamt he thought anything so sleazy about me—anything so vile.
But that was exactly what he had done.
Right from the start.
She wanted to scream and yell and denounce him to the world. But there was no one she could
