tolerating her quiet adoration and had begun to snap and snarl at her as though she irritated him. The early, childhood days of affection changed almost overnight to a bad-tempered rejection. Her own brother didn’t want to be bothered with her any more and pride had made her pretend she didn’t care.
‘Me? Worried about you? Good grief,’ she said lightly, ‘I’m well aware that the Devil looks after his own. I stayed up to keep Mother company,’ she added, skirting around the truth.
She knew only too painfully what her mother must have been feeling when István failed to turn up. A deep, searing anxiety that was as intense as a physical pain. He could have been lying somewhere in a ditch after falling off his motorbike. Concussed from being thrown by his horse. Drowned in the river. Even now it angered her to think of the needless hours of worry.
‘All those times when you rolled in without an explanation or an apology,’ she continued, ‘I could never fathom why Mother put up with your thoughtlessness, why she always welcomed you back with open arms and a mug of cocoa and digestive biscuits!’ she finished crossly.
‘Well, she understood me better than the rest of you,’ he said with a slight shrug of his big shoulders. ‘She knew what I was doing and that I could take care of myself. And that there were times when I had to get out and roam the moors or drive till I was exhausted. I can’t stand being fenced in. Don’t you know that by now? I need a free rein——’
‘Freedom!’ She fought back the angry tears, struggled to crush the hurtful memories and lashed out blindly. ‘How can you say you were fenced in? You had all the freedom you wanted! You were spoilt rotten!’ she seethed. ‘And you gave nothing back but heartache!’ Flinging a hasty glance in John’s direction, she saw he was well out of earshot and recklessly let her tongue take her further. ‘You seduced Lisa!’ she hissed. ‘You put her life in danger. You——’
‘Yes? Go on,’ he goaded, his eyes glittering. ‘Say it.’
Her teeth ground together, preventing the hot spurt of angry words. If she spoke of the time Lisa lost István’s baby, she knew she’d howl her eyes out because she was on the brink of losing control of her emotions. He’d been twenty-four and should have known better. Lisa, nineteen, almost three months pregnant. Tanya’s body trembled.
‘You never showed an ounce of family feeling!’ she grated, chickening out of the direct accusation. ‘That’s why I fail to see why you’ve come here at this time. You’re not here to celebrate the wedding, are you? You and John have always loathed each other.’ That left Lisa as the reason, she thought in dismay. Her voice rose half an octave. ‘What…what did make you turn up here?’
‘I decided I had to make a play for what I wanted,’ he said softly.
Her heart thudded. ‘That’s what I was afraid of!’ she said jerkily. ‘István——’
‘Pleading will do no good. My mind is made up.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I refuse to be rushed by you, or anyone. I’m very much my own man, Tanya. I’m calling the shots and in time all will be revealed,’ he drawled, and turned to go.
‘Running away again?’ she taunted, half out of her mind with despair at his intentions. He froze and she knew she’d actually reached a vulnerable part of that apparently impenetrable skin. It gave her no pleasure, however. Somehow he always turned her into a shrew—and that was awful. She hated herself for complaining and whinging, for letting her raw emotions bubble to the surface, for being bitchy. He made her feel less good about herself. That was why she hated to be near him.
Slowly he turned and walked towards her again. ‘I didn’t run,’ he interrupted, a thinly disguised anger underlying the soft tones. ‘I left of my own choice. Why don’t you say it, Tanya? Say what you must and get it out of your system.’
She took a deep breath, the pain swelling to the surface while she struggled with the souring hurt that had destroyed her happiness. ‘All right. You claim that you left?’ she echoed bitterly, blurting it all out in a spurt of spitting flame. ‘Call it what you like, blame who you like; you went without warning, without leaving any address—and—and—you—drove Mother into her grave and—and for that I’ll never, ever forgive you!’
He remained motionless. Her heart rolled over in sickening lurches because she’d voiced the words that had become engraved on her heart and because she had finally faced him with one truth after all the years of nursing its canker inside her.
István’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘How could I kill her?’ he growled. ‘I was in Budapest at the time.’
‘But she didn’t know that! You were special to her and you’d vanished without trace. She went into a decline. Soon after, she died. Isn’t the connection obvious?’ she asked huskily.
Waves of remembered distress made the muscles in her stomach clench as if a ruthless hand gripped her there. A sob lurched from her tremulous lips. Her pained eyes lifted to his and saw…pity.
‘Tan,’ he began, tight with strain.
‘No! Don’t look at me like that! I don’t want it! It’s too late to show sympathy!’ she cried hoarsely. ‘What do you care that Mother was beside herself because you’d vanished?’
‘What did I care?’ he roared. And suddenly, his eyes burning with an intense light, he grabbed her arms in an explosion of movement, his teeth bared in a furious snarl as he shook her violently. ‘What the hell do you know about me?’ he seethed.
Nothing, that was the pity of it all, she thought in silent answer before her brain stopped functioning. Pain erupted in her head, her bruised arms, her neck where it snapped back and forth. ‘István, István!’ she gasped above the roaring in her ears.
Mercifully he came to his senses and held her steady. Her shocked, accusing eyes lifted and widened at the pallor and the gauntness of his face. ‘Twenty-seven years…’ he muttered through bloodless lips. ‘And of all the women I have to vent my frustration on I choose you.’
So he wanted to hurt her. Hearing him, the once-adored elder brother, coldly admitting that he was targeting her was unbearable. Her resolve to be remote and unemotional collapsed under the weight of her own terrible emptiness.
To her total dismay, hot tears overflowed from her stricken eyes and emptied in scalding torrents down her cheeks. With a harsh exclamation, he growled some words in Hungarian then bewildered her by gathering her in his arms and holding her tightly in a bear-hug. The embrace was so welcome, so comfortable and so achingly familiar that she sobbed even harder.
‘I know how much you loved Ester. You did your best to love us all,’ he stated in a harsh mutter. Her shoulders shook and he stroked them. ‘You’re so like her. Strong sense of duty. Loyal. Dogged in your determination and totally blind to anything but what you have to do, like a blinkered horse.’
He was absently stroking the chestnut river of her hair and speaking to her in the same kind of voice he’d once used when she was small and needed comfort in those far-off and innocent days before he’d taken an inexplicable dislike to her. Longing for that time again and disturbed by his gentleness, she buried her face deeper into his warm chest.
Shame filled her. It was a shame brought on by the realisation that the death of her beloved mother had been as traumatic an event as István’s disappearance. That shouldn’t be. He didn’t deserve her regrets. Missing her mother dreadfully, she’d missed István just as much.
