he sighed and moved away, walking wearily across the kitchen. Checking the coffee-pot with his hand, he poured himself out a cup then came to sit down at the table.
Claire flicked him a glance. He was staring down at his drink and his shoulders were hunched over. The strain of the last twelve hours was so severe in his face now that he looked like a man who was having to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders.
She looked away before she started feeling sorry for him again. He might look like Atlas, but he isn’t, she reminded herself brutally. He is just a man—an ordinary man with ordinary appetites. And an extraordinary way of dealing with the aftermath.
‘Do you have a mistress?’ she shot at him.
His head came up, dark eyes very guarded. ‘What?’ he murmured warily.
‘Desmona did warn me that you had a mistress tucked away somewhere, but with everything else I forgot to ask. So I am asking you now.’
‘Desmona said that?’ He frowned. ‘When?’
‘At the betrothal thing.’ She refused to call it a party. ‘She pointed out a couple of candidates and suggested I choose.’ Her eyes flicked up again, catching him without his guard, and his expression was—
She looked away again quickly, not wanting to acknowledge what that expression was telling her because it had the power to shatter the brand-new shell of protection she was hugging closely around her.
‘You haven’t answered the question,’ she prompted huskily.
‘There is no one,’ he said.
Eyes fixed on her cup, she tried to decide if she could believe him when the man found it so easy to be economical with the truth.
‘There is no one, Claire,’ he repeated in the kind of tone that forced her to believe him. ‘I would not do that to you. Desmona was talking like a loser, that was all.’
Which was what Claire had told herself when Desmona had fed her the poison, she remembered. ‘Good,’ she said, deciding to believe him. ‘That means I have one less guilty sin to carry around with me.’
‘What we did just now was not sinful,’ he denied.
‘No?’ she mocked. ‘Well, it certainly feels as if I’ve just done something dreadful.’
‘We made love!’ he husked.
‘No—we had sex!’ she burst out. ‘Just the same as we did a week ago. W-we had sex, then you walked away—just like you did a week ago. And I f-feel unclean,’ she added painfully. ‘Just like I did a week ago.’
‘I did not walk away from you just now,’ he asserted heavily. ‘I walked away from—’
The words stopped.
Sitting there with bated breath, Claire waited for him to continue. But he didn’t. Instead he ran a tired hand through his perfectly combed hair—and added nothing.
‘May you burn in hell,’ she murmured succinctly.
To her surprise he laughed—albeit cynically. ‘I have been burning away in that place for years,’ he drawled with an irony that flew right by her. ‘You will have to come up with a better curse than that to hurt me.’
And why do I get the impression that he knows exactly what that curse would be? she wondered, seeing a flash of something almost haunted pass across his eyes.
‘Whatever,’ she said, dismissing the look—because she had to do that if she was to remain strong. ‘Burn in hell or laugh at it. It doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t want you to come near me like that ever again—do you hear?’
With that she got up with the intention of leaving him—but his next words stopped her. ‘I’m sorry if I let you down,’ he said very huskily. ‘I didn’t do it to hurt you, Claire. I just didn’t think.’
‘You mean—you always walk away from a woman directly after making love to her?’ she asked derisively.
There was a distinct pause—more a guarded hesitation—before he sighed out, ‘Yes.’
‘The man on a mountain,’ she murmured softly, aware that the cryptic remark would mean nothing to him. She shivered inwardly. ‘I understand now. It’s yourself you feel the need to walk away from.’
She had been throwing out words haphazardly with the specific need to hurt him, but as she stood there watching his face grow white beneath his olive skin before it closed up altogether Claire realised, with a small shock, that she had hit the nail right upon its head!
‘You know me so well,’ he drawled, offering her that grim brief smile again in an effort to cover his reaction up.
And she wanted to hit him—probably would have done if she hadn’t noticed the tremor in his fingers as he reached for his cup. He was more affected by all of this than he wanted her to believe.
What was it with him, Claire wondered furiously, that he hated wanting her as a woman so much that he kept his wretched sexuality hidden inside his trousers until the very last moment? As if he had still been praying for deliverance right up until then, she realised with a shudder.
And on a muffled sob she turned and ran from the kitchen—kept on running, across the hall and up the stairs, desperately needing to get to her room before she broke down and wept.
Panting and sobbing together by the time she reached her bedroom, she barely had a chance to close the door before it was thrust open again.
‘Go away!’ she cried.
‘Don’t…’ he groaned, reaching out to pull her into his arms.
To her horror she pressed her face into his chest and sobbed all the harder.
It wasn’t fair! she told herself pitiably. He loved his grandmother. He could love Melanie. Why was it so terrible for him to try to love her?
His first wife, she then remembered with a sudden chilling of her flesh. She must have been quite something to have locked his heart up as totally as this.
Fighting for control of the tears now, she tried to push away from him.
‘No,’ he refused, his arms only tightening around her.
Her face lifted away from his chest, blue eyes awash with so many painful things that it was impossible to pick which was hurting her the most. ‘Oh, please,’ she pleaded helplessly. ‘Please, Andreas, let me go.’
For some unfathomable reason, hearing her use his name in that pained, wretched way unlocked something desperate inside him. His chest expanded on a tense draw of air, his eyes flashing with some awful emotion—then he lowered his head and crushed her mouth to his with a hunger so fierce that it caught her utterly blindsided.
Once again Claire discovered that she didn’t stand a chance. Not with emotions running as rife inside her as they were doing right now. And his mouth was hot, the taste of her own tears mingling with the moistness of his tongue. It was a seductive combination. The passion
