she said stonily. ‘I’m not ashamed of that. But my screen persona and my private life are leagues apart, whatever you may want to believe. And forget that garbage about the casting couch too. I don’t go in for casual sex. As you would have found out, Mr Penvarnon, dinner is one thing, but I’d have to love a man before I slept with him.’
She saw his jaw muscles clench and braced herself for anger, but when he spoke his voice was cool.
‘Then let me put your mind at rest,’ he said. ‘The term “advance honeymoon” was only a figure of speech. I wouldn’t really want Simon Rawlins’ leavings.’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. ‘But I still have a problem. As you’ve already noticed, I’m pretty recognisable, and if we’re seen together—in Spain, France, or anywhere else—the obvious conclusions will be drawn.’
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But when we resume our totally separate lives they’ll have to think again.’
‘And I know what they’ll think,’ she said curtly. ‘That I’m your discarded mistress. You talked about potential headlines earlier. Well, I can see these now: “Ariadne dumped.” “Millionaire turns down TV’s Sex Siren.” I don’t court bad publicity. I can’t afford to. And I shouldn’t think you want it either.’
She paused. ‘Especially if people start digging around, unearthing old scandals. How long, do you think, before that nasty little man from the Duchy Herald is told gloatingly by someone that my mother was your father’s mistress? That she betrayed a sick woman who trusted her, and destroyed her marriage, driving her into a nervous breakdown. Which is why Esther Penvarnon lives in widowed exile to this day—because it’s too painful for her to return.’
She drew a harsh breath. ‘Isn’t that still the authorised version of what happened?’
‘You, of course, have a different one.’
‘I certainly have another perception of my mother. You never knew her.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘And you never knew mine.’
‘True. However, I’m sure she wouldn’t want those stories rehashed either, or served up as background to your supposed involvement with me.’
‘Indeed not,’ he said. ‘So I shall make damned sure that our “supposed involvement” remains our little secret, and I advise you most strongly to do the same. Unless you think I missed the vague threat in your last remark.’
He paused. ‘I’m not planning to parade you through the streets of Barcelona, sweetheart, or sunbathe nude with you by a pool on the Côte d’Azur. The paparazzi can’t board this boat, and this is where you’ll stay—until the wedding’s past and gone and the happy couple far away where you can’t touch them.’
He sent her a grim smile as he turned to leave. At the door he hesitated, glancing back at her. ‘In retrospect,’ he said, ‘wouldn’t it have been better just to have taken my advice and stayed in London? Think it over, if by some mischance you can’t sleep. Goodnight, Rhianna.’
‘In retrospect,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t it have been better, in fact, if you and I had never met? You think about that.’
The door closed behind him, and this time she heard the key turn in the lock. For a moment she sat motionless, then she drew a long quivering breath and bent forward, covering her face with her hands.
While in her head a voice whispered over and over again, What can I do? Oh, God, what I can I do? How can I bear this?
But she heard only silence in reply.
AS A confrontation, she thought painfully, it had not gone too well. She might have had the last word, but the upper hand had eluded her completely.
What on earth had possessed her to rake up past history to throw at him? They both knew what had happened, and nothing could change that—a certainty she’d lived with during the whole five years since she’d first learned the truth.
The summer when her life had changed forever.
She’d had her eighteenth birthday, acknowledged as usual by a card from her aunt, and celebrated joyously by a night out in Falmouth with Carrie and some of the girls from school. Her final examinations had been over, and she’d been waiting for the results—although her grades hadn’t really been all that important, she reflected unhappily, as Aunt Kezia had refused point-blank to allow her to apply for a university place, unlike Carrie, who’d been hoping to go to Oxford.
‘It’s time you went out to work, my girl,’ Miss Trewint declared harshly. ‘Started contributing to your upkeep.’
In the meantime, almost as soon as the school gates closed, she found Rhianna a job for the season at Rollo’s Café. The hours were long, it was poorly paid, Mrs Rollo was a witch and by the time her board and lodging had been extracted Rhianna was left with little to show for each week’s hard work.
And this, she supposed, was to be her future. Or some dead-end office job, using the computing and word processing course from school, bolstered by weekend and evening work during the summer.
The only bright spot on the horizon was the anticipation of Carrie’s eighteenth birthday, which was going to be marked by a major party at Penvarnon House.
And for once Simon was expected to be there.
He’d pretty much faded out of the picture since he’d gone up to Cambridge two years ago. He still came to Polkernick sometimes in the summer, when his parents were there, but they were fleeting visits, and often he was accompanied by friends from university, his time occupied with them. Sometimes, too, the friends were female.
Instinct told Rhianna, suffering her own pangs, how much Carrie must be hurt by this, and by the fact that her regular letters to Simon had been answered so infrequently since he left for university.
‘He’s frantically busy, of course,’ she’d said once, her clear eyes faintly shadowed. ‘With work and all the other stuff he’s involved in. Because it’s a different world. Everyone says so. Three years of complete whirl.’ She’d paused. ‘Besides, everything changes. We all move on, and I shall too.’
But Rhianna wasn’t convinced. And her own dream image of Simon the Golden wasn’t quite as perfect as it had been once, its gold just a little tarnished.
She wondered if he was bringing anyone to Carrie’s party, and hoped devoutly that he wasn’t.
She’d been invited, although naturally she wouldn’t be attending the dinner that would precede the dancing. Judging by Carrie’s obvious embarrassment, it was clear her mother had vetoed any such idea.
Carrie had the world’s loveliest dress, in aquamarine chiffon, and Rhianna couldn’t hope to emulate that. However, a charity shop in Truro had yielded a simple black slip of a dress in a silky fabric, cut on the bias with shoestring straps, nearly new, in her size and affordable. They’d even found her a pair of high-heeled sandals to match—which, the helper had confided, had proved too narrow-fitting for most of their customers.
‘Might
