the anger edging up under his voice. ‘Something must have brought you.’
‘You’re here too,’ Adam retaliated coolly. ‘What brought you?’
Somehow Fern managed to swallow down the hard, hurting ball of tears which had locked in her throat. It was always like this when they met, their voices full of painful anger, her body stiff and tense with the effort of rejecting and controlling what she was really feeling, the indifference, the distance she forced herself to display taking so much out of her that she already knew that the moment he had gone she would be reduced to a trembling, shivering wreck, totally unable to do so much as put one foot properly in front of the other; that she would spend hours and not minutes trying to stop herself from reliving the past, from wishing… wanting…
‘You’re here,’ he had said. Tension crawled along her spine and into her nerve-endings. Did he think she had known he would be here… that she had followed him here… that she might… ?
‘I wanted to see the garden, before you destroy it…’
Try as she might, she could not keep the pain out of her voice. She turned to face him, her chin tilting, the sunlight catching her hair so that for a moment she seemed so ethereally a part of her surroundings that Adam found himself holding his breath, afraid almost to breathe as he watched her, mentally reclothing her in soft greens and yellows, the colours, the fabrics flowing and harmonious, enhancing the feminine suppleness of her body, highlighting the almost fawnlike quality of her features, so delicate that they were cruelly swamped by the dullness of the clothes she was actually wearing. Only her hair… Her hair…
Abruptly he looked away from her. She was Nick’s wife and she loved him, although how she…
As she watched him, Fern wondered what he would say if she told him that she had seen the brochure he had been carrying.
Pain flooded through her. It seemed unfairly cruel of fate that it should be Adam of all people who threatened the existence of somewhere that had come to mean so much to her… a solace… a refuge… a sanctuary…
From what? From life? From herself? From her marriage? Tiredly she knew that she wouldn’t challenge him… just as she couldn’t challenge Nick about Venice?
‘I… I must go. Nick… Nick is… will be expecting me. He… he’s leaving for London and…’
Without finishing her sentence she ducked her head to one side and hurriedly started to skirt a wide circle around him, heading back towards the path, sensing that he was watching her but knowing that she dared not look back at him.
Adam! She could feel the heavy, dreary feeling of despair starting to settle over her as she half ran and half stumbled back down the path. Her body was trembling and she felt icy cold even though at the same time her face felt as though it was burningly hot, and her heart was beating so fast that she was finding it difficult to breathe properly.
Too late now to wish she had gone straight home… to wish she had not given in to the temptation to go to Broughton House and in doing so inadvertently and so very, very dangerously and painfully she now risked opening the Pandora’s box into which she had tried to lock away all her memories and thoughts of Adam.
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