TO HELL, apparently. They went to hell, Annie decided later as she lay in the middle of the rumpled bed that César had just stalked angrily away from—after taking her to hell by the most exciting route he could find.
And now she lay devastated, maybe suffering from shock—she wasn’t sure. All she did know was that that one small question had exploded into a blistering row and from the blistering row had come the blistering sex.
But, worse, she had not been dragged down into the fiery depths of that hell protesting. No, she’d gone willingly—eagerly!
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned, rolling onto her side so that she could bury her shame in the snowy white pillow.
His pillow. A pillow that held the scent of him. And almost instantly she was assailed with the kind of thoughts and feelings that cruelly mocked the sense of shame.
It wasn’t as if she could even comfort herself with the knowledge that she’d tried to fight him off! Because she hadn’t.
From the moment his hands had reached out to take hold of her she had lost all sense of reason. Pure sexual exhilaration had fizzed up from the centre of her fury to coil in a hot, pulsing constriction around the muscles of her womanhood, and she’d gone, kicking, scratching, biting, into the fiery vats of passion with him, giving him back kiss for savage kiss, caress for ravaging caress until the whole wild battle had finally converged in a soul-destroying climax which had left her dead-limbed, mind-blown and spent, and him punching the pillow with a white-knuckled fist as he fought to regain control of his shattered emotions.
Then, ‘Damn you,’ he’d muttered to her as he’d climbed off the bed. ‘Damn you to bloody hell for making me behave like that!’
If he’d called her Annie the super-tramp he could not have hurt her more than that angry damning did.
Then she heard it, and her head picked up, ears tensed and listening to the faint, deep whooshing sound that took a few moments to register in her sluggish brain.
No, she thought hectically. She refused to believe it—not after what had just taken place on this bed! No!
Suddenly she was jackknifing to her feet, fingers scrambling, body trembling in her haste as she dragged the rumpled sheet with her and began draping the fine cloth around her body even as she ran out of the open French windows and onto the upper balcony.
The sun was high, blinding as it hit her eyes, and she almost lost the sheet altogether when she instinctively lifted a hand to shade out the brightness. Then she saw it, hovering just twenty feet from the ground, the powerful whir of blades shattering the still air with its blunt, cruel statement.
‘No, César,’ she whispered, tripping over the trailing sheet as she staggered to the balcony rail. ‘Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare!’
But he did dare, apparently. And it felt as if everything living inside her took a swooping dive to her stomach as the helicopter slowly turned until it was facing out to sea, then shot forward, leaving her leaning there against the balcony rail, watching it go, while hot tears of bitter helplessness ran unchecked down her cheeks.
It hurt. His cruel desertion of her hurt. The fact that he could leave her here like this after what had just taken place in the bedroom behind her—hurt.
Where was he going? Why was he going? Was he going to find Susie to explain that he couldn’t make Annie Lacey bend totally to his will?
* * *
A whole week she was left alone to stew in her own bitterness, seven long frustrating days and nights when all she did was consolidate every bad thought that she had ever had about him. It was a week in which she barely left the villa and had Margarita fussing around her like a worried hen as her moods swung from anger to hurt and from hurt to wretched tears and from tears to a cold, dark depression that refused to lift no matter how often she told herself that none of it was worth this much grief.
On the eighth day she was sitting in the coral-coloured sitting room when the familiar sounds of helicopter blades heralded his return.
Her heart skipped a couple of beats, but other than that she didn’t move, did not lift her eyes from the paperback that she was supposed to be reading. For the space of thirty long, taut seconds she showed no visible sign at all that his return interested her in the slightest…
Then smoothly, coolly, calmly she got up, walked out of the room and up the stairs to her bedroom.
She was methodically folding clothes into her suitcase when he appeared in the doorway. She felt his arrival, felt his sudden stillness when he saw what she was doing, felt his eyes home sharply in on her—and didn’t even grace him with a glance.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded finally.
She didn’t bother to answer the obvious either, her hands remaining steady as they settled soft, silky underwear in the suitcase lying open on the stand by the bathroom door.
‘I’ll be ready to leave in a few minutes,’ she informed him instead.
Silence. A silence so taut that it made her ears begin to tingle and her chest grow tight. Then, ‘Don’t be foolish!’ he said roughly, striding further into the room to throw something onto the nearby tabletop. ‘You are not going anywhere. OK, so you are angry with me,’ he allowed magnanimously. ‘I acknowledge it.’
Big of you, she thought, and continued back to the dressing table to begin emptying the next drawer.
His eyes followed her in pulsing frustration. ‘Angelica…’ he sighed, reaching out with a hand to stop her as she went to walk past him.
She turned on him like a rattlesnake. Then wished to God that she hadn’t when she felt herself hit by the full, stinging blast of his grim, dark attraction.
Why do you do this to me? she screamed out in silent anguish as her senses caught alight and began crackling like a flash-fire through her blood.
He was standing there in the immaculate clothes of a businessman. Plain grey tie worn over a crisp white shirt. Plain grey twill trousers sitting perfectly on the top of polished black shoes. The epitome of convention in fact. While that hair of his, so arrogantly contained in is slender black ribbon, shrieked ‘Rogue’ at her! ‘Scoundrel! For God’s sake watch out!’
‘Don’t you touch me!’ she spat at him in sheer reaction. ‘Don’t you—’ disgustedly she wiped his hand from her arm ‘—dare touch me!’
His chin went up, his eyes alight with the green, green glow of affronted pride, his chiselled mouth pulling into a straight, flat line that did nothing—nothing to spoil its innate sex appeal! While she just stood here, breasts heaving, eyes defying him, waiting with her senses on full alert to see how he was going to react to that little bit of ego-squashing.
‘Look…’ he muttered after another tense pause. ‘This is crazy.’
Her word, Annie thought possessively. Crazy. Her whole existence had been crazy from the moment she’d first set eyes on him!
‘What do you want me to say, Angelica? That I am sorry? That I should not have left here the way that I did? I know it,’ he accepted. ‘You know it! But I had to leave. I did not like what we were doing to each other. I needed to be alone—to think—to try to find a—’
‘Well, at least you had the choice whether to go or stay!’
There was another short silence while he took on board the full import of that last remark. Then he gave another heavy sigh, and the muscles in her chest began to throb. She wasn’t sure why. They just did, holding her tense and still and so utterly miserable that she wanted to weep.
‘I just want to leave here,’ she repeated thickly. ‘Now—as soon as it can be arranged.’
‘We have to talk.’
She shook her head. ‘What is there left to talk about?’ she asked. ‘The Cliché launch?’ Her mouth took on a bitter twist that mocked the whole subject. ‘I’m no longer interested in discussing that with you,’ she announced. ‘Not any of it.’
‘And why not?’ he asked grimly. ‘It meant all the world to you a week ago.’
‘A week ago I was still living in cloud-cuckoo-land,’ she derided. ‘Since then, and while you’ve been off having your lonely think, I’ve been having mine. And I want out. Out of this house and this island, out of any commitment I may have to you so I can go and deal with my own commitments myself.’
Take that, you arrogant devil, she thought, and turned stiffly away.
‘You said you’d wait until we knew if there was a child or not.’
She paused half a stride back to her suitcase, her eyes closing on a moment’s frozen stillness. When they opened again the blue was empty—as empty as she was feeling inside right now.
‘There isn’t going to be a child,’ she told him huskily, and continued jerkily on her way. ‘So that’s it,’ she went on in a tone that said she didn’t care, when really she had cared. It had come as yet another devastating blow to find out how much she had cared about carrying his baby. ‘All promises to you fulfilled,’ she stated. ‘Now I want you to fulfil your promise to me and let me go.’
‘You could be lying…’ he drawled, his eyes narrowing in suspicion at her carefully controlled voice.
‘You expected me to preserve the evidence?’ she mocked with crude sarcasm.
He didn’t like to hear it from her. The sudden black flash of disapproval in his eyes told her that he didn’t like it. ‘Don’t talk like that,’ he said grimly. ‘It degrades you.’
She swung round. ‘And you think it isn’t degrading to have my word questioned as you just did?’ she threw back.
His mouth closed tight, his face with it. ‘So you want to leave,’ he said quietly after a moment.
She nodded. Mute. Determined.
He let out a short sigh. ‘We have something good going for us here, Angelica, if you could try to show me a little trust.’
Trust. There was that word again—trust.
‘And what is there to trust exactly?’ she derided. ‘When none of this has been real?’
‘It’s been real enough!’ he countered. ‘This is real!’ Stepping forward, he reached out to grab hold of her hand and tugged it out in front of them both so that the band of gold on her finger glinted in the sunlight. ‘We made solemn vows to each other and signed a legal document to make it real!’
‘I’m not talking legally, I’m talking personally!’ Angrily she snatched back the hand, clenching her fingers over the ring that was to her only a sham, like the vows they shared and the document they’d signed. ‘You—me—actually meaning those vows we said to each other! That wasn’t real!’ Her tight mouth quivered. ‘Yet we both had the gall to behave as if they were.’
‘We like making love to each other,’ he pointed out.
She sighed, but didn’t deny it. He was right, after all—they did like making love. Revelled in each other, in fact. Drowned in each other.
‘We like being with each other. We like talking together and laughing together—or even fighting together as we are doing now!’
‘I’m not the one fighting here!’ she denied vehemently. ‘All I’m trying to do is get packed to go home! I hate all this fighting we do,’ she added as a muttered aside.
To her utter annoyance he laughed! ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You love it. It excites you. Just the same as it excites me to fight with you.’
‘Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?’ she gasped in choking indignation.
‘I am not joking,’ he denied. ‘I tell you—’ His hands slapped a brazen gesture on the top of his thighs. ‘No joke,’ he claimed, drawing her angry eyes downwards.
And dark heat rumbled into her face when she saw what was happening to him. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she snapped, looking angrily away.
‘I am a man,’ he replied, as if that made everything acceptable.
‘And an arrogant one.’
‘I do not deny it.’ He shrugged. ‘But then,’ he added silkily, ‘I am not the one denying anything here.’
‘Why don’t you go to hell?’ she flashed, for want of a better answer to that.
‘What—again?’
Her insides jumped, blue eyes flickering warily upwards to catch the way that those sleek black brows of his had arched in a gesture of mocking knowledge. So he too had seen that last sexual battle they’d fought as a visit to hell, she realised with a sudden flutter of alarm as he began to walk towards her.
‘How nice of you to offer,’ he went on silkily. ‘Thank you, I think I will…’
And she began backing. ‘Don’t you come near me!’ she choked, her heart pumping dangerously fast, hands held out in front of her as if to ward off the devil.
He reached the hands; they flattened against his rocksolid chest. Eyes narrowed and glinting bright green with intention, he herded her backwards like a piece of cattle until her back made thudding contact with the wall. And still he kept on coming, until her braced arms buckled beneath the strain and his body was making full and dangerous contact with her own. In all her life she had never felt so intimidated—or so exhilarated!
‘No!’ she gasped out breathlessly. ‘Please, César! Don’t!’
Too late, his dark head was already lowering, his mouth hot as it made contact with hers. She could feel his heart pumping beneath her spread palms, could feel the warmth of his body, the powerful muscles, felt his tongue run in a moist, sensual slide across her tightly clamped lips.
And in seconds she could feel herself surrendering, her mouth wanting to part, her tongue to join with his, her fingers trembling with a desperate need to rip open his shirt and bury themselves in the crisp, dark hair covering his chest—the whole lot threatening to fling her screaming with delight into that wild, hot well of passion.
Oh, God, she thought dizzily. But she wished that she could hate him! She knew that she should hate him! She wanted to hate him! But she didn’t. She loved him!
With a sob of anguish she tried to thrust him away. He growled something impatient, brought his hands snaking up to rake roughly through her hair—cupping her head—arching it backwards—long thumbs sliding across her heated cheeks to hold her face up to his—enthralling her with the urgency with which he forced her lips apart and hungrily deepened the kiss.
And in an act of sheer self-preservation she gave a violent push at his shoulders and managed to wrench her throbbing mouth to one side. It stopped him. His dark head came up, his big chest heaving, his own cheeks flushed with desire, and his eyes barely focused as they stared at her.
‘If you’ve quite finished,’ she heard herself say with unbelievable cool, ‘then I would now like to get packed and leave.’
He was suddenly very still, the new silence beating like a hundred war drums inside her head as she stood there defying him with her eyes. Ever since she’d met him—all along the line!—she’d given in to him. But this time—this time she was determined to win.
And at last and finally he must have realised it, because his eyes went black with anger then cold as pale green ice. He took a step back from her, severing all body contact like a scalpel slicing through flesh.
‘OK, Angelica,’ he said grimly. ‘If that is what you want. You win.’
With that he turned and walked out of the room.
‘You win’, she repeated dully to herself as she wilted against the wall behind her, eyes closing, heart hurting at the prize that she had just managed to win for herself.
Freedom, she supposed you’d call it. She’d just won the freedom to choose to leave here at last.
So why did she feel as if she’d just lost the biggest prize of her life?
No, that’s weak thinking, Annie, she told herself grimly. He doesn’t love you. He wants you, she conceded bitterly. He desires your body like crazy, and he’s possessive and territorial about it. But that isn’t love.
A man in love doesn’t lie and cheat and connive to trap. He doesn’t blackmail and bully and seduce and—Oh, shut up! she told her hectic brain. Shut up! Stop rubbing it in!
Eyes flying open with a flash of pained anger, she thrust herself away from the wall—
It was then that she saw it—a brown paper package lying askew on the pale wood tabletop. Her mind did a flashback of César tossing it there.
Slowly, uncertainly she began to walk towards it. Drawn there. Unable to resist.
It was an envelope, she realised. A special kind of envelope. Big, rectangular, card-backed. Her mouth went dry, clammy sweat breaking out all over her as she recognised it instantly for what it had to be.
The kind of envelope a photographer put prints in.
Her flesh began to tingle with a new guilt-ridden fear, and she knew why. She was going to look inside it—knew she couldn’t stop herself. Even though she knew with a cold sense of anguish just what she was going to see.
Susie decked out for the Cliché launch.
It had to be. What else could it be?
Fingers trembling, heart hammering, she slipped open the flap and slowly slid the contents onto the shiny tabletop.
For a dozen heart-stunning moments she was completely unmoving. Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, didn’t function at all on any human level.
Because they were not photographs of Susie.
Tears blurred her eyes, hot and burning, catching as a sob in her throat.
They were not even photographs in the true sense.
They were mock-ups of the front and centre-fold pages of a magazine—‘CLICHÉ’ superimposed in red across a beautiful Caribbean blue sky.
‘Oh, God,’ she whispered as she stared at them, a hand jerking up to cover her trembling mouth.
There was an old saying about cameras never lying. But, being a professional model, Annie knew this to be an utter untruth. Cameras could and did lie—all the time.
But this camera wasn’t lying. The camera that took these pictures was so glaringly obviously telling the truth that no one—no one who looked at these images in front of her could even begin to doubt that what was being shown was the truth.
Two people about to marry each other.
Two people decked out in white and gazing into each other’s eyes with such a bitter-sweet intensity that it was as clear and clean and spiritual as the smile on the minister’s face in the background that these two people were madly, blindly in love.
‘But I didn’t even know then,’ she whispered to herself in thickened dismay.
‘I did.’
With a shaken gasp she spun around to find César leaning in the open doorway to the balcony.
Dark colour flooded into her cheeks then drained away again, leaving her pale and shocked by what he had just said.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about these?’ she asked shakily.
He had his hands stuck in the pockets of his grey trousers. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was right behind him, but she saw a broad shoulder lift and fall in a lazy shrug. ‘There never seemed to be an—appropriate moment,’ he replied very drily, referring, she presumed, to the fact that they’d started fighting almost from the moment he’d come into the room. ‘Do you still want to leave here?’ he asked suddenly.
She shook her head, tears blurring out her vision.
‘Good,’ he replied, but his tone was oddly flat and reserved. It held her back from running to him as she wanted to do. And there was a decided reticence about the slow way he straightened himself then came further into the room.
‘Those pictures are the reason I was away so long,’ he explained. ‘I had to go to London. To see your half-brother. We—talked,’ he said, after a small pause which suggested that they’d done a whole lot more than just talk. ‘About you, mainly. But also about the Cliché launch.’ Another pause, and again she received the odd impression that he was telling her all of this with constraint.
Was he still angry because she’d rejected him a few minutes ago? she wondered. Was he waiting for her to apologise, beg forgiveness?
‘Hanson had those mock-ups done for his first issue, but if you don’t want it splattered all over the world then we won’t do it.’ Another shrug and he had reached the end of the bed. ‘But…’
Ah, Annie thought, and stiffened, the cynical side to her nature recognising that there was usually a big ‘but’ to most things.
‘I had trouble convincing him of a few—provisos of my own before I would give permission.’
‘What provisos?’ she asked warily. She didn’t like this—she didn’t like any of it. She had just experienced the absolute beauty of discovering that the man she was in love with loved her too, yet the whole thing was being so thoroughly dampened by his manner that she was already beginning to doubt what her own eyes had told her those photographs claimed!
‘There are two envelopes on the table, Angelica,’ he pointed out.
‘Two?’ She glanced back at the table, then made a sound of surprise. He was right, and there were two! She hadn’t noticed.
‘It has to be sheer fluke that you opened the right one first,’ he then said drily. ‘Or I don’t think you would be standing there eating me with your beautiful eyes as you have been doing.’
Sarcasm, dry and taunting. It hurt.
‘Open it,’ he commanded.
She shook her head. She didn’t want to. There was going to be something horrible in that other envelope, or why else would he have said what he’d just said?
‘This is it, Angelica,’ he stated quietly. ‘The point where you learn you were right not to trust me. Open it,’ he repeated. ‘Open it.’
Reluctantly she pulled the other envelope towards her. Lips dry, fingers shaking, she opened the flap then slid the contents out.
No mock-ups this time, she noted on a sickly hot wave of disenchantment, but glossy seven-by-nines. Professional photographs—of Susie. Susie in white, wearing rubies. Susie in gold, wearing emeralds. Susie in black, wearing the most beautiful diamonds…Tears flashed across her eyes as slowly, shakily, with the silence growing thick all around her, she looked at each photograph in turn—a half-dozen of them in all.
‘No sapphires,’ she murmured finally.
‘No,’ he confirmed. ‘No sapphires.’
Hurt blue eyes flicked around to search out his. ‘Why not?’
There wasn’t a hint of emotion showing in those steady green eyes. ‘They’re yours,’ he reminded her quietly.
That was all he said, and, swallowing thickly, she looked away from him again. ‘Did you ever intend using me for this shoot?’
‘No.’ Just as quiet, just as lacking in emotion. She flinched.
‘You see, I promised Susie years ago that the next time I put a collection together she could show it,’ he explained in that same quiet, flat voice. ‘It isn’t her fault that I decided to use the Adamas name as bait to hook you, Angelica. That was my decision. Those pictures were taken weeks ago—well before Hanson made his decision to use you instead of Susie for his launch. I made that promise to her in good faith and I couldn’t, in all fairness, break it simply because I had made the damned thing so complicated.’
Which was why he had tried so hard to talk her round that day before he’d left, Angelica realised. And at last began to understand the full tangle that this web of conspiracy had got into.
‘She loves Hanson, dammit!’ he suddenly exploded when she showed no sign that any of what he’d said had got through to her. ‘And she believed that he loved her! On the strength of that love she’d constructed this great plan where he chose her to launch Cliché and she came up with the biggest scoop for his first issue he could possibly hope for! I’d even gone to London specially to be there when she did it!’ A sigh rasped harshly from him. ‘Have you any idea how deeply he hurt her when he chose you instead of her?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, because she was feeling a little of how that hurt felt herself right now. ‘Has Todd seen these?’ she then asked quietly.
‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘He’s seen them. I took them with me to try to make him see some sense about Susie. He didn’t,’ he clipped. ‘The man is—’
Hurt, Annie put in silently when César cut the rest of the sentence off. Not that ‘hurt’ was what César had been going to say, she noted from the angry look on his face.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’ve offered him a deal whereby he can launch Cliché with our wedding—hence the mockups—’ he indicated them with his hand. ‘So long as he fronts Susie and the Adamas collection in his second issue.’
She said nothing, her blonde head bowed over the two different sets of photographs scattered on the table.
‘I’m sorry if you feel I have forfeited your feelings with this decision,’ he went on heavily after a moment. ‘But, being faced with the dilemma I had made for myself, I saw no other way out without hurting someone, and…’
My feelings were easier to hurt than Susie’s, she silently finished for him when he stopped, shrugging eloquently instead.
‘And Todd agreed?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘He is considering my offer as we speak and is due here in a couple of days with his decision.’ Another sigh, and the atmosphere in the sunny room thickened a little more. ‘He already had a fair idea of what has been going on here, Angelica,’ he informed her. ‘We were caught by a Press photographer in that tight embrace when I poured the champagne over you the first night we met. The picture appeared in the paper the next morning.’
More bad publicity, she thought, and shuddered.
‘Hanson recognised me as the same man who had let him discover the Adamas identity that same night,’ he went on. ‘Almost immediately my real name DeSanquez struck a chord in his brain, connecting me with the Alvarez affair, and since then he has been tearing his hair out trying to trace where you’d been taken. He was worried about you,’ he huskily confessed. ‘Frightened because he had to suspect me of planning the whole thing for the purposes of revenge and…’ His expressive shrug acknowledged how accurately Todd had put the full picture together. ‘So I had to do some quick thinking if I was going to stop him from guessing the rest.’
‘And said—what?’ she asked, turning coolly to face him.
He was half leaning, half sitting on the edge of the dressing table, outwardly perfectly relaxed—if you didn’t notice the tell-tale nerve working in his jaw.
But his eyes were studiedly impassive as he continued. ‘I told him the truth,’ he answered simply, then almost immediately qualified that remark. ‘Or the truth as far as it was necessary, anyway.’ And the smile that played briefly around his mouth hinted at just which part he had left out. The big love scene—their big love scene. The one that had ripped a gaping hole in the Annie Lacey persona. ‘Then I showed him the pictures of our wedding day and let them speak for me.’
‘And did they?’
‘Oh, yes.’ He smiled. ‘They speak loud and clear to anyone who looks at them, don’t you think?’
She refused to take him up on that one; there was still too much left to be said. ‘And Susie?’ she prompted. ‘What did you tell him about Susie’s involvement in it all?’
‘I told him that Susie knew nothing of what I had planned for you here,’ he stated flatly.
But her sceptical look made him sigh with impatience.
‘It’s the truth,’ he insisted. ‘Susie knew nothing! Which is why it is so unfair for her to pay the price for my sins. She loves Hanson!’ he declared. ‘And whatever slant you want to put on it your relationship with him did look suspect! She had a right to feel jealous, used, unfairly treated!
‘And, yes,’ he added before Angelica could say it herself, ‘she hated you for being what she saw as the woman who was wrecking her life on both personal and professional counts. But her hatred stopped short of plotting with me against you. I didn’t need her help to plot,’ he then said drily. ‘I am cunning enough to manage without the need of an accomplice.’
‘You threw that champagne over me deliberately,’ she pointed out.
His wry half-nod acknowledged it.
‘It was Susie who took great delight in telling Todd all about the embrace which followed,’ she added. ‘She knew exactly who you were.’
‘And that part, I concede, was a set-up. But only in as far as I promised to get you out of the way so she could talk to Hanson. As to the rest—she was then and still is totally in the dark!’
Did she believe him? Annie shifted restlessly. She wanted to believe him. It was easier on her pride to believe that Susie knew nothing of what had been planned on this island for her arch-rival Annie Lacey.
‘So, why are you telling me all of this?’ she asked carefully.
‘Because,’ he said quietly, ‘I need your support when Hanson gets here. I need you to help convince him that Susie is the innocent party in all of this, and that you really don’t mind that Susie has taken the Adamas scoop from you.
‘It’s important to her, Angelica,’ he added roughly, when her cool face gave him no hint at all as to what she was thinking. ‘It is important to Hanson that he is offered a way to—give a little where she is concerned! He is in love with Susie, but, as you once told me yourself, he is capable of never forgiving her if he truly believes she collaborated with me against you.
‘Please,’ he appealed, ‘in the face of what those mockups tell us, show a little compassion for someone less fortunate in love than yourself and back me up in all of this.’
She moved at long last, shifting out of her cool, still stance to turn back to the array of photo work littered across the table. Her fingers flittered across those of Susie and settled on one of César and herself. It was one in which the photographer had captured the moment when César had slid the rings onto her finger. His dark head was bent, his lean profile taut, his mouth straight and flat and grim. But the eyes were alive—looking at her while she looked at the rings—alive with a burning, helpless—
‘No…’ she whispered, beginning to gather up with trembling fingers every mock-up lying there. ‘I d-don’t care what you do with the Adamas thing. Susie can keep it. It doesn’t matter a jot to me. But—’ she turned, clutching the mock-ups possessively to her chest ‘—I won’t allow you to publish these, César. I won’t,’ she warned him defiantly. ‘I won’t let you make a public spectacle out of these!’