SHE GAVE AN audible cry—she couldn’t stop it—and lurched backwards as quickly as she could. He automatically reached up his hands to steady her, then dropped them, as if he might scald himself on her.
She couldn’t think straight—couldn’t do anything at all except stumble another step backwards and blurt out, ‘Marc—I... I thought you had left the hotel.’
Marc’s face hardened. The livid emotion that had flashed through him as she’d bumped into him turning away from the reception desk was being hammered down inside him. He would not let it show. Would not. He’d been cancelling his reservation for that night. What point and what purpose to stay now? he thought savagely.
He knew he had to say something, but how could he? The only words he wanted to hurl at her were...pointless. So all he said, his voice as hard and as expressionless as his face was, ‘I am just leaving.’
Had she come running after him?
But why should she? She has no need of me now!
The words seared across his naked synapses as if they were red-hot. No, Tara had no need of him now—no need at all!
Savage fury bit like a wolf.
Hans! God in heaven—Hans, of all men! Beaming like a lovesick idiot, offering her that ring...that glittering, iridescent diamond ring! For her to reach for. To take for herself. Just as Marianne had.
Fury bit again, but its savagery was not just rage. It was worse than rage. Oh, so much worse...
Yet he would not let her see it. That, at least, he would deny her!
She was looking up at him, consternation in her face. Was she going to try and explain herself—justify herself? It sickened him even to think about it.
But she made no reference to the scene he knew she had seen him witness. Instead she seemed to be intent on attempting some kind of mockery of a conversation.
‘So am I,’ he heard her say. ‘Just leaving the hotel.’
Tara heard her own words and paled. Oh, God, don’t let him think I’m angling for a lift! Please, please, no!
Memory, hot and humiliating, came to her, of how she had asked to go to New York with him—and the unhesitating rejection she had received. She felt that same mortification burning in her again, that he might think she had come racing after him.
This whole encounter was a nightmare, an ordeal so excruciating she couldn’t bear it. He was radiating on every frequency the fact that seeing her again was the last thing he wanted. His stance was stiff and tense, his expression closed and forbidding. He could not have made it plainer to her that he did not want to talk to her. Did not want to have anything at all to do with her any more.
He wants nothing to do with me! He didn’t even want to come over and say hello—not even to his friend Hans!
Could anything have rammed home to her just how much Marc Derenz did not want her any longer? That all he wanted was to be shot of her?
Her chin came up—it cost her all her strength, but she did it. ‘I must be on my way,’ she said. She made her voice bright, but it was like squeezing it through a wringer inset with vicious spikes.
She paused. Swallowed. Thoughts and emotions tumbled violently within her, a feeling akin to panic. There was something she had to say to him. To make things clear to him. As crystal-clear as he was making them to her. That she, too, had moved on with her life. That she would make no claim on him at all. Not even as a casual acquaintance...
She felt emotion choke her, but forced herself to say what she had to. Reassure him that she knew, and accepted, that she was nothing to him any longer.
She had said as much in her letter to him and now she would say it again, to make sure he knew.
‘I’ll be moving away from London very soon. I’m getting out of modelling completely. I can’t wait!’ She forced enthusiasm into her voice, though every word was torn from her.
His stony expression did not change.
‘I’m sure you will enjoy your future life,’ he replied.
He spoke with absolute indifference, and it was like a blow.
‘Thank you—yes, I shall. I have every intention of doing so!’ she returned.
Pride came to her rescue. Ragged shreds of it, which she clutched around her for the pathetic protection she could get from it.
‘Hans is still in the restaurant.’ She made herself smile, forcing it across her face as if she were posing for a camera—putting it on, faking it, clinging to it as if it were a life raft. ‘I’m sure that he will want to see you! He has such exciting news! Best you hear it from him...’
She was speaking almost at random, in staccato ramblings. She could not bear to see his face, his indifferent expression, as he so clearly waited for her to leave him alone, to take himself off. She shifted her handbag from one hand to the other, and as she did so she jolted. Remembering something.
Something she might as well do here and now. To make an end to what had been between them and was now nothing more than him waiting impatiently for her to leave him be.
She raised her bag, snapping open the fastener.
‘Marc—this is most opportune!’ The words were still staccato. ‘I was going to ask the jeweller across the road to courier this to you, as I promised, but you might as well take it yourself.’
She delved into her bag, extracted the jewellery case. Held it out to him expectantly.
His eyes lanced the box, then wordlessly he took it. His mouth seemed to tighten and she wondered why. Expressionlessly, he slid it into his inside jacket pocket.
For a second—just a second—she went on staring up at him. As if she would imprint his face on her memory with indelible ink.
Words formed in her head, etching like acid. This is the last time I shall see him...
The knowledge was drowning her, draining the blood from her.
‘Goodbye, Marc,’ she said. Her voice was faint.
She turned, plunging down the corridor. Eyes blind. Fleeing the man who did not want her any longer. Who would never want her again.
Whom she would never see again.
Anguish crushed her heart, and hot, burning tears started to roll silently down her cheeks. Such useless tears...
Marc stood, nailing a smile of greeting to his face as his guests arrived. It was the bank’s autumn party, for its most valued clients, held at one of Paris’s most famous hotels, and he had no choice but to host it. But there was one client whose presence here this evening he dreaded the most. Hans Neuberger.
Would he show up? He was one of the bank’s most long-standing clients and had never missed this annual occasion. But now...?
Marc felt his mind slide sideways, not wanting to articulate his thoughts. All he knew was that he could not face seeing Hans again.
Will he bring her here?
That was the question that burned in him now, as he greeted his guests. What he said to them he didn’t know. All that was in his head—all there had been all these weeks, since that unbearable day in London—was the scene he had witnessed. That nightmare scene that was blazoned inside his skull in livid, sickening neon.
Ineradicable—indelible.
Tara, leaning forward, her face alight. Hans offering that tell-tale box, its lid showing the exclusive logo of a world-famous jeweller, revealing the flash of the diamond ring within. And Tara reaching for it. Tara bestowing a kiss of gratitude on Hans’s cheek with that glow in her face, her eyes...
Bitter acid flooded his veins. Just as it had all those years ago as he’d watched Marianne declare her faithlessness to the world. Declare to the world what she wanted. A rich, older man to pamper her...shower her with jewellery.
His face twisted. To think he had rejoiced that Tara had declined to cash the cheque he’d left for her! Had returned his emeralds.
Well, why wouldn’t she? Now she has all Hans’s wealth to squander on herself!
He stoked the savage anger within him. Thanks to his indulgence of her, she had got a taste for the high life! Had realised, when he’d left her, that she could not get that permanently from himself! So she’d targeted someone who could supply it permanently! Plying Hans with sympathy, with friendliness...
It was the very opposite of Celine’s open scorn, but with the same end in mind. To get what she wanted—Hans’s ring on her finger and his fortune hers to enjoy...
With a smothered oath he tore his mind away. What use to feel such fury? Such betrayal?
He had survived what Marianne had done to him. He would survive what Tara had inflicted upon him too.
Yet as the endless receiving line finally dwindled, with only a few late guests still arriving, he found his eyes going past the doors of the ornate function room to the head of the stairs leading up from the lobby.
Would she come here tonight with Hans?
He felt emotion churn within him.
But it was not anger. And with a sudden hollowing within him, he knew what the emotion was.
Longing.
He stilled. Closing his eyes momentarily. He knew that feeling. Knew its unbearable strength, its agony. Had felt it once before in his life.
After his parents had been killed.
The longing...the unbearable, agonising longing to see again those who were lost to him for ever.
As Tara was.
Tara who could never be his again...
‘Marc—I am so sorry to arrive late!’
His eyes flashed open. It was Hans—alone.
He froze. Unable to say anything, anything at all. Unable to process any thoughts at all.
Hans was speaking again. ‘We have been a little delayed. Bernhardt is with me, and I hope you will not object but I have brought two other guests as well. Karin—Bernhardt’s fiancée—and...’ He smiled self-consciously as Marc stood, frozen. ‘And one more.’ And now Hans’s smile broadened. ‘One who has become very dear to me.’
Marc heard the words, saw Hans take a breath and then continue on, his eyes bright.
‘Of course until my divorce is finalised no formal announcement can be made, and it has been necessary, therefore, to be discreet, so perhaps my news will be a surprise to you?’
Marc’s expression darkened. ‘No—I’ve known for weeks.’ His voice was hard—as hard as tempered steel. His eyes flashed, vehemence filling his voice now, unable to stay silent. ‘Hans, this is madness—to be caught again! Did you not learn enough from Celine? How can you possibly repeat the same disastrous mistake! For God’s sake, man, however besotted you are, have the sense not to do this!’
He saw Hans’s expression change from bewilderment to astonishment, and then to rejection. ‘Marc,’ he said stiffly, ‘I am perfectly aware that Celine was, indeed, a very grave error of my judgement, but—’
‘And so is Tara!’ Marc’s voice slashed across the other man’s.
There was silence—complete silence. Around him Marc could hear the background chatter of voices, the clinking of glasses. And inside the thundering of his heartbeat, drowning out everything. Even his own voice.
‘Did you think I hadn’t seen you both, in London? You and Tara—’ His voice twisted over her name. Choking on it. ‘Did you think I didn’t see the ring you were giving her? See how her face lit up? How she couldn’t wait to take it from you? How eager she was to kiss you?’
Hans stared. Then spoke. ‘Bist Du verukt?’
Fury lashed across Marc’s face. Insane? No, he was not insane! Filled with any number of violent emotions, but not that!
Then suddenly Hans’s hand was closing over his sleeve with surprising force for a man his age. ‘Marc—you could not possibly have thought—’ He broke off, then spoke again. His tone brooked no contradiction. ‘What you saw—whatever it is you feared you saw, Marc—was Tara’s very kind reaction to the news I had just told her. Of my intention to remarry, yes, indeed. But if you think, for an instant, that she was the object of my intentions—’
Marc felt his arm released. Hans was turning aside, allowing three more people who had just entered the room to come up to them. Marc’s eyes went to them. Bernhardt, a younger version of Hans, well-known to him, with a young, attractive woman on one arm. And on the other arm an older woman with similar looks to the younger one. A woman who was smiling at Hans with a fond, affectionate look on her face. And on the third finger of the hand tucked into Bernhardt’s arm was a diamond ring...
Hans turned back to Marc and his tone was formal now. ‘You will permit me to introduce to you Frau Ilse Holz and her daughter Karin?’
His eyes rested on Marc.
‘Ilse,’ Marc heard him say, as if from a long way away, ‘has done me the very great honour of agreeing, when the time is right, to make me the happiest of men. I know,’ he added, ‘that you will wish us well.’
Marc might have acknowledged the introduction. He might have said whatever was required of him. Might have been aware of Hans’s gaze becoming speculative.
But of all of those things he had absolutely no awareness at all. Only one thought was in his head. One blinding thought. One absolute realisation. Burning in him.
And then Bernhardt was leading away his fiancée, and the woman who was to be both his mother-in-law and his stepmother, into the throng.
Hans paused. His eyes were not speculative now. They were filled with compassion. ‘Go,’ he said quietly, to Marc alone. ‘This...here...’ he gestured to the party all around them ‘...is not important. You have others to see to it. So—go, my friend.’
And Marc went. Needing no further telling...