A BLACKBIRD WAS hopping about on the lawn, picking at the birdseed which Tara had started to scatter each day now that autumn was arriving. A few late bees could be heard buzzing on what was left of the lavender. There was a mild, drowsy feel to the day, as if summer were disinclined to pack its bags completely and leave the garden, preferring to make a graceful handover to its successive season.
Tara was glad of it. Sitting out here in the still warm sunshine, wearing only a light sweater and cotton trousers, her feet in canvas shoes, was really very pleasant. The trees bordering the large garden backing on to the fields beyond were flushed with rich autumnal copper, but still shot through with summer’s green. A time of transition, indeed.
It echoed her own mood. A time of transition. She might have finally made the move from London to Dorset some weeks ago, but it was only now that she was really feeling her move was permanent. As was so much else.
She flexed her body, already less ultra-slim than she’d had to keep it during her modelling career. It was filling out, softening her features, rounding her abdomen, ripening her breasts.
Her mind seemed to be hovering, as the seasons were, between her old life and the one she was now embarked upon. She knew she must look ahead to the future—what else was there to do? She must embrace it—just as she must embrace the coming winter. Enjoy what it would offer her.
Her expression changed, her fingers tracing over her midriff absently. She must not regret the time that had gone and passed for ever—the brief, precious time she’d had during that summer idyll so long ago, so far away, beside that azure coast. No, she must never regret that time—even though she must accept that it was gone from her, never to return. That Marc was gone from her for ever.
A cry was stifled in her throat. Anguish bit deep within her.
I’ll never see him again—never hear his voice again—never feel his mouth on mine, his hand in mine. Never see him smile, or laugh, or his eyes pool with desire... Never feel his body over mine, or hold him to me, or wind my arms around him...
Her eyes gazed out, wide and unseeing, over the autumnal garden. How had it happened that what she had entered into with Marc—something that had never been intended to be anything other than an indulgence of her overpowering physical response to him—had become what she now knew, with a clutching of her heart, to be what it would be for ever?
How had she come to fall in love with him?
She felt that silent cry in her throat again.
I fell in love with him and never knew it—not until he left me. Not until I knew I would never see him again. Never be part of his life...
Her hands spasmed over the arms of the padded garden chair and she felt that deep stab of anguish again.
But what point was there in feeling it? She had a future to make for herself—a future she must make. And not merely for her own sake. For the sake of the most precious gift Marc could have given her. Not the vast treasures of his wealth—that was dust and ashes to her! A gift so much more precious...
A gift he must never know he had given her...
Her grip on the arms of the chair slackened and she moved her hands across her body in a gesture as old as time...
She would never see Marc again, and the pain of that loss would never leave her. But his gift to her would be with her all her life... The only balm to the endless anguish of her heart.
In the branches of the gnarled apple tree a robin was singing. Far off she could hear a tractor ploughing a field. The hazy buzz of late bees seeking the last nectar of the year. All of them lulled her...
She felt her eyelids grow heavy, and the garden faded from sight and sound as sleep slipped over her like a soft veil.
Soon another garden filled her dreamscape...with verdant foliage, vivid bougainvillea, a glittering sunlit pool. And Marc was striding towards her. Tall, and strong, and outlined against the cloudless sky. She felt her heart leap with joy...
Her eyes flashed open. Something had woken her. An alien sound. The engine of a car, low and powerful. For a second—a fraction of a second—she remembered the throaty roar of Marc’s low-slung monster...the car he’d loved to drive. Then another emotion speared her.
Alarm.
The cottage was down a dead-end lane, leading only to a gate to the fields at the far end. No traffic passed by. So who was it? She was expecting no visitors...
She twisted round to look at the path leading around the side of the cottage to the lane beyond. There was a sudden dizziness in her head...a swirl of vertigo.
Had she turned too fast? Or was it that she had not woken at all, was still dreaming?
Because someone was walking towards her—striding towards her. Someone tall and strong, outlined against the cloudless sky. Someone who could not be here—someone she’d thought she would never see again.
But he was in her vision now—searing her retinas, the synapses of her stunned and disbelieving brain. She lurched to her feet and the vertigo hit again.
Or was it shock?
Or waking from the dream?
Or still being within the dream?
She swayed and Marc was there in an instant, steadying her. Then his hands dropped away.
Memory stabbed at her—how he’d made the same gesture in that nightmare encounter at the hotel, dropping his hands from her as if he could not bear to touch her. She clutched at the back of her chair, staring at him, hearing her heart pounding in her veins, feeling disbelief still in her head. And emotion—unbearable emotion—leaping in her heart.
She crushed it down. Whatever he was here for he would tell her and then he would leave.
For one unbearable moment dread knifed in her.
Does he know?
Oh, dear God, she prayed, please do not let him know! That would be the worst thing of all—the very worst! Because if he did...
She sheared her mind away, forced herself to speak. Heard words fall from her, uncomprehending. ‘What...what are you doing here?’
He was standing there and she could see tension in every line of his body. His face was carved as if from tempered steel. As closed as she had ever seen it.
Yet something was different about him—something she had never seen before. Something in the veiling of his eyes that had never been there before.
‘I have something to give you,’ he said.
His voice was remote. Dispassionate. But, as with the look on his face, she had never heard his voice sound like that.
She stared, confused. ‘Wh-what?’ she got out.
‘This,’ he said.
His hand was slipping inside his jacket pocket. He was wearing yet another of his killer suits, she registered abstractedly through the shattering of her mind. Registered, too, the quickening of her pulse, the weakening of her limbs that she always felt with him. Felt the power he had to make her feel like that... Felt the longing that went with it.
Longing she must not let herself feel. No matter that he was standing here, so real, so close...
He was drawing something out from his inner pocket and she caught the silken gleam of the grey lining, the brief flash of the gold fountain pen in the pocket. Then her eyes were only on what he was holding out to her. What she recognised only too well—the slim, elegant jewel case she had returned to him that dreadful day in London that had killed all the last remnants of her hope that he might ever want her again...
She shook her head. Automatically negating.
‘Marc—I told you. I can’t take it. I know...’ She swallowed. ‘I know you...you mean well...but you must see that I can’t accept it!’
Consternation was filling her. Why was he here? To insist she take those emeralds? She stared at him. His face was still as shuttered as ever, his eyes veiled, unreadable. But a nerve was ticking just below his cheekbone and there were deep lines around his mouth, as though his jaw were steel, filled with tension.
She didn’t understand it. All she understood—all that was searing through her like red-hot lava in her veins—was that seeing him again was agony... An agony that had leapt out of the deepest recesses of her being, escaping like a deranged monster to devour her whole.
Through the physical pain rocking her, from holding leashed every muscle in her body, as if she could hold in the anguish blinding her, she heard him speak.
‘That is a pity.’ He set the case with the emerald necklace in it down on the table beside her chair.
There was still that something different in his voice—that something she’d never heard before. She’d heard ill-humour, short temper, impatience and displeasure. She’d heard desire and passion and warmth and laughter.
But she’d never heard this before.
She stared at him.
He spoke again. ‘A pity,’ he said, ‘because, you see, emeralds would suit you so much better than mere diamonds.’
‘I don’t understand...’ The words fell from her. Bewildered. Hollow.
The very faintest ghost of what surely could not be a twisted smile curved the whipped line of his mouth for an instant. As if he was mocking himself with a savagery that made her take a breath.
‘They would suit you so much better than the diamond ring which Hans presented to you.’
Tara struggled to speak. ‘Presented? He showed it to me! Dear God, Marc—you could not...? You could not have thought...?’
Disbelief rang in every word that fell from her. He could not have thought that! How could he? Shock—more than shock—made her speechless.
A rasp sounded in his throat. It seemed to her that it was torn from somewhere very deep inside him.
‘We see what we want to see,’ he replied. The mockery was there again, in the twist of his mouth, but the target was only himself. And then there was another emotion in his face. His eyes. ‘We see what we fear to see.’
She gazed at him, searching his face. Her heart was pounding within her, deafening her. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said again. Her voice was fainter than ever.
‘No more did I,’ he said. ‘I didn’t understand at all. Did not understand how I was being made a fool of again. But this time by myself.’
She frowned. ‘“Again”?’
He moved suddenly, restlessly. Not answering her.
Here he was, standing and facing her in this place that had been almost impossible to find—hard to discover even by relentless enquiry.
It had taken him from a ruthless interrogation of her former flatmates, in which he had discovered that she had moved out...had hired a van to transport her belongings, to the tracking down of the hire company, finding out where they had delivered to, and then, finally, to hiring a car of his own and speeding down to that same destination.
All with the devil driving him.
The devil he was purging from himself now, after so many years of its malign possession. So much depended on it. All depended on it.
He took a breath—a ragged breath. ‘When you look at me, Tara, what do you see?’
What do you see?
His words echoed in her skull. Crying out for an answer she must not give.
I see the man I love, who has never loved me! I see the man who did not want me, though I still want him—and always will, for all my days! That is the man I see—and I cannot tell you that! I cannot tell you because you don’t want me as I want you, and I will not burden you with my wanting you. I will not burden you with the love you do not want from me... Nor with the gift you gave me.
But silence held her—as it must. Whatever he had come here for, it was not to hear her break the stricken silence that she must keep.
He spoke again, in that same low, demanding tone.
‘Do you see a man rich and powerful in his own realm of worldly wealth? A man who can command the luxuries of life? Who has others to do his bidding, whatever he wants of them? Whose purpose is to protect the heritage he was born to—to protect the wealth he possesses, to guard it from all who might want to seize it from him?’ His voice changed now. ‘To guard it from all who might want to make a fool of him?’
He shifted again, restless still, then his voice continued. Eyes flashing back to her.
‘You saw Celine with Hans—you saw how she took ruthless advantage of him, wanted him only for his wealth. You saw what she did to him—’ He made a noise of scorn and disgust in his throat. ‘I am richer than Hans—considerably so, if all our accounts were pitted one against the other! But...’ He took a savage breath. ‘I am as vulnerable as he is.’ A twisted, self-mocking smile taunted his mouth. ‘The only difference is that I know it. Know it and guard endlessly against it.’ He shook his head. ‘I guard myself against every woman I encounter.’
His expression changed.
‘And the way I do it is very simple—I keep to women from my own world. Women who have wealth of their own...who therefore will not covet mine. It was a strategy that worked until—’ he took a ravaged breath, his eyes boring into hers, to make her understand ‘—until I encountered you.’
A raw breath incised his lungs.
‘I broke a lifetime’s rules for you, Tara! I knew it was rash, unwise, but I could not resist it! Could not resist you. You taunted me with your beauty, with that mouthy lip of yours, daring to prick my amour propre! Answering me back...defying me! And your worst crime of all...’ His voice was changing too, and he could not stop it doing so. It was softening into a sensual tone that was echoing the quickening of his pulse, the sweep of his lashes over his eyes. ‘You denied me what I wanted—pushing me away, telling me it was only play-acting, tormenting me with it.’
His breath was ragged again, his eyes burning into hers.
‘And so when we were finally alone together, free of that damnable role-play, I could only think that I should not make it real with you—that I should not break my lifetime’s rules...’
He saw her face work, her eyes shadow.
‘Not all women are like Celine, Marc.’
Her voice was sad. Almost pitying. It was a pity he could not bear.
He gave a harsh laugh. ‘But they could be! And how am I to tell? How would I know?’ He paused, and then with a hardening of his face continued. ‘I thought I knew once. I was young, and arrogant and so, so sure of myself—and of the woman I wanted. Who seemed to want me too. Until...’ He could not look at her, could see only the past, indelible in his memory, a warning throughout his life, ‘Until the day I saw her across a restaurant, wearing the engagement ring of a man far older than I. Far richer—’
He tore his voice away and he forced his eyes to go back to the woman who stood in his present, not in his past.
‘How could I know?’ he repeated. His eyes rested on her, impassive, veiling what he would not show. ‘That last night you asked to come with me to New York...’
She blenched, he could see the colour draining from her skin, but he could not stop now.
‘But if you came to New York with me then where next? Back to Paris? To move in with me perhaps? For how long? What would you want? What would you start to take for granted?’ His voice changed, and there was a coldness in it he could not keep out. ‘What would you start to expect as your due?’
He drew breath again.
‘That’s why I ended it between us,’ he said. ‘That’s why,’ he went on, and he knew there was a deadness in his voice, ‘I left you the emerald necklace. Sent you that cheque. To...to draw a line under whatever had been. What you might have thought there was—or could be.’
He fell silent.
Tara could hear his breathing, hear her own. Had heard the truth he’d spoken. She pulled her shoulders back, straightening her spine, letting her hands fall to her side. Lifted her chin. Looked him in the eye. She was not the daughter of soldiers for nothing.
‘I never thought it, Marc.’ Her voice was blank. Remote. ‘I never thought there was anything more between us than what we had.’
She had said it. And it was not a lie. It was simply not all the truth. Between ‘thought’ and ‘hope’ was a distance so vast it shrank the universe to an atom.
‘But I did,’ he said. His jaw clenched. ‘I did think it.’ His expression changed. ‘I didn’t want to end it, Tara. I didn’t want us to end. But...’ Something flashed in his face. ‘But I was afraid.’
She saw a frown crease his forehead, as if he had encountered a problem he had not envisaged. As if he were seeing it for the first time in his life.
‘But what is the point of fear,’ he asked, as if to the universe itself, ‘if it destroys our only chance of happiness?’
His eyes went to her now, and in them, yet again, was something she had never seen before. She could not name it, yet it called to her from across a chasm as wide as all the world. And as narrow as the space between them.
She saw his hand go to the jewel case, flick it open. Green fire glittered within.
‘Emeralds would suit you,’ he said again, ‘so much better than mere diamonds. Which is why—’
There was a constriction in his voice—she could hear it...could feel her heart start to slug within her. Hard and heavy beats, like a tattoo inside her body.
She saw him replace the necklace on the table, saw his hand slide once again within his breast pocket, draw out another object. A cube this time, with the same crest on it that the emerald necklace case held. She saw him flick it open. Saw what was within.
He extended his hand towards her, the ring in its box resting in his palm. ‘It’s yours if you want it,’ he said. The casualness of the words belied the tautness of his jaw, the nerve flickering in his cheekbone, the sudden veiling of his eyes as if to protect himself. ‘Along with one other item, should it be of any value to you.’
The drumming of her heartbeat was rising up inside her, deafening in volume. Her throat thickened so she could not breathe.
He glanced at her again, and there was a sudden tensing in his expression that hollowed his face, made it gaunt with strain. ‘It’s my heart, Tara. It comes with the ring if you want it—’
A hand flew to her mouth, stifling a cry in her tearing throat. ‘Marc! No! Don’t say it—oh, don’t say it! Not if...not if you don’t mean it!’ Fear was in her face, terror. ‘I couldn’t bear it—’
Her fingers pressed against her mouth, making her words almost inaudible, but he could hear them all the same.
‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘I’ve said it now. I can’t take it back. I can’t take back anything—anything at all! Not a single thing I’ve ever said to you—not a single kiss, a single heartbeat.’ Emotion scythed across his face. ‘It’s too late for everything,’ he said. ‘Too late for fear.’
He lifted his free hand, gently drew back the fingers pressing against her mouth, folding his own around her, strong and warm.
‘What good would it do me? Fear? I can gather all the proof I want—the fact that you returned my cheque, refused my emeralds, gave away a couture wardrobe! That my insane presumption that you had helped me dispose of Celine only to clear the path for your own attempt on Hans was nothing more than the absurd creation of my fears. But there is no proof! No proof that can withstand the one sure truth of all.’
He pressed her fingers, turning them over in his hand, exposing the delicate skin of her wrist. He dipped his head to let his lips graze like silken velvet, with sensuous softness... Then he lifted his head, poured his gaze into hers.
Her eyes glimmered with tears, emotion swelling within her like a wondrous wave. Could this be true? Really true?
‘Will you take my heart?’ he was saying now. ‘For it holds the one sure truth of all.’
His eyes moved on her face, as if searching...finding.
‘It’s love, Tara. That’s the only one sure truth. All that I can rely on—all that I need to rely on. For if you should love me then I am safe. Safe from all my fear.’
His eyes were filled with all she had longed to see in them.
‘And if my love for you should be of any value to you—’
Another choking cry came from her and her arm flung itself around his neck, clutching him to her. Words flew from her. ‘I’ve tried so hard—so desperately hard—to let you go! Oh, not from my life—I knew that you were over in my life—but in my heart. Oh, dear God, I could not tear you from my heart...’
The truth that she would have silenced all her life, never burdening him with it, broke from her now, and sobs—endless sobs that seemed to last for ever—discharged all that she had forced herself to keep buried deep within her, unacknowledged, silent and smothered.
As he wrapped her arm around her waist, pressing it tightly to him, something tumbled from his palm. But he did not notice. It was not important. Only this had any meaning...only this was precious.
To have Tara in his arms again. Tara whom he’d thrown away, let go, lost.
He had let fear possess him. Destroy his only chance of happiness in life.
He soothed her now, murmuring soft words, until her weeping eased and ebbed and she took a trembling step back from him. He gazed down at her. Her eyes were red from crying, tear runnels stained her cheeks, her mouth was wobbly and uneven, her features contorted still...
The most beautiful woman in the world.
‘I once took it upon myself to announce that you were my fiancée,’ he said, his voice wry and his eyes with a dark glint in them. ‘But now...’ His voice changed again, and with a little rush of emotion she heard uncertainty in his voice, saw a questioning doubt in his eyes about her answer to what he was saying. ‘Now I take nothing upon myself at all.’ He paused, searching her eyes. ‘So tell me—I beg you...implore you—if I proposed to you now, properly, as a suitor should, would you say yes?’
She burst into tears once more. He drew her to him again, muffled her cries in his shoulder, and then he was soothing her yet again, murmuring more words to her, until once again she eased her tears and drew tremblingly back.
‘Dare I keep talking?’ he put to her.
She gave another choke, but it was of laughter as well as tears. Her gaze was misty, but in it he saw all that he had hoped beyond hope to see.
He bent to kiss her mouth—a soft, tender kiss, that calmed all the violent emotion that had been shaken from her, leaving her a peace inside her that was vast and wondrous. Could this be true and real? Or only the figment of her longings?
But it was real! Oh, so real. And he was here, and kissing her...kissing her for ever and ever...
And then he was drawing back, frowning, looking around him.
‘What is it?’ Tara asked, her voice still trembling, her whole body swaying with the emotion consuming her.
He frowned. ‘I had a ring here somewhere,’ he said. ‘I need it—’
She glanced down, past where the emerald necklace lay on the garden table in its box, into the grass beneath. Something glinted greener than the grass. She gave a little cry of discovery and he swooped to pick it up from where it had fallen.
He possessed himself of her hand, which trembled like the rest of her. Slid the ring over her finger. Then he raised her hand to his lips, turned it over in his palm. Lowered his mouth to kiss the tender skin over the veins in her wrist. A kiss of tenderness, of homage.
Then he folded her hand within his own. ‘I knew that I had gone way past mere desire for you,’ he said, his voice low, intense, his eyes holding hers with a gaze that made her heart turn over, ‘when on the evening of the bank’s autumn client party—which Hans always comes to—I realised that for all the blackness in my heart over what I thought you had done, there was only one emotion in me.’
He paused, and she felt his hands clench over hers.
‘It was an unbearable longing for you,’ he said, and there was a catch in his voice that made Tara press his hands with hers, placing her free hand over his. ‘As unbearable as my longing to see my parents again after their deaths—’
He broke off and she slipped her hands from his, slid them around him, drawing her to him. She held him close and tight and for ever. Moved beyond all things by what he had said.
Then, suddenly, he was pulling away from her.
‘Tara...’ His voice was hollow. Hollow with shock.
Her expression changed as she realised what he had discovered. And she knew she must tell him why she had made the agonising decision that she had.
‘You didn’t want me, Marc,’ she said quietly. Sadly. ‘So I would never, never have forced this on you.’
He let his hands drop, stepped back a moment. His face was troubled.
‘Are you angry?’
He heard the note of fear in her voice. ‘Only at myself,’ he said. ‘My fears nearly cost me my life’s happiness,’ he said. His voice was sombre, grave. Self-accusing. ‘And they nearly cost me even more.’ His face worked, and then in the same sombre voice he spoke again. ‘I tried to find proof—proof that you did not value my wealth above myself.’ He took a ragged breath. ‘But if I wanted the greatest proof of all it is this. That you were prepared to raise my baby by yourself...never telling me, never claiming a single sou from me—’
Her voice was full as she answered him. ‘I could not have borne it if you had felt any...any obligation. Of any kind.’ She drew breath. ‘But now...’
She smiled and took his hand in hers again. Slowly, carefully, she placed it across her gently swelling waistline. She saw wonder fill his face, light in his eyes, and her heart lifted to soar.
French words broke from him, raw and heartfelt. She leant to kiss his mouth. There was a glint in her eye now. ‘I’m going to lose my figure, you know... Turn into a barrage balloon. You won’t desire me any more—not for months and months and months!’
The familiar look was in his eyes—that oh-so-familiar look that melted the bones of her body.
‘I will always desire you!’ he promised, and he laughed. Joy was soaring in him, like eagles taking flight. And desire too—heating him from within.
She gave a laugh of pure happiness that lifted her from her feet—or was it Marc, sweeping her up into his arms?
She gave a choke, felt emotion wringing her. ‘Marc, is this real? Is it? Tell me it is! Because I can’t be this happy—how can I?’
The future that had loomed before her—empty of all but the most precious memento of her brief time with him—now flowed and merged with the past she had lost...becoming an endless present that she knew she would never lose!
His arms tightened around her, his eyes pouring into hers. ‘As real as it is for me,’ he said.
Happiness such as he had never known since the carefree days of his youth overflowed in him. Tara was his for ever, and she was bringing to him a gift that was a wonder and a joy to him: the baby that was to be born.
He was striding with her now, towards the cottage. He glanced around, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Is this the new life you said you were making for yourself?’
She smiled, tightening her grip around his neck with the hook of her arm. ‘A new life—and an old one,’ she said. ‘The cottage belonged to my grandparents, and they left it to me. It’s always been my haven...’
‘And it will be ours, too, if you will permit me to share it with you,’ he said, his voice warm. ‘In fact it seems to me that it would be the ideal place for a honeymoon...’
The glint in his eyes was melting her bones as he negotiated the narrow doorway, sweeping her indoors and ducking his tall frame beneath the beamed lintel. Purposefully, he headed for the stairs. There must be bedrooms upstairs, and beds...
He dropped a kiss on her mouth as he carried her aloft, following her hurried directions to her bedroom, lowering her down upon the old-fashioned brass bed which creaked under their combined weight, sinking them deep into the feather mattress.
‘Starting right now.’
‘Now, that...’ Tara sighed blissfully ‘...is a wonderful idea!’
Marc gave a growl of satisfaction at her answer and began to remove their entirely unnecessary clothing, covering her face in kisses that would last their lifetimes—and beyond.