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A Heartless Marriage
HELEN BROOKS
Marriage on trial!From playboy lover… When gorgeous millionaire Raoul de Chevnair chose Leigh as his bride, it seemed he'd left his flirtatious bachelor days behind for good. But had he? Their marriage had scarcely begun before his playboy habits returned and Leigh found him in the arms of another woman… . … to faithful husband?That was five years ago. Leigh is no longer a naive teenage, bowled over by Raoul's charm. So when he vows to win back her trust, Leigh is determined not to give in that easily! It's all very well for Raoul to sweep her off on an exotic second honeymoon, but Leigh needs a lot of convincing that Raoul has decided to take his marriage vows seriously after all!Helen Brooks creates "rich characters, sparkling interplay and a riveting emotional conflict." - Romantic Times
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ucf45b88c-d1f1-5953-8ce6-1bc18eb1c661)
Excerpt (#u705f5801-4d3c-5741-bbc5-09f99780f831)
Dear Reader (#u76166d39-f17b-5c9e-b932-a72055e58ce1)
Title Page (#ud6f0231c-35a5-5d48-ac82-16fd20247a32)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub49f0580-4f8f-5f98-b6c1-fe54f1e9e227)
CHAPTER TWO (#u788bbfe3-e883-580f-a7a8-a54fccf358bd)
CHAPTER THREE (#u29f5d8fe-e90a-5e99-a19f-63b9cd46bb25)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Just who do you think you are?”
“I thought we’d established that. I’m your husband.”
“In name only.” Leigh lashed back.
“I’m quite prepared to rectify that if you’d care to oblige.?” Raoul’s eyes were mocking. “I seem to remember that we were good together once.”
“Are you sure it was us you are thinking of? There have been so many women in your life, Raoul, I’m surprised you can remember any one liaison.”
Dear Reader,
HELEN BROOKS is an author with a growing reputation. Her books are emotional, involving, and bursting with romantic intensity! She is particularly talented at capturing the depth of feeling between a married couple.so we know you’ll enjoy in A Heartless Marriage.
The Editor
A Heartless Marriage
Helen Brooks
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_daba8433-ec21-589f-86f7-0439212b8117)
‘IT’S been a long time, Leigh.’
As the deeply caressing, velvet-smooth voice with its faint tinge of a French accent spoke just behind her Leigh’s blood froze. She had known this would happen one day but had been unable to prepare herself for it, in the same way that she couldn’t control the snaking shiver that crept down her spine as the unmistakable voice touched a spot deep inside her.
‘Hello, Raoul.’ She turned slowly as her mind raced, without attempting to smile, to meet the full force of that piercing ice-blue gaze that had once had the power to take her to heaven or hell. ‘Five years, in fact.’
‘And two months?’ He looked devastatingly handsome, more so, if possible, than the last time she had seen him. He was just the same and yet. different. The intervening time-span had carved a few lines around his eyes and mouth but they merely added to the tanned perfection of a face that was stunningly beautiful in its complete maleness.
The strong straight nose, aristocratic chin and warm, sensual mouth would have been a masterpiece if captured in oils, and the wild shock of thick black curly hair that she recalled had been groomed into a more sedate style that added extra emphasis to the darkly lashed, wicked blue eyes.
‘You see, I remember.’ He, too, was making no attempt to smile or lighten the situation, and a sudden little dart of resentful anger at his cool selfpossession turned the soft brown of her eyes slatehard. He was just the same after all! Just as arrogantly cold, just as casually cruel, just as’You are well?’ Now the dazzling white teeth flashed in acknowledgement of her nod. ‘That is good.’
‘And you?’ This was ridiculous, she thought helplessly, to stand and talk in polite cliches as though they were distant acquaintances renewing some tenuous connection, when really—
‘I too am well.’ The vivid blue eyes wandered lazily over her flushed face, lingering for a moment on the tremulous, soft mouth before travelling to the rich dark brown hair that hung down below her shoulders. ‘You have grown your hair. I like it this way.’ The touch of hauteur caused her chin to rise a fraction.
‘Thank you.’ I shall scream in a minute, Leigh thought desperately as she felt the blood begin to sing in her ears. She hadn’t felt so exposed, so vulnerable, in years. Five years, in fact. She knew her hands were clamped together as though in a vice, the knuckles white with tension, but she couldn’t have unwound them to save her life. She steeled herself to meet those piercing eyes again and forced a polite smile to her lips. ‘Are you in England on business?’ she asked coolly.
‘In a way,’ he smiled easily, obviously totally unaffected by her presence anyway, Leigh thought bitterly. ‘I suppose you could call it that.’
‘Oh…’ She couldn’t think of another thing to say; her mind had suddenly gone blank. ‘Well.’ She glanced round helplessly as she took a small step backwards. ‘I’d better be—’
‘I hear you are doing very well at your painting now, Leigh.’ As her eyes snapped back up to his she searched his face for mockery and found none. Instead she found interest, and something else. Something that made her breath catch in her throat and her head swim. He had no right to look at her like that! No right at all. ‘You are just as beautiful as I remember.’ His voice was husky and for a moment the memories flooded in in vivid painfulness. How many times had she woken from a night spent in his arms to hear him say she was beautiful? That she was his treasure? That he would never let her go?
‘I’ve never been beautiful, Raoul,’ she said coldly as she forced the hurt from her voice.
‘You have, to me, always.’ She really couldn’t take much more, she thought wildly. She had looked forward to this occasion for weeks, knowing that there would be many prestigious artists among the throng of idle rich that always attended Nigel Blake’s little ‘gatherings’ as he liked to call them. Nigel prided himself on getting just the right mixture of up and coming artists and wealthy influential titles to make his parties the talk of London. There had been more than one struggling artist who had been set on the road to fabulous wealth by a commission at one of Nigel’s ‘do’s.
‘I need to talk to you, Leigh.’ As Raoul placed his hand on her arm she actually jolted with the shock of it. An electric current more dangerous than anything harnessed by man shot through her body and she took a step backwards, her eyes enormous.
‘I’m sorry, Raoul,’ she said quickly, appalled he could still affect her so violently, ‘but I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Now that isn’t kind.’ Was that some kind of dark amusement she saw in those ice-blue eyes? ‘I’ve been a patient man, Leigh, but there are still matters we need to discuss. Surely you can understand that?’
‘What do you mean?’ She stared at him, mesmerised by his audacity.
‘Oh, come, come.’ The accent was more pronounced now and those magnetic eyes drew her into him just as they had always done. ‘You didn’t think we would always remain in some sort of timeless limbo? You surely knew there would be a day of reckoning?’ He smiled with slow cruelty.
‘Well, Leigh, honey.’ As the harsh American female voice sounded in her ear Leigh breathed a sigh of relief. She had never expected in her wildest dreams that she would ever be pleased to see Vivien James but just at this precise moment the tall willowy blonde was an answer to prayer. ‘It’s not fair to monopolise all the talent!’ Leigh had heard the outrageous come-on before but Vivien always counted on the fact that the man in question hadn’t, and now she glided seductively close.
‘I’m Vivien.’ The six-foot model stuck out a slender hand for Raoul to shake as she wriggled an invitation no man could ignore.
‘Of course you are.’ Raoul was a few inches taller than the beautiful blonde, his long lean body and big broad shoulders giving an impression of even greater height, and Leigh noticed, with a stab of apprehension, that his handshake was cursory and his smile tight. She knew the signs. He suffered fools badly.
‘Well, I do suspect Leigh has been holding out on us,’ Vivien gushed prettily. ‘They say the quiet ones are the worse, don’t they?’ She laughed throatily, totally sure of herself and of the beauty that had taken her monthly salary into six figures in the last two years. ‘Don’t tell me you’re an old friend?’ She pouted provocatively as she touched Raoul’s arm.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Raoul said quietly, his eyes cold.
‘No?’ Vivien’s predatory eyes gleamed, dismissing Leigh’s presence with regal indifference as she edged forward, almost elbowing the other woman out of the way. ‘What, then?’
‘Leigh’s husband, as it happens.’ There was a positively diabolical glint of satisfaction in those cold blue eyes as they noted the stunned surprise on the carefully made-up face, the mouth an O of bewilderment.
‘You’re joking.’ Vivien stared at Raoul, her eyes flicking over the tall lean body and film-star good looks before moving on to Leigh’s medium height, slightly plump frame which housed a pretty but totally unpretentious face, the straight brown hair and large brown eyes ordinary by anyone’s standards. ‘I don’t believe you. You can’t be married to her!’
Her meaning was clear and as Leigh flushed painfully Raoul’s face darkened. When he next spoke his voice was cutting, the accent as sharp as glass. ‘Then that is your problem, yes?’ He had taken Leigh’s arm as he spoke, his attitude both protective and proprietorial, moving her away from the other woman into a quiet corner of the crowded room.
‘Let go of me.’ As she shook off his hand the urge to lash out was paramount, but she took a long, deep breath before facing him again, the anger that was coursing through her body giving her the courage to look deep into the piercing eyes without flinching. ‘Why did you tell her that? And why are you here? I don’t want you in my life.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ He was standing quite still now, the total lack of movement disquieting. ‘Nevertheless, it is the truth. You are my wife, Leigh.’ Her skin prickled helplessly as he turned her to face him with her back to the room so that her face was shielded from curious eyes. ‘And don’t look like that. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘You aren’t going to.?’ Her voice trailed away in a tight bitter laugh that turned his face into stone. ‘What could you do to me that you haven’t already done, Raoul? I loathe you, I detest you. If you were halfway decent you would have given me a divorce as soon as I left you.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ His arrogance made her blink. ‘Why didn’t you file for one later?’
‘Why?’ She stared at him. ‘You really want to know? Because I wanted to shut even the slightest thought of you out of my mind. I wanted to pretend that you didn’t exist, that our marriage had never happened.’ It wasn’t the whole truth. A divorce had been almost unimportant compared to the excruciating step she had taken in leaving him in the first place. She had known she would never marry again. He was too hard an act to follow. ‘I expected you to contact me anyway.’ She raised her chin slightly. ‘Is that why you are here now? To ask for a divorce? This meeting isn’t by accident, is it?’
‘No, it is not.’ His eyes were slicing into her.
‘What’s her name?’ she asked coldly. ‘Surely Marion isn’t still around?’ She forced herself to say the hated name.
‘I don’t intend to discuss our private affairs here,’ Raoul said tightly, ‘but suffice it to say I am not here to ask for a divorce. How soon can you leave?’
‘How soon can I.?’ For the second time in as many minutes she was speechless. ‘You don’t seriously think I’m going anywhere with you, do you? For all you know, I’m with someone.’ She waved distractedly at the crowded room.
‘Are you?’ The glittering eyes challenged her, his mouth twisting in a faint smile as she tossed her head without replying. ‘I thought not. Jeff Capstone is in Scotland, isn’t he?’ It was a cool statement of fact and delivered with icy disdain. ‘You see, I know more about you than you think.’ His eyes never left her face for an instant.
She stared at him in amazement as seething resentment turned her brown eyes black. ‘How dare you?’ Her voice, though low, was full of scathing contempt. ‘Just who do you think you are?’ She couldn’t believe the pretentious insolence.
‘I thought we had established that.’ He smiled coldly. ‘I am your husband.’
‘In name only,’ Leigh lashed back quickly as her heartbeat raced.
‘I’m quite prepared to rectify that if you’d care to oblige?’ His eyes were mocking. ‘I seem to remember we were good together once.’ The blue eyes were insultingly familiar.
‘We were?’ Her mouth curled scornfully. ‘Are you sure it was us you are thinking of? There have been so many women in your life, Raoul, I’m surprised you can remember any one liaison.’
At last she had hit him on the raw. She saw it in the arctic frost that turned the vivid blue eyes rapiersharp and the way his big body froze into stillness. ‘You were not a “liaison”, Leigh,’ he said furiously. ‘You were, you are, my wife!’
‘It was a pity you didn’t remember that when it counted,’ she said simply. ‘Goodbye, Raoul.’
She had turned and left him before he realised what was happening and as she crossed the room she half expected to feel a restraining hand on her shoulder but nothing happened. She wanted to run away, to find a safe little hidey-hole where she could lick the wounds that she’d thought had healed but which were as raw as the day he had gouged them into her heart-but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. How had he found her? Why was he here? More to the point, why was she here?
She looked through the high, beautifully worked arched doorway into the next massive room full of London’s elite-high society at its best, with the odd bearded aesthete to keep Nigel’s precious balance right-and groaned inwardly. When she had first begun to be noticed, two years ago, she had decided then that the power game was not for her. She would succeed or fail on her paintings, not on her connections, but when the prized invitation had dropped through her letterbox she had been unable to resist. The urge to see first-hand one of Nigel’s famous soirees had been too tempting. Curiosity! Well, now she was paying for her weakness in a way she had never anticipated in her darkest nightmares.
‘Everything all right, sweetie?’ As Nigel drifted by without waiting for an answer, his long sequinned smock in outrageous contrast to the tight bright red trousers, she bit her lip hard. She had been here two hours. She had been seen by the right people and now she couldn’t stand it another minute. A careful glance backwards told her Raoul was nowhere to be seen, now was the moment to escape. She had to get away, break free.
‘Off already, darling?’ She was just slipping into her jacket, incongruous against the mass of furs and silk shawls that filled the rest of the ladies’ cloakroom, when Vivien’s smooth white hand touched her arm imperiously. ‘Bigger fish to fry?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Leigh had never liked Vivien, having had the misfortune to work with her on more than one occasion in her early days in London when she was working part-time as a photographer’s assistant in order to be able to eat while she followed her dream to paint, and now she turned to face the taller woman with frank distaste on her heart-shaped face. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I just bet you don’t.’ Vivien’s hard slanted eyes were poisonous. ‘What’s your little game, then? I’ve made a few enquiries and that’s Raoul de Chevnair you were talking to, isn’t it? You don’t seriously expect me to believe that a multimillionaire playboy like Raoul de Chevnair would ever notice a little nobody like you, let alone marry her!’ She laughed spitefully, her face mocking.
‘I don’t expect you to believe anything, Vivien,’ Leigh said coldly, her shoulders straight and her face mirroring her opinion of the beautiful blonde more effectively than words ever could have done. ‘Now would you mind moving out of the way? I’m going home.’ Her voice was glacial.
‘Yes, I would mind, actually,’ Vivien drawled slowly, her mouth pulled into a thin red line and her eyes shooting daggers. ‘You haven’t answered my question, Miss Leigh Wilson! Doesn’t sound much like Mrs de Chevnair to me!’
‘Then, as my husband said a few minutes ago, that’s your problem.’ Leigh pushed past the willowy figure, taking her completely by surprise. ‘Goodnight, Vivien.’
Once outside the cloakroom in the large woodpanelled hall, she leant against the wall for a moment and took a deep breath. Already! Raoul had only been back in her life five minutes and already the women were gathering like bees round a honeypot. But he wasn’t back in her life! She seized on the thought and repeated it to herself firmly. She wouldn’t let him be.
When she had crawled from his presence, crushed and broken, all those years ago, she had felt that life was a deep black abyss that would never hold a spark of joy or contentment again. And it hadn’t at first. She had fled back to London, hiding herself in the careless anonymity of the big metropolis, unable to think or eat or sleep for weeks-and then one spring morning a ray of sunshine had caught a spider’s web on the window of her grubby little bedsit and the urge to paint had resurfaced. And with it she had gradually clawed back her selfrespect, making a new life for herself, taking charge of her affairs, growing into a person whom, if she didn’t actually like, she could live with. And over the years she had settled into the new woman who had been reborn out of the scorching devastation, content with her light sunny little flat with its bird’seye view of London and her peaceful solitary life. A tranquil life in the cool valley after the cruel heat of the mountaintop. And now he was back! Her heart pounded so violently for a moment that she felt faint. Why-after all this time? She had made it clear to him when she’d left that everything between them had been burnt to ashes, that there was nothing left. So why now, just when everything was beginning to happen for her?
She levered herself carefully off the wall and walked sedately to the heavily carved oak front door, opening it quietly and slipping through quickly with a sigh of relief that she had got away so easily. She felt shell-shocked, bruised.
The warm summer air was filled with the city perfume of petrol fumes and dirt but she didn’t care; she had got used to London in all its moods now, appreciating the obscurity of town life, the nameless oblivion, hugging it to her like a hard-won prize. She was just Leigh Wilson, budding artist; that was all.
The night was black without a shred of moonlight to lighten the darkness, and the old-fashioned wrought-iron street lamps gave a discreetly small circle of light into the elegant, quiet, expensive avenue. As she stepped down the narrow circular steps into the empty street she clucked disapprovingly to herself. She should have called for a taxi before she left. She wasn’t thinking straight, but then it was hardly surprising!
‘Leigh?’ As one of the tall shadows across the dimly lit expanse detached itself she gave a little start of surprise, swiftly concealed, and then she was staring into Raoul’s dark face again and he wasn’t smiling. ‘Can I give you a lift?’ He indicated a long, low, sleek white monster on wheels a few yards away. ‘Please?’
Please? This wasn’t the Raoul she knew. The Raoul she had lived with for eighteen glorious, mind-boggling months had never said please to anyone in his life. ‘I don’t think so.’ She stared at him nervously. ‘I don’t want to be difficult, but—’
‘Then don’t be.’ As he cut into her words the arrogant forcefulness curled the muscles in her stomach. This was the Raoul she knew, riding roughshod over everyone else, cutting through any small talk, intent only on getting his own way. The veneer was just that-a light covering to hide a mind of steel. ‘I intend to talk to you, Leigh, so you might as well get it over and done with now.’ He smiled coldly. ‘You never were one for putting off unpleasant duties, were you?’
There was something of the satyr about him, she thought painfully; there always had been. Perhaps that was what had attracted her once, but not any more! Now she could see him for exactly what he was and it disgusted her.
‘Is it really necessary?’ She still didn’t move from the last step. ‘Can’t our solicitors sort it out?’
‘No, they damn well can’t!’ He took a long deep breath and spoke more quietly. ‘I don’t want solicitors meddling in my affairs. Now be a good girl and come and talk to me for a few minutes while I take you home. Kingston Gardens, isn’t it?’
She looked at him in surprise and took a step forwards in spite of herself. ‘How do you know where I live?’
‘I told you, I know more about you than you think,’ he said smoothly, his deep rich voice and faint accent giving the words a sensual overtone that brought the blood rushing into her cheeks. ‘First it was a bedsit in Baron Place, then a shared flat with a Miss.’ the dark brows wrinkled ‘…ah, yes, a Miss Angela Hardwick, and for the last two years a flat of your own in Kingston Gardens.’ He folded muscled arms.
‘Have you been spying on me?’ she asked weakly. ‘I don’t believe this.’ A flood of burning anger replaced the stunned amazement his words had caused. ‘How dare you? How dare you, Raoul? I—’
‘Shut up and get in the car,’ he said brusquely, the patience for which he was not renowned running out suddenly. As he took hold of her arm a shiver of apprehension trembled down her spine-or was it excitement? She bit on her lower lip till it hurt. She mustn’t let him see how he affected her. She hated and loathed him but he might mistake it for something else. She would listen to what he said, coolly and calmly, and then that would be that. And he was right. She might as well get it over and done with now.
The interior of the car was as magnificent as the outside, soft white leather seats and thick grey carpet, a sexual experience on wheels, she thought balefully. How in keeping. How very in keeping!
‘Do take that frown of disapproval off your face,’ he said lazily as he joined her. ‘You’ll have deep lines before you’re forty at this rate and I don’t intend to spend a fortune on face-lifts as you get older. My wife will grow old gracefully.’
‘What?’ She swung round to face him, big brown eyes incredulous, hardly able to believe what she had heard. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Us,’ he replied easily. ‘I’m talking about us.’ He urged the big car into purring life, drawing out of the parking space and joining the main stream of traffic at the end of the avenue, seemingly totally relaxed and faintly amused.
‘There is no “us”,’ she said sharply as she turned to look out of the window at the brightly lit shops and restaurants they were passing at incredible speed. He was driving too fast but then he always had. It had been a mistake to get in the car. The big, powerful, muscular body so close to hers was bringing back too many unwelcome memories, memories that caused her cheeks to burn and her eyes to glitter as she sternly repressed the aching fluttering in the pit of her stomach. He even smelt the same! That delicious and wickedly expensive aftershave that had always rendered her helpless in his arms. She brought her knees together tightly. She was immune to him now. She was!
‘Oh, but there is, kitten.’ The use of the old pet name jarred piercingly into her heart. ‘There always will be.’
‘I want to get out.’ Her hands were clenched together now and she ground her teeth silently as a low laugh rippled through the car. ‘Do you hear me, Raoul?’
‘No way, my love.’ She steeled herself to look at him and then wished she hadn’t. The profile was so familiar, so devastingly, painfully familiar. She had forgotten just how breathtakingly handsome he was, how enigmatically in control, how altogether electric. It wasn’t fair that one man should have so much going for him. It wasn’t just his looks, compelling though they were; there was a dark magnetism, an inner vitality that accentuated every aspect of the lean hard body and tanned face until the aura in which he moved was all-absorbing. ‘You’re nearly home now.’
Even as he spoke he pulled off the main thoroughfare which led to the huge block of flats where she lived and into a narrow, deserted sidestreet that was dark and unlit. ‘Now then.’ As the engine died a sense of danger shivered down her spine. This was Raoul, Raoul her husband, the man who knew her more intimately than any other human being ever would, the man who had almost destroyed her once and had let her go almost casually. The feeling of exhilaration that had had her in its grip since the party died, and pure undiluted fear took its place. Was she strong enough to withstand his devious fascination now? She had never understood him and had no idea why he had sought her out after all this time but she sensed instinctively that it wasn’t an impulsive decision.
She had been right in her initial impression that he had changed. The old Raoul had never had such a hard light of cold purpose in his eyes. He was the same but he was different: older, menacingly determined, altogether more dangerous. She prepared herself for what he was going to say. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t like it, she was suddenly quite sure of that.
‘Leigh.’ As he spoke her name he bent towards her, the fingers of one hand threading into her thick silky hair as the other wrapped round her waist, drawing her into him in the close confines of the car before she had time to resist.
‘Don’t!’ Even as she spoke his mouth took hers and in the first moment of contact she knew, with a frantic silent scream, that the old magic was there. She couldn’t evade him, there was nowhere to go, and, bent over her as he was, his body had trapped her more securely than any chains. The kiss shot through the nerve-endings all over her body in an explosion of sensation, moulding, drawing her, emptying her of everything but him. She tried to fight it, to jerk her head away, but he was too strong for her and then, as the kiss became deeper and he plundered that intimate territory she had never given to anyone else but him, she didn’t want to resist. The dizzy, helpless submission his passion had always induced rose like a phoenix from the ashes, sensual, powerful, accelerating her heartbeat and causing her to strain towards him, revelling in the feel, the smell of him as he fitted her into his body until she could feel every inch of his hard frame.
She couldn’t believe she had been without the touch, the feel of him for five years. Like an addict who thought she had conquered the habit only to find its pull stronger than ever, she shuddered desperately against him, his obvious arousal firing her to new heights of ecstasy.
He seemed gripped by the same sort of madness, murmuring incoherently against the softness of her mouth, his lips moving frantically over her face and throat as his body trembled against hers, a storm of pent-up emotion devouring the long lean body until the tremors that were shaking his limbs reached through to hers.
‘You’re mine, you’re still mine, you’ll always be mine.’ As his voice, urgent and filled with a mad exultation, pierced the spinning whirlwind that had her in its grip, she froze in his arms, a biting wave of humiliation and shame breaking over her head and draining the colour from her face.
‘No!’ As she wrenched her face from his she jerked sideways savagely, hitting her shoulder against the door of the car without even feeling it. It wasn’t going to happen again. She wasn’t going to be swept into his orbit like a mindless robot that could only function when its master pressed the switch. She was autonomous now, she didn’t need him any more, she wouldn’t need him! She had survived without him for five years; it couldn’t all be lost now. She had to fight him.
‘Leigh, listen to me—’
‘No!’ She knew she was almost hysterical but that didn’t matter, all that mattered was convincing him that he had to leave her alone, that she was her own person now, not a plaything to be brought out at convenient moments. ‘Don’t you touch me again, Raoul, not ever again. I mean it, I hate you! I’ll always hate you!’ She was shouting and in the enclosed space the words bounced off the metal with deafening ferocity, and as she struggled to open the door she was aware of him leaning back into his seat, his face hardening into cold mocking lines.
‘A simple “no” would have sufficed,’ he said quietly. ‘You really didn’t have to pretend that you enjoyed what was obviously a grievous ordeal.’ He was laughing at her! In the same instant that the mocking words registered on her bruised mind her hand shot out with savage force to hit him hard across one tanned cheek, the sound deafening.
‘Leigh!’ He punched her name into the space between them as his hands shot up to hold hers, restraining her with just enough force for the mad pounding in her head to ease and the enormity of what she had just done to break into her consciousness. She shut her eyes against the look on his face, leaning back against the soft leather as she felt the strength drain from her body, leaving her quivering and silent. ‘Consider yourself most fortunate,’ he grated through tight-clenched teeth. ‘There is no other woman on this earth who would get away with that twice.’
Twice? As her eyes opened to meet his the memory of their last encounter was there as clearly as if it was yesterday. Marion’s long, golden looselimbed body sprawled on the bed-their bed-her long golden blonde hair spread out across the pillow like a silky veil and the big green eyes bright with triumph as they caught sight of her standing whitefaced in the doorway. Her clothes had been scattered round the bedroom floor as though discarded in a frenzied game of tag, and as Raoul had emerged from the en suite, magnificently and in the circumstances inexcusably naked, she knew with a sick feeling of despair exactly who the beautiful blonde had been playing with.
‘Leigh?’ Raoul had begun to speak, his eyes flying from her drowning eyes to Marion in one lightning glance, but she had blown his words away with the impact of her hand across his mouth. She shut her mind to the scene that had followed. She had dissected it too often as it was.
‘I’ll take you home.’ As her eyes refocused on his face he let go of her hands, placing them into her lap as though she was old and helpless, which was exactly how she felt. She had been almost twenty when she had left him. After eighteen months of heaven on earth she had been plunged into a dark void that was indescribable, and just for a minute, a crazy minute, she had forgotten that tonight. But never again.
She glanced at him as he manoeuvred the powerful car out of the narrow street and into the lights again. This time her head must, must rule her heart! She couldn’t let herself become this man’s plaything again, his little toy. She was a grown woman now, not a child bride; she had shaped and woven her own life into the pattern she required of it and her independence was the most precious thing she owned.
I hate you, Raoul, she said silently as the car purred its way through the traffic, I hate you, I do! So why was it that for the first time in five years she felt alive again?
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e56b9b41-d306-5660-a4f2-023070f22f71)
‘I’LL see you to your door.’ Leigh’s heart was still
pounding with disgust at her own weakness as they drew up outside the block of flats where she lived, and as his cool expressionless voice cut into her whirling thoughts she stiffened instinctively, her eyes widening in protest.
‘No!’ She lowered her voice a few decibels and tried again. ‘No, Raoul, please don’t.’
‘As you wish.’ He was sitting very still, an intense watchfulness colouring his eyes ice-blue. ‘Goodnight, Leigh.’
‘What? Oh, goodnight.’ This was it, then? After five years? A macabre anticlimax was making her knees weak.
As she climbed out of the car it was gone in an instant, roaring down the street to the blaring of horns and screaming brakes from the other traffic, the sound of its engine soon lost in the general mêlée.
As the lift took her upwards she really felt as though she was going to collapse. Her legs felt like jelly and there was a strange blackness that was most peculiar coming and going in front of her eyes. She suddenly realised she was leaning against the wall of the lift, which was unsavoury at the best of times, and on a Saturday evening, after the revelry and beer-swilling carousal of a Friday night, definitely suspect.
It brought her back to earth abruptly and she even found herself smiling at the irony of leaving Raoul’s fabulously expensive car to step into such a paradoxical little box. She shrugged wearily. Such was life. If only Raoul were as easy to shrug away.
The little flat was cool and welcoming as she opened her front door. One of the advantages of being on the sixth floor was that she could leave the large French doors that took up almost one wall of the tiny lounge open in the summer, letting the cool night air and rich scents from the tiny balcony crammed full with potted plants and sweet-smelling tubs of bright flowers stream into the room. She used this room as a small studio; the light was excellent all year round, and the minute tiled bathroom leading off the small box bedroom and even tinier kitchen kept housework to a minimum.
She owned one comfortable old easy-chair parked at one side of the windows, one bed and a small wardrobe, and that was all the furniture she possessed, having ploughed all her money into the hundreds of pounds’ worth of canvases, paints and brushes that roamed across every inch of available space, cluttering the walls in untidy harmony and filling the flat with the smell of turpentine and paint. And she loved it. She stood for a moment feasting her eyes on her little domain, willing the hard-won peace and quiet contentment back into her heart. But it was no good. She grimaced to herself helplessly. Raoul had destroyed it, at least for tonight. She wouldn’t let it be any longer than that!
She was standing under the shower, letting the cool water annihilate the last flush of humiliation still staining her skin pink, when the telephone called stridently from its hook on the kitchen wall. ‘You can just ring,’ she told it loudly, reaching for the bottle of shampoo and pouring a large amount of the thick creamy mixture into her hair, working up a lather determinedly.
She couldn’t speak to anyone tonight, she just couldn’t. Her head was swimming with a thousand and one images, her mind was aching and she still didn’t know why Raoul had exploded back into her life! The phone rang again as she was towelling herself dry and once more as she lay in bed sipping a hot mug of cocoa and flicking through a magazine article on life drawing by one of her old lecturers at college. It had become a matter of principle not to answer it now, a kind of rebellion against having the frame of her carefully built screen of fragile self-sufficiency broken by Raoul’s easy intrusion.
Sleep was too long in coming and she didn’t have the patience to wait for it, preferring paint and canvas after an hour of tossing and turning and forcing her mind away from paths that it dared not follow. Delectable, forbidden paths where Raoul’s magnificent body was exposed in all its flagrant manhood and her shape was moulded into his in a manner as old as time. The phone was now off the hook; that, at least, she could control! She had another cool shower before she started work at two o’clock. The night was excessively warm, she told herself aggressively—that was absolutely all it was!
At six she fell into bed just as she was, paintsmeared and somewhat grubby, and at eight o’clock she was woken by a furious pounding at her front door that she was sure could be heard on the tenth floor.
She stumbled bleary-eyed to the door, still in her tattered old painting smock, her hair tangled and hanging limply on her shoulders and her eyes cloudy with lack of sleep.
‘And just where the hell have you been?’
‘What?’ Raoul’s face was a picture of injured outrage and for a moment she wondered if she was in the middle of some inexplicable nightmare. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Answer me, damn you!’ He seemed very angry, she reflected weakly as she tried to spark her mind into ignition. ‘I’ve been ringing this number most of the night. First there was no answer and then it was engaged. What are you playing at? Who have you got here?’ His voice was bitingly sharp.
‘Who have I…?’ He brushed past her into the flat, stalking into each tiny room before coming to a halt in front of her stained easel, the paint on the canvas still tacky.
‘You’ve been working all night, haven’t you? You took the phone off the hook because you were working. You stupid girl!’ He glared at her angrily. ‘What about an emergency? What if someone was trying to get you urgently?’
‘Stop shouting at me!’ She had found her tongue along with the burning resentment that was filling her small body from head to foot. ‘And what did that gibe mean, incidentally? “Who have I got here?” You cheeky hound! We aren’t all like you, Raoul. Some of us consider that there are more important things than procreational pursuits!’
‘What?’ In a more conventional situation the look of sheer amazement on Raoul’s face would have been food for her soul, but just at the moment she couldn’t appreciate that for once she had totally and completely surprised him.
‘You burst into my home, you accuse me of goodness knows what and then you criticise my lifestyle! How dare you? How dare you? You haven’t bothered with me for five years and now you think you can tell me what to do. Get out! Get out!’
‘“Procreational pursuits”?’ He didn’t even seem to have heard the rest of her tirade. ‘“Procreational pursuits”!’ The great peal of unbridled raucous laughter took her completely by surprise. Raoul laughed the way he did everything else, with unrestrained frankness and wholehearted participation, and in spite of the fact that it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and the neighbours would be thinking-well, she didn’t dare to imagine what they would be thinking-she found herself infected by his appreciation of the moment. Unfortunately they had always had the same slightly off-beat sense of humour. It had seemed good when they were together but as Mrs Billett next door banged ferociously on the wall and Mr Silver overhead nearly brought the ceiling down with his walking-stick, she tried to restrain the paroxysms of laughter that recurred every time she thought she had control. It was nerves, it had to be.
‘Oh, Leigh.’ Raoul had collapsed on the one and only chair and was looking at her through streaming eyes. ‘Only you could come out with a phrase like that. “Procreational pursuits”!’ His head went back in another burst of laughter. ‘You’re priceless, kitten, you really are.’
Somehow the nickname sobered them both at the same moment and from helpless laughter they changed to expectant stillness within seconds. ‘Leigh?’ Raoul’s voice was a low endearment and she shuddered against it, her hands going out in unconscious protest as she took a step backwards. ‘Let me hold you, show you nothing has really changed.’
‘No, no, Raoul.’ He crossed the room in one movement to stand looking down at her, small and defenceless, in front of his overpoweringly tall bulk, and then with a smothered groan he lifted her right off her feet into his arms.
‘You’ve got paint on your nose and you stink of turpentine,’ he said softly as he traced the outline of her jaw with tiny feather-light kisses, his lips moving to her mouth as she opened it to protest. ‘And you’re so damn beautiful.’ Why that word should be the catalyst to the emotion that was sending hot waves of desire into every nerve-ending she didn’t know. Maybe it was because no one else had ever called her beautiful, maybe it was because the images she had been fighting all night had reared their sensual heads as soon as she had seen his face again. Whatever, she was now fighting herself as much as him and she was suddenly scared to death.
‘Put me down, Raoul! I don’t want this, I don’t want you—’ As he smothered her voice with a piercingly sweet kiss the feel of his hard, warm lips brought a host of memories she was powerless to resist. Raoul, the frighteningly perceptive lover who had been as anxious for her satisfaction as his own, infinitely patient, incredibly tender but capable of such heights of erotic passion that she had frequently felt she would die from the glorious ecstasy he induced.
He had been her first love, her only love, and had constantly delighted in fusing their bodies into rapturous oblivion until she had been quivering and sated in his arms. This was the Raoul she had purposely blocked out of her consciousness for years in her desire to survive, drawing on the mental picture of a cold hard womaniser who had betrayed her in the most callous way possible and with seemingly no shred of remorse.
‘I want you, my darling.’ How they had reached the bed she didn’t know-she hadn’t been aware that he had carried her there as she had continued to struggle against the seductive weakness that was flooding her limbs at his touch-but as he laid her down on the rumpled covers she brought every ounce of will-power she possessed into play. It couldn’t happen again, she couldn’t let him take her over again.
‘Leave me alone, Raoul.’ Her eyes were huge as she stared up at him in the dim light from the curtained window. ‘I can’t—’
‘But you can, kitten! We’re married, Leigh; you’re my wife, remember?’ His voice was teasingly mocking as he stroked a silky lock of brown hair away from her face with a gentle hand, lazily leaning forward to take her lips with his own again.
He was so sure of himself, she thought with a little dart of pain that strengthened her resolve. So sure that he could overcome her resistance as though the last five years had meant nothing! But then, they probably hadn’t to him! Had he even noticed she’d gone? She froze into stillness as he kissed her again, forcing her senses into submission and willing the warm pulsing beat of desire that was making her limbs shake to quieten. He didn’t notice her lack of response at first, and as he continued to trace a path of fire over her face and throat she knew it was only a matter of time before the heat that was bursting into life deep inside became evident again. She clenched her hands tightly by her side. She had to make him stop and this was the only way. She had to find the strength from somewhere.
Her complete lack of movement finally got through to him and he raised himself slowly, leaning on one elbow at her side to look into her wide brown eyes as he raked back the shock of curly black hair from his brow. ‘Don’t tell me I’m losing my touch?’ The dry, sardonic tone whipped a flush of colour into her cheeks and fanned the earlier flame of pain into white-hot agony.
With a bitterness that was directed at herself as well as him she stiffened into stone in an effort to hide the hurt. He really didn’t care! ‘Losing your touch?’ Her voice dripped with contempt. ‘Is that all anything means to you? An opportunity to prove you’re the greatest? That no woman is immune?’ Mercifully anger was replacing the pain now.
If she hadn’t been so angry she would have taken warning at the slow darkening of his face but right at that moment she was incapable of taking notice of anything. ‘You disgust me, Raoul, with your arrogant and all-important male ego. We’re strangers now and you know it! We’re just two people held together by a meaningless piece of paper.’
‘Like hell we are!’ He swung his legs violently over the edge of the bed as he turned from her. ‘Was that why you insisted on a church wedding because all our marriage boiled down to was an expendable bit of paper? I do not believe this, Leigh; I know you better than that. You are my wife, my wife in the eyes of God and man, and I know it and so do you.’ His accent was as brittle as glass.
‘No—’
‘Oh, yes, my little English rose.’ He stood up as she drew herself into a sitting position, locking her hands round her knees after pulling the short smock down to her feet. ‘You are mine and what is mine I keep. You should know this.’ His voice was shaking with rage and cold determination.
‘Raoul, listen to me—’
‘Why should I?’ He spun round now with a dark raging fury in his eyes that made her shrink away in fear. ‘You do not listen to me, do you? You didn’t listen five years ago and still you will not. What is it with you?’
‘What is it with me?’ The sheer arrogance acted like a shot of adrenalin and her small face was convulsed with hot resentment and burning fury. ‘How can you ask me that? You aren’t real! You just aren’t real.’
‘This is nonsense,’ he said coldly, his face hard and his eyes an icy blue. ‘If you cannot talk sense—’
‘Can’t talk sense!’ He had turned into the iceman again but for the life of her she couldn’t match his coolness. He stood gazing at her, powerfully, dangerously handsome with an insolent tilt to the ebony head and his eyes such a startling vivid blue that her breath suddenly caught in her throat as she fought for words. He was so handsome. So amazingly, painfully handsome. What had he ever seen in her anyway? ‘I may not be saying what you want to hear but it makes perfect sense, to me at any rate.’ Her voice was trembling and low and she heard it with a little throb of self-disgust. She wouldn’t let him break her, reduce her to tears again.
He swore softly as he took in the huge brown eyes in her chalk-white face, filled with a churning darkness that made him run his hand through his hair wearily, the anger draining from his face as he shook his head gently. ‘You are your own worst enemy, kitten,’ he said softly. ‘We were so good together once and you cannot deny we were happy. You can’t fight what’s between us, Leigh; your body betrays you every time I touch you. You want me to make love to you.’
For a stunned moment she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, couldn’t believe he could have the audacity to actually voice such incredible words in view of what he had done. ‘You betrayed me, Raoul.’ Her voice was flat now and totally devoid of expression. ‘In the worst possible way. In our own bed. You can’t deny that.’
‘I cannot?’ His eyes narrowed slowly and his voice was very tight, his body stiff with emotion. ‘But of course I cannot. It is all cut and dried, is it not? Like that evening five years ago when I wasn’t allowed to speak?’
‘Oh, and I suppose if you’d come back to our home and found me in bed with another man you would have sat down with us in a reasonable manner and asked politely for an explanation?’ She glared at him. ‘There was only one possible interpretation. Admit it!’
‘You weary me.’ His face had hardened further at the note of undisguised disgust in her voice.
‘I weary you?’ She was aware in the far recesses of her mind that she kept repeating his remarks like a dozy parrot, but the haughty insolence was leaving her gasping for words. ‘Well, maybe I do at that. But I’m not stupid and I won’t pretend to be. Marion had been after you for weeks and you knew it. I suppose you only held out for as long as you did because she was your best friend’s wife and they were staying with us. You betrayed him and me and for what? A little—’ She stopped abruptly and took a long deep breath, settling back into the bed and pulling the covers more closely around her. She felt suddenly cold, cold and very tired. ‘Anyway, it’s over, finished; none of it matters any more. Maybe we can be friends one day.’ She missed the lightning flash of pain in his face.
‘I do not want friendship from you,’ he said savagely. ‘I want more, much more than that or nothing at all.’
‘Then it will be nothing,’ she said slowly as she
lifted her eyes to stare straight into the arctic blue of his.
‘You think so?’ His voice was soft now and with a chilling coldness that sent a tiny shiver sparking down her spine. She knew Raoul. He was always at his most dangerous when perfectly in control like now. ‘Tell me, my Leigh, what did you imagine would happen in the future? Did you seriously expect me to remain in the background like an emasculated stallion forever?’ She shivered at the crudity.
‘I didn’t expect anything,’ she said tightly, forcing her eyes not to fall before the piercing clarity of his. ‘I didn’t expect anything and I don’t want anything. Not from you. I thought you knew that after all this time.’
‘Then this is where you are wrong,’ he said calmly as he walked easily towards the door, his big shoulders proudly straight and his head held high. ‘Quite wrong.’
‘Can’t you just leave me alone, Raoul—?’
He spun round instantly with that smooth animal reflex she remembered from the past. She could tell he was angry, blazingly angry, but the big body was held in quiet restraint and his voice was perfectly contained when he next spoke.
‘No, I will not leave you alone any more.’ It was a statement rather than a threat but it had the same effect on her as the latter. She couldn’t understand any of this. What exactly did he want of her after all these years? ‘We have things to decide and arrangements to make but I refuse to discuss it now. Not with you in this mood.’
‘This “mood” is me,’ she said sharply, ‘and nothing you could say would convince me—’
He cut off her words with a vicious stab of his hand as he waved her to silence from the doorway. ‘I have given you the time you asked for that day when you left, the chance to follow your dream of becoming an artist, the opportunity to become your own person, but that doesn’t mean that I will allow anyone else to take my place. Do you understand me?’ He glared at her across the small room, his hands arrogantly splayed on his hips and his eyes flashing cold fire. ‘If I had kept you with me you would never have been sure of what you could have achieved, never sure if your love for me was a mirage that had chained you to my side.’
She stared at him silently as she tried to take in what he was saying. This was all nonsense. She hadn’t said—
‘I have never been more than a step behind you through the years. I have known exactly what you were doing, what you were involved with, who you were seeing and when. And this Jeff Capstone, I will not tolerate that you see him. Is that clear?’
She still couldn’t speak, couldn’t formulate what she was hearing’I shall return to see you tomorrow and I will tell you then how I expect you to behave. Goodbye, Leigh.’
‘Raoul!’ As she found her tongue the front door slammed with a violence that rocked the tiny flat and as she went to leap out of bed to follow him, her cheeks scarlet with anger, she caught her bare foot in the bedclothes and fell in a sprawling heap on to the floor. By the time she reached the front door the lift’s ancient whirring mechanism informed her she was too late. He had gone.
As she slowly stepped back in the flat, shutting the door, her rage grew in tune with her sense of injustice. It was as though they had been talking about a different marriage and two different people! She ground her teeth furiously. She had left him because she had found him in bed with another woman! End of story. What was all this rubbish about time and being her own person? And he had had her followed! She paced the small flat angrily. He had actually had the audacity to have her followed!
She made herself a cup of instant coffee in order to give her shaking hands something to do, wandering out on to the small balcony as she sipped the hot liquid and looking out over the rooftops into the clear blue sky.
If he contacted her again, when he contacted her again, she was going to insist on that divorce. She closed her eyes tightly. She had to sever all links, all ties; she should have done it years ago. Why hadn’t she? She opened her eyes to gaze unseeing into the warm summer air. Because she had been hanging on to a dream against all reason. She had pushed the divorce out of her mind, not because she didn’t want to think of Raoul but because she dared not!
She brushed back the heavy fall of hair from her face and took a big gulp of coffee, letting the burning liquid trace an avenue of fire into her chest. In those heady days of marriage she had dreamt of their life together as being for always, of their babies, their grandchildren. She smiled bitterly to herself. But it had just been part of the impossible dream and she’d had to let go of it before it destroyed her. It hadn’t been real. Their life together hadn’t been real.
She leant against the wrought iron, which was already slightly warm from the heat of the summer’s day, as dark misery gripped her mind. Raoul’s wealth had cocooned them in an endless honeymoon. First a few months at his beautiful house in the Caribbean, eight weeks at his villa in Greece and then a long, slow cruise on his private yacht to the house he called home in the South of France.
It had been miraculous and magical-but it hadn’t been real. Real life was working and caring and loving and taking the rough with the smooth. It had been all smoothness. And it was finished.
As she turned to go back into the room she noticed a tiny tentacled weed in a tub of wallflowers in the corner of the balcony and suddenly its intrusion seemed symbolic of Raoul’s reappearance in her life. As she pulled it, viciously, from the black earth she nodded to herself desperately as the flood of tears she could no longer restrain burnt hot on her face. It was finished. It had to be.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a58aa715-f4bc-5c73-af6f-cf0ee355786c)
‘MRS DE CHEVNAIR?’ The young lad standing outside her door was almost buried under the huge bouquet of deep red roses he was holding. ‘Mrs Leigh de Chevnair?’
‘Yes?’ Leigh’s voice was grudging. To be woken up on a Monday morning at nine o’clock when she hadn’t slept all night and then asked to acknowledge her married status wasn’t her idea of a good start to the week.
‘I thought I’d got the address right but the card on the door says Leigh Wilson.’ The boy’s forehead was wrinkled. ‘Still, that’s your affair.’
‘Exactly.’ She wasn’t usually this snappy, she thought miserably as she reluctantly took charge of the flowers that could only be from one person as the boy left with a stiff nod. She had to get herself together! There was no card, just the picture of a small brown kitten fixed to the enormous silk bow at the base of the bouquet, its eyes enormous.
She deposited the flowers in the kitchen sink before having a shower and getting dressed, her movements mechanical and slow. The memories that had haunted her all night were just as vivid in the cold light of day and as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror she peered at herself critically for the first time in months.
The anxious face that stared back at her was averagely pretty, no more, she reflected miserably, the big brown eyes and thick dark hair pleasant but fairly mediocre. Her shape was inclined to plumpness, she wasn’t very tall and yet from the first moment they had met Raoul had called her beautiful.
She peered closer, trying to see what he saw, but after a few searching moments shook her head in defeat. Oh, Raoul. ‘Now none of that,’ she told herself loudly. ‘It’s over, finished! You are going to devote yourself to your work and become a great artist.’ The thought couldn’t have depressed her more and after a few minutes of claustrophobic misery she decided she had to get out and go for a walk. She needed to get her hopes and aspirations back on course and she couldn’t do it with the smell of fifty or more roses pervading her senses and weakening her resolve.
‘Running away? Again?’ The bright warm sunlight trapped neatly in the building-framed street had momentarily blinded her as she stepped out on to the pavement from the dark confines of the murky passageway leading from the lift, and as she raised startled brown eyes to Raoul’s cool sardonic face she almost groaned out loud. He had no right to look so gorgeous, no right at all. Dressed simply in figure-hugging jeans and a blue denim shirt that reflected the deep blue of his eyes, he looked…gorgeous. But he wasn’t hers. Not any more.
‘I happen to be going for a walk. if that’s all right with you, of course.’ She smiled tightly. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. My clocking-in card is in my pocket.’
‘Miaow…’ He touched her flushed cheek gently with a cool finger. ‘My little kitten is scratchy today.’ She glared at him without replying and he laughed softly. ‘I think I’ll join you; I need the exercise.’
Now she did groan out loud, and he eyed her quizzically as he fell into step beside her. ‘It’s lucky for me I do not suffer with the English insecurity,’ he said quietly. ‘You have been death to my ego from the first moment we met.’ He placed a casual arm round her shoulders and she saw two beautifully dressed career women across the road grimace with envy. She didn’t have to be able to hear what they were saying to know its content; she’d heard it so many times before. ‘What a dish! And what’s he doing with her?’
‘Do you remember?’ he continued softly in her ear as he moderated his large steps to hers. ‘In St Tropez?’
‘Of course I remember,’ she said painfully. ‘I was on a cheap package holiday with my cousin and you were on your yacht with Lord Somebody-orother.’ She eyed him morosely. ‘Very symbolic!’ He ignored the gibe with regal indifference. ‘And then you started to show off on the beach for all the women.’
‘I did not!’ Now she had his attention! ‘I merely played football with a group of friends, that is all.’ He shot her a warning glance. ‘You are not too big to fit over my knee, little kitten, understand?’ Now she ignored him. ‘And there was one girl who would not emerge from her umbrella. Buried up to her nose in her newspaper. Just a pair of round dimpled knees on view.’ He smiled slowly. ‘I fell for those knees then and there.’ The blue eyes were reflective.
‘Raoul!’ She pushed him slightly with her hand as she fought, unsuccessfully, to keep back the grin that was twisting the corners of her mouth upwards. She shouldn’t listen to this.
‘Oh, but I did.’ His eyes narrowed in remembrance. ‘And then, when I persuaded the butterfly from its chrysalis, it was to find that I was-how you say?—cradle-snatching.’
‘You were not,’ she said indignantly. ‘I was eighteen when we met and you were only twenty-five. Not exactly Methuselah by anyone’s standards!’
‘Ah, but you were a baby in the ways of love,’ he said deeply. ‘But how quickly you learnt. You will always be mine, Leigh, you know this?’ She couldn’t quite place the timbre of his voice but there was something in the hard handsome face that was quite ruthless and she shivered in spite of the heat.
‘Like your car or yacht, you mean?’ Her voice was deliberately cold. ‘Something to be used when necessary or convenient and then put into the appropriate slot or maybe even forgotten if a better model comes along.’ She looked straight up at him now. ‘Maybe another Marion?’
‘You say these things but you do not believe them,’ he said grimly as he brought her to a halt at the opening of a tiny green park with a pocket handkerchief square of lawn surrounded by a border of orderly bushes and regimented benches. ‘Marriage is forever. There has never been a divorce in my family.’
‘Is that all that matters to you? Your family’s reputation?’
He brought her angry words to a halt by the simple expedient of placing his lips on hers, bending down to take her mouth with an arrogant gesture of familiarity that had her head jerking away immediately. She ignored the response the casual action ignited in her body, veiling her eyes against him as she glared up into his face. ‘Don’t.’
‘I have decided there is only one way to deal with your stubbornness, kitten,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I have given you time to to find yourself, to become established in your work. I let this happen because I had to. Now it is time for you to come back to me.’
‘You’re crazy.’ She stared at him in amazement. ‘I’m not coming back, Raoul.’
‘This person, this Jeff, does he have something to do with your decision?’ he asked coldly as he drew her down beside him on one of the benches, his touch burning her arm.
‘My life is my own affair now,’ she said quietly as a dart of anger at his presumption turned her eyes black. ‘You don’t own me any more.’
‘I never did.’ He looked down at her quizzically. ‘I never wanted to “own” you in that way. Possess you, as you possess me, maybe, but not “own” you.’
‘We’re finished.’ She had said it! She shut her eyes for an infinitesimal moment of time, expecting another explosion, but apart from a stiffening of the big body there was no change in his manner. He sat watching her, his blue eyes reflecting the sky overhead and the faint breeze ruffling his hair. This was merely a game to him, she thought wretchedly.
‘Did you like the roses?’ he asked with cool detachment. She stared at him for a moment, nonplussed by his control.
‘They’re lovely.’ She smiled nervously. ‘You must have bought the shop out.’ What on earth did he expect her to say?
‘A rose for every month we have been apart.’ There was no expression in the smooth voice. ‘How are you going to convince me you are adamant our marriage is at an end?’ he asked in the same tone of voice. ‘I feel you still want me on a physical level but I also know that you have remained celibate since our break so I do not doubt your control of your physical desires. But nevertheless, you do want me, don’t you?’
This total change of front into cool quietness puzzled her. Yesterday he had been volatile, passionate and angry. Today, at first thoughtful and reflective-and now.? Now she wasn’t sure but she didn’t like it and she didn’t trust him an inch. She had once, implicitly, and look where it had got her!
‘I have a suggestion to make that I would like you to consider very carefully,’ he continued softly. ‘You know me, Leigh, you know I do not give in easily.’ She smiled inwardly. The understatement of the year. ‘My proposal is that you come back to live with me for three months.’ Her eyes shot up to meet his but he was ready for her, his hand already raised for silence. ‘This will not involve you doing anything you do not wish to do, either on a physical level or a social one. You understand?’ She nodded silently, her eyes enormous in the chalkwhiteness of her face. ‘If, at the end of that time, you are able to tell me coldly and dispassionately that you still want a divorce, I will make sure you get one immediately. You have my word on that.’
‘And if I can’t?’ She forced a note of mockery into her voice to hide its trembling.
‘Then you become my wife again in every sense of the word.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ She rose from the bench to look down at him, her hands clenched into fists at her side and her heart-shaped face fiery. ‘I don’t need to do this! We have been apart for five years. I can get a divorce now if I want one, with or without your consent.’
‘Maybe.’ He smiled coldly. ‘But maybe not. We would see. But that is by the by. The real issue is that I would not be satisfied.’ He stared at her proudly, his face ruthlessly arrogant. ‘I need to know you mean what you say, that you are absolutely sure; only then would I leave you alone.’
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HELEN BROOKS
Marriage on trial!From playboy lover… When gorgeous millionaire Raoul de Chevnair chose Leigh as his bride, it seemed he'd left his flirtatious bachelor days behind for good. But had he? Their marriage had scarcely begun before his playboy habits returned and Leigh found him in the arms of another woman… . … to faithful husband?That was five years ago. Leigh is no longer a naive teenage, bowled over by Raoul's charm. So when he vows to win back her trust, Leigh is determined not to give in that easily! It's all very well for Raoul to sweep her off on an exotic second honeymoon, but Leigh needs a lot of convincing that Raoul has decided to take his marriage vows seriously after all!Helen Brooks creates "rich characters, sparkling interplay and a riveting emotional conflict." - Romantic Times
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ucf45b88c-d1f1-5953-8ce6-1bc18eb1c661)
Excerpt (#u705f5801-4d3c-5741-bbc5-09f99780f831)
Dear Reader (#u76166d39-f17b-5c9e-b932-a72055e58ce1)
Title Page (#ud6f0231c-35a5-5d48-ac82-16fd20247a32)
CHAPTER ONE (#ub49f0580-4f8f-5f98-b6c1-fe54f1e9e227)
CHAPTER TWO (#u788bbfe3-e883-580f-a7a8-a54fccf358bd)
CHAPTER THREE (#u29f5d8fe-e90a-5e99-a19f-63b9cd46bb25)
CHAPTER FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“Just who do you think you are?”
“I thought we’d established that. I’m your husband.”
“In name only.” Leigh lashed back.
“I’m quite prepared to rectify that if you’d care to oblige.?” Raoul’s eyes were mocking. “I seem to remember that we were good together once.”
“Are you sure it was us you are thinking of? There have been so many women in your life, Raoul, I’m surprised you can remember any one liaison.”
Dear Reader,
HELEN BROOKS is an author with a growing reputation. Her books are emotional, involving, and bursting with romantic intensity! She is particularly talented at capturing the depth of feeling between a married couple.so we know you’ll enjoy in A Heartless Marriage.
The Editor
A Heartless Marriage
Helen Brooks
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_daba8433-ec21-589f-86f7-0439212b8117)
‘IT’S been a long time, Leigh.’
As the deeply caressing, velvet-smooth voice with its faint tinge of a French accent spoke just behind her Leigh’s blood froze. She had known this would happen one day but had been unable to prepare herself for it, in the same way that she couldn’t control the snaking shiver that crept down her spine as the unmistakable voice touched a spot deep inside her.
‘Hello, Raoul.’ She turned slowly as her mind raced, without attempting to smile, to meet the full force of that piercing ice-blue gaze that had once had the power to take her to heaven or hell. ‘Five years, in fact.’
‘And two months?’ He looked devastatingly handsome, more so, if possible, than the last time she had seen him. He was just the same and yet. different. The intervening time-span had carved a few lines around his eyes and mouth but they merely added to the tanned perfection of a face that was stunningly beautiful in its complete maleness.
The strong straight nose, aristocratic chin and warm, sensual mouth would have been a masterpiece if captured in oils, and the wild shock of thick black curly hair that she recalled had been groomed into a more sedate style that added extra emphasis to the darkly lashed, wicked blue eyes.
‘You see, I remember.’ He, too, was making no attempt to smile or lighten the situation, and a sudden little dart of resentful anger at his cool selfpossession turned the soft brown of her eyes slatehard. He was just the same after all! Just as arrogantly cold, just as casually cruel, just as’You are well?’ Now the dazzling white teeth flashed in acknowledgement of her nod. ‘That is good.’
‘And you?’ This was ridiculous, she thought helplessly, to stand and talk in polite cliches as though they were distant acquaintances renewing some tenuous connection, when really—
‘I too am well.’ The vivid blue eyes wandered lazily over her flushed face, lingering for a moment on the tremulous, soft mouth before travelling to the rich dark brown hair that hung down below her shoulders. ‘You have grown your hair. I like it this way.’ The touch of hauteur caused her chin to rise a fraction.
‘Thank you.’ I shall scream in a minute, Leigh thought desperately as she felt the blood begin to sing in her ears. She hadn’t felt so exposed, so vulnerable, in years. Five years, in fact. She knew her hands were clamped together as though in a vice, the knuckles white with tension, but she couldn’t have unwound them to save her life. She steeled herself to meet those piercing eyes again and forced a polite smile to her lips. ‘Are you in England on business?’ she asked coolly.
‘In a way,’ he smiled easily, obviously totally unaffected by her presence anyway, Leigh thought bitterly. ‘I suppose you could call it that.’
‘Oh…’ She couldn’t think of another thing to say; her mind had suddenly gone blank. ‘Well.’ She glanced round helplessly as she took a small step backwards. ‘I’d better be—’
‘I hear you are doing very well at your painting now, Leigh.’ As her eyes snapped back up to his she searched his face for mockery and found none. Instead she found interest, and something else. Something that made her breath catch in her throat and her head swim. He had no right to look at her like that! No right at all. ‘You are just as beautiful as I remember.’ His voice was husky and for a moment the memories flooded in in vivid painfulness. How many times had she woken from a night spent in his arms to hear him say she was beautiful? That she was his treasure? That he would never let her go?
‘I’ve never been beautiful, Raoul,’ she said coldly as she forced the hurt from her voice.
‘You have, to me, always.’ She really couldn’t take much more, she thought wildly. She had looked forward to this occasion for weeks, knowing that there would be many prestigious artists among the throng of idle rich that always attended Nigel Blake’s little ‘gatherings’ as he liked to call them. Nigel prided himself on getting just the right mixture of up and coming artists and wealthy influential titles to make his parties the talk of London. There had been more than one struggling artist who had been set on the road to fabulous wealth by a commission at one of Nigel’s ‘do’s.
‘I need to talk to you, Leigh.’ As Raoul placed his hand on her arm she actually jolted with the shock of it. An electric current more dangerous than anything harnessed by man shot through her body and she took a step backwards, her eyes enormous.
‘I’m sorry, Raoul,’ she said quickly, appalled he could still affect her so violently, ‘but I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘Now that isn’t kind.’ Was that some kind of dark amusement she saw in those ice-blue eyes? ‘I’ve been a patient man, Leigh, but there are still matters we need to discuss. Surely you can understand that?’
‘What do you mean?’ She stared at him, mesmerised by his audacity.
‘Oh, come, come.’ The accent was more pronounced now and those magnetic eyes drew her into him just as they had always done. ‘You didn’t think we would always remain in some sort of timeless limbo? You surely knew there would be a day of reckoning?’ He smiled with slow cruelty.
‘Well, Leigh, honey.’ As the harsh American female voice sounded in her ear Leigh breathed a sigh of relief. She had never expected in her wildest dreams that she would ever be pleased to see Vivien James but just at this precise moment the tall willowy blonde was an answer to prayer. ‘It’s not fair to monopolise all the talent!’ Leigh had heard the outrageous come-on before but Vivien always counted on the fact that the man in question hadn’t, and now she glided seductively close.
‘I’m Vivien.’ The six-foot model stuck out a slender hand for Raoul to shake as she wriggled an invitation no man could ignore.
‘Of course you are.’ Raoul was a few inches taller than the beautiful blonde, his long lean body and big broad shoulders giving an impression of even greater height, and Leigh noticed, with a stab of apprehension, that his handshake was cursory and his smile tight. She knew the signs. He suffered fools badly.
‘Well, I do suspect Leigh has been holding out on us,’ Vivien gushed prettily. ‘They say the quiet ones are the worse, don’t they?’ She laughed throatily, totally sure of herself and of the beauty that had taken her monthly salary into six figures in the last two years. ‘Don’t tell me you’re an old friend?’ She pouted provocatively as she touched Raoul’s arm.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Raoul said quietly, his eyes cold.
‘No?’ Vivien’s predatory eyes gleamed, dismissing Leigh’s presence with regal indifference as she edged forward, almost elbowing the other woman out of the way. ‘What, then?’
‘Leigh’s husband, as it happens.’ There was a positively diabolical glint of satisfaction in those cold blue eyes as they noted the stunned surprise on the carefully made-up face, the mouth an O of bewilderment.
‘You’re joking.’ Vivien stared at Raoul, her eyes flicking over the tall lean body and film-star good looks before moving on to Leigh’s medium height, slightly plump frame which housed a pretty but totally unpretentious face, the straight brown hair and large brown eyes ordinary by anyone’s standards. ‘I don’t believe you. You can’t be married to her!’
Her meaning was clear and as Leigh flushed painfully Raoul’s face darkened. When he next spoke his voice was cutting, the accent as sharp as glass. ‘Then that is your problem, yes?’ He had taken Leigh’s arm as he spoke, his attitude both protective and proprietorial, moving her away from the other woman into a quiet corner of the crowded room.
‘Let go of me.’ As she shook off his hand the urge to lash out was paramount, but she took a long, deep breath before facing him again, the anger that was coursing through her body giving her the courage to look deep into the piercing eyes without flinching. ‘Why did you tell her that? And why are you here? I don’t want you in my life.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ He was standing quite still now, the total lack of movement disquieting. ‘Nevertheless, it is the truth. You are my wife, Leigh.’ Her skin prickled helplessly as he turned her to face him with her back to the room so that her face was shielded from curious eyes. ‘And don’t look like that. I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘You aren’t going to.?’ Her voice trailed away in a tight bitter laugh that turned his face into stone. ‘What could you do to me that you haven’t already done, Raoul? I loathe you, I detest you. If you were halfway decent you would have given me a divorce as soon as I left you.’
‘I didn’t want to.’ His arrogance made her blink. ‘Why didn’t you file for one later?’
‘Why?’ She stared at him. ‘You really want to know? Because I wanted to shut even the slightest thought of you out of my mind. I wanted to pretend that you didn’t exist, that our marriage had never happened.’ It wasn’t the whole truth. A divorce had been almost unimportant compared to the excruciating step she had taken in leaving him in the first place. She had known she would never marry again. He was too hard an act to follow. ‘I expected you to contact me anyway.’ She raised her chin slightly. ‘Is that why you are here now? To ask for a divorce? This meeting isn’t by accident, is it?’
‘No, it is not.’ His eyes were slicing into her.
‘What’s her name?’ she asked coldly. ‘Surely Marion isn’t still around?’ She forced herself to say the hated name.
‘I don’t intend to discuss our private affairs here,’ Raoul said tightly, ‘but suffice it to say I am not here to ask for a divorce. How soon can you leave?’
‘How soon can I.?’ For the second time in as many minutes she was speechless. ‘You don’t seriously think I’m going anywhere with you, do you? For all you know, I’m with someone.’ She waved distractedly at the crowded room.
‘Are you?’ The glittering eyes challenged her, his mouth twisting in a faint smile as she tossed her head without replying. ‘I thought not. Jeff Capstone is in Scotland, isn’t he?’ It was a cool statement of fact and delivered with icy disdain. ‘You see, I know more about you than you think.’ His eyes never left her face for an instant.
She stared at him in amazement as seething resentment turned her brown eyes black. ‘How dare you?’ Her voice, though low, was full of scathing contempt. ‘Just who do you think you are?’ She couldn’t believe the pretentious insolence.
‘I thought we had established that.’ He smiled coldly. ‘I am your husband.’
‘In name only,’ Leigh lashed back quickly as her heartbeat raced.
‘I’m quite prepared to rectify that if you’d care to oblige?’ His eyes were mocking. ‘I seem to remember we were good together once.’ The blue eyes were insultingly familiar.
‘We were?’ Her mouth curled scornfully. ‘Are you sure it was us you are thinking of? There have been so many women in your life, Raoul, I’m surprised you can remember any one liaison.’
At last she had hit him on the raw. She saw it in the arctic frost that turned the vivid blue eyes rapiersharp and the way his big body froze into stillness. ‘You were not a “liaison”, Leigh,’ he said furiously. ‘You were, you are, my wife!’
‘It was a pity you didn’t remember that when it counted,’ she said simply. ‘Goodbye, Raoul.’
She had turned and left him before he realised what was happening and as she crossed the room she half expected to feel a restraining hand on her shoulder but nothing happened. She wanted to run away, to find a safe little hidey-hole where she could lick the wounds that she’d thought had healed but which were as raw as the day he had gouged them into her heart-but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. How had he found her? Why was he here? More to the point, why was she here?
She looked through the high, beautifully worked arched doorway into the next massive room full of London’s elite-high society at its best, with the odd bearded aesthete to keep Nigel’s precious balance right-and groaned inwardly. When she had first begun to be noticed, two years ago, she had decided then that the power game was not for her. She would succeed or fail on her paintings, not on her connections, but when the prized invitation had dropped through her letterbox she had been unable to resist. The urge to see first-hand one of Nigel’s famous soirees had been too tempting. Curiosity! Well, now she was paying for her weakness in a way she had never anticipated in her darkest nightmares.
‘Everything all right, sweetie?’ As Nigel drifted by without waiting for an answer, his long sequinned smock in outrageous contrast to the tight bright red trousers, she bit her lip hard. She had been here two hours. She had been seen by the right people and now she couldn’t stand it another minute. A careful glance backwards told her Raoul was nowhere to be seen, now was the moment to escape. She had to get away, break free.
‘Off already, darling?’ She was just slipping into her jacket, incongruous against the mass of furs and silk shawls that filled the rest of the ladies’ cloakroom, when Vivien’s smooth white hand touched her arm imperiously. ‘Bigger fish to fry?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Leigh had never liked Vivien, having had the misfortune to work with her on more than one occasion in her early days in London when she was working part-time as a photographer’s assistant in order to be able to eat while she followed her dream to paint, and now she turned to face the taller woman with frank distaste on her heart-shaped face. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I just bet you don’t.’ Vivien’s hard slanted eyes were poisonous. ‘What’s your little game, then? I’ve made a few enquiries and that’s Raoul de Chevnair you were talking to, isn’t it? You don’t seriously expect me to believe that a multimillionaire playboy like Raoul de Chevnair would ever notice a little nobody like you, let alone marry her!’ She laughed spitefully, her face mocking.
‘I don’t expect you to believe anything, Vivien,’ Leigh said coldly, her shoulders straight and her face mirroring her opinion of the beautiful blonde more effectively than words ever could have done. ‘Now would you mind moving out of the way? I’m going home.’ Her voice was glacial.
‘Yes, I would mind, actually,’ Vivien drawled slowly, her mouth pulled into a thin red line and her eyes shooting daggers. ‘You haven’t answered my question, Miss Leigh Wilson! Doesn’t sound much like Mrs de Chevnair to me!’
‘Then, as my husband said a few minutes ago, that’s your problem.’ Leigh pushed past the willowy figure, taking her completely by surprise. ‘Goodnight, Vivien.’
Once outside the cloakroom in the large woodpanelled hall, she leant against the wall for a moment and took a deep breath. Already! Raoul had only been back in her life five minutes and already the women were gathering like bees round a honeypot. But he wasn’t back in her life! She seized on the thought and repeated it to herself firmly. She wouldn’t let him be.
When she had crawled from his presence, crushed and broken, all those years ago, she had felt that life was a deep black abyss that would never hold a spark of joy or contentment again. And it hadn’t at first. She had fled back to London, hiding herself in the careless anonymity of the big metropolis, unable to think or eat or sleep for weeks-and then one spring morning a ray of sunshine had caught a spider’s web on the window of her grubby little bedsit and the urge to paint had resurfaced. And with it she had gradually clawed back her selfrespect, making a new life for herself, taking charge of her affairs, growing into a person whom, if she didn’t actually like, she could live with. And over the years she had settled into the new woman who had been reborn out of the scorching devastation, content with her light sunny little flat with its bird’seye view of London and her peaceful solitary life. A tranquil life in the cool valley after the cruel heat of the mountaintop. And now he was back! Her heart pounded so violently for a moment that she felt faint. Why-after all this time? She had made it clear to him when she’d left that everything between them had been burnt to ashes, that there was nothing left. So why now, just when everything was beginning to happen for her?
She levered herself carefully off the wall and walked sedately to the heavily carved oak front door, opening it quietly and slipping through quickly with a sigh of relief that she had got away so easily. She felt shell-shocked, bruised.
The warm summer air was filled with the city perfume of petrol fumes and dirt but she didn’t care; she had got used to London in all its moods now, appreciating the obscurity of town life, the nameless oblivion, hugging it to her like a hard-won prize. She was just Leigh Wilson, budding artist; that was all.
The night was black without a shred of moonlight to lighten the darkness, and the old-fashioned wrought-iron street lamps gave a discreetly small circle of light into the elegant, quiet, expensive avenue. As she stepped down the narrow circular steps into the empty street she clucked disapprovingly to herself. She should have called for a taxi before she left. She wasn’t thinking straight, but then it was hardly surprising!
‘Leigh?’ As one of the tall shadows across the dimly lit expanse detached itself she gave a little start of surprise, swiftly concealed, and then she was staring into Raoul’s dark face again and he wasn’t smiling. ‘Can I give you a lift?’ He indicated a long, low, sleek white monster on wheels a few yards away. ‘Please?’
Please? This wasn’t the Raoul she knew. The Raoul she had lived with for eighteen glorious, mind-boggling months had never said please to anyone in his life. ‘I don’t think so.’ She stared at him nervously. ‘I don’t want to be difficult, but—’
‘Then don’t be.’ As he cut into her words the arrogant forcefulness curled the muscles in her stomach. This was the Raoul she knew, riding roughshod over everyone else, cutting through any small talk, intent only on getting his own way. The veneer was just that-a light covering to hide a mind of steel. ‘I intend to talk to you, Leigh, so you might as well get it over and done with now.’ He smiled coldly. ‘You never were one for putting off unpleasant duties, were you?’
There was something of the satyr about him, she thought painfully; there always had been. Perhaps that was what had attracted her once, but not any more! Now she could see him for exactly what he was and it disgusted her.
‘Is it really necessary?’ She still didn’t move from the last step. ‘Can’t our solicitors sort it out?’
‘No, they damn well can’t!’ He took a long deep breath and spoke more quietly. ‘I don’t want solicitors meddling in my affairs. Now be a good girl and come and talk to me for a few minutes while I take you home. Kingston Gardens, isn’t it?’
She looked at him in surprise and took a step forwards in spite of herself. ‘How do you know where I live?’
‘I told you, I know more about you than you think,’ he said smoothly, his deep rich voice and faint accent giving the words a sensual overtone that brought the blood rushing into her cheeks. ‘First it was a bedsit in Baron Place, then a shared flat with a Miss.’ the dark brows wrinkled ‘…ah, yes, a Miss Angela Hardwick, and for the last two years a flat of your own in Kingston Gardens.’ He folded muscled arms.
‘Have you been spying on me?’ she asked weakly. ‘I don’t believe this.’ A flood of burning anger replaced the stunned amazement his words had caused. ‘How dare you? How dare you, Raoul? I—’
‘Shut up and get in the car,’ he said brusquely, the patience for which he was not renowned running out suddenly. As he took hold of her arm a shiver of apprehension trembled down her spine-or was it excitement? She bit on her lower lip till it hurt. She mustn’t let him see how he affected her. She hated and loathed him but he might mistake it for something else. She would listen to what he said, coolly and calmly, and then that would be that. And he was right. She might as well get it over and done with now.
The interior of the car was as magnificent as the outside, soft white leather seats and thick grey carpet, a sexual experience on wheels, she thought balefully. How in keeping. How very in keeping!
‘Do take that frown of disapproval off your face,’ he said lazily as he joined her. ‘You’ll have deep lines before you’re forty at this rate and I don’t intend to spend a fortune on face-lifts as you get older. My wife will grow old gracefully.’
‘What?’ She swung round to face him, big brown eyes incredulous, hardly able to believe what she had heard. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Us,’ he replied easily. ‘I’m talking about us.’ He urged the big car into purring life, drawing out of the parking space and joining the main stream of traffic at the end of the avenue, seemingly totally relaxed and faintly amused.
‘There is no “us”,’ she said sharply as she turned to look out of the window at the brightly lit shops and restaurants they were passing at incredible speed. He was driving too fast but then he always had. It had been a mistake to get in the car. The big, powerful, muscular body so close to hers was bringing back too many unwelcome memories, memories that caused her cheeks to burn and her eyes to glitter as she sternly repressed the aching fluttering in the pit of her stomach. He even smelt the same! That delicious and wickedly expensive aftershave that had always rendered her helpless in his arms. She brought her knees together tightly. She was immune to him now. She was!
‘Oh, but there is, kitten.’ The use of the old pet name jarred piercingly into her heart. ‘There always will be.’
‘I want to get out.’ Her hands were clenched together now and she ground her teeth silently as a low laugh rippled through the car. ‘Do you hear me, Raoul?’
‘No way, my love.’ She steeled herself to look at him and then wished she hadn’t. The profile was so familiar, so devastingly, painfully familiar. She had forgotten just how breathtakingly handsome he was, how enigmatically in control, how altogether electric. It wasn’t fair that one man should have so much going for him. It wasn’t just his looks, compelling though they were; there was a dark magnetism, an inner vitality that accentuated every aspect of the lean hard body and tanned face until the aura in which he moved was all-absorbing. ‘You’re nearly home now.’
Even as he spoke he pulled off the main thoroughfare which led to the huge block of flats where she lived and into a narrow, deserted sidestreet that was dark and unlit. ‘Now then.’ As the engine died a sense of danger shivered down her spine. This was Raoul, Raoul her husband, the man who knew her more intimately than any other human being ever would, the man who had almost destroyed her once and had let her go almost casually. The feeling of exhilaration that had had her in its grip since the party died, and pure undiluted fear took its place. Was she strong enough to withstand his devious fascination now? She had never understood him and had no idea why he had sought her out after all this time but she sensed instinctively that it wasn’t an impulsive decision.
She had been right in her initial impression that he had changed. The old Raoul had never had such a hard light of cold purpose in his eyes. He was the same but he was different: older, menacingly determined, altogether more dangerous. She prepared herself for what he was going to say. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t like it, she was suddenly quite sure of that.
‘Leigh.’ As he spoke her name he bent towards her, the fingers of one hand threading into her thick silky hair as the other wrapped round her waist, drawing her into him in the close confines of the car before she had time to resist.
‘Don’t!’ Even as she spoke his mouth took hers and in the first moment of contact she knew, with a frantic silent scream, that the old magic was there. She couldn’t evade him, there was nowhere to go, and, bent over her as he was, his body had trapped her more securely than any chains. The kiss shot through the nerve-endings all over her body in an explosion of sensation, moulding, drawing her, emptying her of everything but him. She tried to fight it, to jerk her head away, but he was too strong for her and then, as the kiss became deeper and he plundered that intimate territory she had never given to anyone else but him, she didn’t want to resist. The dizzy, helpless submission his passion had always induced rose like a phoenix from the ashes, sensual, powerful, accelerating her heartbeat and causing her to strain towards him, revelling in the feel, the smell of him as he fitted her into his body until she could feel every inch of his hard frame.
She couldn’t believe she had been without the touch, the feel of him for five years. Like an addict who thought she had conquered the habit only to find its pull stronger than ever, she shuddered desperately against him, his obvious arousal firing her to new heights of ecstasy.
He seemed gripped by the same sort of madness, murmuring incoherently against the softness of her mouth, his lips moving frantically over her face and throat as his body trembled against hers, a storm of pent-up emotion devouring the long lean body until the tremors that were shaking his limbs reached through to hers.
‘You’re mine, you’re still mine, you’ll always be mine.’ As his voice, urgent and filled with a mad exultation, pierced the spinning whirlwind that had her in its grip, she froze in his arms, a biting wave of humiliation and shame breaking over her head and draining the colour from her face.
‘No!’ As she wrenched her face from his she jerked sideways savagely, hitting her shoulder against the door of the car without even feeling it. It wasn’t going to happen again. She wasn’t going to be swept into his orbit like a mindless robot that could only function when its master pressed the switch. She was autonomous now, she didn’t need him any more, she wouldn’t need him! She had survived without him for five years; it couldn’t all be lost now. She had to fight him.
‘Leigh, listen to me—’
‘No!’ She knew she was almost hysterical but that didn’t matter, all that mattered was convincing him that he had to leave her alone, that she was her own person now, not a plaything to be brought out at convenient moments. ‘Don’t you touch me again, Raoul, not ever again. I mean it, I hate you! I’ll always hate you!’ She was shouting and in the enclosed space the words bounced off the metal with deafening ferocity, and as she struggled to open the door she was aware of him leaning back into his seat, his face hardening into cold mocking lines.
‘A simple “no” would have sufficed,’ he said quietly. ‘You really didn’t have to pretend that you enjoyed what was obviously a grievous ordeal.’ He was laughing at her! In the same instant that the mocking words registered on her bruised mind her hand shot out with savage force to hit him hard across one tanned cheek, the sound deafening.
‘Leigh!’ He punched her name into the space between them as his hands shot up to hold hers, restraining her with just enough force for the mad pounding in her head to ease and the enormity of what she had just done to break into her consciousness. She shut her eyes against the look on his face, leaning back against the soft leather as she felt the strength drain from her body, leaving her quivering and silent. ‘Consider yourself most fortunate,’ he grated through tight-clenched teeth. ‘There is no other woman on this earth who would get away with that twice.’
Twice? As her eyes opened to meet his the memory of their last encounter was there as clearly as if it was yesterday. Marion’s long, golden looselimbed body sprawled on the bed-their bed-her long golden blonde hair spread out across the pillow like a silky veil and the big green eyes bright with triumph as they caught sight of her standing whitefaced in the doorway. Her clothes had been scattered round the bedroom floor as though discarded in a frenzied game of tag, and as Raoul had emerged from the en suite, magnificently and in the circumstances inexcusably naked, she knew with a sick feeling of despair exactly who the beautiful blonde had been playing with.
‘Leigh?’ Raoul had begun to speak, his eyes flying from her drowning eyes to Marion in one lightning glance, but she had blown his words away with the impact of her hand across his mouth. She shut her mind to the scene that had followed. She had dissected it too often as it was.
‘I’ll take you home.’ As her eyes refocused on his face he let go of her hands, placing them into her lap as though she was old and helpless, which was exactly how she felt. She had been almost twenty when she had left him. After eighteen months of heaven on earth she had been plunged into a dark void that was indescribable, and just for a minute, a crazy minute, she had forgotten that tonight. But never again.
She glanced at him as he manoeuvred the powerful car out of the narrow street and into the lights again. This time her head must, must rule her heart! She couldn’t let herself become this man’s plaything again, his little toy. She was a grown woman now, not a child bride; she had shaped and woven her own life into the pattern she required of it and her independence was the most precious thing she owned.
I hate you, Raoul, she said silently as the car purred its way through the traffic, I hate you, I do! So why was it that for the first time in five years she felt alive again?
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_e56b9b41-d306-5660-a4f2-023070f22f71)
‘I’LL see you to your door.’ Leigh’s heart was still
pounding with disgust at her own weakness as they drew up outside the block of flats where she lived, and as his cool expressionless voice cut into her whirling thoughts she stiffened instinctively, her eyes widening in protest.
‘No!’ She lowered her voice a few decibels and tried again. ‘No, Raoul, please don’t.’
‘As you wish.’ He was sitting very still, an intense watchfulness colouring his eyes ice-blue. ‘Goodnight, Leigh.’
‘What? Oh, goodnight.’ This was it, then? After five years? A macabre anticlimax was making her knees weak.
As she climbed out of the car it was gone in an instant, roaring down the street to the blaring of horns and screaming brakes from the other traffic, the sound of its engine soon lost in the general mêlée.
As the lift took her upwards she really felt as though she was going to collapse. Her legs felt like jelly and there was a strange blackness that was most peculiar coming and going in front of her eyes. She suddenly realised she was leaning against the wall of the lift, which was unsavoury at the best of times, and on a Saturday evening, after the revelry and beer-swilling carousal of a Friday night, definitely suspect.
It brought her back to earth abruptly and she even found herself smiling at the irony of leaving Raoul’s fabulously expensive car to step into such a paradoxical little box. She shrugged wearily. Such was life. If only Raoul were as easy to shrug away.
The little flat was cool and welcoming as she opened her front door. One of the advantages of being on the sixth floor was that she could leave the large French doors that took up almost one wall of the tiny lounge open in the summer, letting the cool night air and rich scents from the tiny balcony crammed full with potted plants and sweet-smelling tubs of bright flowers stream into the room. She used this room as a small studio; the light was excellent all year round, and the minute tiled bathroom leading off the small box bedroom and even tinier kitchen kept housework to a minimum.
She owned one comfortable old easy-chair parked at one side of the windows, one bed and a small wardrobe, and that was all the furniture she possessed, having ploughed all her money into the hundreds of pounds’ worth of canvases, paints and brushes that roamed across every inch of available space, cluttering the walls in untidy harmony and filling the flat with the smell of turpentine and paint. And she loved it. She stood for a moment feasting her eyes on her little domain, willing the hard-won peace and quiet contentment back into her heart. But it was no good. She grimaced to herself helplessly. Raoul had destroyed it, at least for tonight. She wouldn’t let it be any longer than that!
She was standing under the shower, letting the cool water annihilate the last flush of humiliation still staining her skin pink, when the telephone called stridently from its hook on the kitchen wall. ‘You can just ring,’ she told it loudly, reaching for the bottle of shampoo and pouring a large amount of the thick creamy mixture into her hair, working up a lather determinedly.
She couldn’t speak to anyone tonight, she just couldn’t. Her head was swimming with a thousand and one images, her mind was aching and she still didn’t know why Raoul had exploded back into her life! The phone rang again as she was towelling herself dry and once more as she lay in bed sipping a hot mug of cocoa and flicking through a magazine article on life drawing by one of her old lecturers at college. It had become a matter of principle not to answer it now, a kind of rebellion against having the frame of her carefully built screen of fragile self-sufficiency broken by Raoul’s easy intrusion.
Sleep was too long in coming and she didn’t have the patience to wait for it, preferring paint and canvas after an hour of tossing and turning and forcing her mind away from paths that it dared not follow. Delectable, forbidden paths where Raoul’s magnificent body was exposed in all its flagrant manhood and her shape was moulded into his in a manner as old as time. The phone was now off the hook; that, at least, she could control! She had another cool shower before she started work at two o’clock. The night was excessively warm, she told herself aggressively—that was absolutely all it was!
At six she fell into bed just as she was, paintsmeared and somewhat grubby, and at eight o’clock she was woken by a furious pounding at her front door that she was sure could be heard on the tenth floor.
She stumbled bleary-eyed to the door, still in her tattered old painting smock, her hair tangled and hanging limply on her shoulders and her eyes cloudy with lack of sleep.
‘And just where the hell have you been?’
‘What?’ Raoul’s face was a picture of injured outrage and for a moment she wondered if she was in the middle of some inexplicable nightmare. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Answer me, damn you!’ He seemed very angry, she reflected weakly as she tried to spark her mind into ignition. ‘I’ve been ringing this number most of the night. First there was no answer and then it was engaged. What are you playing at? Who have you got here?’ His voice was bitingly sharp.
‘Who have I…?’ He brushed past her into the flat, stalking into each tiny room before coming to a halt in front of her stained easel, the paint on the canvas still tacky.
‘You’ve been working all night, haven’t you? You took the phone off the hook because you were working. You stupid girl!’ He glared at her angrily. ‘What about an emergency? What if someone was trying to get you urgently?’
‘Stop shouting at me!’ She had found her tongue along with the burning resentment that was filling her small body from head to foot. ‘And what did that gibe mean, incidentally? “Who have I got here?” You cheeky hound! We aren’t all like you, Raoul. Some of us consider that there are more important things than procreational pursuits!’
‘What?’ In a more conventional situation the look of sheer amazement on Raoul’s face would have been food for her soul, but just at the moment she couldn’t appreciate that for once she had totally and completely surprised him.
‘You burst into my home, you accuse me of goodness knows what and then you criticise my lifestyle! How dare you? How dare you? You haven’t bothered with me for five years and now you think you can tell me what to do. Get out! Get out!’
‘“Procreational pursuits”?’ He didn’t even seem to have heard the rest of her tirade. ‘“Procreational pursuits”!’ The great peal of unbridled raucous laughter took her completely by surprise. Raoul laughed the way he did everything else, with unrestrained frankness and wholehearted participation, and in spite of the fact that it was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning and the neighbours would be thinking-well, she didn’t dare to imagine what they would be thinking-she found herself infected by his appreciation of the moment. Unfortunately they had always had the same slightly off-beat sense of humour. It had seemed good when they were together but as Mrs Billett next door banged ferociously on the wall and Mr Silver overhead nearly brought the ceiling down with his walking-stick, she tried to restrain the paroxysms of laughter that recurred every time she thought she had control. It was nerves, it had to be.
‘Oh, Leigh.’ Raoul had collapsed on the one and only chair and was looking at her through streaming eyes. ‘Only you could come out with a phrase like that. “Procreational pursuits”!’ His head went back in another burst of laughter. ‘You’re priceless, kitten, you really are.’
Somehow the nickname sobered them both at the same moment and from helpless laughter they changed to expectant stillness within seconds. ‘Leigh?’ Raoul’s voice was a low endearment and she shuddered against it, her hands going out in unconscious protest as she took a step backwards. ‘Let me hold you, show you nothing has really changed.’
‘No, no, Raoul.’ He crossed the room in one movement to stand looking down at her, small and defenceless, in front of his overpoweringly tall bulk, and then with a smothered groan he lifted her right off her feet into his arms.
‘You’ve got paint on your nose and you stink of turpentine,’ he said softly as he traced the outline of her jaw with tiny feather-light kisses, his lips moving to her mouth as she opened it to protest. ‘And you’re so damn beautiful.’ Why that word should be the catalyst to the emotion that was sending hot waves of desire into every nerve-ending she didn’t know. Maybe it was because no one else had ever called her beautiful, maybe it was because the images she had been fighting all night had reared their sensual heads as soon as she had seen his face again. Whatever, she was now fighting herself as much as him and she was suddenly scared to death.
‘Put me down, Raoul! I don’t want this, I don’t want you—’ As he smothered her voice with a piercingly sweet kiss the feel of his hard, warm lips brought a host of memories she was powerless to resist. Raoul, the frighteningly perceptive lover who had been as anxious for her satisfaction as his own, infinitely patient, incredibly tender but capable of such heights of erotic passion that she had frequently felt she would die from the glorious ecstasy he induced.
He had been her first love, her only love, and had constantly delighted in fusing their bodies into rapturous oblivion until she had been quivering and sated in his arms. This was the Raoul she had purposely blocked out of her consciousness for years in her desire to survive, drawing on the mental picture of a cold hard womaniser who had betrayed her in the most callous way possible and with seemingly no shred of remorse.
‘I want you, my darling.’ How they had reached the bed she didn’t know-she hadn’t been aware that he had carried her there as she had continued to struggle against the seductive weakness that was flooding her limbs at his touch-but as he laid her down on the rumpled covers she brought every ounce of will-power she possessed into play. It couldn’t happen again, she couldn’t let him take her over again.
‘Leave me alone, Raoul.’ Her eyes were huge as she stared up at him in the dim light from the curtained window. ‘I can’t—’
‘But you can, kitten! We’re married, Leigh; you’re my wife, remember?’ His voice was teasingly mocking as he stroked a silky lock of brown hair away from her face with a gentle hand, lazily leaning forward to take her lips with his own again.
He was so sure of himself, she thought with a little dart of pain that strengthened her resolve. So sure that he could overcome her resistance as though the last five years had meant nothing! But then, they probably hadn’t to him! Had he even noticed she’d gone? She froze into stillness as he kissed her again, forcing her senses into submission and willing the warm pulsing beat of desire that was making her limbs shake to quieten. He didn’t notice her lack of response at first, and as he continued to trace a path of fire over her face and throat she knew it was only a matter of time before the heat that was bursting into life deep inside became evident again. She clenched her hands tightly by her side. She had to make him stop and this was the only way. She had to find the strength from somewhere.
Her complete lack of movement finally got through to him and he raised himself slowly, leaning on one elbow at her side to look into her wide brown eyes as he raked back the shock of curly black hair from his brow. ‘Don’t tell me I’m losing my touch?’ The dry, sardonic tone whipped a flush of colour into her cheeks and fanned the earlier flame of pain into white-hot agony.
With a bitterness that was directed at herself as well as him she stiffened into stone in an effort to hide the hurt. He really didn’t care! ‘Losing your touch?’ Her voice dripped with contempt. ‘Is that all anything means to you? An opportunity to prove you’re the greatest? That no woman is immune?’ Mercifully anger was replacing the pain now.
If she hadn’t been so angry she would have taken warning at the slow darkening of his face but right at that moment she was incapable of taking notice of anything. ‘You disgust me, Raoul, with your arrogant and all-important male ego. We’re strangers now and you know it! We’re just two people held together by a meaningless piece of paper.’
‘Like hell we are!’ He swung his legs violently over the edge of the bed as he turned from her. ‘Was that why you insisted on a church wedding because all our marriage boiled down to was an expendable bit of paper? I do not believe this, Leigh; I know you better than that. You are my wife, my wife in the eyes of God and man, and I know it and so do you.’ His accent was as brittle as glass.
‘No—’
‘Oh, yes, my little English rose.’ He stood up as she drew herself into a sitting position, locking her hands round her knees after pulling the short smock down to her feet. ‘You are mine and what is mine I keep. You should know this.’ His voice was shaking with rage and cold determination.
‘Raoul, listen to me—’
‘Why should I?’ He spun round now with a dark raging fury in his eyes that made her shrink away in fear. ‘You do not listen to me, do you? You didn’t listen five years ago and still you will not. What is it with you?’
‘What is it with me?’ The sheer arrogance acted like a shot of adrenalin and her small face was convulsed with hot resentment and burning fury. ‘How can you ask me that? You aren’t real! You just aren’t real.’
‘This is nonsense,’ he said coldly, his face hard and his eyes an icy blue. ‘If you cannot talk sense—’
‘Can’t talk sense!’ He had turned into the iceman again but for the life of her she couldn’t match his coolness. He stood gazing at her, powerfully, dangerously handsome with an insolent tilt to the ebony head and his eyes such a startling vivid blue that her breath suddenly caught in her throat as she fought for words. He was so handsome. So amazingly, painfully handsome. What had he ever seen in her anyway? ‘I may not be saying what you want to hear but it makes perfect sense, to me at any rate.’ Her voice was trembling and low and she heard it with a little throb of self-disgust. She wouldn’t let him break her, reduce her to tears again.
He swore softly as he took in the huge brown eyes in her chalk-white face, filled with a churning darkness that made him run his hand through his hair wearily, the anger draining from his face as he shook his head gently. ‘You are your own worst enemy, kitten,’ he said softly. ‘We were so good together once and you cannot deny we were happy. You can’t fight what’s between us, Leigh; your body betrays you every time I touch you. You want me to make love to you.’
For a stunned moment she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, couldn’t believe he could have the audacity to actually voice such incredible words in view of what he had done. ‘You betrayed me, Raoul.’ Her voice was flat now and totally devoid of expression. ‘In the worst possible way. In our own bed. You can’t deny that.’
‘I cannot?’ His eyes narrowed slowly and his voice was very tight, his body stiff with emotion. ‘But of course I cannot. It is all cut and dried, is it not? Like that evening five years ago when I wasn’t allowed to speak?’
‘Oh, and I suppose if you’d come back to our home and found me in bed with another man you would have sat down with us in a reasonable manner and asked politely for an explanation?’ She glared at him. ‘There was only one possible interpretation. Admit it!’
‘You weary me.’ His face had hardened further at the note of undisguised disgust in her voice.
‘I weary you?’ She was aware in the far recesses of her mind that she kept repeating his remarks like a dozy parrot, but the haughty insolence was leaving her gasping for words. ‘Well, maybe I do at that. But I’m not stupid and I won’t pretend to be. Marion had been after you for weeks and you knew it. I suppose you only held out for as long as you did because she was your best friend’s wife and they were staying with us. You betrayed him and me and for what? A little—’ She stopped abruptly and took a long deep breath, settling back into the bed and pulling the covers more closely around her. She felt suddenly cold, cold and very tired. ‘Anyway, it’s over, finished; none of it matters any more. Maybe we can be friends one day.’ She missed the lightning flash of pain in his face.
‘I do not want friendship from you,’ he said savagely. ‘I want more, much more than that or nothing at all.’
‘Then it will be nothing,’ she said slowly as she
lifted her eyes to stare straight into the arctic blue of his.
‘You think so?’ His voice was soft now and with a chilling coldness that sent a tiny shiver sparking down her spine. She knew Raoul. He was always at his most dangerous when perfectly in control like now. ‘Tell me, my Leigh, what did you imagine would happen in the future? Did you seriously expect me to remain in the background like an emasculated stallion forever?’ She shivered at the crudity.
‘I didn’t expect anything,’ she said tightly, forcing her eyes not to fall before the piercing clarity of his. ‘I didn’t expect anything and I don’t want anything. Not from you. I thought you knew that after all this time.’
‘Then this is where you are wrong,’ he said calmly as he walked easily towards the door, his big shoulders proudly straight and his head held high. ‘Quite wrong.’
‘Can’t you just leave me alone, Raoul—?’
He spun round instantly with that smooth animal reflex she remembered from the past. She could tell he was angry, blazingly angry, but the big body was held in quiet restraint and his voice was perfectly contained when he next spoke.
‘No, I will not leave you alone any more.’ It was a statement rather than a threat but it had the same effect on her as the latter. She couldn’t understand any of this. What exactly did he want of her after all these years? ‘We have things to decide and arrangements to make but I refuse to discuss it now. Not with you in this mood.’
‘This “mood” is me,’ she said sharply, ‘and nothing you could say would convince me—’
He cut off her words with a vicious stab of his hand as he waved her to silence from the doorway. ‘I have given you the time you asked for that day when you left, the chance to follow your dream of becoming an artist, the opportunity to become your own person, but that doesn’t mean that I will allow anyone else to take my place. Do you understand me?’ He glared at her across the small room, his hands arrogantly splayed on his hips and his eyes flashing cold fire. ‘If I had kept you with me you would never have been sure of what you could have achieved, never sure if your love for me was a mirage that had chained you to my side.’
She stared at him silently as she tried to take in what he was saying. This was all nonsense. She hadn’t said—
‘I have never been more than a step behind you through the years. I have known exactly what you were doing, what you were involved with, who you were seeing and when. And this Jeff Capstone, I will not tolerate that you see him. Is that clear?’
She still couldn’t speak, couldn’t formulate what she was hearing’I shall return to see you tomorrow and I will tell you then how I expect you to behave. Goodbye, Leigh.’
‘Raoul!’ As she found her tongue the front door slammed with a violence that rocked the tiny flat and as she went to leap out of bed to follow him, her cheeks scarlet with anger, she caught her bare foot in the bedclothes and fell in a sprawling heap on to the floor. By the time she reached the front door the lift’s ancient whirring mechanism informed her she was too late. He had gone.
As she slowly stepped back in the flat, shutting the door, her rage grew in tune with her sense of injustice. It was as though they had been talking about a different marriage and two different people! She ground her teeth furiously. She had left him because she had found him in bed with another woman! End of story. What was all this rubbish about time and being her own person? And he had had her followed! She paced the small flat angrily. He had actually had the audacity to have her followed!
She made herself a cup of instant coffee in order to give her shaking hands something to do, wandering out on to the small balcony as she sipped the hot liquid and looking out over the rooftops into the clear blue sky.
If he contacted her again, when he contacted her again, she was going to insist on that divorce. She closed her eyes tightly. She had to sever all links, all ties; she should have done it years ago. Why hadn’t she? She opened her eyes to gaze unseeing into the warm summer air. Because she had been hanging on to a dream against all reason. She had pushed the divorce out of her mind, not because she didn’t want to think of Raoul but because she dared not!
She brushed back the heavy fall of hair from her face and took a big gulp of coffee, letting the burning liquid trace an avenue of fire into her chest. In those heady days of marriage she had dreamt of their life together as being for always, of their babies, their grandchildren. She smiled bitterly to herself. But it had just been part of the impossible dream and she’d had to let go of it before it destroyed her. It hadn’t been real. Their life together hadn’t been real.
She leant against the wrought iron, which was already slightly warm from the heat of the summer’s day, as dark misery gripped her mind. Raoul’s wealth had cocooned them in an endless honeymoon. First a few months at his beautiful house in the Caribbean, eight weeks at his villa in Greece and then a long, slow cruise on his private yacht to the house he called home in the South of France.
It had been miraculous and magical-but it hadn’t been real. Real life was working and caring and loving and taking the rough with the smooth. It had been all smoothness. And it was finished.
As she turned to go back into the room she noticed a tiny tentacled weed in a tub of wallflowers in the corner of the balcony and suddenly its intrusion seemed symbolic of Raoul’s reappearance in her life. As she pulled it, viciously, from the black earth she nodded to herself desperately as the flood of tears she could no longer restrain burnt hot on her face. It was finished. It had to be.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a58aa715-f4bc-5c73-af6f-cf0ee355786c)
‘MRS DE CHEVNAIR?’ The young lad standing outside her door was almost buried under the huge bouquet of deep red roses he was holding. ‘Mrs Leigh de Chevnair?’
‘Yes?’ Leigh’s voice was grudging. To be woken up on a Monday morning at nine o’clock when she hadn’t slept all night and then asked to acknowledge her married status wasn’t her idea of a good start to the week.
‘I thought I’d got the address right but the card on the door says Leigh Wilson.’ The boy’s forehead was wrinkled. ‘Still, that’s your affair.’
‘Exactly.’ She wasn’t usually this snappy, she thought miserably as she reluctantly took charge of the flowers that could only be from one person as the boy left with a stiff nod. She had to get herself together! There was no card, just the picture of a small brown kitten fixed to the enormous silk bow at the base of the bouquet, its eyes enormous.
She deposited the flowers in the kitchen sink before having a shower and getting dressed, her movements mechanical and slow. The memories that had haunted her all night were just as vivid in the cold light of day and as she brushed her hair in the bathroom mirror she peered at herself critically for the first time in months.
The anxious face that stared back at her was averagely pretty, no more, she reflected miserably, the big brown eyes and thick dark hair pleasant but fairly mediocre. Her shape was inclined to plumpness, she wasn’t very tall and yet from the first moment they had met Raoul had called her beautiful.
She peered closer, trying to see what he saw, but after a few searching moments shook her head in defeat. Oh, Raoul. ‘Now none of that,’ she told herself loudly. ‘It’s over, finished! You are going to devote yourself to your work and become a great artist.’ The thought couldn’t have depressed her more and after a few minutes of claustrophobic misery she decided she had to get out and go for a walk. She needed to get her hopes and aspirations back on course and she couldn’t do it with the smell of fifty or more roses pervading her senses and weakening her resolve.
‘Running away? Again?’ The bright warm sunlight trapped neatly in the building-framed street had momentarily blinded her as she stepped out on to the pavement from the dark confines of the murky passageway leading from the lift, and as she raised startled brown eyes to Raoul’s cool sardonic face she almost groaned out loud. He had no right to look so gorgeous, no right at all. Dressed simply in figure-hugging jeans and a blue denim shirt that reflected the deep blue of his eyes, he looked…gorgeous. But he wasn’t hers. Not any more.
‘I happen to be going for a walk. if that’s all right with you, of course.’ She smiled tightly. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. My clocking-in card is in my pocket.’
‘Miaow…’ He touched her flushed cheek gently with a cool finger. ‘My little kitten is scratchy today.’ She glared at him without replying and he laughed softly. ‘I think I’ll join you; I need the exercise.’
Now she did groan out loud, and he eyed her quizzically as he fell into step beside her. ‘It’s lucky for me I do not suffer with the English insecurity,’ he said quietly. ‘You have been death to my ego from the first moment we met.’ He placed a casual arm round her shoulders and she saw two beautifully dressed career women across the road grimace with envy. She didn’t have to be able to hear what they were saying to know its content; she’d heard it so many times before. ‘What a dish! And what’s he doing with her?’
‘Do you remember?’ he continued softly in her ear as he moderated his large steps to hers. ‘In St Tropez?’
‘Of course I remember,’ she said painfully. ‘I was on a cheap package holiday with my cousin and you were on your yacht with Lord Somebody-orother.’ She eyed him morosely. ‘Very symbolic!’ He ignored the gibe with regal indifference. ‘And then you started to show off on the beach for all the women.’
‘I did not!’ Now she had his attention! ‘I merely played football with a group of friends, that is all.’ He shot her a warning glance. ‘You are not too big to fit over my knee, little kitten, understand?’ Now she ignored him. ‘And there was one girl who would not emerge from her umbrella. Buried up to her nose in her newspaper. Just a pair of round dimpled knees on view.’ He smiled slowly. ‘I fell for those knees then and there.’ The blue eyes were reflective.
‘Raoul!’ She pushed him slightly with her hand as she fought, unsuccessfully, to keep back the grin that was twisting the corners of her mouth upwards. She shouldn’t listen to this.
‘Oh, but I did.’ His eyes narrowed in remembrance. ‘And then, when I persuaded the butterfly from its chrysalis, it was to find that I was-how you say?—cradle-snatching.’
‘You were not,’ she said indignantly. ‘I was eighteen when we met and you were only twenty-five. Not exactly Methuselah by anyone’s standards!’
‘Ah, but you were a baby in the ways of love,’ he said deeply. ‘But how quickly you learnt. You will always be mine, Leigh, you know this?’ She couldn’t quite place the timbre of his voice but there was something in the hard handsome face that was quite ruthless and she shivered in spite of the heat.
‘Like your car or yacht, you mean?’ Her voice was deliberately cold. ‘Something to be used when necessary or convenient and then put into the appropriate slot or maybe even forgotten if a better model comes along.’ She looked straight up at him now. ‘Maybe another Marion?’
‘You say these things but you do not believe them,’ he said grimly as he brought her to a halt at the opening of a tiny green park with a pocket handkerchief square of lawn surrounded by a border of orderly bushes and regimented benches. ‘Marriage is forever. There has never been a divorce in my family.’
‘Is that all that matters to you? Your family’s reputation?’
He brought her angry words to a halt by the simple expedient of placing his lips on hers, bending down to take her mouth with an arrogant gesture of familiarity that had her head jerking away immediately. She ignored the response the casual action ignited in her body, veiling her eyes against him as she glared up into his face. ‘Don’t.’
‘I have decided there is only one way to deal with your stubbornness, kitten,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I have given you time to to find yourself, to become established in your work. I let this happen because I had to. Now it is time for you to come back to me.’
‘You’re crazy.’ She stared at him in amazement. ‘I’m not coming back, Raoul.’
‘This person, this Jeff, does he have something to do with your decision?’ he asked coldly as he drew her down beside him on one of the benches, his touch burning her arm.
‘My life is my own affair now,’ she said quietly as a dart of anger at his presumption turned her eyes black. ‘You don’t own me any more.’
‘I never did.’ He looked down at her quizzically. ‘I never wanted to “own” you in that way. Possess you, as you possess me, maybe, but not “own” you.’
‘We’re finished.’ She had said it! She shut her eyes for an infinitesimal moment of time, expecting another explosion, but apart from a stiffening of the big body there was no change in his manner. He sat watching her, his blue eyes reflecting the sky overhead and the faint breeze ruffling his hair. This was merely a game to him, she thought wretchedly.
‘Did you like the roses?’ he asked with cool detachment. She stared at him for a moment, nonplussed by his control.
‘They’re lovely.’ She smiled nervously. ‘You must have bought the shop out.’ What on earth did he expect her to say?
‘A rose for every month we have been apart.’ There was no expression in the smooth voice. ‘How are you going to convince me you are adamant our marriage is at an end?’ he asked in the same tone of voice. ‘I feel you still want me on a physical level but I also know that you have remained celibate since our break so I do not doubt your control of your physical desires. But nevertheless, you do want me, don’t you?’
This total change of front into cool quietness puzzled her. Yesterday he had been volatile, passionate and angry. Today, at first thoughtful and reflective-and now.? Now she wasn’t sure but she didn’t like it and she didn’t trust him an inch. She had once, implicitly, and look where it had got her!
‘I have a suggestion to make that I would like you to consider very carefully,’ he continued softly. ‘You know me, Leigh, you know I do not give in easily.’ She smiled inwardly. The understatement of the year. ‘My proposal is that you come back to live with me for three months.’ Her eyes shot up to meet his but he was ready for her, his hand already raised for silence. ‘This will not involve you doing anything you do not wish to do, either on a physical level or a social one. You understand?’ She nodded silently, her eyes enormous in the chalkwhiteness of her face. ‘If, at the end of that time, you are able to tell me coldly and dispassionately that you still want a divorce, I will make sure you get one immediately. You have my word on that.’
‘And if I can’t?’ She forced a note of mockery into her voice to hide its trembling.
‘Then you become my wife again in every sense of the word.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ She rose from the bench to look down at him, her hands clenched into fists at her side and her heart-shaped face fiery. ‘I don’t need to do this! We have been apart for five years. I can get a divorce now if I want one, with or without your consent.’
‘Maybe.’ He smiled coldly. ‘But maybe not. We would see. But that is by the by. The real issue is that I would not be satisfied.’ He stared at her proudly, his face ruthlessly arrogant. ‘I need to know you mean what you say, that you are absolutely sure; only then would I leave you alone.’
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