The way that one black eyebrow drifted upwards, questioning her declaration, made her stumble over her words.
‘So—so I wanted it to go on a bit longer towards the end—what was wrong with that?’
Crazy with love for him, she had ignored his declaration that it was only a holiday fling. She’d teased him and tried to seduce him into agreeing that she could stay. That they could stay together. Maybe even make a commitment. She hadn’t been prepared for the dark storm cloud that had settled over his face; the way he had shaken off her hands.
‘At the time, I thought I wanted it,’ she flung at him. ‘That didn’t last long.’
Something dark slid across his face, throwing shadows into those golden eyes.
She’d more than ‘wanted it to go on a bit longer’, Raoul recalled. She’d been pushing to keep the relationship going when she went back to Ireland. She’d even tried to get him to ask her to stay in Corsica, to move in together. This relationship could really be going somewhere, she’d said.
For a brief time, he’d fallen for it. It was only when Rosalie, the daughter of family friends—and for a brief time a teenage fling—had seen that he was actually considering going along with what Imogen wanted that things had changed. She’d admitted that she’d let it drop that Raoul was not just the farmer he’d made himself out to be. Imogen’s sudden change of position had come about, Rosalie had said, because she had discovered the wealth that was the reality behind the ‘simple farmer’ pretence. Imogen had known exactly who he was and obviously that was why she was suddenly not going to be content with the two-week time limit on their holiday affair.
That was when he’d realised he’d been taken for a fool once again. That, like other gold-diggers before her, Imogen wanted the man she’d found out he was, not the story he’d told her to act as a protective shield.
That had burned so badly that he hadn’t even been able to see straight. Because he’d felt something different for her. He’d wanted—hoped—that she would be someone who wanted him and him alone. Not the fortune he’d hidden from her.
‘I didn’t know you were protecting yourself that way,’ Rosalie had admitted. ‘I really thought she already knew…’
Imogen knew now. Raoul could mark the change in her from the moment his friend had let slip the truth. The girl he had thought was quiet, shy, innocent, so unlike the women who threw themselves at him with an eagerness that did nothing to conceal the gleam of greed, the euro signs in their eyes, was nothing of the sort. It had burned like acid to realise that she had only been that way as a carefully calculated approach. Once she had learned the truth from Rosalie, she had set herself to entice him in a way that was such a change around from her original behaviour that it was like a harsh slap in the face.
‘And I certainly wasn’t prepared to lie to Adnan. Not now. When he’d promised me so much, surely he deserved to know the truth.’
Only when he had appeared so unexpectedly, Raoul reminded himself. When he had discovered his fiancée in another man’s room, another man’s arms. Acid curdled in his belly at the thought she had only felt obliged to reveal the truth to her groom-to-be when circumstances had forced her into it. She had obviously not told him the full story, though. The acid ate into him more violently at the thought that, if Imogen had never admitted that they had been lovers until now, then there was no way that the other man could know about the baby.
His baby. The one she had aborted without a second thought.
Suddenly, he couldn’t bear to be so close to her. The scent of her skin that he had previously found so enticing now made bile rise into his throat. The bottle of wine sent out a tempting message, offering a promise of the obliteration he had enjoyed when he had first learned what Imogen had done, but he forced himself to turn away, pacing across the worn carpet to stare out of the window into the darkness of the night.
Above the wide expanse of countryside, and the paddocks where beautiful thoroughbred horses grazed during the day, the stars glittered against the black velvet of the sky. His grandmother had once told him that the stars were the souls of tiny babies who had left the world too soon, waiting for their parents to join them. Was his son or daughter there, looking down at him and the mother who hadn’t wanted their child?