A single word. But in it was a wealth of meaning. More than ten years’ worth of meaning.
He set the phone down again and crossed to the window. He looked out across the lake to the cold snow-topped mountains beyond. The same snow seemed to be around his heart, inside his lungs. Memories from long ago pierced him—and a single word in his own mother tongue. A single name.
Nemesis.
Over ten years it had taken, and it had turned him from a carefree young stripling, full of eagerness for life and all that it could offer, to what he was now—to what he had become. An agent of the dark, unforgiving goddess of vengeance. Nemesis.
Justice, he tried to tell himself. Justice was more noble than vengeance.
He turned away, walked back to his desk, and threw himself into his chair, pressing his hands over the arms, his face set in steel.
Remembering.
Remembering what Grantham had done to his family had always been a kind of absolution for whatever sins Luke had committed in his pursuit of the man and his ill-gotten riches. But now, as his dark and troubled thoughts finally sank from his consciousness, another thought came.
His expression changed.
She needs to know.
He took a sharp, incising breath.
And I need to know, too.
To know why Talia had not stayed on in the villa when she’d begged him for it. Why she had refused the rubies he’d sent her to wait on tables instead.
His mouth tightened to a thin line.
And why I thought she hadn’t a shred of talent or professionalism when what she produced is blazing with it!
But there was one question above all that he had to have the answer to?
?whatever it took to find it.
Why did she leave me?
CHAPTER TEN
TALIA WAS MOPPING the café floor, chairs piled on the tables, before finally closing up for the night. Pepe had left, her mother had long gone to bed, and Talia was yawning, too, tired as ever from the long working day.
Her glance went to the café’s large windows. A car had drawn up outside—a long, low, luxurious black car. A car that suddenly, urgently, caused her to abandon her mop and dash over to shut and bolt the café door.
Too late.
He was getting out of the car and striding across the pavement to her as she fumbled with the locks and bolts. He effortlessly pushed the door open before she could get there. Stepped inside.
‘I need to talk to you.’
Luke’s voice was terse, his face grim. He’d known she was at this café, but to see her with a mop and bucket, swabbing the floor, had been a shock for all that.
She backed away—an instinctive, automatic movement. Shock was crashing through her—and so much more than shock.
‘Go away! Leave me alone!’
Talia’s voice was high-pitched and she stepped back from him, clutching at a table as if for support. Her legs were suddenly weak, the blood was drumming in her veins, and faintness was dimming her vision.
I can’t bear for Luke to see me here. I can’t bear to see him at all.
He was speaking again, stepping forward.