His voice was so low she could scarcely hear it. She shut her eyes. They were hot suddenly, and burning, and she could not bear that either.
‘What does it matter, Luke?’
The weariness was in her bones. To know that Luke had been as much
a victim of her father as she had been, that he had wreaked havoc on his parents’ lives as he had on so many other lives, could make no difference.
‘What does it matter?’ she said again. ‘Any more than it matters why I walked out of the gilded cage you offered me in the Caribbean!’
Her hands convulsed in her lap.
‘I thought I had been given a second chance out there on the island with you. I knew that wherever my father was he would not be coming back—and that meant my mother and I were penniless. But it also meant that I could take my chance of finding happiness.’ Her voice was sad as she stared down at her hands. ‘Discovering what you thought of me ripped that stupid illusion from me.’
She made herself look at him. Forced herself. It hurt to do so, and not just because of the pain that she was fighting to ignore pricking behind her eyes. It hurt to see the planes of his face, the hard edge of his jaw, the deep darkness of his eyes that had no expression in them at all as he met her gaze.
Something cried out inside her, but she tamped it down. ‘I’m sorry, Luke,’ she said, her voice still heavy. ‘I’m sorry that I am the daughter of the man who did so much harm to you. I’m sorry I abandoned you that first morning after the party. I’m sorry I don’t want to be your mistress. I’m sorry—’
She broke off. His hand had shot out and crushed down on hers, silencing her. Greek broke from him again, vehement and urgent.
‘Thee mou, do you think I wanted you to be a pampered princess who expected a life of luxury? Corrupted by your father’s wealth so that you’d crave it in any man you might choose to replace him with?’ He took a ragged, scissored breath. ‘Don’t you know what I want? What I have wanted from the moment I set eyes on you?’
He closed his other hand around hers, lifting it to his cheek. His fingers were warm around hers but her hand lay still, as if paralysed. The same paralysis held her motionless, stilling the breath in her lungs, the set of her gaze on his face.
‘I knew I shouldn’t want you—not after you walked out on me that morning. Not after you revealed yourself as the daughter of my enemy. Not after you begged me to let you keep the villa in Marbella that I thought you felt entitled to. Not after I succumbed to the temptation to take you to the Caribbean, telling myself it was to make you work and earn the right to stay on in the villa.’
His voice grew heavy now—with self-condemnation.
‘Not even when I told myself, as you lay in my arms, that I should make allowances for you being a hot-house creature who could not survive without luxury and someone to look after you all the time. I knew I shouldn’t want a woman like that.’
He halted, and Talia felt his strong fingers spasm suddenly over her limp hand.
‘But I did,’ he said. ‘God help me, I did.’
Abruptly he let her hand drop, turned away again. The cramped confines of the car were claustrophobic suddenly. On an impulse he could not control he threw open the door and vaulted out. He stood in the mild night air, with the moon sailing serenely overhead, the chorus of cicadas in the vegetation all around raucously audible. For him there was only the hectic beating of his heart. Like blows against his chest.
Grimness possessed him.
He had got her wrong. So, so wrong.
He heard her get out of the car as well and take a few steps over the gravel to stand beside him. He tensed at her approach. Heard her speak.
‘And I knew,’ she said, with strain in her voice, ‘that I should not want a man who thought so ill of me...’ She paused. ‘But I did.’ She paused again. ‘I do.’
For the space of a heartbeat he did not move. Then slowly, infinitely slowly, he turned towards her.
‘It cost me so much to leave you that first morning, Luke—after the party. But I had to do it for my mother’s sake. And it cost me even more to leave you when I did on the island. But I had to do that for my sake. Because if I’d stayed it would have destroyed me—day by day, night by night. Knowing what you thought of me...what you believed me to be. What I would have become. A woman in love with a man who despised her.’
She made to turn away, but Luke stopped her with a hand on her arm.
‘What did you say?’
He stepped towards her, and as Talia stared up at him she saw his expression change in the moonlight.
‘You said,’ he told her, and now there was something in his voice that went with the expression on his face, ‘that you would have been “a woman in love”?’
Tears, hot and anguished, pricked her eyes now, breaking away from the control she’d pressed them back with.
‘I shouldn’t have said that, Luke. We have nothing else to say to each other now.’