‘Can he pull out?’ Her voice was sharper than she intended.
Tom shook his head.
‘He’s got no reason to. He’s already gone through the bank’s books with a fine-tooth comb, and there’s no more bad news to come—he’s got the lot! So why would he pull out?’
Why indeed? thought Portia, with a hollowing of her stomach.
She walked across to the window, her stomach roiling. Outside the long library windows the lawns stretched for ever, it seemed to her. And a path stretched before her. Dark, and paved with sharpest glass. It was the path she would have to walk.
She had no choice. None.
Behind her, Tom was speaking. She strained to hear his voice.
‘I know this has come as a shock, sis, and I’m really, really sorry. But thank God it’s all worked out all right! I was just about suicidal…’
His voice trailed off.
Guilt crushed her. She had been distraught at the thought of losing Salton—but for Tom, for her brother, the guilt would have been a hundred times worse! Guilt at having failed to guard his inheritance, which he had been handed on trust for his son, as Salton had been passed, father to son, for nearly half a millennium.
She stared out over the grounds. In every life, she knew, there was a test—an ordeal to be endured.
This was to be hers. The ordeal of knowing that she had no choice. She could not, could not, give Diego Saez any reason to pull out from saving her brother. He had made it totally, utterly clear what he wanted. The price he was exacting.
And she would have to pay it.
Her eyes gazed over the sunlit gardens. For her brother’s sake she would pay the price that Diego Saez demanded of her.
Whatever it cost her.
A terrible urge to laugh hysterically almost overcame her. She fought it back. From now on she must do everything to suppress her emotions. She must allow herself none.
Because the price she was going to pay to protect Salton was far more costly than even Diego Saez intended her.
For him, taking her to bed was simply a matter of appetite, a passing, easily sated desire. She had defied him, refused him—scorned him. So he had found a way to change her mind. By offering her brother his only chance to save Salton.
He knew she could not refuse. Knew that finally she would now come to him—give him what he wanted. Her body.
He thought he was breaking her pride, her self-respect, but she knew with a terrible sense of foreknowledge that he was going to break something far, far more precious to her. Something that she had known all along would be in the gravest danger if she succumbed to what he wanted from her—a brief, fleeting, meaningless affair. That would be all it was for him. But for her—
She shut her eyes in anguish. Now that she knew she could not escape him, she also knew that she could no longer deny why she had run from him.
Diego Saez was going to take her to his bed—and break her heart into the bargain.
‘Mr Saez’s suite, please.’
‘Certainly, madam. Whom may I say is calling?’
The voice of the hotel clerk was polite, but Portia knew he would insist on a name.
‘Portia Lanchester.’
Her own voice was rock-steady. She would allow no tremor in it. None.
She had driven up to London that afternoon, grateful that Tom had told her that as he was at Salton he would stay a while, now that his fears for the bank, for Salton, were put at rest.
‘One moment, madam.’
The line went quiet for a few seconds. Then the clerk spoke again. ‘Just putting you through now, Ms Lanchester.’