Yes, she thought, as the pressure ballooned inside her. I had to save Salton for you.
‘He must have been pretty important to you,’ Tom went on, his voice rich with sympathy.
‘No! He wasn’t important at all. He was no one.’
She could feel the cracks widening further. Any moment now, the pressure would burst through them, shattering her into fragments.
He was still looking at her, pity on his face.
‘I know how cut up you were over Geoffrey, and I’ve always hoped you’d find someone you could settle down with and marry and all that. I’m sorry this man wasn’t it. Look,’ he went awkwardly, ‘you really do seem to have been badly hit by it, and although I know you’re probably all set to go straight back to work, why don’t you take a few extra days off and go down to Salton for a while? Mrs T would feed you up, and—’
‘No!’ The word shot from her like a bullet. ‘I’m…I’m sorry, Tom, but I just want to be left alone. I…I can’t go down to Salton.’
She could never go to Salton again. She had saved it for Tom, for his c
hildren, for his future with his wife, but the price she had paid meant she could never go there again.
Grief filled her, a huge welling up of grief. But she knew she could never go there again. She had exiled herself from it.
She turned away. She wanted Tom to go.
If he knew—if he knew what you’ve done! If he could see what you did with Diego Saez! If he could see what you let him do to you—night after night. And you craved it. You couldn’t get enough of it. Couldn’t get enough of him…
Her brother’s voice came from very, very far away.
‘I just want to be left alone, Tom,’ she said in a thin, strained voice. ‘I just want to be left alone.’
But being alone was no comfort. It was worse, far, far worse. Alone, by day and by night, she had to face her demon. The demon that tormented her,
Guilt.
Guilt for so much.
For giving her body to save Salton.
Guilt for having craved the man who’d bought it.
And, worst of all, pincering her with red-hot tongs, guilt at craving him still…
Because that was the worst, that was the ultimate guilt—that after all he had done to her she wanted him still.
The torment of it convulsed her. To want a man who had treated her like that. Who could take her, night after night, with nothing more than lust.
Memory flooded through her. Hot and humid and shaming.
Shaming because she had responded to him, trembled at his touch, burned beneath his skilled, remorseless caresses. A man who had blackmailed her into his bed because she would not come on any other terms.
But slowly, very slowly, out of the crushing burden of the guilt that pressed down upon her, another emotion began to stir.
Crushed long since by necessity. Repressed deep inside her. Because to give vent to it would be to lose the very thing she had sold herself for. An emotion that was so dangerous she had never once, not once, allowed it to surface. But it was there, like a slow, welling pressure, in the very core of her being.
And now it began to surface.
And as it did, as it made its relentless journey to the surface, she knew with a deep, abiding certainty that she must give it voice.
Or lose her mind.
Diego Saez sat back in a leather seat in the lavish chairman’s office at Tencorp, an unreadable expression on his face. The chairman continued with his spiel, wondering whether he was catching his fish or not. With Saez you could not tell. What he did know was that if he did catch Saez for the joint venture he was proposing he would have caught himself a barracuda.