The cottage was down a dead-end lane, leading only to a gate to the fields at the far end. No traffic passed by. So who was it? She was expecting no visitors...
She twisted round to look at the path leading around the side of the cottage to the lane beyond. There was a sudden dizziness in her head...a swirl of vertigo.
Had she turned too fast? Or was it that she had not woken at all, was still dreaming?
Because someone was walking towards her—striding towards her. Someone tall and strong, outlined against the cloudless sky. Someone who could not be here—someone she’d thought she would never see again.
But he was in her vision now—searing her retinas, the synapses of her stunned and disbelieving brain. She lurched to her feet and the vertigo hit again.
Or was it shock?
Or waking from the dream?
Or
still being within the dream?
She swayed and Marc was there in an instant, steadying her. Then his hands dropped away.
Memory stabbed at her—how he’d made the same gesture in that nightmare encounter at the hotel, dropping his hands from her as if he could not bear to touch her. She clutched at the back of her chair, staring at him, hearing her heart pounding in her veins, feeling disbelief still in her head. And emotion—unbearable emotion—leaping in her heart.
She crushed it down. Whatever he was here for he would tell her and then he would leave.
For one unbearable moment dread knifed in her.
Does he know?
Oh, dear God, she prayed, please do not let him know! That would be the worst thing of all—the very worst! Because if he did...
She sheared her mind away, forced herself to speak. Heard words fall from her, uncomprehending. ‘What...what are you doing here?’
He was standing there and she could see tension in every line of his body. His face was carved as if from tempered steel. As closed as she had ever seen it.
Yet something was different about him—something she had never seen before. Something in the veiling of his eyes that had never been there before.
‘I have something to give you,’ he said.
His voice was remote. Dispassionate. But, as with the look on his face, she had never heard his voice sound like that.
She stared, confused. ‘Wh-what?’ she got out.
‘This,’ he said.
His hand was slipping inside his jacket pocket. He was wearing yet another of his killer suits, she registered abstractedly through the shattering of her mind. Registered, too, the quickening of her pulse, the weakening of her limbs that she always felt with him. Felt the power he had to make her feel like that... Felt the longing that went with it.
Longing she must not let herself feel. No matter that he was standing here, so real, so close...
He was drawing something out from his inner pocket and she caught the silken gleam of the grey lining, the brief flash of the gold fountain pen in the pocket. Then her eyes were only on what he was holding out to her. What she recognised only too well—the slim, elegant jewel case she had returned to him that dreadful day in London that had killed all the last remnants of her hope that he might ever want her again...
She shook her head. Automatically negating.
‘Marc—I told you. I can’t take it. I know...’ She swallowed. ‘I know you...you mean well...but you must see that I can’t accept it!’
Consternation was filling her. Why was he here? To insist she take those emeralds? She stared at him. His face was still as shuttered as ever, his eyes veiled, unreadable. But a nerve was ticking just below his cheekbone and there were deep lines around his mouth, as though his jaw were steel, filled with tension.
She didn’t understand it. All she understood—all that was searing through her like red-hot lava in her veins—was that seeing him again was agony... An agony that had leapt out of the deepest recesses of her being, escaping like a deranged monster to devour her whole.
Through the physical pain rocking her, from holding leashed every muscle in her body, as if she could hold in the anguish blinding her, she heard him speak.