He seemed to be echoing everything she said—echoing it as if each word weighed a ton.
‘Of course I’m sorry! That debt to him ate into the value of the house hideously.’
‘Yes, it did.’ He paused, and she felt the world still for a moment. Then he spoke again. His voice sounded distant, remote. ‘One might wonder,’ he said, ‘just why your father should have set such a rate of interest in the first place. Considering the loan was to his mother-in-law.’
‘He didn’t care for her,’ said Flavia.
‘So one might surmise, from the terms and conditions of the loan,’ Leon commented. ‘Had she done something to injure him that he set such terms?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘But there was no love lost between them.’
‘Evidently.’ Leon’s voice was dryer than the Sahara. ‘And yet one might think it reasonable to suppose—’ his voice was deadpan now ‘—that once his own daughter had inherited Harford that ruinous debt would be instantly lifted. Why would he want his own daughter to owe him money like that? What father would want that? What devoted, loving father? Because he is devoted to you, Flavia—he’s told me so himself! Several times! So devoted, he assured me, it was his money that kept Harford afloat!’
She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His eyes were like weights on her, crushing her into the ground.
‘Except that it didn’t, did it? In fact it almost sank like a stone. That debt was hanging round your neck like a lead weight! The house you’d inherited after the death of your grandmother—who died, Flavia, forty-eight hours after you left Palma, whose funeral was the day I confronted you at Harford after what your father had told me—’
His voice was no longer dry. It was no longer expressionless. It was filled with a black, murderous rage.
‘You,’ he bit out, ‘are now going to tell me the truth! Finally and comprehensively. And you are not going to escape this—do you understand me? Because I have been through months of hell trying to find you, and I will not go through one more hour! Not one!’
She was staring wide-eyed, stricken. ‘Leon, please …’ Her voice was strained, low-pitched. ‘I’ve done what I can to make amends—it’s all I can do. I did what I did and I can’t undo it. I know it was unforgivable, and I hate myself for it, but giving you Harford seemed to me the only thing I could do! It was because of Harford that I did what I did, and handing it over to you seemed the only way to try and show you just how sorry I am that I behaved as I did! It was shameful and despicable and dishonest, and you didn’t deserve it!’
He was looking at her. ‘And you did—you did deserve it? Is that what you’re telling me?’
There was something in his voice that told her he was keeping himself on a very tight leash. Then he shook his head, giving a short, rasping sound in his throat.
‘God Almighty, Flavia—why didn’t you just tell me?’ The question burst from him, tearing into his throat.
She could only go on staring, open mouthed. ‘Tell you what?’
He swore—she couldn’t understand the words, only hear the angry emotion.
‘Tell me just why you got back in touch with me after you’d left London! Tell me how your father was threatening to foreclose on you and sending over an estate agent to scare you! Tell me—’ his voice shook ‘—that you’d been nursing your grandmother, and how frail she was, and how you got called back from Palma because she was near death! That’s what you didn’t tell me—and I don’t know why the hell you didn’t!’
He took a sharp, biting breath. ‘And I don’t know why in hell you thought you had to gift me your home because you felt you owed it to me!’
She forced herself to her feet, forced her mouth to open. Forced herself to tell him. Spell it out for him.
‘Leon, I deliberately and calculatingly started an affair with you because I wanted to save Harford. Nothing can make that not true! Why I had to save Harford doesn’t matter! How can it? I used … sex—’ she stumbled over the word but made herself say it anyway ‘—to stop my father foreclosing on that nightmare loan he’d made to my grandmother, which he was using to make me do what he wanted: use sex to keep you sweet, just as you accused me of doing! He wanted the rescue package from you. He didn’t want anything jeopardising it—so if you wanted me in your bed, my God, he’d see to it that it happened!’
Her face worked but she made herself go on. Forced herself.
‘I told myself I didn’t have a choice! That I had to do what he wanted because I knew how devastated and distressed my grandmother would be, in her frail mental condition, if she had to leave Harford. So I got back in touch with you and let you take me out on dates—let you … let you take me to bed! And I knew it was wrong—knew my father was pimping me out to you—but I went along with it! I used sex to get what I wanted!’ Her voice rasped bitterly. ‘And to think I used to despise Anita for doin
g that—I was doing exactly the same thing!’
He was looking at her strangely. ‘That’s what you think, is it? That you’re as bad as Anita?’
‘Yes! How could I be any different from her?’
‘How about,’ he said tautly, ‘because your motivations were somewhat different from hers? You wanted to save your home and you didn’t want your grandmother to lose hers! The home your own father had saddled with iniquitous debt just so that he could blackmail you into doing what he wanted!’
He stopped, his eyes resting on her. Implacable. Drilling into her. Giving her nowhere to hide.
‘And there’s another difference between you, isn’t there? Isn’t there, Flavia? Don’t try and deny it to me! Don’t try and pretend to me that what we had together from that first night, our whole time on Santera, was only because you wanted to save your home!’
She closed her eyes in anguish, unable to bear that merciless gaze drilling into her.