Alexa swayed. Pain bit like a wolf, tearing at her throat. She made her mouth work. Forced it to work.
‘I’m…glad. I’m very glad for her.’
‘So am I,’ said Guy. His eyes were still holding hers. ‘She is deeply in love with her new husband.’
The wolf was tearing now, biting out her throat. ‘I’m…I’m very glad for her,’ she said again.
I must be glad. I must! She deserves that—every bride deserves that!
And every bride deserved a husband who loved her. Her expression changed, emotion rising in her throat, making her take a half-step towards him.
‘Guy—’ she spoke impulsively ‘—be…be kind to her! Don’t do to her what you were planning on doing. Not with anyone. Please don’t. If she’s in love with you, don’t hurt her—don’t hurt her the way you hurt—’
She broke off. He was looking at her strangely, through that veiled mask.
‘Did I, Alexa?’ His words were slowly spoken. ‘Did I hurt you?’ There was something strained in his words. Did he feel bad that he h
ad hurt her? she wondered.
She pressed her lips. Tried to look away, but could not. Yet she could not meet his eyes either. Then she spoke—admitting all, her voice drear, her words heavy.
‘You didn’t mean to, Guy. I know that. I know that the affair we had was…what it was. You were not responsible for my reaction to it. I chose to go along with it, with the affair, and the responsibility for my reaction is mine and mine alone. I should never, that night after the charity gala, have let you…let you…’
She swallowed, unable to finish. Then, with a shuddering breath, forced herself onwards. ‘You have never been responsible for my feelings. And even if I deplored what you proposed—some adulterous, clandestine liaison—then that still does not make you responsible for what it did to me.’ Her hands clenched at her sides. ‘When you hunted me down, turned up at the cottage assuming I would come back to you simply because you wanted me to, I was glad you saw that second portrait. It spoke for me. Said everything!’
His eyes were pressing in on her, but they had changed. She could not tell how, or why, but they had all the same. She shut her eyes to shield herself from what was in his that she could not bear to see, then opened them again.
‘What you wanted of me I no longer wished to give,’ she said. Her words fell like stones. ‘Even without the adulterous offer I would not have wanted it.’ Her face worked. ‘Flying here in your private jet reminded me all over again. How I’d been flown to you when you wanted me, and then flown home again. How you’d arrive when it suited you, and then leave again. I didn’t want that.’
His expression tightened. ‘You knew the limitations I was under from the start,’ he said.
‘I knew what they meant about what I’d thought I’d had with you.’ She lifted her chin. ‘It took me a long time, Guy, to face up to that. It wasn’t until you made your…proposition…to me that I made myself see it. It showed me what I’d been to you all along—’
‘What I’d been to you?’ he echoed, cutting across her like a blade falling. He moved suddenly, abruptly, coming around the corner of the desk to face her.
He was too close, much too close, but she was too frozen to move.
‘Do you know what you were to me, Alexa? Do you?’ His voice was animated, urgent suddenly. ‘You don’t seem to know at all! I thought you did—but then—’ his face twisted again ‘—I thought a lot I no longer think…’ He spoke again, his eyes flashing now, green fire burning in his face. ‘Look about you,’ he ordered. His hand gestured, encompassing the high-tech equipment along one side of the room, the wide mahogany desk behind him, the lavish decor of the room, the vast domain of the château beyond the sweeping windows. ‘What do you see?’
His eyes burnt greener. ‘You see wealth, don’t you? A château on the Loire. Stuffed with treasures. With art that could populate a museum. And this is only one of the de Rochemont properties! There are dozens of others—more!—all over the world. And you know what keeps them all? Keeps all the scores of de Rochemonts and Lorenzes living in the lap of luxury? Money—money that my family have been making for over two hundred years. Two centuries of accumulation, of wheeling and dealing and loaning and banking, to anyone and everyone. We’re a byword for survival—we’ve survived everything! Because we guard everything we’ve got. No matter what history has thrown at us. Wars and revolutions and confiscations and proscriptions and competition and governments and commercial rivals. Every damn thing!’
He took a scissoring breath. ‘But there’s a price to be paid. Oh, it’s a trivial one compared to the price that the mass of humanity has to pay for their survival, but it’s a price all the same.’ He looked at her, his expression bare. ‘I pay in time, Alexa. Time. It’s time that’s my luxury—nothing else.’ He glanced around at his palatial surroundings. ‘Yes, mock if you will, but that is the truth to me. It is time that is my greatest treasure. And something more, as well.’
He took another breath. ‘Do you know how many people there are in my life, Alexa? In my family?’ He gave a short, abbreviated laugh. ‘Too many. Too many. And they all want something of me. Namely: time. Business time and private time. I am deluged with relatives—deluged. And they all want my time. All of them.’
His expression changed again. ‘Which is why my time with you—my brief, fleeting time with you—was so very precious.’
He shut his eyes a moment, then opened them again, and in them was something that made Alexa’s breath catch.
‘You were my haven, my respite. My repose. When I came to you, or you came to me, I could escape everything about my family, and just be with you. Only with you, Alexa. No demands on me. Only the two of us, together—the world shut away from us. All that I wanted. You with me. I thought…’ His voice stumbled a fraction, then he went on. ‘I thought it was what you wanted too. Just to be with me. It worked so well—so easily. It just seemed to happen. Without effort or difficulty. As natural as if it was ordained.
‘Then I realised what you were—something I’d never found before in all my life. A woman who was not setting her cap at me, a woman who was actually indifferent to me, who didn’t care whether I commissioned her or not, who paid me no attention other than to study me for her work, for whom I held no fascination other than deciding how to capture my likeness, who didn’t even notice…’ his voice became drier than ever ‘…that I desired her. And then—ah, then, Alexa—I knew what I wanted.’ He paused.
‘You. I wanted you. Just you. And you were everything that I wanted—in bed and out of it. In bed… Well, how could any man want more? Out of it… Ah, out of it you were peace and comfort, ease and quiet companionship. And I thought—’
There was a break in his voice now, an uncertainty that made Alexa’s throat tighten. But not with the tearing of the wolf, with something quite different that she didn’t dare think about. She dared not do anything other than stand and hear him speak to her.
‘I thought that it was the same for you. That you understood what it was you gave to me that was so precious, and I hoped so much that I gave to you in return. That you understood why I wanted you—and that you understood…’ his voice now had an edge in it, an edge that was a blade turned not against her but against himself ‘…why I had to end our relationship.’