Bastiaan’s brows snapped together uncomprehendingly. Philip knew that ‘Sabine’ was this girl Sarah? That she was in some kind of opera company? Why the hell hadn’t he told him, then? He spoke that last question aloud.
‘Not surprisingly, Sarah’s being a bit cagey about having to appear as Sabine,’ came the answer. ‘It wouldn’t do her operatic reputation any good at all if it got out. This festival is make-or-break for her. For all of us,’ he finished tightly.
Bastiaan didn’t answer. Couldn’t.
She trusted Philip with the truth about herself—but she never trusted me with it!
The realisation was like a stab wound.
‘I have to see her.’
He thrust his way bodily past the pianist, storming down the narrow corridor, his head reeling, trying to make sense of it all. Memory slashed through him of how he’d sought her out that first evening he’d set eyes on her. His face tightened. Lies—all damn lies.
Her dressing room door was shut, but he pushed it open. At his entrance she turned, whipping round from where she was wrenching tissues from a box on her dressing table.
‘Get out!’ she yelled at him.
Bastiaan stopped short. Everything he had thought he’d known about her was gone. Totally gone.
She yelled at him again. ‘You heard me! Get out! Take your foul accusations and get out!’
Her voice was strident, her eyes blazing with the same vitriolic fury that had turned them emerald as she’d hurled her rage at him in her performance.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t Sabine?’ Bastiaan cut across her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that you thought me some sleazy slut who was trying it on with your precious cousin?’ she countered, still yelling at him.
His expression darkened. ‘Of course I wasn’t going to tell you that, was I? Since I was trying to separate you from him.’ A ragged breath scissored his lungs. ‘Look, Sabine...’
‘I am not Sabine!’
Sarah snatched up a hairbrush from her dressing table and hurled it at him. It bounced harmlessly off his broad chest. The chest she’d clung to in ecstasy—the chest she now wanted to hammer with her fists in pure, boiling rage for what he’d said to her, what he’d thought of her...
What he’d done to her...
He took me to bed and made love to me, took me to paradise, and all along it was just a ghastly, horrible plot to blacken me in Philip’s eyes.
Misery and rage boiled together in the maelstrom of her mind.
‘I didn’t know you weren’t Sabine. Do not blame me for that,’ Bastiaan retaliated, slashing a hand through empty air. He tried again, attempting to use her real name now. ‘Look... Sarah...’
‘Don’t you dare speak my name. You know nothing about me!’
His expression changed. Oh, but there was something he knew about her. From the shredded remnants of his mind, the brainstorm consuming him, he dragged it forth. Forced it across his synapses.
She might be Sabine, she might be Sarah—it didn’t matter—
‘Except, of course,’ he said freezingly, each word ice as he spoke it, ‘about the money. Philip’s money.’
She stilled. ‘Money?’ She echoed the word as if it were in an alien tongue.
He gave a rough laugh. Opera singer or nightclub singer—why should it be different? His mouth twisted. Why should ‘Sarah’ be any more scrupulous than ‘Sabine’?
‘You took,’ he said, letting each word cut like a knife, ‘twenty thousand euros from my cousin’s personal account. I know you did because this afternoon you paid another cheque into the very same bank account that the twenty thousand euros disappeared into.’
Her expression was changing even as he spoke, but he wouldn’t let her say anything—anything at all.
‘And this very evening, after you’d oh-so-conveniently cut and run from my villa, I got a request to release two hundred thousand euros from my cousin’s investment funds.’ His eyes glittered with accusation. ‘Did you not realise that as Philip’s trustee I see everything of his finances—that he needs my approval to cash that kind of money? Running back to him with whatever sob story you’re concocting will be in vain. Is that why you left my bed this afternoon?’