‘That’s my private number. I’ll be staying at my penthouse apartment. I’ll give you till tomorrow morning, Kat. If I don’t hear from you I will find someone else and you will never hear from me again.’
She looked at him and marvelled that she’d once believed that he loved her because he’d asked her to marry him. Because she’d always had a romantic notion that that was what people did when they loved someone, in spite of being brought up as the only child of a single parent with no clue as to her father’s whereabouts.
But Zafir’s motives had been so much more strategic than that. She’d been scrutinised and deemed suitable. Perfect. And now he was asking her to step back into a world that had chewed her up and spat her out. Not only that, he was asking her to lay herself bare to him again, to let him carve out the last remaining part of her heart that still functioned and let him crush it until there was nothing left.
Kat was stronger now than she’d ever been, considering the trials she’d faced in the past eighteen months, but she was still only human and she wasn’t strong enough for this. No matter how much money he was offering.
Without taking her eyes off Zafir’s, as if some small, treacherous part of her wanted to commit them to her memory, she held up the card and ripped it in half, letting the pieces fall to the floor.
‘Goodbye, Zafir.’
His eyes flashed and his jaw clenched. Kat could feel the waves of energy flowing like electricity between them, but after a tense moment he just stepped back and said, ‘As you wish. Goodbye, Kat.’
But to Kat’s dismay, when Zafir finally turned and walked out, picking up his overcoat as he did so, and when the door had shut behind him, the last thing she felt was triumph.
She found her feet moving towards the door instinctively, as if to rush after him and beg him not to go. She stopped in her tracks, shocked at the profound sense of loss that pervaded her whole body, and she wrapped her arms around herself as if that could hold back all the turmoil she was feeling.
Zafir had devastated her once before. She couldn’t let it happen again.
So she stayed resolutely where she was, and after she’d heard the sound of his vehicles leaving from outside the apartment she breathed in shakily and sank down onto the couch behind her.
She looked around her, as if seeing the space for the first time again. She’d grown used to the bare furnishings and the sparse décor. It was all she’d been able to afford after the accident and her lengthy rehabilitation, even though the largest part of her debt had finally been gone.
And the reason it had been gone was because once those pictures of Kat had gone public, her blackmailer—the photographer who had taken them in the first place—had had no further means with which to blackmail her. After all, everything he’d always threatened her with had come true—her career had imploded in spectacular style.
Perversely, Kat had been grateful to whoever had found and leaked the pictures, because they had freed her from a malignant threat she’d had no idea how to deal with.
On numerous occasions she’d wanted to confide in Zafir, but then she’d feel too intimidated, or too scared of his reaction. How could a man like him, who had grown up in such a rarefied world, possibly understand why she would do such a thing? The thought of revealing all that ugly poison had pulled her back from the brink each time.
And in the end hadn’t she been vindicated? She’d never forget the look of disgust and horror on his face as he’d confronted her with her past.
Kat stood up again, restless, as Zafir’s visit sank in properly. She told herself that it was his arrogance that still left her breathless, but really it was the knowledge that he still wanted her, and the even more shattering knowledge that she still wanted him. The core of her body felt hot and achy, and her blood felt thick and heavy in her veins.
Damn him.
She paced back and forth, and as she did so her eye snagged on something in the corner of the room and she stopped. Zafir hadn’t noticed them. Crutches and a folded-up wheelchair. She hadn’t needed the wheelchair for some time now, but she would never not need one to hand. And she’d always need the crutches.
To Kat’s shame, she knew that this was as much of a reason as any other as to why she’d all but pushed Zafir out through the door. Because she couldn’t bear for him to know what had happened to her. Because she couldn’t bear to think about the fact that, even if she was to ever be with Zafir again, he would not want to be with her.
Because she was irrevocably altered.
Kat picked up the crutches and went into her tiny bedroom. She took off her sneakers, undid her jeans and pulled them off, then stood in front of her mirror, inspecting herself critically.
At first glance Zafir might not notice anything different about Kat—after all she stood on two legs, and was the same height she’d always been, with the same straight back. But then she imagined his gaze travelling down and stopping on her left leg. Specifically on the prosthetic limb that now made up her lower left leg, with its mechanical ankle and fake foot.
Even now Kat couldn’t recall anything about the accident itself on that fateful night. She only knew that one minute she’d been crossing the street and the next she’d been waking up, a day later, in a hospital, with a doctor informing her that they’d had to amputate below the knee to save her leg—which was kind of ironic, considering half of it was now gone.
She’d had flashbacks however, since then, of regaining consciousness and realising that her foot was trapped under the heaviest weight. People had crowded around her but she hadn’t been able to move or speak. And then she’d slipped back into darkness.
That was why she got claustrophobic now.
Sometimes people gave her a second glance, but they soon dismissed her when they saw her slightly limping gait and figured this woman with darker hair and no make-up couldn’t possibly be the Kat Winters.
A ball of emotion lodged itself in Kat’s chest, and before she could stop them hot tears blurred her vision. But she dashed them away angrily as she sat down on her bed and set about removing her prosthetic limb with an efficiency born of habit.
It had been a long time since she’d indulged in self-pity. That had been in the dark early days, when she’d fallen down in many graceless heaps while trying to get to the bathroom during the night, when she’d hurled her crutches across the room in a rising tide of fury at the hand she’d been dealt. Or when she’d locked herself away for long days, sunk in such a black depression that she’d thought she might never emerge into daylight again.
It was her oldest friend, Julie, who was also her agent, who had finally saved her. And the local rehabilitation centre. It was there that she’d learnt how to deal with her new reality and had been able to start putting things into perspective after meeting a man who had lost both his legs in a war, and a woman who had lost an arm, and an endlessly cheerful little girl who’d lost her limbs after meningitis... They, and many more, had humbled her, and reminded her that she was one of the luckier ones.