Silence, as he stared at her with a slow dawning understanding that took the light of passion out of his eyes, to be replaced with a look of hard, cynical appreciation when he realised just how cleverly she had been manipulating him all evening. ‘You truly are the most cruel and calculating bitch of my acquaintance,’ he then said, quite casually.
Her chin came up, defiance masking the sudden twinge of remorse she experienced inside. ‘I can’t ever forgive you, Guy,’ she told him flatly. ‘And although I also can’t deny that you—you can make me want you physically, I’ll never let you touch my heart again.’
‘When did you ever?’ he drawled, and turned away from her, but not before she’d glimpsed the look of bitterness in his eyes. ‘Go.’ He waved a careless hand towards the sitting-room door. ‘Go to your cold and lonely bed, Marnie,’ he invited. ‘Take your high-minded principles and your unforgiving heart with you, since they seem to be the kind of bed partners you prefer. But remember this,’ he added as he turned back to face her grimly. ‘We have made a bargain tonight. And I expect you to stick to your side of it as fully as I intend to stick to mine. The day we become man and wife again, Marnie,’ he ordained, ‘will also be the day you will accept me back into your bed, and I will expect both the principles and the unforgiving heart to step aside for me.’
‘Then you expect too much,’ she said, forcing herself to move towards the sitting-room door.
‘And why do I?’ he posed sil
kily. ‘I always believed, Marnie, that one first had to care to hurt as badly as you profess to do.’
‘I cared,’ she said, spinning back to face him. ‘Or why else did I marry you?’
His smile was both mocking and self-derisive. ‘I thought we both knew the answer to that, my dear. Because I gave you no damned choice.’
CHAPTER FIVE
NO CHOICE. Well, of everything he’d said tonight, Guy had been most right about that. If she had been given any choice at all, she would never have let him talk her into marrying him.
Bullied, Marnie corrected, and smiled bleakly into the dark silence which shrouded her in her bed. From the first moment he had ever set eyes on her Guy had pursued, seduced and bullied her until eventually she had wilted under the strain of it all and finally let him marry her.
Sighing, she turned on to her side to gaze sleeplessly out on to the clear navy blue sky beyond her bedroom window.
The first time she’d seen Guy, she had fancifully believed herself to have stumbled across some noble throwback from the last century.
He reminded her of the wicked baron portrayed in so many hot romantic novels. Big, dark and dangerous, with just enough charm to make the cynicism etched into his handsome face bearable. And more than enough sex appeal to make her heart quiver with a fatal mixture of excitement and alarm.
Of course, she’d known exactly who Jamie worked for that day she had decided on the spur of the moment to make a flying visit to her brother, but she hadn’t for one moment expected actually to meet the man himself. What she knew about Guy Frabosa had been learned from newspaper and magazine articles—most of them painting a picture of a man who lived and slept with his ego. But they also presented a man who spent most of his busy life jetting around the world keeping the family empire running smoothly, and so she had driven through the tall wrought-iron gates of Oaklands expecting to see nothing more than her oil-smeared brother in his element, working on one of the many high-performance cars in Guy Frabosa’s collection which he helped maintain, then leave again, completely untouched by the personality of the man who paid her brother’s wages.
Coming upon Oaklands itself, nestling in its own small private valley, had been an artist’s delight. And as she’d driven down the gently rolling hillside into the basin of the valley itself and cut across a wide stretch of tarmac roadway towards the elegant cream-painted Georgian mansion house she could see in the distance, it had never occurred to her that she had just driven over Guy Frabosa’s own personal racing track, or that it circumvented the whole estate, built by professionals for a professional to practise upon. Her concentration then had been too enthralled by the beauty of the gardens she had been passing through.
I could sit and paint this forever, she recalled thinking as she brought the car to a stop in the circular courtyard in front of the house and climbed out of her battered old Mini to absorb the wonderful air of peace and tranquillity around her. The air smelled fresh and country-clean, weighed down with the heady scent of roses—roses she had not known then were Roberto Frabosa’s pride and joy.
It was the distinctive throaty roar of a powerful engine revving that had told her in which direction to go looking for her brother, and she had followed the sound around the side of the house and along a pretty winding path through a narrow wood until she found herself standing on the edge of a courtyard that must once have been the stable-yard, but now housed the workshops and garages for Guy’s impresive collection of cars.
And it was there, while she stood beneath the shelter of a spreading chestnut tree, that she had experienced her first shock sighting of the man she had later married…
He was standing like a Michelangelo’s David among a clutch of Lowrie figures as his team of mechanics clustered around him, towering over them as he talked, his dark head thrown up at an arrogant angle while his mouth, firm and shockingly sensual, was stretched into a grin which completely belied the arrogance.
They were talking engines, of course, but then Marnie could only appreciate the sheer artistry of the scene—he, Guy, thrown into strong stomach-churning contrast, in his crisp white shirt and immaculate dark trousers, to the murky cluster of oil-stained-overalled men gathered about him.
A king with his minions, she titled the scene, already capturing it in oils in her mind. He spoke quickly but smoothly, the rich timbre of his voice, attractively spiced with an accent, reaching out to her across the cobbled courtyard to keep her held breathless and still.
Her experience of the opposite sex then was poor to say the least; not finding the time to learn about them had been the main culprit for her ignorance because she’d never seemed to have enough of it to spare for the lighter side of living. But even she, wrapped in the protection of her complete innocence, could pick up danger signals when they were there.
‘Marnie!’ It was Jamie who saw her first. And she just had time to see Guy’s dark head turn sharply, glimpse the sudden narrowing of his dark eyes, note the tensing stillness of his body, before she dragged her wide eyes away from him and forced them to rest on her brother.
Jamie came over to her, so pleased to see her that he was grinning from ear to ear. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded in surprise.
She told him, trying desperately not to allow her attention to wander over to where she knew Guy was watching them with that same silent stillness he hadn’t even tried to snap out of since their eyes clashed.
‘But this is great!’ her brother exclaimed. ‘Can you stay long enough to have lunch with me? There’s a pub just down the road from here that puts on a great ploughman’s; we could—’
‘Introduce me, Jamie.’
Just like that, she recalled. Introduce me. Make me known. I want. Give me. Mine. It had all been there in that one huskily voiced demand.
Not that her brother noticed any of that as he happily complied, moving a step away from her to leave her feeling oddly exposed and very vulnerable to that hot dark stare. ‘This is my sister, Marnie,’ Jamie announced. ‘Marnie, meet my employer, Mr Frabosa.’