It was empty. Her heart gave a painful dive. The room was bare, completely stripped of everything that had once been so familiar to her. Weak tears beginning to cloud her vision, she moved slowly to the middle of the room.
All gone. Everything. Her easel from where it used to stand by the window, the draughtsman’s board from close by where she worked for hours on her sketches before turning her attention to a canvas. The canvases themselves, rows of them which used to lean, face turned inwards to the walls, all gone. Things she had loved too much to sell but had never quite got around to hanging on the walls.
She had painted Guy in this room. He had stood—just there. Her misty
gaze went to the spot on the polished floor where he had posed naked for her in that oh, so arrogant way of his. ‘Like this?’ he’d teased her, turning his impressive body into some disgustingly provoking pose or other. ‘Or this perhaps?’ taking up another pose which would verge on the indecent while she tried to remain professional and shift him into a more respectable position. ‘How am I supposed to stand here calmly dressed like this?’ he’d demanded when she’d scolded him.
‘You aren’t dressed in anything!’ she’d laughingly pointed out.
‘Neither will you be in a minute,’ he’d growled.
Now there was nothing left in the room but the echoes, echoes of something warm and special…
‘I had the room cleared when it became—obvious that you had no intention of coming back to me,’ a deep voice murmured from the doorway, making her spin round to find him standing there with his dark eyes guarded. ‘I thought, for a time,’ he went on quietly, ‘that you might have at least wanted your canvases, but…’ His shrug said all the rest, leaving a heavy silence behind it.
Marnie blinked away the mists from her eyes. ‘W-what did you do with them?’
‘Put them into store.’ Another shrug. ‘They are at Oaklands. Everything.’ His gaze drifted around the bare emptiness of the room. ‘The lot.’
She just hadn’t been able to bear the idea of coming in here again to get anything. Not the tools of her trade or even her precious paintings.
‘Still,’ Guy went on more briskly, ‘you can set up shop again at Oaklands once we’ve settled in there—so long as you don’t take in any outside work, that is. Did you find anything to eat in the kitchen?’
Just like that. The subject of her continuing to work, opened and closed, just like that. Her mouth tightened, any hint of softening in her mood gone. ‘A chicken cacciatore,’ she answered coolly. ‘Ready in about fifteen minutes.’
‘Good.’ He nodded. ‘That will give us time to take a quick shower before we eat,’ he decided, levering himself away from the door-frame. ‘Have you decided which room you want to use?’
‘It’s all the same to me, since there is nothing here I relate to any more,’ she answered bitterly. Then, because she did not feel she had the energy for a return to hostilities, she added flatly, ‘I’ll use the one next door to yours, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘But it isn’t all the same to me,’ he grunted. ‘And you know it.’ She glared at him and he sighed heavily. ‘All right, Marnie. Use what bloody room you want to use. You know Mrs Dukes; she will have left them all prepared ready for unexpected guests.’
‘I need a change of clothes,’ she reminded him as he turned to leave. ‘I suppose there’s no chance you have any of my old things hanging around?’ she enquired hopefully.
‘No,’ he muttered. ‘If you must know, I had them sent to your favourite charity—at least that should please you, since nothing else around here seems to!’
‘You gave all my lovely clothes to the Sally Army?’ she choked out disbelievingly.
‘What the hell did you expect me to do with them—have them lovingly preserved behind glass just in case you decided on a whim to come and collect them?’
‘No, of course not!’ she answered stiffly. ‘I just thought…’ Her voice trailed off. She didn’t know what she’d thought—or even if she had so much as wondered about her clothes before this moment. ‘It—it doesn’t matter.’ Dully she dropped the subject.
Guy seemed happy to do that too, because he nodded grimly and said, ‘I will get you a pair of my pyjamas and a spare bathrobe. Tomorrow, first thing, we will go and collect your things from your flat, if that makes you feel any better.’
And he disappeared down the hall, his movements sharp with irritation. She followed, passing his door to open the one next to it, feeling as though she’d been dragged through the emotional food-mixer, the way they had to constantly keep sniping at each other.
Oh, God. She sat down wearily on the bed. What was she doing, letting herself become trapped by him again? She knew it could only lead to more heartache. More wretched pain. She was in pain now—the constant nagging pain of forced remembrance. Being with him all the time like this was making her face all those things she had thrust so utterly to the back of her mind.
Good things as well as bad. And she wasn’t at all sure which side of the balance-scale was weighing down the heaviest. That frightened her, frightened because it had to mean that her grievances towards Guy were slowly beginning to fade away—just as he had always said they would do.
‘Here. I’ve brought you…’
Guy halted a stride inside the room, his words dying as he looked down at her pale, forlorn face.
‘Oh, Marnie,’ he sighed, his mouth taking on a grim downward turn as he came over to where she sat and threw down the pyjamas and robe before squatting on his haunches in front of her. He took up her hands, long-fingered and so slender-boned that you only had to look at them to know they belonged to someone who possessed special artistic gifts. They were cold and trembling, and Guy sighed again before he lifted them to his lips and gently kissed them. He had discarded his jacket somewhere, and his tie, so the tanned skin at his throat where he had yanked open the top button of his shirt gleamed smoothly in the dying sunlight.
‘Can’t you simply forgive?’ he murmured suddenly. ‘Put us both out of our wretched misery and forgive so we can at least try to move forward into a better understanding than all this bitter standing still?’
She looked down into his face—so handsome, so sleekly hewn beneath its smooth, dark skin. His eyes, dark and deep, lacking any hint of mockery or cynicism or even the impatience he had been showing her all day. And his mouth, grim but soft, not tight and hard. Unhappy, like hers. Weary, like hers.