His back was to her, and she turned slightly to watch him take up the bottle of liquid cleaner she used to clean the paint from her fingers, and squeeze some into the palm of his grease-covered hands.
‘Well,’ he said after a moment, ‘what do you think of this place?’ He didn’t turn, his attention fixed firmly on removing the grease from his long blunt-ended fingers.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why did you build it?’
‘As a place you could be happy.’ He shrugged, rubbing his hands under the running tap to wash away the dirt. ‘I thought,’ he went on, reaching for the roll of paper towel and tearing off several squares, ‘I thought that if I could create a place beautiful enough for you—somewhere here at Oaklands where you could paint, away from the rest of what goes on here, somewhere you could call entirely your own and even pretend it was miles from anywhere if you wanted to feel that isolated—then maybe you would lose that restless urge you have always possessed to be taking off somewhere alone.’
‘An artist’s life by necessity is a wandering one, Guy,’ she pointed out. ‘We need time and space to work to our best potential.’
‘Well, here I give you both,’ he murmured simply.
‘No.’ Marnie shook her head. ‘You will give me the time and the space to work. You always gave me those things before. But this time you want to take away my right to find inspiration where it takes me. You want to imprison me here!’
‘Ah!’ He threw away the paper towel, smiling ruefully as he walked over to stand beside her. ‘Your precious commissions,’ he realised. ‘But did you not tell me once, Marnie, that you could paint this valley for a hundred years and never go short of fresh inspiration? Well, now I give you that opportunity.’ He waved an expressive hand. ‘Paint—paint to your heart’s content. The valley awaits your gifted touch.’
‘While you do what exactly?’ she snapped. ‘Go back to London? Coming down here to visit your contented wife only when the whim takes you?’
‘Do you want me to be here more than the odd weekend?’ he challenged.
She didn’t answer—found she hadn’t got one. Not one she would admit to, anyway. ‘Roberto is right,’ she murmured after a while. ‘We have to both be crazy to be considering returning to that kind of sham again.’
‘There was no sham,’ he denied, ‘just two married people who somehow lost their way. Whether or not we make a better job of our marriage on this second chance will depend entirely on the way we work at it.’
‘And working at it, in your book, means me staying tucked away here at Oaklands while you carry on as you’ve always done in London.’
‘I have a business to run.’
‘So have I,’ she countered, though it had not been quite the point she had been trying to make, her mind still fixed on Anthea as it was.
‘Had, Marnie, had,’ he corrected. ‘Now that you have me to give you everything your heart desires, you no longer need to paint to earn a living, but only to paint because it is what you truly want to paint.’
‘On condition I stay within the boundaries of the Oaklands walls, of course.’
‘Did I ever make that stipulation?’ he challenged. ‘I only said you would not be going away for days on end and leaving me as you used to do the last time.’
‘And how many days and weeks are you going to spend up in London?’ she asked drily.
‘None, if you are not with me,’ he answered, mocking the surprised look on her face. ‘From now on, Marnie, we do everything together. Live together, sleep together, laugh, cry and even fight together, since we seem to like sparring so much.’
A gibe at the way they were sparring now, she supposed. She took in a deep breath and decided to change the subject. ‘Roberto tells me you’ve sent Jamie and Clare off on holiday.’
‘He has been busy, hasn’t he?’ Guy murmured drily. ‘Any other little—surprises of mine he has stolen the thunder of?’
She frowned, her thoughts turning back to Roberto’s disturbing words. Could there be any truth in them? Could Guy really have been just an innocent victim of his friends’ idea of a practical joke?
She took in a deep breath and let it out again on a long, discontented sigh. ‘How much of what your father was saying to me did you overhear?’ she murmured huskily.
‘Most of it.’
‘W-was he telling the truth?’
He didn’t answer straight away, his attention seemingly fixed on the view beyond the window, then he said quietly, ‘You already know the truth. I was unfaithful to you and you caught me out.’
‘So, he was lying to me?’
‘No,’ Guy answered slowly. ‘It would not be fair to say he lied exactly—just told it as he prefers to believe it to be.’
‘That we were set up,’ she nodded. ‘That you were an innocent victim of a nasty practical joke and I the blind, gullible fool for believing what my eyes were telling me.’