She smiled a tremulous smile. ‘Of course. I have to be, don’t I? I’m a senator’s wife.’
Patrizio’s frown deepened as he went to where Keira and the boys were waiting for him. Bruno and Jamie were arguing about something that didn’t sound particularly interesting or even very important. In fact he even had cause to wonder if their exchange of heated comments was genuine.
Keira, however, was staring into the darkness of the garden, her arms wrapped around her body as if she were cold, even though the bout of unusually warm spring weather had not yet abated.
‘Time to go home?’ he said as he brushed her bare shoulder with his hand.
She turned her head and, stripping her face of all emotion, followed him wordlessly to the car.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AFTER the boys were dropped off at school Patrizio let a few minutes of silence pass before he brought up the subject of the text message Keira had received. ‘While it distresses me that my nephew took it upon himself to invade someone else’s privacy in such a way, it raises the question in my mind as to whether or not you have been lying to me all this time about your continued relationship with Garth Merrick.’
‘I haven’t been lying to you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen Garth for more than six or seven weeks.’
‘But you have been in recent contact with him.’
She twisted her hands in her lap. ‘Yes…I wanted to ask him about that night again. I thought it might help me remember something.’
He drew in a harsh breath. ‘I can jog your memory if you like,’ he said. ‘You were lying in his bed with your body on show like a street—’
‘Don’t,’ she said, pinching the bridge of her nose, her eyes clamped shut. ‘Please don’t.’
‘It is true, Keira,’ he went on ruthlessly. ‘You claim you don’t remember, but you did sleep with him. You said it yourself. There is no doubt of it.’
‘I know…’ she said in a strangled whisper. ‘He told me too.’
He flicked a glance her way. ‘Did he tell you how it happened? Who started it?’
She gave him a world-weary look. ‘What difference does it make? You’re never going to forgive me for it, so what does it matter who started it? It doesn’t even matter to you that I can’t remember doing it. As far as you’re concerned, I betrayed you by sleeping with another man. You haven’t even considered there might be another explanation.’
‘What other explanation could there be?’ he asked. ‘I saw you in his bed, for God’s sake.’
‘Yes, I know, and I saw those photos that woman Rita Favore sent me, but it turned out that what I saw wasn’t real,’ she pointed out. ‘What if there is some other explanation for what you saw?’
He brought the car to a halt in the driveway of his house, his dark gaze brooding. ‘If there is another explanation I would like to know firstly what it is, and secondly who is going to give it to me, for apparently you cannot remember.’
‘You think I’m lying about not remembering?’ she asked in increasing distress. ‘Do you realise how upsetting it is to wake up in one of your closest friend’s bed and not remember a single detail of how you got there? Do you?’
Patrizio held her tortured gaze for several pulsing seconds, his mind going back over what Robyn Worthington had said earlier. ‘Had you been drinking that night?’ he finally asked.
She pressed her lips together and looked back at her hands. ‘I had one or two sips of wine but I wasn’t keen on it. I hardly ever drink—you should know that about me from when we were together before. I don’t like the taste, for one thing, and I get a headache if I have more than one glass. I was very upset after we…we argued. I went to Garth’s because I wanted to be with someone I trusted, someone who knew me and would look after me. I had the beginnings of a migraine and I knew if I didn’t take something for it I would be out of it for days
.’
‘What did you take?’
She frowned, as if trying to remember. ‘I’m not sure…Garth had something he’d been prescribed when he tore a ligament in his knee. It was pretty powerful, as I can remember feeling woozy a few minutes after taking it, but then that could have been the fact that I hadn’t eaten for hours…’
His hands clenched the steering wheel as he tried to put out of his mind what he had seen that morning. ‘So what you’re saying is you have no recollection of what happened, no inkling of what led you to be in Merrick’s bed?’
Keira shook her head silently.
‘You said you were in no doubt that you slept with him,’ he said, still clenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled force. ‘Does that mean there was any evidence to suggest you had?’
She couldn’t hold his gaze as she thought about the state of the bed that night. ‘Yes…’ she said. ‘There was…’
She heard him release a ragged sigh as he opened the driver’s door, watching as he came around to help her out of the car. She got out on legs that felt unsteady and followed him into the house, her heart aching all over again for what she had done to him.