‘Rob must have locked it.’
‘And how did he get inside in the first place?’
‘I don’t know!’
Isabelle snatched her hands away from her face, flinging them out in a wild gesture to emphasise her words.
‘I don’t know.’
It wasn’t enough. She could read it in his dark, shuttered face, the way his eyes were hooded under half-closed lids. He didn’t believe her. And really, deep down, she knew she couldn’t blame him.
Would she have believed him if the positions had been reversed? If she had been the one coming home late from a long trip to London to see her brother and she had walked in on Luis, naked, in bed with someone else—with Catalina, for example. Would he have been able to convince her that it was all perfectly innocent? That he had fallen asleep alone and woken up to find the other woman in his bed?
It sounded impossible and totally unbelievable. And she knew that she would have reacted just as he had done. That she would have walked away in a black fury of pain and betrayal and never looked back.
‘Luis, we’d had a row…’
‘I know what had happened. You do not have to remind me. We argued and so—so what? You punished me by sleeping with the first man who asked?’
‘You can’t believe that!’
No, Luis admitted privately, she was right, damn it! He couldn’t believe it. He hadn’t then and he couldn’t now. If anyone had asked him, he would have sworn on his life that Isabelle loved him. That she would always be faithful. That was why finding her with Michaels had hit him so hard that he had thought he would go crazy, do something totally unforgivable, if he hadn’t got out of there at once.
‘It was what you threatened to do,’ he said dully. ‘And Rob Michaels had been sniffing around you for weeks.’
Isabelle winced away from his words, and the pain she could hear behind them, wishing she could deny the truth, but knowing that she could not.
‘It was an empty threat. I never meant it. Certainly not like that. I was angry—hurt. It was my birthday, Luis.’
Her tone pleaded for understanding.
‘My first birthday with you and you spent it away from me.’
‘I had no choice; you knew that. My father was only in London for that day. I had to see him to try to bridge some of the distance that had come between us. I had no other opportunity.’
She understood that now, Isabelle admitted to herself, but then, barely twenty-one, and still in the throes of the first obsessive, possessive love for her new husband, she had been unwilling to share him with anyone, even his family. She had insisted he stay with her—or at least take her with him. And when he had refused she had lost her temper.
‘All right, go!’ she had flung at him, blind to the danger signs of his tightly set mouth, the tension in his hard jaw, the muscle that had flickered just above it. ‘Go if you want, and leave me on my own! But don’t expect me to stay on my own! If you won’t be with me on my birthday, I’ll find someone else who will.’
It had been a hollow threat, bad-tempered, childish and petulant, and she had never dreamed that it might rebound on her so appallingly, until it had been too late.
‘I can see that now, Luis,’ she admitted miserably. ‘And I was very stupid, very selfish—but that’s all I was. Please don’t hate me for being stupid.’
‘I don’t.’
He didn’t hate her.
Dios, didn’t she know that he could never hate her? That was the reason she could get to him so badly. The reason why he’d had to come to England when he’d got that letter. He’d tried to convince himself that he never wanted to see her again, but the truth was that he had never felt anything so terrible as the fear that he might lose her for good. And he’d endured that fear twice now.
‘Why do you think you are here? I forgave you—’
‘Forgave!’
Isabelle couldn’t believe what she was hearing and her distress was a savage wound in her heart as she faced the way her hopes had been lifted, only to be dashed right down in the next second. She could hardly bear to look into his face, to see the way he had stiffened, the golden eyes narrowing, his jaw setting hard and tight.
How could he have taken her so close to the future she had dreamed of and then snatched it away again? She felt as if she had been given a glimpse of heaven, only to have the door slammed right in her face.
‘I didn’t want forgiveness for something I didn’t do! I wanted trust! The sort of trust that doesn’t need proof—that believes in me completely and totally. And if you can’t give me that, then our marriage has no future and we might just as well forget the whole thing!’