She disengaged, her body slipping from his, indenting heavily into the mattress, as her heart-rate began to slow, her heated flesh to cool.
What had she done? What madness, insanity had possessed her?
And—more than that—what criminal stupidity had she committed?
They lay there, two people—two completely dissociated people. Lying there, flesh against flesh, hers soft and exhausted, his hard and muscled, bathed in a faint, cooling sheen of sweat, chilling in the air-conditioned atmosphere.
But she didn’t care about the cold.
It echoed the chill inside her head, where her mind was very slowly repeating, like an endless replay, the same question.
What have I done? What have I done?
She went on lying there, her mind barely working, as if shut down or on standby. Because there was a program running that was taking up all her brain—only she could not let it out into her consciousness. Yet it was growing all the time, consuming more resources, more space, consuming everything she was.
She stared out blindly into the dark room.
Was he asleep? There was no movement—none—from the body beside her, only the subdued rise and fall of his chest. She waited, hearing through her bones the uneven slug of her own heart—unquiet, unresting.
Quietly she slid from the bed. He still did not move. Carefully, shakily, she picked up her discarded clothes, not finding her bra, not caring—caring only that she pulled on her shorts, pulled on her T-shirt, covered her nakedness.
And she went. Fleeing from the scene of her crime, her unspeakable folly.
She slipped out onto the terrace, the humid warmth of the tropical night hitting her like a wall. For a moment she gasped in the steamy air, as if unable to breathe, and then, swallowing hard, made her way to her own room. Inside, she ran for the bathroom.
The shower was hot—as hot as she could stand it. Washing her. Washing everything from her.
Everything but the knowledge of what she had done.
Then, like a wounded animal, she crawled to her bed.
Beside her, undisturbed, her son lay sleeping. The fruit of her folly. The folly of being in love with Xander Anaketos—for which folly she must now pay the same killing price she had paid before.
Out over the water nothing stirred—except the faint, far-off sound of the sea on the reef. Behind Xander the incessant cicadas kept up their sussurating chorus, and in the palms above his head the night wind soughed. Somewhere a lone dog barked, and fell silent.
Xander stood staring sightlessly out to sea, to the dark horizon beyond. He had waited until she had gone, lying in the simulation of sleep. Then he had got out of bed, unable to stay there longer. Pulled on his jeans and walked out here, into the darkness. The warmth of the tropical night lapped him, yet he felt cold. He plunged his hands further into the pockets of his jeans, roughly drawn on, his torso still bare, like his feet.
The coldness was all the way through him. Chilling him to the core.
He had done what he had set out to do. Achieved his goal.
He should be pleased. Satisfied.
Relieved.
He felt none of these things.
Only that he had made a terrible, catastrophic mistake.
‘I’ve eaten my breakfast. Come and play, Daddy!’
Joey beamed invitingly. He seemed completely—thankfully—oblivious to the atmosphere at the table.
You could cut it like a knife, thought Clare, her face expressionless. She was moving like a mummy, wrapped up so tightly that she was almost incapable of moving. There were circles under her eyes from a sleepless, self-lacerating night.
Joey had woken at his customary early hour, and she had gone with him, like an automaton, to make their customary early-morning inspection of the gardens and walk along the beach till breakfast. Usually it was the time she almost enjoyed—so quiet, in the coolest time of the day, and safe from Xander, whom she would not see till breakfast. It was a time when she had Joey all to herself and could almost forget just how totally her life had changed now. How disastrously.
But this morning the walk along the beach had been torture. Hell in the middle of paradise.
The beauty of the island had mocked her mercilessly, showing her cruelly, pitilessly, with every glint of sunlight off the azure water, every curve of the emerald-fringed bay, every grain of soft, silvery sand, just how misery could dwell in the midst of beauty.
Now, as she sat at the breakfast table, she could not let her eyes go near Xander. Could say nothing to him. Could not bear to be near him. Yet she had to. For Joey’s sake she had to make everything appear normal, though the mockery of it screamed at her in her head. Her awareness of his presence was like a radio tuned to a pitch that was like fingernails scraping. Every move he made, every terse syllable he spoke in response to Joey’s artless chatter, every breath that came from him, vibrated in the air between them.
She was completely incapable of eating anything. She had forced down some sips of coffee through a tight, constricted throat, and that was all. Now, as Joey beamed so invitingly at Xander, she thought, desperately, Please, yes. Take him off and play with him. Go, just go—anywhere, but away from me, away from me…
‘Not right now, Joey. Soon.’
Clare scraped her chair back. If Xander would not clear off, then she would. Must.
‘I’ll play, Joey,’ she said, her voice stiff and expressionless. She held her hand out to help Joey down. But he looked at her mutinously.
‘I want Daddy,’ he said. His lower lip wobbled. Maybe he was not so immune to the tension stretching like hot wires between her and Xander after all, Clare realised heavily. She saw Xander press the service button on the table. A moment later the housekeeper appeared.
‘Juliette, would be you be kind enough to amuse Joey for a while, please?’ he said to her. His voice sounded as tense as Clare’s.
Juliette gave a warm smile, and then bestowed an even warmer one on Joey.
‘You come with Juliette, now. I happen to know…’ she looked conspiratorial ‘…that it’s car wash day this morning—and there’s a hose with your name on it!’
Joey’s lower lip stopped wobbling instantly. He scrambled down eagerly.
‘I need a big hose,’ he informed Juliette as she led him off.
Clare watched him go. He was out of sight before she turned her head back. What was going on? Why had Xander got rid of Joey?
Oh, God, he doesn’t think we’re going to have sex again, does he?
The thought plunged, horrifically, into her brain, and her eyes lashed to Xander’s face before she could stop herself. But whatever was on his mind, that was not it. She looked away again instantly and felt relief flood through her, drowning out any other reaction she might have had to that sudden debilitating thought.
Over and over again during the long, agonising night she had asked herself the same question—why, why had he done it? Why had he wanted sex with her last night?
And there was only one answer.
Because right now she was the only woman around. And she was better than nothing. There was no other reason he could possibly have had. None.
Loathing shot through her. For him, for doing that to her, and—worse by far—loathing for herself. For having been so crushingly, unforgivably stupid as to let him…
‘Clare—’
Her name jolted her, and her eyes went to him involuntarily.
His face was expressionless. Quite expressionless. And yet there was something so far at the back of his eyes that she had seen once before…
And suddenly, deep inside her, fear opened up. She knew that face. Knew this moment. Recognised it from four long years ago, when she had sat in the restaurant at the St John and heard her life destroyed—her hopes decimated—in one brutal sentence.
But this time she was no longer the person she had been then. Harder. Xander had called her that to her face, and it was true. She’d had to make herself hard, or she would not have survived. Would have bled to death.
How can I love him?
The cry came from deep inside, anguished and unanswerable.
How can I love a man who threw me out like rubbish, who packed me off with a diamond necklace, who last night used me for sex because I was convenient and on hand…?
How can I love a man like that? A man without feelings, without conscience, without remorse, or the slightest acknowledgement that he was so coldly callous to me?
I mustn’t love a man like that! It debases me to do so. I thought I was free of him—I made myself free of him. I forced myself to be free of him.
But it had been in vain. Completely in vain. It had all come to nothing that night she had stood face to face again with the man she had loved, but who had never, ever felt anything more for her than ‘appreciation’ for her sexual services…
The whole excruciating agony of her situation honed in on her like a scud missile. Because of Joey she could never be free of Xander. Never! The nightmare she had feared four years ago had come true—she would be forced to see him, forced to be civil to him and pretend, time after time, year after year, that he could not hurt her any more. For Joey’s sake she had to let that happen, had to endure it.
‘Clare—what happened last night—’
He stopped, mouth tightening. She stared at him expressionlessly. As blankly as he. But his next words came out of the blue.
‘When is your period due?’
‘What?’ Her eyes stared in shock at the question.
His mouth tightened again. ‘When is your period due?’ he repeated.