Her soft mouth tightened and he laughed softly, reaching across the table towards her. Vivian stiffened, but he was only removing the lid from the casserole.
‘You dish up the food. I’ll pour the wine.’
‘Oh, but I don’t know if I like red wine—’
‘You’ll like this one. It’s a gold-medal winner from a vineyard I part-own in Gisborne,’ he said, brushing aside her diffidence as he filled her glass. He poured himself a glass, drank half and refilled it, all in the time it took her to ladle some of the steaming casserole on to their plates.
She waited until she had eaten several mouthfuls of food before she took her first sip. In spite of her determination not to react, she was unable to prevent a murmur of surprised pleasure as the full-bodied flavour exploded against her palate, drenching her senses in its heady bouquet.
‘You see, you never know whether you’re going to like something until you try it. You need to be more adventurous, Vivian, experiment more…’
She didn’t like the strange tension in him…nor the dangerous ease with which he broached the bottle as they both pretended to eat. She noticed he had shaved since their confrontation in his office. It had been necessary for him to shave but not to dress? She felt a strange thrill of fear.
‘Weren’t you afraid?’ he said disconcertingly, his deep, hushed tone seeming to weave itself into the darkness. ‘The only locked room in Bluebeard’s castle… Weren’t you afraid of the horrors you might find in there when you stole the key?’
‘This isn’t a castle and you’re not Bluebeard,’ she said, resisting the powerful vision he was slyly conjuring out of her imagination. ‘You’ve only ever had one wife,’ she said deliberately. ‘And I’m certainly in a position to know that you didn’t murder her.’
He looked at her broodingly over the rim of his glass. ‘Ah, yes, my beloved wife. Frank tells me you’re curious about her…’ Vivian was suddenly certain that Nicholas was building up towards some kind of critical release of the tension that raged in his face, seethed in his rest less eye.
‘I’m in the mood for violence…’
She rubbed her damp palms surreptitiously against her thighs and felt the forgotten bulge in her trouser pocket.
The idea sprang into her mind full-blown. Her fingers closed around the glass bottle warmed by her thigh.
‘I wouldn’t mind a drink of water, please.’
He got up, moving with his usual swiftness and precision, and Vivian knew that in spite of the wine he had consumed he was still dangerously alert. It was only his inhibitions that had been relaxed, and thus the bonds that chained his savage inner demons.
The moment he turned away to the sink, she pulled out the chloral hydrate, wrenched off the lid and tried to shake a few drops into his full wine glass, horrified when the clear liquid came out in a little gush.
She didn’t have time to get the bottle capped and back into her pocket, and had to thrust it down on her lap as she accepted her glass of water, feeling the remainder of the drug soak into the fabric over her hip as her heart threshed wildly in her chest.
‘You wanted to know about Barbara…’
She watched, her green eyes wide with fascinated horror, as he re-seated himself and took a long swallow of his wine before he spoke again. Oh, God, what madness had possessed her? What if she had given him too much and he died?
‘The biggest mistake of my arrogant young life…’
Mistake? Vivian was jolted out of her frantic abstraction.
His mouth twisted at her expression. ‘You thought it was the love-match of the century? Mis-match, more like. It was my father’s idea. He’s an extremely dominating man and I’m his only son, his greatest pride—and his greatest disappointment. We clashed on just about everything. When I came back from university overseas, he was very ill and used some very clever emotional blackmail to pressure me into marriage with his god-daughter. Needless to say, he then miraculously recovered.’
‘Then…you fell in love with each other after the marriage?’ Vivian said, her thoughts falling into chaos.
‘Love was never part of the equation. Like my father, Barbara saw our marriage in terms of status and control. We lived separate lives from the start. She politely endured me in her bed because it was necessary in order to secure her permanent place in the Thorne dynasty—part of her bargain with my father, I gather—and I politely endured for reasons just as selfish, because I wanted nothing to disturb my build-up for the Olympic trials…’
He paused and Vivian held her breath, hoping the fascinating revelations were going to continue.
‘Then Barbara told me she was pregnant and I realised just how permanent was the trap my father had planned for me. Except it wasn’t—the next day she and the baby were killed…’
He reached for his wine-glass again and Vivian couldn’t stop a darting gesture of involuntary protest.
‘Oh, no, please don’t drink that!’ She clumsily tried to knock it out of his hand.
‘Why not? Are you afraid I’ll pass out on you before I finish baring my soul?’ He stopped, his face sharpening as he looked from her stark expression of appalled guilt to his glass, his shrewd brain making the impossible leap in perception.
‘My God, is there something wrong with this? What have you put in my wine?’