'I had every right,' Gideon asserted with his face taut and stiff. 'You came because you wanted me as much as I wanted you, will always want you.' He slid his hand along her neck and the strong fingers pushed into her fine silvery hair, playing with it tenderly. 'I've been barely alive this past year, my darling. I've missed you more than I can tell you. That's why I had to come down, although Grandie had asked me to stay away from you while you couldn't remember. I had to see you—even if only from a distance. I've been living on memories.'
'Then you'll be used to it,' she said tartly, and heard him suck in a deep, bitter breath.
'No!' he cried in protest, a deep wrenched sound which told her how moved he was and she was glad, glad because now he would suffer as she had suffered and would suffer in the future. Gideon had fought against the clutch of love, but now its claws were sunk deep into his flesh and the sight made her shiver with pleasure.
'Just go,' she told him. 'I've no further interest in you. It's over.'
Gideon lifted his head slowly, his face changing. A dangerous stillness came into the black eyes. 'Like hell,' he muttered through his stiff lips. 'Ever since I arrived you've been proving over and over again that you belong to me.'
She couldn't deny that. He had walked in here as a stranger and from the moment he arrived she had been falling in love with him all over again, and she couldn't hide that from him. She had been safe in her dream world, but from that safety she had loved him exactly as she had before and did now. No instinctive blind warning had reached her. She had looked at him and although she sensed that peculiar, troubling familiarity, she had still loved him, moved into his arms without a shadow of doubt.
'You tricked me,' she accused him furiously. 'You took advantage of the fact that I didn't remember.'
'If you really hated me you would never have turned to me again,' he contradicted. 'Underneath the hurt you're feeling you still care.' He smiled at her, his mouth crooked. 'You've had a bad time, darling, and it was all over nothing. Diana never meant a thing to me. I enjoyed her company and her body but I never gave a twopenny damn for her.'
She winced. 'You think that excuses you?'
'No, of course not,' he said impatiently. 'Before I met you that was all women meant to me—a little pleasure when I was tired and needed relaxation. Diana was the perfect lover for a man who didn't want to get involved. With her it was just the same. We used each other's bodies but had no use for each other's hearts.'
Marina did not believe that. She remembered the woman's angry, passionate movements when she and Gideon argued in the road the other day. Even safely protected from her knowledge of what they had been to each other, Marina had picked up those emotions from a distance. Diana loved him even if he did not love Diana.
Gideon bent suddenly and she felt his lips shaking as he kissed her throat. 'She kissed me, darling, I swear it. I didn't kiss her. When you walked in I was shattered by the look on your face.' He groaned deeply, shivering as though he were suddenly ice cold. 'When I ran out into the street and saw you in the road, the blood, the way you lay there so still and silent, I thought...' He broke off, gasping, and his arms went round her, held her so tightly she couldn't breath. 'I thought, God help me, yon were dead, and I couldn't move. I stood there and I wanted to die too.' He kissed her hair, her cheek, her ear, trying to reach her mouth and being evaded by the turn of her head, her shake of denial.
'Marina,' he whispered, 'I love you. I never even knew how much until I saw you lying in the road and I thought you were dead and I could never tell you.'
'You must go now,' she said coolly, sitting stiffly in the circle of his arms.
He drew back and his eyes flashed. 'Don't do this. I need you.'
'Well, I don't need you,' she snapped, hating him for the way he phrased that because whether he knew it or not he still did not know how to love. He was still putting his own needs in front of everything else. 'You're the last thing I need,' she told him. 'I need you like I need a hole in the head.'
She was totally white, her face clenched in self- control which was going to weaken if he didn't go soon because she wanted to throw herself down on the bed and cry, but if she did, Gideon would take her into his arms and, weakened, she might never have the strength to send him away again.
Gideon stared at her and stood up. The long, lean body stiffened. She met the black probe of his eyes and fought with every ounce of self-control to keep her own gaze level and cold.
'I love you,' he said at last.
'You're too late.' Her lips twisted ironically as she said that. 'Goodbye, Gideon.'
For a long moment he stared at her. Then he turned and walked out of the room. Marina lay down because she was trembling and her head was pounding violently. She closed her eyes and let the world slip far away from her where it couldn't hurt her for a little while.
The sunshine slid around the room like a curious ghost until it found the spilled silvery hair and played with it, giving a reflected brightness to the pale still face. She was sleeping but the tears were crawling down her face and her lips were mumbling silently in her sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WHEN she woke up again the room was filled with the reflections of the dying sun and the house was silent. She shivered, as thou
gh she were dying of cold, listening to the emptiness around her. Gideon had gone, she thought, leaving her aching for him, despite her hatred and anger. She slid out of the bed and padded quietly to the window. The gulls floated silently across the sea, streaming behind a returning fishing boat, in a coloured tail of light shed from the setting sun. The fish refuse from the boat would have been thrown over the side, giving the gulls an easy banquet. It was a common sight in the evenings, a fishing boat with a flock of gulls following it.
What was she going to do? She leaned her elbows on the windowsill and tried to think, but it was hard to force her mind to function when her stupid emotions clamoured as they were doing, thrusting pain on to her when she had had enough of it and wanted nothing but peace.
She would have to make a decision about her future. The dreamy romanticism which had sheltered her during these past months had evaporated in the blinding light of memory and now she knew with a pang that the life of the concert artist was not for her. She did not want to travel around the world, as Gideon did, playing at that pitch all the time, always in the public eye; always walking the tightrope of success with no safety net beneath one to cushion one's fall.
Her marriage to Gideon had taught her that much. She did not have the stomach for that life. For her, music was a private, personal thing. The harsh glare of the concert hall distracted her from that intense experience which music gave her when she was alone.
She would have to tell Grandie, but she could not face it yet. She needed a little time in which she could grow some sort of armour before she faced the outside world. It was not going to be easy, but Marina meant to harden herself.
She went to the bathroom and washed, paused to listen for some sound downstairs and heard nothing. Grandie had perhaps gone for a walk. She dressed and went downstairs, but when she walked into the kitchen she stopped dead, two little coins of red beginning to burn in her cheeks.