Lily took another deep breath to steady herself.
‘That was the day before I was going back to school. I never saw her again. When I asked my father about her he said that Anton had told him she’d stopped modelling because she’d fallen down the stairs to her mother’s flat and broken her leg. I wrote to her, but she never wrote back to me. Her mother wrote instead, saying that Anna had gone to live with her father and her stepmother.’
Her voice broke, and Marco could only guess at what she was feeling.
‘That was at half-term,’ she told him. ‘At the start of the Christmas holiday Anton was still always there at the studio.’ Her voice grew stronger. ‘And then one day, after he and my father had gone out to lunch together, Anton came back but my father didn’t.’
Lily swallowed hard.
‘It was everything I’d dreaded, but worse. He told me what he wanted to do to me—what he was going to make me do to him.’
Marco’s contempt for the other man turned to white-hot rage.
‘I told him I’d tell my father, but he just laughed at me. He told me that he had a thing about virgins—young virgins. It was horrible—sickening. I was so afraid that I ran out of the studio. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I had a key to my father’s flat, but I was afraid to go there in case somehow he, Anton was there.’
Marco closed his eyes against the anger boiling up inside him—against the man who had wanted to abuse her, against her father, against the whole of his sex for being what it was, but most of all against himself for not recognising her fear and for not protecting her from it.
Marco was so silent, so unmoving. Why didn’t he say something? Didn’t he know how much she needed comfort from him? How much she needed him? Defenceless and drained, Lily could only hold out her arms to him in supplication and beg, ‘Hold me, Marco. Please hold me.’
Lily’s words shocked through Marco. Hold her? He couldn’t. Everything he had taught himself to be recoiled from the thought of such intimacy. He feared the private wounds within himself it might reveal, searing him just as her anguished plea had seared his emotions—those emotions he had fought for so long to deny. If he touched her now he was afraid that he would take her to himself, crush her to himself, and never want to let her go.
Marco was turning away from her—no doubt filled with contempt for her and for her weakness, Lily recognised mutely, and her pent-up breath escaped on a sound that was humiliatingly close to a small sob.
Lily was crying? He had made her cry?
Marco turned round, and from doing that took a step towards her, ignoring the mental lashing of his brain that urged him to stop. How could he when his heart was aching with remorse and longing?
Lily watched him without speaking, and for a moment Marco thought that she was going to ignore him and walk away from him. Part of him hoped that she would. But then she made a suppressed sound of desperation and almost flung herself against him, wrapping her arms around him, resting her head on his chest, her body trembling against his.
Slowly, awkwardly, uncomfortably, he lifted his own arms and placed them round her. Defeat. Surrender. The giving in of his will to his emotions. It should have felt wrong. She should have felt wrong. But instead it felt—she felt. Marco understood as he held her close. It felt as though she completed him. He breathed in and then exhaled slowly and deeply, as though he was releasing a burden he had carried for far too long.
She felt so delicate within his hold, and holding her now, as a woman, Marco could only ache for the fragile, vulnerable girl she must have been. Olivia had never felt like this—but then he had never held her like this. He had never held her at all, really. On those rare occasions when he had kissed her she had never aroused in him a hunger for her, as Lily had done, Marco recognised. Never made him want her and then want equally to reject that wanting because it made him feel vulnerable. Their relationship had been more one of brother and sister than two young people who would one day be husband and wife.
But it was Lily who needed to be the focus of his thoughts now, not Olivia, and most certainly not his own self-centred fear of losing face through his damaged pride.