CHAPTER TEN
SHESTOODTHERE, back against the door, her eyes squeezed tight shut until she heard the faint sound of a door closing.
Up to this point the necessity of maintaining rigid defences had kept the exhaustion of the day, as much emotional as physical, at bay. Now as her shoulders slumped a wave of deep weariness swept over her.
Struggling against the memories being in this room evoked, images that were buzzing in her head like a swarm of wasps, she headed for the bed and sank down.
She felt her eyes fill but she was too tired for tears. How had she allowed herself to get into this position?
By saying yes to Dante—so no change there!
She was here and this was not the time for a post-mortem as to how she had put herself in this position. She just had to deal and get on with it.
This was about the baby. A soft smile curved her lips as she rested her hand on the non-existent swell of her belly.
‘Your daddy loves you,’ she whispered, hoping that it were true.
Dashing the hint of moisture that had seeped from the corners of her eyes, she gave a loud sniff. Puffy eyes were not a good look for a formal dinner. She pulled herself up off the bed and stood there, ignoring the heaviness in her legs and the ache in her chest. She didn’t examine her immediate surroundings; instead she opened the wide interconnecting doors into the adjoining room. Outside the bedroom she was able to breathe a little easier.
Wandering through the rooms where she had lived, it was all the same, but not really.
It took her a few moments to realise that though the antique furniture was still the same, some of the heavier items that she had requested to be stowed away, like the priceless, but to her mind ugly, set of cabriole-legged chairs, had been returned. The walls were covered in the paintings that had been in situ when she had arrived; the ones that were more to her taste had presumably been put back in some vault labelled not cultured enough.
As she wandered from room to room it dawned on her that actually all the personal touches she had introduced had vanished from these rooms.
She had been wiped from the rooms and probably Velazquez family history.
In the west-facing sitting room where she liked to spend her morning, the light was so beautiful, she glanced wistfully at the carved stone mantle where the natural sculpted driftwood she had collected during walks on the beach was no longer evident. In its place there were pieces of delicate porcelain, which were beautiful but had none of the tactile quality she had loved.
Likewise, the church candles she had lit in the evening when it was too warm for a fire no longer filled the elaborate grate and the vases she had filled with bare branches now held rigid formal floral displays.
Without the bright splashes of colour from the cushions and throws she had scattered throughout, the rooms looked very different from how they had in her mind. Even the bookshelves had become colour-coordinated and stripped of her piles of paperbacks. There was not a single thing that could have been termed eclectic in any part of the apartment.
Leaving the places where her presence had been clinically expunged, she reopened the door to the bedroom and, with a deep sustaining breath, walked inside.
It was just a room.
No, she realised, it was the same room.
The same room she had walked out of eight months earlier. After the complete removal of anything that was remotely her in the other rooms, the contrast was dramatic. The room was like some sort of time capsule where her presence had been preserved.
It really was almost as though she had just walked out of the room. Stunned, she stood poised in the doorway, her wide blue eyes transmitting shock before she stepped inside.
She ran her fingers across the paperback on the bedside table, the spine still stretched open at the page she had been reading, before walking over to the dressing table where the messy pile of earrings, bracelets and make-up she had left behind still seemed to be in exactly the same place she had left them.
Every item she touched carried distracting memories, which she struggled to push away. Instead, aiming for a practical focus, she pressed the hidden button and the massive walk-in wardrobe slid silently open while the overhead recessed lights burst into life, along with those over the mirrored wall ahead, reflecting her image back at her.
She blinked, and saw her sister’s face appear, her dark eyes laughing as she walked inside the wardrobe she declared to be bigger than the entire flat they had once shared. She was laughing as she spun gracefully around, her arms spread wide as she took in the space.
The image was so real that Beatrice found the corners of her mouth lifting as she remembered Maya’s reaction, then wobbling as the memory of her sister’s assessment swam to the surface of the recollections.
‘Oh, my God. Perfect for people who love looking at themselves.’ Her husky laughter had rung out as she’d stepped inside and begun to open myriad doors to reveal racks and shelves; her laughter had turned to silent awe.
‘When you said you’d stopped off in Paris to shop…’ She’d rubbed her fingers across a silk catsuit that they had both last seen and admired in a high-end magazine spread. ‘When will you ever wear all this?’
Beatrice had shrugged. ‘I know. It’s crazy.’ How was she to have known that the personal shopper thought her trying something on and saying she liked it equated to I’ll take it—in several colours?
Dante had laughed at her horror and overruled her when she’d announced her intention to send back the stacks of clothes that had come draped over hangers inside cellophane wrappers and in layers of tissue paper in ribbon-tied boxes.