I stared at him. ‘What?’
‘What I offered you wasn’t a loan,’ he said. ‘It was a gift.’
A gift? I frowned. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget.’
No. I wasn’t likely to forget that particular encounter either. It had not been pleasant. ‘I didn’t know that.’
‘You didn’t give me a chance to explain.’
That was true. I’d rejected it out of hand barely before he’d finished what he was saying. He’d unexpectedly turned up at my flat one evening shortly after my father’s death, immaculate in a five-thousand-pound suit, not a hair out of place. Flustered, wretched, and acutely aware of how shabby I and my environs looked in comparison to him, I’d just wanted him gone. ‘But why would you offer me a gift?’
‘Because I could.’
‘Any opportunity to rub my nose in our reversal of fortune, right?’ I said a touch bitterly, remembering all too clearly how humiliated I’d felt, how much I’d hated him in that moment for reminding me how far I’d fallen and how much I’d lost.
A thundering silence followed my words. Nick visibly recoiled and paled beneath his tan, a tiny muscle pounding in his jaw. ‘Is that what you think I was doing?’
‘I don’t blame you,’ I said, the memories that were descending thick and fast accelerating my pulse and tightening my chest. ‘I deserved it.’
‘You didn’t deserve any of it.’
I did. After all, I’d once rubbed his nose in the material differences between us, hadn’t I? Furthermore, I’d destroyed my family, and, however unintentional, there was no absolution for that.
‘And you could not be more wrong about my reason for offering you the money.’
‘Then whatwereyou doing?’
‘You’d suffered enough.’
I stared at him, my stomach beginning to churn. ‘So it was pity?’
‘No.’
‘Charity?’
‘No.’
But it had to have been at least one of those two things because if it wasn’t revenge what else was there? It had never occurred to me that Nick had felt sorry for me. The thought of it, the realisation that he might continue to do so, made me feel physically sick. Disapproval and disdain I could just about handle. Pity, with the hateful weakness and helplessness it invoked, I could not.
‘Well, whether it was a gift or a loan,’ I said, suddenly desperate to redress the balance, to try and claw back some modicum of dignity, ‘I’m glad I didn’t take your money. It’s impossible to overstate how much I would have hated being beholden to you. I’m not all that thrilled about it now, to be honest. I loathe the fact that I need your help. I can’t stand it that I had to ask you to come and pick me up from Zanzibar. I didn’t want your charity or your pity or any special favours then, and I certainly don’t want them now. And before you claim again that you weren’t motivated by either, you tell me why a man driven solely by money would still not have sent me a contract or details of his fees.’
I stopped, my heart pounding and my head spinning, the silence thundering. Nick’s expression revealed a split second of shock before it became utterly blank, and his voice, when he spoke, was cold and clipped. ‘I’ll get onto it right away.’
CHAPTER FIVE
BECAUSEIWASdesperate to flee the suddenly horribly tense atmosphere in the study and needed to sort through everything that was swirling around in my head with increasingly hammering persistence, I took a walk outside.
All Nick had said when I’d abruptly announced my intention to get some air and surged to my feet was a curt, ‘Stick to the paths.’ He could have been shocked, he could have been furious, he could have been relieved. The ice-cold impassivity that had descended over him made it impossible to tell.
I followed his undoubtedly prudent advice and set off down a wide sandy track that wound through vegetation that grew denser and lusher the further I progressed into it. The rustling palms and heavily laden fruit trees were alive with caws and squawks. Brightly coloured butterflies of all hues and sizes fluttered around bushes from which came chirrups and squeaks. I could feel and smell the heat and humidity as if they were tangible.
At the westernmost point of the island, as far from the villa as it was possible to get, I came across a second jetty, next to which was a boathouse that contained several surfboards, a kayak and sails of various shapes and sizes.
In one of the white sandy coves I wandered down to, I found, among the driftwood that had washed up on the shore, a metre-long coconut crab and two green sea turtles. I sat on a rock and spent a good ten minutes watching a fish eagle hovering twenty metres above the surface of the sea and then swooping down majestically to capture its prey.
But Nick’s island wasn’t quite the tropical paradise now it had seemed the day I’d originally turned up. Unlike then, this evening’s sun kept disappearing behind ever billowing clouds. The air was growing increasingly thick and heavy and the swell of the sea seemed to be rising. There was a sense of turbulence and disruption rippling through my surroundings, and it matched exactly the uneasy churning of my thoughts.