She shook her head, careless of the loosening hair that splayed around her neck and shoulders.
‘No, I couldn’t. I wasn’t free to travel. I didn’t even realise who you were or that you were alive until a couple of days ago.’
For years she’d lived with an awful sick feeling in the pit of her stomach whenever she remembered that day in San Miguel. His sustaining arm round her shoulders as they drove away after their ‘marriage’. The warmth in his smile as he spoke of safety, a hot bath in a clean hotel and a meeting with embassy officials once they got safely over the border on the strength of his passport and money. And then…nothing. Just the hollow emptiness of being told there were no other survivors of the explosion.
His brows arched in wordless disbelief.
‘It’s true.’ She shot to her feet, hands clasped in unintentional supplication as she faced him. ‘I didn’t escape from San Miguel like you did. I’ve been in South America for the last four years.’
Stavros rocked back on his heels as shock ripped through him. He was prepared for some concocted story but not this. This was outrageous.
For so long he’d believed her dead. He’d promised to rescue her before the country erupted into civil war. Yet he’d failed abysmally when a mortar had blasted the street apart as they drove to the airstrip.
With his investigation of a possible new emerald mine complete, he’d been preparing to leave when his driver told him about a foreign girl held in the local gaol. No tourists came to this backwater, not even intrepid backpackers. Even he had encountered difficulties travelling in the remote region. She’d been locked up as a suspected rebel sympathiser. But everyone knew she was innocent, stupid enough to be robbed of her passport and unlucky to fall into the hands of the police chief who had a violent reputation and a penchant for a pretty face.
Stavros’ visit to the gaol had confirmed the truth and he’d vowed to rescue her. Just one look at her frightened, desperate face as she’d shivered in that filthy cell had convinced him he couldn’t leave her behind. What else could he do? They were the only two foreigners within hundreds of kilometres. She had no other hope of escaping before the looming civil unrest erupted into a full-scale bloodbath. If that didn’t finish her off, the brutality of her gaolers soon would have.
With his money and influence, there’d been no protest to him removing his ‘wife’ from the danger zone once she was under his protection.
But the scenario she’d just raised, of her trapped in that war-torn country, was unthinkable.
Stavros turned on his heel and paced across the room, avoiding her upturned face with its false mask of innocence.
An icy finger stroked down the back of his neck at the possibility he’d abandoned her, alone, to face that bloody conflict. His own severely concussed state when he finally came to after the blast, the identification of the dark-haired woman in jeans right beside the ruined vehicle, the official pronouncement of death counted for nothing in the face of that possibility.
‘It’s not true.’ His voice was husky as he turned to face her. It couldn’t be true.
She’d survived and escaped over the border. She’d appeared now simply because she’d finally realised who he was and how much he was worth.
‘Yes, it is.’ Her quiet conviction would have rocked him if he hadn’t known better. But he had personal experience of grasping women and the lengths they went to for money.
‘If you’d been missing all this time there would have been searches, official enquiries, something. Your family in Australia would have been worried and contacted the authorities. They’d have tried to trace you in South America.’
And that would have led them surely to him, the man who’d apparently last seen her alive. The man whose name was on her marriage certificate.
Slowly she shook her head. ‘No. I don’t have a family. There’d have been no enquiries.’
‘No family at all?’ How very convenient.
‘My mother is dead and I never knew my father.’ She wrapped her arms around herself as if cold. ‘I don’t have any siblings and my mother was estranged from her family. I don’t even know where they live, or if I have grandparents still alive. When I get home, that’s what I want to do—try to locate them.’
Her lips twisted in a way that evoked a pang of unwilling sympathy. But Stavros wasn’t easily convinced by a tale of woe.
‘So why didn’t you escape when you had the chance?’ he challenged. She hadn’t stayed to help in the devastation left by the blast. She must have been long gone by the time he surfaced, wounded and disoriented.