The Morning After

There wasn’t a hint of emotion showing in those steady green eyes. ‘They’re yours,’ he reminded her quietly.

That was all he said, and, swallowing thickly, she looked away from him again. ‘Did you ever intend using me for this shoot?’

‘No.’ Just as quiet, just as lacking in emotion. She flinched.

‘You see, I promised Susie years ago that the next time I put a collection together she could show it,’ he explained in that same quiet, flat voice. ‘It isn’t her fault that I decided to use the Adamas name as bait to hook you, Angelica. That was my decision. Those pictures were taken weeks ago—well before Hanson made his decision to use you instead of Susie for his launch. I made that promise to her in good faith and I couldn’t, in all fairness, break it simply because I had made the damned thing so complicated.’

Which was why he had tried so hard to talk her round that day before he’d left, Angelica realised. And at last began to understand the full tangle that this web of conspiracy had got into.

‘She loves Hanson, dammit!’ he suddenly exploded when she showed no sign that any of what he’d said had got through to her. ‘And she believed that he loved her! On the strength of that love she’d constructed this great plan where he chose her to launch Cliché and she came up with the biggest scoop for his first issue he could possibly hope for! I’d even gone to London specially to be there when she did it!’ A sigh rasped harshly from him. ‘Have you any idea how deeply he hurt her when he chose you instead of her?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, because she was feeling a little of how that hurt felt herself right now. ‘Has Todd seen these?’ she then asked quietly.

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘He’s seen them. I took them with me to try to make him see some sense about Susie. He didn’t,’ he clipped. ‘The man is—’

Hurt, Annie put in silently when César cut the rest of the sentence off. Not that ‘hurt’ was what César had been going to say, she noted from the angry look on his face.

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I’ve offered him a deal whereby he can launch Cliché with our wedding—hence the mockups—’ he indicated them with his hand. ‘So long as he fronts Susie and the Adamas collection in his second issue.’

She said nothing, her blonde head bowed over the two different sets of photographs scattered on the table.

‘I’m sorry if you feel I have forfeited your feelings with this decision,’ he went on heavily after a moment. ‘But, being faced with the dilemma I had made for myself, I saw no other way out without hurting someone, and…’

My feelings were easier to hurt than Susie’s, she silently finished for him when he stopped, shrugging eloquently instead.

‘And Todd agreed?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘He is considering my offer as we speak and is due here in a couple of days with his decision.’ Another sigh, and the atmosphere in the sunny room thickened a little more. ‘He already had a fair idea of what has been going on here, Angelica,’ he informed her. ‘We were caught by a Press photographer in that tight embrace when I poured the champagne over you the first night we met. The picture appeared in the paper the next morning.’

More bad publicity, she thought, and shuddered.

‘Hanson recognised me as the same man who had let him discover the Adamas identity that same night,’ he went on. ‘Almost immediately my real name DeSanquez struck a chord in his brain, connecting me with the Alvarez affair, and since then he has been tearing his hair out trying to trace where you’d been taken. He was worried about you,’ he huskily confessed. ‘Frightened because he had to suspect me of planning the whole thing for the purposes of revenge and…’ His expressive shrug acknowledged how accurately Todd had put the full picture together. ‘So I had to do some quick thinking if I was going to stop him from guessing the rest.’

‘And said—what?’ she asked, turning coolly to face him.

He was half leaning, half sitting on the edge of the dressing table, outwardly perfectly relaxed—if you didn’t notice the tell-tale nerve working in his jaw.

But his eyes were studiedly impassive as he continued. ‘I told him the truth,’ he answered simply, then almost immediately qualified that remark. ‘Or the truth as far as it was necessary, anyway.’ And the smile that played briefly around his mouth hinted at just which part he had left out. The big love scene—their big love scene. The one that had ripped a gaping hole in the Annie

Lacey persona. ‘Then I showed him the pictures of our wedding day and let them speak for me.’

‘And did they?’

‘Oh, yes.’ He smiled. ‘They speak loud and clear to anyone who looks at them, don’t you think?’

She refused to take him up on that one; there was still too much left to be said. ‘And Susie?’ she prompted. ‘What did you tell him about Susie’s involvement in it all?’

‘I told him that Susie knew nothing of what I had planned for you here,’ he stated flatly.

But her sceptical look made him sigh with impatience.

‘It’s the truth,’ he insisted. ‘Susie knew nothing! Which is why it is so unfair for her to pay the price for my sins. She loves Hanson!’ he declared. ‘And whatever slant you want to put on it your relationship with him did look suspect! She had a right to feel jealous, used, unfairly treated!

‘And, yes,’ he added before Angelica could say it herself, ‘she hated you for being what she saw as the woman who was wrecking her life on both personal and professional counts. But her hatred stopped short of plotting with me against you. I didn’t need her help to plot,’ he then said drily. ‘I am cunning enough to manage without the need of an accomplice.’

‘You threw that champagne over me deliberately,’ she pointed out.

His wry half-nod acknowledged it.