‘You had the option to buy fresh clothes in Edinburgh. It was through your own stubbornness that you look a wreck. The rest you can get at the apartment,’ he dismissed.
‘But I could see to my packing tonight rather than having to do it tomorrow,’ she attempted a bit of cajolery.
‘No.’
She glared at him. ‘Did you bully the girls when you were a little boy, too?’ she threw at him tightly.
‘I was known for my charm as a child, actually,’ he answered with the first hint of a smile for days. ‘Only you have ever forced me to resort to bullying tactics.’
‘Because I won’t let you walk all over me.’
‘Because you never know when to give up!’ he snapped, then glanced briefly at her and sighed. ‘Look, you are tired, I am tired. And—dammit, Marnie, but I can still remember the last time I trusted you to remain where I left you only to find you had disappeared within an hour of my leaving you! And I have no intention of suffering another six months like those again,’ he said grimly.
So, he’d suffered: good. So had she. He deserved to. She did not. She felt no pangs of sympathy, no twinges of remorse for worrying him as she had. Her own sorrow had been much harder to shut out. Guy had not held the monopoly on distress.
On her return to London there had been plenty of people more than ready to tell her how much he had suffered during her absence, how Roberto had found it necessary to take back control of the company while his son went demented trying to find her. How Guy had, on drawing a blank with every avenue he tried, turned to the bottle instead and for weeks refused to listen to reason while he drowned his suffering in whisky.
Only when she had felt able to face the world again had she come out of hiding. And she had made Guy aware of her return in the most fitting way possible: with a legal notification that she had filed for divorce.
He had ranted, he had raved, he’d threatened her, and eventually, when he’d come to accept that nothing he could do was going to change her mind, he’d left her alone.
But he had continued to refuse to agree to a divorce. ‘I will pay any penance you consider due to you, Marnie, with good grace,’ he’d told her grimly. ‘But not by taking back the vows I made to you. Those will stay, no matter what you say.’
‘I say I will never be your wife again,’ she’d told him bluntly. ‘Which leaves us both living in a state of limbo if you continue to be stubborn about this.’
‘Then limbo it has to be,’ he agreed. ‘But no divorce. It is an unarguable fact that time eventaully heals all wounds. You will forgive me one day, Marnie. We will stay in limbo until that day arrives.’
And they would have done, if Marnie had not played her final trump card. ‘Sign the papers, Guy, or I will change the plea to adultery, citing Anthea, and drag the whole mucky thing through the courts in the most public way I can manage.’
He had signed. They both knew what her threat would do to his father if she carried it out, and Guy had just not been prepared to risk calling her bluff on it…
The car drew to a halt, and Marnie blinked, bringing her own wandering mind to a halt also, finding herself in the once familiar dimness of the basement car park to his private block of luxury apartments.
‘Out,’ Guy said, snapping open his own seatbelt and climbing lithely out of the low-slung car. Doing the same, Marnie stretched her tension-locked muscles while he moved to the boot and collected his suitcase.
They rode the lift to the penthouse floor in silence, neither apparently prepared to risk another row by making eye-contact, which seemed to be all it took to give the tension buzzing between them cause to vent itself.
Nothing really changes, Marnie thought ruefully to herself as she followed him into the apartment. Everything looked very much as it had done the last time she had been here. Oh, no doubt the walls had enjoyed a fresh lick of paint, she allowed, but other than that it felt a bit like walking through a time warp coming back here.
She shivered delicately.
‘You know the layout,’ Guy said. ‘Take your pick of the guest rooms. I’ll just get rid of this case…’ He was already striding down the wide caramel and cream hallway towards the master bedroom. ‘Be an angel, Marnie,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘See what Mrs Dukes has left in the fridge for dinner, will you?’
‘You still have Mrs Dukes?’ she asked in surprise. The prune-faced housekeeper had worked for Guy long before Marnie arrived on the scene.
He stopped, turning to mock her with a cynical look. ‘Not everyone finds me as objectionable as you do, you know,’ he drawled, and moved on, leaving her feeling ever so thoroughly put down.
She found a ready cooked chicken cacciatore sitting in the fridge with detailed instructions on how to heat it placed neatly on top of the dish.
That made Marnie smile, despite her mood. Neither she nor Guy was much use in the kitchen, and Mrs Dukes had a habit of leaving precise instructions on how not to ruin her carefully prepared dishes.
Marnie followed the instructions to the letter, gaining some childish kind of pleasure in mockingly checking each command as it came up on the list. Mrs Dukes was a quiet, aloof kind of woman. Nice, but not someone Marnie had ever felt she could get close to. The housekeeper had always considered the kitchen her domain. And if she and Guy ever had ventured in here in the dead of night to pillage the fridge, they had used to do it like two naughty children. Mrs Dukes’ kitchen, they’d used to call it. Mrs Dukes’ cooker. Mrs Dukes’ fridge.
A sharp pang of something she had no wish to acknowledge pulled her up short and she walked quickly out of the room, turning towards the guest bedrooms in search of the room she would be using tonight. Only her feet slowed outside another door. The door to her old studio. A room she had not entered since the night four years ago when she’d flown at Guy.
If the kitchen had been Mrs Dukes’ domain, then this, Marnie recalled, had been hers. North-facing, wide-windowed and converted exclusively to suit her needs. Guy had provided her with every conceivable artistic aid she could possibly require.
Slowly, almost unsure that she actually wanted to do it, she turned the handle and stepped quietly inside.