He had done what he would have considered to be his duty. Reminded her that she had to eat, produced the food. It was up to her whether she ate it or not. He couldn’t care either way. So the absence of a lock on the door was no problem either, was it? He wouldn’t try to claim his conjugal rights.
He didn’t want his rights. He couldn’t care less.
Jake heard her thumping up the stairs, his mouth quirking with a reluctant smile. Her languid grace had always been part of her fabled mystique, and now she was clumping around like an ill-disciplined hoyden in hobnailed boots. She who had always been so poised, so amiably cooperative, had developed a will of her own—if his hijacking was anything to go on—not to mention a sharp little tongue.
She must have been desperate to try and work things out between them to have pulled a stunt like this.
He still didn’t want to think about the ramifications, but knew he had to. And, let’s face it, he hadn’t made it easy for her to approach him in a more conventional manner—out of the country far more than he was in it, deliberately avoiding her and anyone who knew her.
He finished the remains of his brandy and leaned back in the chair, long fingers toying with the stern of the glass, his mind absorbed.
Over the past year he’d avoided all contact and allowed her none. His solicitor had paid her allowance into her bank account each month, and those of his staff who knew his movements had been instructed to be politely noncommittal if his estranged wife had ever shown any desire to know his whereabouts.
As far as he knew, she never had. It had appeared that she, too, had written their three years of marriage off as experience—one, in his case, never to be repeated—and was getting on with her life, with the resumption both of her modelling career and her steamy, hole-and-corner affair with the much-married Maclaine.
His mouth tightened. He could never forgive that ugly betrayal, her cold-blooded deceit. Never!
He pushed the empty glass across the table, picked up her untouched one, swallowed the contents in one long draught and snapped to his feet.
However long and loudly she protested he couldn’t believe she was an innocent victim of sibling mischief. For one thing, his sister knew better than to take it into her head to meddle with his life. She knew he refused to have Bella’s name mentioned in his presence.
He was sure Bella had set the whole thing up, somehow convincing Kitty that deceiving him into coming here was in his best interests. Not too difficult a task to accomplish, given the way she’d pulled the wool over his eyes through three years of marriage!
Well, she’d wanted him here and now she’d got him here, so they might as well have things out in the open. And whatever her reasons, and however desperate those reasons were, he had one answer only.
There was no going back. It was over. If she had any doubts at all it was time they were knocked on the head. And there was no time like the present...
He squared his shoulders and strode to the stairs.
CHAPTER FOUR
BELLA was too strung up to sleep. In any case, it was hours before her normal bedtime. The paperback she’d brought along to read wasn’t making any sense. The words slid past her eyes. She was taking nothing in. She closed the book and shivered.
The room was cold, and to make matters worse she’d discovered that Evie—rot her socks!—had performed yet another major interfering act. Her devious little sister must have sneaked into her room at home while Bella had been in the shower and replaced the old, cosy pyjamas she’d packed herself with slivers of sheer silk and lace—the sort of seductive nonsense she hadn’t worn since she and Jake had been living together.
Her first defiant thought had been to go to bed in the leggings and woolly sweater she was wearing. Every last thing she’d bundled into the canvas bag the previous evening had been replaced.
No serviceable jeans and cosy sweaters to be found, just fabulous designer gear, almost forgotten leftovers from her time as Jake’s wife. They had been languishing, unworn, at the back of a cupboard at the flat she shared with that devious, double-dealing sister of hers!
She couldn’t trek out of here, heading for Aberwhatever-it-was, wearing a long slinky shirt or flowing silk trousers!
Nearly spitting with rage she’d stripped off the comfy leggings and sweater, reserving them for the morning, and hugged into a clinging dream of white satin-sheen silk, the tantalisingly revealing lace top supported by the narrowest, flimsiest of shoestring threads.
What had those two she-devils had in mind? A flaunting, a seduction, a reconciliation followed by Happy-Ever-After? What did they have between their ears? Fluff, or rocks?
Her eyes savage with bottled-up temper, she dug her head into the pillow and dragged the duvet up over her ears to shut out the sound of the howling wind. And heard instead the squeak of the door hinges, followed one second later by Jake’s incisive voice.
‘It’s time we talked.’
‘Get out of here!’
Bella shot up against the pillows, regardless of the next-to-nothing she was wearing, her eyes narrowed with temper. She had never been this angry in the whole of her life, and now she had someone to vent it on!
Her formative years had been spent in a restless round of moving from one place to another, the family being dragged by her feckless father to wherever the grass was supposedly greener but never was. She’d become adept at keeping her head down, quiet as a mouse, in case she got noticed and hauled into her parents’ blistering, roof-raising rows.
Then there had been marriage to the man who could have given her everything but hadn’t. And the only legacy she had from their marriage was bitterness.
She had tried to be everything he wanted her to be: glamorous, cool, acquiescent, the perfect wife, anxious—too anxious—to hold onto a will-o’-the-wisp, workaholic husband who was here today and gone tomorrow.