Her eyes went to him. Her heart leapt. Oh, how good it was to see him again! How good to let her gaze feast on him, to drink in every sculpted plane of his face, every feathered sable shaft of his hair, every lean, honed line of his body! How good it was to see him again...see him here.
I have to make a memory of this moment! I have to imprint his image on the sofa, so that I can always see him there. Always have this moment...only this moment...
She moved restlessly, hands cupping her mug of tea, going not to sit beside him but on the edge of the armchair by the fireplace. She saw his eyes flicker uncertainly as she took her place away from him.
She didn’t want to—she wanted to set down her tea, take his coffee from him and then wrap her arms around him as if he were the life raft of her life.
But she could not do that. She could never do that now. She was adrift, alone on an endless sea that was carrying her far, far away on a current that had started long ago, trapped in it for ever...
‘Why did you leave?’ he asked.
He looked into her face and knew the answer. The answer he hadn’t wanted to hear. The answer he’d thought needed no response from him. But it must, or why else would she have done what she had.
‘It’s because of Madeline, isn’t it?’ he said. His voice was quiet. Deadly.
Her eyelids dipped over her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said.
He looked at her. The fumes from the coffee cup on the low table in front of him rose in a coil. Madeline had thrown her coil around them—he had thought he’d broken it, but it must be tightening still around Celeste or else why would she have run from him?
‘She said something to you, didn’t she?’ he said, never taking his eyes from her. ‘She dripped some vicious, toxic poison into your ears before I came, and that’s why you left.’
That had to be it—it had to! But Celeste was shaking her head.
His face worked. ‘Then why—in God’s name, why? Didn’t I make it crystal clear to you just why I would never in a thousand years have anything more to do with her? Do you think I would ever want anything to do with her—with anyone who’s like her?’
He took a shuddering breath. Celeste was looking at him and her face was set.
His expression changed. Slowly, he spoke. ‘You think I was too harsh, don’t you?’
His words fell into silence.
He spoke again. ‘You think I was too harsh, too condemning. Too pitiless—too puritan! Despising Madeline for what she did—how she earned her first money!’
He sat back, drawing a breath. Never taking his eyes from her. Then he spoke again.
‘Celeste, I come from a country that is poor—with a level of poverty almost unthinkable in the pampered West, in the developed countries of Europe and North America and Australasia. I come from a region where peones toiled on the land, barely scraping a living by subsistence farming or working on the landlord’s vast estancias, where those in the cities lived in shacks and shanty towns. Where children begged in streets with gutters running with sewage, where they slept in doorways at night and stole by day, and inhaled glue to numb their hunger and their fear.’
He looked relentlessly into her eyes.
‘And where women, young and old, would sell their bodies for a meal, or for shelter, or to feed their children! That, to me, is poverty! That, to me, is need and desperation! And if you think—’ His voice gritted with intensity, his eyes burning. ‘If you think that I would ever, ever condemn a woman in those pitiless circumstances from surviving in any way she could, then you have misjudged me utterly!’
He leant forward now, infusing his body with urgency.
‘Those women have no choice! Their only choice is prostitution or to go hungry—or to see their children hungry! They are driven to it by desperation!’