The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo

But she’d refuted that, too.

‘No—I don’t regret it.’

Her voice—so very clear, so very insistent.

His voice now, in his head, just as insistent.

It doesn’t make sense!

The words forced themselves into his head, repeating themselves. It doesn’t make sense!

Because it didn’t. It couldn’t. What Celeste had told him about what she had done—that she had just wanted quick, easy money and had no regrets about how she’d got it!—matched nothing else that he knew about her!

She’d turned down renewing her lucrative contract with Reiner Visage because she’d refused to give Karl Reiner what he wanted—sex in exchange for another year’s contract! She’d refused to prostitute herself for her career—for easy money...

How did that match with what she had confessed to him?

Nothing he knew about her matched with her confession!

Memory blazed through him like a forest fire, igniting the undergrowth, ripping through his consciousness. Nothing in any memory of her until that last painful confession bore any indication at all that she could justify that insistence of hers! It was the one jarring note in everything he knew about her!

Making no sense at all.

He stilled. Like an unbearably slow gear wheel turning, his mind worked. The cogs of logic twisted, bringing up into his consciousness the one blazing truth that proved beyond all things just how much her insistence that she was like Madeline simply made no sense. How much it was a lie—must be a lie!

If she has no regrets for what she did, then why was she living a celibate life? Why had she cut herself off from all relationships with men? Why was she so obviously haunted and traumatised by her past? Why was it so painfully hard for her to come to trust me—to give herself to me—to accept me in her life?

He stood stock-still, feeling winded by the realisation. All around him people seemed to be moving like an inchoate sea, but he was alone in it. Slowly, clankingly, the wheels of logic turned again.

Madeline had no regrets—and she lived a life that showed it! A life that gave her her fill of affairs, of revelling in her sexual appetites!

Yet Celeste had withdrawn totally from that side of her existence. Shown extreme reluctance—every sign of trauma...

And that could mean only one thing—

She must regret what she did! She must! Or she would be as brazen as Madeline!

But why would she lie about it?

It can’t be the truth—it can’t! If she had no regrets, if she didn’t care about what she’d done, then she would not have lived the lonely, passionless life she has...

Yet what reason could there be for lying about something that had destroyed everything they had together? Smashing to pieces all that was between them?

With infinite slowness the wheel inside his head made one last turn. If Celeste were not lying about regretting what she had done, even though what she had done had so clearly traumatised her, then there was only one other explanation for her insistence...

Only one.

Without conscious awareness he started to walk out of the crowded room. His hand slid inside his jacket pocket. Took out his mobile. He had calls to make. Urgent calls upon which his entire future happiness depended.

I have to be right about this! I have to be!

Desperation filled him. Mingled with the most precious quality in all the world. Hope—to which he clung with all his strength.

* * *

Celeste was packing. Not for another modelling assignment abroad, but to leave London. For good. She didn’t know where she was going to go. She was just going. She’d let her flat, furnished, and tenants were moving in after the weekend. An agency would deal with them—deal with everything that came up. Her clothes and personal effects were locked away, and she’d cleaned the flat scrupulously. Now she just had to finish packing the case she was taking with her. Summer clothes, for somewhere warm, because she was cold to her very bones...