Mistress of Deception

Alan stared down into the near empty glass as he twirled it slowly in his hands. A degree of puzzlement filtered in when he realised he'd avoided the subject of Ebony's childhood for years. Why? What was he afraid of finding out?

He looked up, blue eyes hardening as he determined to ask about her life with her parents.

'Yes?' She cocked her head on one side and smiled at him. There was a quality of innocence about that smile that curled around his heart. Damn it all, he didn't want to find out anything that would destroy that illusion of innocence. Not now. Not today.

'Yes what?' he asked with deliberate vagueness.

Her smile became knowing. 'You were going to ask me a question. I saw it in your eyes.'

His own smile felt forced. 'I'm glad you're not a business adversary, reading my face like that. I was simply wondering how your foot was. Is it hurting you?'

'It throbs a little.'

'Do you want some pain-killers?'

'No. Just pour me some more of this wine. It's delicious.'

'It is rather good.' He filled her glass to the brim then emptied the rest into his own. 'That's the last of it, I'm afraid, though I do have some other wine around here somewhere. Not Chardonnay, though, and not chilled. Shall I put a bottle in the refrigerator for later?'

'By all means. Might as well take advantage of the fact that you don't have to drive home.'

'Speaking of home,' Alan found himself saying while he rummaged around in the galley cupboards in search of the wine, 'it must have been hard on you not having a proper home while growing up. I mean... you mostly lived in rented apartments and hotel rooms, didn't you?'

And so much for his decision to let sleeping dogs lie...

Ebony's silence drew him to glance over his shoulder at her. 'Aren't you going to answer me?'

No way could he read her face. Ebony was a mistress of deception when she wanted to be. But while those coal-black eyes of hers had glazed into an expressionless void, her body language bespoke a tension that was unmistakable. She didn't want to talk about her childhood. Even having been reminded of it was upsetting her.

'Ebony?'

'Really, Alan, haven't we got more interesting things to talk about besides my boring old childhood?'

A surge of something close to panic claimed him. What in hell lay buried in her past that was so ghastly that she had to put on this pretence of coal indifference?

Several ideas infiltrated, all of them horrifying. Dear God, surely she hadn't been sexually abused, had she? He'd read about such victims often becoming promiscuous as a result of either being raped or abused as a child. It seemed too vile to contemplate, although such a tragic background might explain the mystery of Ebony's behaviour with other men.

Alan paled, but kept his face turned away till he found the wine. If she had been abused in some way, she wasn't likely to blurt it out. She would have to be coaxed into telling the truth. Extracting two bottles of white burgundy from the back of the cupboard, he turned to put them in the small gas fridge before sitting back down opposite her.

'It seems only reasonable that I want to know all about you,' he said smoothly. 'I love you, Ebony. Very much.'

His assertion of love discomfited her, or was it his persistence in asking about the past?

'You already know everything there is to know, surely?' she said with a dismissive shrug.

She was hedging, he could tell, her eyes evading his by pretending to look down at the plaster on her foot.

'Not really,' he replied. 'Because of Pierre's and Judith's constant travelling, I didn't get to spend much time with them. Or you. If your parents hadn't had the misfortune to be on that ferry that day when it capsized, I would never have got to know you at all.'

Her eyes jerked to his, smouldering with an intensity that startled him. 'But you did. And you know what? My parents' misfortune was my good fortune. Because it meant coming to live with you and your mother. God, even the boarding-school you sent me to was preferable to living with them.' Her involuntary shudder of revulsion shocked Alan. 'I hated living with them. Maybe I even hated them,' she bit out.

Alan stared at her. My God, was the situation worse than he'd been envisaging? Had the abuse come from within the family? But who? What?

'That's a very strong thing to say about your parents, Ebony.' He managed to sound calmer than he felt. 'From what I could see, they loved you very much.'