Bond of Hatred

He was dishevelled, his hair tousled, his jawline stubbled. And he was mad. He was so mad, he could hardly articulate. Detached from him by this wonderful wall of cotton wool, she felt no pain. The rat, the treacherous, double-dealing, hypocritical swine that he was...

She made it up the steps all on her own, and headed doggedly for the stairs. She kicked off her shoes, lifted the hem of her long dress, searched for something to hold on to and a second later was swept up into Alex’s arms. ‘You’re hurting!’ she moaned because he was crushing the air from her lungs.

‘If you ever do this again,’ Alex swore, little tremors interfering with the normally steady tenor of his deep, dark drawl, ‘I will take measures to restrain you.’

‘It’s the attic for me!’ Sarah sang off-key.

‘Where were you? Who were you with?’ Alex demanded, dropping her down on to a wonderfully comfortable bed.

‘Are you being possessive, Alex?’

‘If you’ve been anywhere near another man, I’ll kill you,’ he intoned, staring down at her with paint-stripping intensity. ‘You’re my wife.’

‘Yuck,’ Sarah responded sleepily, her heavy eyelids dipping as though weights were attached to them.

When she awakened, she was alone and little men were morris-dancing inside her thumping head. My first hangover, she registered miserably, sliding out of bed and weaving a far from straight passage to the bathroom. A shower would make her feel better. She was emerging from the cubicle, swathed in a towel, white as a ghost and suffering from a raging thirst, when she noticed Alex.

‘Oh, no,’ she mumbled. ‘Not now.’

Alex filled the doorway. She refused to look at him, concentrated on his feet.

‘Shouldn’t you be at the office or something?’ she whispered.

‘It’s Saturday.’

‘I thought you went every day.’ He certainly hadn’t spent any days at home. Her clouded gaze worked up his legs. He was wearing black jeans that hugged his long, lean thighs and narrow hips, and an Aran sweater which accentuated his dark golden skin tone and black hair. Gorgeous, so gorgeous, her knees turned weak. Accidently she clashed with hooded dark eyes and her stomach dipped violently. The pain came back in a debilitating surge.

‘Who is he?’ Alex displayed a newspaper, item one in the prosecution case.

Sarah peered at the photo. Stefan and herself, caught smiling and looking surprisingly intimate. What a joke, she thought bitterly, and edged fluidly past Alex’s incredible stillness. He could have doubled for Gina’s Greek statue, poised there with an inscrutably impassive face and an air of earthquake-proof self-command.

‘Sarah?’

She sank down on the edge of the bed. She wasn’t Vivien and she was still angry that the other woman had placed her in so invidious a position. She ran a hand through her tumbling hair, knowing she looked like death warmed up. It didn’t help.

‘He’s an escort Vivien hired and sprang on me,’ she murmured wearily. ‘She also tipped off the pho-tographer.’

‘Vivien?’ Alex breathed incredulously.

‘Look, I really don’t care whether you believe me or not.’ Sarah told him briefly what had happened, talking to his feet throughout. Direct visual contact hurt.

‘You didn’t have to tell me that he was an escort. You could have lied,’ Alex drawled flatly after a very long silence.

‘Why?’ Sarah glanced up, her emerald eyes pained, her soft mouth tight. ‘I don’t play those sort of games. What would be the point?’

He studied her, disturbingly tense, his eyes dark glimmers of light beneath black lashes. ‘Sometimes those sort of games work on men like me.’

‘That’s not my style,’ she admitted, dry-mouthed.

‘It was Vivien’s. Why did you tell me the truth?’ he demanded abruptly again.

How many lies and deceptions had Vivien practised on his father? How many had Alex witnessed? Vivien was fundamentally kind and caring and Alex was clearly fond of her, but it was equally clear that about the last thing Alex appeared to expect from a woman was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He expected manipulation and manoeuvres, point-scoring and pretences, not honesty. He could not understand why Sarah should without pressure openly admit that Stefan had been an escort and the photo a rigged-up piece of farce.

‘Why?’ he repeated again. ‘When I phoned yesterday, you said—’

She flushed. ‘I talked a lot of tosh, the way you do when you’re angry.’

‘You put me through hell last night,’ Alex muttered half under his breath, the admission dragged from him. ‘I really thought you might—’