‘Until you drank wine and cognac and it washed away your guard.’ His eyes shadowed. ‘It was the only way you’d succumb to me.’ He turned away, walking across to the window, pulling back the curtain halfway to stare down into the street. The car he’d arrived in, black and sleek, was hovering by the kerb. He would go down to it, drive away, leave her
. Get out of her life for ever. Free her from the curse he had been to her …
He heard his own voice echoing in his head.
The mountains expose the truth …
The words mocked him like a whip on bleeding skin. He’d thought he’d expose the truth about her—find whether she had truly changed from the woman she had been five years ago. But she had never been that woman …
He’d known nothing about her. The woman who had walked the mountains with him, at his side, remained as hidden from him as she had always been. He thought of the life she’d had—growing up with the bleak, damning knowledge of her background, her determination to break free of it. He thought of how that life had tried to suck her back into its fetid, filthy pit when some foul, psychotic scum had threatened her, and what she’d done to try and save herself.
What it had cost her to do so.
He heard his voice speaking to her as if from very far away.
‘I ruined you. When you stole from me I ruined you without knowing why you’d done what you had—what had driven you to do it. Ruined you because I presumed you had come to me to sell your body. Ruined you in my anger and my arrogance. And then I ruined you all over again when I saw you with a man you wanted to marry—a man who would have given you security and a place in the world, a place you’d earned. Despite what I did to you, you made yourself get up off the floor again, when I’d thrown you down on to it, and you remade yourself as Thea.’
He shifted his weight, moving his shoulders as if the tension in them had become unbearable.
‘And in Switzerland …’ His voice was harsher now, serrated. ‘My arrogance triumphed yet again. I wanted to test whether you had indeed remade yourself—turned yourself from Kat to Thea, turned your back on all that Kat had been, paid your dues for all that she had done. And—’ he took a harsh, ragged inhalation of breath ‘—above all I wanted to force you to admit the truth. The truth I’d known for so long, for five long years, since I first met you. The truth you’d denied, hurling defiance at me, forbidding me to touch you, lying that you could not bear it … could not bear my touch! It became my whole aim to keep you with me, to disarm you day by day, get you to lower that fierce, ferocious guard against me, get you to trust me—get you to admit your desire for me. The desire I knew with absolute certainty you felt but would not admit.’
His eyes were veiled again, lashes dipping over their obsidian depths. ‘And you did—I achieved my goal, triumphed in it. But I didn’t know.’ His voice changed again, and the contempt in it was naked—contempt for himself. ‘I didn’t know I had achieved it only because you were intoxicated that night—so intoxicated you yielded to me what you have guarded so long. Your virginity. And when you had, you hated me so much for what I’d done to you that you fled from me and would have rather risked your life than take my hand to save you. Because of everything I’d done to you for so, so long …’
He shook his head slowly, from side to side, as if he would negate everything he’d said. But how could he? Arrogance and anger had driven him for five years—and they had brought him here now. With everything he’d come to want in ashes at his feet. Burned by his own anger, his own arrogance.
He fell silent. The silence stretched between them.
Thoughts flowed into Thea’s head. Thoughts that should not be there. Emotions that should not be there.
He lifted his eyes to her.
‘I should ask your forgiveness, but how could you forgive me? How could anything I do make up for what I put you through?’ He took a ragged breath. ‘Go back to your Honourable Giles, Thea. Tell him that I threatened you and blackmailed you and behaved unforgivably to you. Go back and find your happiness.’
She swallowed, eyes shifting away, then back to him. The thoughts that should not be there, the emotions that should not be there, were still there.
She spoke, her voice low and difficult. ‘He’s marrying someone else. A family friend. I saw the announcement in a newspaper at Dover. She’s very suitable. Far more than me. I didn’t love him—I was only fond of him. That isn’t a reason to marry someone. It would have been wrong of me to marry him. But I wanted what you said I wanted—security, a place to belong.’ She looked away again for a moment. ‘I had no family—not any that I wanted—that anyone would want! So I wanted to marry someone who did. Giles knows all his ancestors, over hundreds of years—it was unimaginable to me. I didn’t want his title, or his country house, or his wealth. I wanted his family—his ancestors. Because I had none. That’s why I should never have agreed to marry him.’ She paused, then made herself go on. ‘And though I hated you for forcing me to see what I was doing I was lying to him about myself—about being Kat, deceiving him just as you accused me of doing.’
It was hard to say it, but she had to. It was true. As true as the other truth she was shielding from her head. The truth that Angelos Petrakos had forced her to face.
The final truth about herself.
The one that she could not deny. The one that had nothing to do with whether she had drunk wine that night in the mountain chalet, or whether she had been a virgin when she’d given herself to him, or with anything of the bitter past between them, the anger and the hatred.
The truth had been inside her since she had fled from Switzerland, and could not be denied. It was here now, as she stood looking at him—the truth that would last all her life.
But to what purpose?
Anguish crushed her.
She had discovered a truth in Angelos’s arms that she could never deny. But it was a hopeless truth—a truth that could only mock her …
To have come through so much! To have taken so long a journey, for so many years, through such hardships, such anguish and anger and bitterness, and find such a truth at the end of it!
There was a burning behind her eyelids. Hot and painful. She tried to keep her eyes closed, to quench the burning, but it would not be quenched. She could feel the burning liquefy, like molten fire, feel it squeeze past her eyelids, hot on her cheeks.
She heard him draw breath, speak—words she didn’t know. Then there were footsteps—rapid, heavy. Then his presence, tangible, in front of her.
And then his finger brushed the burning molten tears.