Desolate.
A desolation of the heart. Of the spirit.
Worse, much worse than before.
Then I thought it was simply that I’d fallen in love with a man who hadn’t fallen in love with me. I accepted it—just as I accepted the limitations of the relationship—but I never thought ill of him.
The vice around her heart crushed tighter still.
Now she knew better.
She knew that she’d fallen in love with a man who wanted nothing more than adulterous, clandestine sexual congress. He regarded her as fit for nothing more. Humiliating his bride, holding both her and the woman he wanted to make sexual use of in callous contempt.
For a man like that it was possible to feel only one emotion.
Not love. Never love—not for a man like that. Love had to be not ignored, like last time, not starved or blanked out, but torn out by its roots, ripped out of her heart, bleed though it would. It did not matter. She had to be clean of such a tainted, toxic emotion. For such a man only one emotion should be felt.
r /> Hatred. Hatred that would burn her clean—burn and rip that misbegotten love out of her. Hatred that could tear it loose.
Hatred that could free her from its thrall. Release her from this prison of desolation.
But hatred had to be channelled, or it would devour her.
With a set, granite face she reached again for the canvas. Blank, bare—
Then reached for her paints, her brush.
Reached for her hatred.
And let it loose upon the canvas.
‘Well?’ Guy’s voice was harsh as he snatched up the phone.
‘It’s done.’ The person at the other end of the line was brief, the way he knew his employer wanted him to be. He’d given the answer he knew his employer wanted. Just why Guy de Rochemont, who ran the vast financial and commercial empire of Rochemont-Lorenz, wanted to make this particular purchase his employee had no idea. It fitted in with nothing in the vast Rochemont-Lorenz portfolio, and was on such a small scale that even if there had been some logical reason for it, it was hardly of the order of magnitude that would draw the attention of the head of the empire. But it was not his job to ask questions—only to carry out instructions, and that was what he had done.
‘Now, get me the following information,’ came his next instruction down the line. ‘I want it by tonight.’ The line went dead.
In his London office, Guy dropped the phone on the gleaming mahoghany surface of his desk. His eyes stared out into the middle distance. They were very green. Very glittering.
Hard as emeralds.
They were harder still when he received the information he’d demanded. Still hard when the next morning, after a sleepless night—as so many nights now were—he climbed into the gleaming new vehicle and gunned the engine, keying in his destination to the satnav.
As he headed out into the London traffic the emerald glitter focussed only on the direction he was going.
Westwards.
It had been raining all night. Steady, relentless rain that had come down out of a leaden sky, turning the fields to a quagmire and the unmetalled lane up to the cottage to little better. Alexa was glad she didn’t have to get in any shopping for a while. She’d got into a routine since she’d been here, of driving into the local market town some ten miles away and picking up enough groceries and household items to keep her going for a week.
Her lifestyle was simple, pared to the bone. She was uninterested in anything else. So long as the stash of logs neatly stacked in the outhouse extension behind the cottage’s old-fashioned kitchen held out, so she could feed the log-burning stove in the sitting room that was the main source of heat besides the electric heater in the lean to, and so long as the electricity supply stayed operational, she was fine.
She wasn’t lonely.
She was used, after all, to a quiet lifestyle. Even in London she’d been content with her own company, never craving the bright lights. Occasional dinner parties, lunch out, the theatre, concerts and art exhibitions were all that she’d wanted. Had it not been for her work and for the rich treasures of art that London housed she’d have been happier in the country anyway.
Though she would not want to live anywhere as remote, as desolate as this isolated cottage. It was doubtless an idyllically pastoral hideway in the summer for holiday-makers, but it now dripped water from the eaves on her head when she stepped outside. From under the doors a perpetual draught whistled, echoing the wind wuthering in the chimney in the evenings. The windows rattled in the bedroom, and she was pretty certain that mice were scuttling in the cob walls.
Not that they bothered her either, provided they kept out of sight. Nor did the spiders that emerged from the wood basket, scuttling across the sitting room to take refuge under the sofa.