The sentence, the accusation was out before she could stop it, the look that crossed Marcus’s face mirroring her own shock and distaste.
She wanted to stop herself but she couldn’t; it was as though some alien and destructive force had taken her over as she heard herself demanding bitterly, ‘Tell me again why you came to Provence, Marcus. To be with me, you said. Because you wanted me? Because you wanted me… or because you wanted to compare me with her? Well, there isn’t any comparison, is there? Ask Vanessa.’
Marcus stared at her, caught between anger and guilt. He had done nothing… nothing to merit the accusations Eleanor was flinging at him. On the contrary, he had done everything any man could to resist the temptation offered.
And yet Eleanor was still accusing him… blaming him.
And if he had been tempted, was that his fault? Didn’t Nell realise what she was doing to him, to their relationship with her obsession with that damned house? Didn’t she realise how it made him feel to know how low down he came on her list of priorities? Even in Provence all she had really wanted to do was to talk about the house. Couldn’t she see how he felt? Didn’t she realise that he didn’t even damn well want to move?
But he couldn’t tell her that… it meant too much to her.
‘I am not having an affair with her if that’s what you’re trying to imply. I haven’t even thought of—’
‘She has,’ Eleanor interrupted him fiercely, ‘and if you’re going to tell me that you didn’t know that, don’t bother, Marcus. You must have. You should never have let her come here.’
She was close to tears now, her anger gone, to be replaced by shock and pain. Marcus might not have slept with the American, but he had not discouraged her from believing that he found her attractive. He couldn’t have done. If he had…
> If he had, she would not have been standing there in her kitchen, flirting with him, teasing him… behaving as though Eleanor herself simply did not exist.
When Marcus came to bed later, she pretended to be asleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘NELL… How are you?’
Eleanor sighed as she recognised her accountant’s voice.
‘I’m fine, Charles,’ she told him. ‘How are you?’
‘Fine. Look, I’m having one or two problems with the finance for the house, which I need to discuss with you and Marcus. I’ve got a conference to attend this weekend, but I’ll be back early next week and—’
‘Marcus will be in The Hague then,’ Eleanor interrupted him. ‘He’s got a case there. He’s not sure how long it’s likely to go on for.’
‘Mmm. Well, we really do need to get this finance sorted out. I’m putting as much pressure on the lenders as I can. Perhaps you and I can get together, then. How would Tuesday morning suit you?’
‘Fine,’ Eleanor told him wearily.
As she replaced the receiver she could feel the beginnings of a tension headache cramping her neck and forehead, the pain a jarring discord to the music thumping from Vanessa’s room.
The weeks had gone agonisingly slowly, but now it was only another couple of days until Julia returned. Sasha, thank goodness, had gone shortly after Eleanor’s and Marcus’s return from France, shrugging aside Eleanor’s anxious questions about how she intended to travel back to school and whether her foster parents needed to be contacted.
‘Sasha does her own thing. She doesn’t let her foster parents, or anyone else tell her what to do,’ had been Vanessa’s contemptuous response when Eleanor had commented over dinner on her concern at the other girl’s behaviour.
Things had not been easy since their return from Provence; the brief hiatus of happiness they had shared while they were there had been exactly that.
On the surface they might have appeared to make up their quarrel over Sondra. Marcus had admitted that he had been aware of the American girl’s interest in him, but he had also insisted to Eleanor that she was wrong in suspecting him of returning it, and for her part Eleanor had admitted that she had perhaps over-reacted a little.
Today, after she had dropped the boys off at school, she was taking Vanessa shopping, a ‘treat’ she suspected neither of them was looking forward to.
Monsieur Colbert had rung her the previous evening asking if they could bring forward the commencement of their contract, as he had some urgent translation work for her to do.
Later, worrying about what she had taken on, she had tried to explain to Marcus her anxiety that she would not be able to cope with the amount of work he wanted done without the regulation of a proper office environment where she could shut herself away from all other interruptions. Working here at the house, where she was guiltily aware that she was, reluctantly at last, taking over Marcus’s study, and where there were so many other distractions, was making it impossible for her to achieve her normal output. The work Pierre Colbert required was extremely complex and involved, requiring her full concentration, and how could she give that, she asked Marcus, when she had so many other worries on her mind?
What she had hoped to do was to delay the commencement of the contract until after their house move was settled, but now she was forced to acknowledge that it would be many months before she was able to even contemplate working at Broughton House and, moreover, supervising and overseeing all the work the house needed was going to mean she would be physically as well as mentally unable to give her full time and attention to her work.
And yet increasingly she was forced to acknowledge that the expense involved in buying the house and making it properly habitable was going to mean that they would need the extra income her new contract provided.
Vanessa had repeated her loathing of the idea; said that the last thing she wanted was to have to spend any time in some falling-down dump of a house in the country, and, far from being thrilled at the idea of having her own room and being given a free hand in its décor, all she could talk about was Sondra and how the American girl had never liked her own stepmother.