‘We need to go somewhere we can talk,’ Roel murmured smooth and soft and for no reason at all that she could imagine her blood ran cold inside her veins.
‘I’m…I’m…er…working,’ she mumbled, a coward to the backbone at that instant.
‘Bene…then I assume that you don’t have a problem with your staff and your clientele hearing what I have to say to you.’ Hard, handsome face merciless, Roel switched with fluid ease from his native Italian to English. ‘I’ll begin by admitting that I’m not impressed with the business I recall you set up with my money.’
Hilary almost cringed where she stood. But a split second later she was rocked by the ramifications of what he had just said. If Roel recalled their arrangement, he could no longer be suffering from amnesia. Since she had left Switzerland, Roel had evidently recovered his memory of those five lost years. Although his consultant had forecast exactly that conclusion, Hilary was severely shaken by the knowledge that Roel now remembered everything that had ever happened between them.
Her stomach churning with nervous tension, she turned aside to Sally and asked the other woman if she could cover her appointments until lunchtime.
‘We can talk upstairs,’ she told Roel tautly. ‘When did you get your memory back?’
‘After you disappeared. That probably helped. After all, you had me living a life that wasn’t mine,’ Roel pointed out sardonically.
Hilary paled at that unfeeling jibe and unlocked the door of her flat. ‘I’m surprised you’re here. I didn’t think you’d want to see me again.’
The silence seethed. Roel sent the door flipping shut behind him. The hall was very narrow and dark and Hilary backed out of it into the kitchen/living room. Roel surveyed the worn furniture and general shabbiness and distaste flashed across his lean dark features.
‘You’re even poorer than I imagined. This place is a dump,’ Roel pronounced in a grim undertone. ‘When my foolish aunt, Bautista, contacted you when I was in hospital, the temptation to profit from my misfortune must have been overwhelming for you—’
‘It was nothing of the sort!’ Hilary was shattered by that accusation. ‘How can you say such a thing? All I was worried about was you. For goodness’ sake, I thought you were dying!’
Roel had lifted a letter lying on the table and he was reading it. He winced. ‘You’re in debt—’
Embarrassed to realise that he was looking at a communication from her bank urging her to settle the overdraft she had recently run up on her account, Hilary snatched it out of his hand again. ‘Mind your own business!’
‘Everything about you is my business. Knowing that gives me a good feeling,’ Roel informed her with stinging softness.
Hilary had no idea what he was getting at and in any case was more keen to defend herself against the charge that she had gone to Switzerland in the hope of somehow enriching herself at his expense. ‘Let me explain why I’m in debt. I spent a fortune on two very expensive last-minute flights to and from Switzerland and on paying extra wages to staff to cover for me while I was away. My budget doesn’t run to extravagances like that.’
Unimpressed, Roel elevated a scathing ebony brow. ‘Is poverty your only excuse for jumping at the opportunity to leap straight into my bed?’
Her hands balled into fists. ‘You put me in that bed—’
‘Oh, you really fought me off, didn’t you?’ Roel derided with a honeyed scorn that cut her like a knife blade. ‘You’re a conniving little con artist and you knew exactly what you were doing. Only by consummating our marriage could you ensure that you could claim a substantial divorce settlement from me.’
Hilary was bone-white. She felt horribly humiliated by his suspicions. ‘I won’t be claiming anything from you now or at any other time. I don’t understand why you’re thinking like this about me. Was it such a crime for me to want to see you when I heard you’d been injured? I told you I was sorry in my letter—’
Roel vented a sardonic laugh that made her flinch. ‘All four lines of it? Even then you couldn’t tell me the truth or admit the extent of your deception. You staged a vanishing act and you left me no explanation—’
‘When it got down to it, I just didn’t know what to say,’ Hilary muttered tightly.
‘You didn’t want to warn me that I had been sharing my bed with a lying, cheating little whore?’
‘Don’t call me that!’ Hilary launched back at him on a wave of angry hurt.
‘You were a class act, bella mia.’ Unforgiving golden eyes clashed with her anguished scrutiny and remained resolute. ‘You knew the way to my heart…for an entire week you screwed my brains out every time I asked an awkward question!’
In a wild tempest of mortified pain at that wounding crack, Hilary snatched up the mug sitting on the table and threw it at him. ‘That’s not how it was; that isn’t how I behaved!’
Offensively still, as though it was beneath his dignity to duck, Roel underlined his point by raising a speaking brow as the item hit the wall several feet to the left of him. ‘When you’re cornered you’re very childish but that doesn’t cut any ice with me. Neither do tears—’
‘I’m not going to cry over you!’ Hilary yelled at him full volume. ‘You’d have to torture me to get tears!’
‘Tears irritate me as do emotional scenes and flying pottery. But you should get it all out of your system now,’ Roel advised grimly. ‘If you make an ass of yourself in public again, I will be very angry with you.’
Growing stress was making Hilary’s brow pound with a painful pulse-beat of tension. ‘Make an ass of myself? Again? What are you talking about?’
Roel removed something from the inside pocket of his well-cut jacket and tossed it down on the table for her perusal. It was a magazine clipping and she was aghast to recognise the woman in the photo, who was clearly dashing tears from her unhappy face, as being herself. It had been taken that last day in Switzerland when she was walking into the airport at Lugano and she had not even noticed the photographer. Beneath ran several lines of French.