‘Different women...night after night...media furore.’ The key phrases lit up in illuminated brilliance inside Sarah’s whirling head. And she knew then that if spontaneous combustion existed Elise would have burned alive in front of her. Kill the messenger, she thought hysterically. The enemy had come to crow.
‘I am astonished that Alex should sink to such a level.’
‘I’m not,’ Sarah admitted through compressed lips, a shudder running through her.
Elise surveyed her with apparently troubled dark eyes. ‘I am prepared to speak to Alex on your behalf and reason with him.’
‘That’s very kind of you but I don’t require that type of assistance.’ Sarah stood up, smiling so widely, her jaw ached. ‘I am so very pleased to have met you, Elise. Vivien told me how deeply impressed I would be and I am.’
Faint colour mottled the perfect complexion. Elise got up. ‘But I—’
‘Henri!’ Sarah bawled, certain he was lurking not too far away.
‘I am afraid I have offended you,’ Elise said, looking impressively dismayed by the concept.
‘There you are, Henri!’ Sarah hailed the butler with relief. ‘Please show Madam du Pré out.’
‘Alex will be furious when he hears of this—’
‘I don’t think so.’
Trembling violently, Sarah watched Elise stalk out, the picture of wounded dignity. She listened to Henri’s steps returning across the vast hall, walked to the door of the salon and lifted her head high. ‘I want to see the last two weeks’ newspapers.’
Henri perceptibly paled. ‘All of them, madame?’
‘I think you know the relevant ones, Henri,’ she conceded tightly and then turned away.
Everybody knew...everybody had known but her. That was what Vivien had been shouting at Alex about! And Alex had actually believed she knew as well. ‘The more you ignored what I was doing, the more I seethed,’ he had said. Claudine brought the newspapers in a fat, well-thumbed bunch. The entire staff had been poring over them and feeling so incredibly sorry for the new bride, linked in misery to a groom behaving like a rutting stag within twenty-four hours of the wedding.
Nothing could have prepared Sarah for the agony of seeing the first photo. It dug cruel fingers into her heart. Alex, dining with a blonde; the next one was of Alex dancing with a brunette. She stopped there, looked no further. She was choked with outrage, savaged by pain. Alex had forced her to share his bed on their wedding night and had then gone out to make an outsize fool of her in public. He had told her she would need buckets of humility to stay married to him an
d he hadn’t been exaggerating one little bit.
In turmoil, she sat there, ripped apart by a sense of betrayal so powerful, it blocked out all else. This was the man she had spent five hours in bed with. She was so shattered she couldn’t even cry. ‘You will lie down for me whenever I want,’ he had said. And she had.
Henri was hovering when she glanced up numbly. He passed her the phone. It was Vivien, chattering gaily about how lonely she was in her apartment and how much she would love Sarah to go out to dinner with her. ‘Love to,’ Sarah said numbly.
An hour later, Henri appeared again. This time he passed the phone as if it were an offensive weapon. ‘Monsieur Terzakis,’ he told her.
Sarah snatched at the phone like a madwoman, suddenly galvanised into life again by the power of sheer shuddering rage and hatred.
‘How do you feel?’ Alex purred in a tone of deeply intimate recollection.
‘Gobsmacked!’
‘I don’t think I know that expression...’
‘I saw my first newspaper in thirteen days this afternoon,’ she said sweetly. ‘And then I went on to my second old issue. Gobsmacked,’ she said again in the simmering silence echoing from the other end of the line.
‘You didn’t...know?’ Alex asked sounding astoundingly hesitant.
‘And I was the only person who didn’t, wasn’t I?’ she said fiercely, tears suddenly springing to her eyes.
‘I can explain—’
Sarah wasn’t listening. ‘What Vivien may have done to your father is nothing to what I am capable of.’
‘I’m coming home—’