‘Correct, but you’re not going anywhere.’ He shot her a bitterly angry glance as he thrust the door shut. ‘Such a fragile little flower as you are, I wouldn’t want to shock Thompson with your screams. Not that he’d interfere. You look worried, Claire. All your past and present sins rising up before you? That call I was waiting on came, confirmation from one of my top accountants in Pretoria.’
Claire got up off her knees clumsily. ‘Pretoria? W … what are you talking about?’
Dane lounged back against the dressing-table, a predator, coiled to spring for the jugular. There was anger … and there was anger. Claire was only acquainted with the blustering, red-faced rage of her grandfather. Dane’s ability to remain outwardly cool in the grip of that white-hot blaze silvering his magnificent eyes, cool despite the highly tangible aura of zapping, raw tension he emanated, was far more demoralising.
‘Ken is one of my accountants. He was superintending Adam’s bundle of investments for me.’
‘So?’ The word was forced from her jerkily.
A tiny pulse was beating fast at the corner of his mouth. ‘Just another nail in your coffin, Claire. And you can drop that innocent, wide-eyed look! Adam was as sly as they come. He taught you well, didn’t he?’
Claire backed even though he had not moved. Wild explanations for his insane behaviour were whirling faster and faster in the paralysed limbo of her brain, nothing connecting to make sense.
‘Only you didn’t bargain on being around when the balloon went up, did you?’ he prompted in a black velvet voice. ‘I guess the next time I was going to hear from you was via some fancy divorce lawyer. Or were you planning to crawl back and grovel? Are you that obsessed with me? Did you think I’d forgive you?’
‘What are you accusing me of?’ The cry, edged by the shrillness of hysteria, came from the very depths of her being.
A winged ebony brow lifted. ‘Do you love me? Is that what all this is about?’
Drugs … he was high, not himself … her imagination ran riot. ‘L … love you?’ she parroted, nearly tripping over the foot of the bed. ‘Of course I don’t love you … lay one finger on me, Dane and I’ll scream.’
‘Maybe I’ll gag you.’
‘Dane …’
‘Tie you down?’ He still hadn’t moved a muscle. ‘I ought to congratulate you on the immense and naïve simplicity of the trap. It has to be the only time within my experience that a woman has relied not on sex and not on intelligence but on puppyish appeal. Well, I’m sorry, Claire. You don’t look remotely pathetic right now,’ he asserted with sibilant emphasis. ‘Ring Max.’
Her lashes fluttered in bemusement. She was completely off-balanced. ‘Max?’
‘Yes, Max,’ Dane repeated shortly. ‘There’s the phone. Use it.’
Hot pink feathered her cheeks. ‘I told you he wasn’t on the phone.’
‘But his friend is. That is what you told me, blithely ignoring the fact that you never made a single call from the Dorchester and were with Hannah outside it,’ he filled in with unutterable cool. ‘He doesn’t exist, does he?’
‘Of course he exists!’ she cried.
‘Carter had never heard of him and if he exists, take me to him or get him over here. I’ll even send a car,’ Dane told her silkily. ‘What? You can’t manage that, either?’
She breathed in unsteadily. ‘He isn’t in London at present.’
Dane laughed scornfully. ‘My opinion of your IQ is divebombing, Claire. I have a helicopter, a private jet, a whole fleet of cars, and yet Max is quite inaccessible? Where is he? Lost in the Amazon?’
‘I don’t know … all right, I lied to you!’ she gasped. ‘But he was living on that estate where I was attacked, and when I went there no one was in. I don’t know when he’s due home.’
Dane’s mercilessly hard gaze positively shimmered. ‘And this man whom you purport to love and who was ready to marry you at the drop of a hat … you expect me to believe that you don’t know where he is, that you can’t reach him by any method and that you could marry me without even discussing that with him?’ he summed up derisively. ‘Oh, come on, Claire, a child in the nursery could tell more credible lies than that! Max is a figment of your imagination. The ploy you used to persuade me that that ceremony today was a formality.’
Her control snapped. ‘Damn you, he exists!’ She went plunging over to her handbag and emptied it on the floor while Dane watched her like a hawk. ‘You have to be out of your mind to think I could tell lies like that …’ She fumbled through the scattered cosmetics and then stilled, glancing back at him in horror. ‘My bag was stolen. My photos of him, his letters … they’re all gone.’
‘That was a coloratura performance. Garbo couldn’t have done it better,’ Dane pronounced grimly. ‘And if Max did exist I’d be nailing his hide to the wall permanently, because he could only be your accomplice in this rip-off. Although Adam qualified most for that.’
‘Don’t you dare run down Grandfather!’ she snapped, and suddenly started towards the door. ‘I’m getting out of here.’
A hand as cruelly strong as an iron vice reached out and enclosed her narrow-boned wrist, literally jerking her back. Dane gripped her squarely in front of him, his jewel-bright eyes stabbing like diamond cutters into her starkly pale face. ‘To go where? You’re broke but for the clothes you stand up in, and I can tell you where the couple of thousand cleared off the sale of Ranbury are going,’ he breathed contemptuously. ‘To the old folk you were so keen to pluck violin strings for.’
‘I may … be broke,’ she muttered. ‘But I can go to the Social Services.’
‘You’ve never worked and you’re married. Catch twenty-two! You’re my responsibility.’