‘I’m sure you will enjoy your future life,’ he replied.
He spoke with absolute indifference, and it was like a blow.
‘Thank you—yes, I shall. I have every intention of doing so!’ she returned.
Pride came to her rescue. Ragged shreds of it, which she clutched around her for the pathetic protection she could get from it.
‘Hans is still in the restaurant.’ She made herself smile, forcing it across her face as if she were posing for a camera—putting it on, faking it, clinging to it as if it were a life raft. ‘I’m sure that he will want to see you! He has such exciting news! Best you hear it from him...’
She was speaking almost at random, in staccato ramblings. She could not bear to see his face, his indifferent expression, as he so clearly waited for her to leave him alone, to take himself off. She shifted her handbag from one hand to the other, and as she did so she jolted. Remembering something.
Something she might as well do here and now. To make an end to what had been between them and was now nothing more than him waiting impatiently for her to leave him be.
She raised her bag, snapping open the fastener.
‘Marc—this is most opportune!’ The words were still staccato. ‘I was going to ask the jeweller across the road to courier this to you, as I promised, but you might as well take it yourself.’
She delved into her bag, extracted the jewellery case. Held it out to him expectantly.
His eyes lanced the box, then wordlessly he took it. His mouth seemed to tighten and she wondered why. Expressionlessly, he slid it into his inside jacket pocket.
For a second—just a second—she went on staring up at him. As if she would imprint his face on her memory with indelible ink.
Words formed in her head, etching like acid. This is the last time I shall see him...
The knowledge was drowning her, draining the blood from her.
‘Goodbye, Marc,’ she said. Her voice was faint.
She turned, plunging down the corridor. Eyes blind. Fleeing the man who did not want her any longer. Who would never want her again.
Whom she would never see again.
Anguish crushed her heart, and hot, burning tears started to roll silently down her cheeks. Such useless tears...
* * *
Marc stood, nailing a smile of greeting to his face as his guests arrived. It was the bank’s autumn party, for its most valued clients, held at one of Paris’s most famous hotels, and he had no choice but to host it. But there was one client whose presence here this evening he dreaded the most. Hans Neuberger.
Would he show up? He was one of the bank’s most long-standing clients and had never missed this annual occasion. But now...?
Marc felt his mind slide sideways, not wanting to articulate his thoughts. All he knew was that he could not face seeing Hans again.
Will he bring her here?
That was the question that burned in him now, as he greeted his guests. What he said to them he didn’t know. All that was in his head—all there had been all these weeks, since that unbearable day in London—was the scene he had witnessed. That nightmare scene that was blazoned inside his skull in livid, sickening neon.
Ineradicable—indelible.
Tara, leaning forward, her face alight. Hans offering that tell-tale box, its lid showing the exclusive logo of a world-famous jeweller, revealing the flash of the diamond ring within. And Tara reaching for it. Tara bestowing a kiss of gratitude on Hans’s cheek with that glow in her face, her eyes...
Bitter acid flooded his veins. Just as it had all those years ago as he’d watched Marianne declare her faithlessness to the world. Declare to the world what she wanted. A rich, older man to pamper her...shower her with jewellery.
His face twisted. To think he had rejoiced that Tara had declined to cash the cheque he’d left for her! Had returned his emeralds.
Well, why wouldn’t she? Now she has all Hans’s wealth to squander on herself!
He stoked the savage anger within him. Thanks to his indulgence of her, she had got a taste for the high life! Had realised, when he’d left her, that she could not get that permanently from himself! So she’d targeted someone who could supply it permanently! Plying Hans with sympathy, with friendliness...