Forbidden or For Bedding?

‘Back from the brink,’ said Guy. ‘Just as I’d planned.’

She frowned, trying to make sense. ‘But you had to marry Lousia—’

‘No.’ His eyes were holding hers. ‘I had to let the world think I was marrying Louisa.’ His expression changed. ‘That was what I realised that night after the charity ball. When I knew that everything had changed. When I knew I had to have you back in my life. I could not marry Louisa.’

His hands cupping her elbows tightened. ‘That was when I realised what I was going to have to do. Somehow I had to have it all—I had to protect the bank and have you, too. And I realised that I could do it if I could just keep the engagement going—because that would give me vital time, under cover of the betrothal, to pull together a rescue package. It was going to be a race, and it was going to be risky, but it could be done. I knew it could be done!’

Abruptly he loosed his grip, turning away from her, knuckling his fists on the mahogany surface of his desk. He twisted his head to look back at her.

‘I thought myself so clever—thought I had found a way to make everything work out. Because I had to, Alexa.’ His voice changed. ‘The stakes had just become higher than I could bear to lose. That night—’ his face worked ‘—that night when I made love to you again, I knew that I could never let you go! And I thought…’ He paused, then went on, forcing himself to speak, ‘I thought it was the same for you. That you would agree to what I was proposing. I was scared, Alexa—scared that it would be all too easy for you to take up with another man, like the damn man you’d been with that evening. So I had to keep you—any way I could!—while I sorted out the bank, got myself free of my engagement to Louisa.’

He went on raggedly. ‘I was intending to tell you everything—talk to you—bare myself to you—make you understand the trap I was in. But you disappeared.’

He paused again, then made himself go on, his eyes burning into hers. ‘When I found you I discovered what a fool I’d been—an arrogant, conceited fool—to think you felt for me what I felt for you. And when I saw that portrait—’ He broke off.

‘Then I knew.’ His voice was heavy, as heavy as a weight crushing him. ‘I knew I was too late. I had made you hate me. And I had lost you.’

There was bleakness in his face—as bleak as the desert sands blown by witless winds.

The room, despite its cooling air-conditoining, was suddenly airless. Alexa’s throat was blocked. She couldn’t breathe.

‘I—I need to get some fresh air,’ she said faintly.

At once he was there, crossing to the pair of large French windows that opened on the other side of his desk out to the gardens. He threw them open and she hurried out, dragging in lungfuls of summer air. There was a little ornate garden bench, and gratefully she sank down on it. Her legs did not seem to be working.

Nor her mind.

Thoughts, emotions, swirled like a maelstrom, and she could make no sense of them—no form, no order. All the certainties she had lived with for so long now—certainties that had been like blades in her heart—had suddenly, in a few moments, dissolved to nothing…nothing at all. Desperately she tried to still the swirling maelstrom, make order of it, sense. She seized the one thought that swirled most vividly, most tormentingly. Seized it and stilled it and looked upon it.

Guy wasn’t married. He hadn’t married Louisa. He was never going to marry Louisa. And since the moment he had taken her to bed again he had never been going to marry Louisa.

The enormity of the realisation was like a tsunami going over her. She seemed to sway as she sat, too weakened to move.

As arms came around her. Guy had lowered himself down beside her, his arm over her shoulder, steadying her.

‘Alexa—’

There was anxiety in his voice. At least it sounded like anxiety—but what did she know? What did she know of Guy de Rochemont at all?

She twisted her head, looked at him.

‘I don’t know you,’ she said.

His arm dropped from her, his expression transfixed.

‘I don’t know you,’ she repeated. ‘I’ve never known you.’ She pulled a little away from him. ‘But then…’ Her throat tightened, and the words were so difficult to say, but she had to say them—she must look right into his face, his eyes, and say those words to him. ‘I never tried to know you. Not in those months we were together—though the actual time we spent together was probably little more than a few weeks. But you had barriers all round you, keeping me out—keeping everyone out. I respected them, understood them, knew why you did it—because you were—are—a very private person. I am too. I…I keep myself to myself. Keep my emotions to myself. I’m…used to it. Just like you. That’s why…at the time…I didn’t mind the kind of relationship we had. It was only afterwards, when you came to me again, that I saw it differently. Made myself see it differently. As demeaning. Exploitative. With you just using me for convenient on-demand sex.’

She looked at him, looked into the troubled green eyes that held hers.

‘But it wasn’t. I had been right before. I’d understood

what there was between us, and I should have trusted that. I should have trusted you. Instead—’ her voice was heavy ‘—I simply ran away, giving you no chance. No chance at all. No chance to talk to me, tell me what you intended.’

He disengaged his gaze from her, looking out over the gardens. The last of the sun caught the water in the stone-girded pond, which rippled lazily in a lift of air.

‘But I never did talk to you, did I?’ he said. ‘Not about us. I just accepted what there was and was glad of it. Grateful for it. Grateful to have found a woman who could be, for me, an oasis in my life. So when I had to end it, had to agree to marry Louisa, all I could bear to do was—walk. Walk away. Leave that precious oasis you had become and instead walk out into a desert. Seeing you again…’ He glanced at her now, a gaunt look on his face. ‘It was like seeing a mirage, beckoning to me—promising me all that I could want. All that my life did not have any more. So I reached out, and I discovered—’ his voice was strained ‘—I discovered it was, in truth, nothing more than a mirage. My own imagining. Not real at all.’

He leant forward, back hunched, forearms on his thighs, hands loose, staring at the water rippling in the stone basin, slowly draining of its light as the sun slipped away, off the gardens, behind the shadowing trees that marched along the borders.