She felt her arm caught, her body swung round. ‘Sabine—what is going on? Why are you running away?’
She stared, eyes blank with incomprehension. ‘I have to go,’ she said again.
For a second there was rejection in his eyes, and then, as if making a decision, he let her go.
‘I’ll call a cab—’ he said.
‘No!’
He ignored her, crossed to a phone set by the front door, spoke swiftly to someone she assumed was the concierge. Then he hung up, turned to look at her.
‘I don’t know what is going on, or why. But if you insist on leaving I cannot stop you. So—go.’ His voice was harsh, uncomprehending. His expression blank.
For one timeless moment she was paralysed. Could only stare at him. Could only feel as if an explosion was taking place inside her, detonating down every nerve, along every vein.
‘Bastiaan, I—’
But she could not speak. There was nothing to say. She was not Sabine. She was Sarah. And she had no place here...no place at all...
He opened the front door for her and she stumbled through.
As she ran for the elevator she heard the door slam behind her. Reverberating through every stricken cell in her body.
CHAPTER EIGHT
BASTIAAN WAS DRIVING. Driving as though he were being chased by the hounds of hell. The road snaked up, high into the Alpes-Maritimes, way beyond the last outpost of the Riviera and out into the hills, where bare rock warred with the azure skies. Further on and further up he drove, with the engine of the car roaring into the silence all around him.
At the top of the pass he skidded to the side, sending a scree of stones tumbling down into the crevasse below. He cut the engine but the silence brought no peace. His hands clenched over the steering wheel.
Why had she run from him? Why? What had put that look of absolute panic on her face?
Memory seared across his synapses. What had flamed between them had been as overwhelming for her as it had been for him—he knew that. Knew it with every male instinct he possessed. That conflagration of passion had set them both alight—both of them.
It has never been like that for me before. Never.
And she had gazed at him with shock in her eyes, with disbelief.
Had she fled because of what had happened between them? Had it shocked her as it had shocked him? So that she could not handle it, could not cope with it?
Something is happening, Sabine, between us—something that is not in your game plan. Nor in mine.
He stared out over the wide ravine, an empty space into which a single
turn of the wheel would send his car—himself—hurtling. He tried to make himself think about Philip, about why he had come here to rescue him from Sabine Sablon, but he could not. It seemed...irrelevant. Unimportant.
There was only one imperative now.
He reached for the ignition, fired the engine. Nosed the car around and headed back down to the coast with only one thought in his head, driving him on.
* * *
Max lifted his hand to halt her. ‘Take it again,’ he said. His voice was controlled, but barely masking his exasperation.
Sarah felt her fingers clench. Her throat was tight, and her shoulders and her lungs. In fact every muscle in her body felt rigid. It was hopeless—totally, absolutely hopeless. All around her there was a tension that was palpable. Everyone present was generating it, feeling it. She most of all.
When she’d arrived at rehearsal, horrendously late, Max had turned his head to her and levelled her with a look that might have killed her, like a basilisk’s. And then it had gone from bad to worse...to impossible.
Her voice had gone. It was as simple and as brutal as that. It didn’t matter that Max wasn’t even attempting to get her to sing the aria—she could sing nothing. Nothing at all.