She turned to him. It was still the basilisk stare. Still killing.
‘To tell me what?’ she said. ‘What can you possibly have left to say to me?’
His eyes flashed darkly. ‘Why did you not tell me? Tell me the truth?’
She pulled her wrist away, as if his touch contaminated her. The wide hallway that stretched from the front entrance to another pair of doors, opening onto the gardens, was deserted. The wedding party had gone through into the dining room. Household staff were circulating. Xavier could hear the soft pop of a champagne bottle being opened. Voices and murmured laughter. A mix of French and English.
He seized Lissa’s wrist again, taking her by main force out of the house, onto the terrace. The warmth of the summer sun beat down upon their heads.
‘Let me go!’
‘I must talk to you. Why didn’t you tell me the truth?’
A voice like snake venom hissed at him in return. ‘The truth? You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you. Your twisted mind covered everything—you had it all worked out. Some filthy little casino hostess had got her gold-digging claws into your precious brother, and that was all you needed to know. All you bothered to find out.’
Xavier’s face stiffened. ‘My security team’s investigations into who Armand was visiting only showed you living at that address—no one else was observed coming or going.’
‘That’s because my sister didn’t come or go. She was in a wheelchair, trapped indoors for days at a time. The only time she ever went out was when I took her to the hospital for therapy.’ The venom was still poisonous in her hissing voice.
‘You were reported embracing my brother on the doorstep—’
Lissa’s eyes flashed viciously. ‘He was being kind. He knew how upset I was about Lila—he was trying to comfort me. He knew I was exhausted and in despair because it didn’t matter how hard I worked—including at that vile job I had to take at the casino. And let me tell you something, Mr Oh-So-Bloody-Morally-Pure, there aren’t many damn jobs you can do in the evenings that pay anything like the kind of money I had to try and put by. I’d have cleaned offices if I could, but the hostess job paid better, and I had to do it even if it meant I had to let creeps slime all over me and try and get me to do those disgusting private hires—’ Her voice broke off, and she shook suddenly. Then she returned to her invective. It was pouring out of her, like bile from a w
ound that had never been staunched.
That never could be staunched.
‘It didn’t matter how hard I worked,’ she repeated, the bitterness twisting in her voice. ‘I did office work all day and that horrible casino work half the night, and I still couldn’t get close to what I needed.’
‘What do you mean? Why did you need to—’
He never finished the question. She yanked her hand away again.
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you. Nothing. And now—’ her chin lifted, her eyes flaring ‘—I’m going back indoors. This is my sister’s wedding, and nothing is going to ruin it. I knew you’d be here, and I knew what you’d try and do—but I knew you’d never succeed. Armand doesn’t care that his bride can barely walk, and he doesn’t care that I was a casino hostess. So there’s nothing you can do. Except go to hell. Just go to hell!
CHAPTER TWELVE
SHE stormed off. Her heart was pounding. She’d known, just as she’d thrown at him now, that he would arrive in time for the wedding. In time to try and stop it. But she’d known he wouldn’t succeed. Couldn’t succeed. The love that bonded Lila and Armand was much, much too strong to be broken.
Her throat tightened as it did whenever she thought of Lila—and the miracle that Armand had wrought.
Xavier Lauran’s falseness could not touch them.
And she would not let it touch her. Never again!
She was trembling with reaction, she knew. She’d been keyed-up ever since she’d arrived at the beautiful, imposing villa. Even though it was the setting for her sister’s crowning happiness, for herself it could only be a place of torment. Returning her to memories that writhed like poison in her brain every time she looked out over the brilliant, azure sea towards the Îles de Lérins.
So close. A short boat ride would have taken her back there.
But they were as distant as the far side of the galaxy. On rapid clicking heels she walked down the wide, tiled hallway to seek the guest cloakroom. She needed to compose herself before joining the wedding party. She had to hide everything she felt about Xavier Lauran. To Armand, to his parents, they would never have met previously.
Ever since she had come back to London, with the destruction of everything she had thought true about Xavier lying in twisted, ugly shards at her feet, she had had to tread on eggshells when it came to Armand. She had known, above all, that she must not tell him what his brother had done—had only, instead, resorted to putting all her focus, all her emotion, into rejoicing at the miracle that had happened to her sister.
The miracle that she had prayed for. That the pioneering operation on her spine at the clinic in America where Armand had taken her would work, would undo the damage done in the car crash that had crippled Lila and killed her parents. Lila was all she had left, and her devotion to her was absolute.
As Armand’s had proved.
It had been so hard to let him take Lila to America without her. She had longed to go with them, to give Lila the support and encouragement she had always given her these last, terrible two years since she’d been crippled. But she had let them go without her. Because she had seen the love she had so fervently hoped for spring between them. For hadn’t Armand’s eyes the very first time he’d seen Lila in her wheelchair by the hospital lift, lit with a light that had surely only meant he was instantly smitten? Lissa had known, when he’d taken her to America, that love was surely blossoming between them, and that because of that they needed no third person present. And Lila herself had been adamant, determined that she did not want Lissa with her during the treatment.