‘I haven’t forgotten one second of the last three months, believe me. The time’s engraved on my memory for ever. Sheer hell.’
He had moved so she could join him on the sofa but she deliberately sat facing him on the opposite one, pretending an interest in the cathedral where the concert was being filmed as she tucked her feet under her legs, curling up and pulling the robe over her toes. ‘It’s very beautiful,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s a timeless quality to such places, isn’t there?’
‘Why have you shut me out so completely?’ His voice wasn’t accusing, in fact it was verging on conversational, and for a moment the words didn’t register. ‘I mean, I’d really like to know.’
‘Zeke, please don’t start this again. It’s no good.’
‘For such a soft, gentle creature you can be as hard as iron when you want to be,’ he said thoughtfully.
Stung, she met his gaze. ‘I’m not hard.’
‘Not with the rest of the world, no. Just with me. Why is that? What is it about me that makes you believe I don’t bleed when I’m cut? That I don’t feel like other people?’
She drew in a deep breath. ‘I know the last months have been hard for you too. I do know that. But that doesn’t make any difference to now.’
‘Do you blame me for the fact I wasn’t with you when it happened?’ he asked quietly. ‘That’s completely understandable. I hold myself responsible. I could have—should have—prevented it. I let you down and it’s unforgivable.’
Shocked beyond measure, she stared at him. ‘Of course I don’t blame you. How could I?’
‘Very easily,’ he said flatly, leaning forward so his hands were clasped between his knees, his dark gaze tight on her pale face. ‘We were supposed to meet for lunch that day. I would have been with you but for that problem that arose. If I hadn’t cancelled, put a damn business meeting before my wife—’
‘Stop it, Zeke,’ she whispered, horrified. ‘The accident was nothing to do with you. It was me. For a brief moment of time I didn’t think. It’s as simple as that. Probably countless thousands of people have momentary lapses of concentration every day. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time to have mine. But it wasn’t your fault.’
She had forgotten they’d been supposed to meet at a little bistro that day, before he had called and made his apologies; the trauma of the accident and the following days and nights of unconsciousness had wiped it from her mind. But even if she had remembered she would never have imagined he blamed himself for what had happened. Zeke was such a logical man—so rational and clear-headed. She couldn’t believe he had been condemning himself all this time. The fault had been hers and hers alone.
He stood restlessly to his feet, shaking his head. ‘I don’t see it that way but we won’t argue about it.’ His eyes held hers. ‘I’m not going to let you go, Dee. Not after nearly losing you three months ago.’
It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life to look back at him and speak the painful truth. ‘You have no choice. It takes two to make a partnership and I can’t do it any more. I need…’ She paused, knowing her voice was shaking but unable to keep the tremours from showing. ‘I want a divorce, Zeke. Our lives are set to go down different paths now. Surely you see that as much as I do? We can’t go back to the way things were. It’s over.’
Two small words that cut like a knife through all the intimacy they had shared, the good times, the laughter, the joy and pleasure. She watched his face change, becoming set and rigid, as though he’d pulled a mask into place hiding any emotion. ‘And what I want and feel counts for nothing?’
Melody unconsciously gripped her hands together, struggling for composure. ‘I’m doing this for you as well as me—’
‘Don’t give me that.’ He didn’t shout, but the tone of his voice stopped her mid-sentence. ‘That’s too easy a get-out and you know it. Never once today have you asked me what I want or how I’m feeling. You’ve simply stated you’re walking and that’s that. No discussion, no compromise, no nothing.’
She could see why it appeared that way to him, but how could she explain it was sheer self-survival driving her? She had always felt out of her depth in Zeke’s world, but before the accident she had known she was out of the ordinary in one way—her dancing. She was good, more than good, and it had been the foundation of who she was—for right or wrong. Now that foundation was gone, smashed by a ten-ton truck…
The ball of pain in her stomach that had nothing to do with her accident and all to do with leaving Zeke contracted suddenly, as though a steel fist had been driven deep into her solar plexus. Without picking her words, she whispered, ‘When I was a little girl I was always on the outside looking in. I didn’t get invited to parties or to tea with anyone. No one waited to walk home from school with me or called for me at the weekends to go to the park or play at their house. Of course looking back now I know it was because my grandmother never let me have friends round and she wasn’t friendly with the other mothers, but then I thought it was me. That the other girls didn’t like me—thought me odd because I hadn’t got a mother and father like them. Perhaps they did or didn’t. I don’t know. But then I found that when I danced the rest of the world didn’t matter. I lost myself. I wasn’t me any more. And my grandmother encouraged it, knowing how much it meant to me. She did do that for me.’
‘While effectively screwing you up in every other way.’
Taken aback by the bitterness and outrage in his voice, Melody shook her head quickly. ‘No, no she didn’t. She—she did the best she could—the same as we all do, I suppose. She didn’t have to take me in, she could have let me go into care, but she didn’t. And she had been hurt—badly. I think she loved my grandfather very much, and certainly she never got over him. Her way of dealing with it was to hide her pain behind a façade of being tough. And she had lost her daughter too?
?my mother. She had a lot to cope with.’
‘You’re making excuses for her. You always do,’ he said softly, the harshness gone from his voice.
‘I’m trying to explain.’ The unexplainable. And opening up like this terrified her. But he deserved this at least.
‘Dee, you’re more than a dancer. You’ve always been more than a dancer.’ He’d come and crouched in front of her as he spoke, his trousers stretched tight over muscled thighs.
The temperature in the room rose about twenty degrees and all coherent thought went out of Melody’s head. She stared at him, knowing he was going to kiss her and wanting it more than she had wanted anything in her life.
The polite knock at the door to the suite followed by a male voice calling, ‘Room Service,’ came as a drenching shock. Zeke reacted before she did, standing up and walking across the room while Melody made a heroic effort to pull herself together.
The man bustled in with a laden serving trolley, quickly and efficiently setting the small table in a corner of the room with cutlery and napkins, lighting the two candles in a silver candelabrum which he’d brought with him and placing it in the centre of the table. ‘Would you like me to serve the food, sir?’ he asked Zeke, after he’d opened the bottle of wine Zeke had obviously ordered and offered him a taste before pouring a little into two large wine glasses.
Zeke glanced across at Melody, who was still sitting on the sofa. ‘No, we’ll be fine. Thank you, and happy Christmas.’