Bridal Bargains

She heard the bedroom door close as she was rummaging in the dressing-table drawers, picking out the bits that belonged to her and leaving behind the ones that no longer did.

‘Why?’ he asked quietly.

She didn’t answer—couldn’t. It was all stopped up inside her as if someone had ground a cork into a fizzing bottle. But what really bothered her was what would happen if that same person came along and shook the damned bottle.

‘Something happened in Rafina,’ he prompted when she didn’t say anything.

Naturally he would presume that because that was where she had been when she’d altered into a different person. Or went back to being the person she used to be, she corrected grimly.

‘You saw someone …’

She could feel his footsteps vibrate through the carpet as he came towards her. Her hands began to shake badly as she pulled open another drawer.

‘Desmona, perhaps. Has Desmona been stirring up trouble again, Claire?’ he demanded. ‘Is that what this is about?’

Try again, she thought bitterly. She picked up a framed photograph of her mother holding Melanie in her arms and made as if to edge round him.

His hand came out to touch her shoulder. ‘Claire …!’ he rasped out impatiently. ‘This is—’

The cork blew. In a fountain spout of bitter fury, she turned on him and let fly with her hand to the side of his wretched, deceiving face. ‘Don’t touch me ever again—do you hear?’ she spat at him.

His hand was already covering the side of his face where she’d stung him. He should have been angry—Claire would have preferred him to get angry so she could feed off it, build on what was bubbling up inside her.

But those black eyes of his just looked bewildered. And she couldn’t cope with that. ‘You lied to me,’ she accused him thickly. ‘Ever since the first day that we met you’ve lied and you’ve lied and you’ve lied …’

With that she managed to step around him. On trembling legs she walked across to the bed and placed her mother’s photograph on the stack of things already assembled there.

‘You’ve seen your aunt Laura,’ he realised belatedly. ‘I did wonder if there was a risk of that when she turned up at my office today.’

Claire said nothing. She just stood tautly, with a white-knuckled grip on each side of the photo frame, and let the silence grow to suffocating proportions.

‘What did she tell you?’ he asked eventually, sounding flat and weary, like someone who knew he had been exposed without the ability to defend himself.

‘She doesn’t even work for you,’ she whispered. ‘She never did.’

‘You made that assumption, Claire,’ he murmured. ‘All I did was allow you to go on thinking it.’

That was his defence? Claire didn’t think much of it, then.

‘But why?’ she demanded, spinning around to lash the question at him, and so hurt by her own wretched gullibility that she couldn’t keep it out of her voice. ‘Why should you want to deceive me and trick me and manipulate me like this—when the truth would probably have given you the same results?’

He released a heavy sigh. His hand fell away from the side of his face and as it did so Claire felt a tiny pinch of remorse when she saw the imprint of her fingers showing white against his olive skin.

‘I could not afford to take the risk that you would not fall in with my—plan,’ he answered.

‘Your plan to take Melanie away from me.’ She spelled it out clearly.

‘That was the original idea, yes.’ He freely admitted it. Then his eyes flicked her a searching look. ‘Your aunt told you about my brother and your mother?’

For an answer, she wrapped her arms around her slender body, her eyes closing as her mind replayed her aunt’s wretched story of her mother’s brief affair in Madrid with the hugely wealthy but very married fifty-year-old Greek merchant banker, Timo Markopoulou, which had resulted in Melanie.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard him mutter.

What for? she wondered. For being responsible for making her feel like this, or was he apologising on behalf of his brother and her mother?

‘Did you know about their affair while it was happening?’ she whispered threadily.

‘I knew about an affair—yes,’ he confirmed, turning away from her to go and stare grimly out of the window. ‘But I did not know who the woman involved was,’ he went on. ‘Or the fact that she had borne him a child, until almost a year after Timo’s death and I was in London on business when your aunt came to see me.’