Lost in Love

‘Where are we going?’ she asked curiously.

‘You will see soon enough,’ he murmured secretively. ‘Ah, but this is good,’ he sighed. ‘Walking the garden with a beautiful woman on my arm. I had forgotten just how good it can feel!’

‘You old charmer,’ Marnie teased, and reached over to kiss his leathery cheek.

‘Now that,’ he drawled, ‘was even better!’

She laughed, and so did he, neither aware of how easily the sound of their laughter floated on the still air to where several men stood talking in a huddle.

A head came up, dark and sleek, standing head and shoulders above the rest. He pin-pointed the sound, frowned for a moment, then went back into the huddle, his concentration broken while he puzzled over what was eluding him.

‘Oh—!’ Marnie cried as they emerged through a small clump of trees into the evening sunlight again. ‘How absolutely enchanting!’

In front of them, about a hundred feet away, stood the quaintest, sweetest little cottage she had ever seen. It could have been stolen right out of a child’s picture story-book with its cream-washed walls clamouring with red and yellow roses.

‘What is it?’ she asked excitedly, realising that this must have been the building she’d picked out when she and Guy arrived on the estate. But she was at a complete loss as to why Guy would have constructed such a beautiful thing in this idyllic spot.

Then a sudden thought occurred to her and she turned sharply to her companion. ‘Roberto?’ she gasped. ‘Is this for you? Have you decided to move out of the main house to live here?’

He just shook his head and refused to answer. ‘Let us go inside,’ he said, his smile enigmatic.

Letting him urge her forward again, Marnie found herself half expecting Little Miss Moffat sitting primly inside.

She could not have been more wrong, and stopped dead in her tracks, her breath suddenly imprisoned in her breast.

Not a cottage at all, her stunned mind was telling her, but a studio, a light and airy one-roomed studio made to look like a cottage from the outside so it could blend so perfectly with its surroundings.

They had come upon the place from the south, and really that sweet fairy-tale frontage was only a façde. The rest of the walls were wall-to-wall glass! Glass from the deep window-ledge that ran around the room from thigh-height onwards. And furnished with purely functional Venetian blinds, rolled away at the moment to let in maximum light, but there to use when necessary.

Her easel stood there—not the one from her London studio with Amelia and her cat resting upon it, but her old easel, the one from Guy’s apartment, and her old draughtsman’s board, with a sheet of white sketching paper lying on its top.

On unsteady legs, she walked over to it and looked down. It was the same sketch she had been doing four years ago when her life had fallen apart. She ran her fingertips over the sharp lines of an abstract she had been working on, its image just a blurred memory now, the clean symmetrical lines pulling chords in her creative mind, but not the burning inspiration which had urged her to begin it then.

‘Why?’ she whispered to the old man watching her in silence from the open door.

He didn’t answer straight away, and when eventually she turned to look at him there were tears shining in her blue eyes.

‘Why?’ she repeated.

‘He had everything moved from London to here after this had been completed. It helped him, I think.’ His gaze flicked grimly around the sunny room before settling back on Marnie’s shock-white face. ‘As a kind of therapy, during a time when he was…’ He paused and grimaced. ‘Your continued absence from Oaklands has given it all a maturity. So I suppose this makes it perfect for seeing for the first time.’ There was a hint of bitterness in his voice then, and Marnie averted her face, knowing it was probably meant for her.

So, Guy had created this heavenly place for her. The tears grew hotter, burning her eyes as she let them wander over all the other achingly familiar things placed neatly about the room, her emotions in a state of numbing confusion. Shock, surprise, pleasure, pain. And, raking under all of that, suspicion of his motives.

Was this her ivory tower, then? she wondered. The place Guy had always wanted to hide her right away?

‘My wife—mine!’ He could have been standing right beside her as those fiercely possessive words shot right out of the past to grate fiercely on her senses. He had said them the day they were married, when he took her in his arms for the first time as his wife.

‘My son is not guilty of the terrible crime you believe of him, Marnie,’ Roberto dropped into the throbbing silence.

She tensed up. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she dismissed coldly.

Roberto shook his silver head, leaning

with the aid of both hands on his elegant walking stick. ‘I may be old, my dear,’ he murmured drily, ‘but I am not senile. And nor am I so surrendered to my infirmity that I am incapable of finding out for myself those things I wish to know.’

Like father, like son, she recognised bitterly. Of course Roberto would have left no stone unturned in his determination to discover why his son’s marriage fell apart so dramatically. When Roberto had retired from business, he had done so because he was weary of the constant race for power, not because he was no longer capable of winning the race.

‘And,’ he went on grimly, ‘there were plenty of people present at the fated party willing to relay events as they saw them—not good people,’ he conceded to her bitter look. ‘But knowledgeable people, none the less.’