Part 15 (2/2)

'None of those things. I dropped you, Kat, for the same reason I took you to Switzerland.'

She rounded on him. 'I know why you took me there! So you could throw it in my face, rub my nose in it, that you could make me want you! And you did,' she finished bitterly.

'Just as,' he replied, 'you'd made me want you five years ago.' His mouth twisted. 'You were like no other female I'd ever met. Oh, not just that incredible body and that face of yours-that beauty you wear as carelessly as if you didn't know you had it! But the woman behind the beauty. The one with the att.i.tude, the raw edginess, the beautiful, insolent mouth that answered me back, that made me think there was only one way to silence it. That's why I dropped you from that campaign.'

His eyes were branding her, boring into her.

'I didn't want a woman like that in a publicity campaign for one of my businesses.' His eyes held hers for one moment longer. 'I wanted her in my bed.' He took a sharp, indrawn breath. 'But I never mix business with pleasure, Kat. I never let the women I take to my bed use me for their careers. Never. So I knew that if I wanted you for myself I could not let you do that shoot. When I made my decision to make my relations.h.i.+p with you personal, not professional, I countermanded my instructions to my campaign director. He'd already notified your agency of my first decision, and so had to issue a cancellation. I was going to contact you the following day, and tell you, but you,' his voice turned into a blade, 'pre-empted me by arriving at my suite that same evening. Offering me your body to get the job back.' Now the blade of his voice was cutting his own flesh. 'I did not realize how desperate you had cause to be. I only knew that I was angry, so very angry with you, because you'd made it impossible for me to have an affair with you by showing me how you would try and use it to advance your career.'

There was contempt in his voice, but it was not for her.

She was staring at him. 'I never,' she said slowly, each word biting, 'never offered myself to you! You accused me of it, but I never did. I never would.' She took a painful scissoring breath. 'I told you my mother was a junkie, my grandmother an alcoholic.' She looked at him. Looked at him unflinchingly. 'How do you think they funded their addictions?' She paused. 'They were prost.i.tutes-both of them. Raised in care, like I was. And when I discovered that about them-I vowed I would never be like them! So I started to make something of myself-started modelling, because there was nothing else I was qualified to do. But I never touched a drop of alcohol, or touched drugs of any kind, and I never, ever let s.e.x anywhere near me. Never! Until-'

She stopped, shame flooding through her like a drowning tide. Shame like she had felt when she had stolen from him. But then she'd had desperation, terror, to fuel her theft. What had fuelled her into falling into Angelos's arms, his bed, that night in Switzerland?

He gave her the answer himself.

'Until you drank wine and cognac and it washed away your guard.' His eyes shadowed. 'It was the only way you'd succ.u.mb to me.' He turned away, walking across to the window, pulling back the curtain halfway to stare down into the street. The car he'd arrived in, black and sleek, was hovering by the kerb. He would go down to it, drive away, leave her. Get out of her life for ever. Free her from the curse he had been to her ...

He heard his own voice echoing in his head.

The mountains expose the truth ...

The words mocked him like a whip on bleeding skin. He'd thought he'd expose the truth about her-find whether she had truly changed from the woman she had been five years ago. But she had never been that woman ...

He'd known nothing about her. The woman who had walked the mountains with him, at his side, remained as hidden from him as she had always been. He thought of the life she'd had-growing up with the bleak, d.a.m.ning knowledge of her background, her determination to break free of it. He thought of how that life had tried to suck her back into its fetid, filthy pit when some foul, psychotic sc.u.m had threatened her, and what she'd done to try and save herself.

What it had cost her to do so.

He heard his voice speaking to her as if from very far away.

'I ruined you. When you stole from me I ruined you without knowing why you'd done what you had-what had driven you to do it. Ruined you because I presumed you had come to me to sell your body. Ruined you in my anger and my arrogance. And then I ruined you all over again when I saw you with a man you wanted to marry-a man who would have given you security and a place in the world, a place you'd earned. Despite what I did to you, you made yourself get up off the floor again, when I'd thrown you down on to it, and you remade yourself as Thea.'

He s.h.i.+fted his weight, moving his shoulders as if the tension in them had become unbearable.

'And in Switzerland ...' His voice was harsher now, serrated. 'My arrogance triumphed yet again. I wanted to test whether you had indeed remade yourself-turned yourself from Kat to Thea, turned your back on all that Kat had been, paid your dues for all that she had done. And-' he took a harsh, ragged inhalation of breath '-above all I wanted to force you to admit the truth. The truth I'd known for so long, for five long years, since I first met you. The truth you'd denied, hurling defiance at me, forbidding me to touch you, lying that you could not bear it ... could not bear my touch! It became my whole aim to keep you with me, to disarm you day by day, get you to lower that fierce, ferocious guard against me, get you to trust me-get you to admit your desire for me. The desire I knew with absolute certainty you felt but would not admit.'

His eyes were veiled again, lashes dipping over their obsidian depths. 'And you did-I achieved my goal, triumphed in it. But I didn't know.' His voice changed again, and the contempt in it was naked-contempt for himself. 'I didn't know I had achieved it only because you were intoxicated that night-so intoxicated you yielded to me what you have guarded so long. Your virginity. And when you had, you hated me so much for what I'd done to you that you fled from me and would have rather risked your life than take my hand to save you. Because of everything I'd done to you for so, so long ...'

He shook his head slowly, from side to side, as if he would negate everything he'd said. But how could he? Arrogance and anger had driven him for five years-and they had brought him here now. With everything he'd come to want in ashes at his feet. Burned by his own anger, his own arrogance.

He fell silent. The silence stretched between them.

Thoughts flowed into Thea's head. Thoughts that should not be there. Emotions that should not be there.

He lifted his eyes to her.

'I should ask your forgiveness, but how could you forgive me? How could anything I do make up for what I put you through?' He took a ragged breath. 'Go back to your Honourable Giles, Thea. Tell him that I threatened you and blackmailed you and behaved unforgivably to you. Go back and find your happiness.'

She swallowed, eyes s.h.i.+fting away, then back to him. The thoughts that should not be there, the emotions that should not be there, were still there.

She spoke, her voice low and difficult. 'He's marrying someone else. A family friend. I saw the announcement in a newspaper at Dover. She's very suitable. Far more than me. I didn't love him-I was only fond of him. That isn't a reason to marry someone. It would have been wrong of me to marry him. But I wanted what you said I wanted-security, a place to belong.' She looked away again for a moment. 'I had no family-not any that I wanted-that anyone would want! So I wanted to marry someone who did. Giles knows all his ancestors, over hundreds of years-it was unimaginable to me. I didn't want his t.i.tle, or his country house, or his wealth. I wanted his family-his ancestors. Because I had none. That's why I should never have agreed to marry him.' She paused, then made herself go on. 'And though I hated you for forcing me to see what I was doing I was lying to him about myself-about being Kat, deceiving him just as you accused me of doing.'

It was hard to say it, but she had to. It was true. As true as the other truth she was s.h.i.+elding from her head. The truth that Angelos Petrakos had forced her to face.

The final truth about herself.

The one that she could not deny. The one that had nothing to do with whether she had drunk wine that night in the mountain chalet, or whether she had been a virgin when she'd given herself to him, or with anything of the bitter past between them, the anger and the hatred.

The truth had been inside her since she had fled from Switzerland, and could not be denied. It was here now, as she stood looking at him-the truth that would last all her life.

But to what purpose?

Anguish crushed her.

She had discovered a truth in Angelos's arms that she could never deny. But it was a hopeless truth-a truth that could only mock her ...

To have come through so much! To have taken so long a journey, for so many years, through such hards.h.i.+ps, such anguish and anger and bitterness, and find such a truth at the end of it!

There was a burning behind her eyelids. Hot and painful. She tried to keep her eyes closed, to quench the burning, but it would not be quenched. She could feel the burning liquefy, like molten fire, feel it squeeze past her eyelids, hot on her cheeks.

She heard him draw breath, speak-words she didn't know. Then there were footsteps-rapid, heavy. Then his presence, tangible, in front of her.

And then his finger brushed the burning molten tears.

'Thea-my Thea-'

His voice sounded broken, which was strange-so strange. So strange, too, the brush of his fingertip on one cheek and then the other. And stranger still the cupping of her chin, the tilting of her face up to him.

'Don't cry! I've hurt and harmed you so much! So much I cannot bear to think of it! When I saw you fall, slipping down the rockface, risking death rather than take my outstretched hand, I felt a horror I have never felt-never want to feel again in all my life.'

His voice was low, intense, his body so close to hers. Though her eyes were still screwed so tight shut she could feel his presence, his heat. His height and his breadth and the scent of his body. The warmth of his breath. His hands cupping her face, thumbs smoothing away the hot, molten tears slipping silently down her cheeks.

'I ask for nothing-nothing. Least of all your forgiveness for what I have done. I deserve nothing from you-only your hatred for all I have done! But I beg you, from my heart, to believe me now when I say to you that the night you gave yourself to me I meant you no harm, no ill intent. Though you have every reason to think I did. That night, those days we were together, will be a treasure to me all my life. They showed me a truth about myself that I will carry to my grave-and you hold it in your hands, worthless though it can be to you. It is all that I can offer. My heart, my love-'

His eyes were gazing down into hers, ablaze, but her vision was blurred with tears. There was a ball of pain within her, squeezing tight, so tight ...

He was speaking still, his voice shaken and vehement. 'I have been monstrous to you-but I will beg forgiveness all my days. Don't cry, my Thea, don't cry. I will not let you cry. So brave, so beautiful, and I love you so much-so very much!'

She was crying more, tears pouring from her, and with an oath he wrapped her to him, folded her against his body, cradled her and rocked her, his hand soothing on her hair, his arm tight around her waist, her face buried in his shoulder.

How long she cried she did not know. Five years of tears. A long, long time to cry.

He scooped her up, lowered them both down upon the sofa, and went on holding her, letting her weep, soothing her, kissing her hair, rocking her gently, murmuring to her in Greek, in English, all the things he had never said to her but which came from him now.

She stilled at last, no tears left in her, but he held her still, exhausted, drained, cradled across his lap. He kissed her eyelids.

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