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‘Is that all?’ he asked tersely.
‘More or less,’ she answered. ‘But I’ll think of more if you press me.’
‘In other words, you want me out of your life.’
‘Yes.’
‘As a business advisor and as a friend?’
‘Yes.’
He left her no alternative if he wanted to mix sex with friendship. Her gratitude for what he had done for her didn’t extend that far. Nevertheless, she did feel a certain hollowness burrowing through her stomach. He had been like a cog around which her life had turned for a long time. A mainstay. Her head swam a little with the enormity of cutting free from him. Did she really want that?
‘Is there another man?’ His harsh tone of voice verged on the critical.
Natalie’s eyes flared. ‘Not yet. But there will be.’
He returned a steely challenge. ‘What do you really want, Natalie?’
Had he somehow read her mind? Sensed the doubt? The fearful uncertainty in severing all ties? Natalie focused hard on the question. If she was going to be her own woman, she had to know the answer. It came to her in a burst of bright clarity.
‘The best thing that ever happened to me was Ryan. I can’t replace him. He was a unique and wonderful child. But I can have another child who can be just as unique and wonderful, Damien. That’s what I intend to have.’
Damien sat back abruptly in his chair. Once again his face reflected shock. He stared at her as though he had never known her, an unseeing blankness in his eyes, all the clever intelligence frozen, or turned inward.
It sent a chill through Natalie’s heart. He had left her. The impulse to draw him back surged through her so wildly, words were spilling off her tongue before she could stop them.
‘Aren’t you glad to be rid of me? Aren’t you glad to have any responsibility to me set aside?’
The taunt succeeded. His eyes refocused on hers. ‘No.’
The stark negative gave her nothing to work on. Damn the man and his self-sufficiency! Why couldn’t he reveal what was going on inside him?
‘What purpose is there in our ever seeing each other again?’ she pressed. ‘Give me one good reason.’
‘Your husband was my friend,’ he said slowly, picking his words with care. ‘However much you think he loved you, I believe he was no friend to you.’
The import of those words was not lost on Natalie. She sat very still, holding her breath. Damien’s loyalty to Brett was cracking. Would he now speak the truth about her husband, reveal the infidelities he had helped to cover up? Did Damien even suspect how much she already knew, or was he still convinced he and Brett had artfully concealed everything?
He leaned forward. As though he had flicked a switch that flung open the windows of his mind, his eyes once more blazed with naked desire.
‘The reason I sold the company was to have the time to prove to you—conclusively and forever—that you married the wrong man, Natalie.’ The low throb of passion in his voice gathered a deep soul-shaking conviction as he added, ‘The man you should have married was me. Not Brett. Me!’
CHAPTER TWO
MARRIAGE? To Damien?
Natalie felt as though she had been pummelled in the solar plexus. Her mind was blown into whirling confusion. She stared incredulously at Damien, struggling to connect what she knew of him to the words he had spoken. He held her gaze, relentlessly reinforcing what he’d said with compelling intensity.
She supposed she should feel flattered a man of his many attractions wanting her. She wondered what influenced his choice. He hadn’t mentioned love. She wasn’t the first woman he’d wanted, and wouldn’t be the last. So why her?
Natalie’s shell-shocked mind finally grasped the motive behind Damien’s statement.
Brett.
She felt sick.
And angry.
She leaned forward, her eyes a golden shower of blistering sparks. ‘Even now, with Brett in the grave, you can’t help competing with him, can you? You can’t let go. You want to take me over to prove to your insatiable ego that you were the better man.’
He grimaced in frustration. ‘That’s nonsense! Why are you avoiding the obvious?’
‘The obvious is that Brett’s still on your mind,’ she retorted. ‘You began and ended your ridiculous claim with Brett. After I’d specifically asked you never to mention him to me again.’
‘So it still hurts that much, does it? Goddammit, Natalie, I’ve waited long enough! Will you recognise me for what I am?’
‘That’s the problem, Damien. I do recognise you for what you are. You told me straight out that you sold the company because it wasn’t any fun without Brett. It was something you shared. So what’s the new project? Me. Something else you can share with him in some tormented, twisted, perverted way.’
‘I’m not sharing you with anyone,’ he declared indignantly. ‘When I saw you today...’
‘You thought the fun could begin.’
From somewhere inside her came a billow of outrage. It activated a burst of adrenalin. She reached down, snatched her shoulder-bag from the floor, opened it, and grabbed her wallet.
‘I thought you had finally put your grief behind you,’ Damien continued.
‘I will not be beholden to you for anything, Damien.’ She found a twenty-dollar note and slapped it on the table. ‘That will pay for our drinks. I don’t want to eat with you. I don’t want to be with you. I will never, in any circumstance, sleep with you. Do you understand what those words mean?’
‘So the brave new front is just a charade,’ he mocked angrily. ‘You can’t face up to a different reality.’
‘What’s different?’ She returned her wallet to her bag and stood up, casting him a look of contempt. ‘If you want to prove you’re a better man than Brett, you can run after all the women he had on the side.’
‘What?’ He looked astounded, incredulous. ‘You knew?’
‘Of course I knew. And your part in it, as well.’
‘I played no part in it...’
‘Don’t lie to me, Damien. You covered up for Brett. He deceived me. You betrayed me.’
Disdaining to glance at Damien again, Natalie set off down the length of the dining-room to the exit of the restaurant.
‘Natalie...’ It was both a protest and an appeal.
She ignored it. She heard Damien coming after her, brushing past hovering waiters, but she neither turned her head nor slowed her pace. She felt utterly deflated and cast down. She should never have trusted the feeling that he meant well by her. It was a sham so he could win out in the end. Against a dead man.
As she stepped into the reception nook outside the restaurant, Damien caught her arm, forcibly halting her. She gave him an intimidating stare of icy rejection.
‘What did you want from me that I didn’t give?’ he demanded. ‘Tell me one thing.’
‘Approval. As in a-p-p-r-o-v-a-l. APPROVAL as in block letters. Approval as in italics. Simply approval. That’s what I wanted from you, Damien. That’s what you never gave me. Not even today.’
‘You’ve always had that, Natalie.’
‘Never.’
He dragged in a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry I was impatient with your grieving for Brett. Terribly sorry.’
‘I was grieving for Ryan, not Brett. Brett had whittled away my love for him. There was none left.’
‘How was I to know that? You never gave any indication. I never realised you were disillusioned with your marriage.’
‘Who parades private pain in public?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘How would you have reacted if I’d come running to tell you about Brett’s affairs? You would have hated me for it, Natalie.’
‘It would have destroyed your friendship,’ she mocked.
She wrenched her arm out of his grasp and headed for the staircase. What he said hurt. It bit painfully into her psyche. The deep-seated sense of rejection, the sense of failure, of being a discard, inadequate.
Damien fell into step beside her. ‘What makes you think I covered up for him?’
‘I know.’
‘Give me one example.’
‘You slipped up at the funeral.’ She paused at the head of the stairs to face him with bleak derisive eyes. ‘The woman who went on the camp with you and Brett that weekend...it was reported that she was your companion, Damien. She wasn’t.’
‘She was,’ he insisted.
‘Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your discretion. If the media had latched on to the fact that adultery was mixed up with the death of my son and my husband, they would have had more of a field day than they did.’
‘Natalie, I swear before God she was with me. I invited her. I took her there. She shared my tent. Brett had Ryan with him.’
She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t add up, Damien. She wept copiously at the funeral. You didn’t go near her. Not one word or gesture of comfort.’
‘I didn’t leave your side,’ he asserted with passion. ‘She meant nothing to me. She was keen on abseiling. I asked her on the trip to make it a foursome instead of a threesome. I wasn’t to know you were going to be too sick to come. We were already there at the campsite when Brett arrived without you.’
Was he speaking the truth? Had she misread the situation? ‘How did Ryan get so close to the edge of the cliff? Why wasn’t Brett watching him? Ryan was a sensible little boy. He would have obeyed his father.’
‘Natalie, for God’s sake! Accidents can happen so quickly. Don’t torture yourself like this.’
‘It doesn’t matter any more,’ she said dully. ‘Nothing can bring my beautiful little boy back.’
She started down the staircase. She had to get away from all this. It wasn’t doing her any good, raking over the miseries of the past. She had to look to the future, break with Damien now, start a new life. That was abundantly clear.
Damien wasn’t a friend. And that hurt, too. In his way, he had acted honourably towards her. Yet she had known he had the same attitude towards challenges as Brett had. They were two of a kind. She simply hadn’t anticipated that he would see her as a challenge.
He was matching steps with her, still not prepared to let her walk away from him. ‘Why didn’t you leave Brett?’ he asked.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t imagine any man would understand. Trapped by a pregnancy...making excuses. Trapped by wanting the best for her baby...making compromises. Hoping things would change. Wanting to believe in renewed promises because the sense of failure was too hard to face.
Brett wasn’t all bad. Mostly, but not all. She had fallen in love with his joy in living, his wit, his charm, his exuberant personality, the athletic body he made master of any physical challenge, the mind that thrived on solving problems few others could. She had thought herself the luckiest woman in the world that Brett Hayes had fallen in love with her.
She had never considered herself anyone special. She was averagely pretty, helped along by a better than average figure that had been very firm and trim when she had met Brett. She had been working then as a bush-walking guide, supplementing an irregular income from the paintings she sold to the tourists who flocked to her hometown. Noosa was a very popular seaside resort on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and Brett had been one more tourist, indulging his love of the outdoors, and sweeping Natalie into a marriage that had seemed idyllic. At first.
She had come to realise, painfully, that Brett saw women as a challenge, too. All of them. He couldn’t resist testing himself, over and over again. Natalie he had put in a completely separate category. She was his chosen wife. The mother of his child.
Ryan...always Ryan stopping her from taking that final step away from Brett. He was indisputably a loving father, proud of his son. Ryan had adored his Daddy. She simply hadn’t been able to bring herself to deprive them of the relationship that was naturally theirs. In the end, it would have saved Ryan’s life—both their lives—if she had. She shook off the torment of ‘if only’s.
‘Brett felt inadequate,’ Damien declared. ‘He...’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Natalie answered coldly.
Brett was the most gifted, talented individual she had met in her life. A bright golden god among other men. Brett made other people feel inadequate. People like Damien. People like herself.
Damien touched her arm to try to draw her attention back to him. ‘If you knew about his infidelities, why didn’t you divorce him? What stopped you?’ he asked, exasperation creeping into his voice.
They had reached the foyer. It didn’t really matter what she said to Damien. Whether he comprehended it or not was irrelevant. She was not going to see him again. She glanced at him with determined finality and gave him the one reason that had kept her with Brett.
‘He was the father of my child.’
She didn’t pause to gauge his reaction to that bare statement. She had no intention of explaining or embellishing it. She took a direct line towards the doors that led out of the hotel. This meeting with Damien had been a disaster from start to finish. She was ashamed of having been deluded into thinking he actually cared about her as a person.
Of course, she had realised that to Damien she was an extension of Brett, but there had been thoughtful gestures from him which she had believed were for her sake alone. She had thought he cared about her interests, suggesting ways of developing and extending her creative talent. She had no idea he was so...well, almost deranged...in his obsession about Brett.
Tears blurred her eyes. She had looked forward to telling Damien about the commission to illustrate a children’s book. Damien had taught her creative graphic design. She had imagined him being pleased for her. She had actively gone after the job and got it, an achievement she was sure would earn his approval. Finally.
She had tried so hard to get her life moving again in order to please him. She was proud of her efforts over the past two months. She had wanted Damien to be proud of her.
Disappointment wrenched her heart. This was her second bad mistake, letting another man like Brett get close to her. At least Damien wasn’t pressing any more questions on her. She was grateful for his silence as he accompanied her out to the covered driveway that serviced the hotel. As far as she was concerned, there was nothing more to say. Except goodbye. Forever.
‘Taxi?’ the doorman asked.
‘Please,’ Natalie answered.
‘We need to talk this through, Natalie,’ Damien murmured as the doorman moved forward to summon the first cab from the rank in the street below.
‘No point,’ she demurred.
‘You have some serious misconceptions...’
‘Mine have already been sorted out. Yours haven’t.’
‘Look at me!’ he commanded in exasperation.
‘I don’t want to.’
