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Zac returned with a long glass. She took a sip—it was cool and tasted of fresh lemons with the tiniest hint of juniper berries. “Thank you.”
“Pandora …” Zac gave his head a shake and sank into the deck chair beside her, stretching his long, tanned legs out in front of him. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. Believe me, I want this marriage to work.” His eyes were intent, greener than she’d ever seen them and desperately serious. “I want it to be a real marriage, with you at my side.”
“How can this be a real marriage if you won’t let me go? If you stand over me when I e-mail my father? If you won’t even give me my damn cell phone back?” She gave a sigh of exasperation when he didn’t answer. “And all because of some random family legend, right?”
“It’s not that random,” he said, and she could feel the waves of tension coming off him from where she sat. “But you know what? Somehow the legend is not important anymore.”
“Not important?” She set the glass down. “When you believed that I’d be the perfect patsy to marry?”
His brows drew together. “It wasn’t like that.”
“It was exactly like that. You convinced me that you loved me. You married me because you thought I was a virgin. Who told you that, anyway?”
“Your father.”
“My father?” She gaped at him in shock. “I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t lie.” The distaste in his tone quelled her instant response. “Your father wanted this marriage to happen. I was in Queenstown for an ecology conference. We met. He told me all about you—he’s very proud of you. It was no secret that I needed a wife—the right wife.”
“A virgin bride, you mean?”
He gave a slight nod.
How humiliating! The whole world knew Zac needed a virgin bride. No wonder he hadn’t wanted her reading the newspapers after their engagement was announced. The tabloids’ speculation must’ve been lewd. And her father had put her up as a pure-as-driven-snow candidate. Ack. Suddenly Pandora was fiercely glad she’d decided against e-mailing her father for help. Of course, her father didn’t know about … the incident.
“So everyone knew about this … virgin deal … except me. I was stuck in the backcountry bush, looking after guests at High Ridge, while you guys plotted my fate. God, it sounds so feudal.” She hauled in a deep breath and covered her eyes with her hands. “And I thought it was fate. True love. Jeez, you must have thought me a silly, gullible little fool.”
“I thought you were exquisite. Sweet, charming, funny. I wanted to share my—”
“Stupid. That’s what I was,” she interrupted him, dropping her hands and fixing him with a determined gaze. “A world-class idiot. So how are we going to fix this … this disaster?”
His eyes flashed. “It need not be a disaster. We can work it out. But first I want to hear about this man.”
“What man?” But she had a horrible feeling she knew exactly what he was talking about.
Zac’s deck chair scraped across the terra-cotta cobbles. He leaned toward her and held her gaze squarely. “The one who claimed your virginity.”
“Zac!” Pandora gazed at him in fascinated horror. “You can’t expect me to talk about that.”
“Oh, yes, I can.” His brows drew together, and the dusky evening light that fell across his face dusted his harsh features with gold. “You might not have lied to me intentionally, but you’ve put me in a situation I never anticipated. I need to know the full facts to put a game plan in place to cope with any possible fallout.”
She stared blindly at the pink-and-orange clouds scattered across the western sky. This wasn’t about her, about her dignity, about her future with him. This was about him. About his business. About a fortune in share losses. About how he was going to handle their divorce … except he’d said he wanted to stay married, hadn’t he? She shook her head to clear it of the confusion and the ugliness.
Her relief when Georgios appeared to tell them dinner was ready was short-lived. No sooner had they made their way to the dining room and sat down at the table, where the silver cutlery glinted in the glow of half a dozen tall white candles, when Zac demanded, “Talk to me.”
“Okay,” she said in a flat little voice, and picked up her fork to toy with the seafood salad in front of her. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. His name was Steve. He was charming, fun, good-looking—”
“I don’t want to hear that part,” Zac growled, a muscle pulsing high on his lean, tanned jaw. “I want to know who his family is, where you met this man.”
“I don’t know anything about his family,” Pandora said awkwardly, uncomfortable with the turn the conversation had taken.
“So how the hell did you meet him?”
She stopped picking at her food. “Sometimes my father allowed me to spend the August vacation with my best friend, Nicoletta. Her father was a very wealthy industrialist. They came from Milan, and a couple of times I stayed at their holiday home in Sardinia. A few times Nicoletta stayed with us. But High Ridge in winter isn’t as much fun as Sardinia in summer, so that didn’t happen often. She had an older brother—”
“Ah,” said Zac.
Pandora glared at him. “Alberto was only interested in soccer. There was no time in his life for anything else.”
“Then tell me about this man who—”
“I’m getting there.”
“Too slowly.”
“Zac! This is very difficult for me. Let me tell it my way, okay?”
Zac inclined his head. “I’ll be quiet.”
Pandora could see him visibly forcing himself to relax. It did nothing to calm her. She pushed her plate away and drew a steadying breath. “Nicoletta’s parents told Alberto to escort us around, to be a good host. Nicoletta loved frequenting the fashionable beaches to work on her tan and flirt with Alberto’s friends. I was horribly shy. But I went along with it because I wanted to fit in. Alberto tolerated the beach. In his view, it was better than taking us shopping. So each day Alberto would take us to play volleyball with a group of his friends—friends his parents approved of as fit company for Nicoletta—on the beach at Costa Smeralda. I started to come out my shell. It was fun.”
“I’m sure it was,” Zac growled.
“Zac, you said you’d be quiet!”
“I find it is impossible. What were your friend’s parents thinking allowing you and their daughter to be exposed to all these young men?”
“They came from wealthy families, some had minders. Even Alberto and Nicoletta had a bodyguard. He was young—Alberto wouldn’t tolerate an older guard—and just as mad about soccer and sports as Alberto. That’s why Alberto put up with him.”
“Don’t tell me the bodyguard—”
“No, no, nothing like that! Give me a chance to finish, Zac.” Pandora couldn’t hold back her impatience any longer. “That’s where I met Steve. On the beach, playing volleyball with Nicoletta, her brother and his friends. Alberto didn’t know Steve, but they discovered they had an acquaintance in common.”
“I bet they did.”
“Zac! Anyway, Steve was good at volleyball. But he was different from the other guys—he talked to me and Nicoletta. He was interested in what we had to say.”
Zac pushed his plate away. “I’m no longer hungry.”
“Me, neither,” Pandora muttered.
Zac let out his breath. The sound was loud in the silence of the darkening room. “It couldn’t have been hard to pick out a bunch of rich young kids. He must’ve had his eye on a rich wife.”
“I didn’t see it that way. He seemed so sophisticated. But, remember, I was not yet eighteen and he was twenty-five. He wore clothes with a cachet none of the guys I knew did. He drove a sporty red Alfa. He was very European, very cosmopolitan.”
“I don’t want to hear about your adolescent fantasy.” Zac sounded fit to burst, and the muscle was back in play, working high on his jaw. “I want to hear what happened.”
Pandora closed her eyes to avoid looking at him.
This was so much harder than she’d expected, reliving her stupidity, telling it all to Zac. “You have to understand … it happened precisely because he was an adolescent fantasy. I’d never dated. Goodness, I’d never been allowed to go anywhere with a boy. I didn’t even get to meet any. I had no brothers. I was at a very strict girls’ school. My father was very protective. Steve looked nothing like the kind of guy I’d been warned about. He was good-looking, obviously smart and successful and he wasn’t a threat. I could lust after him to my little beating heart’s content.”
There was silence.
Pandora opened one eye, then the other, and slid Zac a sideways glance. He was glaring ferociously, his jaw working like mad. She took a deep breath and plunged on. “He was more interested in Nicoletta. She’d always been more sophisticated, more developed physically, too. But he was nice to me, polite.”
“I’m sure he was.” Zac snorted.
“He was! He was interested in what movies I liked, the books I’d read and in hearing about the kind of girl stuff guys usually ignore. He even knew how compatible our horoscopes were. We used to joke about it—especially because he fancied Nicoletta. And he took me and Nicoletta shopping. He knew all the best shops. He would give advice while we chose shoes and bags at Prada and clothes at Versace. He was fun.” And she’d been enchanted.
“Sounds like a gigolo.” Zac glared at her, the candle flame throwing his carved cheekbones into sharp relief.
“Zac, he wasn’t. I certainly never gave him money.” But she had bought him a pair of sunglasses he’d admired. And a wallet. Nicoletta had bought him a leather jacket—in spite of his protests—and some other frivolous items that had caught her eye. Pandora had signed some of the tabs when they’d gone to lunch, the three of them—she, Steve and Nicoletta—while Nicoletta had picked up others. They’d thought it empowering. Steve had joked how he liked twenty-first-century women.
“He talked us all into going clubbing.” Pandora remembered her excitement, how it had felt to be seventeen and falling in love for the first time. This time it wasn’t a crush based on a poster of a movie star or a photo of a school friend’s brother. This time it was the real thing. Except she’d thought nothing would come of it because he’d so obviously preferred Nicoletta.
She’d been so naive.
“So he took you to a club and got you drunk.” Zac made a growling sound. “Two young girls.”
“We didn’t go alone.” She glared at him. “Let me finish. Alberto and the bodyguard came with. The first time we went, we only stayed for about an hour and we danced most of the time. But the next time we went, another friend of Alberto’s arrived, a guy Nicoletta had always fancied. Steve was heartbroken.”
“I’m sure he was,” Zac muttered. “He must have been crying in his Jack Daniel’s at the thought of the fortune slipping through his fingers.”
“You’re such a cynic. He wasn’t like that!”
“Did he know how wealthy you were?”
“I don’t think so. I was on the edge of the circle, the quiet, shy one.”
But she hadn’t been so shy that night that Nicoletta had gone off with Luigi. Then, she’d been animated—courtesy of the sweet, colourful cocktails with outrageous names she’d drunk to loosen her inhibitions. The excitement had carried her forward recklessly. When the seduction had come, she’d fallen into Steve’s bed like a ripe plum.
“Afterward …” Even the memory of her enthusiasm was mortifying. Jeez, she’d even invited Steve to High Ridge. “I wanted him to meet my father. I started talking about how soon we could get married. I mean, that’s what I thought love was about. I was so sheltered it was frightening. He couldn’t get away fast enough. I went back to New Zealand with my tail between my legs.”
“Idiot!” But Zac looked thoughtful now. “And that was the only time you slept together?”
She nodded miserably.
“Did he ever contact you again?” The intensity in Zac’s voice told her this was important. She snuck him a look across the table. His face was tense, unsmiling.
She thought of the messages her father had passed on to her when Steve had tracked her down and called her home in New Zealand a month later stating he needed to talk to her, that it had all been a misunderstanding.
Thank heavens her father had no idea what had really happened. She’d told him only that Steve was a friend of Nicoletta’s brother, Alberto. That’s when her father had told her that he’d had a trace done on Steve’s number, had him checked out and had decided he was an unsuitable companion for his only child. That he wanted her to cut the connection. Pandora had agreed with alacrity—Steve had made it painfully clear that last time she’d seen him that he didn’t feel anything like love for her. That her silly crush was not reciprocated. The last thing she’d wanted was her father to discover exactly how stupid she’d been, how she’d let him—and herself—down.
“No,” she said, stretching the truth a little, justifying it to herself. After all, Steve had never actually spoken to her. “And you never heard from him again?” She fiddled with the corner of the linen napkin. “What’s the point of all this? It’s not going to change the fact that I’m not a virgin.” Pandora wanted the inquisition to end. It achieved nothing except to stir up humiliating memories of the silly little goose she’d been.
“Humour me. Did you ever see him again?” She shot Zac a quick glance. His face was set, his gaze persistent. He was not going to let it go. And she no longer wanted to talk about it.
“He’s dead,” she said very quickly, throwing the napkin down and crossing her fingers under the crumpled fabric. Zac tensed, his body vibrating. “Are you sure about that?” Pandora glanced away from his piercing gaze into the blinding flicker of the candle flame. “I told you,” she said tonelessly. “He had contact with Alberto through a friend. That’s how I heard.”
“I assumed his claim to know a friend was a con on the part of this Steve to gain access to Alberto’s circle of friends.”
She’d never thought of that at the time. How naive she’d been. No wonder her father worried about her.
“Okay,” Zac said slowly. “So does anyone else know what happened that night?”
“I never told Nicoletta or Alberto … I was too ashamed.” And racked with guilt because she’d coveted a man who fancied Nicoletta. “And I doubt Steve would’ve, either.”
“No, he’d have wanted to keep open the chance to cement a relationship with your friend, Nicoletta, the wealthy industrialist’s daughter,” Zac remarked a trifle drily.
“Can we let it go now?” Pandora pleaded. “It was a mistake. I was so young, so romantic and so utterly stupid.”
“The memory is painful—”
“Yes. I wish it had never happened. I moved on afterward—it was my mistake, my secret. I went to the doctor. That in itself was terrifying because I had to find a doctor that my father didn’t know.” It had involved deception and made her feel underhanded and defiled. “I confessed to the doctor that I’d had a one-night stand and that I was scared I might be pregnant. I was so naive I didn’t even know if Steve had used protection that night.”
She’d been distraught. The doctor had been sympathetic. She’d done a pregnancy test and sent away samples for tests for diseases that Pandora had never even heard of.
“I told myself that I’d been lucky. I’d made one mistake, but I hadn’t gotten pregnant, nor had I picked up any disease or infection. So I put the whole nasty experience behind me. I refused to let it wreck my life.” Pandora blinked back the tears that filmed her eyes. “Yet now that night has come back to haunt me.”
“Pandora,” Zac’s tone was urgent.
She met his gaze staunchly. Zac would not want her now. She would get her divorce and go home to High Ridge. But at what cost?
“That one night means I’m not fit to be your wife.”
“Pandora!” Zac’s hands reached across the table and closed over hers. The shadows from the candlelight played over his face, giving him a dark, mysterious edge. “There is a way. The only people who know about your … indiscretion … are you, me and the doctor who is bound to silence. The man involved is dead.”
Something, some dangerous emotion, fluttered under Pandora’s breastbone. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that we keep it a secret. The doctor’s not going to tell nor will I. No one need know that you’re not a virgin.”
“Would you do that?” Did this sacrifice mean that Zac loved her? He was going against his entire upbringing—everything he’d believed in—to keep her with him. “Would you stay married to me? Keep the truth from everyone? Even your sister?”
Zac looked torn. “What choice do I have? It’s too late to annul our marriage—it’s already been consummated. If I walk away from you, the paparazzi will tear you apart. How can I do that to you? We have no option but to make this marriage work.”
Her heart plummeted at his response. How wrong she’d been. He didn’t love her at all. But his sense of honour wouldn’t allow him to throw her to the news hounds.
How could she live with him for the rest of her life knowing her marriage was a sham?
“I don’t know …” She hesitated.
If she left and returned to High Ridge, she’d never see him again. Never see that slow, sexy smile light up his eyes. Never experience the heart-twisting kisses again. Did she really want to walk away from him forever?
No.
“What have we got to lose?” Zac ran his thumb along the base of her palm, and tingles ran up her spine. “We have a certain chemistry between us already.”
She blushed. “Marriage is about more than sex, Zac. It’s about common goals and values.” And most of all, it was about love. She’d always dreamed of marrying a man who loved her above all else.
