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‘Women have always seen me as a good catch. Rich women, women looking for a man with the right-sized bank balance, who thought that if they agreed to everything I asked they could eventually get me to agree to putting that gold band around their finger. I enjoyed their company, but I was never tempted to settle down.’ He paused. ‘Open the box.’
She opened it. There was a ring there, nestled on a bed of black velvet. A gold band with two diamonds entwined on the top. She stared at it, feeling sick, hating herself for what she had to do and hating Fate for giving her this glimpse of happiness which she knew could never be hers.
‘You’re different from the rest of them, Katherine Lewis. You’re genuine.’
No! she wanted to shout at him. No, I’m not!
‘I can’t accept this, Dominic.’ I love you, she thought, and love has made me strong and made me weak at the same time. Will you ever understand that? No, of course you won’t. I can hardly understand it myself. It’s a new world and one with which I’m unfamiliar.
‘You think you need time? Is that it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever.’ He was frowning.
‘That’s not it.’ Her grey eyes were wide and miserable. ‘I just can’t, that’s all.’
‘I don’t accept that,’ he told her, not taking the box, in fact not paying the slightest bit of attention to it whatsoever. ‘You must have known that I was falling in love with you.’
In a perfect world, she thought. But she could hardly complete the thought, because it wasn’t a perfect world. In a perfect world there would be no tears and no regrets, no words to be uttered that were so hard that every syllable tore at your soul.
‘We aren’t meant for each other,’ she whispered.
‘You’re talking rubbish,’ he said tightly, and she could see that he was beginning to get angry, a dark, baffled anger that frightened her.
‘Your world is somewhere else,’ she said, struggling to tell him the truth without telling him all of it. She could tell him that she had been living a lie for the past six months, but then that would drag her down into a quagmire of questions, none of which she could answer. The truth, as it stood, was too awful for words. The truth, as it stood, had given her the wild courage to be someone she never had been, but now it forced her to be a monster.
‘Of course,’ he said, and his expression cleared, ‘my home is in France, but naturally we wouldn’t be living there all year. We could spend six months there and six months in London.’ He threw her a crooked, amused smile. ‘George would be only too grateful. He says that most of the time he feels as though he’s hibernating, looking after an apartment that’s only used a couple of times a year. This problem is not insurmountable.’
Katherine didn’t say anything. The box with the ring was burning her hands.
‘The country has nothing to do with this,’ she told him. ‘I just can’t accept it. I just can’t marry you, Dominic.’
She had never imagined that he would fall in love with her. He was, Emma had told her, a notorious heart-breaker. He would give her a good, uncomplicated time, and Katherine had been so sure that she had not had the where-withal to captivate a man like him that she had closed her eyes and let herself be led. Open me up, she had said, handing him the key, and he had, and it was only in the past few days that she had realised that in turning the key to her heart he had changed himself. Or perhaps she had just been blind all along. Blind and, underneath the glamorous wrapping, still the same insecure person she thought that she had left behind, too insecure to believe that the impossible had happened.
‘I see.’ Coldness was beginning to creep into his voice and she could see the shutter coming down over his eyes.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said pleadingly. She held out the box and he threw it a scathing look.
‘I think I understand perfectly, Katherine,’ he said with glacial politeness. ‘You’ve been having a good time but not quite good enough to warrant a commitment.’ He stood up and began walking away and she followed, half running to keep up with him.
‘Please stop, Dominic,’ she called, trying to keep her voice low and not draw too much attention to what was going on.
He stopped, looked at her and said in a hard voice, ‘Why? So that we can talk? I can’t stand people who waste time performing post-mortems on a relationship.’ Then he moved on, and she walked alongside him, still half running, because his long legs covered the distance so much more easily than hers.
‘I can’t keep this,’ she told him. ‘You must take your ring back. It must have cost you a fortune.’
‘It did,’ he said smoothly, stopping to look down at her. All the warm charm which she had seen in the past had vanished, replaced by a cold calm that terrified her.
She had always known that he was a hard man, that underneath the surface was a layer of steel. She had witnessed it a couple of times, in his dealings with people whom he disliked. He would talk to them, but there would always be something forbidding in his voice, a reminder that there were lines beyond which they were not allowed to step.
‘There’s only one law when it comes to business,’ he had once told her, smilingly serious. ‘It’s the law of the jungle. I play fair, but if someone tries to cross me, it’s only right that I should make it crystal-clear who’s boss.’
‘I have no need for it,’ he said to her now, with a smile on his face that sent a little shiver of apprehension down her spine. ‘Keep it. Let it be a souvenir for you, a scalp to go on your belt.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Katherine mumbled, fidgeting from one foot to the other, unwilling to let him go like this, but equally unwilling to face the truth that she had no choice.
‘I suppose,’ he said, with the same dangerous smile on his face, and choosing to ignore her plea, ‘that I should be grateful. At least you weren’t a gold-digger. You never accepted anything from me. At the time I found that enchanting. There are very few rich men who aren’t beguiled by a woman to whom money apparently means nothing.’
‘No, your money never meant a thing to me.’ There, at least, she could be honest.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked steadily at her. He had amazing eyes. A peculiar, deep shade of green. Eyes that glittered; eyes that could stare at her and through her, down into depths she had never known existed. Or so it had seemed.
‘Were you interested in something else?’ he asked softly. ‘Were you only interested in proving to yourself that you could conquer a man like me?’
‘No, of course not!’ she denied feverishly. ‘How could you think that?’
‘What I’m looking for here, Katherine, are a few answers. Won’t you be a good girl and oblige?’
Her heart was racing inside her. She could feel it. Hammering away like a steam-engine, making her breathless and unsteady. Very slowly she sat down on the nearest bench, partly because she knew that if she didn’t she would collapse, and partly because, if she sat down, she wouldn’t have to look at him. She could focus her attention somewhere else. There was a lake of sorts a few yards away and she concentrated on it.
On the opposite side of the water there was a mother with two young children. The children were having a ball, standing as close to the water as they could feasibly get, and their mother looked on anxiously, ready to leap forward the minute one of them fell in. Katherine watched the antics and didn’t turn when Dominic sat down next to her. She could feel him, though, every vibration emanating from that hard, masculine body.
‘I know you must think that I don’t care, but I do,’ she said, looking straight ahead of her. Care, she thought—what an inappropriate word to describe what I feel for you, every nuance of every emotion which fills me up and makes me whole.
‘How generous of you.’
‘But I still can’t marry you. I shall never be able to marry you. I should never have become involved with you in the first place.’
That was true as well. At the beginning she had been too thrilled to pay much attention to the consequences of her actions. In a dark world he had been a sudden, blinding ray of light, and she had been drawn to the source of the light like a moth to a flame. Everything so new, so wonderful, all happening to her, unextraordinary little her whose plainness had been drummed into her from the time she was old enough to understand.
‘You’ll never amount to anything,’ her mother had used to say to her. ‘You’re too plain, my girl. Like your father. I could have had anyone, but I chose him, and look at what he did to me.’
She had known from a very early age that her resemblance to her father was a crime for which she would never be forgiven, and her mother had reminded her of it so often that eventually Katherine had learnt how to switch off when the subject was raised.
Dominic had brought her alive. He had seen her, and she had blossomed under those clever, sexy, watchful green eyes.
‘Why not?’ he asked sharply. ‘Why shouldn’t you have become involved with me?’
‘I had no right. It was selfish.’
‘Stop talking in riddles. If you have something to say, then why don’t you come right out and say it?’
‘We’re not suited,’ she said helplessly.
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘We’re not alike.’
‘I don’t want a mirror image of myself. I’m not a narcissist.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying!’ She was beginning to lose the thread of her logic now. She should have just let it go, let him walk off, but something in her wanted to leave him with feelings that weren’t all bad. Was that selfish too?
‘I’m not a glamorous person,’ she attempted, meaning it. She wasn’t. She had had her stab at glamour; she had borrowed Emma’s clothes and worn them with her hair down and she had enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her. Her flamboyance was born of fear and desperation, a need to see it all before the opportunity slipped between her fingers. She was the person who squeezed her eyes tightly and then parachuted down to earth. The people below might think her brave and only she would know her private terror.
The woman he had fallen in love with had been a chimera, an illusion, someone she had created for reasons which she could not reveal.
‘You’re an extremely glamorous person, Katherine Lewis,’ he said, turning to face her, and she made sure that she kept her profile firmly averted.
‘You need someone else. What you think you’ve found in me, you haven’t.’ There she went again, she thought, making a muddle of it, trying to say so much but not too much.
‘Stop telling me what sort of woman I want,’ he said, his voice like a whip. ‘I don’t want to sit here and listen to flimsy excuses. You’ve told me that you won’t marry me and what I want to know is why. I don’t want a damned dissertation on compatibility.’
‘Life isn’t black and white!’ she snapped, getting angry. She stopped looking at the two children, whose mother had finally given in to anxiety and was dragging them away from the lake with vague promises about coming back another day.
‘When?’ the older of the two was asking in a high voice. ‘Another day, when?’
‘Another day, some time soon! Now, stop complaining. If you stop complaining, I’ll buy you both an ice-cream.’
They promptly shut up. How wonderful, Katherine thought, to be a child, to have problems sorted out with ice-cream cones.
‘It is,’ Dominic said harshly, ‘when it comes to something like this. I asked you to marry me, you said no, and I want to know why.’
‘Haven’t you ever been refused anything in your life before?’ Katherine threw at him.
‘Not very often and never by a woman.’
‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one?’ She could feel the wall between them getting higher and higher, and she wished that she had chosen the coward’s way out and left him a note. She might have done too, except that she had a suspicion that he would have ripped it into a thousand pieces and hunted her down until he found her. If only to drag answers out of her.
‘Tell me!’ he roared, and Katherine felt passing relief that the two children had vanished. They would have been instantly startled into falling into the lake otherwise.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she shouted back angrily.
Anger made it easier. It took over from pain; it took over from fantasising that the truth would make him feel anything other than hatred or pity.
‘I want to know if you’re walking out on me because of another man!’
‘If that’s what you want me to tell you, then I’ll say it!’ she flung back at him, and his face darkened with rage. He gripped her shoulders with his hands, and she could feel his fingers pushing down into her skin, hurting her.
‘Yes!’ he snarled. ‘Let me hear you say it!’
‘All right, then, fine! The reason I can’t marry you is because of another man. Satisfied?’
As soon as the words were out, she regretted saying them. She half opened her mouth to deny it all, but he didn’t give her the opportunity.
‘Eminently satisfied,’ he fired. ‘Did you do it to make him jealous? Did it work, Katherine?’
‘You made me say that,’ she told him, and all the old feelings of hopeless misery were creeping back again. Her anger had dissipated as quickly as dew in the hot sun. She very rarely lost her temper. Living with her mother all those years had built up a layer of silent self-control. Words spoken in the heat of the moment, she had discovered from an early age, were the most wounding and the most difficult to retract.
‘In a way, I’m glad I met you,’ he said, standing up, and there was a stillness about his movements that was as alarming as the black fury on his face had been earlier on. ‘I’ve learnt a valuable lesson from you. Deception isn’t always obvious.’
Katherine scrambled to her feet, and when she met his eyes she saw the scathing dislike there.
Now there was nothing left to say. She had done what she had to do, but, as things had turned out, she had achieved it in the worst possible way.
‘Here,’ she said, handing him the box. ‘Take it. Please.’
He reached out, and for a second his fingers brushed against hers. How painful to think that this, the last time he touched her, it would be with hatred and bitter disillusionment.
His fingers closed around the box and he flung it into the water. There was cold satisfaction on his lips when he looked at her.
‘Some things are better buried, don’t you think?’
Then he turned and walked away. She followed him with her eyes all the way until he disappeared from sight, then she sat back down and stared at the pond. All her dreams were lying there at the bottom. The ring that would never be hers, and, the love which she had been compelled to reject.
She only stirred when it began to get chilly and the park started emptying of people.
Then she made her way back to Emma’s flat, packed her suitcase, left a note and headed for the station. She would call her friend in the morning and explain what had happened, but omitting the details.
Better this way, she kept telling herself. In many ways, better for him. She kept thinking that all the way back to her home town.
Better for him to leave her with an anger he could understand. Nebulous reasons, however true they were for her, would have not been a clean break for him. How would he ever have understood that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was? Would he have accepted it as easily as the thought of another man?
Her house was waiting there for her, patient and faithful. Katherine stood on the path up to the front door and sighed.
I did what I did for myself to start with, she said silently in her head, shutting her eyes. But in the end I did what I did for you.
How could you have coped with the truth? How could you have coped with the fact that I’m dying? Would you have felt betrayed or would you have felt obliged to stay with me through pity? Wouldn’t either have been more destructive than the way I took?
She opened her eyes, raised her hand and, without thinking about it, coiled her hair into a ponytail, then went inside.
CHAPTER TWO
KATHERINE looked around her at the roomful of bright, young faces. Outside, the warm sunshine spilled over the green playing-fields, poured through the open windows and generally helped to propagate the illusion that maybe, this year, winter would hibernate to another country.
September was always lovely. New term, a few new faces, back to work after the long summer holidays. Every year the holidays loomed in front of her, waiting to be filled, threatening to depress if they weren’t, and she was always glad to get back. Back to the sanctuary of her teaching. Away from thoughts of events that had happened six long years ago. Six years! So long ago that she was vaguely ashamed that the memory of them could still plague her with such force, especially when time hung heavy on her hands and there were no demands of work to keep her mind in its harness.
There were two new girls. Victoria, who seemed to have settled in already in the space of a few hours, helped by the fact that she already knew some of the children in the class, and Claire, small, dark-haired, with far too grave an expression on her face for a child of barely five.
Katherine introduced them both to the rest of the class, all girls, and briefly contemplated the dark-haired addition. She would have to take this one under her wing. She could spot at a glance those little pupils who would need over and above the average attention. Usually they were the quiet ones who, left on their own, would easily retreat into their natural shyness.
This little one, she thought, was far too serious, anxious, even, and quite handicapped by the fact that her first language was French, so much of the good-natured chattering of the rest of the girls was literally incomprehensible to her.
The good thing was that the girl would, at least, be at the start of the learning curve, only slightly behind the other girls who were largely au fait with simple reading. She smiled, touched the neat little bun pinned at the back of her neck, and began class.
‘What do you know about her?’ Katherine asked a week later, when she was in the staff-room with Jane Ray, the head of the preparatory school.
Jane Ray was a small, capable woman with short dark hair and darting black eyes, largely hidden behind a pair of spectacles. Katherine found it very easy to talk to her. She and the other teachers appreciated the way they were generally left to their own devices, free to implement their teaching in whatever imaginative methods they found the best.
‘Not a great deal,’ Jane admitted. ‘She came to the open day at Easter, quite desperate for a place here because of a company move of some kind or another, but I couldn’t extract very much background information. She was being dragged from room to room by a young woman, her nanny in France, I gathered, who either didn’t speak any English or, from the looks of it, had decided to conceal the fact that she did. Lived in France all her life, somewhere near Paris, I gather. Never been to school before. Why?’
Katherine shrugged, frowning. ‘She looks as though she’s carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.’
