The Last Illusion. Diana Hamilton
hadn’t expected to see him so soon; it put her at a disadvantage. Thick dark lashes drifted down, briefly closing him out. The white cambric shirt made his olive-toned skin and his cropped midnight hair even darker, his narrow black trousers emphasising his long-legged leanness, the whippy strength of the hard, wide shoulders and non-existent hips. She had forgotten the impact he made.
She should have remembered, been more prepared.
Forcing her tawny eyes open, she stared at him with a cool and desperate defiance. Looks counted for nothing, she told herself. The rare combination of sultry, hooded black eyes and a wide, unashamedly sensual mouth with the harsh asceticism of bleakly carved cheekbones and jawline and the arrogant, aquiline cast of his nose had swept her giddily gullible head off her shoulders when they had first met five years ago.
But she saw more clearly now; he had the face of a fallen angel, the face of a man who could cold-bloodedly kill his own brother, who could pluck an innocent out of her own sheltered element, expose her to the dark pride and passion that was uniquely his own, use her, and betray her without blinking one of his own long, silky black lashes!
‘For about half an hour,’ she made herself answer, trying not to flinch as he stalked closer, like a black panther. ‘It shouldn’t take longer.’
‘I am honoured.’ His dark, intriguingly accented voice seemed to curl around her, and she shuddered. He smiled faintly. ‘You go to the expense and trouble to leave your nest in the middle of England—Stanton Bottom, such a curious name—to fly out to spend a mere half-hour in my company. An honour indeed.’
‘How did you know where I was?’ Shock and dismay had her blurting the words out without thinking, and she watched his sensual mouth go thin, heard a vein of ice creep into his voice.
‘If you imagine I would let you walk away from me and disappear, then you don’t know me. But then—’ the brooding black eyes hardened to glinting jet, ‘—past events adequately proved that you know more about the hidden side of the moon than you know about me. Isn’t that so, mi esposa?’ He spread one hand almost contemptuously, laying out the details of the last four years of her life as if they were beneath notice. ‘You spent six months with your aunt in Harrow. She put you through a crash course and made sure you caught up with your abandoned business studies. She then packed you off to that place with the curious name in your English Midlands, where you worked as an assistant to the manager of a hotel-conference-centre-leisure park. Is that not so?’
‘You spied on me!’ Charley felt what little colour she had drain out of her face. She had thought she was safe, that as far as he was concerned she had disappeared off the face of the earth.
She shifted restlessly from one foot to the other, her teeth biting into her soft lower lip. All that time—the six months of sheer hard grind that had earned her the qualifications she needed, the job Aunt Freda had found through her business and domestic agency, tucked away on the edge of the Staffordshire moorlands. She had felt safe there, had been able to come to terms with what Sebastian had done, had grown in confidence and independence. And all the time he had known exactly where she was, what she was doing. It didn’t bear thinking about. People must feel like this when they came home and found the house burgled and ransacked, their private possessions spewed around like so much tawdry, worthless debris.
‘I prefer to think of it as keeping a watch over my own,’ Sebastian stated, his aristocratically cut nostrils flaring with displeasure at her choice of words. The accusation of something as underhand as spying would not fit in with his exalted opinions of himself. He liked to think of himself as a man of honour—and woe betide anyone who had the temerity to impugn it—and didn’t allow himself to understand that he had long ago compromised what honour he might once have had.
And the fact that he had kept tabs on her meant that he must know about Gregory Wilson, how they had met and how often they had dated. So at least her request for a divorce wouldn’t come as a surprise, she thought, trying to feel tough.
But it was difficult to feel tough and in control of the situation when his lancing eyes informed her that he knew all there was to know about her and wasn’t impressed.
‘If we are to spend half an hour together, then I suggest we do it in comfort.’ The drawled sarcasm turned her stomach, fiery little spirals igniting inside her as he took her arm and led her through to a small sala tucked away at the rear of the house. Being close to him, touched by him, made every nerve end quiver, forcing her to remember how just one sultry glance from those impenetrable black eyes had once had the power to reduce her to a mass of desperate, wanton needs.
It was a memory she refused to entertain and she shook her head as if to clear it, obeyed the slight movement of his hand and sat on a damask-covered chair, her spine rigid. And all around her the cool green light that filtered through the louvres touched the graceful Spanish renaissance furnishings, giving the heavily carved or richly painted pieces an air of soft mystery that would be lost in the full glare of sunlight. This was the room she had made her own, often coming here to read or simply to try to relax, especially when Olivia—with all that false friendliness—had been in residence.
Had Sebastian remembered? Had he chosen this room from the almost countless others because he knew it would give her pain? He must know that it had been here that Olivia had finally shed her veneer of matiness and spat out the cruel, devastating truth.
Charley straightened her already rigid shoulders and wished he’d sit down, but couldn’t ask him to because to do so would reveal that his endless pacing, slow circling, was getting to her. She didn’t want him to know that he could affect her on any level. And the way he moved with the insolent grace born of a natural arrogance, touched a long-forgotten core of unwanted female responsiveness deep within her.
‘You have changed, Charlotte,’ he pronounced at last.
The deep timbre of his voice, that wickedly sensual accent, flicked her on the raw and made her snap without thinking of what she might be revealing. ‘I prefer Charley.’ Only her parents, and Sebastian, had used her full name. She had loved her parents and now they were dead. She had loved Sebastian and, as far as she was concerned, he might as well be dead, too. She didn’t want to be reminded.
‘I refuse to call you by a name that would be ugly for a male and unthinkable for a female, especially a female who has grown into something quite remarkably sophisticated.’
The level look beneath lowered brows was tinged with an amused derision, she noted fumingly, as he lowered himself gracefully on to a velvet-covered chaise. If he had thought of her at all during the past four years it would have been as the slightly plump, wide-eyed nineteen-year-old he had married. Her mouse-brown hair had hung limply halfway down her back, and the only make-up she had used had been a smear of pale pink lipstick.
But she had lost a lot of weight after she’d left him and had never regained it, and her hair had darkened to a glossy seal-brown and she now wore it cut fashionably short. Freda had been initially responsible for the change in her style of dressing. Her, ‘You can’t go through life looking like Alice in Wonderland, not if you want to land a responsible, reasonably paid job. I loved my sister dearly, but she had a blind spot when it came to your upbringing. She insisted on dressing you like the Sugar Plum Fairy since the day you were born, and you couldn’t have been more sheltered if you and your parents had lived out your lives as the sole inhabitants of a desert island,’ had hurt at the time.
However, it hadn’t taken too much soul-searching to acknowledge that Freda had been right. As the only child of parents who had feared that after fifteen years of marriage they would never have children, she had been too protected and sheltered.
Her education had been at a private, girls-only school, her friends carefully vetted, her out-of-school activities more suited to a Victorian miss than a girl of the twentieth century.
Her wish to take a business studies course and stay on in England when her parents retired to Spain had been granted only after endless and minute discussions. Only when her mother’s younger, unmarried sister, Freda, had stepped in and offered to have her stay at her flat