A Passionate Affair: The Passionate Husband / The Italian's Passion / A Latin Passion

How could Taylor imagine, even for one single second, that there was any hope for them after what he had done? But then she had walked away from Taylor, rather than it being the other way round, something he would have found insupportable. To her knowledge, no woman had ever ended a relationship with him before—it had always been Taylor who had ditched them. Which was probably why his ego had been big enough to think he could have his cake and eat it.

This last reflection brought Marsha’s lips into a thin line as she pictured the ‘cake’ in question. Tanya West—a voluptuous redhead with the body of Marilyn Monroe and the face of an angel. And according to Susan, Taylor’s sister, Tanya hadn’t been the first little dalliance he’d indulged in since his marriage.

She whipped the towel off her head, beginning to blow dry her hair into a soft silky bob and all the time denying the hurt and anger which had flared up at the thought of the other woman.

She was still denying it when the buzzer next to the door sounded forty minutes later. Pressing the little switch, she stared at Taylor’s face—small and very far away—as she said, ‘I’ll be down in just a second.’ She didn’t open the front door of the building, deciding he could think what he liked.

One last swift glance in the mirror told her she was looking cool and controlled, despite the way her heart was pounding, and she offered up a quick prayer that the illusion would hold during the time she was with Taylor. He had to understand she wasn’t the same gullible fool who had been so besotted with him she hadn’t seen what was in front of her nose. She had thought he’d accepted that when she had left him and refused to see him eighteen months ago, especially in view of the fact there had been no objection from his solicitor—to her knowledge—when she had filed for divorce.

Locking the door of the bedsit behind her, she made for the stairs, careful how she descended in the high strappy sandals she was wearing, and it was as she approached the ground floor that she heard the unmistakable sound of Taylor’s voice talking to someone inside the house. Someone had let him into the hall. She froze for a moment on the stairs, her ears straining to hear whom he was speaking to.

Mrs Tate-Collins. As Marsha identified the other voice she raised her eyes heavenwards. Her landlady was a sweetie-pie, but the elderly lady really belonged in a powder and crinoline age, where men were gallant and noble and all women were prone to attacks of the vapours. Mrs Tate-Collins had told her once of her privileged upbringing and her private education at home and then an establishment for well brought up young gentlewomen. When Marsha had said she had been raised in a children’s home after her single-parent mother had abandoned her when she was two years old the other woman had stared at her as though she was a creature from another planet. Not that she hadn’t been sympathetic, Marsha qualified, but it had been plain the other woman was out of her depth with such an alien concept. How Mrs Tate-Collins was going to cope with finding out Miss Gosling was really Mrs Kane, Marsha didn’t know.

‘Ah, here she is, Mr Kane,’ Mrs Tate-Collins trilled as Marsha came into view. ‘And looking very lovely.’

Marsha gave what she hoped was a neutral smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said directly to the other woman, before glancing at Taylor, whereupon the smile iced over. ‘I told you I’d be straight down,’ she said evenly. ‘There was no need to come in.’

‘Oh, I was just on my way across the hall after seeing Miss Gordon when your young man rang,’ Mrs Tate-Collins chimed in before Taylor could speak, turning to him as she added, ‘That’s the lady who lives on this floor, you know, the poor thing. She had a fall the other day and it has shaken her up a little, so I took her a drop of soup and a roll to save her having to think about supper. She is getting on a bit, bless her.’

Marsha saw Taylor gaze into the lined face of the small wizened woman in front of him, who looked ninety if a day, but his voice was perfectly serious when he said, ‘That was kind of you, Mrs Tate-Collins.’

‘Shall we go?’ It was clear Taylor hadn’t got round to mentioning their marital status, which suited her just fine, and she was anxious to get him out of the door before her landlady started another cosy chat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Tate-Collins,’ she added briskly.

‘Oh, goodbye, dear.’

It was a little surprised, but in view of the fact Marsha had gripped Taylor’s arm with one hand and opened the front door with the other, virtually pushing him on to the top step, she really couldn’t blame her landlady.

‘She’ll think you can’t wait to have your wicked way with me.’ Once they had descended the eight steps and were on the pavement Taylor raised an amused eyebrow at her.

Up to this moment she had successfully fought acknowledging how drop-dead gorgeous he looked, but as her heart missed a couple of beats she said stiffly, ‘Mrs Tate-Collins would never think anything so vulgar.’

‘Really? I thought she had a little twinkle in her eye.’

Any female, whatever her age, would have a twinkle in her eye when she looked at Taylor. That was the effect he had on the whole of womankind. ‘I think not,’ she said crisply. ‘And before we move from here I want to make it perfectly plain that I have agreed to this meeting under sufferance, and only because I want the divorce to go through with the minimum of disruption.’

Taylor surveyed her silently, his customary stern expression now in place. ‘Feel better now you’ve got that off your chest?’ he asked mildly after a very long moment.

Marsha shrugged. ‘I just wanted you to know, that’s all,’ she said, wondering why she suddenly felt like a recalcitrant schoolgirl.

‘Believe me, Fuzz, I was never in any doubt,’ he said drily. ‘You are nothing if not straightforward.’

Which was more than could be said for him. She hadn’t spoken, but the words must have been plain to read on her face because he next said, even more drily, ‘Especially when you say nothing at all.’

‘So, in view of that, why are we doing this?’ she asked a touch bewilderedly. He hadn’t contacted her in almost eighteen months, so why now, with the divorce just weeks away?

‘Because it’s time.’

He had always been good at those—the cryptic one-liners. Right from when she had first met him she had known he was an enigma, but she had thought she’d found the key when he’d asked her to marry him just weeks after they had first been introduced at a dinner party by a mutual friend. Love. She had mistakenly imagined he loved her as she loved him—had loved him, she corrected immediately. Had.

The warm evening was redolent with the faint smells of cooking from various open windows, along with the strains of a popular chart hit and bursts of laughter from the house next door. Marsha watched Taylor wrinkle his aquiline nose. ‘Shall we go?’ he asked quietly, his eyes tight on her face.

She would have liked to have said no and turned on her heel, but it really wasn’t an option. She nodded, allowing him to take her arm as they walked a few steps to where his Aston Martin was parked. He had changed the model in the last eighteen months, she noted silently, although the other car had only been six months old when she had left him. This one was sleek and dark and dangerous—very much like Taylor.

He opened the passenger door for her, and she slid into the expensive interior with a gracefulness she was pleased about, considering the way her stomach was jumping and her legs were trembling. That was the trouble with Taylor, she thought irritably. However much she tried to prepare herself, he always got under her skin.

Once he had joined her in the car, she steeled herself to glance at him as though his closeness bothered her not at all. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Surprise.’ He didn’t look at her, starting the engine and then manoeuvring the powerful car out of the close confines of the parking space. Her eyes fell on the thick gold ring on the third finger of his left hand, and again her heart lurched. Did he wear his wedding band all the time, or had he donned it specially for this evening? she asked herself, before answering in the next breath, what did it matter anyway? The ring was just an item of jewellery if the commitment it was meant to signify wasn’t there. Her own hands had been ringless from the moment she had walked out of their house and out of Taylor’s life.

The car purred along the busy London streets, passing numerous pubs and wine bars where folk were sitting outside drinking or eating in the dying sunshine. In the interim between leaving university and meeting Taylor Marsha had often enjoyed summer evenings with friends in this way, but since the breakdown of her marriage she hadn’t wanted to go back to the old crowd. She still saw one or two of them occasionally, but it wasn’t the same—not for her. They were still all relatively fancy-free and into having a good time, but she felt she had passed that stage and couldn’t go back—certainly not while she was still legally a married woman anyway. Stupid, maybe, she admitted a trifle bitterly, considering the way Taylor had behaved, but she couldn’t help it.

She glanced down at her hands, which were tight fists in her lap, and forced her fingers to relax, uncurling them one by one as she breathed deeply and willed her pulse into a steady beat. ‘I don’t like surprises,’ she said clearly, as though Taylor had just spoken that moment rather than all of ten minutes ago. Ten minutes of ragged vibrating silence.

She kept her gaze on the windscreen as the tawny eyes flashed over her tight profile before returning to the road ahead. ‘Shame,’ he drawled smoothly.

‘So, where are we going?’ And then, as the car made another turning, she knew. He was taking her home! No, not home—home was now her tiny sanctuary in West Kensington. ‘Stop the car please, Taylor,’ she said as evenly as she could.

‘Why?’

His tone was so innocent she knew she was right. ‘Because you told me you were taking me out to dinner,’ she said stonily.

‘I am.’ He gestured with one hand at the immaculate dinner suit he was wearing.

‘Taylor!’ She paused, warning herself to take care not to lose her temper and give him the satisfaction of winning. ‘I recognise where we are,’ she said more calmly. ‘This is a stone’s throw from Harrow.’

He nodded, totally unrepentant. ‘That’s right, and Hannah has been like a dog with two tails knowing you were dropping by tonight.’

Dropping by? Was the man mad? And then the thought of the buxom, middle-aged housekeeper who had mothered her from the first moment she had been introduced to her melted Marsha enough for a lump to come into her throat. She bit down on the emotion, saying, ‘I have no intention of going to your home.’

‘Our home, Fuzz.’ His voice was suddenly dangerous. ‘And although you might be able to cast people off as though they have never existed, Hannah can’t. Mad as you were with me, it wouldn’t have hurt you to have dropped her a line or arranged to meet her somewhere. Even a phone call would have been something. You damn near broke her heart.’

She couldn’t stand this. Didn’t he know that any reminder of him, however small, had crucified her in the early days, and if she had seen Hannah all her resolve to be strong and make a new life would have been swept away? She had missed the woman who had become the only mother she had ever known nearly as much as Taylor. And then, because she was working on sheer emotion, and without the necessary protective shields in place, she spoke out the thing which had hurt her as much as his betrayal with Tanya. ‘If you were so concerned about Hannah’s feelings, why didn’t you contact me after I’d left?’ she bit out harshly. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about casting people off.’

‘I don’t believe I’m hearing this,’ he growled, raking back his hair with an angry gesture which spoke volumes. ‘I came home after three days in Germany which had been pure hell to find you already packed and waiting to leave. You came at me all guns firing and accusing me of goodness knows what, and when I tried to make you see reason you walked out of the door. I followed you to your car to prevent you leaving and you slammed the door on my hand, breaking several bones in the process.’

‘That was an accident,’ she defended quickly. ‘I said so at the time, if you remember. I didn’t know you’d got your hand in the way of the door.’

‘It didn’t prevent you from driving off though, did it?’ he reminded her heatedly.

Marsha took a moment to compose herself. He was turning this all round, as though she was the one who had had an affair! ‘Hannah was there to take care of you—’

‘Damn Hannah,’ he said furiously, as though he hadn’t just accused her of being unfeeling. ‘I drove after you, if you remember, and do you recall what you said when we stopped at those traffic lights? If I didn’t stop following you, you’d drive into a wall. Tell me you didn’t mean that.’

She had meant it. She had been so desperate and hurt that night it would have been a relief not to have to think or feel ever again.

He nodded grimly. ‘Quite,’ he said, as though she had just confirmed what he’d said out loud. ‘So I let you go. Call me old-fashioned, but I thought I’d rather see you alive than dead.’

‘Call me old-fashioned, but I always thought there were two in a marriage, not three—or more.’