The Price Of Deceit

Out of the corner of her eye, Katherine saw the two girls who had been sunbathing a few yards away shield their eyes and covertly look at him from under their lashes. He always had that effect on the opposite sex.

‘I’m sorry if I dragged you away from something important,’ she said, by way of response, as he sprawled down next to her and tossed his jacket on the grass.

She didn’t want to get too close to him. That would be fatal.

‘Are you?’ he asked lazily, turning to face her, and she tried not to succumb to the sexual warmth of his voice. ‘It seems a shame to be confined to an office building when the weather is like this.’

‘Fortunately,’ she said, nervously keeping her distance, ‘you can afford to indulge your desires to be outside, since the office building belongs to you.’

She looked at his long brown fingers and remembered the way they had touched her that first time, slowly, gently, setting her alight, so that her whole body had burned with the thrill of sensations waking for the first time.

He laughed. He had once told her that she was the most forthright person he had ever met.

‘Most people seem to undergo a personality change when they’re with anyone rich or powerful,’ he had said. ‘But you don’t.’

What would he think of her if only he knew?

‘Fortunately,’ he agreed, slanting his eyes across to her.

‘And how is it going with the project?’ she asked, deciding to give herself a bit of time before she plunged into what she had to say. I love you, she told him silently in her head. I love you and I’m sorry.

‘You don’t really want to sit here and discuss work with me,’ he drawled, lying down beside her with his arm behind his head. With a swift movement, he reached out and pulled her down beside him, laughing under his breath at her gasp, then he draped his arm over her, so that she was lying with her head on his shoulder and his hand inches away from her breast.

She felt a momentary panic and had to force herself to relax.

‘I can think,’ he murmured into her ear, ‘of a thousand things I’d rather be doing with you than discussing work. Or at least—’ he laughed, a low, amused sound that invited her to join in ‘—one. Why don’t we go back to my apartment with a couple of bottles of champagne and some smoked salmon and let the day go by?’

‘No, really, Dominic,’ she muttered hurriedly, struggling to sit up.

She drew her knees up and clasped her arms around them, looking down at him. He had his eyes half closed, and his long, thick eyelashes flickered against his cheeks. There should have been something effeminate about him, but there wasn’t. In fact, his face was starkly masculine.

How much you’ve given me, she thought; have I been selfish and cowardly? Or perhaps I have only been human.

‘Yes,’ he said, opening his eyes to look at her. ‘Really too nice to be cooped up anywhere, even in an apartment. How about a drive?’ There was a lazy glitter in his eyes that made the blood rush round her veins like a tidal flood. ‘We could get in my car and just keep driving until we see somewhere we want to stop. I rather like the thought of the seaside.’

‘Seasides here aren’t like the ones you know,’ Katherine told him, propping her chin on her knees. She knew that this aimless conversation wasn’t going to get her anywhere, that she ought to say what she had to say, but now that the moment of truth had arrived she was driven by a desperate need to prolong things, to take in as much of him as she could, while she still could.

‘The sea will probably be grey, the sand will be gritty and there’ll be thousands of people.’

‘Thank God you don’t work for a travel company,’ he said, and she smiled reluctantly.

‘I’ve never been to Scotland—’ you gave my life meaning, she thought. You made it all worthwhile. Have I taken too much? ‘—but I think the beaches up there are different. Wild and isolated.’ She had never actually been anywhere. Her father had walked out on them when she was five, and from that day on her mother had counted pennies, constantly reminding her daughter that they barely had enough to buy a new pair of shoes, never mind traipse away on holidays.

‘Sounds tempting.’ He sat up and cupped her face in his hand. ‘Let’s go to Scotland.’

‘Don’t be foolish,’ she said, reddening. His cool fingers against her skin sent a jolt of alarm through her.

‘Wouldn’t they give you the time off work?’ he asked softly. ‘I’m sure I could persuade them. Or else I could just buy the company and give you the time off.’

‘No!’ She had made sure not to be specific about what she was doing in London. Emma, the friend whose flat she was sharing, had fabricated that little gem to Dominic, and Katherine had consequently found herself enmeshed in a lie which she had found increasingly difficult to untell.

So many half-truths, so much shade between the light, but when you were soaring for the first time in your life it was so hard to face the crash of coming back down.

‘It’s nice now,’ she said weakly. ‘You know what the weather’s like over here. By the time we made it anywhere, the sun would have changed its mind about shining and it’d be raining.’

‘I’ll take you to my place in the Caribbean,’ he murmured. ‘When it rains over there, people breathe a sigh of relief because it’s good to get away from the heat.’

‘Dominic Duvall, you have too much money.’ Let me see you smile like that one last time, she thought, a smile that’s just for me. You’re the only person who did things just for me. Could you blame me for feeling special when I’ve never felt special in my life before?

He was looking at her, his green eyes teasing. ‘Do I hear the tones of someone about to deliver a lecture?’ he asked, his voice a caress, and she looked away abruptly. ‘Tell me why I have too much money for my own good. No one’s ever told me that before.’ He trailed his finger along her arm and she shivered. ‘Least of all a woman.’

‘You don’t know what hardship is,’ Katherine said, ignoring her response to his feathery touch. ‘It’s like living in a bubble.’

‘That makes me sound irresponsible,’ he answered, smiling, ‘but don’t forget that my companies are responsible for the livelihoods of thousands of people.’

‘I suppose so,’ she said, and he sat up.

‘And, believe it or not, I do care about them.’

‘You don’t have to justify your lifestyle to me.’

‘Oh, but I do.’ He stared at her so intently that her head began to swim. ‘Not to anyone else—but you, yes.’

She laughed uneasily, looking away. ‘It’s too hot to be discussing this.’

‘It’s something that has to be discussed. Would you find the sort of life I lead unbearable?’

‘What are you saying to me?’

He didn’t answer. He fished into his jacket pocket and then held out a little box to her, and Katherine stared at it, dumbfounded and horrified.

‘Go on. Take it,’ he said roughly.

She still had her arms around her knees, and her fingers were digging into her skin. How could she take that box? She had known, of course, that their relationship was becoming deeper—it was one of the reasons that she had known that the time had come to break it off—but this she hadn’t foreseen. She knew what was in that box. An unexploded bomb was in that box.

She reached out for it and found that her hand was shaking. Perhaps it’s just a chain, she thought wildly, or a brooch, or something else harmless.

He was looking at her, and she knew that he must be misreading her nerves as excitement.

‘I’m thirty-four years old,’ he said in a husky voice, ‘and I’ve never come close to doing this. Except now.’

She still hadn’t opened the thing. She dropped her knees to sit cross-legged opposite him, and looked down at it in her hands. A warm breeze lifted her brown hair and blew it gently across her face. Forgive me, she thought, one day. She brushed her hair away from her face.

Before, it seemed like a thousand years ago, in another life, she had always worn her hair tied back, pulled away from her face and coiled into the nape of her neck. When she had flown to London, running as fast as her legs would take her, away from the little Midlands town where she had lived and taught, ever since her mother had died, in a little cottage that seemed to satisfy everything and nothing, away from the catastrophe that had shattered her placid existence, the first thing she had done was to unpin her hair. She had been looking for something, an adventure, and adventures did not happen to women who tied their hair at the back of their necks.

‘I’ve known a lot of women, Katherine,’ he said gravely, ‘and they’ve all been like ships that pass in the night.’

‘Surely not.’ She could hardly speak. Was there glass in her throat?