His response, when it finally came, was practical rather than emotional. ‘Where will you go?’
That was it?
Not, ‘Why?’ Or did he believe he already knew the answer to that? Assumed that the only reason she would leave him was because she’d found someone else? The thought sickened her…
‘Does it matter?’ she asked abruptly.
‘Yes, it matters…’ He bit off the words, shook his head. ‘Manda will need to know where to forward your mail.’
On the point of saying something very rude about his sister, she stopped herself. This was not Miranda’s fault. And she was not hiding from him, running away. Just distancing herself. For both their sakes. ‘The tenants moved out of my flat last month,’ she explained. ‘I’ll stay there.’
‘That won’t do—’
‘It’s what I want,’ she cut in before he could take over and set about organising accommodation that he considered more acceptable for someone who bore his name.
He didn’t look happy about it, but he let it go and said, ‘Very well.’ Then, ‘Is that it?’
No!
Her heart cried out the word, but she kept her mouth closed and, getting no answer, he nodded and returned to his desk to resume the work she had interrupted.
Numb, frozen out, cut off by a wall of ice, she was left with nothing to do but pack her immediate needs and leave.
Miranda emerged from the dining room as she headed for the stairs.
‘Belle? What are you doing here? I didn’t expect you back until tomorrow.’
‘It’s lovely to see you too,’ she said, without stopping, without looking back.
Ivo Grenville was staring blindly at the document in front of him when his sister, taking advantage of the door that Belle hadn’t bothered to close on her way out, walked into the library.
‘What’s the matter with Belle?’ she asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, ‘Honestly, she might have had the good manners to let me know she was coming back today.’
‘Why should she? This is her…’ He faltered on the word ‘home’, but his sister was too busy waving his objection away with an impatient gesture to notice.
‘That’s not the point. Even if I can drum up another man for tonight, I’ll have to totally rearrange the seating. And the caterers are going to—’
‘No.’
‘No? You mean she won’t be joining us for dinner?’ She relaxed. ‘Well, thank goodness for that. To be honest, she did look a mess, but I’ve no doubt people would run around, pull out all the stops for her. One smile and people just fall over themselves—’
‘No!’ He so rarely raised his voice, and never to her, that she was shocked into silence. ‘You won’t have to rearrange the seating because tonight’s dinner is cancelled.’
‘Cancelled?’ Her laugh, uncertain, died as she saw his face. ‘Ivo…?’ Then, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t cancel this late. The Ambassador, the Foreign Secretary…What possible reason can I give?’
‘I neither know nor care, but if you’re stuck for an excuse why don’t you tell our guests that my wife has just announced that she’s leaving me and I’m not in the mood to make small talk. I’m sure they’ll understand.’
‘Leaving you? But she can’t!’ Then, flushing, ‘Oh, I see. Who—’
‘Manda, please,’ he said, cutting her off before she could put into words the thoughts that had flashed through his mind. Thoughts that shamed him. Belle had never been less than forthright, honest with him. She’d wanted security; he’d wanted her…‘Not another word.’
He heard the door close very quietly and finally he sat back, abandoning the documents that moments before he’d insisted were too important to wait. Nothing was that important but, in the instant when he’d looked up and seen Belle, he’d known what was coming. It was in her eyes, the look he’d been waiting for, dreading, had always known would one day come. Security, for a woman of such warmth, such passion, was never going to be enough.
His first thought had been to postpone it, delay it, do anything to give himself time.
Another hour. Another day…
Each and every day of his working life he took a few precious minutes out of his morning to watch her as she lit up the television screen in his office. Each day, while she’d been away, he’d seen the change in her, had felt her moving away from him, had recognised the danger. Maybe it had begun even before she’d left; he just hadn’t wanted to see it. Maybe that was why he had tried so hard to stop her going on the trip.
He opened the desk drawer, pushing aside the ticket to Hong Kong, bought on the day he’d watched, agonised, as she’d talked into the camera, smiling even though there was blood trickling down her face. Plans he’d been forced to abandon when a crisis had blown up over a project he’d embarked upon.
He’d told himself that it didn’t matter. That he would drive down to the airport and meet her flight. Give her the necklace he’d had made for her with the diamonds his mother had worn on her wedding day.
Wrong on both counts.
Belle didn’t bother with the shower; she didn’t want to spend one minute more than necessary in this house. What she did need were clothes, and since she was due back at work first thing on Monday morning that involved rather more than a change of underwear and a pair of jeans.
She stared helplessly at the dozens of outfits that had been carefully chosen to provoke the desire in the red-blooded male to wake up each morning to her presence on the television screen, the wish in every female breast to be her best friend.
It was a difficult trick to pull off. Between them, however, the designers and the image consultants had managed it. Everything about her that the public recognised as ‘Belle Davenport’, her life, her marriage, had been airbrushed so thoroughly that she’d forgotten what was real and what was little more than a media fabrication.
Maybe that was why, for so long, she had felt she was running on empty. That if she stopped concentrating for a second the floor would open up beneath her feet and she’d disappear.
Suddenly losing it, unable to keep up the pretence for another minute, she turned her back on them and tossed the bare essentials in a holdall—underwear, shoes, a few basics, the first things that came to hand.
What else? She looked around. Make-up…
She grabbed for a gold-topped glass pot but her hands were shaking and it slipped through her fingers, shattered, splashing pale beige cream in a wide arc over the centuries-old polished oak floor, an antique rug. With a cry of dismay, she bent to pick up the pieces of glass.
‘Leave it!’
Ivo…
‘Leave it,’ he said, taking her hand, pulling it away from the glass. ‘You’ll cut yourself.’
Her skin shivered at his touch; his hand was cool and yet heat radiated from his fingers, warming her—as he never failed to warm her—so that the siren call of everything in her that was female urged her to let him lift her up into his arms, to hold him, tell him that she didn’t mean it. That she would never leave him. That nothing else mattered but to be here with him.
He touched her cheek, then pushed back her hair to look at the graze on her forehead, regarding her with eyes the colour of the ocean, a shifting mix of blue, green, grey that, as with the sea, betrayed his mood. Today they were a bleak