‘I don’t have a wife, and my girlfriends are all very understanding,’ he murmured smoothly.
‘I suppose they have to be,’ she countered, thinking that his answer told her a lot, ‘or they rapidly become ex-girlfriends.’
‘I travel a lot,’ he offered dismissively, as if in explanation.
Lucia was having difficulty with her breathing. She knew that it was because she was on edge, dreading the moment when she saw Thierry and would know if he had really done this thing to her, but it was easier to blame Rob for the tight, breathless sensation afflicting her.
‘Don’t hold me so tight,’ she muttered angrily.
‘Don’t worry, Lucia, it’s not personal,’ he responded in a low voice for her ears only. ‘I’m not especially attracted to girls like you.’
‘And I don’t like men like you,’ she retaliated promptly.
‘Great.’ He gave her a sharply scintillating smile. ‘We should get on perfectly.’
‘Or not at all—’
She broke off as her eyes encountered a bright red-gold head some distance away, and a tiny sound of acute distress escaped her as she looked for and found the young woman clinging to Thierry Olivier’s arm. The nightmare was real.
The arm about her waist tightened, reminding her of the urgency with which Rob’s fingers had grasped her shoulders when he had first accosted her.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he asserted in a hard voice.
‘I know I will,’ she flared.
‘And your heart isn’t breaking.’ Rob was openly taunting now, as if he actually wanted her furious.
‘No!’
Inwardly she was coming apart, but she would never admit it, never show it to anyone, and least of all to this man who had already seen too much of her, who had seen her openly disbelieving when he had told her the truth, and who must now feel only pity or contempt—either of which were anathema to all that was proud and sensitive in her.
‘Because you didn’t really love him.’ His smile was savagely derisive this time.
‘Because I know I can get him back,’ she contradicted, in an absolute rage with him and the world, and saying just anything. ‘If I want him. I’m not sure that I do.’
Rob’s eyes had narrowed, and it was a moment before he spoke, observing idly, ‘You definitely don’t need him.’
‘I don’t need anyone!’
It was pride driving her to make these wild claims, because it was all she had now, and no one must guess at the humiliation that was scalding her.
‘That’s one thing I knew about you before I’d even set eyes on you,’ Rob commented in a tone of agreement.
Lucia ignored that, forcing her lips into the shape of a smile as she became aware that several people nearby were regarding them curiously, although Thierry was not yet aware of her presence.
‘So that’s her—your sister?’ she prompted in a low, taut voice, staring at the woman whose colouring was the only thing she appeared to have in common with her brother, and whose oval face was still and serene.
‘Nadine,’ he confirmed, ‘who does need Olivier. So you’re going to let her have him, aren’t you? Your hands, Lucia.’
Only then did she become aware that her hands were clasped in front of her, their tense fingers twisting and turning agitatedly again, and she flushed, forcing them free of each other and letting them drop to her sides.
She didn’t care; she wouldn’t care, she told herself frantically. She wouldn’t let these people destroy her—Thierry and that woman, and this man who saw too much and knew how devastated she really was.
‘How did they meet?’ she asked, managing a netural tone despite the unevenness of her breathing.
‘Nadine has been working here at the hotel.’
‘Nepotism,’ Lucia accused smartly, intent on keeping him the main focus of her anger because somehow it seemed safer that way under the present circumstances.
‘She knows the business. She did a course at the hotel school in Johannesburg.’ Rob made it sound as if he was being incredibly magnanimous, bothering to enlighten her that much, but then he gave her a hawkishly challenging look.
‘Strange! Hassan Mohammed didn’t mention gratuitously opinionated and critical. “Such a vivacious, sunny-natured, loving girl” were his exact words, but perhaps something is traditionally blinding him.’
Lucia knew Hassan well. He had clearly been exaggerating, but she supposed that the description could apply loosely. When she wasn’t wounded in pride and heart, she liked and got on with people.
She had felt a pang of envy when Rob had mentioned his sister’s training. Because it involved dealing with people, the hotel industry had always attracted her, and she had been looking for some unhurtful way to tell her father that she wanted to go to the hotel school rather than getting her degree when the unexpected, fatal heart attack had hit, and there had only been time for a loving urge to ease his final minutes with a promise to go for the degree that meant so much to him.
She had done it, confident that when the results came out she would have passed. And she had come back to the Comoros to fulfil her promise to Thierry, knowing that she was unlikely ever to have to use her qualifications for a number of reasons—including Thierry’s reactionary dislike of the idea of a wife who worked, unless it was to help him on the estate.
Nevertheless, she had come intent on requesting a few weeks in which to unwind after the mental pressures of the last year before they started planning their wedding, and she’d been hopeful that he would be agreeable to her at least taking a temporary job at one or other of the new hotels’ which had been erected on the island in proof of international faith in the Comoros’ burgeoning popularity as a holdiay destination.
However briefly, she yearned to experience more of the sort of contact for which she had acquired a taste in South Africa, earning her air fares between Johannesburg and Grande Comore by waitressing at a restaurant in the evenings and working on the tills of an up-market chain store on Saturdays and Sunday mornings.
Now it occurred to her that, without Thierry, a job was a dire necessity as she hadn’t bothered to save a full return fare this year. In effect, she was stranded here, and not even a national. She could only have become Comorean when they’d married, gaining a proper national identity at last, plus the sense of belonging that she imagined must come with being settled and part of a pair.
Lucia sent Rob Ballard an oblique look from behind her sunglasses.
‘She won’t be working once she marries Thierry,’ she ventured.
‘She has quit already.’ His glance was slightly curious.
‘Then—’ She hesitated, but the urge to phrase it antagonistically wouldn’t be suppressed. ‘She has got my man, so can I have her job? Or any job?’
‘You’ll have to apply to Personnel, or ask Chester Watson—the manager here,’ he elaborated, seeing her blank look. ‘They do the hiring and firing and I don’t interfere. I’ll introduce you to Chester in a minute as I’ll have to leave you to announce this engagement for the happy couple, and I don’t want you anywhere near them until you’ve got yourself under better control than you have now.
‘But why don’t you go back to South Africa and get a job? The Comoros aren’t really your home.’
‘They were going to be. Neither is South Africa, and I barely remember England because we moved around the Indian Ocean most of my life. My mother tried to persuade me to go back with her and study in England