‘History makes us!’
‘You forget, I know him well too. Well enough to know that he can be dangerous. He has always taken risks, stupid risks, and the only reason he’s got away with them is because his parents have had the money to bail him out every time.’
‘He holds down a job!’
‘That means nothing.’
‘Why are you his best man if you hate him so much?’ she asked bitterly. Why are you? Why did you have to be here?
‘Don’t you know? He offered it as a challenge, Isobel, and I never refuse a challenge.’
‘You’re as bad as he is.’
‘My intelligence outstrips his,’ he said in a hard, controlled voice. ‘Any risks I take are born from cool calculation. Jeremy saw me as a threat the minute I set foot in that school and when he discovered that I couldn’t be bullied into taking his orders, he did the next best thing. He decided to befriend me, and frankly I didn’t care one way or the other. But don’t you know that underneath the friendship there has always been an undercurrent of envy and resentment?’
‘I know,’ Isobel muttered. ‘But he did like you.’
‘He respected me.’ Lorenzo said this without a trace of vanity. ‘When he asked me to be his best man, we both knew the reason. The reason was you.’
She turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Everything he said was tearing her apart.
‘You were the prize draw,’ he mocked. ‘You have always been the prize draw. In this little, tight-knit community, you were the light that outshone the rest. You dazzled everyone. You were the greatest trophy.’
‘Where is this getting us, Lorenzo?’ she asked, doing her utmost to keep the misery out of her voice.
‘You’re catapulting yourself headlong into disaster,’ he grated, a dull red flush spreading over his cheeks. ‘There is still time to get out of its path.’
This, she knew, was the closest he would ever get to begging, and it made every bone in her body ache with the craving to do just what he asked.
Everything he had said about Jeremy was true. Jeremy had been obsessed with her. He had singled her out and it had never really occurred to him that his privileged background, which had bought him everything, couldn’t similarly buy him her. He had proposed to her when she was sixteen, still at school, while he had been at university, four years her senior. She had laughed. Now the joke was on her.
‘I will marry Jeremy——’ she looked at her watch ‘—in less than thirty minutes’ time,’ she said in a whisper, ‘and that’s all there is to it.’
His lips tightened and his expression changed subtly from anger to contempt. She didn’t know which she hated more.
‘I never took you for a coward or a fool, Isobel Chandler, but I’m rapidly revising my opinion.’
‘People are more complex than you give them credit for,’ she said in a low voice.
‘What are you trying to say to me?’ His eyes glinted and the sun, streaming in behind him through the large bay window, gave him a brooding, dangerous air that frightened and excited her. He had always frightened and excited her, she realised. He had walked into that school and she had been open-mouthed. She and every other girl in the class. They had been a group hesitatingly crossing the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, realising with an uncertain thrill that boys were not quite as uninteresting as they had once assumed. Lorenzo Cicolla with his bronzed skin and his black hair, four years older but vastly more mature than the other boys of his own age, had captivated their imagination. They had giggled from the sidelines, observed him from the distance with the blushing innocence of youth.
The fact that he had not looked at her, at any of them, even with the mildest of curiosity, had only added to his appeal. In fact, it was only when she was sixteen, ironically through Jeremy, that they had struck up a tentative friendship and he had admitted, with amusement at her reaction, that he had always noticed her. He might have been young, but he had already cultivated the dark, intense composure that had hardened as he got older.
‘I’m not trying to say anything.’
‘No? Why do I get the impression that you’re talking in riddles?’
‘I have no idea.’ She shrugged but her hands were trembling, and she quickly stuck them behind her back and clasped them together.
‘What did those letters say?’
She gave him a blank look, and then realised what he was talking about. She might have guessed that he would not have left for too long her unwary admission that Jeremy had written to her. There had only been one letter, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
‘This and that,’ she muttered uncomfortably. ‘Why are we going through this?’
‘Be more specific.’
‘I can’t. I don’t remember.’
‘Ah.’ His face cleared and he shot her a cruel, cold look. ‘You can’t remember what was said in those letters, yet you still decided to marry the man.’
‘No! You don’t understand! You’re putting words into my mouth,’ she said in confusion.
‘Can you blame me, dammit?’ He gripped her and his eyes were so ferocious that she was terrified that he would do something awful, shake her until she came apart. She opened her mouth to protest and his lips met hers in a kiss that was fuelled by anger.
Isobel whimpered and pushed at him and eventually he stood back and stared down at her.
‘What’s the matter, Isobel?’ he asked, his mouth twisting. ‘Can’t you bear to bid a fond farewell to your lover?’
‘Stop it!’ she moaned. She felt close to tears. When she had first told him about Jeremy, he had been angry, but proud. Too proud to question. He had stormed out of her university flat and had not returned. Time had obviously worked on his fury, stoking it. It was a strange, back-handed compliment to her, but one she would rather have avoided.
‘Why?’ he snarled.
‘You know why! I belong to Jeremy now. It’s just the way it is.’
He turned away abruptly, but not before she caught the hatred that her remark had aroused. She realised, because she knew him so well, that she had not phrased her heated reply in the most tactful way possible, but just then, with her passions threatening to soar out of control, she had had to say something that would deflect him from realising how powerful his effect on her still was.
She made a stilted move towards him, then there was a knock on the door and she sprang back as though she had been burned.
It was her father. He came into the room and gave them a puzzled look, in answer to which Lorenzo said, in a normal voice, as though nothing had happened between them, ‘Just wishing the bride good luck. I doubt I shall see much of her once the wedding is under way, and we’ve known each other for so long and——’ he faced her with a smile even though his eyes were as hard as diamonds ‘—so well, that I thought a private last farewell would be in order.‘
Her father came into the room, oblivious to the undercurrents, and nodded with genial understanding.
‘Quite understand, my dear fellow,’ he said warmly. He had always liked Lorenzo. ‘Lucky chap, getting this beautiful daughter of mine.’
Lorenzo looked at her with icy courtesy. ‘I don’t know whether luck had a great part to play in it. Love, perhaps, wouldn’t you say, Isobel?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, reaching out to hold her father’s hand. She couldn’t