‘So it’s the morality of it, then?’ Rosa questioned. ‘You’re too precious to sleep with your own husband even it means he has to spend the rest of his life behind bars?’
Rosa made it sound so simple.
‘For the biggest mistake of your life, you chose rather well, did you not?’ Rosa sneered. ‘You are being paid to sleep with Niklas—it’s hardly a hardship.’
Meg met her eyes and was positive that he and Rosa had slept together. They both stared for a moment, lost in their own private thoughts. Then Rosa stood, a curl on her lip, and another sassy Brazilian gave her opinion of Meg as she upended her life.
‘You need to get over yourself.’
WHEN THEY HAD GONE, Meg did what she had spent a year avoiding.
She looked up the man she had married and found out just how powerful he was—or had been before he had been charged. She understood now that the Niklas Dos Santos she was reading about would be less than impressed to find himself in business class. And then she read about the shock his arrest had caused. Niklas might have a reputation in business as being ruthless, but he had always seemed honest—which was apparently why it had made it so easy for him to con some high-flying people into parting with millions. They had believed the lies that had been told to them. His business peers’ trust in him had made them gullible, and despite Rosa’s and her colleagues’ protestations of his innocence, for Meg the articles cast doubt.
She knew, after all, how effortlessly he had read her, how easily he had played her. Meg had seen another side to Niklas and it wasn’t one she liked.
And yet, as Rosa had pointed out, he was her husband, and she was apparently his one hope of receiving a fair trial.
And then Meg clicked on images and wished she had not.
The first one she saw was of him handcuffed and being bundled into a police car.
There were many more of Niklas, but they were not of the man she knew. The suit was on and the tie was beautifully knotted, the hair was as she remembered, but not in one single image did she see him smiling or laughing. Not one single picture captured the Niklas she had so briefly known.
And then she found another image—one that proved the most painful of all to see.
His arrogant face was scowling, there were three scratches on his cheek that her nails had left there, and a deep bruise on his neck that her mouth had made. Meg read the headline: Dos Santos vira outra mulher! Meg clicked for a translation. She wanted to know if he had returned that morning and been arrested—wanted to know if that was the reason he had been so cruel to her. Had he known he was about to be arrested and ended it to protect her? She waited for the translation to confirm it, held her breath as it appeared: Dos Santos upsets another woman!
And even in prison, even locked up and a world away, somehow he broke her heart again.
There was a knock at the door. Her mother didn’t wait for an answer, just opened it and came in. ‘Helen said you had visitors?’
‘I did.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Friends.’
She saw her mum purse her lips and knew she would not leave until she found out who her friends were and what they wanted. Even without the arrival of her visitors Meg remembered she had been due for a difficult conversation with her parents today, and now seemed like a good time to get it over with.
‘Can you get Dad …?’ Meg gave her mum a pale smile. ‘I need to speak to you both.’
It didn’t go well.
‘After all we’ve done for you’ was the running theme, and the words Meg had expected to hear when she told them that she had chosen not to continue working in the family firm.
She didn’t mention Niklas. It was enough for them to take in without giving them the added bonus of a son-in-law! And one in prison too.
It should have been a far harder conversation to have, yet she felt as if all her emotions and fears were reserved for the decision that was still to come, and Meg sat through the difficult conversation with her parents pale and upset, but somehow detached.
‘Why would you want to be a chef?’ Her mother simply didn’t get it—didn’t get that her daughter could possibly want something that had not been chosen for her. ‘You’re a lawyer, for God’s sake, and you want to go and work in some kitchen—?’
‘I don’t know exactly what I want to do,’ Meg broke in. ‘I don’t even know if I’ll be accepted …’
‘Then why would you give it all up?’
And she didn’t know how to answer—didn’t know how to tell them that she didn’t feel as if she was actually giving up anything, that she was instead taking back her life.
Just not yet.
She told them she was taking a holiday, though she still wasn’t sure that she was, but even without Niklas looming large in her thoughts taking a few weeks off while her parents calmed down seemed sensible.
‘And then I’ll come back and work for a couple of months,’ Meg said. ‘I’m not going to just up and leave …’
But according to her parents she already had.
Later, as she sat on the balcony of her small flat and looked at the stunning view, Meg thought about her day. What should have been a difficult conversation with her parents, what should have her sitting at home racked with guilt and wondering if she’d handled things right, barely entered her thoughts now. Instead she focused on the more pressing problem looming ahead.
Quietly she sat and examined the three things she had that proved her relationship with Niklas had actually existed.
She took the ring from the chain around her neck and remembered the certainty she had felt when he had slipped it on—even though he had told her it could never be for ever, somehow she had felt it was right.
And then she picked up the marriage certificate she had retrieved from her bedside table and examined the dark scrawl of his signature. Niklas Dos Santos. She saw the full stop at the end of his name and could even hear the sound his pen had made as he’d dotted the document.
Finalised it.
And then she examined the third thing, the most painful thing—a heart that even eleven months on was still exquisitely tender.
There had been no one since, no thought of another man since that time. She felt dizzy as she peered into her feelings, scared as to what she might find. The truth was there waiting and she hadn’t wanted to see it. It hurt too much to admit it.
She loved him.
Or rather she had.
Absolutely she had, or she would never have married him. Meg knew that deep down. And, whether or not he had wanted it, still that love had existed. Her very brief marriage with him had for Meg been the real thing.
And, as Rosa had pointed out, they were still married.
It was getting cool, so Meg went inside and read the itinerary Rosa had handed her. Then she looked up the prison he was being held at and could not believe that he was even there, let alone that on Thursday she might be too.
Would be.
Meg slid the ring back on her finger.
A difficult