‘What happened?’ he asked abruptly.
‘After my father died, it was just my mother and me—’
He sounded incredulous. ‘In this great barn of a place?’
‘We loved it,’ she said simply.
He let his eyes roam once more over the high ceilings. ‘Yes, I can see that you would,’ he said slowly.
‘We couldn’t bear to leave it. When my mother died, I had to sell up, of course—because there was Tim to think about by then.’
‘So you sold this and bought the cottage?’ he guessed. ‘And presumably banked the rest?’
She nodded.
He thought of her, all alone, struggling along with a little baby, and he felt the sharp pang of conscience. ‘Lisi, why in God’s name didn’t you contact me? Even if I hadn’t been able to offer you any kind of future—don’t you think that I would have paid towards my son’s upkeep?’
She gave him a look of icy pride. ‘I wasn’t going to come begging to you, cap in hand! I had to think of what was best for everyone, and I came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to cut all ties.’
‘And did you enjoy playing God with people’s lives?’
She heard his bitterness. ‘I thought it would only complicate things if I tried to involve you—for you, for me, for Tim. And for your wife, of course,’ she finished. ‘Because if it had been me, and my husband had done what you did to her—it would have broken my heart.’ She looked at him and her eyes felt hot with unshed tears for the dead woman she had unknowingly deceived. But not Philip—his betrayal had been cold-bloodedly executed. ‘Did she know, Philip? Did your wife ever find out?’
‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Carla never knew anything about it.’
‘Are you sure? They say that wives always know—only sometimes they pretend not to.’ She stared at him as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘How could you do it? How could you do that to her and live with yourself afterwards?’
Her condemnation of him was so strong that he felt he could almost reach out and touch it, but he knew he couldn’t let her stumble along this wrong track any longer, no matter how painful the cost of telling her.
‘She didn’t know,’ he ground out, ‘because she wasn’t aware. Not of me, or you, or what happened. Not aware of anything.’
She blinked at him in confusion. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The night I made love to you—my wife hadn’t spoken to me for eighteen months.’
Foolish hope flared in her heart, putting an entirely differentperspective on events. ‘You mean…you mean that you were separated?’
He gave a bitter laugh at the unwitting irony of her words. ‘In a sense, yes—we had been separated for a long time. You see, the car crash happened before I met you, Lisi, not after. It left her in a deep coma from which she never recovered. She didn’t die for several months after…after…’
‘After what?’ she whispered.
His eyes grew even bleaker. ‘After I made love to you. You must have been about six months pregnant when she died.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE sitting-room of her childhood retreated into a hazy blur and then came back into focus again and Lisi stared at Philip, noting the tension which had scored deep lines down the side of his mouth.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Don’t you?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘My wife—’
His wife. His wife. ‘What was her name?’
He hesitated, then frowned. What was it to her? ‘Carla,’ he said, grudgingly.
Carla. A person who was referred to as a ‘wife’ was a nebulous figure of no real substance, but Carla—Carla existed.Philip’s wife. Carla. It hurt more than it had any right to hurt. ‘Tell me,’ she urged softly.
He wasn’t looking for her sympathy, or her understanding—he would give her facts if she wanted to hear them, but he wanted nothing in return.
‘It happened early one autumn morning,’ he began, and a tale he had not had to recount for such a long time became painfully alive in his mind as he relived it. ‘Carla was driving to work. She worked out of London,’ he added, as if that somehow mattered. ‘And visibility was poor. There were all the usual warnings on the radio for people to take it easy, but cars were driving faster than they should have done. A lorry ran into the back of her.’ He paused, swallowing down the residual rage that people were always in a hurry and stupid enough to ignore the kind of conditions which led to accidents.
‘When the paramedics arrived on the scene, they didn’t think she’d make it. She had suffered massive head injuries. They took her to hospital, and for a while it was touch and go.’
Lisi winced. What words could she say that would not sound meaningless and redundant? He must have heard the same faltering platitudes over and over again. She nodded and said nothing.
‘Her body was unscathed,’ he said haltingly. ‘And so was her face—that was the amazing thing.’ But it had been a cruel paradox that while she had lain looking so perfect in the stark hospital bed—the Carla he had known and loved had no longer existed. Smashed away by man’s disregard for safety.
‘I used to visit her every day—twice a day when I wasn’t out of London.’ Sitting there for hours, playing her favourite music, stroking the cold, unmoving hand and praying for some kind of response, some kind of recognition he was never to see again. Other than one slight movement of her fingers which had given everyone false hope. ‘But she was so badly injured. She couldn’t speak or eat, or even breathe for herself.’
‘How terrible,’ breathed Lisi, and in that moment her heart went out to him.
‘The doctors weren’t even sure whether she could hear me, but I talked to her anyway. Just in case.’
He met a bright kind of understanding in her eyes and he hardened his heart against it. ‘I was living in a kind of vacuum,’ he said heavily. ‘And work became my salvation, in a way.’ At work he had been forced to put on hold the human tragedy which had been playing non-stop in his life. He gave her a hard, candid look. ‘Women came onto me all the time, but I was never…’
She sensed what was coming. ‘Never what, Philip?’
‘Never tempted,’ he snarled. ‘Never.’ His mouth hardened. ‘Until you.’
So she was the scapegoat, was she? Was that why he had seemed so angry when he had walked back into her life? ‘You make me sound like some kind of femme fatale,’ she said drily.
He shook his head. That had been his big mistake. A complete misjudgement. Uncharacteristic, but understandable under the circumstances. ‘On the contrary,’ he countered. ‘You seemed the very opposite of a femme fatale. I thought that you were sweet, and safe. Innocent. Uncomplicated.’
Achingly, she noted his use of the past tense.
‘Until that night. When we had that celebratory drink.’ He walked back over to the window and stared out unseeingly. ‘I’d only had one drink myself—so I couldn’t even blame the alcohol.’
Blame. He needed someone to blame—and she guessed that someone was her. ‘So I was responsible for your momentaryweakness, was I, Philip?’
He turned around and his face was a blaze of anger. ‘Do you make a habit of getting half-cut and borrowing men’s hotel rooms to sleep it off?’ he ground out, because this had been on his mind for longer than he cared to remember. ‘Do you often take off all