She reached out for it and found that her hand was shaking. Perhaps it’s just a chain, she thought wildly, or a brooch, or something else harmless.
He was looking at her, and she knew that he must be misreading her nerves as excitement.
‘I’m thirty-four years old,’ he said in a husky voice, ‘and I’ve never come close to doing this. Except now.’
She still hadn’t opened the thing. She dropped her knees to sit cross-legged opposite him, and looked down at it in her hands. A warm breeze lifted her brown hair and blew it gently across her face. Forgive me, she thought, one day. She brushed her hair away from her face.
Before, it seemed like a thousand years ago, in another life, she had always worn her hair tied back, pulled away from her face and coiled into the nape of her neck. When she had flown to London, running as fast as her legs would take her, away from the little Midlands town where she had lived and taught, ever since her mother had died, in a little cottage that seemed to satisfy everything and nothing, away from the catastrophe that had shattered her placid existence, the first thing she had done was to unpin her hair. She had been looking for something, an adventure, and adventures did not happen to women who tied their hair at the back of their necks.
‘I’ve known a lot of women, Katherine,’ he said gravely, ‘and they’ve all been like ships that pass in the night.’
‘Surely not.’ She could hardly speak. Was there glass in her throat?
‘Women have always seen me as a good catch. Rich women, women looking for a man with the right-sized bank balance, who thought that if they agreed to everything I asked they could eventually get me to agree to putting that gold band around their finger. I enjoyed their company, but I was never tempted to settle down.’ He paused. ‘Open the box.’
She opened it. There was a ring there, nestled on a bed of black velvet. A gold band with two diamonds entwined on the top. She stared at it, feeling sick, hating herself for what she had to do and hating Fate for giving her this glimpse of happiness which she knew could never be hers.
‘You’re different from the rest of them, Katherine Lewis. You’re genuine.’
No! she wanted to shout at him. No, I’m not!
‘I can’t accept this, Dominic.’ I love you, she thought, and love has made me strong and made me weak at the same time. Will you ever understand that? No, of course you won’t. I can hardly understand it myself. It’s a new world and one with which I’m unfamiliar.
‘You think you need time? Is that it? I feel as though I’ve known you forever.’ He was frowning.
‘That’s not it.’ Her grey eyes were wide and miserable. ‘I just can’t, that’s all.’
‘I don’t accept that,’ he told her, not taking the box, in fact not paying the slightest bit of attention to it whatsoever. ‘You must have known that I was falling in love with you.’
In a perfect world, she thought. But she could hardly complete the thought, because it wasn’t a perfect world. In a perfect world there would be no tears and no regrets, no words to be uttered that were so hard that every syllable tore at your soul.
‘We aren’t meant for each other,’ she whispered.
‘You’re talking rubbish,’ he said tightly, and she could see that he was beginning to get angry, a dark, baffled anger that frightened her.
‘Your world is somewhere else,’ she said, struggling to tell him the truth without telling him all of it. She could tell him that she had been living a lie for the past six months, but then that would drag her down into a quagmire of questions, none of which she could answer. The truth, as it stood, was too awful for words. The truth, as it stood, had given her the wild courage to be someone she never had been, but now it forced her to be a monster.
‘Of course,’ he said, and his expression cleared, ‘my home is in France, but naturally we wouldn’t be living there all year. We could spend six months there and six months in London.’ He threw her a crooked, amused smile. ‘George would be only too grateful. He says that most of the time he feels as though he’s hibernating, looking after an apartment that’s only used a couple of times a year. This problem is not insurmountable.’
Katherine didn’t say anything. The box with the ring was burning her hands.
‘The country has nothing to do with this,’ she told him. ‘I just can’t accept it. I just can’t marry you, Dominic.’
She had never imagined that he would fall in love with her. He was, Emma had told her, a notorious heart-breaker. He would give her a good, uncomplicated time, and Katherine had been so sure that she had not had the where-withal to captivate a man like him that she had closed her eyes and let herself be led. Open me up, she had said, handing him the key, and he had, and it was only in the past few days that she had realised that in turning the key to her heart he had changed himself. Or perhaps she had just been blind all along. Blind and, underneath the glamorous wrapping, still the same insecure person she thought that she had left behind, too insecure to believe that the impossible had happened.
‘I see.’ Coldness was beginning to creep into his voice and she could see the shutter coming down over his eyes.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said pleadingly. She held out the box and he threw it a scathing look.
‘I think I understand perfectly, Katherine,’ he said with glacial politeness. ‘You’ve been having a good time but not quite good enough to warrant a commitment.’ He stood up and began walking away and she followed, half running to keep up with him.
‘Please stop, Dominic,’ she called, trying to keep her voice low and not draw too much attention to what was going on.
He stopped, looked at her and said in a hard voice, ‘Why? So that we can talk? I can’t stand people who waste time performing post-mortems on a relationship.’ Then he moved on, and she walked alongside him, still half running, because his long legs covered the distance so much more easily than hers.
‘I can’t keep this,’ she told him. ‘You must take your ring back. It must have cost you a fortune.’
‘It did,’ he said smoothly, stopping to look down at her. All the warm charm which she had seen in the past had vanished, replaced by a cold calm that terrified her.
She had always known that he was a hard man, that underneath the surface was a layer of steel. She had witnessed it a couple of times, in his dealings with people whom he disliked. He would talk to them, but there would always be something forbidding in his voice, a reminder that there were lines beyond which they were not allowed to step.
‘There’s only one law when it comes to business,’ he had once told her, smilingly serious. ‘It’s the law of the jungle. I play fair, but if someone tries to cross me, it’s only right that I should make it crystal-clear who’s boss.’
‘I have no need for it,’ he said to her now, with a smile on his face that sent a little shiver of apprehension down her spine. ‘Keep it. Let it be a souvenir for you, a scalp to go on your belt.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Katherine mumbled, fidgeting from one foot to the other, unwilling to let him go like this, but equally unwilling to face the truth that she had no choice.
‘I suppose,’ he said, with the same dangerous smile on his face, and choosing to ignore her plea, ‘that I should be grateful. At least you weren’t a gold-digger. You never accepted anything from me. At the time I found that enchanting. There are very few rich men who aren’t beguiled by a woman to whom money apparently means nothing.’
‘No, your money never meant a thing to me.’ There, at least, she could be honest.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked steadily at her. He had amazing eyes. A peculiar, deep shade of green. Eyes that glittered; eyes that could stare at her and through her, down into