Twenty-four months should have been time enough to lessen the hurt. A sensible woman would have forgotten it altogether. But she’d never been sensible where Max was concerned and if the tears scalding her cheeks now weren’t proof enough of that, the dull, cold emptiness inside where once she’d known warmth and life and passion, should have been.
What would it take, she wondered, to cure her of Max Logan and heal the scars inflicted by her marriage? Would there ever come a time that she’d learn to love another man as she still loved him—and if so, would she love more wisely the next time?
Although dense silence greeted him when he stepped inside the penthouse, he knew at once that she was there. Quite apart from her suitcases still parked by the front door, and the scent of flowers everywhere, as well as a host of other clues that she’d made herself thoroughly at home, the atmosphere was different. Vibrant, electric, and unsettling as hell. A forewarning of trouble to come.
Dropping his briefcase on the desk in his office—one area, he was glad to see, that she hadn’t tried to camouflage into something out of a happy homemaker magazine—he made a quick circuit through the rooms on the main floor before climbing the stairs. The thick carpet masked his footsteps thoroughly enough that she was completely unaware of him coming to a halt at the entrance to the master suite.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he leaned against the door frame and watched her. She stood at the highboy dresser and appeared to be mopping her face with his golf shirt. But what struck him most forcibly was how thin she’d become. Not that she’d ever been fat or even close to it but, where once she’d been sweetly curved, she was now all sharp, elegant angles, at least from the rear. Her hips were narrow as a boy’s, her waist matchstick slender.
Though probably a prerequisite for all successful fashion models, it wasn’t a look that appealed to him. Even less did he like the air of fragility that went with this underfed version of the hellion he’d been coerced into marrying. It edged her too close to vulnerable, and once he started thinking along those lines, he was in trouble, as he very well knew from past experience.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d wipe your nose on something other than a piece of my clothing,” he said, relishing how his voice suddenly breaking the silence almost had her jumping out of her skin.
But when she spun around, the expression on her face made short work of his moment of malicious pleasure. He’d forgotten how truly beautiful she was. In particular, he’d forgotten the impact of her incredible eyes and, suddenly, he was the one struggling for composure as memories of the night they’d first met in her father’s house rushed back to haunt him.
“I’d like you to meet my daughter,” Zoltan Siklossy had said, as footsteps approached along the flagstone path that ran the width of the front of the rambling old mausoleum of a place.
Max had turned and been transfixed, the impact of the city skyline beyond the Danube forgotten. Backlit by the late May sunset, she’d appeared touched with gold all over, from her pale hair to her honey-tinted skin. Only her eyes had been different, a startlingly light aquamarine, one moment more green than blue, and the next, the other way around.
Fringed with long, curling lashes and glowing with the fire of priceless jewels, they’d inspected him. He’d stared back, mesmerized, and said the first thing that came to mind. “I didn’t know Magyars were blond. Somehow, I expected you’d all be dark.”
A stupid, thoughtless remark which showed him for the ignorant foreigner he was, but she hadn’t taken offence. Instead, she’d come forward and laughed as she took his hand. “Some of us are. But we Hungarians have a mixed ancestry and I, like many others in my country, favor our Finnish heritage.”
Though accented, her English was perfect, thanks, he later discovered, to an aunt who’d studied in London years before. Her laughter hung like music in the still, warm evening. Her hand remained in his, light and cool. “Welcome to Budapest, Mr. Logan,” she purred. “I hope you’ll allow me to introduce you to our beautiful city.”
“I’m counting on it,” he’d replied, bowled over by her easy self-assurance. Although she looked no more than eighteen, he believed her when she told him she was twenty-seven. Why not? After all, her parents were well into their seventies.
In fact, she’d been just twenty-two and the most conniving creature he’d ever met—not something likely to have changed, he reminded himself now, even if she did look about ready to keel over in a dead faint at being caught off guard.
“I’m not wiping my nose,” she whispered shakily, clutching the shirt to her breasts.
He strolled further into the room. “What were you doing, then? Sniffing to find evidence of another woman’s perfume? Checking for lipstick stains?”
Something flared in her eyes. Guilt? Shame? Anger? “Should I be? Do you entertain many women here, Max, now that I’m no longer underfoot all the time?”
“If I do, that’s certainly none of your business, my dear.”
“As long as we’re married—”
“You left the marriage.”
“But I’m still your wife and whether or not you like it, you’re still my husband.”
He circled her slowly and noticed that her eyes were suspiciously red-rimmed. “A fact which apparently causes you some grief. Have you been crying, Gabriella?”
“No,” she said, even as a fresh flood of tears welled up and turned her irises to sparkling turquoise.
“You used to be a better liar. What happened? Not had enough practice lately?”
“I…” Battling for composure, she pressed slender fingers to her mouth.
Irked to find his mood dangerously inclining toward sympathy, he made a big production of tipping the loose change from his pockets onto the shelf of his mahogany valet stand. “Yes? Spit it out, whatever it is. After everything else we’ve been through, I’m sure I can take it.”
Her voice, husky and uncertain, barely made it across the distance separating them. “I hoped we wouldn’t…be like this with one another, Max. I hoped we’d be able to…”
She swallowed audibly and dribbled into another tremulous silence.
“What?” He swung back to face her, stoking the slow anger her distress threatened to extinguish. “Pick up where we left off? And exactly where was that, Gabriella? At each other’s throats, as I recall!”
“I was hoping we could get past that. I think we must, if we’re to convince my parents they need have no worries about me.” She held out both hands in appeal. “I know you…hate me, Max, but for their sake, won’t you please try to remember there was once a time when we liked each other and, for the next two weeks, focus on that instead?”
CHAPTER TWO
HER reminder touched a nerve. They had liked each other, in the beginning. He’d been dazzled by her effervescence, her zest for life. Only later had he come to see them for what they really were: a cover-up designed to hide her more devious objectives.
“My father treats me as if I were made of bone china,” she’d confided, the day she took him on a walking tour on the Buda side of the Danube, some three weeks after he’d arrived in Hungary. “He thinks I need to be protected.”
“Not surprising, surely?” he’d said. “You’ve had a very sheltered upbringing.”
She’d batted her eyelashes provocatively. “But I’m a woman of the world now, Max, and quite able to look out for myself.”
Later that afternoon though, when they’d run into some people she knew and been persuaded to join them for refreshments at a sidewalk café near Fishermen’s Bastion, Max had seen why Zoltan Siklossy