The Forbidden Touch of Sanguardo (17 page)

She’d be OK from now on, Celeste knew.

And so will I—somehow!

How, she didn’t know, because right now it was impossible to imagine being ‘OK’ by any definition of the word—unless it included ‘functioning like an automaton’. But at least she
was
functioning, she thought. Functioning sufficiently to have done everything required to get to this point, where all she had to do was close her suitcase, pick up her handbag with her passport in it and head for the airport.

Where she would go precisely she wasn’t yet sure. She might try Spain—it was cheap enough to live there prudently for a while, on her savings and the rental income from her flat, and it was warm. Then she frowned. No, of course she wouldn’t go to Spain. She would hear Spanish spoken there, and that would remind her of Rafael...

There must be somewhere else. She ought to have thought about it earlier, but she hadn’t wanted to. Thinking about it would have required planning, commitment, envisaging the future. And she couldn’t do that. The future had stopped. Stopped when Rafael had turned his back on her and walked out through the door...

So where else is warm this time of year? Warm and not Spanish-speaking?

She made herself think, because thinking of somewhere warm to go at this time of year was better than thinking about Rafael turning his back on her and walking out of her life...

Where was it warm now? Where did people go to get away from the UK?

Dubai was popular—and very warm—everywhere in the Gulf was warm...

The guillotine slammed down in her head. She would be dead before she ever went to the Gulf again...

Frantically she thought of somewhere else. Where was it summer now?

Australia?

The guillotine slammed down again.

With a smothered cry, she seized up her bag. She would find somewhere warm to go when she got to the airport. Who cared where? She didn’t. She would never care about anything again.

Or anyone...

Pain clamped around her heart, but she ignored it. She always ignored it. There was nothing else to do but ignore it. And keep functioning. That was important.

And finding somewhere warm, even though her bones were cold...so very cold...

The entry bell to the house sounded. Her taxi had arrived. She picked up her suitcase. Her keys. The agent already had keys to give to the tenants. She looked around her bedroom one last time but could feel nothing. She was too cold to feel anything. Carrying her suitcase, she went into her little hallway and buzzed open the front door, to show the taxi driver she knew he was there. Then she put on her coat, busying herself doing it up because it would be chilly outside. Then she opened her flat door, casting one last look around, in case there was something she had missed.

But there was nothing. Nothing left of her.

Nothing left of her anywhere.

She stepped out onto the landing, moving to pull her flat door shut behind her.

And stopped dead.

Rafael was coming up the last flight of stairs towards her.

* * *

She couldn’t move. Could not move a muscle. This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. It could not be happening...

Yet there he was, striding across the short outer landing right up to her door, right up to
her.
She opened her mouth to protest. To protest that this could not be happening, that it was impossible. That he’d walked out of her flat long, nightmare months ago and could never return...

He took her shoulders and she saw by the sweep of his eyes that he’d seen her suitcase. A flashing frown showed on his brow, but he simply manoeuvred her back inside her hallway, picking up the suitcase as though it was a feather and depositing it inside, then turned to shut the flat door.

‘I want to talk to you—’

His voice was deep, harsh. His eyes burned as they ground into hers.

She felt faint, dizzy. Heard him saying more.

‘I
have
to talk to you!’

There was still harshness in his voice, but there was more, too—a powerful, urgent emotion that impelled him forward so that she had to step backwards, back into her living room. She took another stumbling step away from his grip, which was burning through the layer of her coat to the skin beneath.

His rapid, sweeping glance was traversing the room, seeing its bareness—there was nothing of her there any more, no books or ornaments, only furniture and curtains. The flashing frown came again, and his eyes returned to her.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded. ‘The empty flat, the suitcase...’

She found her voice. Finally forced her strangled throat to open.

‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘I’ve rented out my flat and I’m going abroad.’

Emotion knifed through him. She had so nearly disappeared again!

I got here just in time.

‘Where?’ he heard his voice demanding.

‘I don’t know...’ She spoke almost randomly, unable to force her mind into coherent thought. Because her mind was not working at all. It had been overwhelmed by emotion. Emotion that was pouring through her like scalding water.

I can’t bear to see him again—I can’t bear it!

To see him here again, in the flesh, in physical reality instead of just in the dreams that had tormented her, slain her, all these long months since he had gone, was unbearable.

‘Well,’ he said, and there was something different in his voice now, beneath the harshness that was still in it, ‘how about Australia? After all...’ and now his eyes had changed, too ‘...you have dual UK-Australian citizenship—’

She paled. ‘How...how do you know?’

But that wasn’t really the question she was asking.

Why
did he know?

His eyes pinioned hers, as dark, as heavy as basalt. ‘I know a lot about you, Celeste. A lot more than I did. Which is why...’ he took a heavy, searing breath ‘...why I have to talk to you.’

She was shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said.
‘No.’

His hands came onto her shoulders again. ‘Yes, Celeste,’ he said. His voice was different again, and something in it made her throat constrict.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

He pressed her shoulders, not roughly but insistently, and her knees buckled. With a jerk she sat down on the sofa, indenting the cushions she’d lined up so neatly, ready for her tenant to find a pristine flat. He sat down heavily at the far end. There was empty space between them. Yet it seemed to her that there was a force field emanating from him that was holding her in a traction she could not escape. She had to try—

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a taxi coming.’

Even as she spoke the entry phone went again. She tried to rise, but Rafael was before her. He strode out to her hallway and she heard him press the intercom, heard him dismiss the taxi, then stride back in again. He stood there a moment, looking down at her. So tall, so overpowering...

She couldn’t breathe, but she had to. Had to go on breathing in and breathing out, even though her mind had left her body. She could not think or speak—could do nothing except sit there, like a bag of nerveless bones, on her sofa.

Slowly, deliberately, he sat himself back down. He looked at her as she sat, clutching her handbag as if it were a breathing aid.

‘You’re too thin,’ he said abruptly, his eyes sweeping over her critically. ‘Far too thin.’

She said nothing. What did it matter what she looked like? What did anything matter at all? What could it matter ever again?

He was speaking to her and she had to hear him—had to let the words reach her ears though she tried to block them. But it was impossible. They penetrated every last desperate layer of her defence.

His voice was sombre, carrying a weight in it that seemed to bow and bend his words.

‘It took me a long, long time to realise something, Celeste. But eventually it dawned on me—I realised what it was that was wrong about what you said to me. You said...’ he spoke with incised deliberation ‘...that you did not regret what you did when you were seventeen, that you had no regrets even now, as an adult.’

He took a breath. It was time to say what he had flown here to say. Time to stake all his future happiness, his very reason for being, on what he said next.

‘There are only two reasons why someone would say that.’ His eyes were on her, like a beam of laser light she could not escape. ‘Either it’s because, like Madeline, they’re perfectly happy with their behaviour—see nothing wrong in it, nothing to object to, no big deal.’ He paused. ‘Or one other reason.’

His eyes shifted a moment, gazing out into nowhere, then came back to her. ‘Tell me...how do you happen to have dual citizenship?’

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t need to.

‘Your father was Australian,’ Rafael said. ‘You were born there. But your mother was English, and when your father died you came back to the UK, grew up here. When you were seventeen you went back again, and stayed there for several years, only returning when you were twenty.’ He paused again—a longer pause. His eyes never left her.

She sat numb, her face drained of colour. Remorselessly he went on.

‘It’s an expensive journey, from the UK to Australia. And you were raised in a council flat, weren’t you? So there wasn’t any spare money around. Certainly not enough to fund not only getting to Australia but the lavish lifestyle you enjoyed there. Because you lived it up royally there, didn’t you, Celeste? First-class hotels and resorts, travelling right across the continent, from Perth to the Great Barrier Reef. It must have cost thousands. Thousands upon thousands! Especially,’ he finished, ‘when there were two of you to pay for...’

Her hands were clenched on her bag, her knuckles white. She knew what was coming next—knew he must have discovered everything, since he had found out so much already.

He spoke gently. Quietly. And so, so carefully.

‘I’ve seen her death certificate, Celeste. My researchers in Australia obtained an official copy and sent it to me. I’ve brought it with me.’ He reached inside his jacket, took out a folded document, unfolded it slowly.

‘I don’t want to see it!’ Her voice was high-pitched.

‘And I have your father’s, too,’ he said, his eyes never leaving hers. But they were gentle now, like his voice. ‘They were both signed at the same registrar’s office in New South Wales—fifteen years apart.’

He paused again.

‘You told me about your father, Celeste. You told me that he’d drowned in a rough sea. But you did
not
say that he drowned while he was rescuing another surfer who had got into difficulties. I’ve seen the newspaper clippings from when it happened—he was given a posthumous award. There’s a photo of your mother receiving it on his behalf. You’re holding her hand—you were two years old.’

‘I’ve seen it!’ she cried, her voice anguished. ‘I’ve seen it so many times. My mother treasured it! And I can’t bear to see it again! She cried every time she looked at it. Every time! She loved him so much!’

She felt her hand being taken. Loosened from her clenched grip on her bag.

‘Loved him so much,’ echoed Rafael, in that same gentle voice that was a torment to hear, ‘that she wanted to go back to Australia to die in the same place he had.’

His eyes went to the death certificate for Celeste’s mother. Forty-two years old. No age to die. His eyes shadowed. But then cancer found its victims at every stage of their lives. His eyes lifted to Celeste. There were tears in her eyes now.

Gently he squeezed her hand, and she could feel his warmth, his strength running into her. Giving her the strength to speak at last.

After so many years.

‘She was diagnosed when she was already terminal,’ she said. ‘Ovarian cancer is like that—the silent killer, it’s called, because its symptoms are so hard to spot. Especially if, like Mum, you ignore them.’ She swallowed. ‘It’s the reason I have routine ultrasound scans every year—to spot it early if it starts in me, too. Mum made me promise—she dreaded the same thing happening to me as had to her.’

Her voice was low and halting, but she went on. Forcing herself to speak. To relive the fear and the anguish and the grief and the loss. ‘She left Australia straight after my father’s funeral. She couldn’t bear to be there any more, without him. But after she was diagnosed, and knew she could not survive, she wanted to go back—to die in the place he’d loved so much that had killed him in the end. And she wanted to do what they’d done for their honeymoon—backpack all around Australia, seeing everything, thinking they had all the time in the world to live together for all the years to come. But all they got was a bare three years.’

‘So you took her back there, didn’t you?’ said Rafael quietly. ‘You took her back and went with her all around the country, retracing the journey she’d taken with your father. And then you went to the surf spot he loved so much, when she got weaker and weaker, and she died there. And you buried her next to him. And they lie there together, Celeste—side by side, at the sea’s edge.’

She was weeping now, the tears running silently down her cheeks. He brushed them with his fingers and her face buckled more.

‘It was to pay for all of that that you did what you did. That you became a summer bride.’

She was silent. She could not speak.

‘You said...’ He spoke carefully, for this was very, very important. ‘You said that you did it because you wanted money fast. But what you did not say was why.’

She looked at him. ‘What difference does it make?’ she said, and her eyes had that deadened expression in them now. ‘You asked if I regretted doing it—and I don’t. I made the decision I needed to make, and I would do the same again. And I have no remorse, or regret—not a single shred! If I could have done it differently, I would have. But this was the only way.’

He dropped her hand. Got to his feet in a jerking movement. Stared down at her.

‘What difference does it make?’
he echoed. ‘How can you even think that, let alone believe it?’ His eyes flashed. ‘It makes all the difference in the world!’

‘No, it
doesn’t!
’ Her own eyes flashed now, with hatred—hatred for herself and what she had done, for what she would do again without the slightest hesitation or remorse or regret. ‘I still did it! I still sold myself for sex! A summer bride. I was driven out to some villa at the edge of the city and I went through a travesty of a ceremony, in a language I didn’t understand and didn’t need to, because all that was required of me was that I did what I had been paid to do—
paid to do!
’