Читать книгу The Millionaire's Marriage - Catherine Spencer - Страница 7

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 might be concerned. Although she made one glass of wine last the whole hour they were together, Gabriella’s so-called friends—social-climbing opportunists, from what he’d observed—ordered round after round and showed no qualms about leaving her to pick up the tab when they finally moved on.

“Let me,” Max had said, reaching for the bill.

“No, please! I can afford it,” she’d replied. “And it’s my pleasure to do so.”

But he’d insisted. “Humor me, Gabriella. I’m one of those dull, old-fashioned North Americans who thinks the man should pay.”

“Dull?” She’d turned her stunning sea-green eyes on him and he’d found himself drowning in their translucent depths. “I find you rather wonderful.”

For a moment, he’d thought he caught a glimpse of something fragile beneath her vivacity. A wistful innocence almost, that belied her frequent implicit reference to previous lovers. It was gone so quickly that he decided he must have imagined it, but the impression, brief though it was, found its way through his defenses and touched him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

If she were anyone else and his sole reason for visiting Hungary had been a summer of fun in the sun, he’d have found her hard to resist. But there was no place in his plans for a serious involvement, and he hoped he had enough class not to engage in a sexual fling with his hosts’ daughter.

The way Gabriella had studied him suggested she knew full well the thoughts chasing through his mind, and was determined to change them. Her usual worldly mask firmly in place again, she asked in a voice husky with promise, “Do you like to dance, Max?”

“I can manage a two-step without crippling my partner,” he said, half bewitched by her brazen flirting and half annoyed to find himself responding to it despite what his conscience was telling him.

“Would you like to dance with me?”

“Here?” He’d glance at the hulking shadow of Mátyás Church, and the sunny square next to it, filled with camera-toting tourists. “I don’t think so, thanks!”

“Of course not here!” She’d laughed and he was once again reminded of music, of wind chimes swaying in a summer breeze. Good sense be damned, he’d found himself gazing at her heart-shaped face with its perfect strawberry-ripe, cupid’s-bow mouth and wondering how she would taste if he were to kiss her.

“My parents would like to throw a party for you,” she went on, drawing his gaze down by crossing her long, lovely legs so that the hem of her skirt, short enough to begin with, rode a couple of inches farther up her thigh. “They hold your family in such esteem, as I’m sure you know. Your grandfather is a legend in this city.”

“He took a few photographs.” Max had shrugged, as much to dispel the enchantment she was weaving as to dispute her claim. “No big deal. That was how he earned a living.”

“For the people of Budapest, he was a hero. He braved imprisonment to record our history when most men with his diplomatic immunity would have made their escape. As his grandson, you are our honored guest and it’s our privilege to treat you accordingly.”

“I’m here on business, Gabriella, not to make the social scene,” he reminded her. “It was never my intention to impose on your family for more than an hour or two, just long enough to pay my respects. That your parents insisted I stay in their home when I had a perfectly good hotel room reserved—”

“Charles Logan’s grandson stay in a hotel?” Her laughter had flowed over him again beguilingly. Her fingers grazed his forearm and lingered at his wrist, gently shackling him. “Out of the question! Neither my mother nor my father would allow such a thing. You’re to stay with us as long as, and whenever, you’re in Budapest”

A completely illogical prickle of foreboding had tracked the length of his spine and despite the bright hot sun, he’d felt a sudden chill. “I don’t anticipate many return visits. Once I’ve concluded the terms and conditions of the property I’m interested in buying and have the necessary permits approved, I’ll turn the entire restoration process over to my project manager and head back home.”

“All the more reason for us to entertain you royally while we have the chance then,” she’d said, leaning forward so that, without having to try too hard, he was able to glimpse the lightly tanned cleavage revealed by the low neck of her summer dress. She hadn’t been wearing a bra.

Responding to so shameless an invitation had been his first in a long line of mistakes that came to a head about a month later when the promised party took place. It seemed to him that half the population of Budapest showed up for the event and while he lost track of names almost immediately, everyone appeared to know not only of his grandfather but, surprisingly, of him, his purchase of the dilapidated old building across the river, and his plans to turn it into yet another of his chain of small, international luxury hotels.

“You see,” Gabriella had cooed in his ear, slipping her hand under his elbow and leaning close enough for the sunlit scent of her pale gold hair to cloud his senses, “it’s not just Charles Logan’s grandson they’ve come to meet. You’re a celebrity in your own right, Max.”

She looked exquisite in a sleeveless flame-pink dress made all the more dramatic by its simple, fitted lines. The eye of every man in the place was drawn to her, and his had been no exception. “I’m surprised people don’t resent a foreigner snapping up their real estate,” he’d said, tearing his gaze away and concentrating instead on the bubbles rising in his glass of champagne.

“You’re creating work for people, bringing tourism here in greater numbers, helping to rebuild our economy. What possible reason could anyone have to resent such a man?”

He’d been flattered, no doubt about it. What man wouldn’t have been, with a roomful of Budapest’s social elite smiling benignly at him and a stunningly beautiful woman hanging on his every word?

He should have been satisfied with that. Instead, he’d gone along with it when she’d monopolized him on the dance floor because hey, he was passing through town only, so what harm was there in letting her snuggle just a bit too close? Not until it was too late to change things had he seen that in being her passive conspirator, he’d contributed to the evening ending in a disaster that kept on going from bad to worse.

“Didn’t we, Max?”

Glad to escape memories guaranteed to unleash nothing but shame and resentment, he stared at the too thin woman facing him; the woman who, despite the fact that they lived hundreds of miles apart and hadn’t spent a night under the same roof in eighteen months, was still technically his wife. “Didn’t we what?”

“Like each other, at one time. Very much, in fact.”

“At one time, Gabriella, and they are the operative words,” he said, steeling himself against the look of naked hope on her face. “As far as I’m concerned, everything changed after that party you coerced your parents into hosting.”

“You’re never going to forgive me for what I did that night, are you? Nothing I can say or do will ever convince you that I never intended to trap you into marriage.”

“No. You stooped to the lowest kind of deceit when you let me believe you’d had previous lovers.”

“I never actually said that.”

“You implied it, more than once.”

“You were a sophisticated, worldly North American and I wanted to impress you—be like the kind of women I thought you admired, instead of a dowdy Hungarian virgin who hadn’t the first idea how to please a man.”

“My kind of woman wouldn’t have behaved like a tramp.”

“I was desperate, Max—desperately in love with you. And foolish enough to think that giving myself to you might make you love me back.” She bit her lip and fiddled with the thin gold chain on her wrist; the same gold chain she’d worn when she’d come sneaking through the darkened halls and let herself into his room while everyone else slept, himself included. “Your time in Budapest was coming to an end. You were making plans to return to Canada, and I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing you again.”

“So you made sure you wouldn’t have to by adding lies on top of lies.”

She flushed but her gaze, locked with his, didn’t waver. “No. When I told you I was pregnant, I believed it to be true.”

“How convenient that the ink had barely dried on the marriage certificate before you discovered otherwise.”

She gave a long drawn-out sigh. “Oh, Max, what’s the point of rehashing the past like this? You don’t need to spell it out for me again. I already know how you feel.”

“You can’t begin to know how I feel,” he practically snarled, self-disgust sweeping over him afresh at the memory of how the night of the party had ended. Bad enough that he’d been duped into making love to a novice without the final humiliation of opening his door to hustle her back to her own room and coming face-to-face with her father.

“I thought I heard a noise and came to investigate,” Zoltan had said, his voice trembling with suppressed anger at the sight of his guest standing there in a pair of briefs, and his daughter wearing a transparent negligee that showed off every detail of her anatomy. They couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d been caught stark naked! “I had no idea…this…is what I’d find.”

Over the years, Max had made his share of mistakes, but none had filled him with the shame flooding over him that night. For the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.

“You could have told my father what really happened,” Gabriella said now. “You didn’t have to leave him with the impression that you’d lured me to your bed.”

“Do you really think that would have made him feel any better, when the damage had been done already? His beloved child had been deflowered by a man he’d welcomed into his home and treated like a son. He thought the sun rose and set on you. Still does. What was to be gained by letting him know you’d come to my room uninvited? Why the devil would I have wanted to add to his misery by telling him that?”

“If it makes any difference at all, Max, he knew I was as much to blame as you, and he forgave both of us long ago.”

“But I haven’t forgiven myself. And I sure as hell haven’t forgiven you.”

She sank down on the bench at the foot of the bed, and he saw that the slump to her shoulders was not, as he’d first assumed, that she was dejected so much as utterly exhausted. “Then why did you agree to our pretending we’re happily married?”

“Because I owe it to him. He’s eighty-one years old, his health is failing, and I refuse to send him to his grave a day earlier than necessary by letting him in on the true state of our relationship.”

“He might be old, but he’s not blind. If you’re going to curl your lip in contempt every time you look at me, and recoil from any sort of physical contact, he’ll figure out for himself within twenty-four hours of getting here that we’re a long way from living in wedded bliss. And my mother won’t take a tenth that long to arrive at the same conclusion.”

“What are you suggesting, my dear?” he inquired scornfully. “That in order to continue bamboozling them, we practice married intimacy by holding an undress rehearsal tonight?”

Color rode up her neck, a pale apricot tint so delicious it almost made his mouth water. “We don’t have to go quite that far, but would it be such a bad idea to practice being civil to one another?”

“Depends on your definition of ‘civil.’”

“I won’t initiate sex when you’re not looking, if that’s what’s worrying you, Max. Subjecting myself to your outright rejection no longer holds any appeal for me.”

“I’d be more inclined to take that assurance seriously if we were occupying separate beds.”

He waited for the reproaches to follow, a variation on her old theme of You don’t even try to understand how I feel, followed by a crying spell. Instead, she stood up and faced him, her spine poker-straight and her expression uncharacteristically flat. “I won’t dignify that remark by trying to refute it. Believe whatever you like, do whatever you like. For myself, I haven’t eaten since early this morning, so I’m going downstairs to fix myself a light supper.”

“You look as if you haven’t eaten in a month or more, if you ask me,” he shot back, irked by her snooty attitude. He wasn’t used to being blown off like that, nor was he about to put up with it. “And if how you look now is what being stylishly thin’s all about, give me good, old-fashioned chubby any day of the week.”

“I can’t imagine why you’d care how I look, Max, and I’m certainly not fool enough to think your remark stems from concerns about my health.” She brushed a surprisingly badly manicured hand over her outfit, a cotton blouse and skirt which whispered alluringly over silky underthings. “What you apparently aren’t able to accept is that what you prefer in a woman is immaterial. I’d like it better if we could be cordial with each other because it’s a lot less wearing than being disagreeable. But you need to accept the fact that I’m long past the stage where your approval is of the slightest consequence to me.”

If she’d slapped him, he couldn’t have been more stunned. The Gabriella he used to know would have turned cartwheels through downtown Vancouver during the afternoon rush hour, if she’d thought it would please him. “But you still need me, Gabriella,” he reminded her. “Why else are you here?”

“Only for the next two weeks. After that, I’ll be as happy to leave you to wallow in your own misery as you’ll be to see me go.”

Well, hell! Baffled, he shook his head as she stalked out of the room. This new, underfed edition of the woman he’d married didn’t believe in mincing her words—or give a flying fig about anything he might say or do as long as he didn’t blow her cover during her parents’ visit.

On the surface at least, a lot more than just her dress size had changed since she’d entered the world of international fashion. Unless it was just another act put on solely for his benefit, his wife appeared to have developed a little backbone since she’d flounced out of his life within six months of forcing her way into it!

She was shaking inside, her composure on the verge of collapse. Perhaps it was the cruel irony of the setting: the big marriage bed, so invitingly close they could have tumbled onto the mattress together in a matter of seconds if the mood had taken them, juxtaposed beside her finely tuned awareness of his unabashed animosity. Or perhaps it was as simple as his having shown up unexpectedly and taken her by surprise. In any event, she had to get away from him before she burst into tears of pure frustration.

Given that he’d acted as if she was the last person he wanted to spend time with, she didn’t expect him to follow her downstairs, but he showed up in the kitchen about five minutes later to announce, “I’ve taken your luggage up to the bedroom.”

“I could have managed it on my own, but thank you anyway,” she said, laying out the French bread, cold barbecued chicken, olives, heart of palm salad, and mango salsa she’d purchased at the gourmet deli down the street.

He ambled over to inspect the food. “That chicken looks pretty good.”

“Are you hinting you’d like some?” She pulled a chef’s knife and fork from the wooden cutlery block next to the countertop cook surface and slid the chicken from its foil-lined bag to a cutting board.

“If you’re offering, yes. Thanks.” He helped himself to an olive and cast an appraising eye over the changes she’d made in the kitchen. “You’ve been busy. This place almost looks lived in.”

Choosing her words carefully because, although she itched to ask him who owned the apron and hand lotion, she wasn’t about to give him another opportunity to tell her to mind her own business, she said, “It had a somewhat unused look, I thought.”

“Because I’d stored all the china and stuff you left behind, you mean? Not everyone appreciates fine things, Gabriella, and knowing how you value yours and would eventually want to reclaim them, it seemed best not to leave them where they might get damaged.”

She managed an offhand shrug. “But you were always very careful with them…unless, of course, you’re referring to…other people?”

“What you’re really asking is if I ever let another woman loose in here.” He removed two of the wineglasses she’d arranged in the upper cabinet, then strolled behind her to the refrigerator. She heard him rummaging among its contents, and the clink of a bottle tapping the edge of a shelf before he swung the door closed. “Well, as it happens, I did. For about a month, beginning the week after you left.”

Hearing him confirm her worst fears shocked Gabriella into betraying the kind of distress she’d sworn she’d never let him witness in her again. “You mean to say you didn’t even wait until the sheets had grown cold before you let another woman into my bed?” she squeaked, and refusing to vent her outrage where it truly belonged—on him!—she accosted the hapless chicken, wielding the knife with savage intent. “Why doesn’t that surprise me, I wonder?”

“I didn’t say that.” Calmly, he rummaged in one of the drawers for a corkscrew.

“Not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication is clear enough! And so is the evidence!” Brandishing the two-pronged fork, she gestured at the drawer. That drawer! “I saw what’s in there, so don’t bother denying it.”

He laughed. “And what is it that you saw, my dear? A body?”

“Don’t you dare laugh at me!” Hearing her voice threatening to soar to top C, she made a concerted effort to wrestle herself under control. “I found the apron and the hand lotion.”

“Well, as long as you didn’t also find high heels and panty hose, at least you don’t need to worry you’re married to a cross-dresser.”

“Worry? About you?” she fairly screeched, aiming such a wild blow at the chicken carcass that a wing detached itself and slid crazily across the counter. “Let me assure you, Max Logan, that I can find better things to occupy my mind!”

Suddenly, shockingly, he was touching her, coming from behind to close one hand hard around her wrist, while the other firmly removed the knife from her grasp and placed it a safe distance away. “Keep that up and you’ll be hacking your fingers off next.”

“As if you’d care!”

“As a matter of fact, I would. I don’t fancy little bits of you accidentally winding up on my plate.”

“You heartless, insensitive ape!” She spun around, the dismay she’d fought so hard to suppress fomenting into blinding rage. “This is all one huge joke to you, isn’t it? You don’t care one iota about the hurt you inflict on others with your careless words.”

“It’s the hurt you were about to inflict on yourself that concerns me.” As if he were the most domesticated husband on the face of the earth, he pushed her aside and started carving the chicken. “You’re already worried your parents might guess we’re not exactly nuts about each another, without your showing up at the airport tomorrow bandaged from stem to stern and giving them extra cause for concern.”

“Don’t exaggerate. I’m perfectly competent in a kitchen, as you very well know.”

He jerked his head at the unopened bottle of Pouilly Fuissé. “Then make yourself useful and uncork that.”

“Do it yourself,” she snapped, the thought of how quickly he’d taken up with someone else once she’d vacated the scene rankling unbearably. She had honored her wedding vows. Why couldn’t he have done the same?

“Now who’s being unnecessarily hostile?”

She detected marked amusement in his voice. Deciding it was safest to keep her hands busy with something harmless lest she forgot herself so far as to take a meat cleaver to him, she began preparing a tray with plates, cutlery and serviettes. “At least,” she said, “I haven’t given you grounds for divorce.”

“There are some who’d say a wife walking out on her husband is ample grounds for terminating a marriage.”

“Then why haven’t you taken steps to end ours?”

Finished with the chicken, he turned his attention to the wine. “Because we agreed there was no pressing need to formalize matters, especially given your parents’ age, health and religious convictions.” He angled a hooded glance her way. “Unless, of course, you’ve found some urgent reason…?”

“I’m not the one who went out shopping for a replacement within a week and had the bad taste to leave his possessions lying around for you to find!”

“Neither am I, Gabriella,” he said mildly, his mood improving markedly as hers continued to deteriorate. “The woman you perceive to be such a threat was a fifty-nine-year-old housekeeper I hired to come in on a daily basis to keep the place clean and prepare my meals. The arrangement came to an end by mutual agreement after one month because there wasn’t enough to keep her busy and she was a lousy cook. She must have left some of her stuff behind by mistake.”

Feeling utterly foolish, Gabriella muttered, “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Because you immediately assumed the worst before I had the chance to explain anything. Now that we’ve cleared up the misunderstanding, though, I suggest you take that pout off your face, smile for a change, and join me in a toast.” He passed a glass of wine to her and lifted the other mockingly. “Here’s to us, my dear wife. May your parents be taken in by appearances as easily as you are, and go home convinced their daughter and son-in-law are living in matrimonial clover!”

Twenty minutes later, they sat at the glass-topped patio table on the west side of the terrace. The Pouilly Fuissé stood neck-deep in a silver wine cooler. A hurricane lamp flickered in a sconce on the wall.

Outwardly, they might have been any of a hundred contented couples enjoying the mild, calm evening. Inwardly, however, Gabriella was a mess. Poking her fork into her barely touched meal, she finally braved the question which had been buzzing around in her mind like an angry wasp from the moment he’d misled her into thinking his housekeeper had been a lover. “Have you really never…been with another woman, Max? Since me, I mean?”

“Why don’t you look at me when you ask that?” he replied in a hard voice.

Because, she could have told him, if she’d dared, it hurts too much. You’re too beautiful, too sexy, too…everything except what I most want you to be, which is mine.

“Gabriella?”

Gathering her courage, she lifted her head and took stock of him, feature by feature. He leaned back in his chair, returning the favor with equal frankness, his eyes a dark, direct blue, his gaze steady.

His hair gleamed black as the Danube on a starless night. His skin glowed deep amber against the stark white of his shirt. He shifted one elbow, a slight movement only, but enough to draw attention to the width of his chest and the sculpted line of his shoulders.

Miserably, she acknowledged that everything about him was perfect—and most assuredly not hers to enjoy. She knew that as well as she knew her own name. Devouring him with her eyes brought her nothing but hopeless regret for what once might have been, and painful longing for something that now never could be.

Nonetheless, she forced herself to maintain her steady gaze and say serenely, “Well, I’m looking, Max, so why don’t you answer the question? Have you been with anyone else?”

He compressed his gorgeous mouth. Just briefly, his gaze flickered. “You want me to tell you I’ve lived like a monk since you ran off to pursue a career?”

“I want you to tell me the truth.”

He shook his head and stared out to where the last faint show of color from the sunset stained the sea a pale papaya-orange. “No, you don’t, Gabriella. As I recall, you’re not on very good terms with honesty and I doubt you’d know how to handle it in this instance.”

She flinched, his reply shooting straight to her heart like a splinter of glass. Normally the most brutally candid man she’d ever met, his evasion amounted to nothing but an admission of guilt delivered as kindly as he knew how.

Unbidden, the night she’d lost her virginity rose up to haunt her, most particularly the exquisite pleasure he’d given her after he’d recovered from the shock of finding her in his bed and before he realized her duplicity. How practiced he’d been in the art of lovemaking; how knowing and generous and patient. And most of all, how passionate!

Had she really supposed all that masculine virility had lain dormant during her absence, or that he’d feel obligated to honor wedding promises he’d made under duress?

If she had, then she was a fool. Because what right had she to expect either when he’d never professed to love her? When she hadn’t a reason in the world to think he might have missed her after she walked out on a marriage which had been a travesty from the start?

But the truth that hurt the most was the realization of how easy it would be to fall under his spell again. His tacit admission that there’d been another woman—possibly even women—was the only thing which pulled her back from the brink. Another minute, a different answer, and she’d have bared her soul to him!

Staggered by her near self-betrayal, she murmured shakily, “I see.”

“I suspect not,” he said, “but the real question is, does it matter to you, one way or the other?”

“Not in the slightest,” she lied, the glass sliver driving deeper into her heart and shattering into a million arrows of pain.

“Should I take your indifference to mean there’ve been other men in your life?”

“No,” she said forthrightly, unwilling to add further deceit to a heap already grown too heavy to bear. “I’ve never once been unfaithful, nor even tempted.”

“Not even by those pretty plastic consorts you team up with in your photo shoots?”

“Certainly not.”

He hefted the bottle from the cooler and splashed more wine in their glasses. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m telling the truth.”

A mirthless smile played over his mouth. “The way you were when you told me you were pregnant? The way you were when you intimated you’d had a string of lovers before me?”

“I’m not that person anymore.”

“Of course you are, Gabriella. People never really change, not deep down inside where it matters. They just pretend to.”

“When did you become so cynical, Max?” she asked him sadly. “Did I do that to you?”

“You?” he echoed cuttingly. “Don’t flatter yourself!”

The pain inside was growing, roaring through her like a fire feeding on itself until there was nothing left but ashes. For all that she’d promised herself she wouldn’t break down in front of him, the scalding pressure behind her eyes signaled how close the tears were, and to her horror she felt her bottom lip quiver uncontrollably.

He noticed. “Don’t you dare!” he warned her, in a low, tense voice, starting up from his chair so violently that its metal legs screeched over the pebbled concrete of the terrace. “Don’t you dare start with the waterworks just because I didn’t give you the answers you came looking for! I know that, in the old days, tears always worked for you, but they aren’t going to get you what you want this time, at least not from me, so save them for some other fool.”

When she first started modeling, there’d been times that she’d found it near impossible to smile for the camera. Days when she’d missed Max so badly, it was all she could do to get out of bed and face another minute without him. Nights when she hadn’t been able to sleep for wanting him, and mornings when she’d used so much concealer to hide the shadows under her eyes that her face had felt as if it were encased in mud.

But she’d learned a lot more in the last eighteen months than how to look good on command. She’d learned discipline, and become expert at closing off her emotions behind the remote elegance which had become her trademark.

She called on that discipline now and it did not fail her. The familiar mask slipped into place, not without effort, she had to admit, but well enough that she was able to keep her dignity intact.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said, rising to her feet with fluid, practiced grace, “but I stopped crying over you so long ago that I’ve quite forgotten how.”

“Don’t hand me that. I know what I saw.”

She executed a smooth half turn and tossed her parting remark over one provocatively tilted shoulder. “What you saw was a flicker of regret for the mistakes I’ve made in the past—a passing weakness only because weeping does terrible things to the complexion, especially when one’s face is one’s fortune. Good night, Max. I’ve worked hard enough for one day, so if you’re feeling energetic, you might try loading our plates and cutlery into the dish-washer—always assuming, of course, that you remember how to open it. Oh, and one more thing. Please don’t disturb me when you decide to turn in. I really do need to catch up on my beauty sleep.”