‘Here’s the thing,’ she said, spelling it out in black and white. ‘I’m a virgin.’
‘I’
M A
virgin…’
Possibly the only three truthful words she had uttered to him as she had played him for a complete and utter fool.
Cristiano, parked in a dark green Land Rover he had rented in Limerick, coldly surveyed his quarry, which was a picture postcard thatched cottage at the end of the road.
It was five months since she had walked out on him without warning and five weeks since he had discovered that she had strung him along with a pack of lies. Amelia Doni was no fresh-faced, copper-haired girl with green eyes and a knack for teasing him that had proved so addictive that he had cancelled his return to London and ended up whisking her off in his private jet to Barbados for two weeks. Amelia Doni, when he’d accidentally bumped into her over Christmas at his mother’s house, was a blonde in her forties who, she’d told him in mind-numbing detail, had been on an extended cruise because she was recovering from a broken heart. She was the epitome of the wealthy owner of a slice of Rome’s most prestigious apartment block and had bored him to death within two minutes. She had also stoked the fires of his simmering anger into a conflagration when he’d learned about her house-sitting arrangement with her
darkly beautiful Italian god-daughter and realised the woman he had met had been an imposter. Not only had he been summarily dumped, he had also been well and truly taken on a scenic route up a very winding garden path.
It had taken him a mere week to track down the address of one Bethany Maguire, and a couple more had passed as he sat on the information, telling himself to let it go before finally realising that he wouldn’t rest until he had confronted the woman and given voice to his consuming rage.
He had no idea what he hoped to gain by confronting her and it went absolutely and utterly against the grain of the person he was, a man who had always been able to keep his emotions in check with ease, a man who prided himself on his ferocious self-control. A man, it had to be said, who had never found himself in the position of being left high and dry by any woman or, for that matter, being told barefaced lies and gullibly eating them up.
Without the engine running, it was beginning to get cold in the car and the January light was beginning to fade. Give it ten more minutes and the line of picturesque thatched houses that jostled for space along the broad road with colourfully painted cottages and shop fronts would fade into an indistinct grey blur. There was still time, he knew, to drive right back to the hotel, grab a meal and head back to London first thing in the morning. On the other hand, would that put paid to the bitter, toxic knot that sat in the pit of his stomach like a tumour?
He stepped out of the car and began walking along the pavement, cursorily taking in the fairy tale village setting. Not to his taste. The place looked as though it had been designed by a kid who had been given a blank canvas and told to go mad. He almost expected to bump into a gingerbread house at any moment.
The house at the end of the road was no exception. The trees were bare of leaves and the front garden lacked colour, but he imagined that in summer it would be filled with all the stereotypical stuff straight out of a children’s book. Apple trees out back, flowers running rampant everywhere, the prerequisite stone wall over which neighbours would chat while, presumably, hanging out their washing and whistling a merry tune. He scowled and banked down the rise of bile in his throat as he ignored the doorbell to bang heavily on the front door instead.
Bethany, in the middle of foraging in the fridge for ingredients to make a meal for her parents which she had enthusiastically promised three hours earlier, cursed under her breath because she had left everything to the absolute last minute and couldn’t afford to take time out for a chat. Having spent the past two years in London, she had forgotten how life worked in the small village where she had lived all her life. People stopped by. They chatted. They drank interminable cups of tea. It had been worse in the first couple of months after she had arrived back but, even now, old neighbours would drop in and would be offended if she didn’t sit and chat over tea and biscuits.
She wondered if she could pretend to be out, perhaps duck down under the kitchen table and wait until the coast was clear, but then dismissed the idea because half the village would know that her parents were at the village fund-raiser and would also know that she had skipped it because she had felt ill that morning. That was just life around here, and she was going to have to make the best of it for the foreseeable future.
She dumped her handful of random ingredients on the kitchen counter and raced to the front door to intercept another bang.
In her head, she played over the possibilities of who it could be. Several of her old school friends, ones who had never left the little village in which they had grown up, who had settled down at ridiculously young ages to marry and have families, had looked her up. She had been grateful for their support and had tried very hard not to feel hemmed in and claustrophobic. She missed Shania and Melanie, who had both returned to their respective lives in Dublin after a two week family break over Christmas. Perhaps it was old Mrs Kelly a few houses along, who had become a frequent visitor and was prone to extended visits.
Bethany stifled a groan of near despair as she pulled open the front door and then stared at her visitor in frozen, nauseating disbelief.
She blinked, thinking that she must be hallucinating, but when she opened her eyes he was still there and this was no crazy illusion.
‘
You!’
she squeaked in a high-pitched voice which she hardly recognised as her own. ‘What are
you doing here?
’ She clutched her mouth and swayed.
‘No way are you going to faint on me,’ Cristiano said through gritted teeth. He insinuated his foot over the threshold and pushed the door open wide, letting himself in while she was still gasping in shock and as pliable as a rag doll. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and she looked as though she was on the verge of collapse. Good.
Bethany heard the slam of the front door as he closed it and it resonated with the sound of the executioner’s blade. She was busy trying to get her thoughts together but the sight of him, all six foot two of cold aggression towering in the hallway, had slowed her thought processes down to an unhelpful standstill.
‘Cristiano,’ she finally threaded unevenly. ‘What a surprise.’
Only the wall, against which she had pressed herself, was keeping her from sinking to the ground in an unlovely heap.
‘Life is full of them. As I’ve discovered for myself, firsthand.’
‘What are you doing here?’ she stammered, choosing not to pursue that particular avenue of conversation.
‘Oh, I was just driving by and I thought I’d take time out to pass the time of day with you…
Amelia.
But it’s not Amelia, is it,
Bethany
?’
‘I feel faint. I honestly do.’ She put her hand to her head and took a few deep breaths. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’
‘Feel free. I’ll be waiting right here for you when you’ve recovered.’ He closed the gap between them and with each passing step Bethany felt her heart rate rocket.
‘How did…did you f…find me?’
‘Now, now,’ Cristiano said with sibilant menace, ‘isn’t it a little rude for you not to have offered me a cup of coffee? For us to be standing here in a hallway playing catch up when we could be chatting over old times somewhere a little more comfortable…? And after I’ve travelled all this way to see you…’
The man was in no hurry to go. And he was stifling her by standing so close, sending her frayed nervous system into even more acute disarray.
Belatedly, she remembered that she might be in the house on her own
at the moment
but her parents would be returning in under an hour, by which time he would need to have disappeared. The longer she remained in a state of shock, the longer he would be around, and she just couldn’t afford to have him meet her parents.
Another wave of nausea threatened to have her rushing to the bathroom, but she quelled it and cleared her throat.
‘Okay. I’ll get you a cup of coffee, but if you’ve come to
bludgeon me into saying sorry then I’ll spare you the effort. I’m sorry. Satisfied?’
‘Not by a long chalk. So why don’t we start with the coffee and then we can have a really good chat about everything. By the way, did you know that impersonating someone can be prosecuted as a criminal offence?’
Bethany paled and Cristiano, who had only thought of that on the spur of the moment, shot her a smile of pure threat.
‘What else did you get up to while you were staying at the Doni apartment? Aside from shamelessly raiding her wardrobe? How light were your fingers? If I recall, the place was stuffed full of valuables.’
‘How dare you?’
‘I know. Nasty of me, isn’t it? But I’d think twice before I start reaching for the moral high ground if I were you.’ He had expected her to be taken aback by his appearance on her doorstep. No, he thought, scratch that. He had expected her to be shocked and defensive, but he hadn’t bargained on the panicky apprehension in her eyes. Then again, she was a lady of unexpected responses and definitely not one whose words and actions could be taken at face value.
Bethany felt like a mouse pinned to the ground by a predator whose aim was to smack her around for a while before ripping her to shreds. When she had walked away from him, admittedly with a finality which stemmed more from cowardice than anything else, the last thing she had expected was to be hunted down. She hadn’t taken him for a man who would lower himself to chasing after a woman who had dumped him without explanation. His pride would have seen to that. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought ahead to what he might do if he discovered that the woman who had dumped him had also been as genuine as a three pound
note. At least as far as outward appearances went. Now she knew. He went on the attack.
‘I wasn’t trying to reach for any moral high ground.’ Bethany shifted, crablike, against the wall because he was so close to her that she could feel his warm, angry breath on her face. ‘I was just trying to say that I’m
not a thief
.’
‘Now, I wonder why I’m finding it hard to believe anything you have to say…’
Since there was no arguing with that and trying to plead her innocence on that front was just going to be met with scathing disbelief, she decided that it was time for the cup of coffee. She deserved his anger and she would sit through it with lowered head and genuine repentance. Then he would leave and her life could return to its hollow routine.
‘The coffee…I’ll make you a cup…if…if you want to wait in the sitting room…it’s just through there…’
‘And have you out of my sight? Not a chance. I don’t know whether you’ll do a disappearing act through the back window. You seem to be pretty good at that.’
‘I’m…sorry. I told you that.’ She stared down at the ground but there was no escaping his presence because she could see the dull burnished leather of his shoes. Even when he stepped away to fall in behind her, she was horribly, horribly aware of him and it felt as though she was holding her body in agonising tension just to stop herself from shaking like a leaf in a high wind.
‘Nice house,’ he said conversationally, which didn’t fool her for a minute into thinking that he had dropped his anger in favour of a more reasonable approach to having his questions answered. He was just enjoying the moment, toying with her. ‘Funny, you told me that you lived in London.’
‘I did.’ She had her back to him as she filled the kettle with water and fetched down one of the mugs from the mug tree
by the sink. Sadly, she couldn’t take refuge in the task of making his coffee for ever and eventually she was obliged to turn around, albeit reluctantly, to find that he had taken up residence on one of the pine chairs at the kitchen table. It was a reasonably big kitchen, big enough to fit a generously proportioned table, but he still managed to reduce the space to the size of a prison cell.
She shoved the mug of coffee in front of him and sat on the chair furthest away. This cold-eyed stranger staring at her with biting antagonism was as far away from the sexy, amusing, highly intelligent charmer who had swept her off her feet sufficiently for her to extend her
one night of fun
into a two week, mind-blowingly idyllic trip to paradise as chalk was from cheese.
Playing at the back of her mind was his casual insinuation that she could be prosecuted for impersonation. Was that true? Could that really happen? She couldn’t even begin thinking about that, so she shut the horror of it away and focused instead on the humiliation awaiting her at his hands.
Of course she deserved it. She had meant so many times to confess the truth to him, but every time she’d got to within striking distance of doing so she had pulled back because she hadn’t wanted their affair to end. Instead, she had laughingly sidestepped awkward questions, glazed over the truth and generally done such a good job of dancing round anything remotely incriminating that she could have had a career as an escape artiste. Houdini would have been proud of her.
In the process, he had stolen her heart and if he had asked her to stay on in sunny Barbados for another fortnight she knew she would have jumped at the chance and postponed the inevitable again.
Her punishment was as deadly as it was conclusive. He had taken up residence inside her and not a single day had
gone by when she hadn’t thought about him and about the fact that she would never be entitled to have him in her life again. Ever.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she muttered mutinously.
‘Like what? How do you expect me to look at a liar, a cheat and a thief?’
‘I told you
I didn’t steal anything from Amelia Doni!
’
‘But you certainly managed to rip me off for quite a bit when you count the dinners, the wardrobe, the first class ticket to the other side of the world…’
‘You don’t understand…’
‘Enlighten me.’ He sat forward and Bethany instinctively cringed back, licking her lips nervously, with one eye on the clock behind him over the kitchen door.