‘It’s nice to have other people about again.’ She looked around the restaurant at the other diners, who seemed to be enjoying themselves in an uncomplicated way, who were talking and laughing and not making stilted conversation with their own husbands and wives.
‘I’ve missed that at Kincaillie,’ she said. ‘I’ve always lived in a town, somewhere you can pop down to the shops for a pint of milk, or walk to meet a friend for a drink. You can distract yourself in a city. You can’t do that at Kincaillie. You can’t get away from yourself.’
She hadn’t meant to reveal that much about herself, but somehow the words were out before she could stop them. Letting her gaze slip away from his, she fiddled with her fork.
‘Get away from yourself, or from me?’ asked Torr.
‘From myself, mostly,’ she said. ‘From feeling as if nothing matters and that every day is just time to be got through before you can go to bed and sleep again.’
‘Is that what it’s been like for you?’ The harshness had faded from his voice and Mallory nodded, grateful for his understanding.
‘For a long time I wouldn’t admit how much Steve had hurt me,’ she told him. ‘I’d keep trying to think up excuses for him, some reason to explain why he behaved the way he did, because that was easier than facing up to the fact that he’d used me and betrayed me and abandoned me.’
The hardest thing to accept had been the fact that Steve had probably never really loved her at all.
‘It felt as if there was a great tangled knot of barbed wire inside me, and I was all caught up on it,’ she tried to explain to Torr. ‘If I let myself think about Steve and what he had done, it was like trying to tear myself free. The more I did that, the more it ripped at me, and it hurt so much I couldn’t bear it.’
Her voice cracked at the memory, and she drew a breath to steady it. ‘So I chose to keep very still instead. If I didn’t think, didn’t feel, I was still trapped, but at least the barbed wire didn’t pull at me.’
Abandoning the fork, she lifted eyes to Torr’s with a painful smile. ‘I suppose you think I’m a coward?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We have to deal with these things the best way we can.’ He paused. ‘I understand now why you seemed so…lifeless in Ellsborough.’
‘It was like being dead inside,’ Mallory agreed. ‘Friends kept telling me I should be angry, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t really feel anything. At least when I was in Ellsborough I could try and distract myself by going out and trying to do things, but when I got to Kincaillie there was nothing, nobody. There were just those bleak mountains and the sea, and knowing that I didn’t belong.’
Torr was watching her face. ‘Is that why you cried that day?’ he asked, and she sighed at the memory.
‘Yes. I realised then that I couldn’t avoid facing the fact that Steve didn’t love me any longer, and it was just as painful as I thought it would be.’
There was a tiny pause. Torr straightened his cutlery.
‘Do you think you’ll ever get over him?’ he asked abruptly, glancing up at her. ‘Steve,’ he added, as if there could be anyone else.
Mallory didn’t answer immediately. ‘Have you ever been in love, Torr?’ she replied at last.
It was Torr’s turn to look away. ‘Yes.’
‘How did it end?’
He hesitated. ‘To be honest, it never really began,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s what you might call an unrequited passion,’ he explained, with a derisive smile.
He was mocking himself, but Mallory could tell that it was more important to him than he was prepared to admit. She wasn’t entirely surprised. She had suspected that some heartache lay behind that forbidding exterior.
‘Is that why you married me?’ she asked him.
For a moment she thought Torr wouldn’t answer. He was turning his glass between restless fingers, but after a moment he looked up and met her dark brown gaze very directly. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘Has marrying me meant that you’ve stopped loving her?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you think you’ll ever get over her?’
Torr’s smile twisted. ‘It would be a lot easier if I could, but, no, I don’t think I will. My trouble is that I never give up.’
‘So what makes you think I’ll be able to get over Steve?’
‘Because he’s a slimeball who has hurt you and humiliated you?’ Torr suggested.
Mallory sighed. ‘The trouble is that it’s not that easy to stop loving someone, even when you know that you should. You must know that.’
‘Yes,’ he said after a moment.
She mustered a smile. ‘At least we’re in the same boat,’ she said, and his dark brows contracted.
‘What do you mean?’
‘We’re both in love with someone who doesn’t love us back.’
‘Yes,’ he said in an expressionless voice, ‘I suppose we are.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE wine waiter was hovering, wanting Torr to taste the wine, pouring it into their glasses with great ceremony and fussing around with their table. He seemed to take a long time about it.
When he was finally satisfied, and had taken himself off, Torr swirled the wine in his glass and stared broodingly down into it.
‘I still don’t understand how you can love someone who could treat you like that,’ he said to Mallory.
‘I didn’t know what he would do when I fell in love with him,’ she pointed out. ‘I had no idea that he was capable of dishonesty. Of course I knew Steve had his weaknesses, but he was so handsome, and such fun, and… oh, I was always so happy when I was with him,’ she remembered with a sad smile. ‘I overlooked his faults because of the way he made me feel. With Steve, everything seemed possible. He had a way of sweeping you along with his ideas. I suppose they weren’t always very practical, but he made them sound irresistible.’
‘Like all the best con men,’ Torr commented austerely.
‘Perhaps,’ she acknowledged. ‘All I know is that when Steve suggested we went into business together, restoring old properties, it seemed to make perfect sense. Steve would do the building work and I would do the interior design. At first we did very well, and if we’d stuck with that everything would have been fine. But it wasn’t enough for Steve. He started to get restless.’
‘Or greedy?’
‘Or greedy,’ Mallory agreed evenly. ‘He started talking about buying up the old warehouses down by the river and renovating them as luxury apartments. I was doubtful at first-it seemed beyond our scope-but Steve was very persuasive, and before I knew what had happened I believed in that project more than anyone else. It was all going to be so exciting.’
She smiled wistfully, remembering how eagerly she had pored over the plans with Steve. Had he been planning even then to dump her and run off with the money? He must have been.
‘You certainly had me convinced when you told me about it,’ said Torr.
The memory of how cynically Steve had set her up to persuade Torr to invest in the project still made Mallory wince.
‘We didn’t have enough start-up capital. The bank lent us some, but Steve said that we needed another investor, and we knew how successful you’d been in your own property businesses. When you asked me to design the interior of your new house, it all seemed to be falling perfectly into place…’
‘And it did-for Steve,’ Torr added dryly. ‘It didn’t work so well for the rest of us, though, did it?’
‘No,’ she said on a sigh.
‘Do you know where he is now?’
Mallory shook her head. ‘The police found out he’d got a ferry from Dover, but he could be anywhere on the continent. He’ll have a new girlfriend now,’ she said a little bitterly. ‘Steve’s not the kind of man to go without a
