‘Can I get you anything?’
She made an inarticulate sound in her throat and vaguely registered the sound of the door closing, the images floating in her head exerting a tug she couldn’t resist.
She was standing on the balcony that she knew existed behind the heavy curtains in the bedroom. It was night, as dark outside as a city ever got, and she was staring down at the shining lights, the glistening moisture on the rain-soaked pavements, when she felt the quivering downy hair rise on her skin a second before the back of her neck started to tingle—she was no longer alone.
Her breath left her lungs as his big strong hands came to rest on her shoulders. As if connected by an invisible thread to his body, she leaned back against his chest, drawn to the hard warmth of his maleness, breathing in the clean unique fragrance of him. For a few moments they stayed that way, her heart beating heavy and slow in anticipation for a long while before he twisted her around to face him, and, like a parched flower turning to the sun, her face had tilted as she had strained upwards to meet his cool, firm lips with her own.
The languid heat that had spread through her body like a flash fire had made her bones dissolve and she would have slid to the floor had a muscular arm not banded her narrow ribcage before he’d picked her up and...!
Behind the smoky lenses of her sunglasses her pupils dilated as she swallowed hard, pushing the memory kicking and screaming back into its box. She glanced at the bedroom door again and felt her insides tighten.
With a cry she shot to her feet, opened the suite door a crack and positioned herself within reaching distance of the door handle for a quick escape should she need it, before pressing her rigid shoulder blades against the wall and closing her eyes...
What were the odds of finding herself in the exact same suite?
Fighting to keep her thoughts in the here and now, which, no matter how uncomfortable, was infinitely preferable to obsessing about the past, she took another deep mind-clearing breath.
She was winning and then she just had to sabotage her own progress and peek through the open bedroom door and see that bed. With no warning the past collided painfully with the present again with a concussive impact.
‘No!’ Teeth clenched, she ran across the room and closed the door with a decisive click before leaning her back against it, even though she knew a couple of inches of wood was no defence against the memories that had been playing in a loop ever since she’d got out of the taxi and found herself standing in the exact spot where it had all begun more than five years earlier.
Suddenly, she was feeling the rain from that day over five years ago beating down from a leaden sky, plastering her water-darkened hair to her head, much longer then than the shoulder-blade length she favoured now.
The soaked strands kept getting in her eyes, though with her head down against the driving force of the cloudburst all she could see were people’s feet and the standing water on the pavement increasing in depth with each passing moment.
It had taken seconds for the thin linen jacket she was wearing to become totally saturated, her bare legs below the denim skirt she was wearing were slick with rain and her feet in wedge sandals squelched as she avoided another lethal umbrella that was being wielded like a shield. Any trace of make-up was a mere memory, and she gave up brushing away the droplets trembling on the ends of her long curling eyelashes before falling into her eyes.
It had seemed like such a good idea when she’d been sitting waiting for Rupert to come out of his weekly appointment with his oncologist, less so now. But when the page of the glossy magazine she had picked up had opened on an advert for the opening of the new London branch of the famous Parisian chocolatier that Rupert, with his sweet tooth, adored, it had seemed like something nice to do for the man to whom she owed so much.
Rupert, the man who legally at least she was married to, had called their arrangement symbiotic when he had offered her an escape route from the seemingly endless nightmare she had fallen into after her father’s death, but to her it often seemed more like a one-sided deal.
She wasn’t even sure that this mysterious debt Rupert had claimed he owed her father existed, though the men’s friendship certainly had. Her father had been a man with a lot of friends; he’d been funny, articulate, generous to a fault and he’d thrown legendary parties—of course he’d had friends. Only for the most part, they’d turned out to be the variety that had disappeared when it had become public knowledge after his death that, despite his lifestyle, there had been no money left, just debts.
His death was the only thing that had kept the bailiffs temporarily away from the door of the lovely home she was living in that was mortgaged up to the hilt. The staff had not been paid for two months, though selling her jewellery had dealt with that issue, and everything else would have to be sold too: the fleet of cars in the garage; her father’s share in the racehorse that never won anything but cost a bomb in trainers, stables and veterinary bills.
She’d been poor before, that was not a problem for Marisa, but what had been a nightmare was the money that the lawyers said her father owed, and not all the debts, she’d soon learnt, were owed to legitimate sources. Some, the ones whose sinister representatives Marisa had come home from the funeral to find sitting uninvited in her living room, were not inclined to stand
