by Penny Jordan
‘I badly wanted to look my best,’ Louise added.
‘Wear Dior ones,’ Chloe suggested, adding wickedly, ‘He won’t be able to tell the difference just by looking! I suppose you want me to stay on and finish what you’ve done while I’ve been out,’ she added carelessly, thinking it would be a perfect excuse for not meeting Madame Kriticos, but Louise shook her head firmly.
‘You’ve already worked late twice this week, and that’s more than enough. And you’re losing weight, and yet….’ She frowned thoughtfully. ‘We’ve only worked together for two months, Chloe, but in that time I’ve become very fond of you. If you have any problems, or just need a sympathetic ear, I hope you can always come to me.’
‘The tough novelist who’s really as soft as butter,’ Chloe teased, but she was touched by Louise’s offer. However, the past was over, and the surest way to make sure it stayed behind her was to put it out of her mind and refuse to think about it.
She deliberately dawdled over tidying up her desk, reluctant to leave and commit herself to the first step towards the evening ahead. Louise had long since disappeared upstairs to prepare for her date, and at last when she knew she had no possible excuse for remaining any longer, Chloe pulled on her coat and hurried outside.
As luck would have it an empty taxi was cruising past, and within minutes of leaving Belgravia she was in her own bedsitter in a far less salubrious part of the city.
The chill in the air had sharpened; she seemed to be feeling the cold far more intensely since her return from Greece, and for that reason she dressed in a silky jersey dress in a matt black fabric, with long sleeves. The rich cloth accentuated the silver-fairness of her hair and the purple darkness of her eyes, but she had lost weight, Chloe acknowledged, idly smoothing an inch of slack fabric across her hips.
It was half past seven when she opened her wardrobe and pulled out a cream wool jacket. No mink for her. She had had one, a beautiful coat which Leon had bought for her in Paris, choosing the skins himself, but she had left it behind her in Athens, the first time.
Once again she had no problem with a taxi, and it was just eight o’clock when she stepped into the foyer of the Savoy and asked for Madame Kriticos.
‘You came! I am so glad,’ the older woman beamed, when Chloe was shown to her table—set discreetly in a semi-private alcove, and yet with an excellent view of the rest of the restaurant. ‘I thought you might have had… what is it you call it? Ah yes, I have it. Cold feet!’
‘I did,’ Chloe heard herself admitting wryly, ‘but I still came.’
‘I am glad.’ The Greek woman reached across the table, covering Chloe’s slender fingers with her own plumper, bejewelled ones.
‘You still wear your wedding ring,’ she commented quietly. ‘We heard, of course, that you had left Athens. No,’ she said quickly as Chloe opened her mouth to speak, ‘no, do not say anything. I asked you to dine with me because I wanted your company, not because I wanted to pry insensitively into your private life. Now, shall we order? I must tell you that we now have high hopes of Nikos becoming betrothed to a charming girl—that is one of the reasons we are here in London—that and the shops. I love them, but oh, the cold!’
She talked about Athens, comparing the shops there with those in London; their main course arrived and Chloe, who had enjoyed her lemon sole, suddenly found her appetite vanishing as Madame Kriticos said chattily, ‘Marisa is still unmarried. I doubt Leon will ever get rid of her now. She seems determined to disgrace him. Of course, the trouble is that she has been spoilt quite ridiculously. Are you not hungry?’ she asked ingenuously, looking at Chloe’s pale face. ‘My dear, you don’t look at all well, and you have lost weight,’ she commented, inadvertently repeating Louise’s observation. ‘If you will forgive me for saying so,’ she added forthrightly, ‘neither you nor Leon looks any better for your separation—far from it. The last time I saw him he looked worn to death—all Marisa’s fault, I am sure.’
Chloe pushed her food away almost untouched, turning her head and biting hard on her lips to prevent the betraying tears, which had formed the moment her companion mentioned Leon, from falling.
‘Oh Chloe… my dear, I’m so sorry!’ Madame Kriticos apologised, deftly angling her own chair so that none of the other diners could witness Chloe’s distress, at the same time proffering a dainty lawn handkerchief edged with delicate lace. ‘I never intended to be so tactless. I told myself that I wouldn’t mention Leon…. You still love him, don’t you?’ she added softly.
Chloe wanted to deny it, but her tears, plus the fact that she simply could not form the words, betrayed her. All she could do was nod her head.
‘It is all Marisa’s fault,’ Madame Kriticos announced energetically. ‘I am sure of it, just as I am sure that Leon would welcome you back….’
‘No!’ The word sounded louder than Chloe had intended, and she was aware of other diners glancing across at them. ‘No… no, it just isn’t possible,’ she said in a lower voice. ‘I can’t talk about it… I….’
To her horror she felt nausea overwhelming her, coupled with an enervating feeling of faintness.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ she managed to whisper as Madame Kriticos’ face swam hazily in front of her. ‘I must have drunk too much wine.’
To her relief the sickness and dizziness started to fade almost immediately. Madame Kriticos wanted to summon the hotel doctor, but Chloe refused, privately believing that they had been caused by nerves and too much rich food. To her relief Madame Kriticos did not mention Leon again, but although the evening passed pleasantly enough Chloe found it hard to concentrate entirely on her companion, her thoughts returning again and again to Leon. It was always a mistake to start probing a still tender wound, she told herself later, preparing for bed, and especially a wound like hers, which seemed in danger of never healing.
It was a relief to learn from Louise the following day that the novelist had promised to visit some friends living near York, and that she wanted Chloe to go with her.
‘It will be very much of a working weekend,’ she apologised. ‘Richard is a lecturer at York University and I’ve promised to give a talk on the merits of modern literature. It promises to be a lively discussion and I’d like you along to help me with some notes. You’re excellent at that sort of thing—far better than me. It must be your advertising training. Do you ever hanker after that life?’ she asked casually. ‘You must find working for me quite a change.’
‘It is a change,’ Chloe agreed, ‘but not one that I regret.’
She was thinking in particular of Derek, who had so neatly and callously led her into the trap Leon had prepared.
The weekend went well. The Davidsons were a pleasant easygoing couple in their mid-forties, who lived in a rambling Victorian rectory several miles outside York itself, together with an assortment of children, dogs and ponies. Apart from the brief periods when she was helping Louise with her notes, Chloe was able to relax—or at least relax as much as she could. Her appetite was still almost negligible, and on the Sunday, while she was helping Mary Davidson prepare the lunch, she was astounded when the older woman said cheerfully:
* * *
‘It seems unfair to let you help me prepare all this, when you don’t feel like eating anything. Wait until a little later on, though, you’ll find your appetite comes back with a vengeance. I was just the same with each of mine….’
She was just in time to catch the pan of sprouts Chloe had been preparing, and having neatly fielded the vegetables unhurriedly pushed Chloe down into a comfortable chair and said practically:
‘I take it you are pregnant? I recognised the symptoms straight away, especially when Louise commented that although you’d been losing weight, your face seemed to be fuller.’
Pregnant! Chloe did some rapid mental arithmetic and closed her eyes. How could she have been so blind, so unaware! That nausea the other night, her faintness, her general feeling of dragging tiredness, and the whole host of tiny
but telling symptoms she ought to have recognised straight away.
‘I didn’t know,’ she admitted, ‘but I suspect you’re right.’
‘I’m sure I am. Like I said, having had five of my own, I know all the symptoms upside down and inside out. Louise tells me that you’re separated from your husband?’
‘Yes, we’re going to get a divorce,’ Chloe said briefly, aware of the older woman watching her.
‘Umm, and the present situation could rather complicate things?’
‘Not to the extent where I would want to change it,’ Chloe said quietly.
* * *
Pregnant! Even now she could hardly believe it. They had been back in London a week and the first thing she had done had been to visit her own doctor. This morning she had received confirmation of her pregnancy. She had told Louise, who typically had said, ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned it need not make any difference. You’re the best secretary I’ve ever had—we get on well together too, so well in fact that I’ve been contemplating asking you if you’d care to move in here with me. You know how I am—working at odd hours and so forth. It could work out quite well, and needless to say, the offer includes Junior when he or she arrives.’
Chloe could have wept. Instead she grinned and said huskily, ‘Wait until you’ve been kept awake for half a dozen nights on the run—you might feel differently then!’
‘I’m willing to take that chance if you are, Chloe. I know myself well enough now to know I won’t marry again. The twins are growing up, and I’m too gregarious to want to live alone. Are you going to let the father know?’ Louise asked casually.
* * *
Was she? It was a question that tormented Chloe over the next few days. Leon had a right to know, she acknowledged, but she could not go back to him, not knowing what she did, and if she knew Leon he would move heaven and earth to try to secure custody of his child, and that was something she could not tolerate. She knew that she could, of course, reveal exactly why she had left him, but somehow she shrank from using such distasteful measures. She was still worrying at the problem the morning the letter arrived.
The envelope was thick, white and very expensive. Her name was typed on the front, and that of a firm of solicitors printed on the back. Chloe opened it, reaching unsteadily for a chair as she read it. Leon was going ahead with their divorce. She was to present herself at Suite 104 of the Ritz tomorrow when a representative of Leon’s solicitors would discuss with her the procedure to be adopted to obtain the divorce.
If Louise found her rather preoccupied she made no comment, and it was only the tiredness which engulfed Chloe every evening now that allowed her to sleep. Even so she was awake early, dressing with far more care than the interview merited. She was ready much too early, unable to face anything more than a cup of tea, and decided to use the underground and then walk through the park, rather than take a taxi.
There had been frost during the night and leaves crunched underfoot as she walked across the grass. The park was empty, and she lingered for a few minutes, trying to prepare herself for the coming ordeal—and it would be an ordeal to hear from the lips of a stranger how her marriage was to be set aside, destroyed as though it had never been.
She was early, but rather than wait in the foyer she crossed to the reception desk and gave her name.
‘Of course. You are expected. If you would just come this way….’
Chloe was escorted to a lift which soared effortlessly upwards, stopping silently with a barely perceptible jerk.
Outside the door to the suite the porter smiled at her before knocking, then turned and left. By the time the door opened, the lift door was closing, and Chloe, her mouth dry with nervous tension, forced a formal smile to her lips as she stepped inside the suite.
She had a brief impression of cream carpet, and dark leather chesterfields, velvet curtains framing the huge expanse of plate glass windows, and then the room and everything in it faded from her mind, as the door closed behind her and Leon stepped away from it and took hold of her arm.
‘You! What are you doing here?’
She was turning back as she spoke, reaching blindly for the handle, but Leon was too quick for her, his body blocking her exit as he leaned negligently against the door, arms folded across his chest. He had obviously just showered and his hair was still damp, curling at the nape. His skin smelled of soap and beneath the fine silk shirt Chloe could see the dark shape of his body.
‘How could you do this to me?’ she demanded huskily, pride forgotten in the shock of seeing Leon in place of the solicitor she had expected. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’
‘Not half as much as I’d like to,’ Leon groaned, moving with the swiftness of a panther, almost jerking her off her feet as he hauled her into his arms. ‘Tell me you don’t want me,’ he said softly, ‘that you don’t love me, and I’ll walk out of this room and never contact you again.’
His lips were the merest hair’s breadth from hers. Chloe swallowed painfully.
‘I don’t want you. I don’t love you.’ How it hurt to say the words!
‘Liar!’ His thumb caressed the line of her jaw, stroking the sensitive skin. ‘You told Christina Kritikos that you did.’
Chloe’s breath seemed to die in her throat.
‘There’s only one way to find out. Kisses can’t lie, can they?’ Leon murmured before his mouth covered hers. ‘Which is something I ought to have realised before.’
Chloe tried to resist, to fight the drugging longing that swept through her at his touch, but her body betrayed her, her mouth opening between the sorcery of Leon’s like the petals of a flower welcoming the sun. Her arms crept round his neck of her own volition, and she was unaware that she was crying until he touched her damp face with tender fingers.
‘Now tell me you don’t love me.’
‘I can’t,’ Chloe admitted. ‘Oh God, Leon, why did you have to do this? Pride? Punishment? If you had any feelings for me, you would set me free….’
‘You think so?’ All at once he was breathing harshly. ‘It’s just because I do have “feelings” for you, as you put, that I can’t. God, Chloe, do you have the remotest conception of what it meant to me to hear that you actually cared about me? Loved me, and hearing it too when all hope had gone, when I had forced myself to admit that I had lost you, that….’ His fingers tightened painfully on her arms. He leaned forward resting his forehead against her, and she felt the dampness of his perspiration.
‘Why do you think I’ve come half way across the world if I don’t have “feelings” for you? “Feelings!” My God, you British! I love you, Chloe, you haunt my days and nights, tormenting me when you’re there with your aloofness and tormenting me when you’re not with your absence. Letting me believe that you never cared a damn about me!’
‘You love me?’ Try as she might, she couldn’t quite keep the disbelief out of her voice. ‘Leon! But Marisa….’
‘No, don’t say it,’ he said quietly, his fingers on her lips. ‘Come and sit down, Chloe, I want to talk to you. There’s something I have to tell you.’
Obediently she followed him to one of the leather chesterfields, sitting primly at his side her hands folded neatly in childlike fashion. Leon sat down beside her, his face grave.
‘Marisa died last night.’
Whatever else Chloe had been expecting it was not this, and she acted instinctively and generously, her arms opening wide to hold Leon to her, her eyes compassionate as she looked down at the dark head pillowed against her breast.
‘Thank you for that,’ Leon said unevenly, several seconds later. ‘It was generous of you, Chloe, but then I never doubted your generosity. You know I told you that Marisa’s mother died when she was a child?’ he added. Chloe nodded, allowing him to take her in his arms, and treacherously enjoying the steady beat of his heart beneath her cheek. ‘What I didn’t tell you, and ought to have done, was that she took her own life. She had always been a little unstable, but after Marisa’s birt
h she seemed to grow much worse. My father tried desperately to pretend she was merely highly strung, but it was more than that—much more,’ he said heavily. ‘She drowned herself when Marisa was barely two. When my father knew he was dying he made me promise that I would always look after Marisa. He was afraid for her, you see, afraid that she might have inherited her mother’s instability.
‘I thought she had escaped it. Oh, of course there were tantrums, scenes, but I put them down to adolescent growing pains. Even after our marriage, even when you told me that she had destroyed our child, I refused to recognise the truth—perhaps because I was not strong enough to face it, I don’t know. I knew that Marisa was jealous of you, and God forgive me, I thought perhaps that you were jealous of her. You were so young, you see, and I knew I had rushed you into marriage before you were ready for it—because I was terrified that if I did not I might lose you to someone else. I fell in love with you the moment I saw you, but you were so young… so very young, I daren’t let you see how I felt about you in case the intensity of my emotions frightened you off. I hoped that love for me would grow slowly.
Chloe checked a small protest, surprised that Leon, who had always seemed so invincible, had had doubts, just as she had herself; had not known that almost from the first moment she had seen him she had fallen deeply in love with him—as he apparently had done with her! Leon was still talking, his voice low and filled with pain.
‘When you left me,’ he went on, ‘I cursed myself for driving you away. I wanted to come after you, but pride held me back, and then by the time my longing for you overcame my pride, matters had gone too far, so I decided to devise some other means of getting you back. I told myself that I had every right to demand from you the son you had stolen from me, but underneath… underneath it was you I wanted, Chloe. When Marisa told me you had only married me for my wealth I think I lost my mind for a short time. She deceived us both too easily, perhaps because neither of us had let the other see deep into our hearts.
