She saw the plume of thick black smoke curling up into the sky just as she reached the thick hedge which separated the track from the house, and she stopped, taking this next horror with a choking whimper before she was off and running again, forcing herself through the hedge without a care to the scratches it issued to her arms and face. Careless of everything but the one thought that was going around and around in her head.
Guy was dead, and she had not told him she loved him.
She saw the emergency van at the scene as she rounded a curve in the track. The red van was parked at an angle, its doors all swinging open. The blue and white car was not far away, lost to a blaze of fire and smoke while the men fought to contain the flames. White clouds of foam were emitting from their hand-held extinguishers, fluffy particles of the stuff floating in the air all around them.
Dismay took her legs from under her, sending her tumbling to the ground, her choked cry of horror splitting the air around her. Then she struggled up again, pushing her hair out of her face, terrified of going on yet drawn by some morbid desire to see, witness the worst for herself.
It was as she neared the emergency van that she saw him. He was standing by one of the open doors, his left hand holding his right shoulder, his attention fixed on the tangled mess which was all that was left of the car.
For some reason, seeing him just standing there as large as life, silver flame-proofed suit hardly marked, protective helmet still firmly on his head, Marnie lost touch with reality, and on a surge of white hot fury she launched herself at him.
‘You crazy, stupid man!’ she yelled, the grinding force of her voice bringing his head sharply around to see her running furiously towards him.
‘Marnie…’ He put out his left hand in a calming gesture. ‘It’s all right. I am not—’
But she wasn’t listening. Rage consumed her. And on a cry that came out like an animal howl she threw herself at him, hitting out with her fists, tears pouring down her cheeks, eyes almost blind with shock and anger.
Guy tried to field her blows by catching her fists, but she was too quick and he was still feeling dazed from the crash. And she caught him on his right shoulder, making him wince, and draw back instinctively.
Then someone was catching her from behind. And a different voice tried bringing the tirade to a halt. ‘Mrs Frabosa!’ it said sternly. ‘The man is injured; you can’t—’
‘Let go of her,’ Guy rasped. Marnie was sobbing by now, great big racking sobs that by far outstripped the ones she had sobbed the night before. ‘Let go of her, Tom.’
‘But she—’
‘Let go.’
The man set her free and stood back, but ready, despite what his employer said, to catch her if she made another attack on Guy.
But she had already hit herself out, the anger replaced with a deep inner ache that sent her crumbling to her knees on the wet ground in front of them.
She looked pathetic, jeans scuffed, bare feet all muddied, hair a tangled mess around her face and shoulders, and hands shaking so violently that she had to clutch them together on her lap to keep them still.
Guy muttered something beneath his breath, trying to unclip the strap holding his helmet in place.
‘Dammit, Tom!’ he rasped. ‘Do this for me, will you?’
He stood impatiently while Tom struggled with the strap, both men more concerned with the state Marnie had got herself into than the car or Guy’s injuries now.
‘Shock,’ Tom muttered. ‘She must have thought—’
‘I know exactly what she thought,’ Guy cut in grimly.
The helmet came off, followed by the white flame-proof snood he always wore beneath. ‘Get back to the car,’ he said to Tom, thrusting both items at him, then dropped down on his knees in front of Marnie, shielding her from the sympathetic glances she was receiving from the rest of the team, but not attempting to touch her while he waited once again for her to cry herself out.
After a while, he sighed heavily and glanced at the burned-out remains of the car, steaming passively now. The first spot of rain hit his cheek, and even as he went to wipe it away the deluge came, drenching them all in seconds.
‘If the fire is out, then get back to the house and let my father know I am OK,’ he told the crew.
They went quickly, glad to get out of the rain but curious as to why Guy was just kneeling there in front of his wife, doing nothing in the way of either trying to comfort her or protecting them both from the deluge.
They drove away in the red van. Guy watched them go, his eyes grim and bleak. Then he turned his attention back to Marnie, and, still without attempting to touch her, began to talk, quietly, levelly, with little to no emotion sounding in his tone, and she went silent as she knelt there in front of him, listening, with her heart locked in her aching throat.
‘You know,’ he began, ‘the first time I saw you, here in the yard behind the house, I thought to myself, My God, this is it. The one I have been waiting for for so many years! I wanted to grab hold of you there and then and never let you go. But even as I stood there just drinking you in I could also see that you were about the most innocent creature I had ever laid eyes on. I knew, also, that it would be wrong of me to follow my greedy instincts, though. I was too old for you—oh, not only in years,’ he sighed out heavily, ‘but in experience. In life! I had done too much, seen too much, and, God help me, been too much to be even daring to consider contaminating you with it all. And you possessed special self-protective instincts, too. Instincts that warned you to have nothing to do with a cynical old devil like me. You disapproved of me, Marnie, from the moment our eyes clashed.’
‘I didn’t disapprove of you,’ she denied, the rain pouring on to the top of her bowed head and running down the long pelt of her hair.
Even with her face averted, she knew he smiled. ‘You did, Marnie,’ he insisted. ‘Disapproved of everything about me. My so-called friends. My arrogance. My rather notorious reputation—even my practised methods of seduction! The only glimmer of hope you ever allowed me then was the fact that you could not stop yourself responding to me despite the disapproval! And it was that—need you developed for my physical touch that I exploited ruthlessly to get you to marry me,’ he admitted, ‘then spent the next year trying to live up to the illusion I had created that it was just your body I coveted. When all the time, Marnie—’ his hand came up to lightly touch her cheek ‘—what I coveted deeply was your love.’
‘Oh, Guy,’ Marnie sighed. ‘How can such an intelligent man be so stupid?’
‘Stupid just about says it,’ he agreed. ‘I knew you were pregnant with our child, Marnie,’ he told her, swallowing down on the sudden lump which had formed in his throat. Unable to look at her, he glanced over the track to where the house stood shrouded by the pounding rain. ‘Even before you came looking for me that night, I knew.’
‘But you couldn’t have!’ she cried. ‘I didn’t even know myself!’
‘But I did not know that.’ He faced her grimly. ‘I came back from my business trip to find you standing there looking so wan and frail that it just—hit me—and I knew you were pregnant.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘It was logical to assume that you must know also. But you never said a word about it to me, and you looked so unhappy, as if a child between us was the last thing on earth you wanted, and I was hurt, enough to want to hurt you in return, so I threw some nasty little remark at you about the mess you looked, and turned round and walked out again!’
‘And didn’t come back again that night,’ she inserted painfully.
‘I sat in my car, in the basement car park,’ he confessed, smiling bleakly at her look of surprise. ‘Sat there all night just thinking, feeling rotten for speaking to you like that, and seething with my own hurt because you could not bring yourself to even tell me we had made a child! I came back into the apartment the next morning—’
‘Looking as if you’d just crawled out of someone’s bed to come straight home.’
He nodded, his expression rueful. ‘I know exactly how I must have looked to you,’ he acknowledged. ‘So we started rowing again, and, in the end—through sheer desperation more than anything else because you were actually voicing the idea of leaving me by then—I packed you off down here. Told you brutally to choose between me and your precious work. Smiled and waved arrogantly at you and drove away. Back to London and to blessed relief in a whisky bottle.’
‘Not expecting me to come chasing up to London when I eventually realised I was pregnant, wanting only to share the news with you.’
‘But instead you found me with another woman.’ He lifted his pained eyes to hers. ‘That was the night I came to realise just how much you loved me,’ he said roughly. ‘And just how much I had lost.’
‘But Guy,’ Marnie frowned, ‘if you never knew before how much I loved you, then how—?’
‘You were destroyed, Marnie,’ he said. ‘I destroyed you that night you found me in bed with Anthea. And it does not matter whether I was innocent or not, or whether I was too drunk to know anything about it or not. The simple fact of the matter was that I had been so busy hiding my own love from you that I had not even noticed you were loving me too! And when you flew at me when I got home that night you did not do it in anger, but with all the pain and anguish of one who saw their hopes and dreams lying dead and bloodied at their feet. Only a heart bleeds like that, Marnie. I know because my own heart bled along with yours.’
‘Oh, Guy,’ Marnie whispered unhappily. ‘Of course it matters! There’s a whole world of difference between seeing your husband in bed with another woman because it’s where he prefers to be, and seeing your husband in bed with another woman because his awful friends thought it a great way of having some fun with his stupid young wife while he was too drunk to do anything about it!’
‘But how did I explain that to you?’ he challenged her logic. ‘How does a man who has taken great care to make you believe that he only wants you for your delicious body—and was even guilty of threatening to take another woman to his bed when the one he wanted was making herself unavailable to him—how does a man like that defend himself in that kind of damning situation? How could you allow yourself to believe other than what you saw? I had no leg to stand on,’ he sighed, ‘and I knew, as I watched your love for me turn to hatred in front of my very eyes, that I deserved every last thing I was going to get from you. Though, God, Marnie,’ he ground out, ‘those six months you disappeared out of sight will always go down as the worst time of my life!
‘Then you came back,’ he went on hoarsely. ‘And the moment I saw your slender figure and that awful lifeless expression in your eyes I knew that the child was gone. And that I was to blame.’ He cleared his thickened throat. ‘I knew then that I was way beyond forgiveness.’
‘So all along,’ Marnie concluded, ‘when you’ve talked of penances, you’ve meant because you blamed yourself because I lost our baby, and not because of Anthea and what I believed you had done.’
He nodded grimly. ‘If I had loved you better, Marnie, then—’
‘I had a fall, Guy!’ she inserted shrilly. ‘Neither you nor I could be to blame for that! I fell. I told you last night. I stumbled and fell down some steps. A tragic accident. No one’s fault.’
‘My fault,’ he insisted. ‘You are not a careless creature, Marnie. If I had taken better care of you, loved you so openly that you could never have doubted me in any situation you caught me in, then you would not have run away from me. And you would not have become so wrapped up in your misery as to allow yourself to fall!’
‘So,’ she said, ‘because you decided to take the whole guilt of it on to yourself, you then decided the best thing you could do for both of us was jump into that—rotten car and drive it at speeds guaranteed to kill!’
‘No.’ Reaching out, he took hold of her, dragging her into his arms. ‘Never,’ he denied. ‘I have no intention of ever leaving you again. Be clear on that. But you know my black devils, Marnie. When they drive me I have to answer to them. And behind the wheel of a car I am as cool as a cucumber, clear-headed and clear-eyed. A tyre blew, that’s why I spun off the track,’ he explained. ‘It had nothing to do with my bad driving, or the speed I was travelling at. Or even my trying my best to die for love of you!’ he mocked. ‘It was just the simple result of a faulty tyre. Nothing else.’
She looked dubiously over at the wrecked car. ‘But you could have killed yourself.’
‘Impossible,’ he said with more his usual arrogance. ‘I am too good a driver. Even at speeds of one hundred and fifty miles an hour these cars can be controlled on three wheels. They are built for safety, no matter how flimsy they look.’
‘They set on fire at the drop of a hat, too,’ she pointed out.
‘Which is why I wear all this protective gear, so I can still climb out relatively unscathed.’
It was only then that they both seemed to become aware of the rain pouring relentlessly down on their heads. Of the puddle they were kneeling in. Of their dripping heads and muddy clothes, and their cold, wet faces.
‘You look a mess,’ Marnie observed frankly. ‘And you’ve hurt yourself—here.’ She touched a wet fingertip to his cheek where a bruise was already beginning to swell.
‘And you have scratches all over your arms and face.’ Guy returned the tender gesture by touching his fingers to the thin red scratch-marks on her cheeks. ‘How did they happen?’
‘Coming to rescue you,’ she told him, blue eyes twinkling ruefully. ‘I had to fight my way through a hedge and it fought back—kiss it better?’ she murmured huskily.
Guy looked deeply into her love-darkened eyes, then slowly placed a kiss on each red mark. ‘Anywhere else?’ he enquired as he drew away.
‘Oh, all over, I think,’ she sighed, the feather-like feel of his mouth leaving her skin tingling with pleasure. ‘What about you?’ she then asked in sudden concern. ‘Did you hurt yourself anywhere else other than that bruise on your eye?’
‘Oh, all over, I think,’ he mimicked hopefully.
‘Seriously?’ she demanded.
‘Seriously,’ he mocked. ‘I bashed my shoulder a bit when the car lurched off the track, then received some other more—er—delicate injuries when a wild woman came at me from nowhere and began beating me up!’
‘Oh.’ She pouted, remembering her mad attack. ‘I was angry with you.’
‘I did notice,’ he drawled.
‘Well,’ she defended herself, ‘I expected to find you dead, at least! And there you were standing there looking as fit as a blooming fiddle!’
‘Is there something worse than death?’ he enquired curiously.
‘Yes,’ Marnie answered, her expression suddenly very serious. ‘A lifetime of never knowing how much I love you, Guy.’
‘Come here,’ he muttered, pulling her against him and wrapping her tightly in his arms. ‘You are all I have ever wanted in my life from the moment you entered it, Marnie.’
‘Then let’s go home, Guy,’ she whispered. ‘I want to hold you close in that big warm bed I woke up feeling so alone in this morning.’
‘Bed?’ His mood brightened, his manner with it. ‘That has to be a better option than a puddle any day,’ he agreed, pulling her to her feet as he got up himself. ‘A long hot bath sounds good, too,’ he added leeringly.
‘A bath for two?’ Marnie suggested, tucking her arm around his waist while he hugged her by her shoulders. She lifted her wet face up to him and let her eyes twinkle with promises.
Guy growled something and began to run, dashing with her through the rain towards the house.
‘I could paint you looking like this, all wet and sexily tousled,’ Marnie told him a few minutes later when they were safely locked behind their bedroom door.
‘Not today, you couldn’t,’ Guy said firmly. ‘Today I have other of your—talents to call upon. Mainly making this man you married happy.’
‘Be happy, Guy,’ she said softly and reached up on t
iptoe to brush his lips with hers.
‘I will be,’ he said, pulling her close again, ‘so long as you never leave me again.’
‘Never,’ she promised. ‘You’re stuck with me for life.’
*
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Michelle Smart’s next book,
BILLIONAIRE’S BRIDE FOR REVENGE
The first book in her Rings of Vengeance trilogy!
Benjamin’s plan for vengeance is to steal and marry his enemy’s fiancée, Freya! It’s meant to be a convenient arrangement. But there’s nothing remotely convenient about the red-hot pleasures of their wedding night…
Keep reading to get a glimpse of
BILLIONAIRE’S BRIDE FOR REVENGE
CHAPTER ONE
BENJAMIN GUILLEM CAST his eye over the heads of the people scattered around the landscaped garden of the Tuscan-style villa in the heart of Madrid, an easy feat considering he was a head taller than most. The only guest there without a plus-one, he was also the only guest in attendance with no intention of celebrating Javier Casillas’s engagement.
He snatched a flute of champagne from a passing waitress and drank it in one swallow. The bubbles felt like jagged barbs down his throat, magnifying the hot, knotted feeling that twisted inside him.
Javier and Luis had betrayed him. The Casillas brothers had taken advantage of their lifelong friendship and ripped him off. All the documentary evidence pointed to that inescapable conclusion.
He hoped the evidence was wrong. He hoped his instincts were wrong. They had to be. The alternative was too sickening to contemplate.
Lost in Love Page 15
