Chapter Seven #3
The air snapped tight. This time Willa didn’t flinch. Or maybe she had retreated so far from him that he couldn’t see it.
‘Tell me something, Ares. If Ariana had sex twice with a man who got her pregnant, a man she was working for temporarily, would you be encouraging her to marry him?’ Her eyes jerked to his. ‘No, I thought not.’
He watched as she started to eat her ice cream, his gaze following the rhythmic progress of the spoon, momentarily mesmerised by the movement of her graceful hands.
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Of course not. She’s your sister.’
He pushed his coffee cup to one side and leaned back in his seat. ‘How long did you wear your mother’s engagement ring on your hand?’
Frowning, she pushed the bowl away. ‘I don’t know. Two years maybe.’
‘You were happy to do that. To pretend that you were engaged.’
‘Not happy. I told you why I wore it. It made my life easier.’
‘And wearing my ring for real will do that too. It’s just a different ring, Willa.’
She was giving him a what are you talking about? stare. ‘It’s a lie is what it is. Or are you planning on telling the world that the reason we’re married is because you knocked me up in a one-night stand?’
‘That wouldn’t be quite how I’d phrase it.’
Her eyes clashed with his. ‘In other words, you wouldn’t tell them the truth.’
‘We would know the truth,’ he said slowly. ‘The rest of the world is unimportant.’
‘But your sister isn’t. And your grandfather isn’t. Most important of all, our child won’t be. Is that who you are? Are you happy to lie to the people you love? To make them co-conspirators to our lies?’
The sun had set, but there were solar-powered lights in the trees that edged the terrace and now they cast shadows across Willa’s cut-glass features so that she seemed to be disappearing into the darkness.
‘I don’t understand you. We’ve just spent the better part of two days finessing Ariana’s prenup so that she won’t marry some random man she’s only known for a couple of months, but now you want to marry me, and we only met three weeks ago.’
‘The difference is you are pregnant.’
She had, he noticed, stopped mentioning the DNA test. Which meant he believed it was his child.
Now she took a breath. ‘How long were you engaged to—?’ She left space for him to supply the name.
After a moment he said as calmly as he could, ‘Zoe.’
Her name tasted strange in his mouth. It was such a long time since he had said it out loud. Years, and he felt a rush of anger with Willa for forcing him to do so now.
‘And we were engaged for eighteen months.’ They had known each other a lot longer. Her parents were friends of his parents, and she came to every family event, first as a friend, then as a girlfriend.
‘You must have known each other very well.’
Ares felt his body tighten as if it was being stretched on a rack. At the time, he had thought he knew Zoe as well as he knew himself. Now though, he wondered if he had simply made assumptions.
‘We did.’
‘You knew each other for a long time, and you loved each other, and yet you still walked away from her. Which makes you either cowardly or cruel. Right now, I’m not sure which one best applies.’
He had been neither.
His lungs felt as though they were full of lead. For some reason Willa’s words hurt more than Zoe’s betrayal. More even than his parents’ deaths.
Pushing back his chair, he tossed his napkin onto the table and walked past her towards the gardens. He had no idea where he was going, just that he needed to be in a space large enough to contain the ache in his chest. And nowhere near the olive grove.
Which was why he found himself on the beach.
The tide was in, but there was a strip of sand, cool and pale and powdery like confectioners’ sugar.
He sat down to watch the tumbling waves, breathing in the salt breeze.
Normally, he found it calming to watch the rippling water, but tonight it felt overwhelming, as if the sea was mimicking the chaos inside his chest.
A chaos he had wanted to contain by getting Willa to agree to marriage. To living a lie. To lying to his family and hers. To their child. Only, in answer to Willa’s question, that wasn’t who he was. Not that she would believe him. Or care.
She probably wouldn’t care if she never saw him again.
‘You know, even if we don’t marry, we’re going to have to get to a point where one or the other of us doesn’t storm off in the middle of every difficult conversation.’
He glanced up, his heartbeat blunt with confusion. Willa was standing beside him. Her dark hair was very dark, and her skin looked silver in the moonlight. She looked nervous but defiant.
‘Although, I suppose technically it was your turn.’
‘Is that how it works?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know how most things work. Particularly us.’ She sat down beside him. ‘I wasn’t expecting a proposal. I didn’t handle it very well.’
‘No, you were right to say what you did. It’s better that we’re honest.’
She glanced away. ‘You were trying to do a good thing, and I know people get married for all kinds of reasons, but no good will come of you forcing yourself to do something that you clearly don’t want to do. If you felt trapped with Zoe, how are you going to feel with me?’
A wave rose and tumbled at the shoreline, but he wasn’t really seeing it. There was nothing but the dark-haired woman sitting quietly, patiently, beside him. She had come to find him so that they could finish this conversation.
The idea that she would do that went some way to soothing the turmoil in his chest
So finish it, he told himself.
‘I wasn’t the one who felt trapped.’
He had never said those words to anyone. Not his family. Not the media. And in the past, the idea of revealing Zoe’s infidelity would have felt like ripping out stitches with his teeth, but as Willa’s gaze shifted from the sea to his face, he felt nothing but relief.
‘Then, why did you leave her at the altar?’ she said quietly.
‘I went to Zoe’s apartment on the day before the wedding.
We’d agreed not to see each other, but I’d bought her a bracelet.
’ He glanced down at his hands. ‘I let myself in. The lock was stiff, but I’d learned how to open it smoothly.
If I hadn’t done that, I might never have found her.
’ A pause. ‘I wanted to surprise her, but it was me that got the surprise.’ Was that the right word for a gut-wrenching betrayal?
‘Zoe was there with a man. They were having sex.’
In the silence that followed that statement, he felt Willa’s shock and confusion, but when she spoke, her voice was matter-of-fact, calm. ‘That’s awful,’ she said simply. Because, of course, it was undeniably and emphatically awful. And it felt liberating to acknowledge that, finally.
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’ He frowned. ‘She’d taken off her engagement ring, and I just kept staring at it, and then I left. Honestly, I felt like I was drugged. When I got in the car, I couldn’t remember how to drive.’
‘You were in shock.’ Willa’s eyes were a soft green like wet grass after summer rain. ‘You didn’t want it to be true.’
‘I didn’t.’ But it was. ‘I wanted not to have seen it. Only I had, and I knew I couldn’t go through with the marriage. I went back to my parents’ house, and I was going to tell them. I was going to call the wedding off. But they were so happy and excited. And they loved Zoe.’
Far out at sea, a red light was blinking in the darkness. A yacht, port side, cutting silently through the water like Zoe’s betrayal had sliced through his heart.
‘I didn’t plan to leave her. I was going to go through with it right up until I got close, and then she turned and smiled, and my legs just wouldn’t move—’
He could still remember Zoe’s face. She’d looked beautiful. But all he could think about was how good she was at lying.
‘You did the right thing.’
‘Did I?’ He felt his heart twist. ‘I humiliated Zoe, hurt her family. And my family.’ It still gutted him now, that look on his father’s face. His mother’s tears. ‘I turned our lives into a circus for years. And they died thinking I was that man on the front of all the tabloids.’
‘They knew you weren’t that man.’
There was a fierceness to her voice now that pulled him back from that same dark place he’d been in those terrible months after the wedding, and then he felt the soft touch of her fingers on his hand, and after a moment he twisted his hand round to clasp hers. She tightened her grip, anchoring him.
‘Sure, you have faults. You’re stubborn and bossy and too smart for your own good.’
‘Don’t forget arrogant and ruthless and vengeful?’
Her eyes gleamed, still fierce. She wasn’t fighting him now, but fighting in his corner. It made something flare inside of him, called something back to life.
‘You’re not any of those things. But you are determined and loyal and kind.
I know that, but more importantly, your parents did too.
They knew you better than anyone, and they would have known that you had a reason to do what you did because they loved you and trusted you enough to make you Ariana’s legal guardian. ’
‘I would have told them, but I waited too long. Then later, there didn’t seem any point in bad-mouthing Zoe, so I let people think I was the villain. And in a way I was. I let her be humiliated in public.’
‘You had no choice.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘The alternative would just have been to lie and keep lying because there’s never just one lie. Trust me, it’s better to rip the plaster off than to do it gradually.’
‘You’re very wise for someone so young.’
There was an expression on her face, a flickering emotion he couldn’t catch. And then it was gone. ‘It’s the job. It’s very ageing.’
There were smudges under her eyes, and he got to his feet, pulling her up beside him. ‘I’ve kept you up so late. You must be exhausted. Let’s go to bed.’
His words replayed inside his head during the ten minutes it took the two of them to walk in silence back to the villa. Willa seemed lost in thought, or maybe she was revising her opinion of him again.
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, he stopped and cleared his throat. ‘Just to be clear, I didn’t mean my bed. I wasn’t assuming—’
‘Weren’t you?’ She was staring up at him, her absinthe-coloured eyes steady on his face. ‘I was.’ And then she took his hand and led him upstairs into her bedroom, pulling him against her hungrily as he pushed the door shut with the flat of his hand.