of course not!’ she denied feverishly. ‘How could you think that?’
‘What I’m looking for here, Katherine, are a few answers. Won’t you be a good girl and oblige?’
Her heart was racing inside her. She could feel it. Hammering away like a steam-engine, making her breathless and unsteady. Very slowly she sat down on the nearest bench, partly because she knew that if she didn’t she would collapse, and partly because, if she sat down, she wouldn’t have to look at him. She could focus her attention somewhere else. There was a lake of sorts a few yards away and she concentrated on it.
On the opposite side of the water there was a mother with two young children. The children were having a ball, standing as close to the water as they could feasibly get, and their mother looked on anxiously, ready to leap forward the minute one of them fell in. Katherine watched the antics and didn’t turn when Dominic sat down next to her. She could feel him, though, every vibration emanating from that hard, masculine body.
‘I know you must think that I don’t care, but I do,’ she said, looking straight ahead of her. Care, she thought—what an inappropriate word to describe what I feel for you, every nuance of every emotion which fills me up and makes me whole.
‘How generous of you.’
‘But I still can’t marry you. I shall never be able to marry you. I should never have become involved with you in the first place.’
That was true as well. At the beginning she had been too thrilled to pay much attention to the consequences of her actions. In a dark world he had been a sudden, blinding ray of light, and she had been drawn to the source of the light like a moth to a flame. Everything so new, so wonderful, all happening to her, unextraordinary little her whose plainness had been drummed into her from the time she was old enough to understand.
‘You’ll never amount to anything,’ her mother had used to say to her. ‘You’re too plain, my girl. Like your father. I could have had anyone, but I chose him, and look at what he did to me.’
She had known from a very early age that her resemblance to her father was a crime for which she would never be forgiven, and her mother had reminded her of it so often that eventually Katherine had learnt how to switch off when the subject was raised.
Dominic had brought her alive. He had seen her, and she had blossomed under those clever, sexy, watchful green eyes.
‘Why not?’ he asked sharply. ‘Why shouldn’t you have become involved with me?’
‘I had no right. It was selfish.’
‘Stop talking in riddles. If you have something to say, then why don’t you come right out and say it?’
‘We’re not suited,’ she said helplessly.
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘We’re not alike.’
‘I don’t want a mirror image of myself. I’m not a narcissist.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying!’ She was beginning to lose the thread of her logic now. She should have just let it go, let him walk off, but something in her wanted to leave him with feelings that weren’t all bad. Was that selfish too?
‘I’m not a glamorous person,’ she attempted, meaning it. She wasn’t. She had had her stab at glamour; she had borrowed Emma’s clothes and worn them with her hair down and she had enjoyed it, but it wasn’t her. Her flamboyance was born of fear and desperation, a need to see it all before the opportunity slipped between her fingers. She was the person who squeezed her eyes tightly and then parachuted down to earth. The people below might think her brave and only she would know her private terror.
The woman he had fallen in love with had been a chimera, an illusion, someone she had created for reasons which she could not reveal.
‘You’re an extremely glamorous person, Katherine Lewis,’ he said, turning to face her, and she made sure that she kept her profile firmly averted.
‘You need someone else. What you think you’ve found in me, you haven’t.’ There she went again, she thought, making a muddle of it, trying to say so much but not too much.
‘Stop telling me what sort of woman I want,’ he said, his voice like a whip. ‘I don’t want to sit here and listen to flimsy excuses. You’ve told me that you won’t marry me and what I want to know is why. I don’t want a damned dissertation on compatibility.’
‘Life isn’t black and white!’ she snapped, getting angry. She stopped looking at the two children, whose mother had finally given in to anxiety and was dragging them away from the lake with vague promises about coming back another day.
‘When?’ the older of the two was asking in a high voice. ‘Another day, when?’
‘Another day, some time soon! Now, stop complaining. If you stop complaining, I’ll buy you both an ice-cream.’
They promptly shut up. How wonderful, Katherine thought, to be a child, to have problems sorted out with ice-cream cones.
‘It is,’ Dominic said harshly, ‘when it comes to something like this. I asked you to marry me, you said no, and I want to know why.’
‘Haven’t you ever been refused anything in your life before?’ Katherine threw at him.
‘Not very often and never by a woman.’
‘Well, aren’t you the lucky one?’ She could feel the wall between them getting higher and higher, and she wished that she had chosen the coward’s way out and left him a note. She might have done too, except that she had a suspicion that he would have ripped it into a thousand pieces and hunted her down until he found her. If only to drag answers out of her.
‘Tell me!’ he roared, and Katherine felt passing relief that the two children had vanished. They would have been instantly startled into falling into the lake otherwise.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’ she shouted back angrily.
Anger made it easier. It took over from pain; it took over from fantasising that the truth would make him feel anything other than hatred or pity.
‘I want to know if you’re walking out on me because of another man!’
‘If that’s what you want me to tell you, then I’ll say it!’ she flung back at him, and his face darkened with rage. He gripped her shoulders with his hands, and she could feel his fingers pushing down into her skin, hurting her.
‘Yes!’ he snarled. ‘Let me hear you say it!’
‘All right, then, fine! The reason I can’t marry you is because of another man. Satisfied?’
As soon as the words were out, she regretted saying them. She half opened her mouth to deny it all, but he didn’t give her the opportunity.
‘Eminently satisfied,’ he fired. ‘Did you do it to make him jealous? Did it work, Katherine?’
‘You made me say that,’ she told him, and all the old feelings of hopeless misery were creeping back again. Her anger had dissipated as quickly as dew in the hot sun. She very rarely lost her temper. Living with her mother all those years had built up a layer of silent self-control. Words spoken in the heat of the moment, she had discovered from an early age, were the most wounding and the most difficult to retract.
‘In a way, I’m glad I met you,’ he said, standing up, and there was a stillness about his movements that was as alarming as the black fury on his face had been earlier on. ‘I’ve learnt a valuable lesson from you. Deception isn’t always obvious.’
Katherine scrambled to her feet, and when she met his eyes she saw the scathing dislike there.
Now there was nothing left to say. She had done what she had to do, but, as things had turned out, she had achieved it in the worst possible way.
‘Here,’