‘Same man,’ Rafael told her grimly. This, he thought, was not going to work. He shouldn’t have pursued this woman in the first place. She was right. He wasn’t going to commit to her so what had been the point of the chase? ‘I lied to you. Whether you accept the apology or not is incidental because you were damned right on one score. Neither of us needs this. I shouldn’t have come over here. It was a mistake. I won’t drop you home. There’s no point prolonging the inevitable. I’ll get my driver to take you back and, before you launch into another outraged monologue on yet more things I possess, yes, I have a driver. Or, should I say, I use the guy who works for the company directors but my priorities take precedence over theirs. Also this magnificent house is mine even though I rarely use it. I also have houses in Paris and the Caribbean. If I’m an unforgivable liar to be defined by the possessions I didn’t tell you about, then you might as well know them all. You can go away then and stew over the narrow escape you had from getting involved with a man like me.’
Yes! That should have made her feel a lot better! It didn’t. There was no more arguing to be done and she realised that he now wanted to get rid of her. She had shrieked once too often. Not that she didn’t have a point, she thought bitterly. But then why did she feel so empty as she was bundled into the back of the Jag? She wanted to turn back for one last glimpse, but when she did he had disappeared back into the house.
CHAPTER NINE
AMY expected Rafael to be on the first plane back to America. She wouldn’t have dreamed of actually making an effort to find out, of phoning James and casually dropping the question into the conversation, even though she was racked with misery and barely functioning. The only reason she found out was because, three weeks after she had been ejected from his house, she happened to open the newspaper and there, wedged at the back in those boring financial pages she usually avoided like the plague, was a picture of him smiling, with a tall, dark-haired woman lightly leaning into him, also smiling.#p#分页标题#e#
She read the article over and over, stared at the picture repeatedly, even holding it up to the light and squinting to see if she could decipher any expression on his face that might give her an inkling of what was going through his head. She scrutinised his well-groomed partner and tried to pretend that she was fine with the idea of him with another woman. He was footloose and fancy-free, after all, and how could she complain when she had been the one to send him on his merry way?
It seemed that Rafael Vives, as the chairman and major shareholder of his vast, listed company, had decided to relocate to London for a six-month tenure, during which he intended to sell off certain bits of the company so that he could extend his fledgling venture into the leisure industry. There were all sorts of sums and figures and detailed analysis, which Amy assumed other financial people were interested in, but the only other fact she wanted to know was the identity of the brunette.
She binned the newspaper article, only to retrieve it from underneath the potato peelings three hours later. Then she proceeded to stew over it for three days.
Her lethargy gave way to furious activity. That feeling of being half dead disappeared. In its place was a frantic, restless energy that left her exhausted at the end of the day.
She had stuck the article on her fridge with a magnet. In the mornings, before she left for her course, she had a bowl of cereal and glowered at it from the kitchen table. In the evenings, over elaborate meals that she cooked for practice only to nibble her way through half, she did the same.
Two weeks of this saw her teetering on the edge of complete meltdown before she did the unthinkable. She picked up the phone and called James.
She said all the usual things to him, told him that she was making sure he didn’t forget her name because, when she began her apprenticeship at one of the leading London hotels, she just wanted to know that he would come along and sample her offerings. She whittered on about wanting to open her own restaurant and was chuffed when he told her that he would happily sink some money in the venture, to just let him know where and when. Which actually made her stop and think that perhaps she would indeed do that, open a restaurant, instead of just hanging on to a pipedream that would never materialise in a month of Sundays.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that she had read in the newspapers that his brother had decided to relocate to London for a few weeks to work.
‘About time he used that house of his,’ James joked. ‘’ve been there a couple of times and it’s like a mausoleum—not that it’ll stay like that for very long. Elizabeth will soon put that right.’