Marriage Without Love & More Than a Convenient Marriage(8)

The office door swung open, banishing the past. She looked up quickly, her eyes freezingly disdainful. Kieron had always been tall, but now he was broader than she remembered, filling the small space, his eyes deeply and darkly contemptuous as they looked at the open telephone directory. One lean finger ran smoothly down the page, stopping unerringly against the number of the employment agency.

‘No luck?’ he drawled sardonically. ‘Too bad.’

Briony forced herself not to respond, her eyes carefully blank as she removed the directory and put a piece of paper in her typewriter.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Blake.’

‘Mr Blake?’ he sneered coldly. ‘Oh, come on, surely we needn’t be so formal—Beth!’

The last word was said softly, almost a taunt, and Briony swung round, her eyes blazing with anger and contempt.

‘Don’t call me that!’ she snapped.

‘Why not? It’s your name.’

‘Not any longer,’ Briony told him crisply. How dared he deliberately remind her of the past! ‘I left it behind me.’

‘How convenient.’ Kieron had his back to her, his dark head bent over some papers, ‘Tell me, Briony, did you bring anything of Beth with you, when you decided to trade personalities?’

‘Not a thing,’ Briony assured him shortly. Why was he plaguing her with these questions, resurrecting memories she would rather had remained forgotten?

‘That’s a pity. At least she was a warm, living, breathing woman.’

‘Who you destroyed!’

The words were out before she could stop them, and Kieron’s eyes narrowed sharply as he swung round and stared at her.

‘What makes you say that?’

Sheer disbelief held her rigidly silent. How could he stand there and ask her that? Hadn’t he deliberately and coldbloodedly used her, and then when he had got his story, simply dropped her? He knew how she had felt about him—she had never made the slightest attempt to hide it. He was an intelligent man; he must have known how she would react, how shocked and distressed she would be. She had learned from a photographer who had worked with him, and whom she had bumped into by accident three months after he had left, that his career was flourishing. He had been posted abroad somewhere, although where the photographer had not said.

‘So, nothing of the Beth I knew remains?’ Kieron persisted.

He was watching her intently and Briony felt like a helpless little fly being pursued by a particularly relentless spider. What did he want? An admission of how close he had come to completely destroying her, to gloat over?

‘Nothing,’ she told him emotionlessly.

His anger seemed to explode over her.

‘Don’t lie to me, Briony!’ he gritted furiously, ‘I saw your face when you walked into that office and saw me sitting there. You hate my guts, don’t you. Don’t you?’ he demanded when she refused to answer.

‘Haven’t I the right?’ Her hands were curled into two small fists. ‘After what you did.…’

For a long moment he said nothing, merely watching her in a way that made Briony shiver with apprehension. Why should he examine her with such contempt? He was the one at fault. He was the one who….

‘You’re quite right,’ he said softly, cutting across her bitter thoughts. ‘The Beth I knew has gone completely. You’re quite a woman, aren’t you, Briony? A woman of iron and steel, according to the office grapevine. The Beth I knew would never have held on to a grudge so tightly, nor become so bitter. But then the Beth I thought I knew never.…’ He broke off and without warning leaned over her, watching her eyes spit defiance. It was only when he kept on coming, and Briony eventually shrank back, that she thought she saw some emotion flicker deep in the narrowed eyes, but it was gone almost instantly, his expression withdrawn as he said curtly, ‘You’re perfectly safe. You’ve made your point, but I don’t intend working with a secretary who looks at me as though I’ve crawled out from under a particularly slimy stone. So if I were you I’d have another look at this.’ He dropped the directory he had removed from the shelf behind her on to her desk with a derisive smile, and started to walk towards the door.

‘One thing at least hasn’t changed,’ he said unkindly, pausing to watch the wary expression creep into her eyes. ‘At least not if all the gossip one hears is correct. It seems you still enjoy turning men on and then freezing them off. With one notable exception.’

Briony gasped at the unfairness of the accusation, and the cynical, twisted smile which had accompanied his last words, and was just about to demand an explanation when Kieron added acidly: