‘Yes.’
‘Yet you still went ahead and slept with him? Moved in with him?’
Suddenly Andreas’s voice seemed to be thickened by something. What was it? Magenta wondered. Disgust?
‘No!’ she denied fiercely, determined to put him straight. ‘He offered me the use of his apartment because he’d just bought another one nearer his company and he didn’t want to let it out. He wanted someone to look after it for him for a while. He said it would be better for my image to be living there rather than in “the hovel”, as he called it, I’d been living in with Mum. He wanted us to be lovers, but I wasn’t ready for that. I’m not saying we didn’t kiss, because I did have a mild flirtation with him, and he did everything in his power to try and get me into bed. But it didn’t take him long to guess that I still hadn’t got you out of my system.
‘When he knew I was coming to see you that day with that book I think he realised that you’d only have to touch me to send all his plans for my future awry. He said he’d only promote me if you were well and truly out of my life. That’s when he... Well, you remember that...bruise...for want of a better word...on my neck? It was a deliberate act of brutality to stamp his mark on me before I saw you, even though he didn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of getting me into bed. I think what mattered to him most was losing a marketable commodity—which was all I really was to him. He already had a long-suffering woman-friend in tow. But I was living in his flat for just a fraction of the rent, and he was already negotiating a big contract for me. I didn’t want to give it all up and go back to my old life and the situation I’d been living in, so I did exactly as he told me to do that day. I knew that if you thought he had become my lover you’d never want to see me again, and I wanted to make you hate me so that you wouldn’t try.’
‘Why are you telling me this now?’ His voice sounded almost hoarse. ‘Because you’re worried that I might take Theo away from you?’
Because I love you!
His face was such a hard, inscrutable mask that she couldn’t say it. If she did then he could go away, satisfied that he had the ultimate triumph: Magenta James as crazy over him as he had been over her six years ago. And even if she deserved it, she couldn’t take the humiliation of that.
‘I don’t want you to go on thinking the worst about me,’ she answered steadily at length, but it was an effort when she was trembling so much inside. ‘I know what I did wasn’t very nice, but I just wanted you to know that I’m not entirely as bad as you would have me painted.’
‘So what happened when the wonderful Marcus found out you were pregnant and had ruined all his plans?’ he asked scathingly.
Flinching still from the resurrected memory, Magenta refrained from telling Andreas about the other man’s brutal response. ‘I was asked to leave the apartment when it become clear to him that I wasn’t going to do “the sensible thing”,’ she informed him with bitter cynicism. ‘I was planning to leave anyway. He just accelerated my departure, that’s all.’
‘And you went where?’
‘To the new flat the council had given Mum when she left rehab.’
His features hardened but he didn’t say anything.
‘Then, three weeks before Theo was due... Well, you know the rest. I woke up from my coma thinking I’d lost him, but he was alive and well and almost two months old to the day. When they brought him in to see me I didn’t have any strength in my arms to hold him. I was frightened that I was never going to be able to. He became my reason to recover. To get well.’
‘And I wasn’t there.’
Those four simple words conveyed an intensity of emotion before he looked away towards the lake, though Magenta knew he wasn’t actually seeing a thing. His teeth were gritted and his face appeared slashed by some inner conflict.
‘My son was brought into this world with his mother unconscious and a father who didn’t even know of his existence!’
His self-condemnation was paramount, but Magenta could sense a multitude of other emotions in him too.
‘Don’t be too angry with me, Andreas,’ she begged, wishing she could wave a magic wand and change the past. ‘I can’t ever make up for the way I behaved, but please believe me when I say I’m truly, truly sorry.’
He didn’t say anything, just nodded his head as though he didn’t trust himself to speak any more.
‘Come on,’ he said surprisingly softly, and though he put his arm around her shoulders, she knew it was only to guide her back to the car.