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Twenty-four months should have been time enough to lessen the hurt. A sensible woman would have forgotten it altogether. But she’d never been sensible where Max was concerned and if the tears scalding her cheeks now weren’t proof enough of that, the dull, cold emptiness inside where once she’d known warmth and life and passion, should have been.
What would it take, she wondered, to cure her of Max Logan and heal the scars inflicted by her marriage? Would there ever come a time that she’d learn to love another man as she still loved him—and if so, would she love more wisely the next time?
Although dense silence greeted him when he stepped inside the penthouse, he knew at once that she was there. Quite apart from her suitcases still parked by the front door, and the scent of flowers everywhere, as well as a host of other clues that she’d made herself thoroughly at home, the atmosphere was different. Vibrant, electric, and unsettling as hell. A forewarning of trouble to come.
Dropping his briefcase on the desk in his office—one area, he was glad to see, that she hadn’t tried to camouflage into something out of a happy homemaker magazine—he made a quick circuit through the rooms on the main floor before climbing the stairs. The thick carpet masked his footsteps thoroughly enough that she was completely unaware of him coming to a halt at the entrance to the master suite.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he leaned against the door frame and watched her. She stood at the highboy dresser and appeared to be mopping her face with his golf shirt. But what struck him most forcibly was how thin she’d become. Not that she’d ever been fat or even close to it but, where once she’d been sweetly curved, she was now all sharp, elegant angles, at least from the rear. Her hips were narrow as a boy’s, her waist matchstick slender.
Though probably a prerequisite for all successful fashion models, it wasn’t a look that appealed to him. Even less did he like the air of fragility that went with this underfed version of the hellion he’d been coerced into marrying. It edged her too close to vulnerable, and once he started thinking along those lines, he was in trouble, as he very well knew from past experience.
“I’d appreciate it if you’d wipe your nose on something other than a piece of my clothing,” he said, relishing how his voice suddenly breaking the silence almost had her jumping out of her skin.
But when she spun around, the expression on her face made short work of his moment of malicious pleasure. He’d forgotten how truly beautiful she was. In particular, he’d forgotten the impact of her incredible eyes and, suddenly, he was the one struggling for composure as memories of the night they’d first met in her father’s house rushed back to haunt him.
“I’d like you to meet my daughter,” Zoltan Siklossy had said, as footsteps approached along the flagstone path that ran the width of the front of the rambling old mausoleum of a place.
Max had turned and been transfixed, the impact of the city skyline beyond the Danube forgotten. Backlit by the late May sunset, she’d appeared touched with gold all over, from her pale hair to her honey-tinted skin. Only her eyes had been different, a startlingly light aquamarine, one moment more green than blue, and the next, the other way around.
Fringed with long, curling lashes and glowing with the fire of priceless jewels, they’d inspected him. He’d stared back, mesmerized, and said the first thing that came to mind. “I didn’t know Magyars were blond. Somehow, I expected you’d all be dark.”
A stupid, thoughtless remark which showed him for the ignorant foreigner he was, but she hadn’t taken offence. Instead, she’d come forward and laughed as she took his hand. “Some of us are. But we Hungarians have a mixed ancestry and I, like many others in my country, favor our Finnish heritage.”
Though accented, her English was perfect, thanks, he later discovered, to an aunt who’d studied in London years before. Her laughter hung like music in the still, warm evening. Her hand remained in his, light and cool. “Welcome to Budapest, Mr. Logan,” she purred. “I hope you’ll allow me to introduce you to our beautiful city.”
“I’m counting on it,” he’d replied, bowled over by her easy self-assurance. Although she looked no more than eighteen, he believed her when she told him she was twenty-seven. Why not? After all, her parents were well into their seventies.
In fact, she’d been just twenty-two and the most conniving creature he’d ever met—not something likely to have changed, he reminded himself now, even if she did look about ready to keel over in a dead faint at being caught off guard.
“I’m not wiping my nose,” she whispered shakily, clutching the shirt to her breasts.
He strolled further into the room. “What were you doing, then? Sniffing to find evidence of another woman’s perfume? Checking for lipstick stains?”
Something flared in her eyes. Guilt? Shame? Anger? “Should I be? Do you entertain many women here, Max, now that I’m no longer underfoot all the time?”
“If I do, that’s certainly none of your business, my dear.”
“As long as we’re married—”
“You left the marriage.”
“But I’m still your wife and whether or not you like it, you’re still my husband.”
He circled her slowly and noticed that her eyes were suspiciously red-rimmed. “A fact which apparently causes you some grief. Have you been crying, Gabriella?”
“No,” she said, even as a fresh flood of tears welled up and turned her irises to sparkling turquoise.
“You used to be a better liar. What happened? Not had enough practice lately?”
“I…” Battling for composure, she pressed slender fingers to her mouth.
Irked to find his mood dangerously inclining toward sympathy, he made a big production of tipping the loose change from his pockets onto the shelf of his mahogany valet stand. “Yes? Spit it out, whatever it is. After everything else we’ve been through, I’m sure I can take it.”
Her voice, husky and uncertain, barely made it across the distance separating them. “I hoped we wouldn’t…be like this with one another, Max. I hoped we’d be able to…”
She swallowed audibly and dribbled into another tremulous silence.
“What?” He swung back to face her, stoking the slow anger her distress threatened to extinguish. “Pick up where we left off? And exactly where was that, Gabriella? At each other’s throats, as I recall!”
“I was hoping we could get past that. I think we must, if we’re to convince my parents they need have no worries about me.” She held out both hands in appeal. “I know you…hate me, Max, but for their sake, won’t you please try to remember there was once a time when we liked each other and, for the next two weeks, focus on that instead?”
CHAPTER TWO
HER reminder touched a nerve. They had liked each other, in the beginning. He’d been dazzled by her effervescence, her zest for life. Only later had he come to see them for what they really were: a cover-up designed to hide her more devious objectives.
“My father treats me as if I were made of bone china,” she’d confided, the day she took him on a walking tour on the Buda side of the Danube, some three weeks after he’d arrived in Hungary. “He thinks I need to be protected.”
“Not surprising, surely?” he’d said. “You’ve had a very sheltered upbringing.”
She’d batted her eyelashes provocatively. “But I’m a woman of the world now, Max, and quite able to look out for myself.”
Later that afternoon though, when they’d run into some people she knew and been persuaded to join them for refreshments at a sidewalk café near Fishermen’s Bastion, Max had seen why Zoltan Siklossy might be concerned. Although she made one glass of wine last the whole hour they were together, Gabriella’s so-called friends—social-climbing opportunists, from what he’d observed—ordered round after round and showed no qualms about leaving her to pick up the tab when they finally moved on.
“Let me,” Max had said, reaching for the bill.
“No, please! I can afford it,” she’d replied. “And it’s my pleasure to do so.”
But he’d insisted. “Humor me, Gabriella. I’m one of those dull, old-fashioned North Americans who thinks the man should pay.”
“Dull?” She’d turned her stunning sea-green eyes on him and he’d found himself drowning in their translucent depths. “I find you rather wonderful.”
For a moment, he’d thought he caught a glimpse of something fragile beneath her vivacity. A wistful innocence almost, that belied her frequent implicit reference to previous lovers. It was gone so quickly that he decided he must have imagined it, but the impression, brief though it was, found its way through his defenses and touched him in ways he hadn’t anticipated.
If she were anyone else and his sole reason for visiting Hungary had been a summer of fun in the sun, he’d have found her hard to resist. But there was no place in his plans for a serious involvement, and he hoped he had enough class not to engage in a sexual fling with his hosts’ daughter.
The way Gabriella had studied him suggested she knew full well the thoughts chasing through his mind, and was determined to change them. Her usual worldly mask firmly in place again, she asked in a voice husky with promise, “Do you like to dance, Max?”
“I can manage a two-step without crippling my partner,” he said, half bewitched by her brazen flirting and half annoyed to find himself responding to it despite what his conscience was telling him.
“Would you like to dance with me?”
“Here?” He’d glance at the hulking shadow of Mátyás Church, and the sunny square next to it, filled with camera-toting tourists. “I don’t think so, thanks!”
“Of course not here!” She’d laughed and he was once again reminded of music, of wind chimes swaying in a summer breeze. Good sense be damned, he’d found himself gazing at her heart-shaped face with its perfect strawberry-ripe, cupid’s-bow mouth and wondering how she would taste if he were to kiss her.
“My parents would like to throw a party for you,” she went on, drawing his gaze down by crossing her long, lovely legs so that the hem of her skirt, short enough to begin with, rode a couple of inches farther up her thigh. “They hold your family in such esteem, as I’m sure you know. Your grandfather is a legend in this city.”
“He took a few photographs.” Max had shrugged, as much to dispel the enchantment she was weaving as to dispute her claim. “No big deal. That was how he earned a living.”
“For the people of Budapest, he was a hero. He braved imprisonment to record our history when most men with his diplomatic immunity would have made their escape. As his grandson, you are our honored guest and it’s our privilege to treat you accordingly.”
“I’m here on business, Gabriella, not to make the social scene,” he reminded her. “It was never my intention to impose on your family for more than an hour or two, just long enough to pay my respects. That your parents insisted I stay in their home when I had a perfectly good hotel room reserved—”
“Charles Logan’s grandson stay in a hotel?” Her laughter had flowed over him again beguilingly. Her fingers grazed his forearm and lingered at his wrist, gently shackling him. “Out of the question! Neither my mother nor my father would allow such a thing. You’re to stay with us as long as, and whenever, you’re in Budapest”
A completely illogical prickle of foreboding had tracked the length of his spine and despite the bright hot sun, he’d felt a sudden chill. “I don’t anticipate many return visits. Once I’ve concluded the terms and conditions of the property I’m interested in buying and have the necessary permits approved, I’ll turn the entire restoration process over to my project manager and head back home.”
“All the more reason for us to entertain you royally while we have the chance then,” she’d said, leaning forward so that, without having to try too hard, he was able to glimpse the lightly tanned cleavage revealed by the low neck of her summer dress. She hadn’t been wearing a bra.
Responding to so shameless an invitation had been his first in a long line of mistakes that came to a head about a month later when the promised party took place. It seemed to him that half the population of Budapest showed up for the event and while he lost track of names almost immediately, everyone appeared to know not only of his grandfather but, surprisingly, of him, his purchase of the dilapidated old building across the river, and his plans to turn it into yet another of his chain of small, international luxury hotels.
“You see,” Gabriella had cooed in his ear, slipping her hand under his elbow and leaning close enough for the sunlit scent of her pale gold hair to cloud his senses, “it’s not just Charles Logan’s grandson they’ve come to meet. You’re a celebrity in your own right, Max.”
She looked exquisite in a sleeveless flame-pink dress made all the more dramatic by its simple, fitted lines. The eye of every man in the place was drawn to her, and his had been no exception. “I’m surprised people don’t resent a foreigner snapping up their real estate,” he’d said, tearing his gaze away and concentrating instead on the bubbles rising in his glass of champagne.
“You’re creating work for people, bringing tourism here in greater numbers, helping to rebuild our economy. What possible reason could anyone have to resent such a man?”
He’d been flattered, no doubt about it. What man wouldn’t have been, with a roomful of Budapest’s social elite smiling benignly at him and a stunningly beautiful woman hanging on his every word?
He should have been satisfied with that. Instead, he’d gone along with it when she’d monopolized him on the dance floor because hey, he was passing through town only, so what harm was there in letting her snuggle just a bit too close? Not until it was too late to change things had he seen that in being her passive conspirator, he’d contributed to the evening ending in a disaster that kept on going from bad to worse.
“Didn’t we, Max?”
Glad to escape memories guaranteed to unleash nothing but shame and resentment, he stared at the too thin woman facing him; the woman who, despite the fact that they lived hundreds of miles apart and hadn’t spent a night under the same roof in eighteen months, was still technically his wife. “Didn’t we what?”
“Like each other, at one time. Very much, in fact.”
“At one time, Gabriella, and they are the operative words,” he said, steeling himself against the look of naked hope on her face. “As far as I’m concerned, everything changed after that party you coerced your parents into hosting.”
“You’re never going to forgive me for what I did that night, are you? Nothing I can say or do will ever convince you that I never intended to trap you into marriage.”
“No. You stooped to the lowest kind of deceit when you let me believe you’d had previous lovers.”
“I never actually said that.”
“You implied it, more than once.”
“You were a sophisticated, worldly North American and I wanted to impress you—be like the kind of women I thought you admired, instead of a dowdy Hungarian virgin who hadn’t the first idea how to please a man.”
“My kind of woman wouldn’t have behaved like a tramp.”
“I was desperate, Max—desperately in love with you. And foolish enough to think that giving myself to you might make you love me back.” She bit her lip and fiddled with the thin gold chain on her wrist; the same gold chain she’d worn when she’d come sneaking through the darkened halls and let herself into his room while everyone else slept, himself included. “Your time in Budapest was coming to an end. You were making plans to return to Canada, and I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing you again.”
“So you made sure you wouldn’t have to by adding lies on top of lies.”
She flushed but her gaze, locked with his, didn’t waver. “No. When I told you I was pregnant, I believed it to be true.”
“How convenient that the ink had barely dried on the marriage certificate before you discovered otherwise.”
She gave a long drawn-out sigh. “Oh, Max, what’s the point of rehashing the past like this? You don’t need to spell it out for me again. I already know how you feel.”
“You can’t begin to know how I feel,” he practically snarled, self-disgust sweeping over him afresh at the memory of how the night of the party had ended. Bad enough that he’d been duped into making love to a novice without the final humiliation of opening his door to hustle her back to her own room and coming face-to-face with her father.
“I thought I heard a noise and came to investigate,” Zoltan had said, his voice trembling with suppressed anger at the sight of his guest standing there in a pair of briefs, and his daughter wearing a transparent negligee that showed off every detail of her anatomy. They couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d been caught stark naked! “I had no idea…this…is what I’d find.”
Over the years, Max had made his share of mistakes, but none had filled him with the shame flooding over him that night. For the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.
“You could have told my father what really happened,” Gabriella said now. “You didn’t have to leave him with the impression that you’d lured me to your bed.”
“Do you really think that would have made him feel any better, when the damage had been done already? His beloved child had been deflowered by a man he’d welcomed into his home and treated like a son. He thought the sun rose and set on you. Still does. What was to be gained by letting him know you’d come to my room uninvited? Why the devil would I have wanted to add to his misery by telling him that?”
“If it makes any difference at all, Max, he knew I was as much to blame as you, and he forgave both of us long ago.”
“But I haven’t forgiven myself. And I sure as hell haven’t forgiven you.”
She sank down on the bench at the foot of the bed, and he saw that the slump to her shoulders was not, as he’d first assumed, that she was dejected so much as utterly exhausted. “Then why did you agree to our pretending we’re happily married?”
“Because I owe it to him. He’s eighty-one years old, his health is failing, and I refuse to send him to his grave a day earlier than necessary by letting him in on the true state of our relationship.”
“He might be old, but he’s not blind. If you’re going to curl your lip in contempt every time you look at me, and recoil from any sort of physical contact, he’ll figure out for himself within twenty-four hours of getting here that we’re a long way from living in wedded bliss. And my mother won’t take a tenth that long to arrive at the same conclusion.”
“What are you suggesting, my dear?” he inquired scornfully. “That in order to continue bamboozling them, we practice married intimacy by holding an undress rehearsal tonight?”
Color rode up her neck, a pale apricot tint so delicious it almost made his mouth water. “We don’t have to go quite that far, but would it be such a bad idea to practice being civil to one another?”
“Depends on your definition of ‘civil.’”
“I won’t initiate sex when you’re not looking, if that’s what’s worrying you, Max. Subjecting myself to your outright rejection no longer holds any appeal for me.”
“I’d be more inclined to take that assurance seriously if we were occupying separate beds.”
He waited for the reproaches to follow, a variation on her old theme of You don’t even try to understand how I feel, followed by a crying spell. Instead, she stood up and faced him, her spine poker-straight and her expression uncharacteristically flat. “I won’t dignify that remark by trying to refute it. Believe whatever you like, do whatever you like. For myself, I haven’t eaten since early this morning, so I’m going downstairs to fix myself a light supper.”
“You look as if you haven’t eaten in a month or more, if you ask me,” he shot back, irked by her snooty attitude. He wasn’t used to being blown off like that, nor was he about to put up with it. “And if how you look now is what being stylishly thin’s all about, give me good, old-fashioned chubby any day of the week.”
“I can’t imagine why you’d care how I look, Max, and I’m certainly not fool enough to think your remark stems from concerns about my health.” She brushed a surprisingly badly manicured hand over her outfit, a cotton blouse and skirt which whispered alluringly over silky underthings. “What you apparently aren’t able to accept is that what you prefer in a woman is immaterial. I’d like it better if we could be cordial with each other because it’s a lot less wearing than being disagreeable. But you need to accept the fact that I’m long past the stage where your approval is of the slightest consequence to me.”
If she’d slapped him, he couldn’t have been more stunned. The Gabriella he used to know would have turned cartwheels through downtown Vancouver during the afternoon rush hour, if she’d thought it would please him. “But you still need me, Gabriella,” he reminded her. “Why else are you here?”
“Only for the next two weeks. After that, I’ll be as happy to leave you to wallow in your own misery as you’ll be to see me go.”
Well, hell! Baffled, he shook his head as she stalked out of the room. This new, underfed edition of the woman he’d married didn’t believe in mincing her words—or give a flying fig about anything he might say or do as long as he didn’t blow her cover during her parents’ visit.
On the surface at least, a lot more than just her dress size had changed since she’d entered the world of international fashion. Unless it was just another act put on solely for his benefit, his wife appeared to have developed a little backbone since she’d flounced out of his life within six months of forcing her way into it!
She was shaking inside, her composure on the verge of collapse. Perhaps it was the cruel irony of the setting: the big marriage bed, so invitingly close they could have tumbled onto the mattress together in a matter of seconds if the mood had taken them, juxtaposed beside her finely tuned awareness of his unabashed animosity. Or perhaps it was as simple as his having shown up unexpectedly and taken her by surprise. In any event, she had to get away from him before she burst into tears of pure frustration.
Given that he’d acted as if she was the last person he wanted to spend time with, she didn’t expect him to follow her downstairs, but he showed up in the kitchen about five minutes later to announce, “I’ve taken your luggage up to the bedroom.”
“I could have managed it on my own, but thank you anyway,” she said, laying out the French bread, cold barbecued chicken, olives, heart of palm salad, and mango salsa she’d purchased at the gourmet deli down the street.
He ambled over to inspect the food. “That chicken looks pretty good.”
“Are you hinting you’d like some?” She pulled a chef’s knife and fork from the wooden cutlery block next to the countertop cook surface and slid the chicken from its foil-lined bag to a cutting board.
“If you’re offering, yes. Thanks.” He helped himself to an olive and cast an appraising eye over the changes she’d made in the kitchen. “You’ve been busy. This place almost looks lived in.”
Choosing her words carefully because, although she itched to ask him who owned the apron and hand lotion, she wasn’t about to give him another opportunity to tell her to mind her own business, she said, “It had a somewhat unused look, I thought.”
“Because I’d stored all the china and stuff you left behind, you mean? Not everyone appreciates fine things, Gabriella, and knowing how you value yours and would eventually want to reclaim them, it seemed best not to leave them where they might get damaged.”
She managed an offhand shrug. “But you were always very careful with them…unless, of course, you’re referring to…other people?”
“What you’re really asking is if I ever let another woman loose in here.” He removed two of the wineglasses she’d arranged in the upper cabinet, then strolled behind her to the refrigerator. She heard him rummaging among its contents, and the clink of a bottle tapping the edge of a shelf before he swung the door closed. “Well, as it happens, I did. For about a month, beginning the week after you left.”