At last, Ritchie reluctantly detached his mouth with a long sigh. She felt him watching her, looking for telltale signs of what his kiss had done to her and somehow kept her face tight, shuttered.
Don't let him guess what's going on inside you, she warned herself. Don't betray Barty. You owe it to him not to weaken.
"We both knew what was happening to us," Ritchie said harshly. "And I knew something was very wrong with your marriage. You weren't happy. You were always so pale, you had a sad look in your eyes. Then I began to notice the bruises, even though you tried to hide them with make-up."
She kept her eyes down, emptied her face of expression, hid her thoughts from him. She mustn't give Barty away, she had betrayed him once, in that courtroom and she mustn't do it again. Barty had lost everything, even his life. All her fault. She had no right to be happy any more.
Ritchie made a rough, angry little sound. "Are you listening to me, Linzi? Do you know how I felt when I realised that husband of yours was knocking you about? I was frantic. You wouldn't talk about it, wouldn't even admit it happened. I didn't know how serious it was, but I was scared you were going to get badly hurt one day. I tried to get you to open up about it, but you were so obstinate..."
"How could I?" she muttered. "Why should I? It has nothing to do with you! You keep saying you can see inside my head, so why can't you see why I refused to let you get involved? Barty was my husband, and ----"
"Don't say you loved him!" he erupted. "I'm sick of hearing you say that. You may have loved him once, but by the time you came to work for me, you had stopped loving him."
The harshness of his voice made her wince. "Stop shouting at me!"
"Then stop lying! From now on all I want to hear from you is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth!"
"There's no such thing! Everything doesn't come in black or white, most things are different shades of grey!"
Their eyes fought and Ritchie's mouth was a hard, white line. "You're trying to confuse the issue, but it won't work, Linzi! You know what I mean! There's no need to lie any more. You can't hurt him any more, if he knows anything then he knows the truth of how you felt, how you feel now. So why lie about it? Can't you see, the punishment is over? We can start again, Linzi. It isn't just me who is out of prison, you are, too. We're both free, the past's behind us, we can forget it."
She couldn't. She was silenced by her sense of right and wrong, by her awareness of the ghost standing between them, by old loyalties, old love. The past was their enemy, a wall between them. Ritchie had created this unpassable gulf by killing her husband. Couldn't he understand that?
"I love Barty," she said obstinately, miserably and saw the angry flare of Ritchie's eyes, a smouldering jealousy which tightened the angles of his face, made him look barbaric.
"When you married him, maybe! He was your first boyfriend, wasn't he? You were Romeo and Juliet, the boy and girl next door, young love incarnate -- oh, I remember everything you said in court, giving evidence."
The reminder startled her. When she was telling the court about her marriage, she realised, Ritchie had been listening too. He had never taken his eyes from her. His voice grim, he said, "It was the first time I'd been able to hear what your life with him had been like, or don't you realise how much of the truth you admitted?"
She was silent. Oh, she realised. But she preferred to forget the ordeal of giving evidence in court, talking about her marriage, allowing strangers to glimpse the hell on earth she had to suffer.
After a moment, Ritchie said quietly. "By the time you met me your marriage had died, hadn't it? You can come up with all the excuses you like but the truth is, he wasn't the man you'd married any more. After his accident he was very ill when he came back he was different. He didn't even love you any more, he almost hated you, that was why he kept beating you up. He resented you because you were still normal, you had good health, you could make love, you could still have babies. He felt he wasn't a real man any more. He couldn't really be your husband, even though he lived under the same roof. He couldn't love you, so he hated you."
Stung to the heart, she cried out angrily, "That isn't true! You didn't know him."
"I think it was you who didn't know him, Linzi," Ritchie said in a grave, low voice. "You persisted in seeing him as the boy you married, when he had become a stranger."
She fell silent, frowning. She had almost burst out with a denial when what he had said sank in and she was struck dumb. It was true. And yet it wasn't. Life was more complicated than that, there was no one answer, no one way of looking at things. Barty had sometimes hated her, resented her, yet at the same time he'd loved her, wanted her to be happy, had felt guilty because he knew he was hurting her, and he had tried to fight it, to stop the drinking and the violent outbursts.
"He was still my husband, and you killed him," she said in a low, husky, regretful voice. "I could never forget that, Ritchie, don't you see? Please go away and don't come back, just leave me alone in future."
He stared down at her fixedly for a moment, and she nervously sensed that he was on the verge of another volcanic explosion, but then his face changed, stiffened into a cold, remote mask. He abruptly got to his feet, ran a hand through his short dark hair, turned on his heels and walked away, across the lawn, towards the gate.
He's going, she thought, dazedly watching him, he's going, and pain burnt along her nerves, made her eyes shimmer with unshed tears.
YOU ARE READING
Guilty Love (Completed)
Roman d'amour"Everything I did was for you!" "For me? You killed my husband for me? Do you really think I wanted him dead? I loved him!" It was an obsessive passion. It had gone too far, and Linzi's husband had died as a result of it. Ritchie Calhoun was sexy an...
