The Prisoner(32)

It seems that Ned is at the end of his tether too. He reacts quickly and violently to the thumping.

“Shut up!” he screams from below.

But I don’t stop. His anger drives me on, I feed off it, so that when my arms are tired and my fists bruised, I use my body, throwing myself against the wall repeatedly, using each of my shoulders in turn. I don’t stop until, exhausted, I collapse onto the mattress—and then, when I feel I’ve waited long enough to lull him into a false sense of security, I devise a new torture, and begin a slow, evenly spaced thump against the wall with the heel of each foot in turn—thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. It feels so good.

When the man comes with my tray, I’m still thump-thumping my heels against the wall, and Ned, hoarse from shouting, is weeping uncontrollably. I don’t stop as he crosses the room and places my tray on the floor, and when he leaves, without the slightest indication that he has witnessed anything out of the ordinary, I retaliate with a drumroll of fury, acknowledging that the thumping hadn’t only been for Ned. During all those hours, I’d been expecting one of the men to burst into the room and make me stop the incessant noise. But no one had come; either they were in a different part of the house where the noise didn’t affect them, or they were happy to let me continue enraging Ned.

I bring my feet down from the wall, hating my invisibility, hating again my inability to provoke a reaction in them, in him. My heels are throbbing, I imagine them red and blistered, like when I walk too long in heels. An image pushes its way into my mind, red high-heeled shoes, scrabbling uselessly on a wooden floor. I rush to blank it out, but it stays, and a solitary tear glides down my cheek.





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


PAST

Ned called me; the press was waiting for us at the gates. It was five days since we’d arrived back from Vegas and I still hadn’t been able to leave the house.

Ned always had an excuse as to why I couldn’t. I never saw him during the day, only in the evening for dinner. I didn’t mind making it, I’d always enjoyed cooking and it gave me something to do.

Ned was waiting in the hall below and as I walked down the marble staircase, he ran a critical eye over me. I was wearing a pink sleeveless dress and my hair hung loose around my shoulders. He nodded approvingly, took an engagement ring from his pocket.

“Here,” he said, taking my hand and sliding it on my finger, next to the gold wedding band that I only usually wore when I went down to dinner. I hadn’t at first, I couldn’t bear to see it on my finger. But when Ned saw me without it the first evening, he’d made me go back and fetch it.

I shuddered internally at his touch, automatically thinking of Justine. She would know by now that I had married Ned and would see it as a terrible betrayal. If only I could see her, see Carolyn, explain to them what had happened. I’d hoped that Carolyn might call me back on Ned’s phone but so far, there hadn’t been anything and I was scared that she couldn’t bring herself to speak to me.

There had been so many times when I’d wanted to ask Ned about Justine, ask him if her interview with Ophélie Tessier had gone well. But an inner voice—the same inner voice that told me to be very, very careful, that I didn’t know the true nature of the man I’d allowed myself to be caught up with—warned me not to.

“It’s not real, is it?” I asked, staring at the biggest diamond I’d ever seen, and Ned laughed.

I pulled my hand away quickly and we moved to the front door. Ned turned his back to me and tapped the code into the panel. I tried to lean around him to see the numbers, but he sensed my movement and bent over the keypad, blocking my vision. The door clicked open, and a clamor of voices reached me. Ned took my hand and instinctively, I tried to pull it away.

“We need to keep up appearances,” he reminded me, holding it firmly.

Hunter appeared. I hadn’t seen him since the day he’d picked me and Ned up at the airport, and I could feel his eyes on my back as he followed us down the large gravel driveway. As we approached the gates, they swung open and I saw twenty or so reporters waiting, with cameras and microphones. They surged forward and Hunter stepped quickly in front of us, spreading his arms, motioning at them to keep back.

The questions started.

“Mr. Hawthorpe, can you tell us about your new wife?”

“Apart from the fact that she’s perfect?” he said. “As you can see for yourselves,” he added, turning to me with a smile.

“Amelie, you worked for Mr. Hawthorpe?”

“I still do,” I replied. “Nothing has changed.”

“Were you surprised when he proposed?”

I blinked in the flash of lights from the cameras, suddenly overwhelmed.

“Yes, she was,” Ned said smoothly.

“It seems to have been a whirlwind romance. You only met four months ago, is that right, Amelie?”

“We met nearly a year ago, at a party,” Ned said, stepping in again. “And I knew straightaway that there was something special about Amelie. I couldn’t believe my luck when she started working at Exclusives. It seemed like destiny.”

“Can you tell us about your trip to Vegas? Did you intend to ask her to marry you or was it a spur-of-the moment decision?”

Ned shook his head. “I planned it weeks ago. But I didn’t want Amelie to guess what I was up to, so I pretended I had to go on a sudden business trip and told her I needed her to come with me to sit in on the meetings. Even when I didn’t take her along to any meetings she still didn’t guess. There were no meetings, of course, I used the time to choose the rings, get the marriage license, find witnesses, and sort out all the other things.”