‘You’re lying,’ Georgia accused him wildly. ‘You’ve taken him somewhere—a kennels or somewhere—and you’ve left him there...just because he’s...he’s a bit...independent and—Have you any idea what it does to an animal to be abandoned like that?’ she asked him in a choked voice. ‘Have you any idea of how your godmother will feel? Have you given any thought to the feelings of—? But you don’t care, do you? You don’t care about anyone else’s feelings. All you care about is your precious shoes,’ she denounced him scathingly.
‘For heaven’s sake, will you just listen?’ Piers said sharply. ‘I have not taken Ben to a kennels. Nor have I abandoned him. I...’
‘Then where is he?’ Georgia demanded, her face flushing with emotion and her eyes brilliant with a mixture of tears and passion as she deliberately held his gaze, daring him to lie to her.
‘I...I wish to God I knew,’ Piers groaned, with such feeling that Georgia shivered, a cold finger of dread icing down her spine.
‘What...what happened?’ she asked him shakily. ‘If he slipped his lead and ran off, refusing to come back, it’s just a game he likes to play. If you’d waited... Tell me where it happened; I’ll go out and look for him...’
‘No, it...isn’t as simple as that,’ Piers told her, catching hold of her arm as she made to hurry past him to the back door, her mind already mentally visualising the familiar river walk she took Ben on every day and the potential spots where he liked to break free of her to investigate rabbit scents.
‘Ben was in my car,’ Piers told her heavily, ‘and the car has been stolen.’
‘What?’ Georgia stared at him. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him furiously, her face burning with a mixture of anger and scorn. Did he really think she was so stupid as to fall for something like that?
‘You were taking Ben for a walk. You never said anything about driving him anywhere in your car,’ she added suspiciously. ‘You...’
‘I decided to call round and see the estate agent,’ Piers told her wearily.
‘No! I don’t believe you,’ Georgia repeated stubbornly. ‘You’re lying.’
Her heart, she had discovered, was beginning to beat frighteningly fast as she tried to grapple with the implications of what Piers was telling her. It wasn’t true, of course; he was simply lying to her to cover himself for what he had really done. After all, he had threatened often enough to have Ben re-homed, but now that he had taken active steps to do so he was refusing to admit it, covering his cruel behaviour with a cowardly lie.
Her face burning with anger and indignation, she told him fiercely, shakily, ‘I think you’ve now insulted me in just about every way there is. Professionally and...and sexually...and now mentally by...by making up a story that no one could possibly believe. You’ve been determined to get rid of Ben right from the start. I realise now that it wouldn’t have made any difference how obedient I’d taught him to be, would it?’ she said, biting down hard on her bottom lip to control the tears threatening to fill her eyes.
She continued painfully, ‘You wanted me to fail. You wanted Ben to fail so that you could have an excuse for getting rid of him. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me now to discover that you deliberately encouraged him to chew your shoes—your handmade leather shoes,’ she emphasised angrily. ‘But you’re simply not man enough to tell your godmother outright that you intended to get rid of her dog, are you? So you had to do it in an underhanded way, using poor Ben’s naughtiness...blaming him...blaming me...’
Georgia could feel her mouth trembling wildly as her emotions threatened to betray her completely. It wasn’t just Ben she was defending...fighting for...it was herself too. Her own integrity, her own emotions...her own love... Love!
Shock stabbed through her, stopping her breath, her face going white with the pain of it as right at the heart of her anger she discovered the reason why Piers’s duplicity and cowardliness hurt so much.
She couldn’t love him. It just wasn’t possible. She hated him, despised him. She...
Now she was crying—dry, desperate tears that shook her body and tore at Piers’s heart.
Despite everything she had said, all the accusations she had thrown at him, all the passionate loyalty she had shown to Ben—or perhaps because of it—he couldn’t sustain the righteous anger he knew he should feel. All he wanted to do, all he ached to do, was to take her in his arms and comfort her, to reassure her that he would search the length and breadth of the country—of the world if need be—to find Ben and prove to her just how wrong she was.