A Whirlwind Marriage by Helen Brooks

whisper against me and mine, and I’ll make sure you suffer the torments of the damned.’
    ‘Zeke—Zeke, I didn’t mean it.’
    ‘Yes, you did, and we both know it. You would have wrecked my marriage on a pack of lies without a grain of truth in them. I don’t want to hear that you’re back in town for a very long time, Liliana, and just be thankful I’mholding my hand and you can still work in Paris and Milan and New York.’
    The waiter chose that moment to arrive with their cocktails, and he placed each one in front of them hurriedly, his antennae picking up that this was not a good time.
    Liliana watched him depart and then she picked up the fluted glass of deep, almost black liquid and drained it, replacing it on the table with a flourish that wasn’t lost on the rest of them before she rose gracefully to her feet.
    She might be a lying, venomous little snake, without a moral to her name, Marianne thought, but one thing was undeniable. Liliana had class.
    ‘Goodbye.’ The opaque eyes swept over each one of them as Claude shuffled to his feet beside his sister. ‘I will be sure to be in Paris by the end of the week. Will that suffice?’ Liliana asked Zeke, her voice cool and even but her cheeks flushed with high, angry colour.
    He nodded dismissively and then turned to Josh and Marianne. ‘Another cocktail?’ he enquired pleasantly. ‘And I think we’ll have a bottle of Bollinger with our meal…to celebrate.’
    There was a moment’s silence as Liliana continued to stand there, unable to believe she had been dismissed in such a cursory fashion, and then she swept out of the restaurant with a muttered oath, Claude trailing behind her.
    ‘Whew.’ Josh leant back in his seat on a long sigh. ‘You sure know how to keep an evening buzzing, Zeke.’
    ‘Are you all right?’ Zeke ignored Josh, reaching across to touch Marianne’s arm.
    She was trying hard to conceal her emotions—she wasn’t even sure what half of them were. Relief, overwhelming, blinding relief was there, along with stunned amazement, incredulity, confusion, wonder, shock, and a certain puzzling panic that at the moment was vague andindeterminate. ‘Yes, I’m all right,’ she said slowly, ‘although it’s hard to imagine someone that can be so devious.’
    ‘Devious, manipulative, selfish, downright evil…’ Zeke included Josh in the turn of his head. ‘You’re right, Josh. Not one of my best decisions.’
    ‘I’m…I’m sorry, Zeke.’ Marianne raised her head and looked directly into the smoky grey eyes as she spoke. ‘I should have known you weren’t having an affair with her.’
    But how should she have known? she asked herself in the next instant, barely aware of Zeke murmuring some soothing reply before Josh engaged him in conversation. Their whirlwind courtship and swift marriage had meant she’d barely been familiar with even the basics of what made Zeke tick when she’d married him. Those few golden weeks had been a haze of romantic dinners and thrilling excursions into London for shows and parties. They had talked of a big house in the country and of filling it with children and cats and dogs, of holidays abroad, the wedding, their honeymoon. But when had they talked about themselves , bared their souls and got to know each other? They hadn’t.
    She sat sipping at her frothy pink cocktail, more disturbed than she had ever been.
    And when they had come home from their honeymoon—a time spent almost exclusively in bed as the sensuous hunger of their love had obliterated everything else—Zeke had picked up his old life again almost as though he didn’t have a wife, and she had found herself imprisoned in a beautiful, cold, empty shell of a home.
    The babies hadn’t happened and so the house hadn’t happened; he hadn’t made time for something that wasn’t necessary just because she kept asking for it, needing it. When she had talked of finding a job he had been gentlydismissive at first—‘You don’t