Irresistible Greeks Collection. Кэрол Мортимер
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changed. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You can’t deny. It’s impossible for you—just as it is for me, Marisa—to deny the effect we have on each other. Don’t you think I curse the fact that I had to deceive you the way I did? I wish to God you’d never had anything to do with my damn brother-in-law in the first place. I wish I’d met you in any other circumstances. Because the effect you have on me would have been the same.’
He paused, his expression changing yet again. The molten, liquid lambency was back in his eyes, and his body language was charged with a voltage she would have to be blind, insensible not to recognise … to respond to.
‘I might have lied to you about why I inveigled an acquaintance with you, lied about what purpose I had—but nothing else was a lie.’ His eyes were resting on her, pouring into her. ‘I never lied to you with my body … ‘
Breath rasped in her lungs, and her nails dug into the wood of the table’s edge.
‘Go!’ she got out. ‘I just want you to go.’ She couldn’t cope with this—she just couldn’t. Ever since she’d seen him get out of his car she had been mentally shaking. But this—what he was saying … proposing …
‘Marisa—listen to me.’
His voice sounded urgent. She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear him being here, saying such things to her—asking such things of her.
She took another shuddering breath, not letting him speak as she cut across him. ‘No! There’s nothing on this earth that would ever make me even consider even for a single second what you are saying to me! How could you even think I would? Just how stupid do you think I am? After what you’ve done to me—said to me.’
He shook his head. Hell, this was all going wrong—totally wrong. He had to claw back somehow—anyhow. He had driven here with the devil on his tail, furious that Ian had dared to seek her out again, consumed with anger at his brother-in-law, consumed even more by an emotion he knew he had to name—could no longer deny.
Jealousy. Raw, open jealousy. Of Ian.
He’s not having her. Never again! She’s mine—and I want her back.
That was the stark, strident message he’d had to face up to as the miles had been eaten up by his foot on the accelerator. He had to get to her so that Ian couldn’t try and persuade her back to him.
So that he could persuade her back to him.
So that she wouldn’t haunt his dreams any more, or torment his memory, so that she could finally be to him what he wanted her to be—not the woman he’d had to sever from his brother-in-law but the woman he wanted for himself.
‘Do you think I wanted to do what I did?’ he demanded. ‘But it’s done now—finished. Over.’
Her eyes iced. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Finished. Over. And I don’t mean Ian—I mean you. So, like I said, go—just go.’
‘You don’t mean that.’ His voice was flat, disbelieving. ‘If you’re waiting for me to apologise for doing what I did the way I did it, then I can’t. You had no business getting involved with my brother-in-law, and nothing can change that.’ Again his voice changed. ‘But having now seen where you come from, seen the kind of background you have, I can understand the temptation to inveigle yourself into his life. Gain from him the affluence and comfort you certainly don’t have here.’
He looked around disparagingly at the cramped, shabby kitchen.
‘I can make allowances,’ he said. ‘Understand why you found Ian so tempting.’ His gaze swept back to her. ‘You don’t have to live like this, Marisa. Let me take you away from it all. We were good together. We can have it again—honestly, this time, with no more secrets.’
His eyes were blazing, rich and lambent, his voice deep, accented, sending vibrations through her.
‘I want you to go.’ Her voice was controlled. Very controlled over an emotion so strong that it might burst from her like an eruption. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want anything more to do with you. And for your information, I don’t want you to “take me away from it all”. This happens to be my home. It may be poor, but it is mine, and it is where I live, and where I will go on living now.’ She took a ragged breath. ‘It’s where I belong,’ she finished.
Because this was where she belonged. She knew that now. Not in Ian’s softly luxurious, pampering cocoon, kept secret from the world. And not—a jagged knife-thrust went through—dear God, not helplessly captive in Athan Teodarkis’s cruel web of lies and deceit that had killed anything that she might once have felt for him.
Stony-faced, insistent, she stood her ground. ‘So I want you to go,’ she said again
Before she cracked, broke down, gave in—gave in to the desperate longing in her to throw herself into his arms, to pretend that nothing had come between them, to pretend that he’d never deliberately set out to seduce her and then denounce her the way he had. To pretend that what she’d thought was true was—he had never set her up, deceived her, lied to her …
But he had, and nothing could undo that
He wasn’t saying anything. He was just standing there, tall and dark and so heart-stoppingly handsome that she could feel the power of it radiating like a force field. His face was a mask.
She’d seen it like that before when he’d confronted her on their return from St Cecile. When he’d closed himself to her, shut and locked the door, thrown away the key.
‘I see,’ he said. His voice was terse. Clipped. ‘Well, you’ve made yourself very clear. So, yes, I’ll go.’
Yet for a moment—a moment that seemed to hang in the air like a weight—he remained motionless. She stood frozen, behind the table that divided her from him—behind everything that divided her from him and always would.
Always.
Then, ‘I wish you well, Marisa. It would be … ungenerous of me to do less,’ he said. His voice had no emotion, no depth. Nothing. Nothing at all.
His face still blank, still closed, he turned and walked out of the room.
She couldn’t move. Could only wait while she heard his footsteps in the narrow corridor to the front door, and then the creaking door open and close behind him. For a few moments longer she waited. Only the crackling of the logs in the range was audible. Then another sound penetrated. A car engine gunning. Louder, then fading.
Fading completely.
He had gone.
Marisa went on standing there, quite motionless. Her eyes started to blink. Slowly, and then faster, tears began to run down her cheeks.
Along the narrow lane Athan drove—dangerously, recklessly fast. He had to. Had to gain as much distance from her as possible. He had arrived here a bare hour ago, driven by a demon he could not shake off his back. By the fear that she had succumbed to Ian Randall’s forbidden blandishments, his begging to resume their affair. A demon had bitten him with the venom of savage jealousy.
Now a different demon drove him. Worse, much worse, than the first.
He wanted her—and she would not come to him.
I’ve lost her.
The words fell into his head like stones. Stones he could not shift. Stones that sat there crushing his thoughts, his emotions, everything.
All around him, pressing on the glass of the car windows, was darkness.
Darkness outside him.
Inside him.
He drove on into the winter’s night.