Chapter Five #2
‘I’m not hiding anything.’ Except, she was.
That was why she had taken the job in London: because work was a place to hide.
At work, there were no kudos earned by sharing personal information.
On the contrary, staff were encouraged to keep their private life private.
Which meant it was easy to deflect questions about herself.
And work was work. There was no shortage of emails and documents and meetings and court appearances to occupy the space that would otherwise be filled with picking at those scabs.
She’d tried to leave them alone. For five months she’d held the truth close, smothering it against her body, lying to her sisters, ignoring Robert’s calls. And when that hadn’t worked, she had fled from it.
But how could she flee from herself?
Something of what she was thinking must be showing on her face, because Ares was shaking his head.
‘You know, people have often said to me that lawyers lie as easily as they breathe. I never believed that. Until I met you. How do you live with yourself? Have you just gotten so good at lying to people that you don’t know when you’re doing it?
’ he said, and she didn’t know whether it was the partial truth of his accusation or the contempt in his voice that shook her more.
The air thumped out of her lungs, and she stared past his shoulder at the line of the horizon which appeared to be shaking. Or maybe that was her.
But Ares Konstantinou didn’t get to judge her life. And this wasn’t some moral crusade. He was just lashing out because she had the temerity not to jump when he clicked his fingers.
‘Oh, I think of the two of us, you’re the expert on lying to other people. I mean, you’re the man who left his bride standing at the altar in front of hundreds of people,’ she said hoarsely.
His grey gaze didn’t flicker, but a different muscle worked in his lean jaw, and she felt a shiver of apprehension as he took a step towards her.
‘You are such a hypocrite.’ His beautiful face was a blank-eyed, bronze mask. ‘If you’re done talking about my fiancée, then perhaps we could talk about yours? Is he the father? Were you having unprotected sex with him too? If so, how can you be sure it’s not mine?’
For a moment she was so focused on the cool contempt in his eyes that she didn’t take in his words. And then she was shocked to stillness and silence. Even her heart seemed to stop beating.
Because his accusation made no sense. She had no fiancé. She had an ex-boyfriend. But most women had one of those, and she had ended things with him eight months ago. Since then, she hadn’t dated anyone. Hadn’t so much as touched a man.
Aside from Ares.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He took a step closer and leaned forward, his dark, powerful gaze, a sweep of steel blocking out the light, swamping her world, holding her captive, and every single cell in her body tightened so sharply that she almost lost her footing.
But it wasn’t pain, it was just her body reacting to his proximity.
She took a breath and dug her feet into the floor to stop herself from turning and running. ‘I know you think your word is law, but you seem to have got your wires crossed,’ she said icily, except beneath the ice her fury was churning like lava. ‘Because I don’t have a fiancé.’
‘Then, why are you wearing an engagement ring on a chain around your neck?’
Her fingers moved automatically to the outline of the ring.
How did he know about that? She had taken it off that night out by the pool, hiding it in her purse.
Of course, she could have told him that it was her mother’s engagement ring, but at that point she didn’t even know his name.
And by the time she did, talking would have changed the atmosphere, slowed things down, and she had been scared that if there was time to talk, there would be time to think, and he might change his mind.
Or she would.
His eyes were fixed on her face. ‘Or are you going to lie about that too?’ he said softly, and she felt the steel and warning of his words slice through her like a blade.
‘It’s not what you think.’
‘Then, why did you take it off before we got together? Why did you hide it in your purse?’
She could feel the heavy thud of her heartbeat. Her hands were suddenly shaking.
‘Did you go through my things?’
He hadn’t. Even before he spoke, she could feel his shock.
‘What kind of man do you think I am?’
The kind that left a woman looking like a fool in front of all her family and friends and the world’s media. The kind that snuck off in the middle of the night because sharing a bed until morning smacked of a commitment that repelled him.
‘You basically blackmailed me into working for you and into coming out here to Greece, and you’ve spent the last half an hour trying to bully me into taking a pregnancy test because your former housekeeper’s dog sat too close to me.
So you’ll forgive me for thinking you might have looked in my purse. ’
‘I didn’t. I was thirsty in the night. I got up to get a drink and I knocked your bag off the chair. It must have opened when it fell.’
She could picture him moving in the darkness of the room, negotiating the unfamiliar layout, then colliding with the chair. She could hear the soft thud of her bag and then his fingers curling around the diamond ring.
Was that why he’d left? But she knew without asking that it was. That his pride had been pricked.
Screw his pride, she thought savagely.
It was the only thing she had of her mother’s. A slim gold band connecting her to the woman who had brought her into this world and then left her with nothing but unanswered questions and a life based on lies.
She let out a small, brittle laugh.
His eyes narrowed. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Nothing.’ She sobered up abruptly. Because it wasn’t funny. But she had felt perilously close to tears, and it was either laugh or cry, and she’d stopped crying when she realised that it couldn’t change any of the things she wanted to change. ‘I don’t have a fiancé.’
She glanced over his shoulder to the rippling blue sea. Hamilton blue.
‘It was my mom’s ring. She died when I was very young.
My dad gave me the ring when I was eighteen.
’ That was mostly true. Aside from the fact that Robert wasn’t her dad, but she wasn’t about to reveal that crushing, admittedly major detail to Ares, a man who already thought so little of her.
How was that wound ever going to heal if she kept scraping away at the scabs?
‘When I first started working, I had a few…encounters with male colleagues which were uncomfortable, and one of the other women at work told me that she had the same problem at her old business. She’d started wearing an engagement ring, and it stopped.’
‘What kind of encounters?’ Ares’s voice was neutral, but the muscles in his shoulders seemed to have expanded outwards.
She shrugged. ‘The usual kind. Inappropriate comments. Getting too close. Once I was kneeling down to unplug a printer and one of the other juniors made this crack about how he’d like to see me like that outside of work.’
‘Did you talk to HR? Your manager? And what did they say?’ he said, and she nodded twice.
‘They had a word. But it happens so often, you can’t always go running to the grown-ups.’
‘Because then you become the problem.’ Something dark moved in his gaze.
‘Yes.’ That was how it felt. How it was. But a lot of men simply didn’t understand that. They thought that, because there were checks and balances in place, sexually suggestive and inappropriate language and behaviour was no longer a problem.
His face was still and unreadable, but when he spoke his voice had softened. ‘I’m sorry about your mother. Losing her so young must have been hard.’
It was just the first of many losses—and the easiest as it turned out.
‘I don’t remember her. I have a stepmother, Amber. She married my father when I was ten.’
‘And you have sisters.’
‘Yes. Three. Triplets.’ Her words reminded her of Robert’s fridge-magnet poems, and she felt a flicker of homesickness.
‘I’m also sorry that you had to deal with those kinds of men.’
He was, she realised, but it was more than that.
He was angry. She could hear it in his voice.
But for the first time, he wasn’t angry with her but for her.
And it made her own anger collapse like a sandcastle, and she felt it unfurl inside of her, that same feeling of being safe, of having someone by her side that she’d felt lying in his arms in her hotel room.
Obviously, it wasn’t real. She’d felt like that at the Clarendon because she hadn’t been intimate with anyone for months, and sex was a game of smoke and mirrors when it came to intimacy.
As for the here and now, she was feeling hounded, literally by something a dog had done. Which for some unaccountable reason, this man was accepting as evidence that she was pregnant. But now, he had backed off, taken her side. She was relieved, grateful.
And clearly suffering from some form of Stockholm syndrome.
Stifling her relief and gratitude, she met his gaze. ‘It’s nothing I couldn’t handle, but I didn’t want to have to handle it. To handle them. So I started wearing my mother’s ring. And it worked. When I wore the ring, men spoke to me like a peer instead of trying to be flirty or showing off.’
Ares was staring at her intently, listening too as if her words mattered. ‘So why did you stop wearing it?’
Because it was a lie. Another lie. And she’d had enough lies by then. But she’d also been unsettled by how easy she’d found it to mislead people. Was that how her mother had started? With white lies? Had those white lies made it easier for her to slip into the deceit of an affair?
‘I didn’t need it anymore. I was older and more confident.’ That was true. ‘I stopped wearing it just before Larry interviewed me.’