“You think this marriage looks too good to be true? Pah!” She moved across the step, intending to brush past him.
He shifted to block her path.
Ilona pulled up short and straightened her spine, trying to look down her nose at him, but she wasn’t quite tall enough for it to have an effect. Plus, her heart was racing at this confrontation and her head was about to explode. It was taking all her effort to maintain control of herself and not start to cry. True disdain was beyond her.
“If I were pregnant, I wouldn’t have agreed to a celibate marriage,” she pointed out. “Even a sucker who snaps up Odessa’s lies like they’re shares in Callas Cosmetics could figure out he wasn’t the father if I never had sex with him.”
“But you kissed me like you wanted to have sex on the table of the restaurant,” he reminded her in a mockingly helpful tone.
Humiliation stabbed into the spot beneath her throat. She knew she was going red with guilt and shame, but she’d been attacked by sarcasm and false accusations enough that she kept her temper. Barely. Her voice shook when she spoke.
“It sounds as though you also bought the one where I’m a whore who gets her kicks by breaking up marriages. I genuinely don’t care what you think of me, Leander, but let me assure you, there is nothing that could induce me to raise a child in a household where one parent resents them. Would you excuse me, please?”
She returned to the inside of the step and this time he let her pass. She reached the bottom and hurried her way across the foyer to the lounge where Ursula stood outside the windows, pacing in the shade of a tree as she spoke on her phone.
Leander came up behind her, but she refused to look back to see what was on his face. She held her arms crossed, but ensured her tense shoulders remained down and back, not hunched and defensive the way she wanted to pull them.
“Dumping me now will do nothing to hurt Midas,” she pointed out, barely turning her head. “He’ll dance a jig over my public disgrace, but that is the only effect it will have. Do whatever appeases that sickness inside you, though. I knew I couldn’t count on you.” She had contingency plans in place. Her agent hadn’t found her a property yet, but she was looking.
“I didn’t say I was dumping you.” He arrived beside her at the window, hands shoved into his pockets. “I said I expect honesty.”
She choked on a laugh of disbelief. “You don’t believe a word I say! What does it matter if I tell you the truth or not?”
“You switched sides without remorse. It follows that you have ulterior motives.”
“I told you what they were—to sever ties with them. I hate them more than you do.”
“I doubt that.”
“Of course, you do. Again, what’s the point in telling you the truth if you presume I’m lying?” The backs of her eyes were hot and a scalded line sat behind her breastbone. It was the familiar ache of her feelings being dismissed and ignored. Disbelieved.
She sensed him looking at her, sensed his frustration that she would throw his words back in his face like that. Did he expect her to grovel and beg him to believe her? Been there, done that, had the emotional scars to prove it.
After a long minute, he grimly acknowledged, “This is war. They were bound to try to divide us.”
Another choke of disparaging laughter escaped her. “I hate to dent your ego, Leander, but this isn’t about you. I mean, Midas is always thrilled when Odessa makes my life difficult, but she’s not doing it for him.”
“Why then?”
There was an agonizing wrench in her chest. “It doesn’t matter,” she decided wearily.
“It sounds like it does matter. If you want me to trust you and believe what you say, tell me the truth, Ilona.”
Persecution had her glaring her astonishment at him, wondering why he insisted on turning the knife within her.
“I am telling you the truth,” she said on a burst of bitter outrage. “I was a child who was given no choice in where I went after my mother died. My father took me into his home, but I never had a place there. I wanted to be with him because he was all I had, but he was a tremendous sexist. He expected great things from his sons and very little from me because I was a girl. My education wasn’t as important as my looking pretty and he thought he was indulging me when he invested in my company. He doted on me when it suited him and Odessa hated me for it. From the time I was five, she told me I was stupid and ugly, an abomination, a mistake, a burden and an embarrassment. Later, when I grew curves, I was a harlot and a source of shame. Like my mother.” She flicked out a hand, batting away the countless other insults that had been hurled over the years.
“Now that my father is gone, and she has this excuse, Odessa isn’t holding back,” she continued. “She will do everything in her power to make me regret my own existence. She’s more than capable of it. I have often wished I had never been born, but that doesn’t matter because I don’t matter, as she has made clear a thousand times.”
“Ilona.” Leander’s breath hissed in and his hand came out.
She tucked her elbow into her side, going stiff with rejection.
“Think what you want of me, Leander. I don’t care.” That was mostly true. She didn’t want to care what he thought of her. “Just tell me whether I should cancel our engagement party this weekend. I could use the time more productively elsewhere.”
He was staring hard enough to scorch the side of her face, but she only watched Ursula happily chattering away out there, oblivious to the war going on in here.
In a sudden move, Leander knocked on the window to catch Ursula’s attention.
“The party is on,” he said darkly. “We’ll marry here and find something else that suits us better as a home.”