Summer Sins

‘I can’t …’

And she had said exactly why that was so. Because of the existence of ‘someone very important to me.’

Like a squad of booted soldiers the words marched back inside his head from which that swirling, overpowering tide had swept them. But they were back now, with their heavy, booted tread that trampled on anything and everything in their way.

Logic, reason, sense.

With bleak, controlled acquiescence he let them in.

Lissa Stephens had turned him down. Turned him down because she had commitments elsewhere to someone ‘very important’ to her. And that someone was Armand. And that she had turned

him, Xavier, down tonight meant only one thing—Lissa Stephens’s loyalty was to his brother.

Did she love Armand? Was her commitment to him out of love, or because a rich man was offering her marriage? Offering her an escape from the casino, from that squalid place she lived, from the poverty of her life?

He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.

For all that he had found out about her, for all the time he had spent with her, talked with her, she was still a mystery—a contradiction. A woman possessed of rare beauty, as well as—so his conversation with her this evening had amply demonstrated—clear intelligence. And yet she chose to work where she did. Was prepared to make herself look like a tart night after night, and yet had walked out of her job when she was required to do anything more than look like one. A woman who accepted an invitation to dine with him, a wealthy man—and yet who refused to let him buy her a dress to go with the invitation. A woman who gazed deep into his eyes as if she were prepared to drown herself in them—and yet who said ‘I can’t’ when it came to anything more.

Well, he thought, with a bitter, bleak weariness, it was his turn to say I can’t.

He could do no more. He accepted it. He had done everything in his power to discover the true worth, or lack thereof, of the woman his brother said he wanted to marry.

A hollowing, savage humour stabbed through him. But it had no humour in it—only a bleak, bitter irony that cut to the very quick of him. In the end he had discovered only one thing about her that he knew to be true. And it was a knowledge that mocked him.

Cursed him.

As it would curse any man who shared his fate, a fate he would wish on no man, but which had fallen upon himself.

Because the one, overwhelming truth that he knew about Lissa Stephens was that he desired her. Wanted her.

For himself.

The woman his brother wanted to marry.

Forbidden desire.

A curse from hell itself.

CHAPTER SIX

LISSA sat at the table, very still. The champagne, the wine, all the magic of the evening had drained out of her, emptying out of her like water down a well.

She hadn’t thought it would be like this. So brutal.

But then—she gave a twist to her mouth—she hadn’t thought at all, had she?

She’d sat here, floating on air, entranced by the magic of the evening, and had never thought of how it must end.

Because she hadn’t wanted it to end. She knew that this was all there could be, and she hadn’t wanted it to end, had wanted it to go on for ever and ever.

But it hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t. This had been a time out, that was all, a brief, magical time out. A gift that would at the stroke of midnight dissolve, leaving nothing behind but memories.

She felt her throat tighten. She had known the evening would end, but not like this.

She heard again, felt again, the savage civility of his voice, felt his absolute repudiation of her, dropping her hand as if it were rotting meat.

Did he have to be so brutal?