For Pleasure...Or Marriage?

‘Markos, I don’t know what this is about, but there is no point you being here. Go home. Just go.’

Her voice sounded tired, very tired.

‘I’ll go—’ he bit out each word ‘—when I have the truth from you—and not until then. Tell me his name. The name of the man who got you pregnant. Then I’ll go.’

She looked at him, the man she had loved so devotedly, so besottedly. But whom she could not love any more.

‘That you even have to ask is…is…’ She stopped, defeated.

‘But it must be someone! I have to know. I have to know who you went to—who you left me for. I have to know!’

There was a snarl in his voice and it made her flinch.

‘This is absurd,’ she said. ‘Quite absurd. Insane.’

Then, as if a light had switched on inside her head, she understood. It was something inside him so primitive, so instinctive, that he could not see it in the rational light in which she—so agonisingly—could see it. For him, the logic was plain. He could get engaged to another woman, he could regard the woman who had shared his life for over half a year as nothing but a mistress to whom he owed nothing, not even honesty about his intention to marry, but she, the mistress kept in deliberate ignorance of her protector’s intention of making another woman his wife, was expected to keep her favours for him alone, never stray to another man. She was expected to be faithful; for him the term did not exist. How should it? A mistress had no business knowing anything about a fiancée or a wife. He would expect—demand—that she keep to her appointed role as his mistress, reserving herself exclusively for his pleasure until such time as he chose to dispense with her services. And if she did not, he was entitled to feel betrayed by her, the woman he had honoured by choosing her for his bed.

Sickness filled her. Sickness and bile. But she knew it for the truth, for all that.

‘Just tell me. For God’s sake—tell me who it is!’ His voice cut through her bitter reverie. ‘If you are trying to protect him, then I give you my word—’he spoke through gritted teeth, in an extremity of emotion ‘—that I will not go after him.’ He paused, chest heaving. ‘I just have to know. You owe me that, at least.’

Vanessa’s eyes rested on him dispassionately. Pitilessly.

‘I don’t owe you anything, Markos.’ Her word fell like stones. ‘Not a thing.’

‘Not even the truth?’ he snarled.

She felt her chin lift again. ‘As much truth as you owed me. It’s a two-way street, whatever you think to the contrary.’

His brows snapped together again, face darkening.

‘What the hell do you mean? What two-way street?’

She took a heavy breath, laying her hand flat on the surface of the table.

‘I’m not having this. I’m not dealing with your—your medieval attitudes.’ Her lungs rasped. ‘You may have thought of me as your mistress—well, I can’t do anything about that. I can’t change you, and I don’t even want to. You think what you like, Markos. But I don’t have to believe what you believe—and do you know? I don’t. You can think of me as your mistress, but I never did and I never will. So I don’t care if there are things you’ll tell your mistress about and things you don’t consider are any part of her business, because, after all, she’s just your mistress. Just a convenient bed-warmer, someone to make you look good, someone to drape over your arm, a bejewelled, fashion-plate accessory! Just a rich man’s toy. Not someone to tell anything important to! Oh, no, not that.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ There was incomprehension in his voice, and it might have made her laugh if she’d been in the mood for laughing. But she wasn’t.

Her lips tightened.

‘I’m talking about what was important to you, Markos! The little fact about you getting married!’

It was his turn for shock to immobilise him. She watched it happen, saw how the impact heightened his cheekbones, toughened the line of his jaw.

‘What?’ The word shot from him in total stupefaction. Then, as she watched, his eyes narrowed. ‘Who told you that?’ There was intense wariness in his voice; she could hear it.

For a moment she was silent. She did not want to remember that horrible episode in his apartment that last hideous day, when everything had come crashing down about her as if in an earthquake. But why should she shield him from what she had been put through so insultingly, so callously?

‘It was your mother-in-law to be,’ she said.

She saw the shockwave jolt through him. ‘What?’

‘She wanted…’ Vanessa’s voice was steady, yet there was a hollowness in her tone that made it hard to speak. ‘She wanted to expedite the preparation for your forthcoming nuptials. She felt my continued presence in your life was…superfluous.’

Anger clenched through Markos’s face.

‘When the hell did Constantia Dimistris get hold of you?’ It was not just a question, it was a demand.