‘I bet you don’t even remember that night…’
‘I remember it very well,’ Lucy admitted, lifting her chin. ‘What’s this all about, Jax? I’m getting confused—’
His eyes narrowed, his mouth flattening. ‘I drove over to the bar and before I could get out of my car, I saw you walking down the alleyway in your red dress—’
‘It wasn’t me you saw,’ Lucy sliced in thinly. When Jax had failed to turn up to see her the night before Lucy had stayed in her attic room after doing her shift, frantically hoping that Jax would magically appear with an explanation. Like a child waiting for Santa Claus she had refused to believe he wouldn’t show up eventually and she had been terrified of somehow missing him. She had had that much faith in him, that much trust…
‘It was you. You were with a man—’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Lucy told him confidently.
‘I followed you because I assumed you were heading for the entrance that led up to your room but you weren’t,’ Jax informed her stonily. ‘You stayed outside to have sex with the man you were with against the wall.’
Her lashes fluttered up on disbelieving bright blue eyes and she stared back at him. ‘You think that I had sex with some guy in the alley?’ she demanded with a revulsion she couldn’t hide. ‘Are you kidding me?’
Lean, strong face shuttered and forbidding, Jax stood his ground because naturally he hadn’t expected her to own up to her behaviour. ‘You know I’m not kidding and what I saw that night is why you never heard from me again. There was no point in showing you that file when you were already with another man,’ he proclaimed harshly. ‘I don’t need to apologise or make excuses for not approaching you again.’
‘I agree,’ Lucy said with wooden diction, shattered inside herself but holding it all together out of pride. ‘If I had been with another man that soon, you owed me nothing. Clearly, it suited you very well to assume that night that the girl in the alley was me—’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Jax shot at her suspiciously.
‘Well, you’d seen that file and learned that your precious father did not approve of me. It was really incredibly convenient for you that in spite of everything you knew about me you decided to accept that file and assume that I was the sort of young woman who would have sex in an alley.’
Lucy could feel her cheekbones ache with the strain of keeping her face composed but there was a much deeper ache of pain inside her chest. She knew he didn’t love her. She knew he had never loved her. That wounding knowledge had chipped away at her upbeat outlook on their marriage and she had fought it off, telling herself to settle sensibly for what she could get. But for the first time ever, Lucy decided that Jax was bad for her.
Never mind the Antonakos fame, the money and the gorgeous looks. Two years back, she had told Jax that she loved him and she had, but he had given nothing back, not the words nor any other form of commitment. He had held back from her, he had always held back from her and now she finally knew why. But she deserved better. She deserved a man who would, at the very least, refuse to believe that she would have sex in public with some chance-met stranger. And Jax hadn’t had that faith in her and probably never would have. A horrible sense of emptiness spread inside her. Her loving him wasn’t enough.
‘It was you. I recognised the dress,’ Jax bit out, exasperated by the stretching silence and the strange way she was staring at him.
‘Yes…you may have done but it wasn’t me wearing the dress,’ Lucy countered tightly. ‘I loaned it to Tara that night because she had a hot date and I imagine she was fooling around in the alley because she could hardly bring a man back to the room we shared when I was there. Not everyone has a private room or a yacht available for these things…’
Jax froze. ‘It couldn’t have been her! Why would she have been wearing the dress I bought you?’
Lucy sent him a weary glance of exasperation. ‘Because we shared our clothes. We didn’t have much but what we had, we shared. Half the clothes you saw me wear that summer belonged to Tara.’
‘It couldn’t have been her,’ Jax repeated again doggedly, struggling to remember her friend before dimly recalling the much more worldly blonde whom Lucy had worked and lived with.
Lucy shrugged a shoulder in a jerky movement. ‘Well, it doesn’t much matter after this length of time, does it?’ she traded.
‘It matters to me. And it must matter to you,’ Jax told her with assurance.
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Lucy responded heavily.
Jax hovered and clenched his teeth hard. He wanted it dealt with and then never mentioned again. But could it have been Tara in that stupid dress? It had been dark and Tara had had long blonde hair too. Between the street lights and the shadows, it was possible that he had been mistaken. And if he had been mistaken, it would be the very first time in Jax’s life that he would ever be grateful to have made a mistake. Didn’t she appreciate that? Didn’t she understand what believing she would behave that way had done to him? Refusing to look at him, Lucy was staring at the tiled floor instead as if she were expecting it to start showing a movie and frustration racked Jax’s tall powerful frame. Women! She had gone into a weird mood now and he would probably get nothing more out of her.
‘I have a meeting. I was planning to reschedule it and take us back to Tifnos—’
‘No, go to your meeting,’ Lucy urged, her throat convulsing, and she still wouldn’t let herself look at him because she didn’t want what she felt in her heart to show.
‘We can fly back in the morning,’ Jax commented. ‘The timing would probably suit Bella better than a late flight.’
Lucy listened to the door close on his exit and continued to sit there with tears rolling silently down her cheeks. Jax had just shown her how he really thought of her and how he saw her and it was…it was ugly, uglier than she could bear or forgive or comprehend. To think that all those weeks on the island he had believed that she had been unfaithful to him and yet he hadn’t said a word, hadn’t even given her the chance to explain or defend herself. It was so cruel, so unfair but you couldn’t change a man, couldn’t alter what went on inside his head.
Jax didn’t trust her, had never trusted even a word she’d said. He had been her one and only lover and he couldn’t even believe that. She had been too young and immature at nineteen to recognise how cynical and distrustful Jax was. She had realised that he was pretty jealous and possessive but her awareness had gone no deeper than that. She thought of him seeing Tara in that grubby alley and believing it was her and a stifled sob of pain and regret and humiliation was wrenched from her. That hurt so much and it seemed with Jax at that moment that he did nothing but hurt and disillusion her. She didn’t want to stay married to a man like that, she couldn’t stay married to a man who thought so little of her…
And when the wave of conflicting emotions began to tear at Lucy more than she could stand she dug out her phone and rang her sister, Polly, desperately needing a shoulder to cry on.
Polly was a terrific listener. Lucy let the whole sorry story of her relationship with Jax and Kreon spill out and, very satisfyingly, Polly was even more appalled by the alleyway accusation than Lucy had been.
‘Come and stay with us, Lucy,’ Polly suggested warmly. ‘You need a holiday. I know you felt that you were happy with him at first but Jax doesn’t seem to appreciate you the way a husband should. It’s possible that he resents you for what your father did.’
To Lucy in that instant the prospect of walking away into a different environment shone like a bright welcoming light. ‘I don’t even know where you live, Polly,’ she pointed out unevenly.
‘In a country called Dharia. It’s one of the Gulf States,’ Polly explained.
Lucy was flummoxed by that news. ‘I don’t know how I’d get there or even how I’d get away from here.’
‘Don’t you worry about that,’ Polly told her assertively. ‘I will arrange everything. If you leave tonight, we’ll be ha
ving breakfast together in the morning and I can get hold of Ellie and she could be here by this weekend. We really do want to meet you and your daughter, Lucy.’