Painted the Other Woman

But, as if wires had jerked every muscle in her body, she yanked away. Stumbled around the corner of the table, getting it between them. Her eyes were wide and staring.

‘Are you mad?’ Her voice would hardly work and she had to swallow to make any sound come out. ‘Are you mad?’ she said again, louder now. Stronger.

Her mind was reeling. Reeling the way her body was. Her senses were aflame. But now water had been poured on them—an icy, frozen douche that doused them utterly. Emotion was knifing through her—but not the one she had just experienced, the bliss of his kiss. This was the one that had been coursing its way from deep, deep underground. That broke through now in a terrifying roar in her head.

‘You lied to me from beginning to end! You lied to me and manipulated me and played me like a total idiot. How can you possibly think I would just take up with you again? That I would meekly go back to you after what you did to me? I’d have to be certifiable to do that.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘Get out! Get out of here! I’ve done what you wanted me to do—given up Ian. So you’ve got no right—no right at all!—to come here and dare to say what you have.’

If he was reeling from her onslaught he didn’t show it.

‘You’re angry with me—it’s understandable,’ he began. ‘But—’

‘Get out!’ Her hands clenched the edge of the table. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again. I don’t want anything to do with you ever again.’

His expression changed. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You can’t deny. It’s impossible for you—just as it is for me, Marisa—to deny the effect we have on each other. Don’t you think I curse the fact that I had to deceive you the way I did? I wish to God you’d never had anything to do with my damn brother-in-law in the first place. I wish I’d met you in any other circumstances. Because the effect you have on me would have been the same.’

He paused, his expression changing yet again. The molten, liquid lambency was back in his eyes, and his body language was charged with a voltage she would have to be blind, insensible not to recognise … to respond to.

‘I might have lied to you about why I inveigled an acquaintance with you, lied about what purpose I had—but nothing else was a lie.’ His eyes were resting on her, pouring into her. ‘I never lied to you with my body … ‘

Breath rasped in her lungs, and her nails dug into the wood of the table’s edge.

‘Go!’ she got out. ‘I just want you to go.’ She couldn’t cope with this—she just couldn’t. Ever since she’d seen him get out of his car she had been mentally shaking. But this—what he was saying … proposing …

‘Marisa—listen to me.’

His voice sounded urgent. She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear him being here, saying such things to her—asking such things of her.

She took another shuddering breath, not letting him speak as she cut across him. ‘No! There’s nothing on this earth that would ever make me even consider even for a single second what you are saying to me! How could you even think I would? Just how stupid do you think I am? After what you’ve done to me—said to me.’

He shook his head. Hell, this was all going wrong—totally wrong. He had to claw back somehow—anyhow. He had driven here with the devil on his tail, furious that Ian had dared to seek her out again, consumed with anger at his brother-in-law, consumed even more by an emotion he knew he had to name—could no longer deny.

Jealousy. Raw, open jealousy. Of Ian.

He’s not having her. Never again! She’s mine—and I want her back.

That was the stark, strident message he’d had to face up to as the miles had been eaten up by his foot on the accelerator. He had to get to her so that Ian couldn’t try and persuade her back to him.

So that he could persuade her back to him.

So that she wouldn’t haunt his dreams any more, or torment his memory, so that she could finally be to him what he wanted her to be—not the woman he’d had to sever from his brother-in-law but the woman he wanted for himself.

‘Do you think I wanted to do what I did?’ he demanded. ‘But it’s done now—finished. Over.’

Her eyes iced. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Finished. Over. And I don’t mean Ian—I mean you. So, like I said, go—just go.’

‘You don’t mean that.’ His voice was flat, disbelieving. ‘If you’re waiting for me to apologise for doing what I did the way I did it, then I can’t. You had no business getting involved with my brother-in-law, and nothing can change that.’ Again his voice changed. ‘But having now seen where you come from, seen the kind of background you have, I can understand the temptation to inveigle yourself into his life. Gain from him the affluence and comfort you certainly don’t have here.’

He looked around disparagingly at the cramped, shabby kitchen.

‘I can make allowances,’ he said. ‘Understand why you found Ian so tempting.’ His gaze swept back to her. ‘You don’t have to live like this, Marisa. Let me take you away from it all. We were good together. We can have it again—honestly, this time, with no more secrets.’

His eyes were blazing, rich and lambent, his voice deep, accented, sending vibrations through her.

‘I want you to go.’ Her voice was controlled. Very controlled over an emotion so strong that it might burst from her like an eruption. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want anything more to do with you. And for your information, I don’t want you to “take me away from it all”. This happens to be my home. It may be poor, but it is mine, and it is where I live, and where I will go on living now.’ She took a ragged breath. ‘It’s where I belong,’ she finished.

Because this was where she belonged. She knew that now. Not in Ian’s softly luxurious, pampering cocoon, kept secret from the world. And not—a jagged knife-thrust went through—dear God, not helplessly captive in Athan Teodarkis’s cruel web of lies and deceit that had killed anything that she might once have felt for him.

Stony-faced, insistent, she stood her ground. ‘So I want you to go,’ she said again