Mistress by Agreement

‘He hit you?’ he said grimly, his guts writhing.

She nodded. ‘Where it didn’t show, mostly. He was clever like that. After the divorce an aunt of his contacted me—she was the only one of his family to do so—and she told me he had always been violent and cruel from a small boy, but that his parents had made excuses for him. He was unbalanced, she said, and took after his father’s father who had ended his days in a psychiatric hospital.’

She was shaking, she couldn’t help it, the shock of hearing herself talking to someone about Miles making her nauseous.

‘What made you leave him in the end? I presume it was you who walked out?’ he said carefully, aware from her white face and trembling body she was near the limit of her endurance.

‘I found him in bed with someone else and when he hit me I hit back,’ she whispered. ‘It sent him crazy.’ She could almost feel the clothes being torn off her back. ‘He tried to—’ She couldn’t say it but he understood anyway. ‘Our neighbour broke the door down and pulled him off me.’ She shook her head blindly.

His arms came around her and he drew her against him but she couldn’t relax against him, the shame and humiliation of that moment making her stiff and unyielding. If Robert hadn’t helped her Miles would have raped her that night for sure, because she had been all but naked and helpless by then.

But Robert had proved himself to be a true friend. He hadn’t spoken of what had occurred to anyone except her solicitor when she’d asked him to give a statement, and when Miles’s parents had whisked him home and the rumours had started no one had known anything for sure. It had been the only thing that had enabled her to go on. To be able to hold her head up.

‘Where is he now?’ The words were full of a dark, vibrating energy. No one could have doubted why he was asking.

‘He crashed his sports car, killing himself and the girl he was with some time ago,’ she said shakily. ‘The aunt wrote and told me.’

‘Pity,’ he growled. ‘He got off lightly.’

‘Maybe,’ she said thickly, wondering why she didn’t feel better for telling him. Wasn’t that what all the books said, that you felt better when everything was out in the open?

‘So he was the reason you decided to step out of the human race and become autonomous,’ Kingsley said gently. ‘I can understand that, truly, but don’t let him still beat you down. This is different, we’re different. You do see that, don’t you?’

She moved out of his arms, away from him. Miles had used those very same words on the day he has asked her to be his wife. ‘We’re different to the rest of them, Lee,’ he’d said, his handsome face smiling and his brown eyes dark and compelling. ‘We’re two halves of one whole and life is going to be perfect from now on. I promise you.’

Her hands were clenched together now, tension radiating from her. ‘He talked like that,’ she said almost to herself.

‘Like what?’

She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me,’ he said quietly, struggling for calmness. ‘I don’t like being compared to him, Rosie.’

‘I didn’t mean…’ Her voice trailed away. Perhaps she did mean it. There were so many similarities between Miles and Kingsley, not just the good looks and wealth but their iron wills. She had never imagined in her worst nightmares that Miles was so twisted and cruel under his outward veneer; how could she be sure about Kingsley?

‘I’m me, Rosie, not that creep you married.’ He stated the obvious. ‘And I love you.’

‘When you told me about Maria you said love was just a pleasant concept, that it doesn’t work in the real world,’ she said flatly. ‘Sooner or later doubt and mistrust happen, that’s what you said.’

One half of him wanted to shake her for being this way, the other wanted to make all the hurt go away. His frustration and resentment at the way she was putting him in the same category as her former husband showed in his voice when he said, ‘I was talking out of the back of my head, and men are allowed to change their minds occasionally—it isn’t just a woman’s prerogative. I want to be with you, Rosie. Always.’

‘And if you change your mind again, what then?’ she said tensely, her chin rising as she stared him straight in the face. Miles had said that she had trapped him, ruined his life. That she was nothing, a parasite, unloving and unlovable. She had fought back against allowing his mental abuse to penetrate her perception of herself for the last ten years; she wouldn’t survive a second time. ‘What if you’re not cut out for togetherness? Would you think I’d trapped you; blame me for being around? Would you say you were tripping over me all the time, that you couldn’t breathe—?’

‘Did he do that?’ Kingsley interrupted softly. ‘Did he say all those things?’

She jerked her head back, self-protection written all over her. ‘It doesn’t matter; what matters is that I don’t want any of this. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I was honest with you from the very beginning.’

‘Yes, you were,’ he agreed slowly. ‘So, where do we go from here?’

She stared at him. She had never felt so wretched in all her life. ‘There…there’s nowhere to go.’

‘I don’t accept that,’ he said impassively.

Her eyes widened. She had expected him to storm out and call it a day. ‘Kingsley, I meant all I’ve said.’

‘You think you mean it.’ He was careful not to touch her; it would only complicate things further if he gave in to his desire to take her in his arms and kiss her until she agreed black was white. This was deeper than that. ‘But I don’t believe you do.’

He closed his eyes and settled back on the sofa again, stretching his long legs as he made himself comfortable.