“He offered an impossible to resist dowry. Half of his company upon marriage to you and a will stating the other half would go to our children upon his death.”
She shook her head, denying her father’s culpability and Sandor’s as well. To accept that they could treat her like a piece of barter hurt too much to deal with. She was nothing to either of them. She never had been.
“Yes. However, even half of your father’s shipping business is not enough to entice me to marry a woman who would sleep with another man when the sheets had not even cooled from sleeping with me. A woman who was supposed to be considering my proposal of marriage.”
As she forced the words to penetrate her mind, they began to take horrible shape and two facts became clear. The first was that Sandor thought she’d had sex with another man while she’d been away from him. The second was that she would never have known about the business deal he had with her dad if Sandor had not become convinced of the first fact.
“You believe simply because I went out of country sans my security detail for a few days that it naturally follows I was having sex with someone else?” she asked, finding that as difficult to accept as the knowledge that she’d been played like a pawn between the two men in her life she loved.
She was used to indifference from her father, not this all out brutality toward her feelings. And from Sandor she had expected so much more. What a fool.
“I do not make such sweeping judgments on that flimsy a pretext.”
“Are you saying someone told you I was cheating on you?”
“In a way.”
“Explain,” she demanded, the cold inside her growing until she felt like she was filled with ice that would shatter with the next blow.
He dropped a manila folder on the coffee table.
She picked it up, refusing to hesitate or fear what she would find inside. She pulled out several sheets of paper. The top one listed a prominent worldwide detective agency. It looked like a fax cover sheet. Underneath it was a copy of a sleazy tabloid article. A woman was standing at a roulette table with a man. The woman could have been Ellie’s sister, she looked so much like her.
She was thinner, though, by at least ten pounds. Her eyebrows were waxed to a popular thinness, whereas Ellie left hers untouched because they were tapered naturally. The other woman dressed in the latest sexy fashions and held herself with the confidence of a cover model, or an actress.
Ellie always looked so stiff in photos like this. It was as if she had a sixth sense the press was zeroing in on her and would tense up just before any shot. She really disliked having her photo taken. The fax was black-and-white, so Ellie couldn’t tell what color of eyes the woman had or if her companion’s hair was black or brown.
She flipped to the next page and one of her questions was answered. The man’s hair was brown. The full color sheet photo was of the same woman and man, this time kissing on the beach. The woman wore a bikini and hip sarong. She was so thin, her bottom rib was outlined. She didn’t look sick like some Hollywood starlets, but she was definitely ultrathin.
As Ellie flipped through the pictures, she realized the woman’s eyes were the same color as hers. She looked even more like Ellie than a sister would. Except for the weight thing and a few other cosmetic differences, the woman could have been Ellie’s double.
The last picture was of the two people in bed together. She felt like a voyeur looking at it, but she could not tear her eyes away because it spoke so deeply to her. As Ellie recognized the same vulnerable look on the woman’s face as she herself wore after making love to Sandor, she knew this womanwas her sister. She did not know how it was possible. She tried to tell herself the doppelganger was just that…some stranger who shared enough genetic makeup from a distant past that they looked like twins though were probably not even considered really related.
But her instincts screamed it was more. She knew somewhere deep in her soul, somewhere so primitive she could not deny it…that this woman was her twin.
Her father had told her that her mother had died after giving birth to her. He’d never said anything about another baby being born. But it had to be. And her father had lied to her. How she and her twin had gotten separated, she didn’t know. And she didn’t care.
All she knew was that out there was a human being who would have loved her because sisters loved each other. A woman she would have loved and been there for, too.
She turned to Sandor. “Get out.”
“That is all you have to say to me?”
“No.”