Were there any men like him?
‘Being proved right seems to make you happy, though some might call it a lucky break. You might have pulled your little stunt and then discovered I was actually a kind and warm-hearted person. Actually I feel quite flattered that I made such an impression on you six years ago.’
She laughed, a hard, scornful sound, and put her bare feet on the floor. ‘I remember you the same way people remember a bad dose of food poisoning.’ Her hair fell forward in a rippling wave that caught and held his fascinated gaze as she checked out under the couch, adding accusingly, ‘Where are my shoes? I want to go home.’
‘And it’s that simple?’
Mari struggled to hide the flash of fear that sent a chill through her body. ‘You can’t stop me!’ She caught her full lower lip between her teeth and looked up at him through her lashes, hating the quiver of uncertainty in her voice.
‘I think you owe me some sort of explanation at least, don’t you?’
‘I owe you nothing!’ she flared back.
‘Do you seriously think you can pull a stunt like that and walk away? Think about it,’ he suggested, walking across to the window, where a butterfly was helplessly battering its fragile wings against the glass. He opened it, nudging the insect towards freedom with his finger before he turned back to Mari, whose eyes had followed every move he made. ‘Did someone put you up to this?’
The abrupt question made her blink. There was something hypnotic about the way he moved. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, I get it, you’re one of those people who see a conspiracy around every corner.’ She flashed an understanding smile. ‘I believe they call it paranoia.’
‘You expect me to believe that after six...six years you decided to get your own back just because I spoilt your dirty weekend with your married lover?’ He grimaced remembering Adrian, now the ex-husband of the local doctor. ‘I can only hope that time and experience has improved your taste.’
She loosed a laugh, her chest swelling with indignation. Experience... One day she might meet a man who was willing to go at her pace, but that looked about as likely as winning the lottery at the moment.
‘Just!’ she yelled. ‘It’ll be your fault if I never...’ Appalled by what she had almost blurted out, she closed her eyes. Maybe a better form of revenge would have been sticking him with some bills for the therapy she so obviously badly needed.
I’m so screwed up, she thought grimly, that the only man I have even imagined myself in bed with in recent memory is him!
He arched a black brow. ‘Never...?’
She shook back her hair, struggling to force the words past the emotional lump in her throat. ‘Nothing. You started this, you acted like judge, jury and executioner when you took it on yourself to humiliate me in front of—’
‘Of a handful of people who didn’t know you, not several hundred who do know me. If this was a tit for tat it was overkill. You may not have liked what I said, but it was the truth.’
‘Your truth!’ she flared, her eyes flashing. Nothing had changed—he was still the same judgemental creep.
‘It’s really hard to play the truth-and-justice card, angel face, when you just stood up in front of everyone back there and lied your beautiful head off.’ His glance dropped to her flat stomach. ‘Are you actually pregnant?’
‘How dare you?’
‘Dare...?’ he echoed, loosing an incredulous laugh. ‘You just stood up and told several hundred people that I’m the father of your unborn child...so yes, pardon me for being crass, but I do bloody dare!
‘You do realise, I suppose, that a DNA test will prove definitively that I am not the father? If you suggest otherwise I have a team of very expensive lawyers who will sue you to hell and back and issue so many writs that no tabloid will print a word of the story, and I don’t respond well to blackmail.’
‘And I don’t respond well to threats,’ she countered contemptuously. ‘And I’m not pregnant! And if I was,’ she added on a horrified afterthought, ‘you would be the last man in the world I would want as the father!’
The insult appeared to pass over his head. ‘There is no baby?’ One less complication to be dealt with.
She responded without thinking. ‘I don’t want children.’
His impressive shoulders moved in the slightest suggestion of a shrug. ‘No maternal feelings?’
Mari knew very little about maternal feelings, but she did know there were a lot of children out there who needed homes, and few like her own foster parents who were willing to offer one. She had decided a long time ago that if she was ever in a position to offer a child a home, it would be one of those abandoned children.
‘You can’t help yourself, can you? You just love to judge.’
‘It wasn’t a judgement.’ At least she was honest, he mused, his expression hardening as he thought of Elise’s parting shot—You think you know everything, but I had no intention of having a baby and ruining my figure!
The combative silence stretched as blue eyes clashed with dark brown; it was approaching snapping point when there was a tap on the door.
Mari turned her head as the door swung inwards and the girl that Mark loved appeared. The photo on his phone had shown how pretty she was, but it hadn’t captured her sheer vitality or the suggestion of mischief in her big brown eyes.
‘Tea, two sugars, good for shock, and a sandwich, the best I could do.’
Seb resisted the temptation to mention he was the one who’d had the shock as he took the tray and balanced it on a deep slate windowsill.
‘Hi.’ She waved a hand in Mari’s direction. ‘How’s Mark these days?’
The unexpected question felt like a raw wound being jabbed with a knife.
‘About as well as you’d expect.’ A sound half between a sob and a laugh escaped Mari’s pale lips as she shivered from a chill that came from within before elaborating with a bitterness born of despair, ‘For someone who’s driven into a lamp post and been told he might never walk again.’
It was as though it happened in slow motion. The girl’s pretty, vivid little face crumpled, but before the tears that filled her big brown eyes could fall she was in the shelter of her brother’s protective arms and out of the room. Before he left he turned his head and the look he gave Mari was one that promised retribution and maybe, she thought, biting her own quivering lip, she might deserve it.
The heavy door was only partially closed. Mari could hear the sound of voices, but not what they were saying.
Tears threatened, lying in a heavy clogging lump in her throat as she looked around the room. The stark white walls were bare but for a couple of wall sconces holding half-burned candles. Other than the couch she sat on and a massive dark wood cupboard, the only other piece of furniture in the place was a spindle-backed chair.
She stiffened as the door
