you must have assumed my acting ability rivalled your mother’s!’ Lucy slotted in a little shakily because anger was rising now to cut through the shock of what she was learning. ‘I just don’t know what to say about all this...stuff!’ she selected jaggedly, tossing the file down on the floor in disgust. ‘I thought you knew me—’
‘I thought I knew you too until I read that file,’ Jax admitted curtly. ‘But I had no good reason then to suspect my father of setting me up.’
‘So, you’re telling me then that he was responsible for me losing my job?’
‘I didn’t go into that with him... I was far too angry,’ Jax confessed. ‘But it’s probable that he was responsible for that and for the manner in which you were treated as you were put off the yacht. If I had stayed long enough to get into that kind of detail I probably would have hit him...’
‘Oh...’ Lucy was a long way from forgiving him for having had so little faith in her but she was certainly mollified by that little speech.
‘You were pregnant,’ Jax pointed out, still stuck on that offence with an anger she could see making his lean, darkly handsome features rigid. ‘You could have been seriously hurt. He could have killed his own grandchild...we could have lost Bella!’
Lucy warmed up to him a little more in response to that additional really quite emotional exclamation. Jax had only known her for six weeks in Spain. Six weeks and a handful of dates. They had finally become intimate during the final two weeks of that time frame. Why would he have distrusted his father? The father then riding high on the wave of finally deciding to accept and welcome the younger son he had once ignored?
Lucy felt that she had to be fair to Jax. After all, she had not distrusted Kreon when she first came to Greece, had she? It occurred to her that Jax was probably feeling much as she had felt on their wedding day, angry and hurt and defensive while wondering how someone he cared about and respected could have done such a thing to him.
‘I think the very least you could have done was speak to me about the file and give me the chance to answer those allegations,’ Lucy told him firmly. ‘There is no excuse whatsoever for you failing to tell me about that file two years ago.’
And Jax’s long, lean, powerful physique went rigid, shoulders squaring, legs straightening. ‘Actually there is...’
‘No, there’s not.’ Lucy could understand and forgive a great deal but he could not justify his complete failure to tell her what was going on either in the past or the present. ‘You didn’t even send me a text in Spain to tell me we were finished, for goodness’ sake!’ she exclaimed.
‘I had my reasons,’ Jax breathed in a raw undertone, his eyes gleaming like polished gems.
‘Unacceptable reasons.’ Lucy refused to give way. She often gave in to Jax because he had a very forceful personality but she knew she couldn’t go through life without disagreeing with him occasionally. ‘You owed me an explanation of some kind—’
‘I owed you nothing!’ Jax shot at her with sudden derision. ‘I did come to see you the night after I received that file.’
Her brow had furrowed because she was beginning to feel a little lost in the dialogue, as though she had misinterpreted some crucial sentence. ‘You didn’t come to see me—’
‘And do you know why?’ Jax’s hands knotted into fists because he felt like a volcano about to spew lava and somewhere in the back of his mind lurked a tiny voice asking him if he really wanted to say what he was about to say. But Jax didn’t back down, had never learned how to back down. He only knew how to come out of a corner fighting and how to win. He had had a hell of a day and it wasn’t getting better the way it was supposed to, it was only getting worse and that thought did nothing to cool his temper. He had done nothing wrong with Lucy, he was, in his own opinion, the injured party. He was not a vengeful man but he would not be accused of something he wasn’t responsible for.
‘If I did, I wouldn’t be arguing with you or trying to get you to see my point of view,’ Lucy parried.
‘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
