She was the last woman alive likely to lie to conceal a friend’s affair.
Taken aback as she was by Andreas’s instant dismissal of her explanation about the apartment, Hope swallowed hard. She was very pale. ‘Vanessa lives at that address,’ she stressed in her determination to make him listen. ‘I hardly know Ben Campbell and I have not been unfaithful to you. I appreciate how dreadful all this must look to you but surely the two years we’ve been together at least buys me the right to a fair hearing—’
Andreas studied her with raw contempt. ‘It buys you nothing.’
He swung on his heel and strode out of the bedroom.
‘Wait!’ Hope called down the corridor after him.
Slowly and with a reluctance she could feel, Andreas turned his arrogant dark head and looked back at her.
Hope snatched in a jagged breath. Her nerves were so fraught that she had to immediately pull in another deeper breath. The terrifying finality and obduracy she saw stamped in Andreas’s lean, hard face frightened her to the edge of panic. She saw that she truly had no choices left. She saw that keeping quiet about Elyssa’s behaviour was no longer a sustainable stance. It was wrong that she should be afraid to tell the truth, she reflected unhappily. Unfortunately, the truth would be most unwelcome to Andreas. He might well dismiss what she said out of hand and hate her even more for making damaging allegations against his sister. But Hope felt that she should not let that daunting awareness prevent her from speaking out in her own defence. After all, she might never have another opportunity. As that reality sank in on her, as she was finally forced to confront the possibility that she might never see Andreas again, Hope was impelled into sudden speech.
‘Let me give you my version of events last night. It was me who walked into a room and saw your sister in a clinch!’ she admitted with all the abruptness of severe stress.
Outrage firing his brilliant gaze, his lean features clenching taut with disgust, Andreas fell very still. ‘Theos…don’t say another word; stop right there—’
Hope thrust up her chin. ‘I can’t. Elyssa came after me and swore that I would suffer if I told you what I’d seen—’
‘How dare you speak of my sister in such a way?’ Andreas was white with anger below his olive skin.
‘I had no intention of telling anybody what I’d seen…to be honest, I just didn’t want to be involved,’ Hope continued doggedly.
‘You’ve said enough to make me your enemy for life. The Nicolaidis family have honour—each and every one of us and I am proud of that,’ Andreas proclaimed in fierce dismissal. ‘It is deeply offensive that you should soil Elyssa’s reputation in a pointless attempt to rescue your own. Were you a man I would not have stood here and let you talk about my sister like that. Don’t take advantage of the fact that you’re a woman.’
‘You’re the one who’s been taking advantage!’ Hope protested, a floodtide of anger and agony breaking loose inside her because he had immediately dismissed her account of what had happened at the party. ‘You’ve called me a liar and a slut…you’re refusing even to listen to my side of the story.’
‘What’s to listen to? What’s to understand?’ Andreas demanded, striding back down the corridor and cornering her against the wall outside the bedroom. ‘You spread your legs for a pretty blond toy boy!’
‘Of course I didn’t!’ Colour had run like a banner into her cheeks. ‘Don’t be crude—’
‘That’s nothing to what I would like to know.’ Andreas slammed his hands to the hall on either side of her head, effectively holding her entrapped. Smouldering golden eyes as dangerous as dynamite challenged her. ‘Did you do it in our bed?’
‘It didn’t happen!’ she cried. ‘I wouldn’t even look at someone else, never mind—’
‘You forget…I saw you looking at Campbell last night,’ Andreas reminded her darkly.
Hope was trembling with the strength of her emotions. Her spine pushing into the wall, she was forced to tip her face up. ‘But I wasn’t looking in the way you mean—’
‘What does he have that I don’t?’ Andreas demanded with savage force. ‘Is he better in bed?’
‘Andreas…’ Hope gasped, fierce embarrassment and dismay at the tenor of that blunt question making her full lower lip part from the cupid’s bow curve of her upper.
‘Is he more inventive? More exciting? Kinky? What did he do that I didn’t do? Didn’t I satisfy you? Tell me…I have the right to know!’ he launched at her, stunning eyes smouldering ferocious gold with dark sexual jealousy and dropping to the luscious pink swell of her mouth.
‘There’s nothing for you to know!’ she cried in despair.
The tension in the atmosphere was electric. At first Hope did not understand its source. There was a warm, heavy feeling low in her tummy, a buzzing vibration of awareness holding her on a dizzy edge. Holding her indeed on the edge of an anticipation that left her mind frighteningly blank.
‘And right now…it’s me you want,’ Andreas purred with silken satisfaction, lifting lean brown hands to skim a blunt masculine thumb over the distended buds of her nipples, which were clearly delineated by the thin wrap.
Hope gasped in helpless response and arched her back. Her entire body felt hot and super sensitive. Recognising her own sexual excitement shook her inside out. ‘Yes, but—’
‘In fact you’re begging for it,’ Andreas husked, dropping his hands to her hips and mating his passionate mouth to hers with a bold hunger that in its very intensity was overwhelmingly erotic.
Fire snaked sinuous seductive forays through her heated flesh. She melted like honey in sunshine, yielding to the plundering thrust of his tongue and the heady intoxication of her own response. In one powerful movement he lifted her off her feet and carried her into the bedroom. As he brought her down on the bed his mouth was still melded to hers with devouring passion.
Just as swiftly he relinquished his hold on her. Still lost in the fever of her own desire, Hope clung to his shoulders to draw him back to her.
With cool disdain, Andreas detached her arms from him and straightened to his full commanding height. Proud, dark head high, he stared down at her with icy derision. ‘It’s over. The instant you let Campbell touch you, it was over. I expect my mistress to preserve her affections exclusively for me.’
Her face drained of colour, Hope thrust herself up into sitting position. ‘I’m not and I never was your mistress!’
From the doorway, Andreas vented a sardonic laugh that scored her tender skin like a whiplash. ‘Of course you were. What else could you have been to me?’
Hurt far beyond his imagining, Hope blanked him out and stared into space. She could no longer bear to see him. She listened to his steps recede down the corridor, the distant slam of the front door echoing through the apartment. It was over and he was gone and without apparent regret. He could never have cared a button for her, she thought in an agony of mortified pain.
