social elite smiling benignly at him and a stunningly beautiful woman hanging on his every word?
He should have been satisfied with that. Instead, he’d gone along with it when she’d monopolized him on the dance floor because hey, he was passing through town only, so what harm was there in letting her snuggle just a bit too close? Not until it was too late to change things had he seen that in being her passive conspirator, he’d contributed to the evening ending in a disaster that kept on going from bad to worse.
“Didn’t we, Max?”
Glad to escape memories guaranteed to unleash nothing but shame and resentment, he stared at the too thin woman facing him; the woman who, despite the fact that they lived hundreds of miles apart and hadn’t spent a night under the same roof in eighteen months, was still technically his wife. “Didn’t we what?”
“Like each other, at one time. Very much, in fact.”
“At one time, Gabriella, and they are the operative words,” he said, steeling himself against the look of naked hope on her face. “As far as I’m concerned, everything changed after that party you coerced your parents into hosting.”
“You’re never going to forgive me for what I did that night, are you? Nothing I can say or do will ever convince you that I never intended to trap you into marriage.”
“No. You stooped to the lowest kind of deceit when you let me believe you’d had previous lovers.”
“I never actually said that.”
“You implied it, more than once.”
“You were a sophisticated, worldly North American and I wanted to impress you—be like the kind of women I thought you admired, instead of a dowdy Hungarian virgin who hadn’t the first idea how to please a man.”
“My kind of woman wouldn’t have behaved like a tramp.”
“I was desperate, Max—desperately in love with you. And foolish enough to think that giving myself to you might make you love me back.” She bit her lip and fiddled with the thin gold chain on her wrist; the same gold chain she’d worn when she’d come sneaking through the darkened halls and let herself into his room while everyone else slept, himself included. “Your time in Budapest was coming to an end. You were making plans to return to Canada, and I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing you again.”
“So you made sure you wouldn’t have to by adding lies on top of lies.”
She flushed but her gaze, locked with his, didn’t waver. “No. When I told you I was pregnant, I believed it to be true.”
“How convenient that the ink had barely dried on the marriage certificate before you discovered otherwise.”
She gave a long drawn-out sigh. “Oh, Max, what’s the point of rehashing the past like this? You don’t need to spell it out for me again. I already know how you feel.”
“You can’t begin to know how I feel,” he practically snarled, self-disgust sweeping over him afresh at the memory of how the night of the party had ended. Bad enough that he’d been duped into making love to a novice without the final humiliation of opening his door to hustle her back to her own room and coming face-to-face with her father.
“I thought I heard a noise and came to investigate,” Zoltan had said, his voice trembling with suppressed anger at the sight of his guest standing there in a pair of briefs, and his daughter wearing a transparent negligee that showed off every detail of her anatomy. They couldn’t have looked more guilty if they’d been caught stark naked! “I had no idea…this…is what I’d find.”
Over the years, Max had made his share of mistakes, but none had filled him with the shame flooding over him that night. For the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to look another man in the eye.
“You could have told my father what really happened,” Gabriella said now. “You didn’t have to leave him with the impression that you’d lured me to your bed.”
“Do you really think that would have made him feel any better, when the damage had been done already? His beloved child had been deflowered by a man he’d welcomed into his home and treated like a son. He thought the sun rose and set on you. Still does. What was to be gained by letting him know you’d come to my room uninvited? Why the devil would I have wanted to add to his misery by telling him that?”
“If it makes any difference at all, Max, he knew I was as much to blame as you, and he forgave both of us long ago.”
“But I haven’t forgiven myself. And I sure as hell haven’t forgiven you.”
She sank down on the bench at the foot of the bed, and he saw that the slump to her shoulders was not, as he’d first assumed, that she was dejected so much as utterly exhausted. “Then why did you agree to our pretending we’re happily married?”
“Because I owe it to him. He’s eighty-one years old, his health is failing, and I refuse to send him to his grave a day earlier than necessary by letting him in on the true state of our relationship.”
“He might be old, but he’s not blind. If you’re going to curl your lip in contempt every time you look at me, and recoil from any sort of physical contact, he’ll figure out for himself within twenty-four hours of getting here that we’re a long way from living in wedded bliss. And my mother won’t take a tenth that long to arrive at the same conclusion.”
“What are you suggesting, my dear?” he inquired scornfully. “That in order to continue bamboozling them, we practice married intimacy by holding an undress rehearsal tonight?”
Color rode up her neck, a pale apricot tint so delicious it almost made his mouth water. “We don’t have to go quite that far, but would it be such a bad idea to practice being civil to one another?”
“Depends on your definition of ‘civil.’”
“I won’t initiate sex when you’re not looking, if that’s what’s worrying you, Max. Subjecting myself to your outright rejection no longer holds any appeal for me.”
“I’d be more inclined to take that assurance seriously if we were occupying separate beds.”
He waited for the reproaches to follow, a variation on her old theme of You don’t even try to understand how I feel, followed by a crying spell. Instead, she stood up and faced him, her spine poker-straight and her expression uncharacteristically flat. “I won’t dignify that remark by trying to refute it. Believe whatever you like, do whatever you like. For myself, I haven’t eaten since early this morning, so I’m going downstairs to fix myself a light supper.”
“You look as if you haven’t eaten in a month or more, if you ask me,” he shot back, irked by her snooty attitude. He wasn’t used to being blown off like that, nor was he about to put up with it. “And if how you look now is what being stylishly thin’s all about, give me good, old-fashioned chubby any day of the week.”
“I can’t imagine why you’d care how I look, Max, and I’m certainly not fool enough to think your remark stems from concerns about my health.” She brushed a surprisingly badly manicured hand over her outfit, a cotton blouse and skirt which whispered alluringly over silky underthings. “What you apparently aren’t able to accept is that what you prefer in a woman is immaterial. I’d
