best way to do that was to not give him a challenge. Wounding his massive pride might have driven him away, had kept him there for a while, but the need to satisfy it had driven him back. She had to learn from her mistakes, if only this once.
“Memories are nice, I’m sure,” she said. “But you’re focusing on inconsequential memories and forgetting relevant ones. Like why you intended to delete me from your memory in the first place.”
Ice suddenly extinguished the embers of sensual fire in his eyes. “I forget nothing. It’s a curse Aal Shalaans suffer from. It’s also why I failed to perform that deletion I intended. The moment I knew you were back here, I admitted that I never would.”
She’d known about Aliyah’s amazing eidetic memory but this was the first time he’d mentioned possessing something similar. But then, what had he ever told her? He’d talked, a lot, but it had all been about passion, both sexual and contentious. Besides that … nothing.
She shrugged. “This infallible memory must also mean you haven’t forgotten the bad parts. And those were ugly enough to douse anything you imagine was so wonderful.”
“You mean the parts where you got close to one of my best friends and conned him into marrying you, only to dispatch him in record time? Though maybe I shouldn’t call ‘almost two years’ record time. As always, I salute your tenacity. You must have wanted to get rid of him sooner.”
“So you assume.”
At the reigniting challenge and enjoyment in his eyes, she almost smacked herself. Focus. Just be a neutral bore and defuse his confrontational circuits.
“So why don’t you fix my assumptions?”
She wanted to tell him to go fix himself.
Instead, she decided to deflate the misapprehension that clearly fueled his perverse interest in her.
She released her breath in a resigned exhalation. “I wasn’t at liberty to disclose the matter when we … last met. I’m still not comfortable talking about it, but I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, at least from you.”
“Is that your oblique way of warning me to keep this a secret? Because I’m known to be such a blabbermouth?”
“You mean you won’t run to the media with my disclosures, or rush to tweet about them?” She tamped down another wave of bitterness, lips twisting with it. “But you’re right. The way you keep secrets, I bet anything I tell you would be even safer than it would with a corpse. But I wasn’t thinking about your ironclad discretion when you showed up two months after Patrick’s death. With the turmoil I was in and the dangers I was facing, not to mention your added aggravation, sharing the truth with you was pretty low on my list of considerations.”
“Are you going to share said truth now? About how he ‘really’ died? If it’s what you told the police, don’t bother.”
“I don’t know how the police work in this region, O Prince of Two Kingdoms, but in New York they don’t care what you ‘tell’ them. They only listen to solid evidence. Especially when someone so rich and young dies of unnatural causes.”
“But they found no evidence of foul play, hence my accusation a couple of years ago.”
“About getting away with murder?” She cocked her head at him, hating the way her heart sputtered as his eyes followed the movement of her hair when he was more or less accusing her of being a murderess. “So you think I’m capable of it?”
“I know you’re capable of driving a man to take his own life.”
“Based on what? My infamous former career as a woman who used my body to make a living? Or as the woman who dared to end things with you?”
She stopped, cursing herself silently, viciously. She was sliding into inciting recriminations again.
“How about as the woman who ‘used her body’ to trap herself a billionaire when I didn’t make the bid you were after?”
It was no use. This man could goad a rock into hurtling itself at him. “You’re saying I was after a proposal? As in marriage? Did it seem to you like I thought fairy-tale movies were based on true stories? Last time I looked, those and rom-coms were the only realms where the prince married the servant’s daughter.”
“When you said you wanted a man who ‘wouldn’t hide you like a dirty secret,’ who’d ‘walk with you in the sun,’ you meant you wanted a proposal. You let me know I was useless to you if I didn’t cough up one only when you had a suitable substitute secured.”
“Suitable substitute secured? I bet you can’t say that five times in a row.” She coughed a furious laugh. “It never crossed my mind that our … liaison would be more than what it was—trivial, sporadic, not to mention base. And that’s why I decided to end it. Sex was no longer enough to put up with the degradation.”
“Degradation?” he hissed. “I went to every effort to make sure our … liaison, as you put it, remained only between us so you wouldn’t be exposed to anything of the sort.”
Bile rose again. “And I knew it couldn’t have been different between us. But that doesn’t mean it was okay or even sane. I was trapped in a vicious circle, wanting to end it then letting you walk back into my life anytime you pleased, to lure me back into that … toxic compulsion. That’s why I ended it. The inequality, the unbridgeable gap, the pointlessness, on every level, was corroding my self-esteem and psychological health.”
“And the only cure for both was a besotted billionaire husband.”
She snorted. “That’s your favorite assumption, isn’t it? You have to find a mercenary, borderline criminal rationalization to explain that a woman would choose to deprive herself of you, don’t you?”
“When I’m left with no explanation, apart from an ambiguous rant, I had to fill in the blanks, before and after the event.”
“And you couldn’t find a rationalization where you were in any way to blame, right?”
“If I were, you should have aired specific grievances and given me the chance to undo them. Instead, you chose to become hysterical before storming out. And you promptly ended any chance for me to approach you with reconciliation efforts. What could I do but adopt the harshest explanations?”
“Wow, your Cambridge English major is sure coming out to play, isn’t it?”
His smile turned lethal. “So you’re telling me that blowup wasn’t a pretext to get me out of the picture while you grabbed the opportunity to land a far more malleable man with almost as much money?”
“Patrick was far more of a man, period, and a human being than you can ever dream of being.” And she was pathetic, because knowing that had never extinguished the hunger that consumed her alive. Not that she’d let it steer her now that she had far more than herself to safeguard, to defend. “And I certainly didn’t marry him for his money and assets. In fact, he married me for them.”
After that first punch, Jalal had managed to anticipate Lujayn for the next two years. Her pattern had changed in the following two, but after some readjustment, he’d still charted it.
Then
