‘You weren’t complaining five minutes ago,’ he pointed out smoothly.
Below the belt, Sophie thought, but her face burnt when she thought about how her talk had taken a back seat the second he had touched her. He was right. She hadn’t been complaining. In fact, at one point she remembered asking for more.
‘I don’t want more from you, Javier,’ she gritted, reaching for the paper with shaking hands and flicking it open to the piece in the centre section. She tossed it to him and then stood at the opposite end of the table with her arms folded, nails biting into the soft flesh of her forearms. ‘But what I do want is to know that you’re not running around behind my back while we’re an item!’
Javier stared down at the picture in front of him. He remembered the occasion distinctly. Another boring opening, this one at an art gallery. It had been full of just the sort of types he loathed—pretentious, champagne-drinking, caviar-scoffing crowds who had never given a penny to charity in their lives and had all attended top private schools courtesy of their wealthy parents. He could have given them a short lecture on the reality of being poor, but instead he had kept glancing at his watch and wondering what Sophie was doing.
As always, mixing in the jabbering, wealthy intellectual crowd was the usual assortment of beautiful hangers-on dressed in not very much and on the lookout for men with money. He had been a target from the very second he had walked through the door. He had shaken them off like flies, but by the end of the evening he had more or less given up and that was when the photographer had obviously seen fit to take a compromising snap.
In under a second, Javier could understand why Sophie had questions. He couldn’t even remember the woman’s name but he knew that she was a famous model and the way she was looking at him...the way she was holding on to his arm...
She didn’t look like a woman on the verge of being cast aside by an indifferent stranger. Which she had been.
And snapped when, for five seconds, his attention had been caught by something the guy standing next to her had said to him and he was leaning into her, the very image of keen, while the guy to whom he had been speaking had been artfully cropped from the photo.
Not for a second was Javier tempted to launch into any kind of self-justifying speech. Why should he? He looked at her angry, hurt face and he ignored the thing inside him that twisted.
‘Are you asking me to account for my actions when I’m not with you?’
‘I don’t think that’s out of order on my part!’
‘I have never felt the need to justify my behaviour to anyone. Ever.’
‘Maybe you should have! Because when you’re sleeping with someone, you are, actually, travelling down a two-way street whether you like it or not!’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning it’s not all about your world and what you want.’
‘And maybe that will be the case one day, when I decide that I want more than a passing...situation with a woman.’
Sophie recoiled as though she had been physically struck. Suddenly all her anger seeped out of her and she was left feeling empty, hollow and utterly miserable.
Of course he would account for his behaviour one day. When he had met the right woman. In the meantime, he was having fun, and that was all that mattered. He wasn’t tied to her any more than he had been tied to any of the women he had dated in the past, so if someone else came along and he was feeling energetic, then he probably thought, why not?
Facing up to that was like being kicked in the stomach. She literally reeled from the truth but she faced it anyway, just as she had faced the fact that she was still in love with him.
What was the point hiding from the truth? It didn’t change anything. Having to deal with the mess her father had made of the company and the horror of her doomed marriage had taught her that, if nothing else.
‘Did you sleep with that woman?’
‘I’m not going to answer that question, Sophie.’ Javier was incensed that, picture or no picture, she dared question his integrity. Did she think that he was the sort of man who couldn’t control his libido and took sex wherever he found it?
He was also annoyed with himself for the way he had drifted along with this to the point where she felt okay about calling him to account. He’d been lazy. This had never been supposed to end up as anything more than an inconvenient itch that needed scratching. This had only ever been about finishing unfinished business.
‘And maybe,’ he said carefully, ‘it’s time for us to reassess what’s going on here.’
Sophie nodded curtly. The ground had just fallen away from under her feet, but she wasn’t going to plead or beg or hurl herself at him, because they really did need to ‘reassess’, as he put it.
‘Your company is pretty much back on its feet.’ He gave an expansive gesture while she waited in hopeless resignation for the Dear John speech he would soon be delivering.
She was too miserable to think about getting in there first, being the first to initiate the break-up. It didn’t matter anyway. The result was going to be the same.
‘Your brother’s disappeared back across the Atlantic and there’s no need for you to continue taking an active part in the running of the company. The right people are all now in the right places to guide the ship. You can do whatever you want to do now, Sophie. Go back to university...get another job...disappear across the Atlantic to join your brother...’
Sophie’s heart constricted because that was as good as telling her what he thought of her and she could have kicked herself for having been lulled into imagining that there was ever anything more to what they had.
‘Or France.’
‘Come again?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of weeks.’
Javier was at a loss as to what she was talking about. ‘Thinking about...what, exactly?’
‘Ollie’s job is still up for grabs,’ she said, thinking on her feet. ‘And it’s dealing with marketing, which is something I’ve found I rather like and I’m pretty good at.’
‘You’ve been thinking about going to France?’
Sophie straightened. Did he think that she wasn’t good enough for the job? Or did he think that she was always going to hang around until he got fed up with her, without giving any thought at all to life beyond Javier?
‘Pretty much decided in favour of it,’ she declared firmly. ‘The house has found a buyer, as you know, who’s happy to take it on and complete the renovations I’ve started, so there’s literally nothing keeping me here. Aside, that is, from Mum. And I think she’d be overjoyed to come and visit Paris once a month. And, of course, I can easily get to Cornwall to see her.’
‘So you’re telling me that you’ve been concocting this scheme behind my back for weeks?’
‘It’s not a scheme, Javier.’ The more she thought about it, the better it sounded. How else would she get over
