style="font-size:15px;"> His biography. Succinct. Replete with his success stories. Sycophantic in its adoration of the man who had made his first billion before the ripe old age of thirty-five.
She finally looked up with a dazed expression.
‘You’re DC Logistics...?’
Art flushed darkly but he wasn’t going to start justifying himself.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly.
‘You’re the guy we’ve been fighting...’
‘Yes.’
‘You came here... You pretended to be... Why?’ She shot up, trembling, as thousands of implications clearly began sinking in. ‘You bastard.’ She edged away from him, recoiling as though he was contagious, and took up position by the large Victorian fireplace, leaning against it and staring at him with huge round eyes.
‘You came here with a plan, didn’t you? You came here so that you could infiltrate and get us onside. You didn’t like the fact that we were protesting about you putting up a bunch of houses that no one wants!’
Art’s jaw hardened but there was nothing he could say to refute her accusations since they were all spot on. ‘I owned the land. I was going to build, whether you stood in the way or not. I thought it diplomatic to try to persuade you to see sense before the bulldozers moved in and trying to persuade you within the walls of my London offices wasn’t going to work.’
‘You used me.’
‘I...’ Art raked his fingers through his hair. ‘There was no need for me to come clean. And I did not use you. We both enjoyed what happened between us. I could have walked away without saying anything.’
‘Are you asking for a medal because you finally decided to tell the truth?’
‘There was also no need for me to grant the concessions that I have.’
‘No wonder you were so confident that the big, bad developers were going to accept our terms and conditions. Because you were the big, bad developer.’
‘I played fair.’
‘You lied!’
‘A small amount of subterfuge.’
‘You came here...you...’ She turned away because she needed to gather herself. Everything was rushing in on her and she was beginning to feel giddy. She took a few deep breaths and forced herself to look at him. To her fury, he met her gaze squarely, as if he was as pure as the driven snow!
‘I let you stay in my house.’ Rose laughed bitterly. ‘No wonder you insisted on paying rent! You’re worth a small fortune. It must have troubled your conscience that you were sponging off someone who couldn’t hope to come close to matching you in the financial stakes. Someone with rooms in need of decorating and plumbing on the verge of waving a white flag and giving up! I bet you’ve never painted anything in your life before or done anything manual at all!’
‘Going through each and every detail of the ways you feel deceived isn’t going to progress this.’
‘I slept with you.’
Those four words, delivered without any expression whatsoever, dropped like stones into a quiet pond and silence settled between them, thick and uncomfortable.
* * *
‘I’m guessing...’ Rose kept her voice level but the blood was rushing through her veins like lava ‘...that that was all part of the game plan? To get me onside?’
‘That’s outrageous!’
‘Really? Is it? Why? You conned your way into my home!’
‘I was more than happy to go stay in a hotel.’
‘You accepted my hospitality and you used it to get what you wanted out of me! I can’t believe I was stupid enough to actually think that you were a man of integrity.’
‘Sleeping with you was never part of any plan.’ Art shook his head and dropped down on the sofa, legs apart. She walked towards him and stood in front of him with her arms folded. ‘You doubt me?’ he growled, staring at her, and even in the height of this scorching argument, when she was burning with rage, those fabulous dark eyes still had the power to do things to her body. Rose’s lips thinned.
‘Do you honestly believe that I could make love with you the way I have if I wasn’t seriously attracted to you?’
Hot colour flooded her cheeks. Rose remembered the intensity of their lovemaking, the flaring passion in his eyes. She remembered the way he had touched her, his fingers as they’d explored her body and the urgency of those times when he just couldn’t wait to have her.
No, he hadn’t been faking that. Somehow that was something she just knew. He’d come here on a mission but going to bed with her had never been part of the plan. Should she feel better for that? Maybe, but then, with a bitter twist, she also remembered the way she had felt about him and her stupidity in actually thinking that there might have been more to what they had than just a romp in the sack.
It was always going to be just a romp in the sack, had she but known, because she had always just been an enjoyable add-on to the main reason he was there, a pleasant side dish but never the main meal.
Humiliation roared through her, stiffening her backbone and settling like venom in her veins.
How on earth could she have been so stupid? She, of all people! Always cautious, always watchful...how could she have thrown herself in the path of a speeding train and actually thought that it would be okay?
‘You need to leave,’ she said coldly.
‘I was honest with you.’ Art rose to his feet, a towering, dominant presence that made her step back in alarm.
He sucked the oxygen out of the room, left her feeling as though she needed to gasp for air, and the strength of her reaction terrified her because she knew that, mixed in with the rage, the hatred and the bitter disillusionment, was something else...something she didn’t want to put her finger on.
‘And now that I’m weeping with gratitude at your terrific display of honesty, are you going to renege on all the things you said you’d do for the village?’
‘Dammit, Rose!’ Art roared. ‘I could have just disappeared. Instead, I came clean. Why can’t you cut me some slack?’ He stepped towards her, ignoring her crab-like shuffle away from him, until he had cornered her without her even realising it was happening.
She collided with the wall and he placed both hands squarely on either side of her so that she had nowhere to run.
‘I didn’t come here to—’ he looked away and clenched his jaw in frustration ‘—mess you or anyone else around.’
‘You came here to get on our good side so that we would get off your case and make things easier for you!’
‘Where’s the crime in that? I purchased the land
