‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll tell me. After all, you already know everything about me, don’t you, Roman?’ She threw him a look of utter disdain and stalked stiff-backed across to his desk where his laptop lay open. ‘I was looking for you when I bumped into the desk. The thing woke up...and can you imagine my surprise when I saw my name on the PDF file on-screen?’
As she spoke, a chill spread through his body. He knew before she’d reached the big reveal what had happened. Dios, the file was only there because he had intended to delete it and then... He couldn’t even remember what had distracted him. The missed call from his mother, maybe—he still hadn’t rung her back.
‘This isn’t what it looks like, Marisa.’
‘Oh, you mean you didn’t sit there and let me spill my guts to you about my dad’s gambling and my mother finding me so lovable that she wiped me out of her life, while already knowing all about it?’ Marisa’s voice cracked and she had to take a deep breath before she could trust herself to go on. ‘You let me open up to you, Roman, when all along you already knew every last tiny detail. There is stuff in that file that even I had forgotten.’
She stood there willing him to intervene, willing him to say something that would put her in the wrong. She so wanted to be wrong about this. But his stony expression and the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach told her she wasn’t.
He might not love her, but she had started to believe and respect the fact that he didn’t pretend, that he was upfront, and all the time he’d been manipulating her emotions to get what he wanted. Frustration and fear settled over her like a dark fog. She had started to fool herself that they had something beyond the physical and Jamie, but she was wrong.
She had wanted to believe that Team Jamie was some sort of permanent solution, which only made her look completely sad and pathetic, she concluded.
It begged the question: how many nasty realities was she prepared to turn a blind eye to? Without warning an image of her dad’s face floated into her head, his optimistic smile that he had fallen lucky, that he was onto a sure thing that would turn around their fortunes, even though she had been able to see the sadness in his eyes, because he didn’t really believe it himself.
Her hunger for security and continuity and Roman’s love was, she realised now, as strong as her poor dad’s drive to be the big personality, the success story.
The memory of her first instinct when she had seen her name on the open file surfaced. She hadn’t closed the laptop or her eyes—but she had really, really wanted to. Would she keep her eyes open the next time...and the next...or one day would she close them? Did she want to live her life with that same desperate fake optimism she had regularly seen in her dad’s eyes? And how long would it be before Jamie could see all the lies too?
She squared her shoulders and unconsciously donned a quiet dignity as her eyes found his.
‘Have you any idea how it makes me feel,’ she said quietly, ‘to know that all the time I was opening up to you, you knew? You knew about Dad’s debts after he died, the men who threatened me when I couldn’t pay the money back, and said I could make things easier on myself by being nice to some of their friends. Somehow sleeping my way out of debt didn’t feel like such a great option to me. You know, that look on your face really is very convincing,’ she admired nastily as the betrayal rising up inside her grabbed her in a vicious chokehold. ‘You’ve got the horrified thing off really well.’
He shook his head, looking more shattered now than shocked, but she refused to be influenced by his superlative acting skills. She’d been fooled by him before.
‘It’s all there in black and white.’ She pointed at the computer screen. ‘My life has tabloid headlines written all over it, doesn’t it? Maybe one of your Hollywood friends could make it into a movie?’
It took Roman several moments before he could trust himself to speak, to control the images her shocking disclosures had stirred to lurid life in his head. Several more moments to move beyond the protective rage that made him feel nothing was more important than seeking revenge on the animals who had issued the vile threats to her. Ripping the world apart until he found them did not seem at all excessive to him.
A sordid world had touched Marisa but she had emerged untainted. She was, he decided as a surge of cleansing emotion supplanted his anger, the strongest person that he knew.
‘I didn’t know.’ It sounded as pathetic a response as it felt, his brow furrowed as he registered his own outstretched hand. He saw her flinch away and let it fall, acknowledging the knife thrust of pain that her rejection inflicted on him.
Marisa’s body was tense, every muscle quivering and taut. She had wanted so much to be able to reach out and be pulled into his body, to pretend that none of this had happened. There was still a shameful part of her that wished she had not confronted him.
‘Do you know how all this makes me feel?’
Betrayed, she thought, ruthlessly pushing down the sob in her throat.
‘Other than I don’t want to be in the same room as you?’
She saw his nostrils flare as he inhaled sharply as if she had struck him, and told herself she didn’t care. She wanted him to hurt, because he had hurt her; he had betrayed her trust.
‘I’ve
