LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘But, as you’ve made only too plain, the way you’ve lived your life this past six months is no business of mine.’

      Damon’s voice had grown colder by the second. Now it sounded positively glacial, sending icy shivers sliding down Sarah’s spine.

      She managed some unintelligible murmur that he could take as agreement or not as he wished and dumped the denuded pillow on the floor, flinging the cotton case after it. It was as she reached for the crumpled sheet that a sudden recollection of how she had felt as she’d stood outside on the landing and heard the sound of Jason’s voice attacked without warning, making her sway weakly, fingers clenching on the bedding until the knuckles showed white.

      ‘Sarah?’

      Damon must have been watching her every move because he stepped forward, reaching her before she had even realised herself that she was no longer steady on her feet.

      ‘Sarah!’ he said again, his voice rough with some emotion that she couldn’t begin to name.

      There was anger in there, but at who? And it was blended with a whole range of feelings that made her head whirl just trying to separate them.

      But she was weak enough not to resist when he gathered her into his arms, held her close against him, her cheek resting on his shirt, one hand cradling the back of her head.

      ‘Sarah, the bastard isn’t worth it! Don’t waste your tears on him.’

      Tears?

      Somehow Sarah edged a hand up to touch her face and find that Damon had spoken nothing less than the truth. Her skin was wet with tears that she had been unaware of letting escape, her eyelashes spiked into damply clinging clumps.

      They were the tears that had been threatening ever since she had pushed open the bedroom door a crack and seen Jason—the man who had said that all he wanted was to heal her broken heart—naked in bed with another woman. She would feel better if she could let them fall. If she could simply give in to her feelings and, abandoning all restraint, weep her heart out on Damon’s supportive shoulder.

      It was a dangerously tempting prospect and one she was having to struggle fiercely against, because if she did start crying then she knew the interpretation that Damon would put on it. The only interpretation that he believed was possible.

      He would think that she was crying for Jason.

      He would believe that the other man had callously broken her heart by being caught in her bed with his mistress in the middle of the afternoon.

      He would curse him, call him every name under the sun, possibly even threaten vengeance on him. In fact, if she knew this husband of hers, estranged or not, he might actually try to take off after Jason and then she would have to hold him back, beg him to stay.

      And if she did that then she knew it would destroy her.

      There could never have been a good moment for Damon to reappear in her life, but this afternoon had to be the worst one possible.

      At last she had thought that she was finally growing a new, protective skin over the wounds that this man had inflicted on her in their short marriage. Only this morning she had told herself that she was gradually starting to get her life back under her control again, get things in order, consider the prospect of beginning again without dissolving into total misery. She had a good job as PA to Rhys Morgan, an international art dealer and owner of a hugely prestigious gallery here in London. Jason seemed to have set himself to charming her out of the black depression into which she had fallen since her return from Greece. And, most important of all, the husband she had adored, and who had taken her love and used it for his own totally selfish ends, was thousands of miles away, on the Greek island he called home.

      The only reason Jason had been in the house at all today was because she had been expecting an important delivery. The freezer in the kitchen had died with a spectacularly dramatic waste of food, and she had had to buy another. But when she had been asked to go in to the gallery to cover for a sick workmate, she’d thought she would have to cancel the delivery until Jason, who had recently been made redundant from his own job, had stepped in and offered to wait for it instead. They had been out on a couple of what he called dates but in her eyes they were little more than friends.

      ‘I’m not doing anything important,’ he’d said. ‘Only checking the jobs pages—I can do that as easily at your place as I can at home.’

      But then she had come home unexpectedly early, having been given the afternoon off by an unusually preoccupied Rhys, who had clearly wanted to be anywhere but in the office, and she had seen Jason’s car parked outside as she had walked up the street towards the house. Some instinct had kept her silent as she opened the door, crossed the hall. A faint noise from the first floor, the sound of laughter—another woman’s laughter—had drawn her to the stairs, and she had mounted them in silence.

      ‘This is the life, Jace! I could really get to like this!’ The woman’s voice had floated out clearly to her as she reached the top, and set foot on the thick blue carpet of the landing.

      ‘Well, don’t get too comfortable, honey.’ Jason’s drawling, upper-class tones had been unmistakable. ‘The prissy Ms Meyerson will be home by five—and you’ll have to get your pretty little butt out of here well before then.’

      ‘I wish I didn’t have to! I don’t like sharing you with her, Jacey. I really don’t.’

      ‘And I don’t like wasting my time with her either, sweetie,’ Jason had hastily assured her. ‘But the lady is loaded! Look at this house for a start. It’s huge, and in this part of London it must be worth a fortune! She has to be worth millions. And she’s almost mine. She’s already given me a key so that I can come and go as I please. Another couple of weeks and I’ll have her eating out of my hand…’

      And it was then that she had known. Known that whoever it was who had said that lightning didn’t strike twice had been absolutely right.

      Because even as she had listened to Jason and his witchy girlfriend planning to play on her emotions simply to use her, she had realised that she just didn’t care. That in spite of her barely formed hopes, her dreams of starting again, Jason didn’t mean a thing to her, and his greedy, grasping plans even less.

      No, the shock that had ripped through her, shattering her composure and destroying all that hard-won peace of mind, was the realisation that it had all been just a delusion. That her hopes of a new life, of a new beginning, putting behind her the pain and the betrayal of the past, were built on the shaky foundations of self-deceit. She was no more ‘over’ Damon than she was capable of flying to the moon.

      And if she had any room for doubt, any hope of being wrong, that hope had been totally destroyed in the moment that she had blundered into Damon’s arms and into the feeling that she had come home.

      She had fallen totally, blindly and irrevocably in love with Damon Nicolaides in the first seconds that she had ever seen him, and nothing that had happened had changed that. He had taken her heart prisoner and he still held it captive in his strong, powerful hands. All the dreaming of a future, of a new life, had been just a fantasy, one that had evaporated like mist before the sun at the first touch of reality.

      The reality was that she loved Damon desperately and she always would, while he had never felt anything for her but the searing passion that had driven him to take her to his bed. And even that had been a complication he hadn’t looked for, hadn’t wanted in his campaign to use her to get what he wanted.

      It was for that reason and that alone that she now wanted to weep. To try to wash away the savage pain in her heart under the rush of tears.

      And of course she could do nothing of the sort for fear of betraying herself totally to the man who was responsible for that anguish in the first place.

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