LITMIR.BIZ

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divorced.’

      ‘Ah.’ A jerk of triumph knifed its way through him. ‘There is a lot of it about.’

      The way he said it made her feel guilty—or had that been his intention? She knew his views on divorce. The break-up of families. He had condemned the easy-come, easy-go way of life which had been so alien to his own. She knew what his next question would be before he asked it.

      ‘Children?’

      ‘No.’ Molly stirred her coffee unnecessarily, then lifted her eyes to his. So far he had been the one asking all the questions, but she had a few of her own. ‘Do you have any more—apart from Zoe?’

      He shook his head. ‘Just Zoe.’

      ‘And your wife? Won’t she think it a little strange that you’ve come here this morning? Are you planning to tell her about us?’

      ‘What “us” was that, Molly?’ he retorted softly. ‘What is there to tell? That we were lovers, until someone better came along?’

      Someone better? As if anyone could be better than Dimitri!

      ‘Someone else to lose yourself in and to vent that remarkable, newly discovered sexual hunger on?’ he continued, quietly yet remorselessly. He remembered the sight of the man’s bare chest. Of Molly’s unbuttoned dress. Of the way that the man’s hand had rested with possession over the swell of her hip, and the image had the blinding power to take him right back. To recall how he had wanted to smash his fist into something. ‘Was he a good lover, Molly? As good as me?’

      Even now, the sense of injustice was powerful enough to hurt her. To be wrongly judged struck at the very heart of her. And stung as she was by the need to defend herself, everything else dissolved into insignificance—for wasn’t he now giving her the opportunity to tell him what he had refused to hear at the time? The truth?

      ‘You don’t really, honestly think that I had sex with James that night?’

      ‘James,’ he mimicked cruelly. ‘Ah! I did not know his name. James.’ The black eyes glittered. ‘It was, of course, simply a little craziness on my part, was it not, agape mou—that when I find my girlfriend in bed with another man, to assume that they had been having sex? Whatever could have given me that idea? Don’t forget, Molly—I knew what you were like. I knew how much you loved it—I have never known a woman who fell so completely and utterly in love with sex the way you did.’

      What use would it serve now to qualify his accusation with the plaintive little cry that it had been him she had loved? And that had been what had made it so mind-blowingly and uniquely special. Sex with Dimitri had seemed as easy and as necessary as breathing. She could no more have been intimate with another man at that time than she could have grown wings and flown

      ‘Had you tired of me?’ he demanded. ‘Was that why you took the American into your arms and into your bed? Had you taken your fill of me, Molly—eager to try out your newly acquired skills with someone different?’

      But she was still filled with the burning need to separate truth from falsehood. ‘I never touched him, Dimitri,’ she whispered. ‘Nor he me—not in the way you are thinking.’

      He remembered the abandoned posture of her sprawled, bare legs. It had been the first time in his life that he had experienced real jealousy, and its potency had unsettled him. ‘What way am I supposed to think? He was asleep on the bed next to you!’

      ‘It wasn’t like that!’

      ‘Ochi?’ He gave a slow, cruel smile. ‘Then how was it? I am so interested to hear.’

      ‘He was comforting me.’

      ‘Comforting you?’ He laughed. ‘Lucky man indeed—to offer comfort in such a way! I must begin to offer comfort to beautiful women—how very noble it will make me feel!’

      And suddenly Molly had had enough. He was in her house and this was her territory and yet she was allowing him to dominate in the way that came so naturally to him. Throwing accusations at her and here she was, weakly trying to defend herself—when didn’t she have a few accusations of her own?

      ‘Actually, yes, he was comforting me,’ she said. She looked him straight in the face. ‘Because I had just found out about Malantha, you see.’

      He stilled then, became so still that an outside observer might have wondered if he breathed at all. Only the ebony glitter from the narrowed eyes showed that he did.

      ‘What about Malantha?’ he questioned softly.

      ‘That she was the girl you were promised to! I discovered that I had been nothing but a light, summer diversion, one in just a long line of willing lovers! I saw you both together, you see, Dimitri. I discovered that night what everyone else on the island knew—that Malantha was always the girl you were intended to marry—and, yes, I was upset. Very upset,’ she finished, though the word sounded tame when she said it now.

      Upset? At the time it had felt as though her heart had been torn from her body and ripped apart, with the edges left raw and jagged and gaping. First love and first heartbreak—and didn’t they say that the cut of first love was the deepest cut of all?

      Everyone had told her that the pain would fade and eventually heal, and heal it had. It had just left a faint but indelible scar along the way.

      She lifted her head and stared at him, her eyes bright and searching. ‘What happened to Malantha, by the way?’ she asked.

      There was a pause, a pause that seemed to go on for ever and ever.

      ‘I married her.’

      The world shifted out of focus, and when it shifted back in again it looked different. It was what she had half known and half expected and yet not what she wanted to hear. For hadn’t there been a foolish part of her that longed for him to tell her that she had been mistaken? That he had not been promised to Malantha at all. Or that he had, but had changed his mind along the way.

      In a way it made things worse, and yet in a funny kind of way it made things better. So she had not been wrong. Those nights when she had lain awake wondering if she had ruined everything by jumping to a stupid conclusion had been wasted nights. Her instincts had been right all along.

      She sucked in a dry, painful breath. ‘Then hadn’t you better be getting back to her?’ she questioned coldly. ‘In the circumstances, I doubt whether she would approve of you sitting in my kitchen, drinking my coffee—do you, Dimitri?’

      ‘My wife is dead,’ he said baldly.

      There was a moment of terrible, stunned silence and Molly was rocked by emotions so basic and conflicting that for several long seconds she could not speak.

      Dead? She looked at him blankly, seeking and finding the sombre affirmation in his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘W…when?’ she asked ineffectually.

      ‘When Zoe was a baby.’

      ‘Oh, God, Dimitri—that’s awful.’

      He shook his head. He didn’t want her sympathy. It was mistimed and irrelevant now. He wanted her, he realised. He always had and he still did. To lose himself in the soft white folds of her body. To feel that tumble of blonde hair swaying like silk against his chest. Desire could strike at any time, and this could not be a more inappropriate one, but that didn’t stop him feeling its slow, stealthy course through his veins, like some unstoppable drug.

      ‘It was a long time ago. It is past.’

      For a moment, all that could be heard was the ticking of the clock.

      ‘How old is Zoe now?’ she asked suddenly.

      The black eyes narrowed. ‘Fifteen.’

      This time the sums were easier. ‘So you married Malantha soon after I had left?’ But she didn’t need an answer to that. ‘Of course you did.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Just tell

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