A Touch of Temptation(23)
“Sorry to be crowding you on the dance floor like this, but I have to take my chance now. You’re the father of my niece or nephew—” a smile split her mouth “—and I only have a few moments before Alexander chews my head off for butting in.”
His anger thawing, Diego took the hand she offered boldly.
Where Kim wore her sophistication, her brilliance, like an armor that no one could pierce, Olivia’s irreverence, her open smile, was the pull. Her emotions were right there in her smiling gaze.
A man wouldn’t look into those eyes and wonder if she was his salvation or his purgatory. He wouldn’t have to spend a lifetime wondering if he was banging his head against a rock.
They looked exactly the same and yet were so different. He found it highly disconcerting and illuminating. Because he didn’t feel the least bit of attraction toward her.
He frowned. “A chance at what, Mrs. King?”
Her gaze twinkled. “Call me Liv. My chance to talk to you. Everyone’s talking about your statement to the press, and Kim hasn’t been very...forthcoming about you.”
“No?” Just like that his ire rose again. “Let’s just say I’m your perfect sister’s dirty little secret.”
His gaze sought the woman in question and found her immediately. Kim was standing at a table, talking to Alexander.
They were peas in a pod, those two. So similar in everything. And yet Alexander King had walked away from Kim, entrenched himself in scandal for Olivia.
“Which you’ve made sure is not a secret or dirty anymore,” Olivia said, with the initial warmth fleeing from her words.
He flicked his gaze back to her. “Waiting for your sister to do the right thing was a futile exercise.”
A little frown appeared in her brow. “My sister...” She hesitated, as though choosing her words carefully. “She’s always kept her feelings and her fears to herself.”
“You mean she has any under that brilliance?”
Her brow furrowing, Olivia continued, “Kim always had to be the strong one—for my mother and for me. It was the only way to survive—the only way she could protect me.”
“From whom?” he said, before he could stop himself. He rubbed his nape, feeling tension curl into his muscles. Damn his wife and his ever-spiraling curiosity about her. “You know what? All I care about is that she does the right thing by my child.”
He couldn’t keep his resentment out of his words.
Olivia nodded. “Look, all I wanted to say was that I’m glad you and Kim are working things out.”
“Do you know, if looks could kill, I would have died a few times from your husband’s wrath in the past few minutes?”
She glanced to where they stood—her husband and his wife. “Please ignore Alexander.” She bent toward him, and though she stood at a perfectly respectable distance to someone standing on the other side of the room, it looked as though she was too close to Diego. “He’s a bit possessive when it comes to me.”
She had sidled closer to him just to get a rise out of her husband. On cue, the frown on the other man’s brow deepened across the banquet hall. Diego smiled despite everything. “He doesn’t like me very much.”
She smiled. “My husband has a very rigid sense of right and wrong.”
“Really? And yet he carried on with you while pretending to be married to her? Traded her for you without a moment’s—?”
Her gaze flashed with anger. “Alexander and Kim—what they shared was not a real relationship. Even before she knew about us, after her time with you on the island, she broke it off with him. I mean, they never even—”
Kim had broken it off with Alexander? When? He felt as though he’d had his breath knocked out of him. “Never even what, Olivia?”
Olivia’s look was more calculated now, gauging if he was trustworthy. “Did you mean what you said to the press? About a new beginning with Kim?”
“Yes.”
“Alexander and Kim never had a physical relationship.”
Diego felt as if a curtain was falling away from his eyes. Primal satisfaction filled his veins even as he wondered why his perfect wife would hide something like that from him. Especially when he had accused her of being unemotional and unaffected by how easily she had gone back to Alexander.
But of course Kim offered nothing of herself. Truth or anything else. Frustration erupted through him.
True, he had given her the perfect reason to believe him the enemy. And that had to change if their marriage had a chance of being anything but a battleground.
He looked up at Olivia just as she stiffened next to him. Within seconds the color fled from her animated face and her gaze was stricken with fear. Diego turned to see where her gaze was trained.