Rion gathered up the papers and smirked to himself. She’d just shut herself in his storage room, and something told him that bedding down for the night amongst a heap of clutter he hadn’t got round to sorting yet wasn’t exactly the alternative to the master bedroom she’d had in mind.
Not that he had any idea what was really going on in her mind, he thought, turning at the foot of the stairs and trying to get his head around her revelation that she had no duke or earl waiting in the wings to marry her after all.
He walked into his study, tossed the papers into the bottom drawer of his desk, slammed it shut, and poured himself a generous measure of Scotch. It made little difference, of course; he was under no illusion about that. She’d still no doubt had other lovers, still found the idea of being married to him abhorrent, no matter how hard she tried to absolve herself of guilt by arguing that she’d simply needed time to ‘find herself’.
He swilled the amber liquid around his glass. But what it did mean was that if she’d been pursued by men she deemed suitable husband material—and he had no doubt that she had been—in one way at least they hadn’t matched up to him.
Was that why she’d never gone back to her parents?
Discovering that she hadn’t had shocked the hell out of him at first, but then maybe she’d known that her father would require appeasement in the form of a second, more appropriate match. And maybe she hadn’t been able to bear that thought, because she understood that, ironically, the kind of man she wanted fathering her children was not the kind of man who turned her on.
Rion lifted the glass to his lips and knocked back the measure in one go. It appalled him that his wife had been out there alone, that her father was such an unforgiving man that she’d felt unable to go back home. He’d gathered that Thomas Ashworth was a strict father even before they’d naïvely gone to seek his blessing to marry, but he’d always imagined he’d forgive Libby just as soon as she’d dumped him. For once, his own father’s abandonment seemed almost tame.
But most of all he was appalled that he empathised with Libby whatsoever, when by definition empathy meant feeling on the same page as another person and she thought of him as a whole other book, on a different shelf altogether. The bottom shelf.
Rion put the glass down on the table with a bang. Well, maybe they would always be on different shelves in her eyes, but their bodies spoke the same language, and this time around he wasn’t going to let her forget it. He was going to make her beg, and only then would he let her go.
Libby hadn’t expected to turn on the light and find a room full of his photos and personal possessions, but it seemed fate had made up its mind to just keep dishing out the pain tonight.
Although she could have opened the door and asked him if she could sleep elsewhere, or gone and tried to find another room herself, the last thing she needed was to run into him and receive another insincere invitation to his bed.
Besides, she needed to train herself to look at his face and feel nothing, instead of remembering the man she’d fallen in love with. That man no longer existed. Her heart ached at the realisation, at the thought that her actions might be partly responsible—actions he couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. She wanted to believe there must have been some mistake, that he hadn’t become a ruthless, blackmailing brute, that it was just a nightmare—but she knew it was the part before they’d met Spyros which had all been a dream.
So maybe finding herself in such close proximity to all his possessions was the best thing that could have happened. Maybe she could uncondition those old feelings and build up her resistance ready to confront the real thing again tomorrow? Like presenting images of a spider to an arachnophobe, she thought, remembering something she’d once read in an in-flight magazine about the way cognitive behavioural therapies worked.
But hadn’t it also said something about the dangers of presenting the phobic with too much too quickly? She shook her head, wishing for the second time that day that she didn’t recall everything in such categorical detail, before deciding that the analogy was pointless anyway. Because she wasn’t afraid of Rion, she reasoned with herself, ignoring the voice which said no, but you’re afraid of the way he still makes you feel.
But at least she had discovered the truth early—wouldn’t have to go through the pain of slowly coming to realise that he only had space in his heart for money and power. And now she knew that making their separation official was one hundred per cent the right thing to be doing. That the way forward was to refuse to comply with his blackmail until he couldn’t bear her remaining as his wife a moment longer. Yes, she was actually grateful for tonight, because it had banished all the doubts she’d started to have about whether getting divorced was the right thing to do. It was. Unequivocally.