He took her in: flushed, tousled, sexy. His face tightened. He made a split-second knee-jerk reaction decision. He knew he was doing it, and his weakness made his voice unbearably harsh. ‘In fact, I’ve been thinking. The divorce is underway, and I think you’ve spent enough time here. I’ve been more than generous where Zac is concerned, but the time has come for you to leave.’
Rowan’s head reeled. They seemed to have gone from zero to a thousand in emotional voltage in a nanosecond.
‘Isandro—’
‘I see Sandro has gone out of the window.’ He mimicked her voice in a cruel parody of passion. ‘“Sandro, I want you so much. Sandro I need you—”’
‘Stop it!’ Rowan cried out, with such vehemence that he did. He was flaying her heart with a whip, shredding it to pieces, and it was in that moment that she knew for certain that she’d fallen for him all over again—had never really stopped loving him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have the power to hurt her so deeply.
‘All I want is to tell you where I’ve been since that day, Isandro. It’s not easy for me to tell you—’ Especially when you’re like this …
‘And I know why.’ His arms were crossed, a sneer on his face.
‘Why?’ she asked, as if she couldn’t already guess the answer.
‘Because you’ve had to try and figure out how to make yourself look as sympathetic as possible.’
He started to walk around her then, making her dizzy, but he wouldn’t stop, so she gritted her teeth and stood still.
‘Do you need me to show you the note again, Rowan? I still have it downstairs.’
She hid a shudder. She could still remember writing it, the bile that had been in her throat as she did, the unbelievable pain in her heart.
She shook her head, feeling sick. ‘No … I don’t need to see it.’
‘Because you were very clear. “I’m not ready to be a wife and mother. I have things I want to do, things I want to see …” Is that about right? Forgive me, I might have forgotten the actual wording.’
She turned to try and face him, but he eluded her efforts.
‘Isandro, I know how the note looked. But believe me—I only wrote it because I never expected to see you or Zac again.’
He stopped and turned to face her, and she took a step back. He was livid. She heard her words reverberate and winced. They had come out all wrong. Well, right and wrong.
‘No—wait. It’s not like that—’
‘No, I’m sure it’s not. But your inheritance running out and you not finding another willing sucker drove you back here to a cushy prenup, using Zac, the convenient ace up your sleeve, along the way to curry favour.’
Rowan opened her mouth but nothing came out, and in any case Isandro wasn’t finished.
He came and stood right in front of her. Worse than anything, he just looked emotionless now. ‘You’ve been dead to me since you left, Rowan, dead to Zac. And in many ways I think it might have been preferable if you had died, or at least stayed away.’
He couldn’t know what he was saying. He couldn’t possibly have any clue as to how cruelly close to home those words were. Rowan comforted herself with that as she stood there and felt ice trickle into her blood and her heart freezing. There was so much meaning, so much hate in those words that she had to get away from him. Before he could reduce her completely. She had thought she’d been to hell and back already, but this was coming a close second.
She looked somewhere in his vague direction. ‘I agree with you about moving out. I had already thought of perhaps renting somewhere in Osuna. I’ll get on to it tomorrow.’
And then she turned and went back into her room, shutting the door softly behind her. In a moment of black parody her sheet caught in the door and she couldn’t move forward. Loath to open the door again, to face Isandro’s wrath and very evident self-disgust, she dropped the sheet and went straight to her bathroom. She pulled on a robe and locked the door, then sank to the floor in the dark and dropped her head to her knees, wanting to curl up into as small a ball as possible. No matter how much she tried she couldn’t stop Isandro’s words going round and round. And with them was another word: fool … fool …
CHAPTER NINE
ISANDRO looked at the piece of sheet caught under the door and waited impatiently for Rowan to open the door again and take it out. But she didn’t. What was she doing? Just standing there? His irritation and anger levels had been finally cooling somewhat, but threatened to spike again now. He went and opened the door, only to find the crumpled sheet on the floor and the room bathed in soft light which jarred with his nerves.