“What do you mean?” She hissed again as he cleaned out the longest, deepest cut.
“With your story.”
He was trying to distract her from what he was doing. Deciding to cooperate, she took hold of his thick wrist until his gaze lifted to hers.
“All my life, I was the good girl, the responsible one. You were my walk on the wild side, and I truly loved it. I loved you. I had so much damn fun with you. You were all I could think about, even when I had to go on site to Singapore to finish shooting that awful movie. Remember that?”
Reluctantly, one corner of his mouth pulled up. The half smile creased his lean cheek. “The movie wasn’t that bad. Didn’t it win an Academy Award for special effects?”
“It was terrible,” she said with emphasis. “It took forever to film. I couldn’t sleep without you, and the director was always mad at me because I kept forgetting my lines. If I could have gotten out of my contract, I would have, and to hell with my professional reputation. I hated every minute of it.”
He finished washing her wounds, eased the edges of her top together and carefully buttoned it up again. “Where are you going with this?”
She took another fragment of his T-shirt and a fresh bottle of water and began to work on him, washing the dirt and the blood from his chest and shoulders and cleaning out the wounds that hadn’t healed.
She gave him a crooked smile. “I was consumed with you. The mere thought of going on a date with someone else was irritating and distasteful to me. Yes, I was asked out a couple of times, but I didn’t have the time, not physically and not emotionally, and I certainly didn’t have the interest. I don’t know where you got your information from, Julian, but I didn’t cheat on you. Not even with a kiss. Not from the moment you walked up to me at my mom’s house, the night of the Masque.”
He bowed his head, and while he didn’t say anything, for once he wasn’t rejecting her outright or snapping at her, but he was actually listening intently to everything she said.
She told him softly, “I just wanted to tell you all of that, and this time, I didn’t want to make it about me or how you hurt my feelings. I wanted to make it about you. You deserve to know that I thought you were worth it. I can only imagine how I would have felt if someone had convinced me that you had cheated on me, and I’m sorry you had to go through that. That’s all.”
He took her hand with the washcloth and held it, as he studied it. Silence pounded in her ears with the rhythm of her own heartbeat. Then, with a gentle squeeze on her fingers, he eased her hand into her lap and turned away.
Okay, then. She hadn’t really expected anything else.
It had taken twenty years and serious exhaustion and blood loss, but at least now she felt like she had said what she needed to say to him without shouting or fighting. Over the last several hours, the message had grown into something more generous and honest than she would have believed possible.
Maybe that could be cathartic for both of them.
Blinking tears out of her eyes, she tossed the used rag away. Maybe now she really could let go of her bitterness, figure out a way to get over him and move on.
Of course, that was provided they managed to survive getting out of here.
How much weight, Julian wondered, should you give to an old lie?
People lied all the time, and they did it for so many reasons. Self-protection, self-gain. Often it was with the best of intentions, to avoid hurting someone else’s feelings. Hell, he lied without compunction whenever he needed to, or he spun the truth in such a way that it suited him, like he had done in the press conference about the multiple homicide on Justine’s estate.
But this wasn’t just any lie — it was a lie that had stabbed him to the core and had had a pivotal effect on his life.
And he simply didn’t know anymore how much weight he should give to it. He felt adrift, confused again. He was tired of carrying his anger around. It felt heavy, cold and poisonous.
In the meantime, Melly was here in front of him, warm and vibrant, funny, sexy and as infuriating as ever, and man, could she ever sell something. Every word she had spoken felt like the God’s honest truth.
In spite of knowing how well she could act, he still couldn’t bring himself to believe that everything she had said was a lie. Clearly, her message mattered too much to her. It showed in the fragility of her expression, the dampness in her gaze — hell, even in the tenderness with which she had washed him.
Yet she still seemed incapable of admitting that she had cheated. Was it because she couldn’t face confronting him with the truth, or because she couldn’t face the mistake she had made?