Leila wouldn’t laugh.
He knew that now.
What he didn’t know though was that at this very moment he was breaking the heart of the woman he loved.
* * *
Leila had walked into the reception unseen by James and Manu. She had watched them walk over to the elevators and had hoped upon hope that this was not what it looked like.
Leila tried to trust him, tried to tell herself that he wouldn’t take another woman to a bed that they had shared.
She watched the light on the elevator stop at the seventeenth floor instead of the top one and she pressed it and watched in dismay as the elevator came straight down and opened empty.
No.
Even now she still wanted to trust him.
Even now, as she stepped in and pressed the button and took the elevator up to the seventeenth floor, she tried to tell herself that she was wrong.
She had to be wrong, for the man who had made love to her the night before last would not do this. The man who had brought her to his home could not do this to her.
Or had he brought her to his home so that he could free himself to carry on with his ways here?
As she walked along the plush corridor Leila thought of the nights he had returned smelling of perfume.
Leila walked, wondering what one he was behind, and then she heard the one thing she was dreading—the sound of James’s voice and a woman laughing behind a hotel door.
She wanted to kick the door, she wanted to burst in on them and scratch his face, but what was the point?
What would it change?
From the start he had told her he was a playboy. She had fallen in love with a man who had, as it turned out, wanted nothing more than a one-night stand.
Circumstance had forced them together.
Tears would not come, anger would not come—all she felt was weary from a world that denied her love over and over.