Proof of Their Sin(28)

He’d reminded himself that he’d vowed to Ryan that nothing would ever happen again. He’d fought everything he was feeling, telling himself she was being so earnestly bashful and tentative to tease him. She had wrung her timorous hands while her twenty-two-year-old body had been rocking a sexy black cocktail dress and a pair of four-inch heels that had set every man in the room alight.

She was trying to get a rise out of him, to see if she could taunt him into another rash act like at the wedding, he’d told himself. All he’d wanted was to keep a wall firmly between them. There couldn’t be any openings, even if he did know something that might make her available....

Paolo had shut down the thought and the conversation as swiftly and ruthlessly as possible. He wanted to do the same now, but Lauren was still talking.

“His lover found me online. I’ll be nice and call her that since she believed he truly loved her. That’s why she had an affair with a married man, she said. You know what’s wrong with digital communication? You can’t burn it. Hitting Delete doesn’t feel as permanent, especially when every word is imprinted right here.” Lauren tapped the middle of her forehead. “No matter how I try to forget, the begging for forgiveness is carved into my psyche. I knew he was a player but I thought I was different. Did you know, Paolo? Did you know then, when I asked you?”

Lie, he told himself, but he couldn’t. Not again. It had chewed on his conscience all this time, but he hadn’t been willing to break up his best friend’s marriage. Not when he’d nearly done it once before. He had owed Ryan for that and, now he looked back on it, realized it was the reason he hadn’t made much effort to see his friend since. He’d resented withholding his suspicions from Lauren. It had made him feel sordid and had severely damaged the respect he’d had for Ryan.

His hesitation was all the answer she needed. Her face paled into a look of disillusionment and betrayal then cold criticism. She took a step back as though repelled, forcing him to rush with a defense.

“I didn’t know. It was a collection of things I’d heard. A possibility, not a certainty.” An awareness that Ryan had never gone long without sex and a remark from Vittorio that he’d seen a man who looked like Ryan in a low-end bar in Berlin, a buxom fräulein in his lap.

“Yet you made me feel like a criminal.” Her face contorted with the stunned pain of misplaced trust. She bit her lips together, but her chin crinkled and her brows came together in deep hurt.

He knew he had to say something, but couldn’t form a reply to save his life, and she was shaking her head, shutting him out, making him desperate. Making his stomach tie up.

With a pained sob, Lauren took off out of the room, snatching up his keys along the way.

“No! Lauren—!” Before he could go after her, a hissing sound behind him warned of a pot overboiling. In two steps he was back at the stove, snapping off the gas then racing after Lauren.

She wasn’t tearing out of the drive in his Lamborghini as he’d feared. It was worse. She’d popped the lid into the storage compartment and was trying to lift her bags out of it.

“What are you doing?” He brushed her out of the way to lift them himself. “What do you need so damned badly you’d give yourself a miscarriage over it?”

“Just go, okay? I’ll stay alone in your wretched house hosting pity parties for myself the way I’ve been doing for months and you can go live your life of righteous double standards.” She wiped angry fingers under her wet eyes before yanking up the handle of her bag, bouncing and rattling its wheels over the stones toward the front door.#p#分页标题#e#

Over her shoulder, she continued acridly, “Go sleep with your future wife and conveniently forget to mention you have a baby on the way with another woman. I’m glad you don’t believe me. I hate all of you, the way you stick together and act like your sexual needs are more important than our hearts. No, you’re not invited in.”

She barred the door when he tried to come in. Pointing to the stoop, she only let him set down her remaining bags then dragged them inside to thump into a pile around her ankles.

“Let me carry them up the stairs for you,” he cajoled.

“I’ll manage.” Standing in the crack of the door so only half of her was visible, she let him glimpse the hollow point in one smudged copper eye. She was devastated, but what was worse was the flatness. Until this moment, he’d always seen a certain reliance and confidence in her eyes when she looked at him. As though she knew she could count on him. Now there was only dejection and betrayal.