‘Is this true?’ Jed demanded, any pretence of indifference sliding away.
‘You think I’d make it up?’ she asked scornfully. ‘I can put grim storylines down on paper, but, whether you like it or not, I’m straightforward in my personal life.’ So think on that, she tacked on silently, meeting the sudden brooding gaze with a hard, challenging stare.
‘So what did you do?’ he asked.
‘Do?’ She shook her head slowly, a slight frown pulling her brows together. It had been years since she’d thought of any of this, of Liam. She’d put it all behind her and got on with her life. She’d seen what dwelling miserably on the past had done to her mother and had wanted no part of it. ‘I went to the police, of course.’
And if that made her sound hard, so be it. By then their marriage had been on the rocks. She’d been sick of the round of nightclubs, fancy restaurants, the fast crowd he belonged to, suspicious of where the stream of money was coming from, worried when he told her he’d hit a lucky gambling streak because luck didn’t last.
‘Mum was dead against it. She said I should simply leave him and let him get on with it. She said dirt stuck. No one would believe I hadn’t been a part of it.’
‘And did they?’ His eyes probed her, carefully assessing her expression.
Elena lifted her shoulders wearily, reclaiming her glass of juice and swallowing it thirstily. The fire of anger had burned out and now she felt fit for nothing, mentally capitulating beneath the weight of the present situation, which was even more traumatic than the one she’d had to endure all those years ago.
She said flatly, ‘After some tough questioning, yes. After the trial I came out to Spain, with little more than the clothes I stood up in—no way would I touch any of the things bought with stolen money—reverted to my maiden name and divorced him when he was two years into his prison sentence.’
It was impossible to tell what he was thinking. They’d been so in love, so close until recently, they’d been able to read each other’s minds.
Not now. Not any more.
Only by the merest flicker of those darkly shadowed eyes as they touched her now wilting body did he indicate that he was aware of her presence at all.
He was probably weighing every word she’d said and deciding that her former husband had taken to crime to satisfy her ever increasing demands, that she’d coolly handed him over to the authorities before they caught up with him, foreseeing a humiliating end to the glitzy roller-coaster ride. He’d be grouping himself with Liam as the injured party. He believed that badly of her.
And he confirmed it when he said drily, ‘How moral you make yourself sound. But then you’re good with words. You have to be, the job you do. But there’s one thing even you can’t lie about, or gloss over—the fact that you married me in the full knowledge that you could be pregnant by another man.’
Anger blistered her. ‘Stop this!’ Her hands flew up to her head, as if to hold it on her shoulders before frustrated rage blew it away. ‘Listen to yourself! I’m carrying Sam’s child—nothing as vague as another man’s! Sam’s! Why can’t you bring yourself to say his name?’
From the odd comments he’d made she was beginning to think she knew. She wasn’t sure, but if she was right it would answer a whole heap of questions about his total and absolute refusal to listen to her.
‘Because the thought of you and him together infuriates me,’ he came back quickly, rawly.
‘Infuriates?’ She questioned his choice of word sharply. ‘Until just now you weren’t interested in my first marriage. As far as you were concerned it was unimportant. And you didn’t ask if there’d been any other men in my life since my divorce. You appeared not to have a jealous bone in your body.’
Carefully, she kept her voice calm, refusing to believe there was nothing but hatred behind that stony façade, hoping, almost against hope, that she could find a way to get through to him. ‘Just as I didn’t want, or need, to know who you might have shared a bed with before we met. I believed our future was all that mattered, not what might or might not have happened in the past. I’m sure you felt that way, too.’
He shrugged, impatience highlighting his eyes now. ‘I see no point in rehashing this.’
‘Probably not,’ she conceded, ‘but there is one. Ask yourself if you’d have felt so badly—so betrayed,’ she granted him, ‘if this baby had been an accident, fathered by any other man. Some man, say, I’d had a brief and meaningless affair with before I met you. And then ask yourself why you categorically refuse to let me tell you what really happened between me and Sam.’