‘I can’t stay, Gabrielle. Will you tell Ari I’ve left? But don’t rush to do it,’ Ella advised, turning on her heel to move towards the front door.
‘Don’t do it, Ella. I really like you, and he’ll be furious if you walk out on him,’ the other woman protested. ‘I’m sure you’re right. He’s only flirting…it means absolutely nothing to him. Women of that sort come onto him every day. But you’re different, not least because you happen to be wearing the Xenakis sapphires and possess a brain.’
Ella glanced back at Aristandros and the redhead. She felt sick with rage and hurt, and the depth of her reaction terrified her. The hand she employed to push her hair off her hot, damp brow was trembling. She travelled down in the lift to the ground floor where the concierge called a taxi for her. Cameras flared as she departed alone and in considerably less state than she had arrived. By then she was willing to acknowledge that she was running away from her own feelings as much as she was turning her back on a scene of public humiliation. But she was horrified by her over-sensitivity and the powerful emotions churning around inside her. Why should it matter to her so much what Aristandros did? Wasn’t she capable of switching off her emotional responses to him? Just then she didn’t care about the agreement she had signed. She refused to act like some whore he owned and to do as he expected regardless of how he himself behaved. A dignified departure from the party was truly the only option she could live with.
Back at the townhouse she headed straight for the nursery. Callie was slumbering peacefully, while Kasma was also asleep in her bed in the next-door bedroom with the door ajar. Ella gazed down at the little girl with a volcanic mixture of relief, love and pain rocketing through her. She reminded herself that Callie had managed fine before she was around, and would scarcely miss her, and that while she stayed her mother would refuse to visit her granddaughter. How could she allow that to happen?
Her maid helped her remove the dress and the sapphires and brought her a case when she asked. Ella put on jeans and a T-shirt and packed the few personal items she had brought from London. Then the heavy thud of the front door reverberated through the whole house, and she went rigid.
‘Ella!’
Ella gulped at the harsh sound of her name on Aristandros’s lips. ‘I’m up here…’
Aristandros filled the doorway, strong features taut, eyes blazing a challenge. ‘What in hell are you playing at?’
Ella settled bright-blue eyes on him, her chin at a defiant angle. ‘What were you playing at? If you think I’m going to stand around while you carry on with other women in front of me, you have another thought coming!’
‘You don’t walk out on me in a public place…ever!’ Aristandros raked back at her in a tone of fierce condemnation.
‘You can tear up the agreement. I’m leaving you, so all bets are off.’
‘You’re all grown-up now,’ Aristandros lanced back with derision. ‘You’re not allowed to run away when things get too hot for you.’
‘I’ve never run away from anything in my life!’ Ella yelled back at him, her temper unleashing like a dam overflowing.
‘You run from anything that upsets you.’
‘I’m not upset!’ Ella practically screamed at him.
‘This is not the calm, sensible Ella that I know.’
‘But you don’t know me!’
A sleek ebony brow listed. ‘Don’t I?’
‘No, you don’t!’ she repeated squarely.
Aristandros settled scornful dark eyes on her. ‘I have to confess that I didn’t expect quite such a hysterical reaction.’
‘Who are you calling hysterical?’ Ella threw the demand at him furiously. ‘And why the use of that word, “expect”? Are you suggesting that you deliberately chose to flirt with other women to get a reaction out of me?’
His brooding gaze locked to her hectically flushed and lovely face, Aristandros spread brown hands in a graceful gesture that neither confirmed nor denied. ‘Would I do something that calculating?’
‘Yes!’ Ella’s seething gaze was glued to him, her accusing stance unabated. ‘Yes, you would if it amused you, because you are the most naturally devious and manipulative man I have ever met.’
‘I could simply have told you that you were behaving badly,’ Aristandros sliced back. ‘It’s ill-mannered to keep on taking phone calls in company.’
Outraged by that censure of her own behaviour, Ella looked at him in raw disbelief. ‘How dare you tell me that I was behaving badly?’
His sculpted jawline squared even more, and he settled his steady gaze on her with considerable cool. ‘It’s the truth. Your behaviour was atrocious this evening. You went out in a sulk and you never came out of it.’
‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say!’
‘Is it? You didn’t want to leave Callie.’
‘So, I’m human and caring, which is more than anyone could say of your attitude tonight. You didn’t give a damn that she was ill!’ Ella condemned him hotly.
‘Then why did I ensure that I spoke to the doctor who attended her? And why did I check back with Kasma after that?’
Ella ground her teeth together, while giving him a look that would have withered a lesser man. ‘I didn’t know you’d talked to the doctor…you didn’t mention it.’
‘In short, I was as informed as you were, with regard to your many phone conversations,’ Aristandros skimmed back, smooth as glass.
An almost overwhelming desire to slap him threatened Ella’s cracking composure. ‘Maybe you did speak to the doctor.’
Aristandros dealt her a tough look. ‘I’m not lying. I may not get all emotional and dramatic like you do, but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t also concerned about Callie tonight.’
In receipt of that cutting, hard-hitting reproof, Ella snatched in a deep, steadying breath. ‘I apologise if I misjudged you on that score.’
‘You did,’ Aristandros drawled, rubbing salt in an already open wound.
‘But I do not sulk…and I certainly wasn’t sulking earlier!’ Ella slung back at him angrily.
‘Maybe you have another word for it, but you were definitely in a strop.’
‘I was annoyed with you,’ she admitted grudgingly.
‘I’m not so thick-skinned that I didn’t get the message, but it was juvenile to parade your mood in public.’ Aristandros sent her a grim look. ‘I’m a very private man and I value discretion, but tonight you made a scene for the gossip columns. Do it one more time and I’m sending you back to London.’
Ella sent him a fiery look of sheer loathing. ‘You don’t need to send me any place. I’m leaving. But, my word, you are good at turning the tables, You haven’t said one word about your own inappropriate behaviour, except to imply that you were giving other women encouraging signals purely to rile me.’
Aristandros laughed out loud, the unexpected sound of his amusement shattering the tense atmosphere in the room. ‘Not to rile you.’
‘I don’t give a damn what you do,’ Ella hissed, slamming the case shut and closing it.
‘Liar,’ Aristandros framed silkily. ‘For a woman who doesn’t do jealousy, you were red-hot with it tonight.’
Ella went rigid, shot him a fuming appraisal and swung the case down. She was so mad she wanted to throw things at him. How dared he accuse her of being jealous? How dared he have the power to divine feelings she had not even admitted to herself? As she stalked across the room in a rage, he cut across her path and snatched the case off her. ‘What the heck do you think you’re doing?’ she shouted at him.
‘I’m preventing you from doing something very stupid, moli mou,’ Aristandros growled, throwing open the door of the dressing room and slinging the case in there with a resounding crash.
‘I’m not some whore who’s going to take whatever you throw at her!’ Ella flung at him wrathfully, adrenalin pumping like crazy through her veins and making it impossible for her to stay still or even think with any rationality. ‘I’m not interested in your money or what you can buy me. I’m not impressed. Nothing you could give me would persuade me to tolerate the kind of treatment you gave me tonight!’
‘Even if I admit that the only woman I want is you?’ Aristandros chided, leaning elegantly back against the door to close it. ‘Yes, I conducted an experiment tonight, I wanted a reaction.’
‘An experiment?’ Ella parrotted with raw incredulity.
‘A harmless one. Only a very possessive woman would get so worked up at the sight of me dancing with another woman.’
Her slim hands clenched into fists. So much emotion was hurtling round inside her that she felt frighteningly violent, and yet terrifyingly vulnerable at the same time.
‘But that’s all that I did,’ Aristandros continued steadily. ‘Nothing else.’
The hard truth of that statement struck Ella like an avalanche powerful enough to knock her off her feet. So he had danced with another woman and smiled and laughed…big deal! Social interactions of that ilk were normal at parties. What had made her overreact to such an extent? Why did she feel like rage was ready to explode out of her because she couldn’t contain it? He had wanted a reaction and she had given it to him. Only a very possessive woman…And in spite of all her denials she was possessive, wasn’t she? Violently possessive, with feelings and responses born from years of sitting by on the sidelines looking at photos of Ari with other women and reading about his affairs. Lily had suggested it was an unhealthy obsession, and so it was, for it had fostered a bone-deep streak of jealousy that she had not even recognised for what it was.