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“I haven’t forgotten,” he growled. “And you would never listen to explanations.”
“Explanations come before you spend the night with another woman hanging off you, not after,” she pointed out sarcastically. “And I didn’t want explanations. The fact that you did it, without telling me, was enough.”
“We weren’t married…”
“I was falling in love with you,” she cried out. “You knew it. You knew it, and rather than telling me I was wasting my time, you let me find it out at an event I was covering for the paper. You didn’t tell me anything.”
“I didn’t know you would be there.”
“Which only makes it worse.” She swiped her fingers beneath her eyes before blinking back her tears. “I’ve paid enough for our affair, Joe.”
She turned, stalking from the room before he could stop her. Following her, he caught the bedroom door before she could slam it closed and moved slowly into the room.
“Explain that comment.” Suspicion uncurled in his stomach. He had tried to convince himself that Grant had been good to her, that he had loved her. Through the past two years he had never imagined she had been anything but worshiped.
“He married me because he was convinced you cared about me.” Her eyes flashed with pain and anger. “Three months after our marriage I left him, Joe.” Mockery twisted her features. “Only to be forced back. He blackmailed me with a mistake my father made when first starting the newspaper. He wasn’t about to let me leave, to lose the one thing he had to torment you with.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” He forced back his anger, his disbelief.
“Blackmail, Joe. You understand the concept, right?”
“I understand the concept.” He held on to his control by a thread.
She wasn’t lying. He knew Maggie. In that moment he realized that he knew her better than he had ever known anyone in his life. And he couldn’t make himself believe that she was lying.
“He left me alone for the most part, as long as I played the role.” She sniffed back her tears as she sat slowly on the edge of the bed. “We had separate bedrooms. He never tried to touch me. He got off on hurting you. He hated you.” She shook her head, confusion filling her voice. “I never understood that.”
Joe met her gaze as she lifted her eyes to his, watching him with such perplexed anger that it caused his chest to clench.
“Did he ever say why?” He had never really known Grant—Joe realized that now—but a lifetime of believing in the friendship he thought they had was hard to put behind him. He had trusted Grant above anyone else in the world, even his family. Grant had been the brother Joe had never had. At least, he had thought Grant was. Separating himself from those memories sometimes felt as though he were separating a part of his soul from his body.
“Oh, he had plenty of reasons.” Weariness washed over her expression. “The promotion you got and he didn’t. Something about bullies in school. But I think most of it came down to the fact that your family was stinking rich, according to him. That bothered him most of all.”
And Joe had never known. That was the hardest part for him. He had never suspected that Grant had hated him so thoroughly.
“I loved him like a brother.” And he had, since they were boys. “That’s why I didn’t stand between you when I learned who he was dating, then marrying. It’s the reason I left it alone, Maggie. I thought you deserved someone to love you, and I thought he loved you.”
She stared back at him for long moments, remnants of anger glittering in her dark green eyes.
“Such sacrifice,” she snorted, the sound causing him to clench his teeth against the frustration eating at him. “You should apply for sainthood, Joe.”
She rose to her feet once again, moving slowly around the bedroom before stopping on the far side and turning back to face him.
“What did you think I was going to do now? Fall back into your arms as though the past two and a half years never happened?”
“I could have handled it.” He shrugged tensely. “I never forgot, Maggie—”
“Then forget now.”
Joe read the wariness in her eyes.
“Have you forgotten, Maggie?” He moved toward her slowly, dying to touch her, to taste her one more time. “Did you forget how hot I could make you? How hot and wet you got for me, baby?”
He didn’t touch her as he moved to her; he stared into her eyes, feeling the needs rising inside him as fiercely as they reflected in her eyes.
“This isn’t going to get us anywhere,” she whispered, her hands clenching the material at the front of her shirt. “I won’t let you do this to me again.”
“That’s what I swore about you a week ago,” he admitted. “That I wouldn’t get so hard for you that the only thing that mattered was getting you beneath me, burying my cock so deep inside you I didn’t know where you ended and where I began. That I wouldn’t ache for you, that I wouldn’t need to hear that soft little cry you make when you come for me.”
