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Only one, Bee completed inwardly. If you sleep with my husband I might try to murder you.
‘Sergios and I have been very close for a great many years,’ Melita informed her with a self-satisfied smile.
Not a muscle moving on her taut face, Bee compressed her lips and pretended to sip at the too-hot coffee that Melita had poured for her. ‘I guessed that.’
‘I have no intention of poaching on your territory,’ Melita declared importantly. ‘I’ve never wanted to be a wife or a mother, so I don’t covet what you have.’
‘But you do covet Sergios,’ Bee heard herself say helplessly.
‘Any woman would covet him,’ the other woman fielded, her sultry eyes widening in amused emphasis. ‘But there’s no reason why we can’t share him.’
‘Just one,’ Bee murmured flatly. ‘I don’t share.’
Melita’s pencilled brows drew together in surprise at that bold statement. ‘Is that a declaration of war?’
‘It’s whatever you choose to make of it. Why did you invite me here?’ Bee enquired drily.
‘I wanted to reassure you that I have no desire to damage your marriage. Sergios really does need a wife to do wifely things like looking after his houses and his children. Naturally I’m aware that it is a marriage of…shall we say…’ Melita looked unconvincingly coy for a moment ‘…mutual convenience?’
‘Oh, dear…is that what Sergios told you?’ Bee asked, wincing with an acting ability she had not known she possessed, for she refused to cringe at the apparent level of Melita’s knowledge about Sergios’s reasons for marrying her. ‘Men can be so reluctant to break bad news. I’m afraid our marriage is rather more than one of convenience.’
‘If by that you mean that Sergios shares your bed, I expected that. After all you’re there when I can’t be and he’s a man, very much a man,’ Melita purred with glinting eyes of sensual recollection.
For a split second Bee felt so sick that she almost ran into the en suite and lost her sparse hospital breakfast. She could not bear to think of Melita naked and intimately wound round Sergios. That hurt, that hurt like a punch in the stomach. Nor could she bear to consider herself a sexual substitute, a sort of cheap and available fast-food option instead of the grand banquet of thrilling sensuality that she imagined Melita might offer.
‘You do realise, I hope, that your husband is still shagging me every chance he gets!’ Dropping the civilised front with a resounding crash, Melita surveyed Bee with angry, resentful dark eyes. ‘He was with me on your wedding night and I have no intention of giving him up.’
‘Whatever,’ Bee framed woodenly, setting down the cup with precise care and rising to her feet again with all the dignity she could muster. ‘I think we’ve shared a little too much for comfort. If you contact me again I’ll tell Sergios.’
‘Don’t you dare threaten me!’ Melita ranted furiously.
Bee walked out and she didn’t look back or breathe until she was safe inside the lift again. Sergios was still sleeping with his mistress and had been from the first night of their marriage. Why was she so shocked? What else had she expected? That a man with a notoriously active libido would suddenly turn over a new leaf on entering a platonic marriage? That had never been a possibility. Before their marriage she had agreed to him maintaining his relationship with Melita. He had said upfront that Melita was not a negotiable facet of his life. Having received that warning, she had chosen to ignore it by allowing their marriage to become much more real than either of them had ever envisaged.
Leaving the hotel, Bee was blank-eyed, her mind in chaos and emotions raging through her in horribly distressing waves. She didn’t know where she was going but she knew she couldn’t return to the hospital in such a state, nor would she involve her mother when she was so upset. Her cell phone was ringing and she checked it. It was Jon Townsend. Heaving a sigh, but in a strange way grateful for the distraction, Bee answered his call. He invited her to join him at his apartment for lunch with the charity’s PR woman. It was somewhere to go, something to do in a world rocking on its foundations, and she agreed and boarded a bus, too wrapped in her own unhappy thoughts to notice that she was being followed.
Sergios had already cancelle
d appointments and left his office, planning to meet with Beatriz at the hospital. The news that she had met up with Melita had hit him like a torpedo and almost blown him out of the water. Where had that come from? How had that happened? What had he done to deserve that outcome? Nourishing a strong sense of injustice along with the suspicion that he was being royally stitched up, Sergios was in no mood to receive the bodyguard’s second piece of news: Beatriz had entered an apartment owned by Jon Townsend?
‘Beatriz…’ From the minute Bee stepped through the door, she began regretting having agreed to lunch. Jon was alone, the PR lady apparently having been held up in traffic. Unfortunately her host’s effusive welcome made Bee feel even more awkward.
Bee toyed with the salad on her plate and for the third time attempted to steer their conversation back to the subject of the charity and away from the past times that Jon seemed much more eager to discuss.
‘We were so close back then.’ Jon sighed fondly.
‘Not as close as I thought at the time. We were still very young,’ Bee pointed out lightly.
‘I didn’t realise how much you meant to me until it was too late and I’d lost you,’ Jon said baldly.
‘It happens.’ Her attempted smile of acknowledgement was a mere twist of her lips, for she was in no frame of mind to deal tactfully with Jon’s evident determination to resurrect their shared past. ‘If you had been happy with me you wouldn’t have strayed.’
Jon brought a hand down on top of hers and she was so irritated with him that she very nearly lifted her other hand to stab him with the fork. ‘Jenna—’
Bee lifted a hand to silence him. ‘Stop right there. I really don’t want to hear about your marriage, Jon. It’s none of my business.’
‘Perhaps I want to make it your business.’
‘More probably you’re barking up the wrong tree—I’m in love with my husband,’ Bee responded impatiently. ‘And now I think it’s time I went. I want to get back to the hospital.’
