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“How? By fucking me?”
“Isabelle.” He actually had the nerve to reach for her.
She heard the growling noise coming from her own throat, and she couldn’t stop it. She didn’t want to. She slapped his hands away, and then she kept on slapping, hitting his arms, his face, trying to scratch him and make him bleed. Trying to make him hurt for what he’d done.
He caught her wrists before she was satisfied. “Stop it.”
“Why didn’t you take me in, huh? Were you waiting to see if my dad showed up? Or were you just holding out for a few more blow jobs?”
“It wasn’t like that, damn it!” He looked furious, as if he was the one who had a right to be mad.
She tried to jerk her arms away, and when that didn’t work, she kneed him in the balls. Or she tried to. He blocked her knee with his thigh and twisted her arms around until she was facing away from him.
“Stop,” he said close to her ear, his arms wrapped around her in a parody of intimacy. She screamed and struggled, but she knew it was hopeless. All those muscles she’d admired so much weren’t just for show, and she was just a stupid, useless artist who couldn’t fight or hide or protect herself. Her screams turned to sobs.
“Isabelle. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“How long have you known?” she managed to say past her thick throat. Her voice sounded like a stranger’s.
“Shit,” he muttered, and she knew. He’d known from the start.
“You knew before. Before you even got here.”
“No. It wasn’t like that. You acted so suspicious of me when I first showed up that I started checking into you. That’s all. That’s all it was.”
She slumped, giving up on fighting. She’d given herself away, just as she’d feared, and now it was all over. “Just take me in,” she rasped. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Ever.”
“I’m not taking you in. Stand up.”
She eyed him warily, suspicious about what he wanted from her now. But when his arms loosened, she found the strength to stand on her own two feet, though she put one hand on the wall as he let her go, just in case.
“Do you know where your father is?”
She laughed. “No.”
“Are you helping him?”
“I haven’t heard from him since I left Chicago. He doesn’t know where I am or what my name is. All right? Is that all you wanted?”
He sighed. “Can we sit down?”
“Sure. Maybe I can serve coffee and cake. We can pretend we’re fuck buddies again.”
“Just sit!”
Isabelle shrugged. She’d gotten her composure, finally, but her legs still trembled as she moved carefully to the living room. She took the chair so he couldn’t sit near her.
He collapsed onto the couch. “I didn’t know who you were the first time we... After your party... I didn’t know until the next day when I had a chance to look up your mom and her accident.”
Her heart twisted so hard it hurt. “You were spying on my personal conversations. And trying to get me to talk about myself... I thought you were actually interested in me. Jesus.”
“I was. I’d realized how much I liked you and, I swear to God, at that point I was trying to disprove my own suspicions so I could let it go and get to know you.”
She concentrated on the one mark she’d managed to leave on his face. The scratch was already fading. It wouldn’t hurt him for more than a few more minutes, if he’d even felt it at all. “We slept together,” she said, “and you kept checking into me.”
He looked away from her. “Yes.”
“And you thought that was okay?”
