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Roman reared back as if slapped. ‘I don’t...’
‘It’s not often that you are lost for words, Roman.’
He stared at her, unsure what she was saying, unsure as to what was happening.
‘What game are you playing?’ he demanded.
She cocked her head to one side. ‘The one you apparently decided we were playing.’
‘Would you stop speaking in riddles!’
That his anger apparently caused her only to smile was deeply unsettling.
‘I think that might be the first real and honest reaction to this whole damn thing since you took me to the restaurant. A tad ironic, but real at least.’
Roman ground his teeth together so hard he thought he might have heard something crack. For here she was again. The beautiful, proud, determined fury that he had met here six months ago. The woman who had seduced as much as been seduced. The woman who had become the mother of his child and keeper of his heart.
‘You want my anger? Then get out,’ he roared, even more horrified that his fury seemed to have exactly the opposite effect on Ella.
‘But how am I supposed to witness your anger if I am gone? No, Roman. Surely better for me to be here and witness you in your full monstrosity, no?’
He wanted to hurl the bottle he still held against the wall beside him, and the only thing staying his hand was that somehow the glass might shatter and catch her. And when everything in him was screaming out to protect her, to keep her from him, that he could not do.
‘What are you doing here? What do you want from me?’ he demanded.
‘I want to know why you lied.’
‘Good God, Ella, everything I’ve ever said to you has been a lie.’
‘Not everything. But certainly all that you said in the restaurant.’
He couldn’t look at her. He had done that day, but it had taken everything in him and he no longer had the energy to fight. He knew that if she looked too hard, thought too much, she’d realise the truth. And he had to protect her from that.
‘You are fooling yourself. Once again. So naïve.’ He forced the cruel words through thin lips.
&n
bsp; ‘But no longer innocent?’
‘Have I not hurt you enough? Have I not proved to you how depraved and damaged I am?’
‘I will not lie and tell you that. Because there have been too many lies between us and you have hurt me. And I’d not use depraved—that was your word—but damaged? Yes, you have been damaged, but not broken and not irretrievably so. I...’ She paused, and he couldn’t not look at her, couldn’t not face whatever it was that she would say next. ‘I owe you an apology.’
‘Hell, Ella. What are you—?’
‘I asked you to trust me. I asked you to trust me to know that you could be better. Trust that I knew that about you. And I let you down. Because at the first sign, the first suggestion that you might not be, I walked...ran even, not looking back. Not looking back enough to see the truth.’
He was shaking then. He was racked by it, the trembling that had started in his heart, spreading out through his body, and he felt the press of hot wet heat against the back of his eyelids. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t...
‘I told you that I loved you and I left.’
She was killing him. Tearing him apart with her words. All the things he had never wanted to face, never wanted to know or feel.
‘I will not take full responsibility for that, because you did have a hand in that. But, for my part, I am sorry.’
He wanted to rush to her, drop to his knees and beg her forgiveness. Beg her to take him back, promise to do whatever it would take to make it up to her. Tell her that...that...he loved her more than life itself. But he couldn’t. Not yet.
‘Ella, please.’ Roman no longer knew what he was asking for. For her to stop, or never stop.
