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“Mitchell?” she asked, her voice cracking.
Very slowly he lifted his arm, and Julie’s eyes dropped to his left hand.
Where he was holding the New York Tribune.
Chapter Seventeen
Julie couldn’t tear her eyes away from the paper. She was too late.
Feeling as though her heart would explode, she forced her eyes up to his. She was braced for his anger. Braced for his hurt. But what she saw was so much worse. Anger she could have defused; hurt she could have soothed. Instead he was completely devoid of emotion, showing nothing but stone-cold indifference.
He was done with her.
Julie heard a small keening noise and realized it had
come from her own throat. “You read it,” she said needlessly.
“Yes, Julie, I read it.” His voice was dangerously soft.
“Mitchell—”
“You used me for a fucking story!”
She pressed her lips together, willing herself not to fall to her knees and beg. “You used me for a bet,” she said softly. “Can’t we—”
“It’s not the same thing,” he said with a disgusted look.
The arrogant dismissal in his tone ignited something dangerous in the pit of her stomach. Kelli and her dead-behind-the-eyes boyfriend completely faded from view as she focused on the only thing that mattered.
Mitchell.
Julie moved closer, trying to keep her voice calm. “Now hold on just a second, Wall Street. I’d say we both did a number on each other. I am sorry about what I did—so sorry—but how is my offense worse than yours?”
He looked incredulous. “Nobody would have known about my stupid bet!”
Kelli’s boyfriend made a nervous noise, and Mitchell cut him a death glare. “Almost nobody. But your little game would have been splashed on newsstands all over the country!”
“So it’s okay to play with someone’s heart if the audience is small, but it’s not okay if it’s public knowledge?”
“It’s a little more than public knowledge, Julie. Stiletto is the largest women’s magazine in the country, as you’ve reminded me a half dozen times.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have used your name,” she said, exasperated by his drama.
It was the wrong thing to say. And hardly the point. But he was being so damned sanctimonious and power-trippy that it just slipped out.
“Is that what you’ve been telling yourself as you fall asleep next to me every night? That you’d just change my name and everything would be okay?”
“Of course not, but Mitchell, can’t we just talk about this? Maybe alone?”
“As far as I’m concerned, there’s not much to talk about. You’re two steps away from a prostitute, except instead of money on the dresser, you want magazine fame, and instead of serving up sex, you serve up vapid little smiles. Oh, no, wait—you serve up sex too.”
Julie’s arms wrapped around her middle as though he’d punched her in the stomach. She’d known this confrontation would hurt, but she hadn’t expected this. Hadn’t expected cruelty. His jaw twitched as if in regret, but he didn’t take back his words.
Neither had she missed that she’d been the only one so far to deliver anything close to an apology. She clung to her anger as a way of staving off the hurt and inched closer, her eyes locked on his.
“You never had any intention of letting me be your girlfriend, did you?” she asked. “You only wanted to get me in bed, maybe have a few laughs, just so you could discard me in time to watch your damned baseball games.”
Mitchell gave a derisive snort. “As if you cared whether or not I thought of you as my girlfriend.”
