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“By that point, you and I weren’t communicating as well, and I thought maybe you’d be happier in Salt Lake around your old friends. But I never intended it to be a permanent move. I despised Sheila.”
Ashley flung her head back. “I saw how much you despised her, Cord.”
Her body tautened. “I was playing a role, Ashley. I pretended to be civil to her and get along until the time came when the board members could legitimately oust her from the business altogether. Then I’d force her out of the house with some kind of payoff.”
His eyes narrowed. ?
??Unfortunately, I underestimated her ability to hurt you. She was and is an opportunistic exploiter who deliberately undermined our marriage by driving you away. But mark my words, one day I’m going to beat her at her own game, and she’ll be long gone from our lives.”
Cord sounded deadly serious, but Ashley knew what she’d seen in Cord’s bedroom. It had been no hallucination.
“She’s also an amazingly beautiful woman, and was able to captivate both you and your father.”
His body went rigid. “You honestly think I found her attractive once I found out she’d been sleeping with my father?”
Cord didn’t raise his voice. Rather he spoke in a deadly soft tone. It sent shivers down her spine. “Sometimes you can’t help what you feel.”
“A fatal attraction?” he interjected with a sneer.
She hung her head. “Yes.”
“Give me the dates and places my supposed liaisons occurred, Ashley. Better yet, ask me to take a lie detector test.”
“I don’t need any proof. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“When?” he demanded, his whole expression primitive.
“Worried, Cord?”
He stared at her for an interminably long moment without saying anything. Eventually he shook his head. “No. But it’s getting through to me that you think you saw something so damning in your eyes, you walked out on me hours after we’d made love.”
Her heart was beating too hard. Her breathing had grown shallow. “Vince was right. Two people can recall the same event with diametrically opposed points of view.”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t you remember?” she reminded him. “As soon as I fell asleep, you left my bed.”
“That’s true. If I’d stayed, I wouldn’t have been able to control myself and I would have made love to you again. After what we’d shared, I had a lot of thinking to do about us and our future.”
“You’re a liar, Cord!” she cried out. “You went straight back to your own bed where Sheila was waiting.”
“And you witnessed all this with your own eyes?”
“Yes.”
“That means you were coming to find me.” The satisfaction in those words twisted the knife a little more.
“Oh, I found you all right.” By now her hands had curled into fists.
“Tell me exactly what you saw.” While she shook convulsively, he stood calm as water in a still pond.
“Sheila was lying on your bed,” she began, “in a very provocative pose. She had put on your kelly-green bathrobe, the one I gave you on our first wedding anniversary. The one you’d worn to my room.” Her voice quavered precariously. “The belt was undone, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.”
“Go on.”
“She’d been in the shower because I could see the wet hair dangling from the towel she’d wrapped around her head.”
“All right. Now tell me where I was,” he muttered as an all-consuming rage seemed to have overpowered him.
