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‘Arrête!’ he rasped against her jaw.
Reiko tensed even more. Frustration built inside him. Never in his life had getting through to someone been so difficult. And never in his life had he wanted to try with every fibre of his being.
He looked at her—the fight in her face, her desperation to hide her vulnerability—and something squeezed inside his chest. He forced himself to relax.
‘Stop tensing. It’s not good for your muscles. As for freezing me out—we’ve gone way past that.’
Her lips started to pout in annoyance. It took several deep breaths for him to resist the urge to taste her again. The time would come soon enough.
First he had more secrets to disclose. He took another breath.
‘I met Isadora Baptiste soon after I left Tokyo.’
Tension gripped her harder. He ran his hand over her knee to clasp one warm, shapely calf and massaged gently until she started to relax.
‘I’m not proud of it, but I tried to use her to forget you. It was only ever supposed to be temporary.’
Her lush lips firmed, and she wore a look of pained contempt. ‘She was a married woman.’
‘No, she wasn’t. She’d been divorced for three years when I met her. But her fashion house was tied into her husband’s business. Shares would’ve hit rock bottom if the public had found out she was no longer married to Antoine Baptiste.’
‘So it was better to be branded an adulteress in the interests of a healthy share price?’
‘Don’t sneer. Empires and dynasties have risen and fallen on the right marriage alliances. It’s as real in the twenty-first century as it was in the first.’
‘What about her children? Did she really abandon them?’
Damion’s insides clamped painfully. His guilt at knowing he’d unwittingly exacerbated the situation pierced sharply as much now as it had when he’d found out.
‘Oui, that is true.’
Her face reflected anger and disappointment. His heart raced with the need to obliterate both emotions.
r /> ‘Three months after I met her, she asked me to meet her children. I didn’t think I was equipped to be any sort of influence on children. I refused. She took it to mean I didn’t like children. I didn’t realise she’d cut them out of her life until her ex-husband informed me.’ Remembering what else Isadora had done, he felt his insides congeal with the familiar mix of pity and anger. ‘It turned out she wasn’t quite stable.’
Her eyes darted to his face and stayed. Slowly a breath eased out of her. ‘Why did you break up with her?’
‘Because I realised too late she epitomised everything I was trying to turn my back on.’
‘She was obsessed with you?’
He nodded. ‘After her husband told me she’d cut her children out of her life, I confronted her. It didn’t go well. Two hours later I found her in the bath, with her wrists slashed.’
CHAPTER TEN
‘MY GOD!’ SHOCK WAVES vibrated through her as she stared at Damion. The gleam of pain she’d seen in his eyes intensified. Against every need for self-preservation, she placed her hand on his hard cheek. ‘That can’t have been easy.’
‘It wasn’t,’ he stated baldly. ‘It became clear very quickly she had a serious problem. It was the reason Antoine had divorced her. I found her a facility in Arizona and arranged for her to be taken in.’
She remembered their conversation in the restaurant in Paris. ‘You went with her?’
He nodded. ‘I stayed for the first few weeks—until it became clear it wasn’t a what that was triggering her condition. It was who.’
A bleak look entered his eyes that tore at her insides. ‘You?’
He took her hand from her cheek and planted a soft kiss in her palm. Deep inside, Reiko felt something give—something she tried to gather back into solid form but failed.
‘So far I haven’t found a way to forgive myself for what I put her through. I knew the signs of obsession, yet I completely missed them. It won’t happen again.’
