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But it had happened.
Hadn’t it?
“I’m not even sure it was real anymore,” she admitted as she fell on the couch and covered her face with her hands. “It all happened at that loathsome masquerade, when I was wearing that stupid wench costume you dared me to wear! He…he was wearing all black. I was outside and thought it was you, and then he kissed me, and we did some intimate things, and I noticed the ring he was wearing as he held me, and I knew that it must be him.”
The deafening, tomblike silence that followed stretched so long and taut, she sat up in confusion and studied Julian in growing alarm.
Suddenly, he stormed down the hallway like a man possessed, and Molly sighed and rubbed her temples to ward off a headache. She just hoped he hadn’t gone to fetch a gun or something, for what was she going to do now? She was usually the impulsive one and always counted on Jules being the one with a cool head.
She considered following him, talking some reason into him, explaining that it was just a kiss and all that, but then he returned less than a minute later and produced something shiny from his pants pocket.
He sounded livid now. Livid.
“You mean this ring, Molly?”
Seven
As Molly stared at the ring he was holding between his two fingers, a horrific sensation crawled up her stomach like a tarantula.
She blinked several times, and her jaw fell open. “Wh-what are you doing with that?”
Garrett used to wear it all day, every day. The platinum was scratched and dented with age, for it had been in the family for generations, boasting at its center a rare blue diamond that was supposed to be worth millions.
“It’s my ring. Mine. I won it from him. Over a month ago. He bet me that it was worth more than my autographed Mark McGwire seventieth-home-run baseball when he was really freaking drunk. He was off by several hundred thousand and lost the bet.” Julian smiled at her, a sharp, angry smile that cut through her skin like the clean, expert slice of a dagger. “I just wear the ring to piss him off sometimes when I know I’ll be seeing him.”
All the color drained from her face, as though all the blood in her body was going straight to her heart, which was racing in her breast like a mad thing. If her ears were hearing correctly and her dazed brain processing correctly, it seemed that he was basically admitting to owning that ring on the night of the masquerade. The night that a stranger had kissed her ever-loving heart out.
Oh. My. God.
The conclusion she’d come up with terrified her. Julian…had been the one wearing that ring? Julian had whispered…those sexy words in his raspy voice while his big, long-fingered hands had touched her so provocatively…?
Julian. Her hero. Her protector. Her best friend. Her young crush. Her lifetime love.
It had been Julian who’d kissed her and made her have an orgasm while he’d fondled her? How he must have laughed! Laughed at her naïveté, at her stupidity, at her…
“I can’t believe,” he breathed softly, his eyes glowing like golden moons, “that you wouldn’t know that I was the one who kissed you that night.”
Grief and unexpected humiliation cut through her like a thousand knives. Julian had known all this time.
Her chest constricted so tightly she thought she would break apart, but she still stubbornly shook her head from side to side. “I don’t understand.”
His kisses. Oh, dear, his kisses. Three total. Each one so different. One, passionate and drunk. The next, cocky and trying to show off in front of Kate. And the last one, in a dark room, where it was just him and her, supposedly playing a game….
Please no, I can’t be that stupid.
“I don’t understand,” she repeated, more frantic now.
In three steps, he closed the distance between them, and when his fingers curled around her arm, Molly could feel the leashed power in his hold, see how he visibly fought for control. “I think I do. You thought I was Garrett that night—when I kissed you hard enough to make your mouth swell under mine. You let me put my hands between your legs, touch your breasts, maul you like a—”
“Stop it, Julian. Stop it!”
She leaped away and backed off, hardly able to look into those fiercely jealous green eyes, which were only reminding her that he—he who was her everything—had done all that. Every bit of what he’d said, and more.
Julian had kissed her, had turned her life upside down with
his touch. He’d made her shatter in his arms, and then he’d acted as if it had meant nothing. Nothing.
He was her best friend, and yet he’d kept her in the dark all this time. He’d been intimate with her, had made her feel as if he wanted her, cherished her, but instead he’d been happily helping her seduce his own brother!
