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Her face flamed. ‘I wasn’t…avoiding sex.’
‘Night after night you turned your back on me. You pretended to be asleep. And if I arrived home too early for you to play that trick, then you threw excuse after excuse at me—“headache”, “tired”, “wrong time of the month”—and I let you hold back because I was only too aware that you’d had absolutely no sexual experience before I came into your life. I was extremely patient with you. I had no idea what was going on in your head and you gave me no clues. You just lay there and hoped it would go away.’
The fact that he’d seen through her pitiful attempts to keep him at a distance increased her humiliation. ‘I’m sure you really regretted marrying me.’ In fact, she knew he did. Wasn’t that why he’d slept with her sister?
‘Do you want to know what I regret, Millie?’ His voice was suddenly weary and he ran his hand over the back of his neck to relieve the tension. ‘I regret that I didn’t tie you to that damn bed and force you to tell me what was going on in that pretty head of yours. I backed off when I should have pushed you for answers, and I regret that more deeply than you’ll ever know.’
‘There was nothing in my head,’ she lied. ‘I was tired, that was all. When you weren’t away on business trips, we were always out—every night there was something you wanted me to go to.’ Another event designed to highlight the differences between them and sap her confidence.
‘Tired?’ His gaze was sardonic. ‘On our honeymoon you had no sleep at all. We had sex virtually every hour of every day. You were as insatiable as I was. Fatigue wasn’t the reason you had your back to me when I came to bed.’
‘Leandro—’
‘The honeymoon was perfect. The problems started when we arrived home. Suddenly you couldn’t bear me to touch you. In fact, you went to the most extraordinary lengths to make sure that I didn’t touch you.’ His lips tightened. ‘I even wondered whether the reason you invited your sister to stay with us was because you wanted something else to keep us apart.’
Appalled by the gulf in their mutual understanding, she dug her fingers into her hair and shook her head. ‘You think I wanted you to have an affair with my sister?’
‘I’ve said all I’m going to say on that particular subject.’
Millie was shaking so much she was relieved she was sitting down. ‘I invited my sister to stay because I trusted her. And because I needed her help—she was always the one I turned to when I was in trouble.’
His brows met in a frown. ‘How were you in trouble?’
Millie sat in silence, wishing she’d phrased it differently. Talking to him wasn’t easy, was it? They didn’t have that depth of understanding in their relationship. They’d shared scalding passion and nothing more. And Leandro was so confident, he wouldn’t be able to understand anyone who wasn’t. ‘This is very hard for me,’ she muttered, emotion swamping her. ‘I didn’t just lose my husband, I lost my sister. She was my best friend. And I lost her long before she died on that dusty, lonely road.’
‘I want to know why you were so quick to assume that I’d have an affair. We’d been married three months, Millie! Three months. Hardly enough time for disillusionment to set in.’
‘I knew your reputation.’
‘Which was earned before I met you.’
Millie smiled through tears that refused to be contained. ‘Oh, sure.’ Her voice was choked. ‘Beautiful me. So vastly superior in every way to those skinny models and actresses who knew how to dress, how to walk—I can quite see how it would have been impossible to notice them with me in the room. You should have reprogrammed the lights in this house so that they went off when I walked into a room. That might have helped our marriage.’
‘Sarcasm doesn’t suit you. It was your sweet nature and your gentleness that drew me to you.’ Leandro’s eyes narrowed, his gaze suddenly intent and focused. ‘You always put yourself down. Why didn’t I notice that before?’
‘I don’t know. At the beginning we didn’t do much talking and after that you were too busy being exasperated with me for getting everything wrong, I suppose.’ Millie thought about all those tense hours she’d spent trying to be who he wanted her to be. What an utter waste of time. Obviously she hadn’t even come close. Which just proved that even eight hours in a beauty salon couldn’t make a billionaire’s wife out of a farm girl. ‘You were partly to blame—you just dumped me in that situation and left me.’
‘What situation?’ He looked genuinely perplexed and she decided that there was no reason not to talk about it now.
It wasn’t as if she was trying to impress him. She’d given up on that. ‘You dumped me at all those really glitzy parties.’
‘I did not “dump” you. I was by your side.’
‘You were either talking business with someone in a suit—or you were smiling your smile at some beauty who was determined to grab your attention even though you were with me. And they all looked at me as though I’d crawled out from under a rock.’
‘You were my wife.’
‘Yes. That was the problem.’
Leandro gave her a look of exasperation. ‘You are making no sense at all! Being my wife gave you status—’
‘It was hugely stressful.’
He rubbed his fingers over his forehead. ‘If this is a problem you expect me to discuss rationally, you’re going to have to be a little more specific. In what way was being my wife “stressful”?’
Millie rubbed her hands over her legs, staring down at nails that had been bitten to nothing over the past year. ‘I didn’t have the necessary qualifications. I don’t know why you married me, but you made a mistake.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I did make a mistake.’ His fingers drummed a slow, deadly rhythm on the table. ‘And I’m putting that mistake right and we’re ending this mess.’
