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“Anger requires an emotional investment I have ceased to feel for you. I see you clearly now, as I should have all along. I see the kind of woman you are. It is important that you remember how I feel about you, if this is to work.”
“Damn it, Guy,” she spoke quietly. “It was a mistake…”
“You can say that again.” His smile was dismissive. Just a sharp twist of his lips. His handsome face was otherwise dispassionate. “You know, I’ve wondered what you wanted from me. Was it the prestige you thought I could provide? Money? Connections?” He shook his head.
“It wasn’t like that,” she insisted. “Guy, I fell in love with you. Not because you’re richer than sin, or because you know a heap of important people. It was you.”
His laugh was almost indulgent. “Do not insult me by lying now. Not when you are showing your true colours by coming to me and begging for cash.”
“It’s a loan. I promise, I will pay you back.”
“Out of curiosity, why do you think I’d want to help you, Ava?”
“Addie,” she corrected automatically. “You told me you would do anything to make me smile. That my happiness meant everything to you. I thought that even after we… after we broke up, that maybe you would still care enough to want to help.”
She held her breath, the innocence of her hopes seeming absurd now, standing face to face with Guy and his obvious disdain.
“You were wrong.”
Her heart stuttered. Hopes dropped.
“I do not wish to help you. I certainly do not ‘care’ for you.”
Addie sucked in a breath that burned all the way down to the pit of her stomach. “Guy…”
He lifted his finger to her lips, pressing it against her, his eyes boring down on hers. “Nothing comes for free, Ava. You want me to give you money?”
“Lend me,” she reminded him croakily.
His expression was a swift rejection of her differentiation. “You came to my door, in need of my help. Did it not occur to you that I would expect something in exchange?”
Her breath hitched in her throat and her knees suddenly felt weak and tingly. “What do you mean?”
And then, the penny dropped. Was he actually suggesting that she sleep with him in exchange for money? Colour drained from her face and she stepped back in an instantaneous, silent rejection of any such notion.
“You can’t be serious?” She reached behind her, finding a chair and dropping down into it. The support was suddenly imperative.
“Serious about what?” He prompted, moving to stand over her, his arms crossed, his expression like iron.
“You think I’ll go to bed with you in exchange for money?”
His laugh was sardonic. “Oh, Ava. You were a sensational lover, but not irreplaceable, believe me. I do not need to pay any woman to get her into bed.”
Addie squeezed her eyes shut as emotions tumbled through her. Embarrassment at the way he’d belittled what they’d shared, reducing it to average sex when it had been anything but. Jealousy and rage at the way he’d just intimated she’d been usurped in his bed – and so easily. Hate, yes, hate, for how they were speaking to one another, when at one time she had loved him with all of her heart.
How could he think these things of her? How could he despise her so much?
“That’s a relief, because believe me, I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot barge pole.”
They both knew it was bravado. And a lie. Then again, she was a skilled liar, according to him, so what if she was simply living up to his expectations?
“I’ll enjoy disproving that at a later date.”
Her eyes lifted to his. That implied a future that she hadn’t envisaged. “What do you want from me, Guy?”
“It’s what you want from me,” he corrected. “And what you’re willing to do to get it.”
Addie thought of her mother, her mother who might as well have died with her father and brother, she thought of her family as it had once been. And the home that had housed them so happily for twelve years of Addie’s life. She thought of how close she was to losing it all, how desperately she needed to make the repayments that had amassed without her knowledge.
