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She huffed moodily. “I don’t.” Her eyes were uncertain. He was so much more adept at these kinds of conversations. Jane always felt that she was being led through a maze of his making, like a rabbit chasing a carrot.
“So there have been other men?”
Jane closed her eyes. “One man.”
Carlo could have keeled over. He felt hot and cold, angry and bereaved. He didn’t speak. He knew Jane would continue, now that she’d cracked the vault.
“It happened a year after I left you. I… I wanted to prove to myself that I was over you.”
Carlo was glad her eyes were closed. His expression was a thundercloud that might have silenced her if she’d seen it.
“And?” He prompted, finally, his voice holding a faraway quality.
“And I wasn’t.” When she looked at him, her gaze was laced with accusation. “It was a disaster.”
He had never felt so jealous in his life. It was an emotion he knew he would never be able to tolerate. The thought of another man making love to Jane had permanently switched something inside of him. He had been possessive of her, and he’d lost her. And another man had taken her.
He pushed away from Jane, and sat on the edge of the bed. His breath seemed to burn in his throat. He stared out of the window, but saw nothing.
Jane looked at his flawless, tanned back, and felt a clench of guilt. He was hurting, and she knew why. She reached out and traced her fingertips down his spine. He was as still as a stone.
“I liked him. He was very different to you.” She leaned back against the pillows, letting her hand fall to her side. “He was sweet. Only a year older than me, and easy to get along with. We had fun together.”
Carlo’s gut was bursting. He felt like he was going to be sick.
“You know, movies. Dinner. Nothing serious. It wasn’t even remotely intense.”
It was the kind of relationship she deserved. With the kind of man who deserved her. He stood and paced across to the window. His hands were on his hips; his shoulders squared.
Jane pulled the duvet up to her chin. Confessing this to Carlo had made her feel feverish. And yet she’d owed him nothing. Their divorce had been final. She had never expected to see him again.
“We were over,” she said emphatically. “I told myself that you could have come after me. That you hadn’t, because you hadn’t wanted me anymore. So when Roger began to get… umm… amorous… I just went with it.”
Carlo closed his eyes, and braced himself against the wall. The sound of his tormented breathing was the only noise in the room for so long, that he wondered if Jane was going to say anything else.
“It only happened once.”
Carlo groaned silently.
“You and I were over,” she repeated.
And though he knew it wasn’t fair, jealousy was zipping through him, sending his self-control into a tailspin. “As if we could ever be over,” he retorted angrily.
Jane’s own emotions were going haywire. She sat up straight, and glared at his back. “You can’t seriously be annoyed about this,” she said with disbelief. “I find it hard to believe you were faithful to me when we were married. At least I waited until long after the divorce had come through.”
Carlo’s face blanched white. “I did not cheat on you.”
Jane rolled her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
“And so you and this Roger fucked?” He demanded, spinning around and shocking her into silence with the mask of distress he wore. “He kissed you and moved within you? His hands ran over your breasts, and your arse, and you wrapped your legs around his waist?”
Jane began to shake like a leaf, and tears clogged her throat. “We were over,” she whispered again, but it only seemed to make Carlo angrier.
“Did he make you scream as I do?”
“Don’t be disgusting,” she said quietly. Her eyes dropped from his furious gaze. Her insides were trembling; her heart was banging so loudly that she could hear blood in her ears.
“Oh, I’m dying to know, cara. Did you come again and again in his arms, as you do in mine?”
