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She swallowed, her delicate throat moving visibly. “If I say ‘yes’, then I suppose you’d just drag me to bed to prove what a liar I am?”
Shame barrelled through him. Shame at the way he’d used her awakening sensuality to achieve his ends, shame that he couldn’t deny her charge. “You told me a moment ago that I use sex to control you, and now you’re saying it again. I understand how you feel, Ella, so I’m asking you questions in an attempt to understand you, yet you seem determined not to answer me.”
She sighed softly. “What do you want to know?”
Everything troubled him. Her surrender, her slumped shoulders, the pale colour of her face. He had the strangest feeling he’d taken something very beautiful and rare and was slowly destroying it. Doubts were new to Elon and he pushed them away with determination, focussing on the information he sought instead.
“Why have you lived a lie?”
She turned away from him again, her face troubled. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me.”
“I wanted people to believe the lies.”
“Which people?”
Her hands fidgeted in her lap. “My father.” It was so soft he barely heard it.
Elon crouched down in front of Ella, putting his hand over hers.
“I knew he didn’t love me, but I thought if I made him angry enough, if I embarrassed him enough, he’d have no choice but to send for me.” Her lips twisted in an imitation of a smile. “I enjoyed doing everything I could to get in the papers – the more reckless a story the better. I lived to imagine his response, the way his media might portray me.”
Elon ignored the rush of sympathy he felt for the hurt young woman Ella had been. He ignored the blade of anger that speared him when he thought of her father and the way his inability to love Ella had shaped her life. “You went to nightclubs and parties, dressed in barely-there outfits, hung off the arms of Hollywood celebrities and minor royalty all with the aim of embarrassing your father?”
“Pathetic, right?” She pulled away from him, moving her delicate body to standing, pacing to the window.
“That’s exactly the word I would use for it.” He strode across to Ella, turning her in his arms. “Your father was a pathetic excuse for a man. What he did to you is unforgivable.” He captured her face, holding her still, staring into her eyes and ignoring the thundering of blood in his body, trying to focus on sensible, rational thoughts. “If he were alive, I’d want to kill him.”
He felt her shiver at the harshness of his words. “And make everything worse between our countries?” She compressed her lips. “It wouldn’t be worth it.”
“You don’t think you’re worth it?”
Her eyes fired to his and she shook her head slowly. “I just meant – I made my bed. I created an image over a number of years. I wanted to hurt him, and it backfired. Now I have to live with what I did. I wouldn’t want you – or anyone – going to war on my account.”
She turned and left before he could argue the point further, before he could realise how fiercely he wanted to argue with her about this. He watched her leave, caught between a desire to follow and a need to let her go. For the first time since returning from the mountains, Elon had the strongest feeling things were getting out of his control – and that wasn’t a sensation he relished.
