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Behind her, Anastasios stilled, his body taut for a moment before he turned away, stalking to the bathroom and disposing of the condom. When he returned, she was gone, back in her own room.
He walked in without knocking, but he didn’t speak. He simply stared at her, trying to understand, to make sense of how this woman who’d allegedly used his father could possibly be a virgin.
She was still naked and given that he wore a pair of shorts, she felt at a distinct disadvantage. She reached for an oversized shirt and pulled it on.
“I don’t understand.” His accent was thick, his confusion was obvious.
“You haven’t understood a thing about me. Not from the first moment we met.”
His brows knit together, the symmetrical features of his face highlighted by the shadows of the early morning light. “So this was what? A way to prove a point?”
She startled.
“Did you think you could sleep with me as evidence that you hadn’t slept with my father?”
She pressed her hand to her lips to quell her emotions, to hold them in rather than letting them burst out. “Even now, you see the worst in me,” she whispered unevenly, tears on her lashes. “Even now you think everything is calculated and premeditated.”
He compressed his lips until they were rimmed white. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Would you have believed me?” She asked, softly, wrapping her arms around her torso.
“Yes.” But they both knew it was a lie.
“Sure. Just like you believe the ‘sob story’ of my childhood,” she muttered, and he had the decency to look, momentarily ashamed. “I don’t understand what the big deal is,” she said after a moment. “You’re used to one-night stands, and that’s all this was.”
Perhaps surprise kept him silent, because he stood there, staring at her, for several beats.
She pushed home her advantage, needing to get rid of him before she gave into her tears.
“And I’m exhausted,” she said, gesturing to the bed. It was an outright lie, but she didn’t care. “Would you excuse me?”
Consternation was writ large on his face. Her heart squeezed.
“We need to talk about this.”
“Why? To what end? It doesn’t change anything.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true.” She rubbed her upper arms, but it didn’t warm the ice cold of her heart. “You’re still the same guy who’s spent a month thinking the worst of me, berating me, accusing me, embarrassing me in public, who threw a cheque in my face and never stopped to wonder why I hadn’t cashed it,” She let that point sink in. “I tore it up, by the way, and threw it in the bin. It’s long gone.”
His eyes swept the room, almost as though he were looking for an anchor point.
“Sex is one thing, but do you really think I could ever forgive you for the way you treated me?” Her eyes slammed into his, the fierce anger flooring him. “This,” she pointed from herself to him, “was a one-time thing. An ending, not a beginning.”
He was uncharacteristically silent for several beats.
“I’d like to sleep now.”
“Phoebe—,”
“No.” She was angry and hurt, and shocked. “It’s over. There’s nothing else to say.”
He moved to the door, standing in the frame, his face tilted to look back at her. “You’re wrong. There’s plenty, but it will wait.”
He hadn’t sleptat all after that, and he suspected she hadn’t either, if the bags under her eyes were anything to go by.
She was wearing the same outfit she’d been dressed in when she came onboard the yacht, her hair pulled into a ponytail, her features pinched, her eyes meeting his but totally shielded, so he couldn’t understand a single thing she was feeling.
