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‘For God’s sake, Nina—that could have killed me!’
‘I wish it had, you lying, slimy creep!’ She followed it up with the heavy book, this time aiming for a bigger target, and it hit him square in the centre of his chest. A cough of pain wheezed out of his lungs as he doubled over, rubbing his heart. ‘No wonder you had a “textbook” presentation of amnesia!’
‘God, Nina—’
He could beg for mercy until hell froze over and she wouldn’t listen. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your memory—there never has been. It was all a set-up! You were stringing me along. You knew exactly who you were all the time!’
‘That’s not entirely true,’ he defended himself through another harsh cough. ‘I was dazed at first. I wasn’t sure what was real and what wasn’t—’
‘Don’t lie!’ she shrieked. ‘I can prove it. I had the credit cards you supposedly didn’t even know you owned—the cards you rang up and cancelled because you thought they were lost! Well, here they are back again. Take them—I never wanted them. They’re as worthless as you are!’ She tore them out of the holder and threw them at him one by one, followed by the stack of business cards that struck him on the cheek and scattered like confetti over the floor.
He rubbed his cheek, ice filming his eyes as he looked at the scattered cards at his feet. ‘You had these?’ he grated harshly. ‘You’ve had them all along?’
She would have liked to torment him by saying yes, but she wasn’t going to give him an excuse to accuse her of trying to steal them. ‘No, I found them down the back of the couch the morning Ray got home, and when I looked at them…I phoned your office and then I knew…I remembered.’
He went white.
‘You’ve got your memory back,’ he said, his voice boiling with black bitterness. ‘You bitch! You knew two days ago and you didn’t tell me? Who’s been stringing who along…babe?’
His insolent sneer fueled her blazing temper. ‘Why should I have told you? I don’t owe you anything. And, unlike you, my amnesia is not a sick joke I play on people for my own sadistic ends. I haven’t got my memory back, only the small chunk of it that confirms what a twenty-four-carat-gold bastard you are.’
Ryan snapped to rigid attention, his eyes narrowing to splinters of blue ice as she continued to blaze away at him with bullets of contempt.
‘What I remember is a couple of months I rather would forget, a couple of months of you making my brother’s life a misery—’ Her breath caught on a humiliating sob.
‘That’s it?’ He snapped out the hoarse question as he started prowling towards her. ‘That’s all…a couple of months nearly three years ago? You don’t remember any more than that?’
Her fists bunched helplessly at her sides. ‘That’s all I need to remember as far as you’re concerned—’
‘Oh, no, it isn’t,’ he cut her off savagely, moving in closer, his eyes locked on her furious face. ‘Oh, no…I haven’t finally tracked you down to be fobbed off like that.’
Tracked her down?
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
His voice was low, purposefully intent. ‘I’m talking about you and me, babe.’
Her breath dug a hollow in her chest. ‘There is no “you and me”,’ she denied in a thin, high voice.
‘How do you know?’ he said cruelly. ‘You’re hiding out here on your magical little island, hiding from all the things you don’t want to remember, things that I don’t have any choice but to live with.’
Nina felt a tremor of deep foreboding. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I can’t—’
‘Not yet. But you will by the time I’ve finished with you,’ he said brutally. ‘I’m not leaving until I get what I want.’
‘And what’s that, for God’s sake?’ she cried wildly.
His expression was dark and saturnine, his smile a caricature of tenderness. ‘How about the two years you and I spent together? How about the money you stole when you walked out on me without so much as a goodbye kiss?’
