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Something glittered in the depths of his eyes. Emotions she couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t remember.” He took a step towards her, and she instinctively moved backwards. He expelled an angry sigh of impatience. “I’m not going to hurt you. God, what happened between us that you’re afraid of me?”
She arched a brow but he could see her pulse hammering, the fine flesh at the base of her throat utterly captivating. She wasn’t afraid of him, though. She was afraid of what she felt when he stood so close to her. “You basically dragged me to your hotel room just now,” she reminded him stiffly.
“Because I remembered you!” He said urgently and then shook his head. “I mean, not exactly. I just know that you meant something to me.”
She angled her head away.
“I have all these black holes in my mind – times and days and events that are foggy. I can’t catch hold of memories, no matter how hard I focus. I look at photos, I talk to friends. They’re gone – probably forever. I’ve come to accept that. But sometimes I have a feeling, almost like a premonition, and I know that a part of my past is before me. That’s what I felt tonight, when I saw you. A sense of recognition so powerful that I had to listen to it.”
His words hammered inside of her, pushing at her certainties, making her doubt everything and know nothing. She looked around, eyeing off the scotch he’d poured her earlier. On instinct, she moved towards it, lifting it to her lips and sipping a small amount. It went down easier, second time around, and warmth spread through her body.
Joshua.
Their son.
A son she’d kept secret from this man because she’d felt she had no other choice. Because she’d had to. And now he was standing before her, asking her to tell him about their time together and she wanted to – she wanted to tell him that they’d fallen in love! Except it was a lie.
He hadn’t loved her.
He’d been using her. Having fun with her. Toying with her. A last indiscretion before he married the love of his life.
And he still was toying with her.
His wife was out there, and he was whisking women up to his hotel room on a hunch. Once a cheater, always a cheater.
“We met at the theatre and you asked me back to your hotel room. We slept together. The end.”
“No, not the end,” he contradicted, moving closer to her. “What was I seeing? Who was I with?”
Her exhalation was impatient. “Les Miserables. You were alone.”
He frowned. “It doesn’t sound likely.”
“You had bought the ticket on a whim, you said,” she grudgingly answered, her mind drifting back to that night. To the way he’d shrugged and laughed and she’d thought he was the most charming man in the world. “You were walking through Covent Garden and a hawker had offered, you’d agreed. You’d never seen it and decided life was too short not to have new experiences.”
She felt him reject that idea. “That sounds overly sentimental.”
“Yes.” She smiled, wistfully, then sobered. “Anyway, that’s all there is to it. What we shared was nothing special.” The words stuck in her throat. “I was one of many women for you.”
“And was I one of many men in your life?” He prompted, coming to stand in front of her, so close that she could have closed the distance between them simply by taking a large gulp of air.
“T-That’s not really any of your business,” she muttered, her cheeks flaming. “Whatever we were was over years ago. Now you’re just a stranger to me.”
He ground his teeth together, his jaw moving with the action. “I don’t believe that. You looked at me and ran a mile. In my experience, people don’t run when they don’t feel. So? What happened between us?”
“Why do you care?” She demanded, turning the tables on him out of a need for self-preservation. “You’re married. How would your wife feel to know you’re out chasing up the ghosts of lovers-past?”
“My wife is now my ex-wife,” he said and Ellie’s eyes flew to his, her body reacting to that announcement with a surge of relief strong enough to knock her to the ground.
“What? When?”
“We divorced soon after we were married,” he murmured. “A couple of months.”
A couple of months? She would have still been pregnant.
The past swirled around them, a whirlpool too difficult to escape from. Why hadn’t his mother called her?
Besides, it didn’t matter. He was a liar and a cheat. So? Hadn’t he deserved to know about the baby? Her conscience demanded. It was one thing to keep the secret when she’d believed she was saving his marriage. Quite another now there was no marriage.
