“I missed you,” he said, infusing his voice with all the longing that had been building since he left.
She neatly sidestepped his outstretched hand. “Please don’t touch me.”
Her words were delivered oh, so politely, but they felt like a vicious slap.
“Yasmin, what the he—?”
“You tell me what the hell,” she demanded, her gray eyes dark and stormy. “Remember Jennifer Morton?”
If he’d walked straight into a propeller he couldn’t have been more shocked. She knew. He’d left it too late.
“I can guess by the look on your face you do remember. How nice. But then again, it might have been nicer if you’d actually told me about it.”
“That’s not fair, Yasmin. We’ve barely begun to get to know each other. Jen, well, that was another time and place.”
“Yes, exactly. A time and place that involved me, too, if you’ll remember. A time and place I told you about when you asked me what my greatest fear was and yet, even despite my pouring my heart out to you about that night, you didn’t think I deserved to know that you, my husband—” she spat the word as if it was a bitter, nasty taste in her mouth “—were there, too?”
“I can explain—” he started.
“I think it’s gone beyond explanations, don’t you? Have you any idea how betrayed I feel? I trusted you. And you were a part of that night all along. You and her!” She made a sound of disgust. “I should have kept on going when I left you at the altar. This whole charade, this fake marriage, was a disaster from the start. I can’t help wondering why you even bothered to marry me. If all you wanted was to get your hands on my company then you could have just sat back and watched me go completely bankrupt and you could have picked up the bones of Carter Air for a song. You certainly didn’t need to go to the bother of marrying me or having all those threatening emails sent to me.
“Which brings me to Jennifer—nice to know you two are still such great friends that she was prepared to help you. Exactly what is her stake in this? Were you planning to ditch me somewhere along the line, after your contemptible games with me, and renew your engagement with her?”
Her words came at him like machine-gun fire. They penetrated his mind but none of it made sense.
“We’re over,” she continued. “I will repay your loan as soon as possible. I will continue to subcontract to Horvath Aviation for as long as the offer remains. But I will not stay here as your wife.”
She moved toward the driver’s door of her truck but he beat her to it, pushing his weight against it so she couldn’t open the door.
“What emails?”
Yasmin laughed. The sound was high-pitched, artificial.
“Out of everything I just said, that’s what you focused on? Look, thanks for the memories, Ilya, and the sex. It was great while it lasted but I can’t stay married to a man I cannot trust.” She tugged her wedding ring off her finger and thrust it at him. “We’re over.”
Sixteen
Ilya wanted to stop her. Wanted to throw himself in front of her truck, if necessary. But he could see the pain and determination on Yasmin’s face and he knew that nothing and no one could change the way she felt right now. She was furiously angry with him, but more than that, she was bleeding inside, he was sure of it. Because he was hurting inside like he’d never hurt before, too.
Ironic, he thought, as he watched Yasmin’s truck disappear up the driveway, that he should only come to realize that he loved his wife in the instant that she left him. He’d fought the feeling, fought the truth, and now it was gone. Self-loathing and remorse engulfed him as he turned and went into the house.
She wouldn’t listen to him now, and he could accept that. But it didn’t mean he had to remain passive and accept her leaving him. They belonged together. He knew it in his bones. He hadn’t wanted to need someone the way he needed her. He shook his head. And here he’d thought losing control was his greatest fear. He’d been a complete and utter fool. Love had been his greatest fear all along. With that, sure, came a loss of control, but he’d finally come to accept that the gift of love far outweighed anything else.
He would get Yasmin back, come hell or high water. Her reaction was understandable. He only hoped that when the dust settled, she’d be prepared to listen to him again.
* * *
Yasmin threw herself into work over the next few weeks, refusing to discuss anything with anyone, even Riya, unless it pertained to business. By day she either worked in the office or took the flights on her roster. If there were more flights allocated to them than she’d expected from Horvath Aviation, then that was all well and good, too, although she’d expected the reverse to happen after she left Ilya. The fact that he hadn’t canceled their contract had given her pause for thought. Maybe he genuinely had been reaching out to help Carter Air. After all, there were easier routes for him to have taken rather than the convoluted scheme that had raged through her head. But that didn’t absolve him from having kept his secret from her. Not at all. The cutting sense of betrayal sliced her anew. All those nights they’d spent together, all the times he could have brought it up...
No, she wouldn’t allow herself to think about him. And if she woke up at night with her body screaming for release, her heart breaking and her cheeks wet with tears because she’d been dreaming about him again, then that was just too bad. She’d get over it, just like she’d gotten over every other shitty thing that had ever happened in her life.
Each day there was a text, a telephone message or an email from him. Each day she ruthlessly deleted them. Last night he’d even had the gall to show up at her apartment, knocking on the door and asking her to please talk with him. She’d remained frozen in position on her sofa, staring silently at the door and willing him to leave before she did anything stupid like actually let him in.
No, there would be no further communication between them, unless it was through their lawyers. She didn’t need any other reminders of how stupid she’d been to think she’d fallen in love with a man who’d not only witnessed her greatest humiliation, but who’d been party to it. She racked her brain, trying to remember if she’d seen him that night with Jennifer, but the hazy images she could recall all involved Jennifer in queen bee mode, surrounded by her sycophantic sorority sisters.
Which meant that Ilya had to have been in the background. Watching. She shuddered. Whatever his part in that awful night, it no longer mattered. Inasmuch as she could engineer it, he was out of her life. So, too, did hisgirl appear to be out of her life. The emails had stopped altogether. Yasmin had followed up with the officer handling her complaint but so far there’d been no new developments. She could only hope that hisgirl would leave her alone now that she’d achieved her goal. And on the cop’s advice, she’d blocked hisgirl from her email.
Yasmin sighed and stared at the proposals piled on her desk. Each one was a pitch for new business. She’d methodically created and reviewed them over and over to make them as sharp and as appealing as they could be. She needed new clients so she could ditch the work that was being provided to her by Horvath.
There was a noise down the hall from her office. Strange, that sounded like a bark, she thought, pushing up from her chair and heading out to see what it was.
“Blaze!” she said, dropping to her knees and accepting an effusive welcome from the puppy who’d managed to slip his leash and come barreling toward her.
“I’m sorry, Yasmin,” Riya said as she followed on the puppy’s heels. “Ilya dropped him off a minute ago and handed him to me. I couldn’t get his leash on him and he knew you were down here. I couldn’t stop him once he took off.”
“It’s okay,” Yasmin said, burying her face in the puppy’s fur and inhaling the scent of him. “Ilya was here?”
“Only briefly,” Riya hastened to tell her. “He asked me to give you this.”
She hande
d Yasmin an envelope. Her first instinct was to tell Riya to take it away and burn it; she wanted nothing to do with it or the man who’d written it, but in light of the fact that he’d brought Blaze and left him here, she supposed she’d better do the right thing and read it.
“Oh, and he also dropped off Blaze’s bed, his crate, his food and bowls.”
“He did?”
Yasmin looked from her friend to the puppy in confusion.
“Well, are you going to open his letter?”
“In a minute,” Yasmin answered, getting to her feet and giving Blaze a command to sit.
To her surprise, the puppy did exactly as he was told. She gave him a pat and told him he was a good boy before sliding her finger under the flap of the envelope and tearing it open. Her hand shook a little as she extracted the single folded sheet of paper from inside.
“Jeez, Yasmin, the suspense is killing me,” Riya commented drily.
Yasmin glared at her friend before unfolding the letter. It contained only one line.
He’s pining for you.
She turned the paper over but there was nothing at all on the back.
“So, what did he say?” Riya prompted.
“Here, read it for yourself.”
Yasmin thrust the paper at her friend and wondered why on earth the simple missive had left her heart pounding and her stomach doing barrel rolls.
“Hmm,” Riya said, pursing her lips. “Not big on words, is he?”
“Not big on anything. Look, if he comes here again just ask him to leave. Okay?”
“If you say so, boss. Do you want me to get one of the boys to take Blaze’s things up to your apartment?”
“Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”
Yasmin snapped her fingers at the puppy and he followed her into her office where he flopped down on her floor with a happy sigh. She reached into the bottom drawer of her desk for a chew toy she hadn’t quite been able to bring herself to throw out. Blaze nosed it then ignored it, instead putting his head on his front paws and closing his eyes.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind doing that, too,” Yasmin said softly.
She tried to turn her focus back to the proposals but her eyes kept drifting to the puppy and her thoughts to the man who’d delivered him here. Why had Ilya given her Blaze? She knew he loved the dog as much as she did. Was this another of his attempts at manipulating her? Did he expect some kind of visitation rights?
“Well,” she huffed, making the dog open his eyes and lift his brows a little to look up at her. “One thing’s for sure. I’ll never know what is going on in that man’s mind and I’m better off not knowing anyway.”
* * *
Ilya picked up the phone in his office, tearing his eyes away from the view of the Carter Air hangar a couple of hundred yards away.
“Yes?” he demanded.
His tone was about as short as his temper lately.
“Hello to you, too,” answered his grandmother on the other end of the line. “I see your temperament hasn’t improved any since Yasmin left you. I’m beginning to see why she did.”
Ilya closed his eyes and swallowed against the retort that sprang to his lips.
“I’m sorry, Nagy,” he said in a voice that filtered out all his frustration and tension. “How are you today?”
“I’m tired, my boy.”
Ilya sat up a little straighter in his chair. Tired? Nagy never admitted to any physical infirmities, ever.
“Are you all right? Have you been to the doctor?”
She laughed. “Not that sort of tired. I’m tired of how long it’s taking you to sort this mess out. I expected more of you, Ilya.”
Her censure was a palpable thing through the phone line.
“She’s a stubborn woman, Nagy.” Like another woman I know, he added silently. “I’m working on it.”
“Well, work more efficiently. If you really want to prove to her how much she means to you and how much you want her back, you have to understand why she left you in the first place.”
“I know why she left me. She thinks I betrayed her trust.”
“Then you had better earn it back, hadn’t you?”
Before he could answer her, she hung up. He put the phone down on his desk and shook his head. She was a piece of work, his grandmother. But she was right. These past two weeks he’d been attacking the problem of losing Yasmin head-on, trying to win her back through appeals to her emotions. And she’d blocked him every step of the way. He had to approach this from a different angle.
It would help if he could track down Jennifer and see if his instinct about her involvement in all this was correct, but so far, he had nothing to go on. He didn’t have access to any of the pictures or videos that the Hardacres had been sent, and wasn’t even entirely clear on how Yasmin had found out about his presence at the hazing that night. Why would Jennifer risk bringing the hazing up again after all these years? She could still get in trouble for that in fact he had every intention of pursuing that angle once he tracked her down. But maybe the trouble had come from someone else who had been there that night.
He forced himself to think logically, to recall exactly what Yasmin had said when he first arrived home from New York.
She’d mentioned emails the morning she walked out. If only he could see them for himself. Then he realized something—Yasmin’s laptop had been in the shop for repairs at the time. Sure, she usually checked email on her phone, but there was a chance she could have accessed those emails on his home computer. He could only hope so.
He looked at his day planner. There was nothing today that was so urgent it couldn’t be postponed, which meant there was nothing stopping him from going home to find out if Yasmin had used his computer. He got up from his desk, shrugged his suit jacket on and headed for the door.
“Deb, please clear my calendar for the rest of the day,” he instructed his assistant as he passed through the outer office.
“Sure thing.”
He continued out of the office without breaking his stride and was in the Tesla a few minutes later. He really needed to get that armrest seen to, he thought as he peeled out of the driveway of Horvath Aviation and turned toward Ojai Road. He pushed the speed limit the whole way home. When he got there, he stalked into the house, slamming the double doors behind him. The house was quiet, which meant Hannah had already gone home for the day. He was grateful for that. He had the utmost respect for the housekeeper but he wasn’t in the mood for idle chatter right now.
Stripping off his jacket and flinging it to one side, he sat down in his office chair and turned on the computer. He opened the web browser and immediately began to search its history. There. That URL had to be Yasmin’s email server, he thought, as a sense of relief vied with the exhilaration of finding something concrete to work with. Of course, she had to have remained logged in to her email account when she closed out of the program if he was going to get any of the information he so desperately sought. He clicked on the link and held his breath.
A massive surge of relief rocked him as her inbox appeared on the screen. Yes, he knew it was an invasion of her privacy to be doing this, but in this case he had to do it. He couldn’t fight for her unless he knew what he was fighting against. He scanned the mail marked read in her inbox, specifically mail from the night before he’d arrived home.
There were more than fifteen messages from one sender, each with an attachment. He checked them, feeling his ire rise with each and every one. By the time he got to the last one—the photo Jennifer had taken the morning after he’d proposed to her—a red haze of fury blurred his vision. She would pay for this and pay dearly, he silently vowed.
He reached for the phone and called the Horvath Corporation’s IT department, asking to be put through to his cousin Sofia. She was a complete computer geek and what she couldn’t find out wasn’t worth knowin
g. She was also the soul of discretion. He explained what he needed and allowed her remote access to his computer. He hung up and sat back, watching the cursor race around his screen as she worked her magic.
She called him back a few minutes later.
“You were right. She tried to cover her tracks but she’s not as good as she thinks she is. While it took a while to get through the aliases, the activity stems from an account registered to Jennifer Morton.”
“Thanks, Sofia. I owe you one.”
“I’ll add it to the list,” she said with a chuckle. “Anything else I can help you with? Tracking Ms. Morton down, perhaps?”
He grimaced at the eagerness in his cousin’s voice. No doubt the idea of tracing his ex was far more appealing to her than whatever software issue she was dealing with at Horvath Corporation. “I’ve got it from here, thanks.”
“Okay, then. Well, no doubt I’ll see you at the next family wedding.”
“Next wedding?”
“Yeah, didn’t you hear? Nagy got her claws into Valentin. Seems he was so impressed with the bride she found for you that he said she could find him one, too. He was probably joking but you know Nagy. She isn’t going to let it go.”
“Strange, he didn’t mention anything to me when I saw him the other week,” Ilya commented.
But then again, was it so strange? Valentin had always been an intensely private person. Ilya knew he’d been married once before. It was a whirlwind affair that had happened overseas, while he was working on an international medical aid mission. After his return to the States five years ago Valentin had started working with Horvath Pharmaceuticals, mostly out of New York. Ilya wondered if his cousin would be so keen to enter into another marriage if he knew the mess Ilya had made of his own. So far Ilya had kept the news of his separation from his wife between himself and Alice, whom he’d sworn to secrecy, because he refused to believe he couldn’t win Yasmin back.
Tangled Vows (Marriage At First Sight Book 1) Page 14