Painted the Other Woman

by Julia James

  ‘You’re out of Ian’s life now, and that was what I had to achieve.’ He looked at her, said what he knew he had to say. ‘I didn’t like what I was doing, Marisa, but I had to do it. Family is everything—and I had to protect my sister from the threat you represented to her. You can have no share in Ian’s life. But,’ he went on, ‘you’ve accepted that, and I’m relieved to hear it—drastic though my method was. I acknowledge that.’

  He held up a hand again, as if to brush aside the means he’d adopted to part his brother in law from her, and continued, getting to the most important part of his communication. The essential part. The part he’d driven over two hundred miles to deliver.

  ‘Now we’re free—both of us. Free to do what I have wanted to do since the moment I left you in your flat on our return.’

  He got to his feet, crossed towards her. The narrow space between them disappeared. He reached out his hand, sliding it around the nape of her neck. The tendrils of damp hair were like silk on his fingertips. The scent of her body was like incense. The flush in her cheeks like roses. Her parted mouth was like honey waiting to be tasted … claimed … reclaimed …

  ‘This,’ he said, and his eyes poured down into hers like a golden haze, so that she was dizzy, blinded. Triumph surged in him—triumph and sweet, sweet possession …

  He lowered his mouth to hers and bliss consumed her. She had dreamt of his kisses, yearned for them, craved them like an addict—and now it was happening. Here, now …

  Bliss, sweet golden bliss.

  He was drawing away from her again, but his hands were cupping her head, his body close against hers, his eyes still pouring down into hers.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ he said. His voice was a husk. ‘I can’t do without you. And now, with you severed from Ian, I’ve realised I don’t have to! I am free to take you back—to have again what I had before.’

  His mouth started to lower again.

  But, as if wires had jerked every muscle in her body, she yanked away. Stumbled around the corner of the table, getting it between them. Her eyes were wide and staring.

  ‘Are you mad?’ Her voice would hardly work and she had to swallow to make any sound come out. ‘Are you mad?’ she said again, louder now. Stronger.

  Her mind was reeling. Reeling the way her body was. Her senses were aflame. But now water had been poured on them—an icy, frozen douche that doused them utterly. Emotion was knifing through her—but not the one she had just experienced, the bliss of his kiss. This was the one that had been coursing its way from deep, deep underground. That broke through now in a terrifying roar in her head.

  ‘You lied to me from beginning to end! You lied to me and manipulated me and played me like a total idiot. How can you possibly think I would just take up with you again? That I would meekly go back to you after what you did to me? I’d have to be certifiable to do that.’ She took a shuddering breath. ‘Get out! Get out of here! I’ve done what you wanted me to do—given up Ian. So you’ve got no right—no right at all!—to come here and dare to say what you have.’

  If he was reeling from her onslaught he didn’t show it.

  ‘You’re angry with me—it’s understandable,’ he began. ‘But—’

  ‘Get out!’ Her hands clenched the edge of the table. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again. I don’t want anything to do with you ever again.’

  His expression changed. ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘You can’t deny. It’s impossible for you—just as it is for me, Marisa—to deny the effect we have on each other. Don’t you think I curse the fact that I had to deceive you the way I did? I wish to God you’d never had anything to do with my damn brother-in-law in the first place. I wish I’d met you in any other circumstances. Because the effect you have on me would have been the same.’

  He paused, his expression changing yet again. The molten, liquid lambency was back in his eyes, and his body language was charged with a voltage she would have to be blind, insensible not to recognise … to respond to.

  ‘I might have lied to you about why I inveigled an acquaintance with you, lied about what purpose I had—but nothing else was a lie.’ His eyes were resting on her, pouring into her. ‘I never lied to you with my body … ‘

  Breath rasped in her lungs, and her nails dug into the wood of the table’s edge.

  ‘Go!’ she got out. ‘I just want you to go.’ She couldn’t cope with this—she just couldn’t. Ever since she’d seen him get out of his car she had been mentally shaking. But this—what he was saying … proposing …

  ‘Marisa—listen to me.’

  His voice sounded urgent. She couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear him being here, saying such things to her—asking such things of her.

  She took another shuddering breath, not letting him speak as she cut across him. ‘No! There’s nothing on this earth that would ever make me even consider even for a single second what you are saying to me! How could you even think I would? Just how stupid do you think I am? After what you’ve done to me—said to me.’

  He shook his head. Hell, this was all going wrong—totally wrong. He had to claw back somehow—anyhow. He had driven here with the devil on his tail, furious that Ian had dared to seek her out again, consumed with anger at his brother-in-law, consumed even more by an emotion he knew he had to name—could no longer deny.

  Jealousy. Raw, open jealousy. Of Ian.

  He’s not having her. Never again! She’s mine—and I want her back.

  That was the stark, strident message he’d had to face up to as the miles had been eaten up by his foot on the accelerator. He had to get to her so that Ian couldn’t try and persuade her back to him.

  So that he could persuade her back to him.

  So that she wouldn’t haunt his dreams any more, or torment his memory, so that she could finally be to him what he wanted her to be—not the woman he’d had to sever from his brother-in-law but the woman he wanted for himself.

  ‘Do you think I wanted to do what I did?’ he demanded. ‘But it’s done now—finished. Over.’

  Her eyes iced. ‘Yes, that’s exactly what it is. Finished. Over. And I don’t mean Ian—I mean you. So, like I said, go—just go.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’ His voice was flat, disbelieving. ‘If you’re waiting for me to apologise for doing what I did the way I did it, then I can’t. You had no business getting involved with my brother-in-law, and nothing can change that.’ Again his voice changed. ‘But having now seen where you come from, seen the kind of background you have, I can understand the temptation to inveigle yourself into his life. Gain from him the affluence and comfort you certainly don’t have here.’

  He looked around disparagingly at the cramped, shabby kitchen.

  ‘I can make allowances,’ he said. ‘Understand why you found Ian so tempting.’ His gaze swept back to her. ‘You don’t have to live like this, Marisa. Let me take you away from it all. We were good together. We can have it again—honestly, this time, with no more secrets.’

  His eyes were blazing, rich and lambent, his voice deep, accented, sending vibrations through her.

  ‘I want you to go.’ Her voice was controlled. Very controlled over an emotion so strong that it might burst from her like an eruption. ‘I don’t want you here. I don’t want anything more to do with you. And for your information, I don’t want you to “take me away from it all”. This happens to be my home. It may be poor, but it is mine, and it is where I live, and where I will go on living now.’ She took a ragged breath. ‘It’s where I belong,’ she finished.

  Because this was where she belonged. She knew that now. Not in Ian’s softly luxurious, pampering cocoon, kept secret from the world. And not—a jagged knife-thrust went through—dear God, not helplessly captive in Athan Teodarkis’s cruel web of lies and deceit that had killed anything that she might once have felt for him.

  Stony-faced, insistent, she stood her ground. ‘So I want you to go,’ she said again

  Before she cracked, broke
down, gave in—gave in to the desperate longing in her to throw herself into his arms, to pretend that nothing had come between them, to pretend that he’d never deliberately set out to seduce her and then denounce her the way he had. To pretend that what she’d thought was true was—he had never set her up, deceived her, lied to her …

  But he had, and nothing could undo that

  He wasn’t saying anything. He was just standing there, tall and dark and so heart-stoppingly handsome that she could feel the power of it radiating like a force field. His face was a mask.

  She’d seen it like that before when he’d confronted her on their return from St Cecile. When he’d closed himself to her, shut and locked the door, thrown away the key.

  ‘I see,’ he said. His voice was terse. Clipped. ‘Well, you’ve made yourself very clear. So, yes, I’ll go.’

  Yet for a moment—a moment that seemed to hang in the air like a weight—he remained motionless. She stood frozen, behind the table that divided her from him—behind everything that divided her from him and always would.

  Always.

  Then, ‘I wish you well, Marisa. It would be … ungenerous of me to do less,’ he said. His voice had no emotion, no depth. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  His face still blank, still closed, he turned and walked out of the room.

  She couldn’t move. Could only wait while she heard his footsteps in the narrow corridor to the front door, and then the creaking door open and close behind him. For a few moments longer she waited. Only the crackling of the logs in the range was audible. Then another sound penetrated. A car engine gunning. Louder, then fading.

  Fading completely.

  He had gone.

  Marisa went on standing there, quite motionless. Her eyes started to blink. Slowly, and then faster, tears began to run down her cheeks.

  Along the narrow lane Athan drove—dangerously, recklessly fast. He had to. Had to gain as much distance from her as possible. He had arrived here a bare hour ago, driven by a demon he could not shake off his back. By the fear that she had succumbed to Ian Randall’s forbidden blandishments, his begging to resume their affair. A demon had bitten him with the venom of savage jealousy.

  Now a different demon drove him. Worse, much worse, than the first.

  He wanted her—and she would not come to him.

  I’ve lost her.

  The words fell into his head like stones. Stones he could not shift. Stones that sat there crushing his thoughts, his emotions, everything.

  All around him, pressing on the glass of the car windows, was darkness.

  Darkness outside him.

  Inside him.

  He drove on into the winter’s night.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MARISA dug carefully with the trowel. The garden her mother had loved so much had become overgrown, and she was trying to clear away the weeds from the new shoots sprouting up all over the flowerbeds. Spring had finally arrived, and as she knelt she could feel the sun warm on her back. It seemed like a blessing.

  She was in need of blessings. Working hard to count them. To keep them in the forefront of her mind. Keep buried in the depths of her mind all remembrances of Athan Teodarkis—buried deep, buried safe.

  She was humming to herself intermittently—some tune she’d heard on the radio. She listened to the radio a lot these days. It was companionship. Comforting. The cottage was so isolated she could play the radio out here in the garden knowing no one would be disturbed by it.

  A robin was hopping around at the back of the flowerbed, tilting its head sideways and eyeing her hopefully. A small worm coiled itself under a clod of earth and she kept it buried. Fond as she was of the robin, who was a cheery visitor to the garden, she didn’t feel up to deliberately feeding it a worm who was only trying to have a quiet life.

  The way she was.

  A quiet life. That was all she wanted right now. One that, like the tiny earthworm could be spent buried deeply and safely. Sheltered and out of the way.

  Where she belonged.

  It had been weeks since Athan had been and gone. Weeks and weeks. How many, precisely, she hadn’t counted. Hadn’t wanted to. The days drifted by, one after another, marked only by the burgeoning spring. That followed a calendar that had its own schedule. One day it was a clump of primroses, unfurling their pale blossoms, another day the catkins showering her with golden pollen. Another the first flush of green on the once bare branches of the trees.

  It was all she wanted right now.

  She kept herself almost entirely to herself. She had set up a grocery delivery service with a supermarket in a large market town, and it suited her not to have to go there in person. The weekly delivery was good enough. Sometimes the local farmer’s tractor rumbled past the cottage, but when she heard it coming she made sure she was not visible. She wasn’t being deliberately stand-offish. She just didn’t want to see anyone. Anyone at all. Whether local or stranger.

  It was as if she was hibernating. Tucking herself away. Shutting down. Trying not to think. Trying not to feel. Trying to keep busy in the garden. While she worked she could feel her mother’s presence, approving of her for what she was doing. Glad her daughter was back here again, safe in the haven she had found for herself—her refuge from a world that had rejected her, a man who had not wanted her.

  Marisa’s face twisted. Athan had wanted her.

  That was the bitter, poisoned irony of it. After what he’d done to her, he wanted her.

  Did he really think I would just totally ignore what he’d done? Why he’d done it? Just act like it had never happened?

  But he had—obviously. That was what he’d assumed—that he could just pick her up again, carry on with her again. Take her back to his bed again …

  No! She mustn’t think like that—they were dangerous thoughts. Bringing in their wake memories that were even more dangerous. Lethal.

  She dug deeper with the trowel, wrestling with a long, tenacious dandelion tap root to extract the last fragment. It wasn’t the kind of root you could leave in the soil—a new weed would sprout even from the tiniest portion, seeking the air and the sun, thrusting up to grow and flourish.

  Thoughts about Athan were like that. So were memories. She must get every last fragment of them out lest they seek to flourish once again.

  She paused in her work, lifting her eyes to the hedge that bordered the garden, to the slope behind that led up onto open moorland. She would go for a walk later—blow away the cobwebs. Blow away the dangerous thoughts and memories that tried to get out.

  Questions went through her mind and she wished she could have an answer to them, but knew she could not. Questions she had never asked but wished now she had. Questions of her mother.

  How long did it take you to get over my father? To get him out of your head, your mind, your heart? To be free of him—free of what he’d done to you?

  And the question that was most fearful of all: Did you ever get over him?

  That was what she feared the most. That the wound was too deep, the scarring too brutal.

  Because the problem was that despite all she was doing not to think about him, absorbing herself in this world, so familiar and so utterly different from the places she had been with Athan, it wasn’t working. That was what she was scared of.

  How long will it take to get over him?

  That was the question that fretted at her, tormented her. She wanted not to think about not thinking about him. She wanted not to have to make this continual effort to turn her mind to other things. To immerse herself in this place she knew so well, surrounded by nature, by the wild landscape of the moors, the quiet fields and hedgerows.

  But it didn’t seem to be working—that was the problem. Surely by now she should at the very least be starting to forget him, to get over him. Not wanting to think about him, remember him. Surely she ought to be able to use her head to control her heart?

  She froze. With one part of her brain she watched the robin hop closer to her. Bri
ght-eyed. Red-breasted.

  Predatory.

  But the rest of her brain didn’t see him. Didn’t see the garden or the sunshine on the bushes, or the hedge behind the flowerbed.

  The words that had sounded unconsciously in her mind came again.

  Surely she ought to be able to use her head to control her heart?

  No! She hadn’t meant that—she hadn’t. Panic filled her, choking in her throat.

  It’s not my heart—it’s nothing to do with my heart.

  Because if it was …

  Before her eyes, the robin pounced. His sharp, deadly beak indented into the damp earth and in a flash, triumphantly, he tugged out the worm she’d tried to hide from him. With a flurry of wings he was gone, his prey consumed.

  It’s not my heart. I don’t love him. I don’t love him!

  ‘Global economy … fiscal policy … employment levels … infra-structure investment … ‘

  Athan let the words drone over his head. He wasn’t listening. He gave the appearance of it, though—anything else would have been rude. But the speaker at the conference—a top economist at a major bank—had been going on for what seemed like for ever. And Athan had heard it all before—

  several times now. This was the third day of the conference, and he had been here right from the start.

  It mopped up time, this conference, and that was the most important aspect of it.

  Time that he would otherwise have spent brooding.

  Obsessing.

  Because that was what it was, he knew. He could look it in the face and know it for what it was. Know why it was what it was.

  He’d lost her. Plain and simple.

  Devastating.

  How had it happened? How had he screwed it up so badly? But he knew why—just didn’t like accepting it. He’d high-tailed it down to the back of beyond where she’d holed up in that rundown hovel, seething with a raw, angry jealousy that he’d disguised to himself as outrage because Ian was daring to try and hook up with her again, and he’d hit a stone wall. Her point-blank refusal to have anything more to do with him.