by Lucy Monroe
“Sandor?” she asked, trying to see if the call was still connected.
“I am here.”
“I’d like to see you.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Okay. Do you want to come by here?”
“I will.”
“When?”
“I will be there after breakfast.”
“Great.” Maybe they could spend the day together. She’d missed him.
The line went dead and she realized the call must have dropped. She didn’t bother calling him back. She was too sleepy and she would be seeing him in the morning.
The next day, Ellie was up early. She didn’t know what time Sandor considered after breakfast, but she was ready at seven-thirty. He didn’t arrive until nine.
When she opened the door to him, he did not kiss her, or even smile.
She wasn’t so reticent. Begin as you mean to go on. And she meant for her relationship with him to be affectionate. Not that she had a lot of experience with that, but they could both learn. She leaned up and kissed his chin.
He didn’t tilt toward her so she couldn’t reach his lips, but she didn’t let that bother her. “I missed you.”
“Did you?”
She stepped back, biting her lip. “You’re upset I was gone for a week.”
“You could say that.” She’d never seen him look so cold and remote.
If she wasn’t sure she was mistaken, she would think his brown eyes were filled with disgust. But that would be much too strong a reaction for her little burst of independence.
“Are you angry I took longer than the weekend to make my decision?” she asked, trying to gauge his mood exactly as she turned and led him into her living room.
She sat down on the yellow sofa.
He took a chair as physically far from her as it was possible to get in the room. “So, you have made your decision?”
She tried a smile. “Yes and you might as well get used to the fact that I don’t take orders well. It will make our life together less bumpy if you accept it. I’m also not fond of the cold shoulder treatment.”
“So, you desire to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“That is interesting. I must wonder why.”
Her buoyant confidence that had carried her home began to falter. This conversation wasn’t making any sense to her. “You haven’t changed your mind just because I was gone for a week.”
“No, I did not change my mind because you chose to take longer for your decision than I told you to.”
“Good.”
“However, other considerations have come to light.” That was definitely disgust in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” What other considerations?
“You were no virgin when we made love the first time.”
“I told you I wasn’t.”
“But what I did not appreciate was that lack indicated a deeper flaw in your character.”
“You consider my status as a nonvirgin a lack?” she asked carefully.
He simply looked at her.
“Should I then consider your similar status the same way?”
“I, at least, understand the meaning of fidelity to one partner.”
“And you’re saying I don’t?” she asked incredulously. No way were they having this conversation. “Because I had one lover before you, you’ve decided I couldn’t be faithful? I don’t believe this.”
“No.”
“What are you saying then?”
“That you have done a very good job of hiding your true character, both from your father and from myself as well as my investigator. At least at first. Clearly you are very clever at leading a double life. I should salute your ingenuity. It takes much to fool my investigator and your father’s security team, but you have managed it.”
“Sandor, I don’t know what you are talking about. I haven’t hidden anything from you.” Well, she hadn’t told him the details of her single past liaison, but that would hardly fall under the misnomer of hiding her true character.
“On the contrary, you did a very good job of deceiving me. Looking back, I can see the signs I was too blinded to take heed of before.”
“What signs?”
“The condoms. If you were so innocent, why did you have condoms the first time we made love?”
“Because I assumed you’d want to make love eventually and I didn’t want to risk pregnancy.”
His lip curled. “That is a convenient excuse, but not a realistic one. Until last week, I made no moves to take our relationship to the bedroom.”
“I know, but—”
He sliced his hand through the air, cutting her off. “I do not wish to sit here arguing with you.”
“What do you want?” Inside, everything was freezing, but she didn’t feel numb. It hurt, like being outside in below zero weather without her gloves. Cold so biting, it cut to the bone. That’s what her insides felt like…painfully frozen.
“To say what needs saying and go.”
“Then say it,” she demanded from between lips that could barely move.
He looked hesitant for a second, but then the cold mask descended again and he said, “Your father wants an heir for his business. You refuse to be that heir, so he went looking. He found me.”
More shards of ice pierced her heart and somehow she knew this wasn’t done. “What?”
“He offered an impossible to resist dowry. Half of his company upon marriage to you and a will stating the other half would go to our children upon his death.”
She shook her head, denying her father’s culpability and Sandor’s as well. To accept that they could treat her like a piece of barter hurt too much to deal with. She was nothing to either of them. She never had been.
“Yes. However, even half of your father’s shipping business is not enough to entice me to marry a woman who would sleep with another man when the sheets had not even cooled from sleeping with me. A woman who was supposed to be considering my proposal of marriage.”
As she forced the words to penetrate her mind, they began to take horrible shape and two facts became clear. The first was that Sandor thought she’d had sex with another man while she’d been away from him. The second was that she would never have known about the business deal he had with her dad if Sandor had not become convinced of the first fact.
“You believe simply because I went out of country sans my security detail for a few days that it naturally follows I was having sex with someone else?” she asked, finding that as difficult to accept as the knowledge that she’d been played like a pawn between the two men in her life she loved.
She was used to indifference from her father, not this all out brutality toward her feelings. And from Sandor she had expected so much more. What a fool.
“I do not make such sweeping judgments on that flimsy a pretext.”
“Are you saying someone told you I was cheating on you?”
“In a way.”
“Explain,” she demanded, the cold inside her growing until she felt like she was filled with ice that would shatter with the next blow.
He dropped a manila folder on the coffee table.
She picked it up, refusing to hesitate or fear what she would find inside. She pulled out several sheets of paper. The top one listed a prominent worldwide detective agency. It looked like a fax cover sheet. Underneath it was a copy of a sleazy tabloid article. A woman was standing at a roulette table with a man. The woman could have been Ellie’s sister, she looked so much like her.
She was thinner, though, by at least ten pounds. Her eyebrows were waxed to a popular thinness, whereas Ellie left hers untouched because they were tapered naturally. The other woman dressed in the latest sexy fashions and held herself with the confidence of a cover model, or an actress.
Ellie always looked so stiff in photos like this. It was as if she had a sixth sense the press was zeroing in on her and would tense up just before any shot. She really disliked having her photo taken. The fax was bla
ck-and-white, so Ellie couldn’t tell what color of eyes the woman had or if her companion’s hair was black or brown.
She flipped to the next page and one of her questions was answered. The man’s hair was brown. The full color sheet photo was of the same woman and man, this time kissing on the beach. The woman wore a bikini and hip sarong. She was so thin, her bottom rib was outlined. She didn’t look sick like some Hollywood starlets, but she was definitely ultrathin.
As Ellie flipped through the pictures, she realized the woman’s eyes were the same color as hers. She looked even more like Ellie than a sister would. Except for the weight thing and a few other cosmetic differences, the woman could have been Ellie’s double.
The last picture was of the two people in bed together. She felt like a voyeur looking at it, but she could not tear her eyes away because it spoke so deeply to her. As Ellie recognized the same vulnerable look on the woman’s face as she herself wore after making love to Sandor, she knew this womanwas her sister. She did not know how it was possible. She tried to tell herself the doppelganger was just that…some stranger who shared enough genetic makeup from a distant past that they looked like twins though were probably not even considered really related.
But her instincts screamed it was more. She knew somewhere deep in her soul, somewhere so primitive she could not deny it…that this woman was her twin.
Her father had told her that her mother had died after giving birth to her. He’d never said anything about another baby being born. But it had to be. And her father had lied to her. How she and her twin had gotten separated, she didn’t know. And she didn’t care.
All she knew was that out there was a human being who would have loved her because sisters loved each other. A woman she would have loved and been there for, too.
She turned to Sandor. “Get out.”
“That is all you have to say to me?”
“No.”
He looked like he was almost hoping she could explain the pictures, but that had to be a trick of the lighting. He didn’t care. He’d wanted to marry her in order to make his business bigger. Even his mom had gotten it right, while Ellie had lived in dumb ignorance. Enough was never enough for Sandor and his company would always come first. Just like her father.
“I think you are contemptible.”
That seemed to rock him back on his proverbial heels. “What the hell did you just say to me?”
“You lied to me. You said you wanted me, but all you wanted was my dad’s company.”
“You think to use this to justify your behavior?”
“No. I don’t have to justify my behavior and yours is irredeemable. Get out of my apartment, Sandor, and don’t come back. Ever.”
He didn’t move. “Ellie…”
“Stop talking and leave.” Too much was going through her mind. Too much pain. Too many surprises. Terror that all she had believed about life and herself was one big deception.
“At least tell me why you went to him. Was he an old lover…was it a last fling?”
“I don’t owe you any explanations.”
“You came home prepared to marry me.”
“Yes, more the fool me.”
“Ellie, make me understand.”
She stared at him. The words felt like a plea from the heart, but he didn’t have a heart. He only really cared about his company, about proving he was bigger and better than his father. He didn’t care about her. His deal with her dad and the fact he had not told her about it proved that.
“You said you couldn’t hide truth from your mother.”
“It is not the same.”
“Patently. You love her and I am nothing more than a pawn my father and you have played between you. I could hate you, Sandor. I really think I could hate you.”
He laughed harshly. “One of the things I found so intriguing about you is how much we had in common. Even to this. I could hate you, too, Ellie.”
“Go away, Sandor.” Hot tears burned her eyes. She blinked furiously, determined not to let them fall while he was still in her apartment. “I don’t want you here. Not ever again.”
He stood, a flash of weary pain sparking in his eyes before it disappeared to be replaced by that glacial cool he’d worn upon entering her home. “And I do not want to be here. It seems we both made a mistake believing we could trust the other.”
“Yes.” Her voice cracked on the single word.
Sandor stopped on his path across the hardwood floor, but then he straightened his shoulders and kept going.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELLIE WANTED TOscream out in pain.
She’d felt this way once before and promised herself she’d never let herself be used again. She’d failed and it hurt. It hurt so much, she didn’t know if she could keep the pain inside like she had the last time. It was too big. Too deep.
But then her love for Sandor was so much more intense than what she’d felt at nineteen, the two feelings did not even compare. She felt like there was a steel band around her chest and it was contracting.
She couldn’t deal with it. It was too much. But there was nothing there…no one to help her through the pain. Nothing to blunt its shattering intensity.
Then her gaze slid to the pictures spread out on her coffee table. The truth. She had to learn the truth.
She grabbed the fax cover sheet and stumbled to the phone. Blinking away tears, she read the number listed for the agency’s landline. There were offices all over the world according to the stationery, but the one that had generated this fax was in New York. Her fingers were clumsy and she had to redial twice before she got the number right.
The sender, a person named Hawk, no last name given, was not in the office. She left her name and both cell and home numbers with the answering service, requesting he call her immediately. She told the service it was an emergency.
In her mind, it was.
She couldn’t let herself dwell on Sandor’s betrayal. She heard you could not die from a broken heart, but you could not tell that by the way she felt. She couldn’t afford to let the wound inside her grow. She had to contain it, lock it away with all the other pain of past rejection.
Desperation clawed through her as the agony threatened to shred her. She picked up the pictures and rushed to the computer, determined to research what she could. Anything to keep her brain occupied with something besides her bleeding heart.
She started with the article in the tabloid. Hawk had efficiently supplied the name of the weekly along with the page the article had been found on. She found the paper online. It was a Spanish tabloid, but since she was fluent in the language, that wasn’t a problem for her.
Only there was no additional information. The name of the man with the woman who looked like Ellie’s twin was given in the original article. Ellie did a site search on his name and discovered several more articles on him. But all that did was depress her.
Apparently she and her sister both had lousy taste in men because this guy had dated a half dozen women in the last year that he’d been photographed with. Who knew how many others he’d been with? There was no follow-up article to the one with his mystery woman.
Then Ellie decided it was time to go to the source. Her work with the unemployed had taught her how to research a person’s background for the purpose of supplying sufficient documentation to get into continuing education programs. She started searching for her own birth records and from there, record of any sibling’s birth.
She’d been at it about forty-five minutes when she stopped, so shocked, her eyes could barely focus enough to read the words on the computer screen. Shehad been born a twin and according to the records she was looking at, there was no record of her sister’s death.
Following a hunch, she called a friend at the library. The other woman was a former client Ellie had helped to get into night school and eventually into a position as a reference librarian for a small town west of Boston. She asked the librarian to do a microfilm search on newspaper articl
es with her family’s name in them around the time of her birth.
Two hours later, her friend called back with news that rocked Ellie’s world right off its axis.
Ellie wasn’t surprised to find her father in his office on a Saturday afternoon, but he was surprised to see her.
He stood up from his desk, a smile of welcome curving his lips. “Eleanor, what are you doing here?”
“I came to ask why you lied to me.”