by Lucy Monroe
The prospect that Rachel had lied to him about her innocence made his insides tighten in fury and pain until he was nauseous with it.
Hadn't Andrea suckered his uncle into believing she was far more innocent sexually than she really was?
Was Rachel set on ensnaring him just as her mother had ensnared Matthias?
She had let him make love to her even though he had clearly stated marriage was not on offer. Why?
A curse erupted from his throat as he remembered something else from the night before. They hadn't used anything for protection the night before. She had never even mentioned it, not when he'd clumsily told her he wanted her without strings or later when they made love. He dismissed as irrelevant the fact he had said nothing himself.
It was only one step further in his admittedly agitated thought process to decide that had been her plan all along. She hadn't asked for a commitment because she'd planned to trap him into one. Rachel had been even more devious than her mother, for he had never been fooled by Andrea.
Rachel had taken him in completely.
When he thought of his decision the night before to marry her, the sickness inside him grew.
She was a professional player of extraordinary skill.
Rachel came out of the bathroom wrapped in Sebastian's oversize robe.
She'd woken up alone, but had tried not to be bothered by that fact. He was a businessman and had spent days away from his company. He would have a lot to catch up on. For all she knew, yesterday's reason for the urgently called meeting still existed.
She would not see it as a dismissal of her importance in his life. No man could make love as tenderly as he had to her and not feel anything but lust.
He'd been so gentle with her, and her heart swelled with the memory. As far as first times went, it had been ideal. Amazing. Beautiful. Wonderful. Her face creased in a goofy smile as the superlatives rolled through her mind.
Sebastian Kouros was the perfect lover.
And she didn't want their relationship to end, but she had asked for no promises and he had offered none. If she told him the truth, about her feelings and her past, would it make any difference?
He had to know she was nothing like her mother now. Rachel had come to Sebastian a virgin. She did not sleep around and she loved him. She was almost positive she'd told him so at one point during their lovemaking. Dared she repeat the words in the cold light of day?
Could she stand the definite cost she would pay for her cowardice if she did not? Sebastian would let her go back to America believing she didn't want anything more than an intense sexual encounter, when in fact, she wanted it all.
She doubted he loved her, but he felt something deeper for her than mere lust. Was it enough to build a relationship on? Would he even want to?
She would not know unless she came clean with him.
Besides, love was honest. It didn't hide behind pride or a fear of the past.
There was so much she hadn't told him about her past, things that would let him know she was not and would never be like her mother. After her experience as a teenager, she had rejected Andrea's way of life completely and Sebastian was bound to believe her when she told him. He was a smart man. He would understand.
He would believe she truly loved him when he realized she had been able to let him make love to her after that trauma.
She got up and headed for the door, ready to tell him everything, only to be brought up short when Sebastian walked into the room, his expression grim.
"Are you all right?" she asked, wondering if another time would be better to discuss their feelings and their future.
He didn't look very receptive.
Almost immediately, she chastised herself for being a coward. Sebastian owned a multinational corporation. There would always be events that were bound to cause a deterioration in his mood. She had to believe her emotions and his could rise above that.
"I am fine." His gaze flicked over her, a strange light in his gray eyes. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes." She took a deep breath. "Sebastian, there is something I need to tell you."
"Is there?" He didn't sound all that receptive either.
"Yes. Please, will you hear me out?"
His lips twisted in a parody of a smile. "I believe I already know what it is."
"No, I don't think you do." He was more intelligent than any man she'd ever known, but even Sebastian wasn't a mind reader.
"It is related to the matter of your virginity," he guessed, his voice curiously flat.
Shocked, she stared at him, incapable of speech for several seconds. How could he know?
"Andrea told you?" she asked in disbelief, but unable to come up with another scenario that made any sense.
"Yes. I figured it out through your mother."
That was an extremely odd way of putting it. "Sebastian, I'm talking about what happened to me when I was sixteen. Do you know about that?"
He paled and bitter anger crossed his features before he wiped them of all expression once again. "You are about to tell me you had a traumatic experience with a man, no?"
She nodded, but found it was harder to talk about than she had expected.
She sat down on the edge of the bed, her knees feeling wobbly. "I can't believe she told you. She made me swear never to say a word."
"And now you are going to tell me that you did not believe you could respond to a man, but I have brought out your womanly passion." The total lack of emotion in his voice bothered her.
"Yes," she said nervously. She wished she could tell what he was thinking.
“Ne, yes, I am not easily fooled."
He was talking about it all so dispassionately and yet, perhaps that was how he was dealing with it. If he cared about her and after last night, she believed he did, he would be furious about what had happened to her. He was a traditional Greek man, possessive and protective. This was probably as hard for him as it was for her to discuss.
"I know you very well." His words confirmed her hopes.
She nodded, choking on emotion. "Yes, you do and maybe that is one of the reasons that I love you so very much."
His face contorted as if in pain and he spun away from her. "Tell me something, Rachel."
She hadn't expected him to match her declaration. Men like Sebastian didn't give in to their feelings very easily, but she hadn't thought he would dismiss her completely either.
Perhaps his turning away did not signify that. "Anything."
"You are aware Matthias had denounced Andrea and planned to divorce her?"
She didn't know what that had to do with her and Sebastian, but she sighed. ' 'One of her friends E-mailed me with the news."
He whipped back around to face her, the ice in his eyes sending shivers down her spine. "So, this knowledge is what prompted the big seduction scene last night."
"What big seduction scene?" Nothing was going the way she had anticipated and he was confusing her.
"The dinner, your willingness to be close to me even after I told you I would not offer marriage. It all adds up now. You came to Greece knowing your mother had been cut off. You didn't want your meal ticket to end so you made a play for another rich man."
"What are you talking about?"
He sliced the air with his hand. "I am talking about you, the innocent virgin,'' he said the words with major scorn, "allowing yourself to have sex for the first time with me, the meal ticket."
She couldn't believe he was saying these things, more and more horror filling her with each passing word until she was as cold as his eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself, but it did not help a cold that had started in her heart and was radiating outward.
"You believe I made love with you because I was looking for money?" She wanted to scream the words, but they came out a harsh whisper instead.
"You think I came to Greece for my mother's funeral intent on seducing you?"
Not only was the suggestion a sick one
, it also indicated a colossal ego she'd give anything to deflate until he felt as empty as she did right now.
"You knew about the divorce."
"I didn't know before I came to Greece. I found out yesterday."
“Who told you, a Mina bird?'' he asked deridingly.
She tried to explain about the E-mail, about how it had been waiting in her in-box with all the others, but he simply stood there in stone-faced rejection as if her words impacted him not one iota.
' 'You expect me to believe Andrea did not call you in a temper and tell you the truth, but that one of her friends sent you an E-mail you conveniently received posthumously?''
It did sound unlikely, but not impossible and if he respected and trusted her at all, he would not deride it as a quickly composed lie.
"No, I don't expect you to believe it, but it's the truth," she uttered, defeat sinking into her bones as her dreams shattered around her.
CHAPTER SIX
"You said you knew me. If you did, you'd know how hard last night was for me after what happened to me when I was younger."
"That trick has been played too. It may have worked on Matthias, but it will not work on me."
Her mother had pretended to have a sexual trauma in her past? She would believe anything of her mother, she'd had a lifetime of her games but could not take in how Sebastian had changed from a warm and caring lover to a cold and heartless stranger.
How could everything have gone so wrong? "Last night was beautiful."
Something came and went in his eyes, but she didn't even try to figure out what. Her heart was dying inside of her.
“A beautiful bit of manipulation, you mean, but I am not my uncle and I will not be deceived by my libido into a relationship with a mercenary bitch."
She surged off the bed, the last insult one too many. "Don't you dare call me names!"
"Does the truth hurt?" he taunted.
"The truth? What would you know about the truth? You're as deceived as Matthias ever was." He believed lies about her, only they were lies of his own making. She'd never once misled him. "I'm not like my mother. I came to you a virgin, for heaven's sake."
He looked as unconvinced as a heartless statue. "Your virginity was as false as your supposed love."
She shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to come to terms with his words. "You don't believe I was a virgin?"
"You've caught yourself in your own lies. You implied you were raped, but then say you are a virgin. Which is it?"
"I never had sex before." It was all she was prepared to say at this point. She wasn't about to bare her most painful memory to him, not after all he'd said.
"You did not bleed."
And that was his incontrovertible proof she had sexual experience? That she did not bleed?
No, she hadn't. She'd bled at sixteen though, so much so that she'd been terrified she would die. Andrea had refused to take her to Emergency, had told her not to be a baby, that all women bled when their hymen broke.
She was bleeding again now. Inside where he could not see, her love was hemorrhaging to death and the pain was even worse than it had been that horrible day so long ago.
"I didn't demand marriage. I gave myself to you freely. Doesn't that count for anything?" She wasn't even trying to convince him anymore, she was simply pointing out the obvious.
"You sold yourself too cheaply."
Each word was like a slap in the face. She hadn't sold herself at all.
If he thought the act of lovemaking outside of marriage had been a no-brainer for her, then he was pig-ignorant where she was concerned. She'd never accepted her mother's lifestyle as the right one to follow. She'd wanted a wedding night, a white gown and Prince Charming, but she'd settled for the prince without the trappings because she'd loved him so much.
And she'd hoped he would see her love for what it was, value the gift of her heart.
She'd been an idiot. A stupid, naive, idiot.
"Nothing else to say?" he asked, a tone in his voice she did not recognize.
She just shook her head, refusing to look at him again. Her heart hurt so much, she wondered if emotional pain could stop its beating as effectively as a heart attack.
He stood there for several seconds looking at her, the tension in him a palpable entity, but finally he spun on his heel and left the bedroom.
She sat, her heart turning to stone in her chest, her pain morphing into an impenetrable wall around emotions she would never risk giving in to again.
It was a long time before she was able to stand on legs that felt like rubber bands stretched unbearably taut, but she did. Then she dropped the robe from her shoulders, unable to bear the feel of anything belonging to him next to her skin. She walked naked from the bedroom, across the hall and into her own room and shut the door. Then she locked it.
Out of the corner of her eye, she had seen movement, but she refused to turn her head to see who it was. She didn't even care if it were one of his employees and they had seen her naked. Nothing mattered anymore.
The process of emotional decimation Andrea started so long ago had been completed in Sebastian's bedroom.
Rachel had been a fool to love such a monster.
The leaden weight in her chest told her she would not make such a mistake again. She was anesthetized against future pain because she could not feel anymore. Surprisingly, she wasn't even sad now. She was just...nothing. Numb.
And she was glad.
She had had her fill of pain.
She packed her cases. She pulled out the box of mementos she'd added to in the last week, a shell from the beach the day of their fishing trip, a flower Sebastian had picked her on one of their walks, simple things that did nothing but taunt her with her own emotional stupidity. Refusing to even look inside, she tossed it in the garbage can, then she called the airline with her ticket and agreed to come into the airport and wait stand-by for the next available flight. Next she called a taxi.
Thirty minutes later, she left the apartment. Sebastian's voice filtered through the study door as she passed, but she had no desire to stop and say, "Goodbye." Everything had been said and she could only hope she never saw the cynical bastard again.
"And how is your guest, son?"
Sebastian gripped the phone tightly and sucked in choking air at his mother's question. The last time he'd seen his guest, she had looked devastated.
He'd spent the last couple of hours trying to get her and last night off his mind, but it hadn't worked. Urgent company business could not keep his thoughts from her and his mother's question just served to bring everything to the forefront of his mind with blinding clarity.
His words, her reactions, assumptions that lost their power to convince in the chilled light of reality not overshadowed by gut clenching emotion.
God in Heaven, what have I done ?
There was no answer from above, but his mother called his name across the phone line.
"Ne?"
"I asked how Rachel is doing."
"Not well."
"You had an argument?" his mother asked, managing to convey both censure and her belief it was his fault with four short words.
"She is just like her mother."
"You don't really believe that, do you?"
Things were shifting inside his head, but to admit he had been completely wrong would be to contemplate a hell of his own making. "What are the chances she would be different?"
"You are a fool if you believe this of her."
To be called a fool by his mother was not a pleasing experience and Sebastian gritted his teeth in frustration. "You are so certain. Tell me why."
"An hour in her company is enough to show that two people could not be more dissimilar. You have let your prejudice color your judgment."
He had thought that too, but then he'd convinced himself he was wrong. "Perhaps you have allowed your compassion to color yours."
His mother's sigh was long and full
of parental disapproval. "She has spent the last several years living completely separate from Andrea. Not only did she insist on living in another country, away from her mother's influence, but Rachel stopped accepting support funds from Matthias when she graduated from university. If she were like Andrea, wouldn't she have been in Greece, participating in her mother's decadent lifestyle? At the very least she would have allowed Matthias to augment her income."
Cold that had been curling at the edges of his thoughts began to fill his being. "I did not know Matthias had ceased supporting her."
"But then you changed the subject every time her name was mentioned in the last few years."
He had wanted her and hearing about her had only exacerbated an ever-increasing ache.
"She lied to me," he said in a last-ditch effort to hold on to the protection of his assumptions.
"This I do not believe."
Goaded by the reproach in his mother's voice, he told her the truth. "Rachel said she was a virgin, but she wasn't. She was trying to trap me just like Andrea trapped Matthias."
