by Lynne Graham
‘Is Alice... You know, your wife... Is she working, or is she looking after the kids? How does that woman cope?’ He shook his head in wondering admiration and drawled, ‘A busy medical practice, a mother of two and a husband who cheats on her?’
Mari waited for Adrian to say something, willed him to say something, to tell this terrible man who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere like some sort of sleek and dark avenging angel—in a world where angels wore very expensive tailoring—that this was all a mistake.
They’d laugh about it later in bed when they were sharing the bottle of champagne that he had ordered.
But the only sound was the shocked mutters from the other guests. Mari didn’t turn her head, but she could feel the hostility and disapproval of their stares like daggers in her slender back.
‘I couldn’t help myself. She... I love my wife but... Well, just look at her!’
Her last hope vanished.
Every word that man had said was true.
She was the other woman. She hadn’t known, but that didn’t lessen Mari’s sense of crushing guilt and shame. Her sense of total isolation was complete; she had never felt more alone in her life. Pressing a hand to her stomach, she breathed her way through a wave of intense nausea. When was Adrian going to tell her? After, stupid.
Seb, tuning out the rest of the other man’s words, followed the line of his accusing finger. The woman standing there represented everything he despised in a female, yet he had no control over the hot hunger that slammed afresh through his body.
While his mind rejected and despised her, his body wanted her. You had to recognise a weakness to control it, and Seb valued control.
Control or not, it was still salt in a raw wound to acknowledge that she stood there looking like a piece of porcelain about to shatter, and there was a part of him that wanted to comfort her.
She could have had any man she wanted, and she had decided she wanted a married loser? When she could have... Who, Seb? You?
He ignored the mocking words in his head and launched a fresh invective, this time directed at the woman. ‘Do you care that he’s got a wife and children waiting for him at home?’
Mari cringed under the man’s interrogative stare, literally paralysed by misery and guilt.
Her silence whipped his anger to a fresh high as he turned his inner rage on her and snarled contemptuously, ‘Is it just a bit of fun?’ He shook his dark head, a harsh sound of disgust escaping his clamped lips as he suggested with withering distaste, ‘Or just because you can?’
She swayed and Seb heard the catch of her breath above the wind and the litany of excuses that were free falling from Adrian’s lips, telling everyone who would listen how this was not his fault, he was a victim.
With an exasperated growl Seb turned his head and dealt the cheating husband an arctic glare. The other man gulped and whined.
‘You won’t tell Alice, will you? It’ll only hurt her, and this will never happen again.’
‘Wow, you really are a prize, aren’t you?’ Seb’s attentions swivelled back to the girl. ‘Did you think he would marry you, or is this real love?’ he mocked. ‘So that makes it all right?’
‘I’m sorry.’
The whisper made Seb’s tenuous grip on his self-control slip another fatal notch.
‘Sorry...?’ he blasted back, six feet five of towering contempt moving in a step closer. ‘You think that makes it somehow better, that it makes the people whose lives you trashed happy again? Love or not, sweetheart, what you’ve done makes you the worst sort of slut... Oh, and just for the record, men take sluts to their beds, but rarely in my experience marry them.’
Every word the man was saying was true; every word was making something shrivel and die inside her.
With a final horrified stare from the swimming blue eyes, she gave a choked sob and turned and ran, her fiery hair streaming out behind her.
‘You big bully!’ An elderly grey-haired woman voiced what seemed to be, if the glares were any indication, the general consensus.
The hell of it was Seb, who kept seeing those blue eyes, half agreed with them.
Copyright © 2015 by Kim Lawrence
ISBN: 978-1-472-09859-7
THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABIES
© 2015 Lynne Graham
Published in Great Britain 2015
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin (UK) Limited
Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR
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