‘So it is you? Didn’t you hear me calling? Why the hell didn’t you answer? What are you doing back this early?’
It was a technique she recognised only too well. A way of firing questions at an opponent in rapid succession, and so disorientating them that they didn’t know which one to answer first. It meant he was rattled. Because he wasn’t sure just how long she’d been there or whether she’d only stayed downstairs.
‘I can come and go as I please, Jason. This is my house!’
My house, technically, the man in the shadows corrected in the privacy of his thoughts. The big London house had always been the property of the Nicolaides family. He had let her continue to live in it because it suited him that way, but she didn’t own it. Even if she was still, technically, his wife.
But only technically, it seemed.
A moment ago he had been severely tempted to step forward, out of the concealing darkness, and confront the pair of them. But from the moment that the blond man had appeared on the landing outside the bedroom he had changed his mind. Watching and waiting seemed a much better idea. Because if ever he had seen evidence of an illicit assignation, a sexual romp unexpectedly disturbed, it was right there on that bastard’s guilty-looking face. If he was any sort of judge, the other female involved was still right there in the room behind this Jason.
‘Sarah, don’t get so huffy about nothing!’
Jason was descending the stairs now, smoothing his hair back with a hurried hand, belatedly fastening his jeans as he came down.
‘Nothing!’
The freezing note in Sarah’s voice made the watcher grin sharply. He knew that tone well. Too well. Oh, yes, he’d been subjected to just that icy note of indignant reproof more than once. He was still mentally smarting from the impact of the last time.
‘Nothing?’
‘Well, OK, so I took a nap in your bed.’
Clearly the blond man thought he could bluff his way out of this.
‘What’s so terrible about that? We’re going to be sharing it from now on anyway.’
‘I haven’t actually agreed to you moving in.’ To anything, if the truth was told.
‘No, you haven’t said the words, but we both know it’s only a matter of time.’
He sounded so sure of himself, Sarah thought, anger warring with hurt and betrayal and producing a highly explosive combination in her mind. So sure that it was obvious he believed she hadn’t been upstairs; that she wasn’t aware of what had been going on inside that bedroom.
He still thought that he could worm his way out of this. He truly believed that she was so simple, so gullible, that she would swallow everything he tossed at her. And what infuriated her most was the thought that, lonely and unhappy, she must have given him that impression.
‘But we both know it was on the cards.’
‘Jace? Jacey, baby…’
A third voice, a light, petulant, feminine voice, interrupted what Sarah had been about to say. And as Jason whirled, another violent expletive escaping his lips, the bedroom door opened and a small, curvaceous female sashayed out onto the landing. She was wrapped loosely in a deep red silky gown that Sarah recognised instantly. Made for her own slender height, it swamped the other woman’s shorter frame and was too long for her on her legs, falling almost to the floor instead of mid-calf.
‘Are you ever coming back?’ she pouted, peering over the banisters and down at where he stood, frozen to the spot in the hall. ‘I’m missing—’
‘Andrea, I told you to wait!’ Jason cut in furiously. ‘To stay where you were and—’
‘I was bored!’ the woman addressed as Andrea protested. ‘I got tired of waiting for you to come back.’
“‘Don’t get so huffy about nothing”!’ Sarah repeated bitterly. ‘I wonder what your—friend feels about being described as nothing!’
Her outburst silenced Jason temporarily in the same moment that it drew Andrea’s frowning gaze towards where the other woman stood in the hallway.
‘And who are you?’
‘Me?’
To her amazement, Sarah managed it with only a trace of a shake in her voice, though anyone who knew her would have recognised in the stiffness of her tone the struggle she was having to maintain control. The man who was listening to everything knew it only too well.
‘I’m just the owner of this house—of the bed you’ve just got out of, the robe you’re wearing…’
And Jason’s girlfriend, she supposed she could have added, but the words stuck in her throat.
‘The robe you’re—almost wearing!’
She was tight-lipped against her emotions, stiff as a board.
The watcher in the shadows saw how the colour had ebbed from her cheeks, the muscles in her jaw clenching tight, and he was struck by a sudden and distinctly unwelcome attack of something close to compassion.
Dangerously close.
Compassion was a mistake with this woman—a bad mistake—because it left him vulnerable. Once he had given his heart completely and willingly to her and she had smashed it into pieces and tossed it back at him like so much rubbish. He wasn’t likely to risk that happening again.
‘So might I suggest that you go and get back into your own clothes and get yourself out of here? And take your cheating fancy man with you!’
‘But Sarah—’
‘Out!’
She might be able to hold herself together if he went now, she told herself. If he turned and walked out immediately, then she might be able to forget just how foolish she had been over the past couple of weeks. Foolish in that once again she had stumbled into a relationship that had been all wrong from the start.
It had been a relationship in which she had been looking for nothing but comfort and a hiding place, and that had led her to the mess she was in right now.
‘Sarah—please. It meant nothing—honest! It was just a fling.’
‘A fling? You were prepared to betray my trust—to risk our relationship—for something that didn’t even matter! Nothing more than an itch you had to scratch!’
At least Damon had had the honour to really care for his ‘bit on the side’. His mistress had been the woman he wanted as well, and she had only been the wife of convenience.
Jason’s expression was every bit as hangdog and spuriously repentant as she had expected, and he had actually taken a step or two towards her, coming much closer. Too close.
‘Oh, come on, Sarr! You have to understand.’
Another step forward, and this time his hand came out. He had almost reached her, almost touched her, and it was too much.
‘No!’
Her own hands came up, knocking him away as her nerve broke completely, and she whirled, unable to think of anything beyond getting away. She couldn’t even bear to be in the same space as him any longer. She wanted only to be away and clear and free. Free to forget about Jason and all he had ever meant to her.
Free to think of the man who had once meant everything. Free to—
‘Ooof!’
The cry of shock, confusion and near-panic escaped her on a violent expulsion of breath as she blundered, blind and disorientated, straight into an unexpectedly hard and solid