"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 mother 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 mother's security team, but you have managed it."
"Nikos, 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 had sex?"
"Because I assumed you'd want to have sex 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 mother wants an heir for her business. You refuse to be that heir, so she went looking. She found me."
More shards of ice pierced her heart and somehow she knew this wasn't done. "What?"
"She offered an impossible to resist dowry. Half of her company upon marriage to you and a will stating the other half would go to our children upon her death."
She shook her head, denying her mother's culpability and Nikos' 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 mother'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 Nikos 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 mom if Nikos 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 sleeping 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 people in her life she loved.
She was used to indifference from her mother, not this all out brutality toward her feelings. And from Nikos 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 Ash's sister, she looked so much like her.