"Patently. You love her and I am nothing more than a pawn my mother and you have played between you. I could hate you, Nikos. 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, Ash."
"Go away, Nikos." 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.
Nikos stopped on his path across the hardwood floor, but then he straightened his shoulders and kept going.
Ash wanted to scream 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 Nikos 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 Blade, 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 Nikos' 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. Blade 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 Ash's twin was given in the original article. Ash 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 Ash 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. She had been born a twin and according to the records she was looking at, there was no record of her sister's death.