The Secret His Mistress Carried(4)

‘You were rude,’ Gio told her without hesitation.

‘But I was entitled to be. Two years ago, you married another woman,’ Billie reminded him over her shoulder, angry that it could still hurt her to have to force that statement out. Unhappily there was no escaping the demeaning truth that she had been good enough to sleep with but not good enough to be considered for anything more important or permanent in Gio’s life. ‘You’re nothing to do with me any more!’

‘I’m divorced,’ Gio breathed in a raw-edged undertone because nothing was going as he had expected. Billie had never attacked him before, never dared to question his behaviour. This new version of Billie was taking him by surprise.

‘How is that my business?’ Billie shot back at him, quick as a flash, while refusing to think that startling declaration of divorce through or react to it in any way. ‘I still remember you telling me that your marriage was none of my business.’

‘But then you made it your business by using it as an excuse to walk out on me.’

‘I didn’t need an excuse!’ A familiar sense of wonderment was gripping Billie while she listened, once again, to Gio vocalise his supremely selfish and arrogant outlook. ‘The minute you married, we were over and done. I never pretended it would be any other way—’

‘You were my mistress!’

Colour lashed Billie’s cheeks as though he had slapped her. ‘In your mind, not mine. I was only with you because I fell in love with you, not for the jewellery and the clothes and the fancy apartment,’ she spelled out thinly, her hands curling together in front of her in a defensive, nervous gesture.

‘But there was no reason for you to leave. My bride had no objection to me keeping a mistress,’ Gio stressed with growing impatience.

My bride. Even the label still hurt. The back of her eyelids stung with tears and she hated herself but she hated him more. Gio was so insensitive, so self-centred. How on earth had she ever contrived to love him? And why the heck would he have tracked her down? For what possible reason?

‘Sometimes I honestly think you talk like an alien from another planet, Gio,’ Billie countered, tightly controlling her anger and her pain. ‘In my world decent men do not marry one woman and continue sleeping with another. That is not acceptable to me and the idea that you found a woman to marry who didn’t care who you slept with just depresses me.’

‘But I am free now,’ Gio reminded her, frowning while he wondered what the hell had happened to Billie to change her so much that she could start arguing with him the minute he reappeared.


‘I don’t want to be rude but I’d like you to leave,’ Billie admitted unevenly.

‘You haven’t even heard what I have to say. What the hell is the matter with you?’ Gio demanded, shaken into outright disbelief by her aggressive attitude.

‘I don’t want to hear what you have to say. Why would I? We broke up a long time ago!’

‘We didn’t break up—you walked out, vanished,’ Gio contradicted with harsh censorious emphasis.

‘Gio...you told me I needed to wise up when you informed me you were getting married and I did exactly like you said...the way I always did,’ Billie muttered tartly. ‘I wised up and that means not listening to a word you have to say.’

‘I don’t know you like this.’

‘Why would you? It’s been two years since we were together and I’m not the same person any more,’ Billie told him with pride.

‘It might help if you could actually look me in the eye and tell me that,’ Gio quipped, scrutinising her rigid back.

Reddening, Billie finally spun round and collided dangerously with stunning deep-set dark eyes, heavily fringed with lashes. The very first time she had seen those eyes he had been ill, running a high temperature and a dangerous fever, but those eyes had been no less mesmerising. She swallowed hard. ‘I’ve changed—’

‘Not convinced, moli mou.’ Gio gazed steadily back at her, enjoying the burst of sexual static now thickening the atmosphere. That her tension mirrored his told him everything he needed to know. Nothing had changed, certainly not the most basic chemistry of all. ‘I want you back.’

In shock, Billie stopped breathing, but within seconds his admission made a crazy kind of Gio-based sense to her. By any standards, his marriage had lasted a ludicrously short time and she knew Gio didn’t like change in his private life. To his skewed way of thinking, reconciling with his former mistress might well now seem the most attractive and convenient option. ‘No way,’ she said breathlessly.

‘I still want you and you still want me—’

‘I’ve built a whole new life here. I can’t just abandon it,’ Billie muttered, wondering why on earth she was stooping to making such empty excuses. ‘You and me...it didn’t work—’

‘It worked brilliantly,’ he contradicted.

‘And your marriage didn’t?’ Billie could not resist asking.

His hard facial bones locked in an expression she remembered from the past. It closed her out, warned she had crossed a boundary. ‘Since I’m divorced, obviously not,’ he fielded, smooth as glass.

‘But you and I,’ Gio husked, reaching out to grasp her hands before she could guess his intention, ‘did work very successfully—’