‘It might be better if I show you,’ Art said slowly. He pulled out his phone, found what he was looking for on the screen and handed it to her. And waited, eyes glued to her expressive face. Every nerve in his body twanged with the sort of tension he had seldom experienced in his life before.
He watched as bewilderment turned to confusion, as confusion turned to disbelief and then, finally, as disbelief morphed into appalled horror.
Long after she should have finished reading the article about him, just one of many to be found online, she kept staring at the phone as though hopeful that it might deliver something that would make sense of what he’d shown her.
His biography. Succinct. Replete with his success stories. Sycophantic in its adoration of the man who had made his first billion before the ripe old age of thirty-five.
She finally looked up with a dazed expression.
‘You’reDC Logistics...?’
Art flushed darkly but he wasn’t going to start justifying himself.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly.
‘You’rethe guy we’ve been fighting...’
‘Yes.’
‘You came here... You pretended to be...Why?’ She shot up, trembling, as thousands of implications clearly began sinking in. ‘Youbastard.’ She edged away from him, recoiling as though he was contagious, and took up position by the large Victorian fireplace, leaning against it and staring at him with huge round eyes.
‘You came here with a plan, didn’t you? You came here so that you could infiltrate and get us onside. You didn’t like the fact that we were protesting about you putting up a bunch of houses that no one wants!’
Art’s jaw hardened but there was nothing he could say to refute her accusations since they were all spot on. ‘I owned the land. I was going to build, whether you stood in the way or not. I thought it diplomatic to try to persuade you to see sense before the bulldozers moved in and trying to persuade you within the walls of my London offices wasn’t going to work.’
‘Youusedme.’
‘I...’ Art raked his fingers through his hair. ‘There was no need for me to come clean. And I did notuseyou. We both enjoyed what happened between us. I could have walked away without saying anything.’
‘Are you asking for a medal because you finally decided to tell the truth?’
‘There was also no need for me to grant the concessions that I have.’
‘No wonder you were so confident that the big, bad developers were going to accept our terms and conditions. Becauseyouwere the big, bad developer.’
‘I played fair.’
‘You lied!’
‘A small amount of subterfuge.’
‘You came here...you...’ She turned away because she needed to gather herself. Everything was rushing in on her and she was beginning to feel giddy. She took a few deep breaths and forced herself to look at him. To her fury, he met her gaze squarely, as if he was as pure as the driven snow!
‘I let you stay in my house.’ Rose laughed bitterly. ‘No wonder you insisted on paying rent! You’re worth a small fortune. It must have troubled your conscience that you were sponging off someone who couldn’t hope to come close to matching you in the financial stakes. Someone with rooms in need of decorating and plumbing on the verge of waving a white flag and giving up! I bet you’ve never painted anything in your life before or done anything manualat all!’
‘Going through each and every detail of the ways you feel deceived isn’t going to progress this.’
‘I slept with you.’
Those four words, delivered without any expression whatsoever, dropped like stones into a quiet pond and silence settled between them, thick and uncomfortable.
* * *
‘I’m guessing...’ Rose kept her voice level but the blood was rushing through her veins like lava ‘...that that was all part of the game plan? To get me onside?’
‘That’s outrageous!’
‘Really? Is it? Why? You conned your way into my home!’
