They pledged to love and support me and they didn’t.Lili couldn’t figure out a way of saying that without sounding whiny. She was agitated now. She stood up and paced back and forth. She stopped. ‘It’s hard to talk about…they weren’t…supportive.’
‘They saved you from the kidnappers!’
Lili shook her head. ‘No, they didn’t. I did that. I saved myself.’
Cassian frowned. ‘What? How?’
A slew of images came into her head, and the memory of dank dark spaces. Big hands, smelly men. Rough voices.
Suddenly Cassian asked, ‘Did they touch you?’
Lili thought of being passed around, manhandled, pushed down, pulled up. She shuddered but then saw Cassian’s expression and said, ‘No. I told you already…they didn’t do anything to me like that. They were just rough…careless. And they said things…about what they’d do.’
* * *
Cassian’s brain blanked for a second at the thought of big brutish men pushing a young defenceless Lili around. Saying disgusting things. There was a maelstrom inside him. He was in shock and he recognised he was also angry and…hurt? that she hadn’t confided in him before now. This was huge.
Earlier this evening, not that long ago, she’d been looking up at him and he’d been drowning in her eyes, and for a moment he’d felt such a strong and profound connection that—he shook his head. She’d deceived him. Badly. He’d taken her at face value when he hadn’t done that with a woman, ever. And now he was paying for it.
‘How did you get away then?’
He saw Lili’s—Lara’s—throat work as she swallowed and he had to clamp down on his body’s helpless response. Even now when there was enough tension between them to cut with a knife.
‘They’d taken me to an industrial site on the outskirts of Rome. They were hired by a man my father had bested in a business deal. He wanted to punish him. Make him pay. Literally. They’d left me in a room but it wasn’t totally secure. There was another door leading into connecting offices hidden behind a tall filing cabinet.’
Cassian said nothing, just folded his arms.
She went on. ‘I managed to get out without them noticing and found one of the cars outside. The keys were in the ignition. I guess they weren’t that bright. I drove to the nearest police station and they brought me home. My parents were having a dinner party.’
‘While you were kidnapped?’
She nodded. ‘They’d told people that they had to be seen to be continuing as normal not to let the kidnappers win.’
‘So they didn’t pay your ransom…what was it again?’
‘A million euros, and no, they didn’t. But they let everyone believe they had.’
Cassian felt a burst of anger on her behalf. No wonder she’d walked away. What awful people.
‘There’s something else,’ she said now, her hands twisting in front of her. ‘Something that explains why they were so…cold.’
‘What?’
‘They had trouble conceiving at first so I was adopted. But my mother especially, she never really…connected with me. But then they tried IVF, when I was about two, and it worked. They got pregnant and had twins, my brothers.’
Cassian absorbed this. ‘What about your biological parents?’
Lili shrugged and avoided his eye. He saw something in her expression that caught at him inside where it shouldn’t. She looked…ashamed.
Then she did look at him and the expression was gone and replaced with one of almost defiance. ‘I’ve never pursued tracking them down because they chose to let me go. Clearly they’re not interested.’
Cassian knew that under any other circumstances with anyone else he would of course refute this but it was Lili and he’d just found out the woman he thought he knew…wasn’t.
There was the sound of cars beeping from the streets below. The sound seemed to break him out of a trance. He looked at Lili. How had this woman assumed such an importance in his life that he was standing in front of her and feeling so many things at once that he couldn’t begin to pick them apart?
He had a memory flash back to that day in his office in the villa when he’d told her they would marry. She’d been so shy, shapeless. She’d promised him that he would barely even notice a ripple of change in his life and yet here he was now and the terrain looked vastly different to anything he’d ever known before.
And the only thing he could think of right now was to cling to what he knew. He shoved down the roiling emotions and the ever-present desire. He said, ‘I have a race this weekend. I can’t think about this now.’
