‘Well, it isn’t about you,’ she snapped. How dare he? ‘Leave him alone.’
‘He slept with you and then tossed you out on your arse, Ari!’
Rafael recoiled from them in obvious horror. ‘I did no such thing.’
‘Oh right, you got your sister to do it.’
‘I did not. I don’t know what’s going on here. I went back upstairs and you were gone.’ Thank God he addressed her directly, rather than talking to Jason, who was all but foaming at the mouth anyway. ‘Nolvene said you’d gone out running, and Laure didn’t know where you were. What is going on? Ari, please, talk to me. With everything that has happened, all that we found in the caves—’
‘She doesn’t want to talk to you,’ Jason snarled and Ari lost it. Only her brother could make her even more angry than Rafael already had. But there he was, as usual, digging deeper.
‘Don’t speak for me, Jason. Go back inside. I’ll handle this.’
For a moment, she thought he’d refuse. She’d never seen him look quite so rebellious.
‘Fine. But, dear God, Ari, the men in your life…’
Ice flooded her. She turned on him, daring him to go further. She’d finally trusted him with the truth about Simon and here he was blurting it all over the place. Throwing it in her face. ‘Don’t! Don’t youdare!’
Jason threw his hands out in disgust or despair and turned on his heel, heading back to the house. He slammed the door behind him and a strange, pregnant silence fell over the garden.
‘I’m going to stop driving over here,’ Rafael said, with a half-smile, as if inviting her to laugh with him.
It was the wrong thing to do.
‘He isn’t wrong.’ Ari brought her hands to her hips, and glared at him.
Rafael looked completely bewildered. ‘We had an argument. We need to talk. We can work this out.’
‘Iheardyou.’
‘Heard mewhat?’
‘You were on the phone cancelling our funding. Laure said—’
Understanding dawned on his face. ‘Oh,Laure said? I bet she did. What did she say?’
And suddenly Ari began to suspect she had been taken for a fool, that Rafael’s sister had manipulated her, for reasons of her own.
Not to mention she’d allowed her own guilt to control her. She’d slept with Rafael. But he wasn’t Simon.
Even Simon had betrayed her in the end. But that didn’t mean Rafael would, did it?
And Simon had been outside. She was sure she’d seen him there. Or maybe it was a trick of the light and her grief, her guilt. She hadn’t been able to find him.
But she’d been certain it was him.
And Rafael had accused her of running away. Not just from him, but from Simon as well. And he was right. That was the worst part.
Rafael was still waiting for an answer, but she couldn’t say that. She couldn’t say any of it. The very idea made her throat close over.
‘That you…that I…’ The words dried up in her mouth. She couldn’t say them either. ‘I ran away.’ Her voice sounded so small.
The confession hung between them and he stared into her eyes as if to say he knew what that confession meant. To her endless relief he didn’t crow, or rub it in. He didn’t mention it at all. When he spoke, his voice was soft and patient.
‘The phone call you overheard wasnotabout your funding. My mother has been running the company like her own personal fiefdom and I need to put a stop to it. She’s in Dubai and I asked someone I trusted to look into the accounts. That’s the funding I meant. Laure cannot resist interfering in my love life. I don’t know what she’s up to, some kind of power play probably, but it doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Ari…’ his voice softened, ‘I thought…I don’t know what I thought. You were just gone. After last night, after our fight, after everything…you were gone.’
He looked devastated and the sudden stab of a new kind of guilt was unexpected. It made her instantly defensive. ‘You thought I’d what? Just slept with you and taken off?’
