Seeing it, Mari felt her temper fizz up all over again. ‘This is just a joke to you, isn’t it?’ she accused, overflowing with a sense of righteous outrage. ‘You don’t even have the guts to admit what you did was because my brother doesn’t have the right school tie and has worked for what he has rather than it being handed to him on a golden platter, and don’t deny it,’ she added breathlessly.
Nostrils flared, he gave a mirthless smile. ‘I wasn’t about to,’ he promised grimly. The idea of him explaining himself to this red-haired virago with a chip on her shoulder the size of a forest offended him on more levels than he could count.
‘Before she brought him home to meet you, everything was fine.’
‘Relationships end every day.’ He cut her off with an impatient gesture of his hand. ‘You have decided that I am responsible for your brother’s broken heart, I get that part of your delusion, but the rest? I’m a bit hazy where I fit in. He had an accident? What sort of accident?’
‘Mark came to see me after he and Fleur split up. He was distraught when he left—if he hadn’t been he’d never have been drinking.’
‘He drank?’
Hearing the grim condemnation in his voice, she rushed to her twin’s defence.
‘He was only just over the limit.’
He greeted this weak defence with a thin smile of disdain.
‘And there was fog...’ Her voice trailed away; she knew there was no excuse. ‘He never drinks and drives—normally—and he wouldn’t have been doing so that night if you hadn’t interfered. You’re the reason it happened.’
And if you’d been more sympathetic? Mari closed her eyes and her ears to the voice of self-loathing in her head because she simply couldn’t bear it.
He watched, fighting an unexpected flash of concern as she started to sway forward and back on her heels, her eyes closed. Concern he didn’t want to feel roughened his voice as he asked abruptly, ‘Are you all right?’
Her blue eyes opened. They glittered with unshed tears and loathing. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not about to faint again.’ She sniffed and wiped a hand across her damp eyes.
While Seb considered himself pretty immune to most female tears, the sniff made him feel... Uneasy was not the right word, but as he pushed away the suggestion that the prosaic action touched a tender spot he refused to acknowledge he settled for it.
‘Sit down,’ he urged, coating his concern in impatience, because actually giving a damn about a woman who had deliberately set out to cause chaos in his life would have been irrational, and he wasn’t.
He just didn’t want her to faint at his feet.
‘I don’t need to sit down,’ she snapped back. ‘I’m going home.’ She took two steps before a voice said in her head, Running away?
Teeth clenched, she swung back. This time she would be the one to have the last word. ‘Why should you carry on living your perfect life when because of you my brother’s life is ruined?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘WE’LL LEAVE THE perfection of my life out of this conversation and while I don’t doubt you need someone to blame for what has happened to your brother—’
Mari stiffened defensively and cut in, yelling angrily, ‘You are to blame.’
‘What happened to your brother is tragic, but it is not the result of anything I did. He chose to drink, he chose to get behind the wheel of a car, his decision, his responsibility,’ he intoned with steely implacability. ‘It is pure luck that he didn’t injure an innocent.’
Gnawing her lower lip, Mari lowered her gaze. He had said it; she had thought it. ‘He loved your sister.’
‘It was hardly the act of passion,’ Seb derided contemptuously. ‘It was the act of a weak man who didn’t think of the consequences of his actions. It seems to be a family failing.’
‘He’s lying in a hospital bed!’ she cried, wondering if the callous monster even had a heart.
‘Which is sad, but he is the architect of his own downfall and I am just glad he has not taken my sister down with him.’
Mari wasn’t even aware that her arm had lifted, moving in a swishing arc towards his face until, a few inches short of making contact with his lean cheek, fingers like iron curled around her wrist, forcing it away and back down to her side.
She didn’t even give him the chance to release her hand; she started fighting, pulling frantically to wrench her hand free. When he did so she lifted her head very slowly, her wild hair falling back to reveal eyes that were wide and filled with hate, her skin flushed rosy, her lips parted as she panted for breath as though they’d just gone several rounds—everything was out of proportion with her and so, he realised, were the reactions she evoked in him.