Fresh air and a much-needed reprieve from his presence.
She stormed back the way she’d come, through the front door and out onto the deck.
* * *
Basa swore with frustration, and then, without having had any thought of doing so, he was striding after her. ‘Why should I believe you?’
A cool breeze accompanied the silence that followed his words and then she spun round, her eyes blazing in the darkness. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’
There was an ache in her voice like a bruise, but he ignored it. ‘Evidence!’
‘What evidence?’ she snapped. She was staring at him as if he’d grown two heads. ‘You mean being related to Charlie and Raymond?’
‘No, I don’t mean that. That would be petty—not to say unfair.’
He shook his head. Tension was swelling around them, crowding them as he had crowded her earlier in the street, and then in the car, and suddenly he was fighting to stay calm.
‘None of us gets to choose our relations, Mimi, but we do get to choose how we act, and that’s how other people judge us. On our actions.’
She breathed in sharply. ‘Well, in that case, if you would stop slinging mud in my direction for a couple of seconds, you should take a good, long look at yourself.’
He took a step forward, his eyes fixed on her small, pale face. ‘Meaning?’
‘You took me to your room and stripped off my clothes and then you lost interest. Only you didn’t even have the common decency to tell me to my face. You just left me lying there, like some half-eaten dessert, while you pretended to go and find a bottle of champagne.’
The ache in her voice made him flinch inwardly, and he felt a dull flush of colour spreading over the contours of his cheekbones as, inevitably, they reached the crux of the matter.
‘But why were you even there? In my room? In my bed?’
He felt a stab of shame. It had been his decision to employ Charlie and Raymond, and his lack of judgement had caused untold suffering to so many people—not least his own father. And yet here he was, fixating on Mimi’s motivation for turning that sweet smile his way.
‘I told you why.’ She stiffened. ‘I wanted to have sex with you.’
His body hardened at the frankness of her words, his eyes dropping instinctively to the lush pink mouth that had spoken them.
‘But you say you were a virgin.’
Her chin jerked up, her eyes widening with shock and hurt, and for one tiny insane moment he wanted to reach out and pull her into his arms.
‘I don’t just say it, Basa, I was. I st—’ She broke off, stepping back unsteadily.
It was the second time she had made that claim, and once again he found himself questioning both her and himself. There had already been so many false positives that he didn’t know whether to believe her. Could she really be telling the truth? Or was she just playing him again? Trying to soften his resolve?
‘So why me? Why that night?’
It was the question he’d asked himself on so many occasions—a question he’d even considered asking his sister over the many months that had passed since that night. A question that seemed to matter even more now that she was claiming to have been a virgin.
‘Why does it matter?’ Her voice was unsteady now too. ‘It was two years ago. Why do you care?’
He took a step closer, the taste of anger and frustration bitter in his mouth.
‘The reason I left you lying there was because I was talking to my lawyer—the lawyer who had been calling me and leaving messages all evening about a “discrepancy” in the accounts.’
She stilled, her blue eyes suddenly like saucers. He could almost track her thoughts as she worked back through the timeline of those hours and days before news of the embezzlement broke.
His own thoughts stalled. No, that didn’t make sense. She shouldn’t need to work back through anything. According to his argument she would already have known that time was running out for her stepfather and her uncle, and that was why she had made a play for him.
Unless... Unless he’d been wrong.