‘No.’
Her lips quirked downward. ‘I’m surprised.’
And though he could understand her surprise, he shrugged and said, ‘Why? You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’
‘Well, pictures don’t lie,’ she said quietly, mulling this over. ‘And there are a lot of photos of you with a lot of different women.’
Yes, that was true. ‘It was another life.’
Sympathy darkened her amber eyes. Damn it. He didn’t want to do this. He didn’t want Lucinda, of all people, to feel sorry for him. He was so sick of the way people looked at him, and to have her turn into one ofthemwas the last thing he wanted.
‘My sex life is not interesting,’ he said darkly. ‘I would much rather discuss yours.’
‘Or the lack thereof?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That is a much greater mystery. How is it possible that a woman like you has not had more than one boyfriend?’
She lifted a hand to her throat, as if looking for something. He remembered the necklace he’d seen on the first day, diamond on a fine silver chain.
‘I can’t say.’
‘Because it is a secret?’
‘No, because there’s not really any particular reason.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What happened to your claim that you are always honest?’
Her lips parted in surprise. ‘I’m—I am being honest.’
‘No, you’re hiding something from me.’
She looked as though she was about to deny it and he waited, his expression giving nothing away. But then, she sighed softly and focused her gaze on the bedspread between them. ‘It was not a good breakup. I guess I lost a lot of confidence when he left me. And relationships are hard, you know? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable to another person. You have to trust someone else not to hurt you, and, after Beckett, I just wasn’t able to do that again.’
Thirio had a burning curiosity. He wanted to understand everything about this Beckett, including how he could be so stupid as to treat a woman like Lucinda badly enough that she’d be gun-shy of all relationships.
‘What did he do to you?’
The tone of his voice drew her gaze. She furrowed her brow, adding complexity and interest to a face that was already far too mesmerising. ‘He fell in love with someone else.’
‘Someone you knew?’
Wariness flashed in her eyes. Surprise too. ‘Yes.’
‘Someone you trusted?’
Her lips pulled sideways. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Lucinda’s long, elegant fingers moved between them, plucking at the bedspread. ‘One of my stepsisters, Sofia.’
‘The woman I met at your office?’
‘No, that was Carina. She’s not—quite as bad as Sofia.’
Thirio had run the gamut of emotions in his life. He’d known delirium and joy as a boy, and careless, giddy happiness as a teenager and then the flipside to that, incomparable loss and grief as a young man, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever known an emotion quite like the one pummelling him from the inside out. It was a mix of protectiveness and angry disbelief. ‘Tell me about these women,agape mou.’ The endearment slipped out before he could stop it, words he’d never said to a woman in his life, for the simple reason he’d heard his father say them to his mother so many times, they seemed almost to belong to his parents.
She opened her mouth, then closed it, sighing softly. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘You have said your stepmother mistreated you. I gather your stepsisters were just as bad?’
‘No, no one could be.’ She responded quickly and with no artifice, so he knew that whatever torment her stepmother had put Lucinda through must have been truly awful. ‘I can’t blame my stepsisters. They’re by-products of their upbringing and my stepmother is not a kind woman. They were never taught to see the goodness in the world, nor in people. They perceive life through a prism of what they can get, not what they can give.’