Page 19 of Bitter Confessions

She pivoted smartly to face him. “My suspicions about your fidelity weren’t why I walked away. They just tipped the scales in a direction I was already leaning. But you confirmed my suspicions when you admitted you got a vasectomy.”

“What about it?”

His tone wasn’t defensive, merely curious, as if they were discussing the weather. Fiery worms funneled through Jasmine’s heart like a rotted apple.

“What faithful married man gets a vasectomy?” she jeered. “Aside from the fact you rarely visited, I was on birth control, so you wouldn’t have had to worry on that front. It stands to reason you did it for someone else. Or multiple someones... You could’ve screwed around to your heart’s content without any repercussions, and I’d have been none the wiser.”

“Is that it?”

His dispassionate tone snapped her tenuous hold on her temper. “Fuck you!”

Even as the familiar curse burst out of her, she castigated herself for allowing him to elicit such a strong reaction. Why couldn’t she be a stone-cold bitch during these confrontations? Why couldn’t she laugh about the past? Why did she care about something that happened five years ago? She felt like a train careening down a mountainside with no brakes: there was a curve up ahead, and if she didn’t get herself under control, she was going to derail.

“You say you didn’t leave me for your inheritance, and you didn’t run back to your father for money or security, so why did you?”

She gave him an incredulous look, which he met with grim resolve.

“I need to know why.”

“You already know!”

“I had my suspicions, which you debunked. I’m not fucking guessing anymore. Spell it out for me.”

“So you can judge if my reasons were good enough? I don’t have to justify my actions. You certainly don’t,” she spat.

She paced in a zigzag pattern, too agitated to walk a straight line. She didn’t owe him an explanation, but her mind was already supplying her with all the reasons she’d ended their marriage. And with the opening he gave her, she couldn’t help herself.

“I ignored my father’s warnings about you, but coming here made me realize how little I knew about you and the life you led. I had no idea you’d invested in this building or how prosperous you’d become. You wanted me in Philadelphia, far from the success you’d accumulated. When I trespassed into your territory, you made my position in your life crystal clear. I wasn’t a wife or a partner who was entitled to know what was going on. I was relegated to a plaything, a sex toy you could entertain yourself with when it was convenient for you. ‘I’ll visit when I want you,’” she quoted and tried not to react as her insides shriveled. “I was just a body you visited a couple of times a year. The way you looked at me, like I was the last person you wanted to see, when I’d come all that way...” Her lower back ached as the invisible load on her shoulders grew a little heavier. “It’s not something I’m likely to forget. I’d never seen that side of you—didn’t even know it existed. You were always affectionate, but that night, you couldn’t bring yourself to touch me, much less be near me, even though we hadn’t seen each other in three months.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, even as her insides curdled and she felt the cold slap of shame. “I realized when you see me, you see my father. We’re one and the same to you.”

He scowled. “That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? If I were some other man’s daughter, you would have confided in me. Instead, you blamed me for my father’s actions.” She fixed him with a level look. “Just like now. That’s why I’m here, right? To pay for his sins because he made your life hell?”

She saw that hit home when Roth’s hand balled into a fist.

“You’re here because I finish what I start. I was blackmailed into letting you go. You were blackmailed back into the position you deserted without my consent. We’re even. If my only goal was to punish you, I wouldn’t have allowed you to spend time with the Davies and Johnny and Aleixo. We wouldn’t even be talking right now and if you really were a sex object, you’d be on your knees, and I’d be coming down your throat instead of listening to this crap.”

A stifling blanket of silence fell. Jasmine’s skin buzzed as his fingers went to the button of his slacks.

“Don’t.” Her voice shook. “If you don’t see me as a whore, you won’t...”

For a long minute, his hand remained in place. She could see him battling his need to subjugate her and rid himself of his temper in the way he normally did. The veins on the back of his hand rippled as he gripped his zipper. When his hand finally fell to his side, she felt a flash of victory, which vanished when he spoke.

“I never saw you as a whore until I read your books as Thalia Crane.”

She went numb.

“It never crossed my mind you would cheat on me until your father told me you had a replacement. I resigned myself to seeing the announcement in the paper or hearing from a business associate that my wife was now someone else’s. When nothing happened, I assumed Maximus had been yanking my chain. And if he was lying about that, then maybe the other things he said were lies as well.”

Her heartbeat matched that of a ticking clock she wasn’t sure was a figment of her imagination or hidden somewhere in the room.

“With book one being nearly autobiographical, I had to assume what came after was more fact than fiction as well. The reality of what you did was worse than I ever imagined. Did you go home with that biker the same day you filed for divorce, like the character in the book?”

“I considered myself a free woman the moment you left me here to go to your meeting,” she said in a tone that belied the guilt and defiance warring for supremacy within her. “I decided to divorce you before I reached the lobby. Filing was just a formality.”

“Legally, you were still my wife.”

“A technicality.”

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