Page 20 of Bitter Confessions

“No, a legally binding reality,” he countered. “You thought you had the final say in our marriage?”

“After you broke your promise to me, yes.”

It took him a moment to understand what she was referring to. Jasmine wasn’t surprised when he dismissed her charge with a sweep of his hand. The one condition she’d made him promise to uphold before she agreed to marry him, he broke that night. She could still hear the distant echo of her tearful, earnest voice saying, “I don’t want you to regret this.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“A few careless words canceled out two years of marriage?” he said derisively. “Your family has said and done countless unforgivable things, but you don’t hold it against them. You forgive them again and again and are willing to sacrifice everything to keep that relationship going. Why am I not given the same grace for the one time I?—”

“Because you meant more to me than they ever did!” Her throat ached from the scream that came from the depths of her soul. “You...” She whirled away, hands scrubbing her face as she tried to get a hold of her rioting emotions. “You were everything to me. For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged somewhere, with someone. I would have done anything for you—did do anything for you,” she amended, feeling her knees buckle from the staggering weight of the disillusioned sorrow she still carried. “I was conditioned to accept that kind of treatment from them. I never thought I’d receive the same from you. After being treated like an outsider all my life, someone to be tolerated, I wasn’t going to beg to be respected when I’d done nothing wrong but love you the best way I knew how. And yes, all it took was one time and a few careless words. Sometimes, that’s all it takes to shatter someone’s world.”

She was trembling. This conversation was making her feel as if she were tearing off pieces of her skin, while Roth watched with an unruffled poise that made her want to attack him with a machete. He stood motionless in the middle of the room while she paced like a confined feral cat. He’d initiated this conversation knowing it would rip her to shreds while he looked on, as unaffected as he had been when he got her out of bed. Nothing rocked him. He was playing judge, weighing her explanations as if he weren’t as riddled with sins as she was. He was so calculating, so much like her father... Jasmine wanted to throw in the towel and lock herself in one of the bedrooms, but since Roth was in the habit of finishing things, she’d follow suit and finish this talk once and for all.

“If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit we never had a real marriage. You’re an expert at compartmentalizing and keeping me in one area of your life that doesn’t touch anything else. You held me at arm’s length, never letting me close—never letting me get to the heart of you. You never once said...” She held up her hand to stop that train of thought. It was no use going down that path. “You said I was lonely and vulnerable—the perfect target. I was a chess piece you acquired to fast-track your career. But the pawn finally realized it was just a game and walked off the board. It never occurred to me you’d fight the divorce. The only thing that makes sense is that you didn’t want to prove Dad right, or you were too stubborn to fold on an investment you didn’t get your money’s worth from. Either way, I wasn’t going to put my life on hold until you decided to release me. I had to move forward.”

“Into a life of fucking anyone who looked your way?”

Jasmine didn’t show any outward reaction, though his words whittled down what little self-worth she’d managed to stash to almost nothing. She lifted her chin and met his condemning gaze with quiet dignity. “You don’t get to judge me for the way I chose to cope.”

“Did you do it to punish me?”

She stared at him for a long moment before looking away. “No.”

She’d done it to punish herself for being too stupid to see she was in a one-sided relationship. Realizing she’d given all her firsts to a man who’d used her, she’d tossed herself into the whirlpool of life with reckless abandon. She’d gorged, the knowledge he was doing the same spurring her on. Her conquests had helped her through the grief and the confusion, while simultaneously giving her new material to write about so she didn’t get stuck on the chapter labeled “naïve wife.” She’d learned to stand on her feet and live without her husband’s support. And she wasn’t going to apologize for it.

“Do your friends know about Thalia Crane?”

The underlying anger warned Jasmine who Roth was referring to. She shot him a cool glance over her shoulder. “You mean Matthew, Lincoln, and the others?” At his curt nod, she turned her back on him and paced toward the crowded bookshelf, wondering if he’d read every title. “No. They’d be horrified.” She paused and then let out a humorless chuckle as she drawled, “Or, if they’re as interested as you suggest, maybe they’ll want me even more once they realize how experienced I am. I wonder if any of them have a fetish for?—”

She received no warning he was on the move. When he whipped her around, she was so startled she would have fallen if he hadn’t grabbed hold of her.

“Try to find out the answer to that question, and I’ll break their necks,” he said through clenched teeth.

She slammed her hands against his chest. “You’re the one who brought it up! You keep tossing my past in my face. If you didn’t want a whore for a wife, you should have conned another virgin like you did the first time!” She glared up at him with burning eyes. “You wanted to be my one and only. Well, I made sure I drowned myself in enough men to wipe your taste from?—”

He gripped her cheeks, forcing her mouth wide so she couldn’t speak. She returned his molten gaze with seething resentment.

“I never touched another woman.”

It took a moment for his words to penetrate the red haze. Her brows snapped together. When she tried to make a vehement denial, his grip tightened, causing her teeth to scrape against the delicate inner lining of her cheek.

“Before you, women were a barely tolerable nuisance. You were the first woman I saw as an individual—one with depth and light and facets I wanted to explore.”

She gripped his thick wrists with both hands to coax him to ease his brutal grip, but it tightened instead.

“I didn’t want anyone else. The way I acted when I came to Philadelphia should have told you that. I stayed faithful while we were separated.”

When she let out a low moan of pain, his hand dropped from her cheeks to her throat. He adjusted his grip, so her pulse jackhammered against his palm.

“You aren’t the injured party in this scenario. I endured years of servitude at Maximus’s hand for daring to claim you, and you walked away without a backward glance. You ran to him, begging him to set you free from the person willing to put it all on the line to have you. Baldwin and the others wanted you, but they wouldn’t act on their desires without permission from their families.”

His voice was devoid of emotion, but his eyes belonged to the devil. Unblinking, malevolent. The fact he was able to keep his expression blank while his demons raged sent a chill down Jasmine’s spine.

“I didn’t ask. I took what I wanted. I knew I wasn’t in your league—that I shouldn’t even be breathing the same air as you, much less touching you.” He fit his unforgiving frame to her quivering curves. “I knew you were used to a certain standard of living, things you took for granted being a Hennessy. I vowed I’d build myself an empire to rival your family’s in wealth and influence. And. You. Left. Me.”

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