Page 46 of The Tycoon's Ultimate Conquest
Art’s eyebrows shot up but something made him hesitate before heading back to the bedroom.
‘I’m not going to have this conversation,’ he said abruptly. ‘If you feel that I am the sort of man who disrespects women, who has somehow disrespectedyou, then it’s clear that we should not be together.’
‘Art...’
‘I’ll be back but don’t wait up.’
‘Is that your way of saying that you’d like me to be gone by the time you return? Because if it is then why don’t you have the guts to come right out and say so?’
‘No one speaks to me like that!’
Rose folded her arms and stared at him mutinously. On the inside she was breaking up into pieces. On the outside she refused to show him just how much she was hurting. ‘Then you’re right,’ she said gruffly. ‘It’s clear that we shouldn’t be together if I’m only allowed to speak to you in a certain way!’
The tense silence between them stretched on and on and on...stretched until she could feel all her wretchedness washing over her in a painful tidal wave.
‘Like I said,’ Art drawled, ‘don’t wait up.’
Rose watched in silence as he threw aside the towel to get dressed. She found that she couldn’t look at him. Even at the height of this toxic argument, she could still be moved by his sheer animal beauty. She didn’t want to be moved.
He left the room without a backward glance and for a while she actually hoped that he would have second thoughts and return.
He didn’t.
She had no idea where he’d gone and her feverish imagination provided her with all sorts of unwelcome scenarios. Had he disappeared into the waiting arms of some other woman? Had he somehow manoeuvred a situation in which she would react in a way that would give him an out?
She wasn’t going to hang around to find out and there was nothing more to be said.
She gathered her things in record time. She hadn’t brought much with her and what little shehadbrought took ten minutes to toss into her case.
She paused to look at the wonderful dress she had worn for the charity event that had been so memorable for so many reasons.
No way was she taking it with her.
It took her half an hour and then she was out of the mansion block and casting one last look behind her from the back of a black cab.
* * *
Art returned to an empty apartment. Of course he knew that she would be gone by the time he got back. He’d disappeared for over four hours. No explanation. What would have possessed her to hang around?
He flipped on the lights and went straight to his computer and switched it on. In his peripheral vision, he could tell that all her belongings had gone with her. There was no need for him to waste his energy hunting for evidence of her departure.
The screen opened up and he stared at it and realised that it really was possible to look at numbers and letters and symbols and see absolutely nothing whatsoever.
She would have caught a taxi to the station and would be heading back to her house by train. He was tempted to look up the possible departure times of the trains and resisted.
He’d done the right thing. That reaction was sufficient to harden his resolve. He had been weak once, had engineered a situation because he had still wanted her and had been unable to resist the demands of his body, but that weakness was something that had to be overcome.
He had seen where emotional weakness could lead. Those lessons had been learned when he had been too young but they were lessons he would never forget.
His indecision had been getting on his nerves and so he’d killed it fast. He hadn’t signed up to a querulous woman throwing a hissy fit because he refused to be subjected to a cross-examination.
So what if that phone call had had nothing to do with a woman?
He scowled, mood plummeting faster than the speed of light. Right about now she should be winding her arms around him, warm and naked and distracting.
Right about now he should be forgetting about work and climbing right back into bed with her because he couldn’t do anythingbutclimb into bed with her whenever they were in this room.
Art envisaged what her reaction would be in a couple of months, when the full extent of that phone call became common knowledge.
