Page 42 of Through You
For the last time, my eyes search for Artemis’s, but he looks away.
“Have a good afternoon,” I force myself to say.
I bolt out of his office. I feel stupid for believing that something great could happen to me, for letting him back into my life and into my heart when I damn well know we belong to very different worlds. Obviously, he only wanted to sleep with me.
Love and devotion, on the other hand, are reserved for his fiancé.
To someone like him, I’m just the other woman; I could never be anything more.
I’ve never felt a pain like this before. For the very first time I gave myself permission to be vulnerable. The bastard told me that he no longer had a girlfriend because he knew I wouldn’t do anything if he was involved with someone else.
How could he lie to me like this?
How was he able to look cool and composed when his fiancé arrived?
Does he not give one damn about how I feel?
I keep my cool, and keep my tears from freely flowing until I get home. There, I run to the bathroom and stare at my eyes, which are turning red as big, fat tears roll down my cheeks.
Claudia, you are an idiot.
Did I really think he would leave someone like her for someone like me? What hurts the most is that she’s engaged to him. Is he going to marry her? How could he kiss me and touch me the way he did when he’s planning to marry someone else?
How could he be unfaithful and use lies to make me complicit in his deception?
The memory of his smile and his words that day in the kitchen are fresh in my mind. How could he do that when he was engaged to someone else?
I cover my face so I can cry with abandon. In this whole fucking mess I can’t pinpoint what hurts most. I only know that the intensity of this pain points to deeper feelings I had started to develop for him beyond physical attraction.
It was much, much more than that.
Thirteen
Hello, sexy.
ARTEMIS
Five hours ago
Sitting around the U-shaped boardroom table alongside the heads of every department working for our company, I’m bombarded with numbers, figures, graphs, and a pile of proposals. I play with the pen in my hand while I listen. But my mind is occupied elsewhere.
Black eyes, red hair.
Claudia.
I still can’t believe that after all these years, waiting and longing, I finally kissed her. The feelings she stirred in me with one single kiss frighten me. I can’t shake the image of her flushed beautiful face, the desire in her eyes, her soft moans, how she desperately unbuttoned my shirt.
She is so precious to me.
I press my lips shut when I’m hit with the memory of how wet she was. The evidence that that she wanted me as much as I wanted her drove me crazy. I would have plunged myself inside her right there in the kitchen if it wasn’t for Ares’s unfortunate timing.
The last thing I need is an erection right in the middle of this meeting, so I push away the wayward thoughts.
“What do you think, sir?” Ryan, a project manager, asks me. I look up at him for the first time in the ten minutes of his presentation. Fortunately, my brain excels at retaining information after hearing it once, even when I’m not fully focused. Maybe that’s the reason why university was a breeze for me.
“Brilliant. However, why the need to hire out-of-state contractors?”
Ryan proceeds to explain. “It will reduce the total cost, sir.”
