FORGOTTEN LOVER, Carole Mortimer [chrysanthemum read aloud TXT] 📗

‘Explain what, for God’s sake?’ he exploded. ‘That you chose to forget me as soon as you had your lawyer’s ring on your finger? I realise now that I was just a last fling for you. After all, every girl likes one lover before she settles down with her husband. I should have realised I was yours,’ he added disgustedly. ‘God, I was thirty-seven then, I should have realised a twenty-year-old girl wouldn’t seriously be interested in me.’

He had to be joking! He was the sort of man who would have women, of all ages, interested in him when he was seventy. He would never lose his harsh good looks, the muscled straightness of his body. Yes, women would always find him attractive—as she did.

‘Mr—Jerard,’ she hastily amended as she remembered his threat of earlier, knowing by the twist of his lips that he too recalled it. She licked her lips, hurriedly stopping that too as she remembered how provocative he found it. She set her mouth in a straight line, her gaze unflinching as she looked at him. ‘I want to tell you why everything you tell me about the past is a mystery to me,’ she said firmly, her tone very positive.

‘Strange,’ he taunted. ‘Nothing about you is a mystery to me.’

Her eyes flashed darkly brown. ‘Will you listen to me!’ she raised her voice, determined he was going to hear her out, even if it took the few brief hours left until morning!

‘Go ahead,’ he shrugged uninterestedly, leaning back with his eyes closed.

Velvet glared at him. If he dared to fall asleep …! ‘Are you listening?’ she demanded angrily.

‘Avidly.’ He made himself more comfortable, his eyes still closed.

She sighed her frustration. How could she talk to a man who to all intents and purposes was fast asleep! ‘Jerard—’

‘Okay, okay,’ he sighed, sitting up, a bored expression on his face. ‘Go ahead.’

A bored listener was better than no listener at all, so she began to tell him of that year she had no memory of, haltingly at first, and then in a rush as she knew she had the whole of his attention, and his eyes narrowed as he listened.

‘So there you have it,’ she finished with a shrug. ‘The doctors said it could all come back, but then again it may just remain a—a blank.’ She looked at him searchingly.

Jerard didn’t say anything, as the seconds stretched into minutes, and still he continued to look at her, his eyes becoming colder and colder by the minute. Finally he stood up, his face a harsh mask. ‘Very convenient,’ he drawled insultingly. ‘But if I’d wanted to listen to a fairy story I could have got you to read one out of Vicki’s books. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get a couple of hours’ sleep.’ He turned his back on her.

It was such a definite snub that it couldn’t be ignored. ‘You don’t believe me,’ Velvet choked. He was the only person outside her family who had ever been told her secret, and he didn’t believe a word of it!

He turned, his expression contemptuous. ‘Was I supposed to?’ he scorned. ‘Credit me with some sense, Velvet. It’s like something out of a soap-opera,’ he derided.

Her bottom lip trembled emotionally. ‘But it’s the truth!’

‘Maybe the truth as you like to see it. Was your marriage to Anthony Dale such a disaster that you prefer to claim you’ve forgotten it?’ his voice was thick with sarcasm.

She winced as if he had physically struck her. ‘My marriage to Anthony wasn’t a disaster at all,’ she denied heatedly.

Jerard’s mouth twisted derisively. ‘I thought you couldn’t remember it,’ he taunted.

‘I can’t,’ she flushed deeply.

‘Then how do you know it was a success?’

‘My brother—’

‘Ah yes, Simon.’

She gasped. ‘You know my brother?’

Jerard shook his head. ‘Only what you’ve told me about him.’

‘I—I talked about Simon?’

Jerard nodded. ‘And his wife, Janice.’

It was very disconcerting that this man should know so much about her when she knew next to nothing about him. ‘Well, Simon told me I was happy with Anthony,’ she defended.

‘And how would he know that?’

‘Well, I—It was obvious!’

‘Believe me, nothing is that obvious.’

‘But I was happy with him,’ she declared stubbornly. ‘I—We—I have Tony to prove how happy I was with Anthony.’

‘And I have Vicki to prove how happy I was with Tina,’ Jerard mocked. ‘And we both know I was never that.’

‘You weren’t?’ she blinked, taking Tina to be his wife.

‘For God’s sake, Velvet,’ he snapped, ‘you’ve taken this farce far enough. You’ve shown me quite plainly that you aren’t interested in carrying on where we left off two years ago. There’s no need to pretend that either of us loved our spouses.’

‘I loved Anthony!’

‘Like hell you did!’

Tears flooded her eyes. ‘But I did.’

‘As a child might love a friend maybe, or as a sister might love an adored older brother, but not as anything else, not as a lover, not like you loved me—or like I thought you loved me,’ he amended harshly. ‘But that’s over with now, Velvet, the dream turned out to be just that. You aren’t the girl I fell in love with, that girl would never use such a feeble story to hide from the fact that she loved me enough to spend a stolen week with me, a week when we hardly ventured out of this apartment, a week when we made love until we were dizzy with it, a week when I thought you’d given yourself to me so completely that not even the passage of time could part us. No, you aren’t that girl,’ he added quietly. ‘She had more guts in her little finger than you have in the whole of that beautiful body you take such pride in.’

His last insults passed over her head. ‘I stayed with you for a whole week?’ she swallowed hard.

‘Yes,’ he snapped confirmation.

Oh heavens, it was worse than she had thought. When Jerard claimed they had been