confidence trick designed to impress me?’
‘Of course I’m keeping Harley!’ Sev thundered back at her.
‘Do you know why you prefer animals to people?’ Amy breathed fiercely. ‘Animals don’t care about your morals and they don’t answer back.’
‘Is that it? Are you finished now?’ Sev shot at her in the rushing silence that seemed to assault her ears. Her stomach was churning, and her chest was tight. Even sucking in a breath hurt. It had just dawned on her that she was never ever going to see him again and that felt like a hammer blow even though she knew it shouldn’t, even though she knew she had had a lucky escape, a welcome wake-up call to reality, whatever anyone wanted to call it.
‘Yes, I’m finished,’ she murmured flatly, and it was true, she had nothing left to say. He had hurt her and there was nothing she could do about it. She wasn’t connected to Sev, she wasn’t close to him, she wasn’t anything she had thought she was. Talking to a guy like him about love was a joke, a pathetic, foolish joke, and she wished she had kept her mouth shut.
‘Reconsider,’ Sev urged in a grudging, deep undertone as he drew out his phone. ‘I won’t run after you...that’s not my style.’
‘I’ll live,’ Amy told him, unable to resist the urge to steal a last look at him, violet eyes scanning the sheer chiselled beauty of his proud dark features. Her gaze lingered on the artful hollows and angles of his spectacular bone structure that lent him such charismatic presence, and took in the challenge of those liquid-bronze eyes that telegraphed more angry frustration than remorse. She lifted her chin in defiance and turned away again.
Within minutes she was tucked into the limousine, travelling home in style for the last time ever, and painful tears were squeezing out below her lowered eyelids, stinging her skin as they trickled down her cheeks, slow and silent in their fall. She sucked in a steadying breath and forced herself to look out of the window at the brightly lit shops. Christmas would be here soon, and she wasn’t about to let him spoil Christmas as well, was she?
She would allow herself one night to grieve, she told herself ruefully. Sev had just been a dream that didn’t pan out, a silly girlish fantasy. She should have smelt a rat from the outset when a guy of his calibre showed interest in someone as ordinary as she was, but who didn’t want to believe that a dream could come true? She had been too busy being flattered, charmed and seduced by his interest and she had stopped using her brain, hadn’t even looked for flaws and inconsistencies. At least Harley had got a home out of it all! She pressed her trembling hands to her face and told herself to stop beating herself up for what she couldn’t help or change. She would survive, she had survived worse, she told herself dully.
Ironically and for the first time ever she was feeling sympathy for her late mother. What must it have been like for Lorraine to watch the man she loved pursue the boss’s daughter? And then for him to come back to her after the wedding, doubtless raising her hopes of reconciliation again? Amy grimaced. Somewhere deep down inside where she didn’t explore very often she had had a little dream that her mother might have been wrong about her father and that he might, after all, have wanted her more than he had been prepared to admit. But she had seen the ugly truth of that childish dream in Oliver Lawson’s stricken face that very evening. He had been horrified by her appearance and clearly much more concerned about how his unfortunate wife would react to the revelation of Amy’s existence and how that might impact on his own life. And poor, unhappy Annabel, Amy thought sadly, who had pinned her romantic hopes on such a lying, cheating coward of a man, who didn’t know what fidelity, or the truth, was.
Amy curled up in her bed with Hopper. She had never felt as alone in her life as she did at that moment. The evening, the fantasy outing in the gorgeous dress, had started out with such promise and she had been so excited, so happy, and then it had all come crashing down like a roof on top of her and had almost buried her alive. Had Sev been right?