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“You make it sound as if I misplaced her,” Damian said, his voice flat and cold.
“You know I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that Nicolo and I talked about it and—”
“Is that all you and Barbieri have to keep you busy? Gossip like a pair of old women?”
He saw Lucas’s eyes narrow. Why wouldn’t they? Damian knew he was tossing Lucas’s concern in his teeth but to hell with that. The last thing he wanted was sympathy.
“We care about you,” Lucas said quietly. “We just want to help.”
Damian gave a mirthless laugh. He saw Lucas blink and he leaned toward him across the table.
“Help me through my sorrow, you mean?”
“Yes, damn it. Why not?”
“The only way you could help me,” Damian said, very softly, “would be by bringing Kay back.”
“I know. I understand. I—”
“No,” he said coldly, “you do not know. You do not understand. I don’t want her back to ease my sorrow, Lucas.”
“Then, what—”
“I want her back so I can tell her I know exactly what she was. That she was a—”
The men fell silent as the waiter appeared with Damian’s second double vodka. He put it down and looked at Lucas, who took less than a second to nod in assent.
“Another whiskey,” he said. “Make it a double.”
They waited until the drink had been served. Then Lucas leaned forward.
“Look,” he said softly, “I know you’re bitter. Who wouldn’t be? Your fiancеe, pregnant. A drunk driver, a narrow road…” He lifted his glass, took a long swallow. “It’s got to be rough. I mean, I didn’t know Kay, but—”
“That’s the second time you said that. And you’re right, you didn’t know her.”
“Well, you fell in love, proposed to her in a hurry. And—”
“Love had nothing to do with it.”
Lucas stared at him. “No?”
Damian stared back. Maybe it was the vodka. Maybe it was the way his old friend was looking at him. Maybe it was the sudden, unbidden memory of the woman outside the restaurant, how there’d been a time he’d have wanted her and not despised himself for it.
Who knew the reason? All he was sure of was that he was tired of keeping the truth buried inside.
“I didn’t propose. She moved in with me, here in New York.”
“Yeah, well—”
“She was pregnant,” Damian said flatly. “Then she lost the baby. Or so she said.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’d never been pregnant.” Damian’s jaw tightened. “The baby was a lie.”
Lucas’s face paled. “Hell, man. She scammed you!”
If there’d been one touch of pity in those words, Damian would have gotten to his feet and walked out. But there wasn’t. All he heard in Lucas’s voice was shock, indignation and a welcome hint of anger.
Suddenly the muted sounds of voices and laughter, the delicate clink of glasses and cutlery were almost painfully obtrusive. Damian stood, dropped several bills on the table and looked at Lucas.
“I bought a condo. It’s just a few blocks from here.”
Lucas was on his feet before Damian finished speaking.
“Let’s go.”
And right then, right there, for the first time since it had all started, Damian began to think he’d be okay.
A couple of hours later, the men sat facing each other in the living room of Damian’s fifteen-room duplex. Vodka and whiskey had given way to a pot of strong black coffee.
The view through three surrounding walls of glass was magnificent but neither man paid it any attention. The only view that mattered was the one Damian was providing into the soul of a scheming woman.
“So,” Lucas said quietly, “you’d been with her for some time.”
Damian nodded. “Whenever I was in New York.”
“And then you tried to break things off.”
“Yes. She was beautiful. Sexy as hell. But the longer I knew her…I suppose it sounds crazy but it was as if she’d been wearing a mask and now she was letting it slip.”
“That’s not crazy at all,” Lucas said grimly. “There are women out there who’ll do anything to land a man with money.”
“She began to show a side I hadn’t seen before. She cared only for possessions, treated people as if they were dirt. Cabbies, waitresses…” Damian drank some of his coffee. “I wanted out.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“I thought about just not calling her anymore, but I knew that would be wrong. Telling her things were over seemed the decent thing to do. So I called, asked her to dinner.” His face turned grim and he rose to his feet, walked to one of the glass walls and stared out over the city. “I got one sentence out and she began to cry. And she told me she was pregnant with my baby.”
“You believed her?”
Damian swung around and looked at Lucas. “She’d been my mistress for a couple of months, Lucas. You’d have done the same.”
Lucas sighed and got to his feet. “You’re right.” He paused. “So, what did you do?”
“I said I’d support her and the baby. She said if I really cared about the baby in her womb, I would ask her to move in with me.”
“Dear God, man—”
“Yes. I know. But she was carrying my child. At least, that’s what I believed.”
Lucas sighed again. “Of course.”
“It was a nightmare,” Damian said, shuddering. “I guess she thought it was safe to drop the last of her act. She treated my staff like slaves, ran up a six figure charge at Tiffany…” His jaw knotted. “I didn’t want anything to do with her.”
“No sex?” Lucas asked bluntly.
“None. I couldn’t imagine why I’d slept with her in the first place. She thought I’d lost interest because she was pregnant.” He grimaced. “She began talking about how different things would be, if she weren’t…” Damian started toward the table that held the coffee service. Halfway there, he muttered something in Greek, veered past it and went instead to a teak cabinet on the wall. “What are you drinking?”
“Whatever you’re pouring.”
The answer brought a semblance of a smile to Damian’s lips. He poured healthy amounts of Courvoisier into a pair of crystal brandy snifters and held one out. The men drank. Then Damian spoke again.
“A couple of weeks later, she told me she’d miscarried. I felt—I don’t know what I felt. Upset, at the loss of the baby. I mean, by then I’d come to think of it as a baby, you know? Not a collection of cells.” He shook his head. “Once I got past that, what I felt, to be honest, was relief. Now we could end the relationship.”
“Except, she didn’t want to end it.”
Damian gave a bitter laugh. “You’re smarter than I was. She became hysterical. She said I’d made promises, begged her to spend her life with me.”
“But you hadn’t.”
“Damned right, I hadn’t. The only thing that had drawn us together was the baby. Right?”
“Right,” Lucas said, although he was starting to realize he didn’t have to say anything. The flood gates had opened.
“She seemed to plummet into depression. Stayed in bed all day. Wouldn’t eat. Went to her obstetrician—at least she said she’d gone to her obstetrician—and told me he’d advised her to get pregnant again.”
“But—”
“Exactly. I didn’t want a child, not with her. I wanted out.” Damian took another swallow of brandy. “She begged me to reconsider. She’d come into my room in the middle of the night—”
“You had separate rooms?”
A cold light flared in Damian’s eyes. “From the start.”
“Sure, sure. Sorry. You were saying—”
“She was good at what she did. I have to give her that. Most nights, I turned her away but once…” A muscle knotted in his jaw. “I’m not proud of it.”
“Man, don’t beat yourself up. If she seduced you—”
“I used a condom. It made her crazy. ‘I want your baby,’ she said. “And then—”
Damian fell silent. Lucas leaned forward. “And then?”
“And then,” Damian said, after a deep breath and a long exhalation, “then she told me she’d conceived. That her doctor had confirmed it.”
“But the condom—”
“It broke, she said, when she—when she took it off me—” He cleared his throat. “Hell, why would I question it? The damned things do break. We all know that.”
“So—so she was pregnant again.”
“No,” Damian said flatly. “She wasn’t pregnant. Oh, she went through all the motions. Morning sickness, ice cream and pickles in the middle of the night. But she wasn’t pregnant.” His voice roughened. “She never had been. Not then, not ever.”
“Damian. You can’t be sure of—”
“She wanted my name. My money.” Damian gave a choked laugh. “Even my title, the ‘Prince’ thing you and I both know is nothing but outdated crap. She wanted everything.” He drew a deep breath, then blew it out. “And she lied about carrying my child to get it.”
“When did you find out?”
“When she died,” Damian said flatly. He drained his glass and refilled it. “I was in Athens on business. I phoned her every night to see how the pregnancy was going. Later, I found out she’d taken a lover and she’d been with him all the time I was gone.”
“Hell,” Lucas said softly.
“They were on Long Island. A narrow, twisting road on the Sound along the North Shore. He was driving, both of them high on booze and cocaine. The car went over a guardrail. Neither of them survived.” Damian looked up from his glass, his eyes bleak. “You talked about grief before, Lucas. Well, I did grieve then, not for her but for my unborn child…until I was going through Kay’s papers, tying up loose ends, and found an article she’d clipped from some magazine, all about the symptoms of pregnancy.”
“That still doesn’t mean—”
“I went to see her doctor. He confirmed it. She had never been pregnant. Not the first time. Not the second. It was all a fraud.”
The two friends sat in silence while the sun dipped below the horizon. Finally Lucas cleared his throat.
“I wish I could think of something clever to say.”
Damian smiled. “You got me to talk. You can’t imagine how much good that’s done. I’d been keeping everything bottled inside.”
“I have an idea. That club of mine. Remember? I’m meeting there with someone interested in buying me out.”
“So soon?”
“You know how it is in New York. Today’s hotspot is tomorrow’s trash.” Lucas glanced at his watch. “Come downtown with me, have a drink while I talk a little business and then we’ll go out.” He grinned. “Dinner at that place on Spring Street. A pair of bachelors on the town, like the old days.”
“Thank you, my friend, but I wouldn’t be very good company tonight.”
“Of course you would. And we won’t be alone for long.” Another quick grin. “Before you know it, there’ll be a couple of beautiful women hovering over us.”
“I’ve sworn off women for a while.”
“I can understand that but—”
“It’s what I need to do right now.”
“You sure?”
Inexplicably an image of the woman with green eyes and sun-streaked hair flashed before Damian’s eyes. He hadn’t wanted to notice her, certainly didn’t want to remember her…
“Yes,” he said briskly, “I’m positive.”
