“All I wanted was to spend one evening like a normal person. Just dance, meet a few people who don’t know what or where I have come from and have fun. Without you and this whole spectacle between us hanging over my head. Without worrying about the past or tomorrow. Now you have made me into an object of speculation. You made me feel as dirty as I have always believed myself to be.”
His silence only lent weight to her accusation.
“I’m going to go over there and apologize to Gaspard. Stay away from me, please. The last thing I want is to create a scene at Leah and Stavros’s wedding after intruding on it so shamelessly in the first place.”
His fingers clamped over her wrist like a vise. “No, you’ll not. You don’t need to apologize to—”
“No, what I don’t need is you in my life, even for another second. What I don’t need is you dragging me around and dumping me without a word, leaving me to wonder what I’m going to do the next day. What I don’t need is for you to make me feel as though every decision I have ever made is wrong, as if my entire life is one giant mistake.
“God, I’m so stupid I kept making excuses for you. I kept thinking...
“No wonder Andrew didn’t want anything to do with you. No wonder he told me again and again that we were better off without you.”
His skin pulled taut over his bones, his mouth blanching at her reckless words. “You’re wrong, about everything.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
SHE HAD JUST reached her room when Dmitri barged into the room. The thud of the door as he closed it with his shoulder sank into Jas’s bones.
He flung the dinner jacket away, untied the buttons of his shirt. Was he preparing for a fight instead of walking away as usual? she wondered. Even that little bit of attention gathered momentum inside her.
God, she had it bad.
She leaned her forehead against the dark wood paneling of the wardrobe and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to look at you...”
“No. I won’t let you sneak away. Not until you hear me out.”
“That’s the problem with you, Dmitri,” she said, still stunned at his mutinous tone.
Now he cared what she thought of him, that he had made her angry? That he had hurt her? Why?
“I have made it by myself all these years. Until you...stop treating me as if I’m rubbish you have been forced to rescue by a thin thread of conscience that you can’t rid yourself of, I have nothing to say to you. Nor do I wish to listen to anything you might have to say.”
They watched each other for an eternity of seconds. How was it that all her self-worth seemed to hinge on what Dmitri thought of her or how he talked to her? Or how he kissed her?
Was it a genetic trait that her mom had passed on to her, this eternal fixation on one man?
And slowly, sinuously, as if it was a snake waiting to strike, that awareness pulsed into life. Jasmine looked away to beat it back. The luxuriously soft red duvet covering the huge antique four-poster bed stared back at her, and the fever in her blood multiplied.
His arm stretched toward his nape, he finally spoke. “I have never thought of you as rubbish.”
His deceptively flat statement lay in the space between them. Molten gray eyes challenging her to take it up, and hers surely reflecting her panic...
Her struggle lasted all of two seconds, that same something inside her being pulled toward him. As it had always been. “All your actions say otherwise.”
“I was so angry that I could have wrung your neck for not coming to me sooner, yes. But I didn’t think that of you, not once.”
She could see him measuring his words now. What had changed?
Before she could argue, he held up a hand. “I didn’t realize that leaving you in the middle of the night could be construed as—”
“Hurtful? Insensitive? It wasn’t the point you were exactly trying to make?”
“No. I just couldn’t wait to...”
“To go back to whoever was waiting for you, I know.” She thought she might be a little sick. “I shouldn’t have kissed you like that, not when—”
“No, you shouldn’t have. And I don’t have a girlfriend.”
Something tight relented in her chest and she blew out a breath. Just because she lost the little sense she had when she was near didn’t mean Dmitri had to reciprocate. “I only realized this morning how much of your plans I wrecked. I didn’t know that Leah insisted that you make me your plus one. I’m absolutely okay with sitting with the guests. Dmitri, are you listening?”