She blushed. “So what?” She couldn’t let him know just how much his touch affected her. How she became almost obsessed with him and his body.
He clenched his jaw and a muscle bunched in his cheek. “There is no way you would have been celibate while we were apart,” he decided. “You are too sensual and too passionate to have slept alone.”
“That’s your evidence? You are using the way I respond to you as proof that I can’t be faithful? Where is the logic in that?” she asked angrily. She had given herself freely to him and he was using it against her.
Dev’s eyes darkened. “How do I know you wouldn’t respond like that to all your lovers?”
All? “Did you ever think that I’m only that way with you?” she said in a hiss. “That I don’t feel that way about another man? Why would I take another lover to my bed when I could have you?”
His lips tilted into a slow, sexy smile. Dev’s eyes glowed with interest as he flattened his hands on the wall above her head, caging her in. “Tell me more.”
“Shut up.” She shouldn’t have revealed that. He was already arrogant and cocky. Now he knew just how much she wanted him. How much she had always wanted him.
“You walked out on me,” Dev said and closed his eyes. “What better way to get back at me than to sleep with another man? Any man would do.”
She had walked away because she loved a man who saw her as an obligation. She had felt betrayed and discarded. She had thought the man she trusted didn’t care about her at all. Yet the idea of getting back at him by sleeping around had never occurred to her.
“I wasn’t thinking of revenge. I was in survival mode.”
Dev raised an eyebrow. “Are you telling me you weren’t tempted at all?”
“I wasn’t looking! And even if I was, there wasn’t a great pool of candidates where I was staying.”
“And where was that?”
Tina covered her face with her hands before she blurted out the truth. “At a treatment center. For the past four months I’ve been staying in a psychiatric facility for depression.”
The beat of silence stretched until her nerves twanged. She didn’t want to see Dev’s expression. The judgment in his eyes. The triumph that he could use this against her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, his voice laced with anger. “Why did you feel the need to hide that?”
“Because I didn’t know if you would help me or use the information against me.”
“I had been trying to help you.”
She wanted to believe that but he had taken some actions that she couldn’t understand. She dragged her hands down her face and caught his gaze. “You made decisions about my career and my finances without discussing it with me. You sent me to doctors who wanted to drug me.”
Dev dipped his head. “I was taking any advice I could get. I had been concerned about you and I wanted immediate results. Any time I tried to discuss a problem with you, you shut me out. It was as if you didn’t know what was going on around you. When you disappeared, I was out of my mind with worry.”
“I’m sorry I worried you. I admit that part of it was to punish you. Part of it was to get away.” She had been angry and hurt, striking out the only way she could. “I’m sorry for everything. I’m sorry you had to marry me because of the baby. I’m sorry that my body couldn’t protect our baby.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “We don’t know why it happened.”
She scoffed and looked away. “I feel like I failed. That my body failed.”
“No, Tina. I am the one who failed,” he admitted. “I should have been there for you and the baby. I wasn’t because I didn’t...I focused on the wrong thing. I was too busy providing for you and creating an empire for my son.”
“You had to work,” she said. “I know how competitive this business is—”
“That is no excuse,” he insisted. “And after the miscarriage, I overcompensated.”
“There was nothing you could do to intervene,” Tina said. “Nothing could have saved our son.”
“I couldn’t save the baby, but I could have saved you. You were so frail and lost. But you made it clear that it was too little, too late.”
“I needed you,” she insisted. “I just wanted you there. That’s all you had to do.” She still needed him. She was always going to have that shadow of fear, wondering if the depression would return. Wondering if she would have to go through hell like she had for the past four months. She had already made the decision that she wouldn’t have children to avoid it happening again, but what if that wasn’t enough?