Free The Call of the Desert by Abby Green Page B

deep. She hadn’t thought of that awful evening for a long time.
    And yet it wouldn’t go away, the memory as stubborn as a dark stain. She could remember feeling compelled to blurt out, “Kaden … why are you behaving like this?”
    He’d arched a brow and crossed his arms. “Like what?”
    “Like you hardly know me.”
    His face had been a mask of cool civility. “You think six months of a summer fling means that I
know
you?”
    Julia could remember flinching so violently that she’d taken a step backwards. “I didn’t think of it as a fling. I thought what we had was—”
    He had slashed down a hand, stopping her words, his face suddenly fierce. “What we had was an affair, Julia. Nothing more and nothing less than what you were engagingin with that man the other night. You are not from this world.” His mouth had curled up in an awful parody of a mocking smile, “You didn’t seriously think that you would ever become a permanent part of it, did you?”
    Of course she hadn’t. But her conscience niggled her. Deep within her, in a very secret place, she’d harboured a dream that perhaps this was
it
. He’d even mentioned his London apartment. Bile rose as she acknowledged that perhaps all he’d meant by that was that he’d give her the role of convenient mistress.
    Horror spread through her body as the awful reality sank in. It was written all over every rejecting and rigid line of his body. Everything she’d shared with Kaden had been a mere illusion. He’d been playing with her. A western student girl, here for a short while and then conveniently gone. Perfect for a summer fling. And now he was ruler, a million miles from the carefree young man she thought she’d known.
    Shakily she said, “You didn’t have to tell me you loved me. You could have spared yourself the platitudes. I didn’t expect to hear them.” And she hadn’t. She truly hadn’t. She knew she loved this man, but she hadn’t expected him to love her back … and yet he had. Or so she’d been led to believe.
    Kaden shrugged and looked at a cuff, as if it was infinitely more interesting than their conversation. He looked back at her with eyes so black they were dead. “I went as far as you did. Please don’t insult my intelligence and tell me that you meant it when
you
said it. You can hardly claim you did when within days you were ready to drop your pants for another man.”
    Julia backed away again at his crude words, shakingher head this time, eyes horrifically glued to Kaden. “I told you, it wasn’t like that.”
    She realised in that moment that she’d not ever known this man. And with that came the insidious feeling of worthlessness she’d carried ever since she’d found out she was adopted and that her own birth mother had rejected her. She wasn’t good enough for anyone. She never had been …
    To this day Julia couldn’t actually remember walking out of that room, or the night that had followed, or the journey to the airport the next day. She only remembered being back in grey, drizzly autumnal England and feeling as though her insides had been ripped out and trampled on. The feeling of rejection was like a corrosive acid, eating away at her, and for a long time she hadn’t trusted her own judgement when it came to men. She’d locked herself away in her studies.
    Her husband John had managed to break through her wall of defences with his gentle, unassuming ways, but Julia could see now that she’d fallen for him precisely because he’d been everything Kaden was
not.
    When she thought of what had happened last night, and Kaden’s cool assertion that he would see her later—exactly the way a man might talk to a mistress—nausea surged again, and this time Julia couldn’t hold it down. She made it to the toilet in time and was violently ill. When she was able to, she stood and looked at herself in the mirror. She was deathly pale, eyes huge.
    What cruel twist of fate had brought them together like this