Free True Bliss by Stella Cameron

try to do better."
    "I don't like liars or cheats, either."
    "God— No one calls me a liar or a cheat."
    "Because you're so successful you've been able to buy respectability." She leveled a steady gaze at him. "Have you been able to buy new memories for people, too. Have they all forgotten you raped your wife—before you married her?"
    Beneath his tan he paled.
    Bliss rubbed her eyes. "You'd better go."
    "Amazing," Sebastian said softly. "You've been waiting for an opportunity to say that to me. All this time you've been waiting. And drying up inside while you waited."
    The words smarted. Bliss locked her knees and felt her skin turn cold. "Have you finished?"
    "Almost. A normal woman would have made a life for herself by now instead of waiting around for an opportunity to strike back for something that happened when she was a kid."
    "Are you suggesting you don't think I've had a life without you?"
    "Well, have you?"
    "My life isn't your business. It might have been once, but not now. You made it clear you didn't want it to be. Please send Bobby in to me."
    He hesitated, then she saw him make up his mind. "Okay. Fine."
    "We like the gate kept closed. Perhaps you'd take the time to get out of your car and see to that as you leave."
    Sebastian opened the door. "I'll do that. Nice to see you again."
    "Yes, very nice."

    "Bliss"—he paused in the doorway—"I don't advise you to lead an attack on me."
    "Oh. Why's that? What would you do, shoot me?"
    "Don't say stupid things. I wouldn't harm you physically, but I'd make you look a damn fool in front of all these people who think you're such hot shit."
    "So long, Sebastian."
    "Lady professor still carrying a torch for childhood sweetheart."
    "How . . . Get out!"
    "Leading a vendetta against him because she never got over being spurned."
    Bliss turned her back on him.
    "Jealous because he left town with someone else on the night when he was supposed to take her to Reno to get married. Mad as hell because she thinks he fucked her over—or because he didn't. Sorry about that."
    She covered her mouth.
    "Don't do it, Chilly. I'll cut you to ribbons."
    "Oh, no you won't." She rounded on him, her heart pounding. "I'm going to do the cutting. The shredding. With the help of my committee."

    Four
    He could get used to this. Oh, yes, this was the life Ron York had been born for. He stood on the terrace of good old Sebastian's newly acquired lakefront home and sipped a vodka martini.
    Stretched on a chaise beside the pool, wearing a sleek swimsuit in her signature color—red, Maryan sighted Ron and waved.
    He waved back. She was okay. Bearable. And she was his ticket to all this. In the two years since she'd picked him up in a Greenwich Village club, he'd learned a great deal. Most importantly, he'd learned he was never going back to being blond, blue-eyed Ronnie who earned his pretties as a fat man's butt boy.
    The paper-thin platinum Piaget on his left wrist told him it was almost four. Sun polished the waters of Lake Washington and turned the surface of Sebastian's oval pool a blinding shade of turquoise.
    "Ronnie! Ronnie, where's my drinkie?"
    She drank too much, but that made it easier for him. Maryan was as sexually demanding drunk as sober, but she tired faster.
    "Ronnie?" Her voice grew petulant.
    He raised his own glass and called, "Just a minute, luv. I'll be right there," before going back into the plant-filled conservatory where a wet bar nestled in an alcove. Three cubes of ice and gin to the rim. That ought to see her on the way to nighty-night land in no time. At least he could hope. There was always the danger that he'd let her get too drunk before she got her jollies. Maryan would fuck till she got it off, even if they were

    both in pain by that time. The secret was to cut off the booze before she was entirely numb, stick it to her like a steam hammer, then top her off with an industrial-strength nightcap.
    Ron sighed and looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar.