Read Online An Indecent Marriage by Doreen Owens Malek - Free Book Online

room, and she had no choice but to follow.
    He dropped his coat on a chair as she went to the bar.
    “Water?” she asked, as he looked around the room at the pictures, the family photographs her mother had framed and hung.
    “Just rocks,” he replied.
    Her fingers trembled as she fixed the drink, but she made sure they were steady before she handed it to him. Then she watched as he prowled the room like a powerful leashed animal, picking up objects and putting them down again, touching pieces of china and crystal as if they were living things. The subdued lighting glinted off his glossy dark hair and cast shadows along his cheekbones, making them seem more prominent. If anything, he was better looking than when she had last seen him, and Jessica felt her stomach muscles tighten.
    “This room smells of money,” he finally said, turning his head to look at her. He took a large swallow of his drink.
    “These things were all inherited. They may wind up on the block very shortly.”
    “What a shame,” he murmured, and she couldn’t tell if he were being sarcastic or not.
    “I think it is.”
    “Some of this stuff is old. Looks like your father hung on to everything,” Jack observed softly.
    “So far,” Jessica said pointedly.
    “Just being back here makes me feel eighteen again,” he said quietly. “And poor.”
    “Then why did you want to come back?” Jessica asked, bewildered.
    “I guess to reassure myself that it wasn’t true any longer,” he answered, fingering a silver sconce on the wall. “You left me because I didn’t have any of this. Now I do, and you’re the one on the outside looking in.” He drank again and drained his glass.
    It was a moment before Jessica found her voice. “Is it that important to hurt me?” she asked in a husky, unsteady tone.
    His eyes flashed, and she saw the fires he kept so closely banked blaze brightly for a second. “You hurt me,” he replied simply.
    “And that’s where we stand. An eye for an eye.”
    He smiled slightly, enigmatically, and didn’t answer.
    “I wish we could both let the past go,” Jessica said miserably, looking away from his pitiless, perfect features. “I wish we didn’t have to carry on with this charade.”  
    “You and your daddy are getting exactly what you deserve,” he said coldly, “and when it’s over you can go back to whatever you’ve been doing for the past ten years.”
    “And in the meantime I have to put up with this...treatment.”
    “Yes, you do, and be grateful that it isn’t any worse,” he said roughly.
    Jessica hesitated, taking a breath. “What if I told you there was a good reason for what I did back then?”
    “I know there was a good reason. I didn’t have any money, and you met someone who did. That was a good reason. For you. Especially for George Portman.”
    “What if I told you it was something else?”
    He smiled charmingly. “I wouldn’t believe you.”
    Jessica’s heart sank. Her father had gotten to him first. And permanently.
    “You’ve changed,” Jessica whispered. “You’re so dead, so unfeeling.”
    He nodded bitterly. “I wonder what made me that way.” He set his empty glass down and picked up his coat. “Shall we go?”
    Vanquished, Jessica shut off the lights and went with him to the door.

 
    Chapter 4
     
    Jack’s low-slung, deep red convertible was parked in the turnaround in front of the house. A brisk wind fluttered Jessica’s hair as he handed her into the passenger seat, then walked around to the other door. She waited tensely for him to join her, wondering if this was really the same person who used to take her on long drives to escape her father, laughing and telling her stories about his large, unpredictable family. But then the car had been his old green Ford, they were young and the world was a different place.
    Jack got in, gunned the engine and guided the car into the street without glancing in her direction. Jessica pressed her lips together and decided