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‘Marina?’ Lilah gasped as if he had punched her, because she was suddenly desperately short of breath, pierced to the heart that he should be more concerned about his former lover’s feelings than about her.
‘Yes—Marina,’ Bastien repeated curtly. ‘Of course she was upset. I saw her face. She knew instantly what you were referring to. You can’t have thought this through, Delilah.’
Lilah was wounded by the angle the conversation had taken and fighting to hide the fact from him. Bastien was standing there, all lean, powerful and poised and devastatingly beautiful, and he was defending another woman to her face. He was her husband but he wasn’t on her side.
Her tummy flipped, leaving her struggling against a sickening light-headed sensation.
‘The termination caused Marina considerable distress,’ Bastien delivered in a grim undertone. ‘She made her choice, but I don’t doubt that the decision cost her. That’s the main reason why I didn’t persist in arguing my case with Leo. Marina doesn’t deserve to have that distressing experience raked up again. So she lied and played victim to look more sympathetic in Leo’s eyes? OK...that was wrong. But Leo is the one who chose to believe her story and disbelieve mine.’
Belated guilt pierced Lilah and she felt more nauseated than ever. On one score Bastien was correct. She had not thought through the implications of what she was throwing at Marina. But she was not a naturally unkind or unfeeling person. She knew she should never have referred to so private a matter. She had been cruel, and the shame of that reality engulfed Lilah like a suffocating blanket.
She blundered upright, desperate simply to escape Bastien’s censorious gaze and lick her wounds and her squashed ego in private.
She swayed as the room telescoped around her in the most disturbing way. Her head was swimming and her skin was clammy and cold. Not a sound escaped Lilah’s lips as blackness folded in behind her eyelids and she flopped down on the rug in a faint.
For a split second Bastien stared at Delilah, who had dropped in a heap on the rug, and then he plunged forward to crouch and gather her up, his brain obscured by the most peculiar fog of something that felt like panic but which he refused to acknowledge as panic. He wasn’t the panicking type—never had been, never would be.
He dug out his phone to ring his brother’s home and ask for Grace. Leo, mercifully, asked no questions, but Grace more than made up for that omission.
Grace told him quietly and succinctly what to do and Bastien followed her instructions, furious that he had once disdained to take a first aid course, assuming he would never feel the need for such training.
By the time he’d come off the phone and was carrying Delilah down to the main bedroom she was showing signs of recovery. Her lashes fluttered, her head moved, and a faint hint of colour began to lift the drawn pallor of her complexion.
Only then did Bastien dare to breathe again. He smoothed a shaking hand over Delilah’s brow to brush back her tumbled dark hair. He had never felt so scared in his life. That knowledge shook him up even more. He had shouted at her, condemned her. And why had he done that?
Maybe I was trying to do something for you, Delilah had said, and the sheer shock value of those words was still reverberating inside Bastien. When had anyone ever tried to do anything to improve his life? When had anyone ever tried to protect him from the consequences of his own behaviour?
Delilah had been trying to protect him.
He swallowed hard. He didn’t need anyone’s protection. Nobody had protected him as a child or as an adolescent—neither his mother nor his father—and Bastien had learned never to look to other people for support. But Delilah had blundered headfirst into a difficult and delicate situation in a clumsy and futile attempt to straighten out his non-relationship with his only sibling.
Admittedly he had noticed how his wife had pokered up by his side when she’d seenhow the Zikos family treated him. Delilah, he registered in a daze, cared about him—in spite of the methods he had used to ensnare her, in spite of all the mistakes he had made.
He snatched in a ragged breath and studied her in wondering appreciation.
‘My goodness—what happened?’ Lilah mumbled, blue eyes opening to fix on Bastien’s lean darkly handsome face. ‘Did I faint? I’ve never done that in my life! I’m so sorry.’
