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her. “I saw you perform an acoustic version of Love,
Honour, Betray on TV last year. There were tears in your eyes. It
seemed so raw still.”
    Erika fixed him with a
contemptuous glare. “It’s called musical interpretation. Great
performers don’t simply sing songs – they live them. All you saw
was the emotion I needed to carry the lyrics. It had absolutely
nothing to do with you.”
    She prayed he wouldn’t spot the
outrageous lie, or work out that she didn’t sing most of her early
songs live because they still remained too painful to perform.
    Many had never been heard at all
and stayed locked inside her head, too distressing to give voice
to.
    Aiden was right and it was still
raw – like old scar tissue that had never properly healed and
remained tender to the touch. The question she’d longed to ask for
five years bubbled up inside her and forced itself out.
    “Why?” she said. “Why lead me on
for five months, and pretend you were in love with me, if you were
only going to fall into bed with someone else as soon as my back
was turned?”
    If she hadn’t known better,
Erika could have sworn she saw a look of shame cross Aiden’s face
but doubted he’d ever been troubled with much of a conscience.
    “I didn’t pretend about loving
you,” he told her, the tiger’s eyes sparkling angrily. “Everything
I felt was very real.”
    “But not real enough,
apparently. Why else would you be in bed with Little Miss
Naked?”
    “Because I panicked. Before I
met you, I’d played around. I dated a different girl every night
and had no plans for a long-term relationship. Then you appeared,
out of the blue, the most beautiful, intelligent, sexy woman I’d
ever seen, and I couldn’t help falling for you in a big way.”
    “Don’t tell me – you only slept
with her to prove you were in love with me.” She couldn’t believe
him. This man was a walking cliché.
    Aiden rushed to justify himself.
“You went back to York to complete your final year. I returned to
London where I told myself that the love and passion we felt for
one another couldn’t possibly have been as intense as I’d
remembered.”
    “Funny, I never doubted it.”
This guy was incredible. How could she have crossed an ocean and
cried herself to sleep for six months over him?
    “You were twenty-two, for God’s
sake, and on the verge of a career. I hadn’t hit thirty and was
building a business. Neither of us was ready to commit.”
    “Who’s talking about commitment?
I never intended trapping you into marriage and forcing you into a
cosy little life.” She refused to be the villain in this. “But that
didn’t stop me loving you with every fibre of my being. I deserved
better, Aiden. You should have been honest with me. Finding you in
bed with another woman broke my heart. It took me a long time to
get over you.”
    “But you’re over me now,” he
guessed although it hadn’t taken a great deal of thought to work it
out.
    “Absolutely. One hundred per
cent guaranteed. Whatever we were to one another, it’s gone.”
    Aiden’s jaw flexed as he clamped
down his teeth, not trusting himself to reply immediately. “You
make it sound very final.”
    “You don’t mean…” The absurd
idea that Aiden had appeared in Yorkshire with the intention of
rekindling their relationship made her laugh. “You didn’t race up
here expecting me to fall into your arms again, did you?”
    “Of course not.” He answered
sharply, making no effort to conceal his rising anger, although
Erika also saw some other emotion she couldn’t define, but which
had obviously chipped away at his self control. “We parted badly
and I’ve never had chance to tell you how sorry I was, or how much
I regretted hurting you.”
    “Any therapist in L.A. would
call that closure but, the truth is, I shut the lid on you years
ago. You may have broken my heart but you also taught me a very
valuable lesson. There’s only one person in this world I can rely
on