Dealing Her Final Card by Jennie Lucas Page A

he choked out, “I don’t understand.”
    “Don’t you?” She sat up against the headboard, and her eyes shimmered in the silver-gold moonlight dappling the high-ceilinged bedroom. She licked her lips. “When you didn’t believe me, I started hoping I could keep my virginity a secret. So you wouldn’t...”
    She stopped.
    “So I wouldn’t what?”
    Her lips trembled as she tried to smile. “Well, it’s pathetic, isn’t it?” She didn’t try to cover her nakedness, as another woman might have done. She just looked straight into his eyes, without artifice, without defenses. “There was no other man for me. Not before you. And not after.”
    Staring at her, Vladimir felt as if he’d just been sucker punched.
    She’d told him the truth. All these years he’d thought of Bree Dalton as a liar, or worse. But even when she’d looked him in the eyes and told him she was a virgin, he hadn’t believed her.
    Who was the one who didn’t recognize the truth when he saw it?
    Who was the one who’d forgotten how?
    Setting his jaw, he looked at her grimly. “And Alaska?”
    She looked down, her eyelashes a dark sweep against her pale skin. “Everything your brother tried to tell you, that Christmas night he burst in on us, was true,” she said softly. “I never had the rights to sell Josie’s land. I was trying to distract you, so you’d put down earnest money in cash before you realized it, and my sister and I could disappear into a new life.”
    “To con people somewhere else.”
    “It was all I knew how to do.” Bree lifted her gaze. “It never occurred to me that I could change. Not until...”
    Her voice trailed off.
    Yes, Vladimir, I’ll marry you. He could almost hear her joyful, choked voice that Christmas night, see the tears in her beautiful eyes as she’d thrown her arms around him and whispered, “I’m not good enough for you, not by half. But I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to be.”
    Now, his hands tightened into fists. “You had plenty of chances to tell me the truth. Instead, you let me find out about your con from Kasimir. You let me shout at him and throw him out of your cabin as a damned liar. You let me leave that night, still not knowing the truth. Until I started getting phone calls the next morning, and discovered from reporters that everything he’d told me about you was true.”
    “I wanted to tell you. But I was afraid.”
    “Afraid,” he sneered.
    “Yes,” she cried. “Afraid you wouldn’t listen to my side. That you’d abandon me, and I’d be left with no money and no defenses against the wolves circling us. I was afraid,” she whispered, “you’d stop loving me.”
    That was exactly what had happened.
    “If that is true, and you were truly intending to change purely because of this love for me,” he said, his voice dripping scorn, “why didn’t you go back to your old life of cheating and lying the instant I left?”
    Her eyes widened, then fell. “It wasn’t just for you,” she muttered. “It was for me, too.” She looked up. “And Josie. I wanted to be a good example. I wanted us to live a safe, boring, respectable life.” Hugging her knees to her chest, she blinked fast, her eyes suspiciously wet. “But we couldn’t.”
    “You couldn’t be respectable?”
    “We never felt safe.” She licked her lips. “Back in Alaska, some men had threatened to hurt us if I didn’t replace money we’d stolen. But my father had already spent it all and more. It was a million dollars, impossible to repay. So for the last ten years, I made sure we stayed off the radar. No job promotions. No college for Josie. Never staying too long anywhere.” Bree’s lips twisted. “Not much of a life, but at least no legs got broken.”
    His hands clenched as he remembered the angry looks of the players at the poker game, when she’d told them how she’d cheated them. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
    “I did,” she said, bewildered at his reaction.