He was in complete control of her body—she was only resisting him through her involuntary limpness—and he ended up pushing her back against the wall in her living room.
Her head connected with the wall, and she instinctively tried to blink away the sharp dizziness from the sudden shift in position.
Caleb was still gripping her ruthlessly by her upper arms, holding her up now with the support of the wall and with the press of his hard, hot body.
“Was it that good?” he snarled, the cold, calculating man he’d always been swallowed completely by his wild, primitive rage. “Can he give you so much more than I can?” He used one of his knees to part her legs so he could push his pelvis against her more forcefully. He wasn’t aroused though. He was trying to gether attention. And Kelly didn’t even react to the angry push of his body against hers. “Do I leave you so unsatisfied that you have to sneak off and screw some?—”
Kelly couldn’t seem to feel anything. She was just so tired. And she wanted him to go away.
“I didn’t—” she began, wondering why she was even bothering to explain.
“Don’t lie to me. What kind of a fool do you take me for? You’ve done nothing but lie to me—the whole time we’ve been together—and you think you can get away with it. And now you can’t stop yourself from cheating on me.”
Kelly just blinked at him. She wondered if you could cheat on someone you were never really in a relationship with.
“They sent me pictures,” Caleb went on roughly, taking hold of her chin with ungentle fingers. His eyes crawled almost cruelly over her face. “You tried to slip away, but I had more than one man following you since I knew you couldn’t be trusted. And now I can see for myself. I know how you look after you’ve been fucked.”
The ironies were coming thick and fast today, but Kelly didn’t have it in her to appreciate them.
“What does it matter?”
Caleb made a strange sort of choking sound, and his face almost twisted with the intensity of his emotions. “What does it matter?” he repeated, loud, uncontrolled. He hauled her up so that she was higher against the wall since her knees had been buckling again. “It matters because I have been faithful to you. I haven’t fucked anyone but you since we got together. Even after I found out who you are and what you were really doing with me, I still didn’t… I thought we were…” He cut off his words, giving his head a brief, jerky toss. “I haven’t even thought about cheating on you. Why the hell shouldn’t I be angry?”
The part of Kelly’s mind that was still working beneath her blank haze recognized that Caleb wasn’t just angry. He’d been wounded and was lashing out instinctively, like a bleeding animal.
She would have been pleased by this sort of victory had she been capable of feeling anything at all.
It seemed like she should be experiencing a whole storm of emotions, like her feelings should be burying her alive.
But she wasn’t. They weren’t. They must be there inside her somewhere, but they were sealed off at the moment, leaving a blankness as hard and unyielding as stone. And not even Caleb’s rage or jealousy or pain was capable of breaking through.
Not even the faint realization that he somehow seemed to know who she was.
She weakly tried to shrug Caleb off, not in anger or fear but in empty annoyance.
He wouldn’t let her go. Gripped her harder. “Look at me, damn it!”
And that did it. Kelly snapped.
“Bastard!” she hissed, unable to find a word that came anywhere close to expressing the depth of her hatred. Her limp body suddenly tightened into fury, and she shoved Caleb with all her strength away from her.
He stumbled back. Stared at her in astonishment.
She didn’t give him enough time to process the shift in dynamic. Advanced on him a white-hot rage barely held in check by the cold momentum of her will. Suddenly slammed with the entire weight of her grief, hatred, betrayal, and confusion from the past seventeen years of her life, Kelly lashed out with her voice.
“You’re mad atmefor lying to you! You’ve lied about everything every moment of your life! Nothing about you is real. You fuck me, act like you care for me. When you have no heartto begin with. Why the hell should I be faithful to a monster like you?”
She hadn’t been planning to confront him like this, as it would put her in a very dangerous position, but at this point it didn’t really matter. She didn’t care, and she was incapable of stopping herself.
Caleb’s expression was incomprehensible. It twisted with effort and surprise and something far deeper as he tried to contain her flailing arms.
“I was starting to believe you…” She was almost strangling on the furious words. “Despite everything.Everything.I was starting to… I knew better. Iknewbetter. But still…”
At the horrifying realization of what she’d almost started to believe—about this man who had murdered her father—her vision actually whited out.
“You’reangry withme?” It finally all came out. “You killed my dad. You don’t get to hate me for anything.”
35