What? I do too. “But... I...”

He shook his head interrupting her thoughts. “Not the kind that you like. Violent, degrading things.” He noticed Sophia’s eyes growing gradually huge.

“And you?” she whispered.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Did you like those things?”

Alistair gazed at Sophia for a moment. “Some of these things I had already tried and liked.” S&M was a bit harsh but I grew used to it. “I like a bit of violence,” he shrugged, “I’ve told you before.”

You’ll have to explain this better later, Alistair Connor. She lifted her head to get a better look at his eyes. “I don’t understand... You like those strange things and still you list a quickie in the car with... things that are wrong?”

“Nae, Sophia. I don’t think a quickie in the car is wrong, no.” He shook his head again and cleared his throat. “What was wrong was the exhibitionist and detached character of the situation she put us through.”

She was stunned. “Do you miss the things you did with her?”

“Nae, listen to me, I’m quite satisfied with my sexual life with you.” This time, white teeth flashed in a crooked smile. “I won’t lie and say that I don’t have a few fantasies that I want to try with you.”

Are you sure? I’m not anymore. “Alistair Connor. I never did anything... violent. I don’t like pain.” She twisted her hair around her fingers. “I have never been to a sex shop. I don’t even have the creativity to imagine the pleasure a person gets from that kind of violence.” She was disturbed. “My sexual life is... too normal, too bland? Am I missing something here?”

“No, Beauty.” He studied her face. “Would you like to try something... different?”

Sophia froze and looked away.

Alistair could touch the sudden tension in the room, but waited quietly for her answer.

“I- Alistair, I’ve- Today, for example, the French maid costume... it was a different things. Yeah, I could try a few different things, however... I-” She frowned. We were talking about you and Heather, not about me and you. “What happened then?”

Sophia’s question wasn’t prompted by curiosity. It was a need to shed some light on the painful shadows she glimpsed in his eyes. She wanted to first hear his version of the facts. Perhaps, then, she could let Alice or Tavish Uilleam talk. Not before.

“In hindsight, what I had with Heather was all just one big bad experience. There were so many wrong aspects in our relationship that I’m still astounded - disgusted, even - by my own behavior.”

Alistair looked into her eyes. His face was grave and the pain in his eyes so fierce that it scared her. “I was her sex toy - or she was my sex slave - I don’t really know. And don’t ask me why, but I liked it. I didn’t see what was coming until it was too late.” He looked at his hands and whispered, “And then she got pregnant. I was careless... And after a few broken condoms, I decided to go on without them. She had told me she was clean and on birth control.”

How dare you, Alistair Connor. But even though rage coursed in Sophia’s veins, she knew it was not time to talk about the comparison and his mistrust.

“When she told me, I was ecstatic. I’d always loved children. It was to be my first child,” he muttered.

Oh, God. “Nathalie?”

He looked up at Sophia and gave her a sad smile. “Nae. I went to Craigdale with her and told my parents that I was in love and was going to marry her.”

“Were you?” she asked in a whisper.

He raised his ink-black brows, questioning.

“In love? Were you in love with her?”

“I thought I was.” He crossed his arms over his chest, in a defensive position. “My parents saw what I couldn’t. Heather was a greedy whore, without morals or feelings for me. She didn’t love me.” He looked down and his arms opened, his hands falling heavily on his thighs. “But then, how could she?”

How could she?! “How could she not?” Sophia edged closer, grabbed his hand, and putting it against her cheek, she murmured, “You are so easy to love.”

“Am I?” His lids lifted, there was no light in his green eyes.

“Yes. So lovable,” she reaffirmed, soothing, and pulled his hand on her lap, between hers, caressing his knuckles. “What did your parents do when you told them you wanted to marry her?”

“Well, my parents refused to acknowledge her as my fiancée and we got married at a Registry Office. Just the two of us. Not even Alice or Tavish Uilleam went. They disapproved of her, by the way,” he huffed. “I had no more friends. I spent my days working and my nights and weekends having wild, depraved sex.” He laughed, disgusted. “Heather wanted money, status, a handsome face and an insane, dark lover with stamina to handle her. I wonder...” A lock of his raven hair fell over his eyes and he let it remain there. “If she ever loved anyone. She had never wanted me, Alistair Connor. I was just another step she used to get her way. But then, what did I really have to offer her?”

“Oh, Alistair Connor. Your-” she couldn’t bear to say ‘wife’ nor was she going to soil her lips with her name. “You are... breathtaking. Not your beauty, not your money or your status. You. Your heart. But she has damaged you too much for you to believe in what I am saying, hasn’t she?” Sophia began to feel an incredible anger for that execrable woman.

The room quietened as Sophia protectively hugged the fierce and broken man that made her heart beat faster. She traced his jaw, asking, “When did you get married?”

“On her birthday. March the fifth, two-thousand-four. She was two months’ pregnant.” His mouth contorted and his green eyes darkened. “A month after the wedding, she had an abortion.”

His pain was so acute that Sophia couldn’t bear it and her eyes teared. “I’m so sorry she lost the baby.”

He squeezed her in his arms. “Sophia, she didn’t lose the baby. It wasn’t a miscarriage.” He looked down at her face and repeated bitterly, “She. Had. An abortion.”

Sophia gasped indignant, “She... She... killed your baby? Her own baby? How could she?”

He shrugged. He didn’t have an answer, since he didn’t understand such a barbaric act himself.

“And what did you do? It was one of the main reasons you married her, wasn’t it? The baby?”

“She told me the baby had spina bifida. It’s a-”

“I know what that is,” she interrupted him. “And?”

He paused for a second. “I found out afterwards it was a lie. Another lie. At the time, I was too devastated to investigate further. I didn’t see the web she was spinning around me. Three months later, life returned to normal. If you can call debauchery normal.” He lowered his eyelids, his long lashes shadowing his cheekbones. “Day after day, she introduced more perversions into our lives. Until-” She asked me to have a threesome with another man. “We had our first fight. She moved into Emma’s apartment, but a month later she was back. We agreed on some ground rules. At least, I thought we had. I had fulfilled my fantasies. I’d reached my limit.”

“But... you told me you liked it.”

“Sophia, I believe in equal rights. If she fulfilled my fantasies, she should have the right to fulfill her perversions.”

“Perversions,” she repeated, baffled. What kind of perversions?

He sighed and nodded, “Aye. She needed them like the air she breathed, but I thought I could prevent them, that I could supply her with other sensations. She was too damaged though, too sick. It was an addiction. The more she did, the more she wanted.” He waved his hand in the air. “Fool that I was, it never crossed my mind that she would look elsewhere to fulfill her desires.”

Sophia cupped his face in her hands, “She cheated on you? I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?” he rasped.

“I thought... you had cheated on her.”

His laughter was bitter. “She did it time and time again. I was working too much to notice it. I bought more shares of the bank in August, 2005. We started to work on different floors and it was easier for her to lure others into our house. She did it all, sex, drugs and rock n’ roll,” he mocked.

Horror creeped onto her face and she didn’t try to disguise it.

“Drugs? You too?” She breathed relieved when he shook his head. “Why didn’t you divorce her?”

“I didn’t find out immediately. She was always eagerly waiting for me. She did it all and still had the energy to fuck me.” His lips thinned to a line. “She got pregnant again. She was so engrossed in her immoral self-indulgence that she didn’t pay attention to her own body. One night, when she was almost five months, I felt the baby kicking my hand. Nathalie.” He breathed the name of his daughter with so much love, like it was a blessing.

“Five months... Impossible. I don’t believe it.” She shook her head.

“She was very, very lean; thinner than you, even. She’d never had regular periods. And she was always on a diet. She was crazy about fitness.”

“But almost five months... Didn’t it show?”

“A little, round belly, but that was all. She was sleeping when the baby moved. I didn’t recognize it at first, but I had remembered Alice’s first pregnancy, so when I felt the next kick I knew it had to be a baby. I panicked. The very next morning I took her, kicking and screaming, to Craigdale and locked her under my mother’s supervision. I threatened her with exposure, if she didn’t stay put and take care of herself until the end of the pregnancy. One month after Nathalie was born, I brought her back to London, and she returned to her perverted life.” He closed his eyes tight, the skin around them crinkling. “But I was too busy to see.” I didn’t want to see that I was a failure as a man, as a husband, as a lover.

“And?”

“I only discovered Heather’s betrayal because a very dear friend of mine insisted I hire a detective. I tried to righten things with her when I discovered it. She promised she would behave, but it was in vain. I was enraged with myself for not seeing Heather’s true colors from the beginning, not to have heard my parents’ advice. Feeling guilty of everything that was wrong in my life and Nathalie’s, I sank deeper into the mud. I don’t know what happened to me. I took off my wedding ring and each night, I fucked a different woman. I mean the word, Sophia. I didn’t make love or have sex with these women. I punished them for Heather’s and for their existence and I punished myself for being so stupid. I was ruthless. Vicious. I wanted to make them suffer.” His body was so stiff, that if not for his mouth moving she’d have thought he’d turned into a statue. “And do you know what made me even madder? They kept returning and asking for more.”

Sophia didn’t want to hear any more, but something keep pushing her. “And?”

“After a few months living in hell, I filed for a divorce...” He put both hands on his face, and his words came out muffled. “I did every fucking thing wrong. Every. Fucking. Thing. Wrong.”

A heavy silence suffocated them.

He hugged her in his arms and started talking again, “I thought... I asked Leonard to help me... We devised a plan. To pull it off, I needed proof of her drug addiction and of her unstable and perverted sexual behavior. I wanted to get full custody of Nathalie. It was not easy. First it took too much time to obtain the proofs and to convince the judge... Well, the day Leonard guaranteed it, I informed her about the divorce.” He squeezed his eyes tightly shut again. “She tried to make amends, she pleaded with me, but I’d made up my mind. It is beyond my capacity to understand why she did what she did, because she never loved Nathalie. I could only imagine that she would use her as leverage... unfortunately.” His hands clenched on her back, “In my selfishness-” He breathed deeply, “Nathalie payed for my sins.”

He lifted his eyelids and looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Nathalie... She was an angel, Sophia. So beautiful, so calm, always smiling. I woke up early to stay with her a few hours in the mornings and in the evenings when I arrived home I spent all the time I could with her. She was a blessing. I... I moved out and put the apartment on the market two months after she died. Every time I walked in, I expected her to come running, just like she always did, a big smile on her face, to throw herself in my arms.” His voice broke and he blinked to stop the tears from falling. “When I arrived home, I would spend hours in her little bed, smelling her baby scent. I didn’t let my mother give away her clothes. I slept with her stuffed elephant, one of her favorite toys. I heard her gentle voice calling me. I was going crazy.” Alistair’s face crumbled and he spoke with a deadened tone, “It was my fault, Sophia. Heather told me she was at Alice’s and I didn’t check. Heather put her asleep in the Porsche with no seatbelt. She crossed a red light. A bus ran into them. Heather died instantly, Nathalie, at the hospital. My mother got so depressed, she died three months later.” His green eyes were dark, all the light gone from them. There was only despair in his voice. “You see, your instincts were wrong when you absolved me.”