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He’d loved Neve and had craved her love in return, but she’d never given it to him. She’d only given him a facsimile, that he’d thought was the real thing. No wonder he’d felt like part of him was frozen.

Automatically, his gaze went to the picture hanging over the fireplace, the photo of Neve at her desk, her hands outstretched on either side of her, looking down at the camera like a goddess looking down at a supplicant.

That had once been his favourite picture of her. She’d looked beautiful and powerful, or so he’d thought, but now… Now she looked arrogant, cold, and unforgiving. And selfish. So fucking selfish.

Kai strode over to the fireplace and lifted the picture off the wall. He stared down at it for a long moment. He’d once worshipped the ground she walked on, but now he knew that ground was nothing but dirt.

Without hesitation, Kai threw the photo into the fireplace and watched it catch alight and burn, Neve’s cold, lovely features lost in the flames.

Chapter Eleven

LIBBY STARED AT Kai’s tall, powerful figure in front of the fireplace, his head bent, his silver hair touched to gilt by the glow of the fire, an unreadable expression on his aristocratic features as the photo of Neve burned to ashes in the grate.

Her throat tightened and her heart squeezed in her chest, her own rage at the woman who’d hurt this man she cared about more than she wanted to admit, burning along with it. But her anger was her own to deal with, Kai shouldn’t have to bear it. Just as he shouldn’t have to bear acknowledging what Neve had done to him.

Laying it out for him and pushing him into remembering things he didn’t want to hadn’t been what she’d intended. She hadn’t wanted to demonise Neve, either, since it was clear that Kai’s feelings about her were complicated, as of course they would be. He had to come to the understanding about it himself; it wasn’t for her to push him into it.

But you did.

She’d tried not to, but he was so hurt, so scarred. She’d wanted to help him, that’s all. She’d been careful, she hoped, giving him the warmth and reassurance of her touch, and listening to what he said, allowing him space for his own feelings.

But it ate at her that he blamed himself for allowing it to happen. None of it had been his fault, absolutely none of it. Perhaps it would take time for him to acknowledge that, but at least he’d acknowledged that the relationship he’d had with Neve had been wrong in so many ways.

She hadn’t expected him to suddenly burn her picture, though, and as symbolic gestures went, it was pretty extreme.

He didn’t say anything as he stared down into the fire, and she let the silence sit there, not knowing what else to say, her heart aching for him.

Finally, he lifted his head and looked at her. ‘She didn’t love me. I know that much.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, knowing how empty the words sounded and yet having nothing else but sympathy to give him. ‘That must have been really awful.’

‘I wanted her to.’ He looked back down at the fire again. ‘But she didn’t believe in love and told me so. She didn’t believe that emotions had any place in business, either, and that’s what our relationship was. A business arrangement.’

A business arrangement with strings that should never have been attached to it.

‘I was eighteen, like I told you,’ he continued. ‘I was a virgin. I loved her and I wanted to sleep with her. I thought it wouldn’t be an issue.’

Libby swallowed, her throat tight. ‘But it was, wasn’t it?’

The flames flickered, limning his face in gold. ‘I was twenty when I proposed to her. I got the biggest diamond I could afford, which wasn’t much, but when I got down on one knee, she laughed in my face.’

Her chest ached with the pain of what he’d had to deal with. At the thought of him at twenty, clear-eyed and in love with a snow queen who had no heart. ‘Oh, Kai…’

‘She told me not to take it personally, and that what we had wasn’t love. So I put my emotions on ice. I froze them so that they wouldn’t touch her.’

Libby’s eyes prickled with tears, but she blinked them away furiously.

‘That must have been terrible,’ she said.

‘It was at first. But it’s easy to detach oneself. To not feel anything. Surprisingly so.’

She took a little breath, afraid to ask the question because she didn’t want to hurt him any more than he was already, but it was probably a question he was asking himself anyway. ‘So…you didn’t think to leave?’

His beautiful profile tightened, and once again he glanced at her, his grey gaze gone dark. ‘No. What she was offering was too important to me. I was ambitious, Libby, you have to understand that. I had nothing, I came from nothing, and she was offering me everything. Wealth, power, influence. I couldn’t say no.’

She could understand him wanting that, as a young man coming from nothing. Neve must have seen that ambition in him and wanted it. She’d harnessed it, turning him into a worthy successor.

‘That wasn’t wrong, either,’ Libby said. ‘But taking advantage of your ambition and manipulating it to get what she wanted, that was the wrong part.’