Chapter 111

‘Beverly told me she’d come to see you.’ His beautiful, shapely lips compressed, a muscle pulling tight at the corner of his unsmiling mouth. "She shouldn’t have done that."

Oh, I don’t know,’ Layla fielded in a tremulous drive that mortified her, frankly bemused by a relationship that crossed the expected boundaries. It was inconceivable to her that Beverly would’ve told Lucas she had been to see Layla. ‘Considering the way you’ve behaved, I thought she was remarkably restrained in what she had to say.’

My relationship with Beverly is not as straightforward as you probably assume it is. Nor does what it entailed matter now because I broke off our engagement earlier today.’ Lucas studied her with screened intensity, expecting an immediate lessening of the tension in the atmosphere.

Layla refused to react in any way because that announcement did not lessen her sense of betrayal in the slightest. She condemned him quietly and simply.

"Let’s move this out of the hall and talk like grown-