She had the good sense to balk at the accusation, but Clark didn’t buy it, just like he shouldn’t have bought anything she sold him all day. The first thing he would do when he got back to Dallas was head straight for the optician’s office. Only a blind man couldn’t see the con played out so deliberately in the lithe body of this beautiful woman.

“You’re good, don’t get me wrong. But how did I not see straight through you? You were using me.”

“Using you?”

“Don’t play dumb,” he snapped. His entire body ached with the pain and the weight of it; it consumed him too much to keep from barking at her. “I see it now. You wanted to wrap me around your finger, giving me all of this garbage about not wanting me to be alone because you thought you could manipulate me. You made me start to…feel for you so you could use me to get your festival back.”

“I didn’t—”

“Not even a little?”

She stammered. Staggered backward. That told him plenty, but not nearly enough to bring him the pain necessary to break away from her. He’d need to hear it from her lips, to hear the confession of the betrayal before he could trust himself not to fall into her arms again. The irrational, stupid part of him that got him into this mess in the first place wanted nothing more than for her to tell him it was all a misunderstanding and explain how none of his suspicions were correct. The smart, detached part of him knew he needed to cut this cancer out before it infected all of him. He’d been right all along. Love—if it existed at all, and that wasn’t even something he was sure of—was a tumor, not a cure.

“I wanted to be close to you.”

One of his assets as a businessman was his ability to see a situation clearly and choose a plan of action. Kate’s motives, cutting as they were, made perfect sense. They were logical. He saw the path through them clearly.

“So you could use me to get what you wanted. You are a liar.” He repeated it and watched it slice straight through her. Now he questioned everything he knew. Were those tragic stories about her family even real, or did she make them up for sympathy? The ornaments, did she make up those stories about them on the spot? Did he know anything real about her, or had he been falling for a fiction this entire time?