by Tara Pammi
She was in love with Stavros. A few months ago, she would have cackled hysterically at the prospect. And yet, had she ever truly stood a chance against the man she had discovered him to be?
Despite all the wrongs done to him as a child, he had done his duty. He could cajole and love and support as fiercely as he followed his duty, he could care, even though it was through actions and not words...
Calista had been so wrong in not trusting him, in doubting his love, so painfully unknowing of her own brother...But Leah understood him finally, she knew what a complex and honorable man her husband was.
And knowing Stavros meant loving Stavros, loving his generous heart, his sense of duty, even his rigidly autocratic dictates.
Why else had she risked everything she had always been scared of, this past month, how else would she have thrown herself into this madness with such relish... “After all these years, I didn’t think the reasons for Calista’s death mattered anymore. Not when I was finally...”
“When you were finally getting what you wanted,” he finished and utter fury filled her.
She gasped as it unfurled inside her, this new feeling, sinuously breathing courage into her very veins, filling her with a tremendous energy.
Reaching him, she refused to let him dismiss her so easily. “When, finally, you saw me for what I was, and let me see what kind of a man you were. I thought I should leave the past where it was. I thought...I could have—”
“Your wants, your needs—it’s all about you, isn’t it, pethi mou?”
“For years, it has been, yes. All I thought of since stepping in Athens was protecting myself from pain, from ever having to mourn another loved one again. But not anymore. For the first time in my life, I lied, not for myself, but for you. I lied to protect you, to spare you from this pain of knowing Calista’s reality.
“I lied because I...care about you. I lied because, somehow, you gave me the courage to live without fear, I lied because you made it impossible to not love you.”
His skin pulled into a taut mask, he looked as if she had dealt him an invisible blow. Everything in her scrunched into a painful ball as Leah realized that her words, somehow, had only hurt him even more.
“Say something, Stavros,” she said desperately.
“I didn’t realize until today how ill-suited we are for each other, pethi mou. Even if I continue this charade in the name of Giannis, it won’t be long before we rip each other into shreds. Before there’s nothing but pain left.”
The bridge of his nose, the sculpted planes of his face, the stubble that was already coming in...it hurt to look at him. “Is that any worse than what you’re doing now?” A shuddering gasp left her. “Somehow, I doubt that you can get any more cruel, any more heartless, Stavros.”
“Then you know why our farce of a marriage needs to end,” he finally said after what felt like an eternity of hell. “You have your freedom. Goodbye, Leah.”
* * *
For the first time since Giannis had brought him to Athens years ago, Stavros did not return to work after Leah left.
He let Dmitri’s calls go unattended, told his assistant to cancel everything indefinitely, heard from his head of security that a particularly treacherous board member, a distant cousin of Giannis who had always resented that Stavros and Dmitri were the topmost shareholders on the Katrakis board, was planning a coup to take over.
Rumors swirled about that Dmitri and he had fallen out, causing the stock for Katrakis Textiles to sink.
But Stavros, try as he did, still clinging to his wretched sense of duty, couldn’t give a damn. He and Dmitri had slaved night and day to build it into a multimillion dollar industry for over a decade, given it their all because they had wanted Giannis’s legacy to mean something...because they had both wanted something to anchor their lives.
And yet, he did not care if it all crashed and burned. All he wanted to do was shrug off the world and retreat. And he did.
Yet, wherever he turned, there were signs of Leah at his estate.
From the workers at the vineyard to the seamstress who asked if Leah was taking New York by storm, from the trails she had loved running through to the small, inconsequential things she had left lying around the house, like her iPod. She was everywhere.
She was under his skin, in his every breath, she had somehow become an irrevocable part of himself.
The peace he had found on his estate, the rules he had set in place all his life, everything was shattered. He felt empty within and he hadn’t even known that he had something so precious.
It was as if Leah had breathed life into him, showed him what it was to laugh, love and live.
For days, he let himself remember every bleary moment from when his mother had left to when his father had died, and he grieved for Calista. Grieved for the innocence he had never had. For days, he sat in the study in his estate, wandered into Leah’s empty workroom.
And slowly, her words gained strength in him, shifted and morphed his very view of himself.
For the first time in my life, I lied, not for myself, but for you, Stavros. I lied to protect you, to spare you from this pain.
I lied because I...care about you. I lied because, somehow, you have given me the courage to live without fear, I lied because you made it impossible to not love you.
Leah loved him, she had protected him. When had anyone ever thought of him like that?
The Leah that wouldn’t leave him alone the night of Giannis’s death, the Leah that had so innocently and full of hope, asked him if he was happy, the Leah that had teased and aroused him with such stark, possessive need...that Leah who refused to let him deny what they both wanted, needed when he had worried that it was becoming an obsession, a madness, the Leah that had held him tightly, when in the aftermath of making love to her he had confided that he didn’t remember how his mother looked, the Leah that had believed in the sanctity of marriage...
That woman was worthy of a fight, was worthy of a man he could be.
She had made him love for the first time in his life, she made him care, had made him live for himself, made him want with such gnawing hunger.
Had given him a taste of happiness, of pain, of ache, of loss.
She had made him feel everything he had shied away from his whole life. And he wanted to live like that again. He couldn’t go back to being an automatic machine.
Shaking at the very chill in his bones, he leaned his forehead against the glass door looking out into the estate.
In a moment of utter desolation he had admitted to Giannis that night that he had been wrong about Leah, that he had ruined her life. Even facing death, Giannis had smiled, had said that Leah needed him, that he, Stavros, was a man worthy of her... Those words pushed through to the fore, crushing his self-doubt.
Maybe he hadn’t deserved Leah five years ago.
But now, facing his own incapability to love Calista as she had needed, and accepting that, despite his every effort, his parents had somehow damaged him, forgiving himself for not loving Calista as she had needed, he deserved Leah now.
He deserved to be happy, he deserved to think about himself after a lifetime of thinking about everyone else.
Suddenly, Stavros couldn’t live without telling Leah that, couldn’t bear that she was thousands of miles away. Not when he loved her so much.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HER COLLECTION AT the Independent Fashion Week in New York had gone better than Leah could have imagined in her wildest dreams. Her designs had been called modern, colorful, yet sophisticated. Just last week, with Helene’s advice, she had invested a load of money into creating a lookbook that incorporated line sheets, one that gave buyers and fashion magazine editors a view into her brand.
After a crazily hectic two weeks, she had returned to Athens. When she h
ad knocked at Mrs. Kovlakis’s door and requested the keys to her old flat and the dragon had simply handed them over, she had been both shocked and relieved. One look at the news and she found Dmitri and Stavros and herself at the front and center of it.
Hiding and barely eating, she had slept for a week. All of a sudden, she would find herself awake and looking at her phone, before she realized she was waiting for his call.
Had he so thoroughly washed his hands of her? Had she truly meant nothing to him?
She had cried until she had been disgusted with herself, moped around the flat until one afternoon, Dmitri had almost broken the door down when she hadn’t heard his knocking.
He had taken her out to lunch, plied her with food until she had eaten enough for a month, inquiring if she needed anything.
Did he send you? she had asked, pitifully desperate.
No, he had said with unflinching honesty. You’ve truly proved yourself to him.
Words she would have embraced before now seemed like punishment.
At which point, she had cried and he had sighed and hugged her, and point-blank asked her if she meant to spend the rest of her hard-won freedom like a howling puppy, if she meant to spend the rest of it as the discarded wife of Stavros Sporades, hiding from the world.
Hating him and loving him for it, she had decided enough was enough. After fighting Stavros tooth and nail, she refused to let him win, refused to let herself become a shadow.
She had her whole life in front of her. She had decisions to make about where she would operate, about staff to hire, preparations to make for the winter collection, about her finances and how much of her inheritance she could invest in her business and how much she needed to save for a rainy day. She couldn’t live in some distant, unfamiliar corner of the world because Stavros was here.
The freedom to make her own choices, once she had begun, was heady, exhilarating.
More than one designer house approached her with offers to join them. Loath to compromise her creative vision, she refused all of them in a bold move.
Just as she finally embraced the fact that she was a shareholder in her grandfather’s textile companies, that she was part of his legacy.
She had walked into the legendary Katrakis offices in downtown Athens and attended her first board meeting, her heart threatening to rip out of her chest at the thought of facing Stavros.
That Stavros was absent and she was present created a stir that had made Dmitri smile wickedly. Whispers and innuendoes abounded large, about Dmitri, about Stavros, about her. And the worst of all, about the state of her marriage to Stavros.
It had taken everything she had possessed to get through the day. Especially after she received a message from Stavros’s assistant that he would like to meet her before she left on her trip to Milan the next day. The requisite paperwork would be sent to her lawyer if she could provide a name, she had been told.
Nausea rising in her throat, Leah had headed straight to the ladies’ room.
That was that then. He was going to divorce her. After five years, the bond between them would be broken. He would be free of her and she...of him. He would not be hers, even for a moment, ever again.
That night she went to bed, an ache in her gut.
She dreamed of him, intense, vivid dreams that woke her from restless sleep, breathing hard and aching, damp with need, inconsolable that he would never hold her again.
Violently furious that after demanding that she show him the real her, he had not believed the biggest truth she had ever told him.
He didn’t deserve her, she decided, the lie hollow to her own ears.
* * *
Leah arrived at Stavros’s office thirty minutes after ten, having finally fallen into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. Her head hurt, her muscles ached from having thrashed so much.
So when she grabbed the handle and pushed the door open, she was feeling particularly bloodthirsty, as he put it once.
There was no one in his office room. Her heels clicking on the marble floor, she walked around. Her nape prickled and she turned.
Standing at the entrance to his private suite, Stavros studied her.
He looked as he always did, arrogant, implacable, larger than life, except for the haunted look in his eyes. He wore jeans that molded those powerful thighs and a gray shirt that stretched against the muscled expanse of his chest.
He was so achingly gorgeous, so painfully beautiful that her throat closed up. She just stared at him hungrily for several minutes.
“I found the land you were looking at to build a factory.”
Leah flinched at the sight of him, at his raspy voice, at his blank expression. That was the first thing he said to her? Not even hello?
“I don’t need your help,” she said flippantly. “Where are your lawyers?”
“We don’t need them.”
“Then why did you summon me here? Why not just sign the papers and be done with it? Or have you gotten addicted to me begging you for things like cash, sex and the minimum courtesy that you believe me?”
Something slumberous glinted in his gaze. “I don’t remember you begging me for sex.”
“Maybe because it held no meaning to you except for relief after five years of...” He prowled toward her with such dangerous intent that she stopped talking.
“I remember every moment, pethi mou. I just don’t have a memory of you begging me for it. All those nights, and days, not once.” A dark current tinged his words as if he was very much fantasizing the prospect of it now. “You teased me, you taunted me, you seduced me...and I just gave in every time, your willing slave.”
“I’m leaving,” she said, his strange mood making her weak everywhere.
He blocked her way. “Dmitri told me that you attended the board meeting. That you caused quite a stir. A walking powerhouse, that’s what he called you.”
She sent a silent thanks to Dmitri for hiding the ugly crying from Stavros.
“Are you surprised? I will not slink away from what is mine like a coward anymore. I will sit on the Katrakis board, I will launch my label from Athens. I will not hide as if the fiasco of our marriage is my fault.
“I won’t let you browbeat me into anything I don’t want to do ever again.”
He looked tortured, his mouth pinched. “Forcing you to marry me was the biggest mistake I have ever made, thee mou. I can’t believe—”
She had no idea that she had thrown herself at him. That with her weight and fists she had pushed them farther into the rear room of his private suite. Pain, and ache and a bone-deep hunger, everything deluged her.
Tears flew freely down her cheeks as she continued attacking him.
How dare he call knowing her a mistake? How dare he hurt her when all she had wanted was to protect him? How dare he be so heartless when she cared so much about him?
“Do you, agape mou?” he whispered when she hit him in the gut and she realized she had been screaming the words at him. “Do you care so much, Leah?”
She wouldn’t say it again, wouldn’t beg for his love when it had to be hers, when it was what she deserved.
“Leah, pethi mou, look at me,” he begged continuously, yet she couldn’t stop.
She was so afraid that he would disappear if she stopped, so afraid that she would wake up and realize it was a dream. That she would be achingly alone again.
“I’m sorry, yineka mou,” he whispered, without even trying to stop her. “I’m so sorry that I sent you away. I’m so sorry that I didn’t listen to you.”
“You’re a heartless bastard and I should hate you,” she said, with another push and then they were falling into the bed.
“Theos, no more than I hate myself, Leah,” he said on a ragged whisper.
Her breath jarred
out of her as Leah landed on top of him. Fear and relief gave way to something else as her mouth lodged in his neck and his arousal pressed against her belly. Moving of their own accord, her legs straddled him, until his hardness pressed against her heated core. Her thighs shivered with the repressed need to ride him.
Her hands in his hair, Leah lifted her head and looked into his eyes.
Their harsh breaths thundered in the silent room, joined by the whisper of the satin sheets.
“I want you to sign those papers and get the hell out of my life. I want to never see you again.”
“I can’t,” he said, sounding almost regretful.
“I do hate you,” she said again, every inch of her desperately craving what he could give.
Only him. Always, only Stavros.
She closed her eyes to lock away the tears and touched her mouth to his.
Familiar and intense, the taste of him made her shiver violently, sent a jolt of electricity through her very veins. She continued kissing him softly until her heart was beating a loud tattoo against her chest, until tears blocked her throat again.
Until all she could touch, breathe and feel was him, until she could be sure that he was here, with her.
“I will never divorce you, Leah. I will never set you free.”
What new madness had he thought of now?
Rolling away from him, she began to slide off the bed. His hand on her ankle, Stavros pulled her back onto the sheets in a deft movement. Struggling to get free, she squealed. And gasped when he covered her body with his.
His weight pressed her into the bed, stealing her breath. Clutching her eyes closed, Leah fought the craving that burst within her belly like a fire. Her arms literally ached to hold him, her body on fire to be possessed by him.
“I have missed you so much, agape mou,” he said, shuddering harshly.
She felt his mouth probe hers softly, slowly, as if asking for permission. Holding her wrists at her head with one hand, he pressed little kisses on the seam of her lips, his warm breath drenching her.
