He refused to feel guilt. He refused. But he understood that the thing that pressed into him was that, and more. Much more and much worse besides, and his refusal didn’t seem to matter much. It was dark and fetid and it wasn’t listening to him, a terrible coil of bitterness and regret and loss, and her taste in his mouth only made it worse.
And he still couldn’t seem to find his feet beneath him.
“You win again, Theo.” She sounded different. Not the cool, brittle queen of the charity circuit. Not the open and too-bright girl he’d married. Weary, he might have said. Broken, finally. “You’ve hurt me worse, at last. Hooray. Do you want me to congratulate you?”
“What did you think would happen?” He blazed it at her, and he didn’t care, for the first time in years, if anyone was watching. Listening. He didn’t concern himself with whether or not this entire conversation would show up on the front page of some sleazy tabloid and reveal all of their dirty laundry to the world. He didn’t care about anything but shifting that thing off him, because he refused to accept that it was guilt. He refused to let it in.
That would mean believing her.
“I haven’t accused you of anything, Theo.” But her words were like bullets and he felt them punch into him, piercing his skin and burrowing deep. “I haven’t called you a whore or myself a mark. I haven’t said a damned thing.”
He refused to believe her. This was just another one of her games, surely. Then why are you out here, arguing about it? a small voice asked reasonably enough inside of him. If you really believed this was another lie, why would you care enough to follow her here?
Theo scowled at her as if she’d been the one to say it. “If the sanctity of our marriage vows was important to you, perhaps you shouldn’t have gone to such lengths to convince me otherwise.”
“What lengths are you talking about?” she demanded, surprising him with the flash of temper in her eyes, the crack of it in her voice. “I said I’d done it and you believed me instantly. Instantly. You took no convincing at all. It was almost as if my betrayal was a foregone conclusion.”
“Ah, yes. Revisionist history. My favorite.”
She ignored his harsh tone, though her triangular chin edged up a notch, and that same temper flashed again, brighter, in her pretty gaze.
“I was a virgin when I met you. I’d managed to make it more than twenty years without sleeping with anyone but you. Yet you found it perfectly reasonable that six months later I’d had a blistering one-night stand with someone else whose name I didn’t even bother to learn.”
“Because you told me you had,” he bit out, that heaviness inside him starting to spread out wider, press down harder, and he wouldn’t let it. He wouldn’t. “I wasn’t some jealous maniac, bristling with accusations every time you walked down a street. It never would have occurred to me that you’d cheat on me.”
“I know.” Her voice was a terrible thing then, judgment and pain and something he didn’t want to recognize, but the look in her blue eyes was worse. Much worse. “Because you and I were inseparable and in love and we spent most of our time in bed. Still, you believed, without question and despite everything you knew about me, that I had the time and the energy to nip down to a tourist bar and have a quickie in an alleyway with some stranger.”
“Because you told me you had.”
He didn’t recognize his own voice and she shook as if it had been a roll of thunder instead, and he couldn’t tell which one of them was the storm or where it was coming from, only that he had no idea how to escape it.
“I must be the world’s best liar,” she whispered, and her eyes were nearly black with torment. Torment, damn her, and there was no escaping that heavy weight then. It crushed him. It flattened him. “To fool a man as jaded and cynical as you were when I met you. Then again, perhaps you wanted to believe the worst of me. Perhaps that was what made it so easy to convince you.” She laughed, and it made everything worse. “Believe I’m a whore and what does it matter if you are, too? You get to slip back into your old ways without a second thought.”
“Don’t you put this on me,” he grated at her, scarcely aware that he’d moved toward her, or that his hands were on her shoulders again, pulling her up on her toes and much closer to him than was wise, so that her warm vanilla and faintly spicy scent surrounded him. “You lied to me of your own volition, Holly. Was there a gun to your head? Was there force involved? Was there some villain lurking in the shadows who forced you to ruin our marriage and run?”
“No villain,” she threw back at him. “Just a husband who couldn’t wait to get his own back.”
She shrugged out of his hold and he let her go because that was the smarter course, not because he wanted to do it. His palms felt burned by the heat of her soft skin even after she moved. She staggered back a step, looking faintly dazed. Then her blue eyes narrowed on him.
“How long did you wait to start sleeping around again, out of curiosity?” she asked, her voice as crisp as her gaze was wild. “Five minutes? Or did you wait a whole night after I left, out of respect?”
CHAPTER SIX
“I LOVED YOU,” he seethed at her, refusing to answer her, because this was the crux of it. This was the point, and she was twisting it and distorting him in the process. “And you destroyed me.”
“If only that were true, Theo,” Holly whispered, and he didn’t know which she meant, that he’d loved her or that she’d destroyed him. Both. “But that was just what we told ourselves, wasn’t it? I’d have to have really known you first, and you me.” She made a hollow sort of noise. “And I think we both know that never happened.”
She staggered back a step, then another, wrapping her arms around herself as if she was cold when the air was warm all around them. And somehow all of that black and terrible fury simply drained from him then. Not gone, he thought as he eyed her, but banked. He felt nothing so much as tired, and as ruined as he’d felt four years ago when he’d believed she’d betrayed him.
And worse than all of that, sad.
It was then he understood that he did, in fact, believe her now. Despite what that made him. Despite all the things that made him, that he’d promised himself he’d never become. Theo shoved a hand through his hair and tried to force air into his lungs, and Holly took another step away from him, looking over her shoulder toward the lights of the city, as if she could will herself somewhere, anywhere, else.
Anywhere but here, stuck in this misery they’d made, and for the life of him, Theo still didn’t know why.
“Will you run now?” he asked her, his voice as soft as the night, and as dark. Inky and lethal.
“I...” But she didn’t finish.
So Theo did.
“That is what you do, is it not?” He didn’t sound like himself. But then, he wasn’t himself, was he? He was the creature she’d made him. A man like his own father, the kind of man who lined up the promises he made in whatever shifting order of importance he chose and then ignored the rest when they became inconvenient. His own worst nightmare, in other words. He focused on Holly instead. “When it is hard, when it is intense, you make excuses or you lie, and then you run, and you leave nothing but this wreckage behind you.” He shrugged. “Why should this be any different?”
* * *
That last part was almost the worst. Almost.
Holly felt half-dead—or maybe she only wished she did. Maybe she only wished she could retreat into something that much like oblivion, because that would make this easier, surely.
“I’m not running anywhere,” she told him fiercely. But she had to lock her knees to keep from moving back even farther, away from that look on his face, anywhere at all but here with him. And she hated the fact that he could read her so well when it turned out she’d been so terribly wrong about him. It made her feel vulnerable.
Or more vu
lnerable, anyway.
And for what felt like forever, they simply stood there. The music from the clubs behind them was a wild smear of sound through the darkness, bass and drum and eerie melodies distorted by the water. And there was nothing but the sea in front of them, and yet they stood there as if they were on opposite sides of it.
“How many?” Holly asked. It was sick. She knew that. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. And she couldn’t seem to stop, either. “How many women did you sleep with? How many times did you pay me back for my betrayal?”
“I’m not going to answer that.” His voice was a dark throb into the night, and she didn’t know how he could do that—how he could sound so dangerous and furious and lofty at once. “You do not get to claim any moral high ground in this, Holly. You are not the wronged party.”
“But I am the faithful party, it turns out.”
He let out a low, male growl that moved inside of her, half heat and half accusation.
“You cannot have it both ways. You left me. You threw your affair in my face whether it was true or not, and then you left. That is not faithful, by any definition.”
“How about the definition that involves sex with other people? How am I doing with that one, Theo?”
He shifted, and she had the impression he was holding himself back, but barely.
“What did you think would happen? Was I meant to suspend myself in pointless sainthood, awaiting this moment I had no reason to believe would ever come?” He let out a scrape of something too painful to be laughter, and it made Holly feel hollow and ruined at once. “You cannot be so naive.”
She understood she wasn’t being fair. That none of this was fair and that, worse, she’d put all of this in motion herself when she’d told that first lie. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“You never wanted a divorce,” she said helplessly after a moment, when the buzzing in her ears stopped making her feel dizzy. “I suppose I thought...”
She shouldn’t have said that, and Holly wasn’t surprised when he seemed to rebound into a greater rage right there before her, his dark face taut and furious, his eyes blazing.
“That this was some kind of sick flirtation across whole years?” His voice was scathing. “That even though I believed that you’d cuckolded me, I still hoped to win you back with open access to my bank account and my otherwise complete and total indifference?”
“You’re the one who taught me how to play these games, Theo!” she hurled at him wildly, and she didn’t have it in her to worry about what was fair. Maybe it was that word he’d used: indifference. Because that was what she’d seen in the lobby of The Chatsfield, and that was the end of everything. She knew that. “You could have come after me but you chose to throw money at me instead. Don’t you dare stand here and accuse me of ruining our marriage when you did nothing to save it. When you no doubt rejoiced the moment I left!”
“Enough.”
She’d never heard that tone from him before. Abrupt and powerful, reminding her who he’d become in these past years. The heights he’d climbed in his father’s company and how like the old man he’d become along the way. It was only then she realized she was shaking again, and not from the temperature. She rubbed her hands up and down her own arms and his mouth tightened.
“Theo...”
But Holly didn’t know what she meant to say and it didn’t matter, because he was already shaking his head.
“I said enough.” He closed the distance between them and took hold of her arm, and she automatically pulled against it, letting out a surprised sort of sound when his fingers only tightened. “Walk or be dragged, agapi mou.” It was nearly a snarl, and she felt it like a slap. Or perhaps a kick. “In the mood I am in right now, I do not much care which.”
Holly walked.
Theo kept a tight hold of her, and she told herself it didn’t matter. It didn’t make a difference that he had put those beautiful, gorgeous hands of his on countless other women, possibly even tonight before she’d found him. That he knew about places like that alcove because he’d used them, obviously, and not only with her.
That made her feel sick, it was true. And yet the pit in her stomach that yawned open wider with every step wasn’t about that, not really.
This was her fault. No matter what she threw at him, she knew that. She had done this, no one else. She had remembered so vividly what her mother’s departure had done to her father, how it had broken him but made him unwilling to go after her in all the years that followed out on that lonely little ranch, and she’d used it. She’d claimed the same sin and gotten the same reaction in response. She’d done this.
But knowing that only seemed to make things worse. Or maybe it just made her hate herself. She could hardly tell the difference any longer, and his fingers wrapped tight around her upper arm didn’t help.
“I can take a taxi,” she told him when she realized Theo was striding toward his car and the uniformed driver who beckoned from a spot down the street, but nearly swallowed her own tongue when he turned a savage glare upon her.
It seemed smarter to get in the car. And then to tell his driver where she was staying when asked, because that would be faster than fighting about it or trying to conceal it.
“Theo,” she started again when the car glided into traffic, “I want to try to...”
“My mother died when I was only twelve,” he told her in that abrupt way that made her think of that look he’d turned on her, cutting her off.
He sat beside her but he might have been worlds away, that fine body of his taut and visibly furious beneath his elegant clothes, his elbow propped up against the far window. He stared out of it, out toward the delirious explosion of the city and all its fantastical structures as if she wasn’t there. But Holly didn’t make the mistake of thinking he was speaking to himself.
“I know,” she said quietly. “I’m sorry.”
“It is the proper thing to murmur, as if it was a tragedy, or a mistake, but the truth is that she took too many pills with far too much alcohol and I believe it must have been a great relief to her to finally slip off into eternity.”
Holly felt ripped wide-open. “I had no idea.”
“My father told everyone she had lost a struggle with a sudden and violent illness, and I suppose, in some way, this is also the truth,” Theo said in that same low, pointed way, as if he could have been talking of his shipping concerns as easily as these private family things Holly had never heard even a whisper of before.
He paused for so long she thought he was finished, and wondered why she trembled, why even her bones seemed to shake, but then he turned his head to look at her instead and it pinned her to her seat.
“But another, more pertinent truth is that my father’s affairs were not only legion but common knowledge. Every piece of jewelry he gave my mother was a bribe, an apology, another young woman’s body he’d taken as his due. This broke her, jewel by jewel and lover by lover, and he knew it. But he never stopped. And she draped herself in each and every one of them, every bauble that proclaimed my father’s guilt and carelessness, when she killed herself to escape his endless stream of betrayals.”
Holly couldn’t move. The city lights played over her face, bathing them both in intermittent light as the car navigated the streets, but all she could see was Theo and that terrible gleam in his dark gaze, that grim line of his mouth.
She whispered his name, or she thought she did, and he ignored it, anyway.
“And tonight,” he said quietly, with ferocious precision, “you have made me exactly like him.”
Holly couldn’t breathe. “I thought you admired him now. I thought everything had changed between you.”
Theo’s teeth bared in something far too stark to be a smile, and she knew he could see exactly what kind of coward she was, to avoid the point of
what he’d told her. But she could hardly take it in. She wasn’t sure she could bear it.
“I said he was a tough man. An excellent businessman.” Theo’s dark gaze hurt as it moved over her, Holly realized. She was half-afraid it would leave scars, to fit right in with all the rest she bore from their time together. Not to mention the ones she’d caused. “I never said he was a good one.”
And they sat in strained silence, another wound that would leave its mark, for the remainder of the ride.
“I will walk you to your door,” he told her in that harsh way of his when the car pulled up to the tall, gleaming doors of The Harrington, towering over the narrow, medieval street. He didn’t glance at her as he said it.
Holly swallowed, hard. “I can’t think of anything less necessary than that.”
She could simply go back to Dallas and resume her lonely, gray life, she thought. This was a terrible mistake, that much was clear, but she could remedy it. She could take the first flight out in the morning. She could stop playing stupid games with his money, her silly and childish attempts to gain his attention, and move on with her life, such as it was. All she had to do was leave.
“I didn’t ask you for your permission, Holly.”
“Why not pretend none of this ever happened?” she suggested, ignoring his tone and pretending that everything else that had gone on tonight wasn’t crowding out her ability to think clearly. “We’ll divorce and go on our merry way. We can start by you not walking me inside like this is some sick parody of a good date.”
“You came on my hand not an hour ago,” Theo retorted icily, and turned that too-black gaze on her again, making her feel still and small. “Yet an escort to your hotel room is an intimacy too far?”
She didn’t respond to that. She didn’t trust herself. Holly climbed from the car and let him accompany her in a grim march across the lobby—though she wasn’t certain let was the right word. How could she have stopped him? How could she have stopped any of this? Once she’d decided to leave him four years ago, had all of this darkness and despair been inevitable?
Greek's Last Redemption Page 8
