Greek's Last Redemption

by Caitlin Crews

  It made her feel something like seasick to think so.

  They didn’t speak on the endless, deeply fraught ride in the paneled elevator, nor the long walk down the hushed corridor to her room. She glanced at him when she went to swipe her key card, but he only stared back at her, stone-faced, with that vengeful glitter in his dark gaze and his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

  “Open the damned door,” he said when she paused, his voice soft but like nails even so. “I will not discuss any more of my private life in these open public places, filled as they are with so many eyes and ears.”

  A thousand hurtful replies to that swirled inside her then, but his glare only intensified.

  “Don’t push me, Holly,” he advised her in that same tone. “Not tonight.”

  She opened the door and it felt like the worst kind of capitulation, but she wasn’t sure she knew herself anymore. She felt like a marionette. As if her limbs were responding to some far-off controller and she could only do as she was bid.

  Then again, maybe that was one more way to avoid taking responsibility for the mess she’d made of her marriage.

  And then they were standing there in her hotel suite, which had felt comfortably spacious while she’d been in it alone. But Theo roaming through it, looking angry and male and too much in the midst of so much quietly assured elegance, made her feel trapped. Or perhaps that was the sudden lump in her throat, restricting her breath.

  The insistent pulse of her own shame, her own deepening guilt.

  Tonight you have made me exactly like him.

  “I’m sorry,” she forced herself to say, though she felt nothing so easy or uncomplicated as sorry. “I realize you acted only on the information you had. I have no right to blame you for that. I have no right to be hurt by what you did.”

  He’d moved over to the windows and he turned back then, something terrible on his face, caught there in his dark eyes.

  “I cannot process this,” he told her after a moment. “I cannot make sense of it. You have not only done a monstrous thing to me, to us—you made me into the very creature I vowed I would never become. I could not bear the first betrayal, Holly. I have no idea how I am to come to terms with this one, the one that makes me worse than you by any emotional arithmetic.”

  Her hands were in fists again, tight and hard against her thighs. “Is that what this is about? Who’s worse?”

  “I have no idea what this is about.” His voice was harsh. “I cannot imagine you do, either, or it would not be this convoluted.”

  Everything had shifted. The room was so bright where the night and the club had been so dark, and Holly couldn’t ever remember feeling so naked before. So wide-open and on display. She wasn’t shaking any longer, but she felt even more broken than before, and looking at Theo made it that much worse.

  He held her gaze from across the room, across all the lies and the betrayals and the stupid games they’d played, and Holly felt a great wave of something darker than simple grief crash over her. She remembered that first week on Santorini, glossy and sunny and perfect. That beautiful week when they’d done nothing but bask in each other and fall madly in love, and she’d believed with every fiber of her being that something so magical, so impossibly vast, could never break or shatter or end. She never could have imagined they’d be standing here now.

  Hadn’t that been what had driven her all these years? She still couldn’t believe it. She’d made it happen herself, but she couldn’t believe it had worked.

  “None of this matters, anyway,” she said. It hurt to swallow. To breathe. “You had the right idea earlier when you walked away. That’s what we should do, of course. This never should have been more than a brief, holiday romance years ago. Your whole family was right.”

  His mouth twisted into something too painful, too dark and cutting, to be a smile.

  “Of course,” he said, and it hurt all the worse because there was nothing harsh in the way he said it. It sounded like acceptance. Like resignation. “This is the most honest moment I think we’ve ever had outside a bed, and you think we should end it. I don’t know why that surprises me.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she said, that expression on his face pricking at her, getting deep beneath her skin. “If this night—this marriage—has proved anything, it’s that. You are not the authority on my honesty. You believed the biggest and worst lie I ever told. And what do I really know about you, anyway? All I knew was that you’d lost your mother when you were young, not how. We might as well be strangers, Theo. Married strangers who are long overdue for a divorce.”

  He looked at her for what felt like a lifetime, and God, but it hurt. It hurt more than all the rest, or maybe she couldn’t tell the difference any longer, and then it hurt even more when he raked his hands through his hair and started moving. For the door, she assumed.

  Maybe this really was over, after all. She told herself that should have been a relief.

  “I’m not going to chase after you, Holly,” he said in a low voice. “You started this four years ago for what I assume are your own good reasons.” His expression suggested he assumed nothing of the kind. “You know where I’m staying. If you want to deal with the mess you made, if you think you can bear to stop playing these games, you know where to find me.”

  “To what end, Theo?” Her own voice was a raw scrape of sound, though it seemed to echo in her like a shout. “To see if we can make all of this that much worse?”

  “No. To see if we can make it honest.” His mouth crooked and he was too close to her then. Much too close. But she couldn’t breathe, anyway. “But I am not optimistic.”

  “And what do you think that looks like?” she asked. She was whispering now, though the words felt like acid at the back of her throat and she was terribly afraid that the heat on her face was more of the tears she didn’t want to let him see. “As far as I can tell we only have two speeds. Wild sex or pure agony. And before you suggest it, I’m not as debauched as you are. I don’t quite see myself working out the two extremes with whips and chains in some S and M dungeon somewhere.”

  “Too bad,” he said, his eyes on hers, standing over her with his hands still deep in his pockets and too many shadows on his face. “I think I’d enjoy throwing you over my knee and paddling you until you screamed.” Another faint crook of his mouth, this one a kind of dark amusement, and it was like a gift. It gave Holly the smallest bit of hope. “At a bare minimum.”

  And she reminded herself that what she wanted—what she’d always wanted, however terribly she’d shown it and despite the awful things she’d done to ruin it when she’d had it—was Theo. Not a divorce. It seemed silly to have come all this way, gone through so much, and not make that as clear as possible. No matter how much she really, truly, wanted to run in the opposite direction.

  “Or,” she suggested, not knowing how she dared when everything was ruined and he was still looking at her as if he might hate her, or maybe it was because of that, “you could kiss me.”

  He studied her for an eternity, while Holly came face-to-face with the depths of her own cowardice and, conversely, the boundless limits of her capacity to hope. “That doesn’t strike me as sufficient punishment.”

  “That all depends on the kiss, I’d think,” she replied.

  Theo moved then. He was so big, so beautiful, and that look on his face made her heart cartwheel madly inside her chest. He reached over and took her face between his palms, tipping her face toward his, and it felt new. Perhaps because of the high shoes she wore, perhaps because it had been so very long.

  Her heart beat so loud it blocked out the world.

  His eyes were so dark they rivaled the night.

  Theo bent closer and pressed his lips softly, so softly, against her brow. Then one cheek. Then the other.

  And if that careening
wildfire that raced through her burned in him, as well, he didn’t show it.

  “The next time I kiss you—if there is ever a next time—it will be because I trust you, Holly,” he told her quietly, almost sweetly, though she understood this was neither of those things. This was a weapon made all the sharper for his restraint, and she felt run clean through. He let go of her then, his dark eyes tearing into her as if he could see the way her heart beat, the way it spun and jumped and dipped. “And I don’t imagine that’s likely to happen anytime soon, do you?”

  And Holly couldn’t seem to do anything but stand there, ruined all over again, ruined anew, her throat as dry as her stomach was twisted.

  He gave her one last look from his too-dark eyes, his mouth so very grim, and then he moved across the hotel room and let himself out into what was left of the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THEO WOKE LATE the next morning in what had once been his honeymoon suite to find himself neck-deep in a three-ring circus, which was marginally preferable to the sea of rose petals he’d ordered removed, before he even rolled out of the vast bed.

  There were more messages from his office than he could count. His direct employees. Mrs. Papadopoulos, her voice more steely each time. His father. Even his younger brother, Brax, away on a business trip in the far-off reaches of Perth, Australia.

  “Your father is trying to reach you, sir,” Mrs. Papadopoulos said icily in one of her voice mails. “He has passed by your office. In person. Four times already this morning. To say nothing of the numerous calls from the exceedingly impolite press.”

  She’d left that message at 9:00 a.m.

  “What is it with you and that damned woman?” Brax demanded, sounding as aggrieved as he did far away. “Why must you play these endless games with her to the detriment of the Tsoukatos name? Why can’t you call her the mistake she is, divorce her and move on?”

  His father was more gruff, and sounded the most furious. As usual.

  “I no longer find it amusing to see my successor presented as little more than a pathetic sex machine in the papers,” Demetrious Tsoukatos growled. “End this, Theo. Now. Endaxi.”

  Theo tossed his mobile to the side, swung himself out of the bed and onto his feet with a surge of adrenaline and dragged his hands through his hair. Then he forced himself to stop. To breathe. He told himself his pulse was not pounding, that he did not feel that all too familiar wallop of something much too close to betrayal all over again. He told himself that whatever had happened, whatever had spurred all these messages, Holly could not possibly be involved. How could she? He’d left her room not long before dawn, and he’d left her in emotional turmoil.

  A quick call to the suspiciously overapologetic front desk—never a good sign, Theo thought darkly—brought him a giant carafe of very strong coffee and the papers in question, which Theo spread out before him on the low, solid glass coffee table where once, years before, he’d made a long, sweet feast of his brand-new wife, tasting and savoring every last inch of her delectable body.

  It was harder than it should have been to shove those unhelpful images from his head, but Theo managed it.

  The screeching, salacious headlines plastered all over the tabloid papers helped him along.

  Tsoukatos Savages Scorned Wife! the first hollered, featuring a grainy picture of the two of them in The Chatsfield’s lobby, Theo towering over a miserable-looking Holly, appearing to be every inch the savage they claimed he was.

  It’s been years since shipping tycoon Theo Tsoukatos has been seen in public with the American wife his disapproving father begged him not to take, giving rise to all manner of rumors the notoriously tight-lipped magnate has refused to either confirm or deny... But this emotional scene—captured in the luxurious Barcelona location of the grand Chatsfield Hotel—suggests that an estrangement is the least of the former lovebirds’ problems!

  Unnamed sources at The Chatsfield dish that while once-infamous Theo checked into the hotel’s swanky love nest, a suite created specifically to melt the hardest heart, he’s staying there alone!

  Can the messy divorce the whole world predicted years ago be far behind?

  His jaw ached, and Theo realized he was clenching it. Much too hard. He had to force himself to read the rest of the “article,” a series of paragraphs supposedly outlining his and Holly’s history while actually making dramatic noises about his wealth and supposed corporate might, before moving on to the other paper.

  Reunited at Last? queried the headline. And then just below that: Or is this just a spot of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

  This one showed a picture of Theo leaving Holly’s hotel, The Harrington, with a time stamp in the corner to show it was not exactly at an hour anyone might consider decent, not even in Spain. Inside—on a two-page spread filled with regurgitated photos dating all the way back to their first days on Santorini when Holly had been called his “unnamed companion”—he found a picture of him escorting Holly inside, his hand wrapped possessively around her arm, and more breathless speculation.

  Are the famously estranged couple finally working out their differences in the high-class embrace of The Harrington, perhaps the most romantic hotel in all of Barcelona? Or is this secret reunion—in the very city where the pair honeymooned following their whirlwind romance and too-hasty wedding almost five years ago—merely a part of a bid for control over the vast Tsoukatos shipping empire?

  After all, Holly Tsoukatos stands to be a very wealthy woman in any potential divorce, given fiery tycoon Theo’s infamous refusal to sign a prenuptial agreement when they married. A decision a source close to the family claims was widely held to have been “unconscionably stupid.”

  Brax, Theo assumed, as his father would sooner give himself a frontal lobotomy than speak to the press for any reason, though it could as easily be his secretary.

  Representatives for the Tsoukatos family could not be reached for comment, but according to one observer, “It was very flirty and they looked like they were back together. Theo couldn’t keep his hands off Holly, and she was clearly loving it.”

  But is she playing him?

  It was only when those last words blurred in front of him that Theo realized he was scowling ferociously. His hands were in hard fists and his temper was kicking in his gut, so loud and so intrusive he was certain he could actually hear it. Like a kettle drum.

  It took him long moments to realize that it wasn’t his temper making the racket in his head—it was someone at his door.

  He glared, but the pounding came again. Hard, direct, pointed slaps, like the palm of a hand slamming with significant force into the center of the door.

  Theo stalked across the great room and threw it open, welcoming the opportunity to express the depth of his feelings to whatever hapless hotel employee had foolishly happened by into the middle of this mood he was in...

  But, of course, it was no hotel employee at all.

  It was Holly.

  He felt his adrenaline surge again, and then desire with it, that same old unquenchable and ungovernable need that made him act without thinking. Four and a half years ago. Last night. That bone-deep wanting that made Theo hate himself. Almost as much as he told himself he hated her then, for doing this to him in the first place. For their entire, twisted and tangled history.

  For making him a faithless breaker of vows despite himself, just like his goddamned father.

  The moment stretched out, electric and intense.

  She was dre
ssed like that chilly version of herself Theo decided he actually detested, in one of those sleek dresses she must have had made for her by the ton, the wild, thick hair he couldn’t resist coiled into smooth submission at the nape of her neck. Gone was the creature he’d touched last night, the half-gypsy woman he’d been unable to keep his hands off. He supposed he should thank her for that.

  He did not feel anything like thankful.

  “Why are you here?” Theo demanded, his voice as cool as his temper was hot. “Do you require another photo op? Did the tabloid reporters miss anything?”

  “Did you do this?” she threw right back at him. She scowled at him, then brushed past him to enter the suite, her arm barely grazing his bare chest, and Theo was too furious to care the way he should have when everything seemed to simply light up inside him at so casual, so tiny, a touch. “Did you sell us out for some labyrinthine reason of your own?”

  It was as if she’d switched him on that easily and no matter how little he might wish it.

  She strode inside and despite everything, despite the whole of their past and even that note of accusation in her voice, Theo allowed himself the pleasure of watching her move. He’d forgotten the sheer joy of it, and he told himself he would have to be made of stone indeed not to notice that sweet roll of her hips, that smooth, lickable gait she couldn’t hide beneath her elegant clothes. It made him remember her cowboy boots, her laugh as big as the sky, her hair wrapped around her like a wild cloak.

  It reminded him that the Holly he’d thought he knew hadn’t been a complete figment of his imagination—she was there, somewhere, beneath all the lies and the costumes and the hurt. He hadn’t made her up out of thin air.

  And then he had the far greater pleasure of watching her come to an abrupt stop as her surroundings impressed themselves upon her. He heard her breathe in, sharp and hard, and saw the way she straightened her spine—and he preferred focusing on that rather than the disquieting things inside of him that he couldn’t seem to shove aside.