He was honest enough to admit, if only to himself, that he liked that this suite affected her, too. That he wanted their history to get under her skin as much as it did his. That even if she was still playing her damned games, even if the papers were correct and this was all part of her attempt to start maneuvering for control of the company, the heat between them had never been feigned. He remembered, too well, the things that had happened in this suite four and a half years ago. Neither one of them had been faking. At least not that.
“It is so nostalgic, is it not?” he asked acidly, still standing at the door, though he’d closed it behind her. “What a pity I had them clean up all the rose petals you’d so thoughtfully requested. Or I might have asked you to crawl through them, the way you did back then.”
Holly turned to look over her shoulder at him, her eyes as blue as the bright Spanish day he could see out the windows beyond her, her wide mouth in a firm line.
“Really?” she asked mildly. As smooth as whatever she’d done to her hair and he liked it as little. “The papers are full of insulting speculation, you almost certainly tipped off the paparazzi yourself or how would they have known to track us to The Harrington, and you want to stand here and talk about a four-and-a-half-year-old bout of oral sex?”
“I think, agapi mou, that you may well find it difficult to unearth a single man alive who would not find that particular subject preferable to all others,” he observed, a dark kind of amusement coloring his voice as he spoke. “No matter how hard you try to make it sound like some kind of virulent illness we suffered in tandem.”
“Yes, Theo,” she said in a brittle tone of voice, pivoting around to face him, her sharp heels loud against the marble floor of the arching vestibule, bright sunlight and delicate art all around her, framing her. “I remember. I remember crawling across the floor to you because I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d rather do. I remember what happened once I reached you on the couch. I remember what you did with the champagne and I remember how insatiable we both were, that day and the long month after. Are you satisfied? Can we talk about the present?”
“I don’t understand,” he said, and he refused to acknowledge how difficult it was to maintain that dry, offhanded tone in the wake of all those images she’d thrown at him, all those memories. “Surely you wanted me to stay in this suite so that I would be racked with memories and tortured alive by the past. But now it is the present you’d prefer to discuss? How can I possibly keep up?”
She rolled her eyes and it occurred to Theo that he was as close to enjoying himself as he’d been in...years. That the fury he’d felt rolling through him when he’d read the tabloids, when he’d thrown open the door, had simply gone. Disappeared. It was lost in that stubborn mouth of hers, perhaps, or somewhere on that too-pretty face he still found much too captivating. It had disappeared into the perfect curve of her behind, the sweet indentation of her waist above the intriguing flare of her hips...
Or maybe it was simply that he’d touched her last night, tasted her, and he was an addict. How could he pretend otherwise when he still wanted her—when he always wanted her?
He’d already fallen off the wagon. Why not indulge himself?
As if she could read the rising heat in him, see it right there on his face, Holly moved farther into the room. He followed, studying her as she walked over to the far side of the coffee table and then frowned down at the papers spread out across the glass there.
He’d gotten lost somewhere in his too-vivid memories of Holly on her knees before him, but he remembered the rest of what she’d thrown at him now. Belatedly.
“I did not tip off the paparazzi,” he said. She lifted her gaze to his, and he held it as he made his unhurried way around her to settle on the low-slung, soft white sofa. He leaned back, taking his time, watching the way her gaze shifted from his face to the expanse of his chest he hadn’t bothered to clothe when he’d gotten out of bed earlier—as if she couldn’t help herself, either. “There is little benefit to me in reminding the corporate world that I married a social-climbing American nobody without taking the trouble to protect my family legacy.”
“I appreciate you applying such creative license,” she said, her tone still so cool that if he hadn’t been watching her face so closely, if he hadn’t been able to see all that frustrated heat in her blue eyes, he might have believed the ice in it. “But I don’t recall any of the articles referring to me as either a social climber or an American nobody.”
He inclined his head. “I believe it was inferred.”
“Is that why it was so easy for you to believe I’d cheated on you, Theo?” she asked quietly. He hadn’t been expecting it and he told himself that was why it slammed into him like that. “Because that was what you thought of me? Because deep down, or maybe not so deep at all, you imagined cheating on you with some random tourist was exactly what a social-climbing American nobody would do?”
Theo fought back the urge to defend himself—again. Or to offer her any explanations for the things he’d done after she’d torn him apart. He owed her neither, he assured himself. Instead, he lounged back against the sofa and spread his arms along the length of it, keeping his eyes trained on her face as he did, watching all the reactions she fought to hide.
Pretending he didn’t feel each and every one of them in the hungry length of his sex, as if it was her mouth instead.
“Why did you come here?” he asked after a moment. He could see a faint flush high on her cheekbones, and he ordered himself not to react to it. Not to give in to the urges of flesh, of memory. Not yet. “Surely a telephone call would have sufficed. Why come in person, thereby throwing fuel on the fire, if the blaze wasn’t of your own making?”
“I suppose I wanted to watch you lie to me in person,” she replied, and he suspected she knew it stung. He forced himself to shrug it off.
“And why are you back in all that armor you wear?” he asked instead of responding to her dig. Instead of surging to his feet and hauling her against him, then rolling her beneath him at last. Instead of handling her with his body, with the passion that had always been there between them, a connection nothing ever seemed to break or diminish. A compulsion, he thought. A damned addiction, nothing more. “What do you imagine I might do to you, that you should require it?”
She stood taller, if that was possible. More rigid. “Armor? Where I come from we call this a dress.”
“Last night you came to find me in the clubs dressed like the girl I remember,” Theo said, as if he was speaking words of love. Or sex. As if there was a difference where the two of them were concerned. As if the poetry between them had ever been anything but dark. “Was that only for the dark of night? Or was it yet another manipulation? Another role for you to play as you tried your best to bend me to your will?”
“It was an outfit appropriate for the circumstances,” Holly said, her voice as sharp as glass. “Not a grand conspiracy. I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“And what circumstances are these, then, that require you dress as an imposter of yourself?” he asked. He let his eyes move over her. “You must realize that I have always found Holly Holt, the charmingly innocent adventuress who happened upon me on a sunny Greek island one summer, far more attractive than Holly Tsoukatos, the brittle and scheming society wife who drains my bank accounts and my patience in equal measure.”
“I’ll be certain to let you know the next time I require your input on how I dress.” A flash of temper i
n those blue eyes. A cold curve to her lips. “Let me offer you a hint. It won’t be soon.”
“Yet you raced here to speak to me. Dressed like this again when only last night you showed me the Holly I remember for the first time in years. How can I imagine it is anything but deliberate?” He made a show of leaning back, of relaxing. He even smiled, though he could feel the sharp edge to it—and more, could see it reflected in the way she pulled in a breath. “Last night’s Holly was the carrot, I suppose. This must be the stick.”
She sniffed, and eyed him. “Should I have dressed like you, Theo? Then made my way through the city half-naked and rumpled with sleep? What grand theories would you have come up with then?”
“What do you want?” he asked again, softly. “And why did you feel you had to put on your favorite disguise to come here and ask for it?”
Holly looked something like shaken for a moment, but then she blinked, and he was almost convinced he’d imagined it. Almost.
“I think we should concentrate on the fact we’re all over the papers again,” she said tightly—as if this was hard for her, Theo thought, and God help him, but he wanted this to be hard for her. He wanted all of this to be hard for her.
Because if it was hard, it must matter. It must.
He refused to think about why he found that so critical.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“You don’t think we should worry about the fact the tabloids are stalking us?” She sounded incredulous, and irritated besides. “Telling melodramatic stories about us all over again?”
“I don’t think that’s why you’re here. I don’t think that’s why you went to such care with your appearance, the better to look cool and polished when you arrived.” He let his gaze linger on her, let her see what she’d made him, steel and stone. “I don’t think the tabloids are anything but an excuse.”
“For what?” She lifted her chin and her blue eyes were chilly, but her voice betrayed her. It was too soft. It hinted at too much turmoil beneath.
“For this.” He didn’t move any closer to her then. He didn’t stand up and put his hands on her—he didn’t have to. It was as if they were gripped in the same tight fist, held close and trapped. He could feel the constriction of it. He could see the way it made her breathing shallow. He could feel it inside of him, heat and longing, and something far darker besides. “I’d be surprised if you slept at all last night. You wanted to race here as soon as possible this morning to take the measure of my guilt.”
She only stared back at him. Her blue eyes were bright, perhaps too bright. He could see the pulse in her throat, beating too fast. Giving her away no matter how she tried to hide in her elegant costume and haughty demeanor. He could see. He knew.
“You seem crippled with shame,” she pointed out drily.
The lie came easily. “I feel no shame, Holly. No guilt. All of that is yours to bear.”
“Yes,” she said in a whisper. “Two wrongs are largely renowned, I’ve found, for making a right. Everybody always says so.”
“There was one wrong,” he told her, very deliberately, very clearly. “One lie. And everything that followed came directly from that. Will we argue this forever? Is this why you came here this morning? To see if my answer would magically change?”
“I didn’t think your answer would magically change,” Holly said quietly, and the way she looked at him then made something in him very nearly shudder. He told himself it didn’t matter, just as he’d been telling himself she didn’t—and yet here they were. “But I persist in imagining you might.”
He’d changed. He’d been leveled. But he only stared back at her and refused to admit that. Not now. Not here.
“It didn’t matter who those other women were,” he said then, and he did nothing to ease the blow. He did nothing to make it better—if anything, he let the bitter truth of it spill out where it would. “All I ever saw was you.”
* * *
Holly stopped lying to herself in a sudden rush as Theo’s harsh sucker punch connected, a direct hit, then reverberated through her as if he’d delivered a street fighter’s kick to the back.
Hard enough to maim, she thought dimly, if she let it.
“Oddly,” she heard herself say, as if from some great distance, from somewhere her ears weren’t ringing and she felt less dizzy with reaction and regret alike, “that doesn’t help at all.”
Theo was lounging back against the all-white sofa, looking dark and dangerous and something far more compelling than simply delicious as he sat there, all of that hard heat in his dark eyes and the vast, sculpted expanse of his naked chest beneath.
Would this be easier if he was less beautiful? Holly wondered.
When he’d answered his door wearing nothing but dark athletic trousers low on his hips and a scowl, she’d nearly toppled over. This was the Theo she remembered, this impossibly beautiful creature, all sinew and strength, even when it looked as if he’d done nothing more today than roll out of his bed. He exuded sex. Danger. He was male and hot and astonishingly magnetic, and more than that, he was imprinted deep in her soul. Every place he’d touched her last night thrilled to the sight of him and then ached, long and low. Like a fire she’d never put out.
She stopped pretending she could. Or that she’d ever wanted to, because she hadn’t. Not really.
“What part of me?” she asked instead, before she knew she meant to speak—and maybe it was better that way. There was less chance she’d edit herself. Less opportunity to hide in plain sight. “What part did you see?”
Theo blinked, and then went still—so still that Holly had to replay what she’d just said to make sure she’d really said it out loud.
Oh, yes. She really, truly had.
It was like another kick, and this time, she was the one who’d delivered it. Shock waves rolled through her, and she could see them in him, too, though he didn’t move.
No particular shame in telling a lie, I suppose, her father had told her once a long time ago, when she’d been a young girl dealing with the usual trials of middle school and the duplicity of some of her peers. A person has reasons. The shame is in holding on to the lie when the truth is right in front of you. The shame is in pretending the lie is the truth. A lie might not kill you, darlin’, but shame always will.
“I beg your pardon?” Theo asked with an exaggerated politeness that almost made Holly laugh. But she didn’t. This was much too important.
“Which part of me did you see while you were drowning your troubles in other women?” she asked instead, as distinctly and directly as she could.
She didn’t understand what was happening to her, what she was feeling. The idea of him with other women made her feel sick, as she imagined he meant it to—but then, the logical part of her brain knew he was right. She was the one who had brought infidelity into their marriage, whether real or imagined. She’d opened that door. She was the one who’d broken the trust between them, who’d claimed she’d broken the vows they’d made to each other. How could she hold him to a standard she’d insisted he believe she’d ignored herself? When she’d left him to marinate in what remained after her tortured “confession”?
But it was more insidious than that, Holly knew. It was far sicker, if she let herself consider it fully. It was all right there in what he’d said. That he’d seen her, even when she was far away. That it was all about her, somehow.
She didn’t understand why that felt like a gift. Like something
almost romantic, in a deeply twisted way, given their circumstances. Only that it did. And that no matter how messed up it all was, she would accept it.
And she didn’t care what that made her.
“I don’t know what game this is,” he growled at her.
“My hands?” Holly asked, ignoring him. She moved toward him, letting the stilettos she wore accentuate the sway of her hips, noting the way his dark eyes dropped hungrily and stayed there. Watching her. Enjoying her. “My hair?”
“Not scraped back and hidden like that, no,” he muttered, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, and Holly felt that everywhere. It ignited deep inside her, rolling outward, dark smoke and thick flames, making her feel molten and undone.
And powerful, somehow. As if he really was still hers, after all. After everything.
She stopped moving when she stood before him at last, just slightly inside his sprawled-out legs. He didn’t sit up straighter or do anything to suggest he was reacting to her nearness—but she could see that hunger in his eyes, so dark, so damned hot, and it was enough.
It made that fire in her arc higher. It consumed everything.
It was all that mattered.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOLLY REACHED UP behind her, taking her time, arching her back as she did it so her breasts pressed against the bodice of her dress, and plucked the pins from her hair. One after the next. Lazily, with her gaze on his. Her hair uncoiled slowly and then, when she pulled out the last pin, fell in a thick line to her shoulders.
That was when she shook it out, using her whole body, running her fingers through the mass of it, letting the blond waves swirl and then fall where they liked. While Theo sat there below her, gazing up at her as if he was having a religious experience, his arms spread wide while his hands gripped the back of the couch, his knuckles as white as the fabric beneath him.
Greek's Last Redemption Page 10
