“You are needed in Athens,” his father barked at him, the slight rasp in his voice the closest he ever got to a display of emotion. Theo considered it a direct hit. “You are meant to be running my company, not letting that girl parade you around Europe by your—”
“That girl is my wife whether you like it or not,” Theo said icily, cutting the old man off before he could veer too far into the unforgivable. “And I am as interested in your thoughts on my marriage now as I was four and a half years ago, Father, when you boycotted my wedding and yet, somehow, it went ahead without you.”
“Perhaps if you’d listened back then you wouldn’t be in this crisis now!” his father retorted, sounding as guilt-free now as he had then. But, of course, Theo wasn’t certain Demetrious knew what guilt was. “Splashed all over the papers and half the company—my company—at her greedy fingertips!”
“Why don’t we continue this conversation when you have recalled that, once again, I did not ask for your opinion on my marriage,” Theo said, very distinctly. “Or—and this is my preference—not at all. Make peace with this, Father, however you can. I don’t care what you think about it.”
“You must end this spectacle, Theo.” His father’s voice was dark, and wholly unmoved by anything Theo might have said, as always. The great Demetrious Tsoukatos cared about two things—himself and whatever made him more money. Theo knew better than to expect otherwise, and the truth was, the longer he spent with Holly, the less he cared what the old man did. “One way or the other.”
“Goodbye, Father,” Theo replied, and ended the call, tucking his mobile into the pocket of his trousers and letting the stunning Spanish sunset, pinks and deep blues cavorting magnificently over the old city before they succumbed to the coming dark, soothe the ragged things inside of him.
But he knew that there was only one thing that could truly do that, only one person who ever had, and he had stopped pretending otherwise.
They’d stood in that alley for a long time, kissing. Just kissing.
And it had changed everything.
He’d tasted her again and again, kissing her as if his life depended on it.
He rather thought it might, that was the trouble. Because it had been one thing to live out the past four years in a dark fury. Outraged at what she’d done to him and determined to prove he wasn’t ruined by her deception, her betrayal. Determined to be unbroken, unchanged, by what had happened between them, he’d told himself almost daily—and yet he hadn’t let her go, had he?
He wanted to let her go even less, now.
“That did not sound like a pleasant conversation,” she said from behind him.
“Perhaps you’ve forgotten that my father is not a particularly pleasant man,” Theo replied with a shrug. “Merely an effective one.”
He turned to find her standing in the graceful doorway that led into the suite, and he thought she was far more beautiful than the sun’s display over the distant hills and the gleaming sea. She was wearing his shirt like a robe, wrapped around her lovely form, with her hair a great and glorious mess around her shoulders, and his chest ached at the sight.
Maybe it would always ache when he saw her. Maybe that was the point.
They’d had a great deal of sex since that first time on the sofa, only a handful of days ago. It had been wild, intense. Deeply addictive. Perfect, every time, just as he remembered it from before.
But none of it had come close to what they’d shared this last time, when they’d come back here after their interlude in that alley in the Gothic Quarter, drunk on all that kissing. Intoxicated and filled with a new kind of light. A new kind of trust.
Sacred, he thought.
He had no intention of letting her go. None whatsoever. Not ever again.
“You must have things to do back in Athens,” she continued after a moment, her hand on the door frame as if she needed to steady herself. Theo’s gaze sharpened at that, and he felt everything inside him still. “You can’t have planned for a vacation on the fly like this.” She swallowed, hard, as if she was forcing down a reaction she didn’t want him to see, shoving it out of his view before he could name it. “I don’t want to keep you from your responsibilities, Theo.”
He studied her then, all of his senses on high alert. The sunset played over her face, making her shine that little bit brighter, but he could see the shadows in her eyes. That stark vulnerability.
And he knew. He knew what she was going to do.
“Are you ready to return to Greece with me, Holly?” He leaned back against the rail behind him and kept his attention trained on her, and he did not ball his hands up into fists. He did not bellow his feelings into the twilight sky. He simply gazed at her and waited for this ax of hers to fall. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“I think you should go to Greece right now if that’s what you need to do,” she told him, and he could see she meant that.
She wove her hands together in front of her, and he had the sudden, perfect recollection of her standing exactly like that four years ago as she’d spun her lies for him, devastating him in a few stark sentences. He hadn’t paid much attention to her body language then, that she’d held her hands out like that when she never had before. But he’d had four years of angry mornings in his gym, remembering every single moment of that last night and every tiny thing she’d done as she’d ripped out his heart and stomped on it.
Tonight, he knew what it was.
Fear. Again.
“You are too kind,” he murmured.
Holly’s troubled blue gaze met his, then danced away again.
“I think these days together have been enormously instructive,” she said, and her voice changed as she spoke. She stood taller, held herself more elegantly. He supposed this was the Holly Tsoukatos who dominated all the charities she was involved with. Remote. Inaccessible. Unemotional—but he could see her eyes. He could see her, no matter what she said. “I think we’ve learned that we do, in fact, have something to build on, after all. Maybe we should take a month or so to reflect on everything that’s happened, and then craft a reasonable way to move forward.”
“Or,” he said softly, “you can just come home with me. And then stay there, the way you should have done from the start.”
“Oh!” Her face flushed red and her eyes went wide, as if he’d suggested something shocking. “I don’t think—”
“Holly.” He said her name, just her name, and her voice cut off as if he’d barked out a harsh command. He met her gaze and held it. Tried to will her not to do this thing he knew very well she was planning to do. He could see it, written there over her face as if she’d inscribed the words in blood, right there on the perfect slopes of her cheeks. “Come home, agapi mou. It’s time.”
CHAPTER TEN
THEO DIDN’T KNOW what he expected, only what he wished with every last shred of himself, yet Holly only stared back at him for a long, shuddering sort of moment, something much too much like misery making her blue eyes look dark.
“No,” she said, her voice thick. “I can’t, Theo. I can’t go to Greece.”
She didn’t wait for him to form a response to that, or even to see if he’d try. She spun around and disappeared back inside, throwing herself into the shadows of the suite’s interior with a kind of desperate lurch that suggested she was unsteady on her own feet.
But it was the throwing herself away from him that he comprehended first, and it cut deep. She was escaping him as best she could, all over again, and it was hard not to bleed out a little bit at that. No matter that he’d seen this coming.
If anything, that made it worse. Because he should have known better than to kiss her like that, to make love to her like that. Pain and cruelty and uncertainty drew her to him, made her run to him. Love made her run away. These days together in a city he would a
lways think of as theirs made that clear to him.
He only wished he’d understood the truth of that years ago.
Theo stood where he was for a long moment, then another. When he had that bright red thing within him under control again, shoved back down deep and bound up tight, he followed Holly into the bedroom, not at all surprised to find her pulling her clothes back on in a frenzied sort of hurry.
As if, were she to delay even a second, she’d be lost.
He’d peeled off that blouse she was shrugging back on slowly, so slowly. He’d tasted every last millimeter of the skin he’d bared as he went. Her collarbone, her elegant neck. That sweet, soft place where her arm met her shoulder and veered off toward her breast. Only when she’d moaned beneath him had he moved to strip off the bra she’d worn, baring those dark-tipped breasts to his view—to his mouth—at last.
He should have kept her naked, the animal in him growled. Maybe then he’d have kept her close.
“Where are you going?” Theo asked, his voice as light as he could make it, but he knew. He already knew. He could see the panic and the darkness fighting it out in the storm inside her gaze, in the careful way she held her mouth, as if she worried a sob might escape if she wasn’t careful.
“You need to get back to your business and I’m needed in Dallas.”
“By whom?”
Her eyes had that sheen in them, that hectic sparkle, that gave him all the answers he needed. But he didn’t relent. He couldn’t.
“I have responsibilities,” she told him, but she dropped her gaze as she said it, looking around the bedroom as if the tossed-back sheets and well-used mattress might offer her a clue.
He almost felt sorry for her, Theo thought. He was almost sympathetic. But he was standing there in nothing but a pair of boxer briefs and his body was still pleasantly worn-out from all the ways he’d explored her, cherished her, taken her. Worshipped her. He’d kissed away the tears that had leaked from behind her closed eyes when she’d shattered in his arms. When she’d moaned out her pleasure and he’d heard nothing but love in the sound. But he doubted she’d let him do it now.
“Do you?” He watched her move around the room, every part of her vibrating with a terrible tension, as if she was holding back a personal, internal earthquake by sheer force of will alone. Perhaps she was. If he wasn’t so angry with her, with what she was about to do again, he thought he might ache for her. “And what responsibilities are those, exactly?”
She stopped moving then, and threw her hands out. “Stop!” she hissed at him, as if he couldn’t see the way her hands shook, undercutting anything she might say. “Just let me go.”
“But you see, that is the trouble,” Theo replied, making his voice lazy, forcing his body to lean against the doorjamb as if he felt anything like at his ease. “I’ve already let you go once. I don’t particularly want to do it again.”
“This was a mistake,” she muttered. “This was all a god-awful mistake.”
“Which part, Holly?” He watched her shove her hands in her hair, saw the conflicted expression that moved over her face, sad and lost and wounded, and he wondered how he’d missed it the first time around. Had he truly been so narcissistic four years ago? Had he seen nothing at all but his own pain, his own ego? But he knew he had. He’d watched her do exactly this and he’d believed her. On some level, Theo thought then, that was the greatest betrayal of all. If he’d known her at all, he should have known better. “The part where you love me so much it terrifies you? Or the part where you don’t know how to love at all unless it hurts?”
She breathed in something ragged that sounded a good deal like a sob, but there was something else in her stormy gaze. Something like steel. Resignation and regret.
“Maybe love simply hurts because that’s what it does,” she flared at him. “Maybe everything between us is too painful for a reason. I lied to you. You slept around. None of that could ever have happened if we were anything remotely resembling good for each other!”
“Holly.” He straightened from the doorjamb and waited for her to look at him again. He watched the way she trembled and he couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than to go to her, to gather her close, to soothe away this latest storm of hers—but he didn’t. “You believe that love should hurt. That the only way you can possibly know if it’s love in the first place is if it’s crippling. If you worry it might break you. So if the hurt doesn’t exist on its own, you invent it.”
Her mouth fell open and she stopped trembling with a suddenness, an abruptness, that was almost like a gunshot through the quiet room around them.
“Is that a roundabout way of telling me I’m crazy?” she asked, but her voice had gone cold. It was pure ice, all the way through, and Theo understood it. He understood her for the first time, he thought, her and him and everything that had happened between them then and now—and that was why he couldn’t let this go the way so much of him longed to do.
“Not at all,” he said. “We are all what we were raised to be, are we not? Though we claim that will never happen to us, that we’ll fight it with our dying breaths, that we take only what we like from our parents and no more. Yet I am my father’s son, for better or worse. Just as you are your father’s daughter.”
She sucked in another too-harsh breath, and it was loud. So loud he thought it must have hurt her. It hurt him, too.
“Be careful, Theo,” she warned him then. “My father was a good man. A good man and a true one to the very end. He’s not ammunition you can use to make a point.” Her eyes flashed, darkening, and her pretty mouth trembled. “Any good thing there might be in me, he taught me.”
“He taught you how to mourn,” Theo contradicted her with gentle deliberateness that was no less accurate for its softness, and she stiffened. “He taught you how to make a whole life into a monument to a selfish woman who wanted neither one of you.”
“He loved her!” Holly cried.
“Just as my mother loved my father, and to what end?” His own voice was merciless then, Theo knew, but he couldn’t stop. “Love is a living thing, Holly. Don’t you see that? It’s not set in stone. It’s not a test of endurance designed only to break you. You can love me without all this darkness. Without the pain and the loss and the grief. You can simply love me, I promise.”
She let out a sound far too painful to be a laugh, and it tore at him. It wrecked him as surely as a lie had four years ago. “How would you know? What evidence is there to support that? Not one thing in our history suggests we can do anything but fall apart.”
“Those six months in Santorini were the best of my life,” he told her, holding her gaze, letting her see the very heart of him. “There was no darkness. There was no fear. There were no others between us, real or imaginary. And we were happy.” He let that sink in for a breath. “That was why you ran, wasn’t it? It’s not losing yourself you fear. It’s finding yourself whole. Whole and happy and loved. The way your father never could.”
And he couldn’t say he was particularly surprised when she blanched at that, jerking back as if he’d hit her and going terribly, alarmingly pale besides.
No more, everything inside of him shouted, wild and snarling at the restraint he was showing. You should be the one who protects her, not the one who attacks her!
“Holly...”
“Enough!” she threw at him, though her voice was but a strangled whisper, and she hardly sounded like herself. She sounded as wrecked as he felt. As if they’d crushed each other to pieces all over again. Shards of glass, ground into dust. “You’ve said enough, Theo. More than enough. I can’t hear any more of this.”
And this time, she didn’t sneak out while he slept. She didn’t run away while he wasn’t looking, leaving him to pick up what pieces remained and then stitch himself back together with whatever fury and heartbreak and grief she’d left be
hind her.
Not this time.
This time, Holly walked swiftly away from him and she didn’t look back. She didn’t glance over her shoulder, and she was still so alarmingly pale it was as if she’d become her own ghost.
And Theo let her go.
* * *
Holly was halfway across the gleaming, fresh-scented lobby of The Harrington before she realized that someone was calling her name—and that it wasn’t Theo, the only person she both wanted to hear and wanted to avoid, all at the same time.
More than that, she wanted to die. More accurately, she thought she’d already died and wanted nothing more than to hide herself away in some corner somewhere and collapse... Maybe then, she’d stop feeling all of this. Maybe then, she’d make sense of the mad tilt and crash that was still happening inside of her.
But instead of heading up to her room to find that corner, she stopped, pasting what she hoped was a smile on her face and aiming it at the woman who marched toward her, wearing the trim suit and gold-edged nametag of a Harrington employee.
“Mrs. Tsoukatos,” the woman said in an efficient British accent. “I am so sorry. I’m the day manager here and I wanted to make certain I apologized to you personally for the grievous and unacceptable breach of your privacy. I spent the morning on the telephone with our CEO, Isabelle Harrington, who was deeply concerned and appalled and asked me to extend an apology both on behalf of The Harrington in general and from her in—”
“Forgive me,” Holly interrupted before her head exploded, all over the shiny floor and the tasteful flower arrangements that tossed scent and color around like confetti and made her feel somehow more exposed because of it, “but I have no idea what you’re taking about.”
The woman stood straighter, her polite expression intact, if more careful. She cleared her throat and Holly didn’t bolt, because thinking about something—anything—besides Theo and her marriage and the stunning mess she’d made of her life seemed like a gift. A reprieve.
Greek's Last Redemption Page 13
