by Pippa Roscoe
‘Perhaps it is a good thing that Anna is with you.’
‘I think it may be because Anna is with me.’
‘She’s a good woman, Dimitri.’
‘She’s not just a woman. She’s the mother of my child.’
‘Is that all? You have the look of a man in more than lust, Dimitri.’
‘You know me better than that, Danyl.’
‘But does Anna?’
* * *
Anna came from the bathroom stall out into a beautiful, Ottoman-styled bathroom. Large mirrors adorned high arched walls covered in exquisitely detailed tiles in shades of blue and white. As women bustled around the room she was almost surprised not to see them in period dress.
As she washed her hands she caught sight of Birgitta at the basin beside her.
‘So you are Dimitri Kyriakou’s new bride.’ The statement was accompanied by such a deep study, Anna wondered if Birgitta was trying to understand why Dimitri had chosen her.
‘Yes, I suppose that would be me. Unless he has another one squirrelled away that I don’t know about.’
With a slight inclination of a perfectly smooth shoulder, Birgitta sidestepped Anna’s attempt at humour. ‘Though I wouldn’t expect it of Kyriakou, there are certainly some men out there I wouldn’t put it past.’
Anna honestly couldn’t tell if Birgitta was being funny or not. ‘You mean Danyl?’
An arched eyebrow reminded Anna that she was speaking of royalty on a far too familiar basis.
‘If the Sheikh of Ter’harn were married, I doubt very much that I would be here.’
With no trace of self-pity in her tone, Anna couldn’t help but marvel at the woman’s apparent stoicism.
‘Oh, don’t look at me like that,’ Birgitta continued in a weary tone. ‘I know what my role is here tonight. Danyl,’ she said, ‘needs a bride. My family need me to make a good marriage.’ Another shrug of her beautiful shoulder punctuated her concluding statement. ‘We—wives or potential wives—are nothing more than conveniences and possessions. We make of it what we will. And don’t misunderstand me—I will make the most of this.’ The determination in Birgitta’s tone made Anna reassess the woman in an instant. She only hoped that Danyl knew what he was getting into.
But her words had struck a chord within Anna. She certainly hadn’t been a convenience for Dimitri, she knew that much. But the determination, the idea that she could make something of this, rather than sit passively by and let things happen to her... Hadn’t that been what Dimitri had said to her the night of their wedding? That she needed to ask for what she wanted?
Was she so terrified, she thought sadly, that she had truly stopped asking for things for herself, for her future? Was she so convinced that she would be rejected, or left, abandoned, that she had stopped even thinking of her future, of herself?
As she re-entered the ballroom she located Dimitri easily amongst the throngs of people. The breadth of his strong shoulders drew her to his innate power. As if sensing her, he turned, his eyes finding her in a heartbeat. The hairs on Anna’s arms rose, goosebumps raining down over her skin at the sensual promise of his gaze.
She wasn’t willing to allow this marriage to simply happen to her. If she wanted to make their marriage work, then she couldn’t live in fear, or hold herself back. She needed to have faith in both her husband and herself, faith that he wouldn’t leave her and faith that she was good enough to make him stay. And, with that thought ringing in her ears, she took a glass of champagne from the nearest waiter, taking a deep drink and allowing the bubbles to explode in her throat, sparking excitement and something like hope deep within her.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dear Dimitri,
Today I found you. The real you.
DIMITRI HAD DELIVERED the keynote speech about the poverty that was affecting Greece’s families, the orphanages that were filled not just with orphans, but also with children with loving parents who had turned them over to the state because they simply couldn’t care for them whilst holding down the myriad jobs they needed to take to keep a roof over their heads. He’d highlighted the plight of just a few small families, giving voice to the crisis that affected so many, and he’d felt righteousness ring in his voice—a righteousness that he so rarely felt about his own business these days, aside from the need to compensate for Manos’s awful actions.
He’d tried to avoid thoughts of his half-brother’s betrayal for so long, but now that the limousine pulled up to the apartment he hadn’t stepped foot in for over three years, he wondered if Anna could sense the dark thoughts that were descending upon him. One look at Anna, who had shifted in her seat to look up at the large building towering over the port’s skyline, the silks of her skirt rising up against perfect thighs, and Dimitri struck down the well of arousal firing within him, instead focusing on Danyl’s insightful question.
No, he thought. Anna didn’t understand his difficult feelings about love, didn’t understand how it had been routed out of him by his father’s aloofness and his mother’s death. Didn’t understand how it had been impossible for him to let a woman get close to him. How impossible it still was. He cursed himself, thinking that he should tell her. Warn her. But the words wouldn’t come.
‘This is yours?’ she asked, awe evident in her tone. From any other woman, he’d find it jarring, a leading question that instantly became calculating. But no matter how much he searched her voice, he couldn’t accredit Anna with that.
‘Yes,’ he bit out gruffly into the night as he escorted her from the car.
He entered the foyer, pulling out the key card for the lift access to the penthouse apartment, feeling rather than seeing Anna follow on his heels. Mirrors lined the lift, rose-gold lighting turning Anna’s skin an even more delectable shade. Standing so close, he could smell her perfume in the air, warmed by her body. His hands itched inexplicably, desperate to reach out. As if she sensed that need somehow, she leaned ever so slightly towards him and for a moment he fought against the desire to step back, to create some kind of distance...the distance that was with them before he’d taunted her on their wedding night. Before he’d laid a challenge, a demand, at her feet.
He should have let her have her paper marriage, because ever since that moment, his brain had seemed to stop functioning and instead he was immersed in feelings, wants and needs he’d been able to prevent for years.
The doors to the lift opened up directly onto the foyer of the apartment.
Dimitri didn’t know what he’d expected. Owing to his brother’s use of it, he’d somehow imagined the walls to be painted black...evidence of drugs and prostitution perhaps—the things that he had bought with other people’s money. Perhaps broken TVs and plates from one of Manos’s legendary tantrums.
Anna swept past him, deeper into the apartment.
‘This is lovely,’ she said, looking around the open-plan kitchen and living room. And it was. It didn’t have any incredible floor-to-ceiling windows wrapping around the apartment, but the balcony leading from the master suite could be seen through the windows of the living room.
But, despite the incredible view, it wasn’t enough. It didn’t feel open enough. The walls were beginning to press down on him, as if his whole being was shaken with the need for air, for the open sky. Memories of his time in the care system, of the small, bunk-bed unit in the prison, each thought scratched against him like barbs, drawing thin lines of blood invisible to the eye.
He needed a drink. He needed his bed. His bed, alone. Not with her. Not with the wife whose very presence was taunting him—the woman whose image he had clung to as if his sanity depended on it as he had lain in prison listening to the sounds of the other prisoners, hundreds of men all breathing the same air. He needed to stop all these chaotic thoughts.
He didn’t realise that he’d been pacing the room until he felt Anna’s gentle hand on his forearm, stop
ping him almost midstride.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, concern easy to read in her eyes.
‘Go to bed, Anna,’ he ordered, hating that his own words sounded so harsh.
‘No,’ she said, cocking her head to one side as she looked at him, as if she was trying to understand a puzzle.
‘I need you to leave.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
* * *
The growl that emerged from lips thinned by anger and something else Anna couldn’t quite identify should have been chilling, but instead it fired her own determination to understand her husband. She could see the pain, the fury emanating from him. So, instead of turning and fleeing, she stepped towards Dimitri’s potent frame, relished the powerful vibrations coming off him in waves, allowed them to fill her, to imbibe her with that same sense of energy and power.
‘What is it?’ she demanded.
The indecision in his eyes tore at her heart. If he couldn’t trust her, then what would that mean for their marriage? Because that was what she had begun to think of it as. Not just some blackmail scheme to access his daughter...but a partnership. But if she couldn’t get Dimitri to see that, she didn’t know how much longer they’d be able to go on.
‘It’s... Ever since...’
Anna was shocked. She’d never seen her husband speechless before, grasping for words. Even in his fury he was eloquent and impossible.
‘It’s okay,’ she assured him, closing the distance between them, placing her hand on his arm—the muscles beneath her palm locked tight.
‘It’s not okay. None of it’s okay, Anna.’ He spun out of her hold and left her standing in the living room. But she wasn’t going to let him get away that easily. She followed him through the side door—ignoring the palatial master suite—and out onto the balcony, where Dimitri was now standing, fingers gripping the balustrade, the white of his knuckles clashing with the stone.
‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’ he demanded.
‘No.’
Dimitri turned to see her standing, strands of her dark hair caught on the gentle breeze, proud, immovable, determined. She had changed. It was as if after their wedding night she had taken something within her, inside her, keeping her strong, making her fearless. Or perhaps she had always been that way, and he had only just seen it now.
If he were any kind of man he would match her strength, and that was enough of a thought to loosen the words that had clogged his throat in the living room, that had stuttered to a stop before escaping.
‘I don’t like being in enclosed spaces. It’s too much like being in prison.’ He looked at Anna, this woman who wanted more from him, demanded more from him...but just how much he was willing to give he wasn’t sure any more. ‘White-collar crime. That’s what they call it in America.’
‘Why did you go to prison there and not in Greece?’
‘The clients Manos chose to steal from were American, and he did it through the American branch. He believed that the Greeks had lost too much already. It was, apparently, the only altruistic thought he’d ever had—but don’t for one second take him as a Robin Hood figure. He couldn’t have been more of a cliché if he’d tried, using the money to fund his drug addiction, prostitution, a lifestyle even more lavish than this,’ he said, gesturing to his stunning apartment.
He was surprised when Anna came to stand beside him, desperate to cling to the warmth of her body heat, allowing it to warm him as his words, memories, turned him cold.
‘You were in prison for fourteen months,’ she said, more of a prompt than a query.
‘Between being released on bail and the court case, I spent a total of four hundred and twenty-seven days in prison.’
‘But you were innocent.’ Her outrage was a pale echo of the one he had nursed for what felt like years now.
‘Yes, but so was every single man in there.’ Her frown drew a grim smile from his lips. ‘It’s what they all said.’
‘But for you it was true.’
‘I remember the first time the lead investigator’s questions changed. They had enough evidence to convict me, but I had two very good witnesses for one occasion when it was simply impossible for me to have taken the money.’ An unspoken question rang loud out into the open air. ‘No, Anna, not bedfellows. Antonio and Danyl. Even the FBI couldn’t argue with the Sheikh of Ter’harn.’
‘So why didn’t they let you go?’ Anna demanded.
‘They needed time; they would need me to follow the court case through, until they had enough proof to bring down the real perpetrator. The Americans take financial crime very seriously and they didn’t want to risk him escaping their justice again.’
Anna took all this in with wide-eyed shock. If he hadn’t experienced the whole sorry mess himself, he could almost have felt sorry for her.
‘What did you do, while you were in there?’
At first nothing came to his mind, a blank wall protecting him from that time. Initially he’d thought his innocence would protect him. Not from the other prisoners, but from his own mind. ‘Not much, is the answer to that question. I read.’ He shrugged as if it were nothing, as if he hadn’t spent hours, days, climbing the walls...nursing a secret fear that he’d never get out, that the FBI had lied to him. That he’d spend the rest of his days there. ‘It’s funny what your mind will do to you when you have no control over your day, your time. I spent time in the gym, trying to work off some of the energy that I suddenly had. And when I couldn’t escape my body, I escaped into my mind. I... I thought about you,’ he finally admitted. Hours and hours, losing himself in that night they’d had together. Holding the memory of her as a beacon against the darkness that had sometimes seemed to overwhelm him.
‘What did you think about me?’ Anna was almost too scared to ask.
‘I could show you if you want,’ he taunted, the gleam turning his eyes darker than burned caramel. But she refused to let him distract her.
‘Later perhaps,’ she replied, softening the rejection with a smile. She knew there was more. It wasn’t just that this proud, powerful man had been caged like an animal. She sensed, somehow, that it wasn’t the imprisonment that had really hurt. She needed to go deeper, poke deeper; he needed her to.
‘And when you got out?’
The taunt dropped from his eyes, his gaze once again out to the silent night sky, whilst inside a storm raged within him.
‘Everything was both the same and different. I had initially fooled myself into thinking that it had been some high-level executive stealing from the company. My father had promised that he would provide the FBI with all the help they needed, and when the FBI first came to tell me they had identified the criminal I was relieved. I was actually fool enough to think that my father and brother had saved me. That all the time during my childhood, when I felt on the outside looking in, when I felt...when I was made to feel like an imposition, like an imposter...it all disappeared. For just a moment, I felt that I had family and that they had put aside their feelings and somehow found proof that had saved me from imprisonment. I felt love for them, the tendrils of connection... And when the FBI revealed that it was Manos I was struck dumb.’ It was as if an axe had come down on the roots of his foundations.
Even though Anna had known the outcome, that it had been Manos’s betrayal that had put him in prison, she felt the echo of his first moment of shock cut through her like a knife.
‘I had been betrayed by a man who shared my blood. Not just betrayed, for that implies some kind of implicit wrongdoing on my part. He actively laid paperwork that set me up.’
She could see the pain of that hurt, she knew that pain, had borne it every day with her mother. But Dimitri’s actions, although poorly motivated, had enabled her mother to find the help she so very much needed. And now Anna wondered if she could help Dimitri heal some of that pain, those hurts...tha
t betrayal.
‘Ma’s drinking...it was hard. Each time she would promise to stop, and I would go through the stages of grief, denial, anger. Each time it was harder and harder to forgive, because each time it felt like a greater betrayal. Each time it was a betrayal. But it seems that the rehab centre is working for her. She’ll be coming out soon and she’s really trying this time. And I want to thank you for that. I wouldn’t have been able to provide her with that kind of help.’
He was watching her, wary. She had to tread lightly and feared that, even if she did, he could see what she was coming around to. He was like a panther, sleek, powerful, ready for fight or flight.
‘And that’s why this time it’s important for me to be able to forgive. Her drinking is a disease. It’s not something she can help; it’s not a choice.’
He turned away from her, back to the skyline of Kavala.
‘Manos had a choice. It wasn’t a disease. He chose to steal money, chose to set me up.’
Pressing down the hurt she’d felt as he turned away from her, she once more placed a hand on his arm. ‘I could imagine that your brother might have felt inadequate next to you. Clearly your childhood with your father was difficult...but is it the same now?’
Dimitri frowned. ‘He’s been...different, recently,’ he reluctantly acknowledged.
‘Relationships aren’t static things, always staying one particular way. If there is hope for you and your father, could there be hope for you and Manos? I’m not saying that Manos is nice or even worth your sympathy—not at all. But sometimes when someone acts unnecessarily horribly towards another person, it’s not about that other person, but about them. Which means that he might be at least worth your understanding.’
Anna’s heart was in her mouth. She hoped, so much, that her words were getting through to him. Because he carried too much. He held too much within him, bottled up. It needed to be released if they were ever to have a chance.
