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Because she wasn’t prepared for him in all his almost violent perfection. She never had been.
Because he was Theo and he was right there on her enormous desktop computer monitor after all these years, big and brooding and beautiful, bursting straight into her lonely little life with all that force and fire...
And he was still so very angry with her.
So deeply, encompassingly, seethingly angry, it felt like being plunged into a dark cloud without his having to say a single word. Though the words hurt, too—harsh and furious, each like a separate slap.
Looking at him was like a contact sport. It always had been. It was worse now, with all that fury making him seem to burn right there before her eyes.
Holly had heard it on the phone during their short and hostile calls regarding her deliberately outrageous credit card bills these past years—always spaced out according to his ever more busy schedule, one per quarter at most and never long enough for any kind of real discussion. But now she could see it, burning like a fierce heat in his eyes as dark as the Greek coffee he’d made for her back in the early days of their brief marriage, before she’d ruined everything.
She could see it stamped in the fascinating iron set of his harshly masculine jaw, could even feel it deep inside her own body, like a shiver. Like a seismic warning. As if she should count herself lucky indeed that they were separated by computer screens, the internet and some six thousand miles.
As if he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened if they were ever in the same room again, and Holly felt suspended in the thick, dark promises she could see in the furious heat he trained on her then, the glare of all that threat and power and fury, even after all this time.
What did you expect? that little voice inside of her that sounded a lot like her beloved father’s, God rest his soul, whispered then. He hates you. You made sure of that. That’s what happens when you leave.
She should know that better than most, after living through all those long, lonely years with her father after her mother’s defection when Holly had been a little girl. Her father wouldn’t have called how he’d mourned his wife’s betrayal hatred, of course. He’d have called it grief. Or holding a torch. But Holly had always felt it like a burning thing, changing their whole world. Charring what was left.
And now here she was, all these years later, staring at that same fire directed straight at her. In high-definition.
Theo lounged before her in a leather chair in a sleekly furnished office, his thick, dark hair looking disheveled and too long, the way it always had. He was more beautiful than she remembered him, and she remembered him as very nearly a god with all that lean, leashed power packed into his solid boxer’s form, as if he could have been a fighter had he been the son of a man with lower aspirations. He wore a crisp white shirt that strained to contain his corded, solid shoulders, that wonder of a chest and the tautly ridged abdomen she knew lay beneath. He looked powerful and furious and his own, special brand of lethal, and Holly hated herself all over again.
For what she’d done. For what she’d claimed she’d done. For the great big mess that was her whirlwind, ill-conceived, overwhelming marriage to this man and that big old dark hole in the center of everything that she’d come to realize was pure and nauseating regret. Greasy and enveloping, and so thick she truly believed it might choke her one of these days.
Though it never did. Not quite.
Instead, worse, she had to live with it.
She wanted to reach forward, through the screen, and test the heat of his smooth olive skin against her palms again. She wanted to run her fingers through his thick, dark hair and play with that hint of curl that had always made her silly with desire. She wanted to taste that full and talented mouth of his again, salt and fire, longing and need.
But there was no easy road here. Holly knew that. There was no way back to Theo that wouldn’t rip open old scars and make ancient wounds bleed fresh. That wouldn’t hurt, and badly. She’d been so terrified of becoming like her father that she’d become her mother instead, and she couldn’t live with that any longer. She couldn’t. She had to try to do something about it, no matter what.
Holly had thought she’d accepted how hard this was going to be already—but that had been before she’d seen him again. Somehow, the years had dulled him in her memory. Dimmed him.
Seeing him again, even through a screen, was as blinding as the first time she’d laid eyes on him. In that tiny restaurant in Santorini where she’d been sipping an afternoon coffee, unaware that her entire life had been set to collide with his when he’d shouldered his way inside and claimed the table next to hers.
Like a comet, she’d thought then, even on a sun-drenched Greek island with nothing but dizzying blue and whitewashed walls on all sides and then this man in the middle of it all, like a dream come to startling and powerfully sexy life...
“Holly.”
His voice tore into her, dark and impatient and yet still, that little lilt to her name that made her whole body shimmer into instant, almost painful awareness. She was glad he couldn’t see the way she tensed in her seat in automatic reaction, her legs going tight as she dug her toes into the floor beneath her desk. Or that bright little light inside she knew was the most dangerous, most doomed, thing of all. Hope.
“I don’t have time for this today. And even if I did, I have nothing to say to you.” His hard mouth moved into some lethal approximation of a smile, and her curse was, it made him no less attractive to her. Quite the opposite. “Nothing polite, that is.”
It was so tempting to simply lose herself in him, or to let herself break down and start telling the truths she already knew he wouldn’t believe, not when she’d spent these long years trying so hard to force him to let her go by any means possible. She’d made him detest her, if not release her. She had to remember the game she needed to play here or she’d lose before she started.
So Holly smiled at him. Not the way she once had, when she hadn’t had the faintest shred of self-preservation in her body, when she hadn’t been able to help herself from falling into him and for him like the proverbial ton of bricks, her innocence indistinguishable from her stupidity, to her recollection. But the way she’d perfected in these past few lonely years, the smile that made it possible to play the role she’d created for herself out of the ashes of the marriage she’d burned to the ground with her lies. The role she’d thought would make it so simple for him to wash his hands of her, to discard her, to divorce her and free them both.
She’d been wrong about that, too. She’d finally, painfully, faced the fact that she’d been wrong about everything, and that she’d done nothing here but reenact her own painful history. But he wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. He would think it was nothing more than another game, and he’d made it clear he wouldn’t play them with her, hadn’t he? Perfectly, coldly clear.
Which meant she had no choice but to play one last game with him, this one with the highest stakes of all.
“Busy?” she asked, letting her drawl take on a life of its own, a Texan specialty. “Doing what, exactly? Still playing the crown prince in your daddy’s great big kingdom?”
Theo’s expression went from furious to something like thunderstruck, then back to a hardness that should have left her in tatters. Maybe it did. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t tell the difference any longer.
“I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy, but there was no mistaking the threat beneath it. “I didn’t realize it was time for our long-overdue conversation regarding each other’s character flaws. Are you certain you’re ready for that?”
“Blah blah blah,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving a hand dismissively, wishing she felt even a tiny bit that relaxed or casual. “Just call me a whore already, Theo. You’ve been dancing around it for almost four years now.”
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_c307e5d2-e2ab-51cd-b57c-da242470b593)
THEO’S DARK EYES blazed to a molten fury and it amazed Holly that he could still make her lose her breath, that easily. Even when he thought so little of her.
And she was such a fool—because a sane woman, Holly knew, having done what she’d done, having lied so extravagantly in order to escape this man the only way she’d thought she could, would not have looked at that flare of fury in his dark eyes and read it as some sliver of hope for the future she’d torpedoed herself.
Because fury wasn’t the same thing as indifference. Fury meant he still felt something for her, no matter how twisted and painful.
But then, Holly was aware that a sane woman wouldn’t have gone ahead and married the dark Greek lover who’d swept her up in a kind of sensual tornado that summer, either, stealing her innocence and her heart and her good sense along with it. So maybe sane wasn’t in the ballpark here.
Maybe she should stop pretending it had ever been a possibility where proximity to Theo was concerned.
“Let me guess,” he said, his voice controlled in a way that made her wonder exactly how he’d grown in all these years. Exactly how he’d changed, when the Theo she’d known had been as impetuous and wild as he’d been rich and pampered. She’d been completely out of her league with this man from the start. “You decided to purchase a jet. An island. A couture house and half of Paris to go with it. I don’t care, Holly. Your allowance is yours. Do what you want with it and leave me the hell alone.”
He moved in his chair, his hand reaching toward her, and she knew he was about to end the call. That there was nothing tender there in that gesture, despite what it looked like for a brief second—what she wanted it to look like, fool that she still was.
“I want to see you,” she said, before he could cut her off. Before she lost herself in these tiny little moments and the daydreams that went with them and completely forgot why she was doing this. Because she didn’t need him to tell her that he wouldn’t answer a call like this again. She knew it.
Theo shifted in his chair then, in a way that suggested he was preparing for a fight, those dark eyes seeming to laser into her. He seemed bigger, suddenly. Darker. “You’re seeing me right now. Witness the glory of technology. And my surpassing joy.”
“In person.”
He laughed, a harsh scrape of sound that lodged in places it shouldn’t. “No.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled again, even more icily, because this was how she had to play this. No matter how tired she was of it or how sick it made her. “That wasn’t a request. Did it sound like one?”
“It wouldn’t matter if it was a formal summons from God himself,” Theo remarked, almost idly, but she could see his expression and knew there wasn’t anything idle about this man any longer. Had she done that, too? “The answer is still no.”
“Theo.” She shook her head as if he disappointed her, hiding her clenched hands in her lap, out of sight. “There’s no reason we can’t pretend to be civilized. Some things require a face-to-face meeting whether you want to admit it or not. You don’t want to make me do this on a video call, do you?”
“It has been perfectly clear to me and to most of the world, I’d imagine, that I can’t make you do anything,” he replied in that lethally soft tone that sent spears of ice down the length of her spine and a hot curl of shame deep into her belly. “Certainly not behave as a wife should. You couldn’t even manage to remain faithful to me for six short months. What, pray, could I possibly make you do now?”
Holly didn’t flinch. How could she, when she’d told that lie to his face? Deliberately and with a full understanding of what would happen once she did? She was all too aware she’d brought this on herself.
“I want a divorce,” she said now. Simply and distinctly.
As if it were true.
“My answer is the same as it has ever been,” he replied in the same cool tone with all that rampaging fire beneath it. “You can’t have one. Is that the reason for all this theater today? You could have spared us both. In future, I suggest you do.”
“We don’t have much of a future left, is the thing,” she told him then, as his hand moved toward his screen again. Again, he stopped. When he only glared at her, she summoned that hard-edged smile again and aimed it at him as if this was all somehow amusing to her. As if she really was the woman she’d pretended to be these past four years. The woman, she knew, he fully believed she was. “I know that we’ve had fun these past few years—”
“Is that what they call it in Texas?” he asked, his voice even softer but no less vicious. “That is not the word I would choose for any of this.”
“—playing all these games, scoring points, all this tug-of-war nonsense.” She shrugged. “But all good things come to an end, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not giving you a divorce, Holly. I don’t care what argument you trot out. And, as I believe I’ve made perfectly clear with your generous monthly allowance and the life you live without any interference from me, I really don’t care what you do. Or who.”
“So you say,” she murmured.
But she didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe him. A harsh, predatory light flared in his eyes then, turning them volcanic with that edgy fury of his, making Holly’s heart jolt and then catch inside her chest. Once again, she chose to call that hope.
“The only thing I will not give you is your freedom.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it is the only thing I know you want, agapi mou,” he said, his voice harsh and cold, especially when he called her my love. Holly couldn’t let herself dwell on the way the endearment sounded now, when he didn’t mean it at all. Not when she was sure they could both remember too well how he’d sounded when he’d meant it with every last shred of his heart, his soul. Not now, while he could watch her reactions. “Aside from my money, of course.”
“Goodness,” she drawled, and put a theatric hand to her chest, because that was the best way to cover the sensation of it being ripped straight out from behind her ribs and then stamped on. She ought to be used to that by now, having done it herself the first time. “So possessive, Theo. Be still my heart. I’m tempted to believe you still have feelings for me.”
“I don’t.” His voice was a growl. “I told you this four years ago, and I meant it. Spend my money. Embarrass me. I don’t care. You can have anything you want except a divorce. That’s not negotiable. If I have to live with this marriage, with the unfortunate choices of our tattered past, so do you.”
“Except you’ve run out of time.” She shrugged when his glare intensified. “That’s Greek law, Theo.” She made a show of picking up a piece of paper on her desk and reading from it, though she didn’t have to read the words there. She knew them by heart. “Divorce is granted in cases of marital breakdown. And if the spouses have been separated for at least four years there is the presumption of that breakdown, regardless of whether or not you’d prefer to continue torturing me across whole decades.”
“We are not separated. You left.” His dark gaze licked over her, fire and fury, and what was wrong with her that she felt it echo within her—as if it was some kind of caress? “You can always return to me, if you are feeling unaccountably brave. Or foolish. I’ve told you this for years.”
Dared her, more like. Come back and face your sins, he’d told her years ago, a dark and terrible promise of retribution in his low voice. Who knows? Perhaps I am more merciful than I appear.
But they both knew better than that.
“The four years is the sticking point, I’m afraid.” Holly forced herself to hold that penetrating gaze of his, reminding herself that this was the easy part. That this would all be much, much harder if she got what she wanted and they did this face-to-face. If she’d been any good at dealing with this man in person, after all, if she’d been able to say what she felt instead of running away, none of this would have happened. “All I have to do is prove that we’ve been continuously apart for all that time, which we have and which has been exhaustively documented in at least three different tabloids, and then it won’t matter what else happened between us...”
“If you spend your days telling yourself fairy tales about how you were the victim in this, I certainly can’t stop you.” His voice was made of granite then, and it landed on her, hard. “But on the occasions that you speak to me of our marriage, and I pray they remain rare, let’s not hide in all the vague asides about ‘what else happened.’” He leaned closer to the screen, his beautiful face harder than before, as if it was carved from the same stone as that harsh voice he used. “You happened. You are a liar. You deceived me from the start and then, when that was not enough for you, you slept with another man and threw it in my face. Then you left me under cover of night rather than deal with what you did, and you’ve trotted about the world happily spending my money ever since. I won’t call you a whore, as I have some respect for the oldest profession in the world. At least it is an honest transaction. You are nothing like honest. You are far lower than any whore, Holly. And you offend me in every possible way.”
And she merely smiled back at him, pretending that wasn’t one mortal blow after another. Pretending she could block out the disgust in his voice, the contempt on his face. Telling herself this would all be worth it in the end, that there was no point defending herself until they were in the same room again. Until she could see if it was still the same—that brilliant, soaring comet. That wild joy that had nearly taken her out at the knees every time he’d looked at her, every time they’d touched. That beautiful thing that had terrified her so deeply and so profoundly she’d gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape it, fearing—knowing—it would swallow her whole.
“Noted,” she said calmly, amazed that she could sound so unmoved by what he’d said, and look it, too, in that tiny little box in the corner of her own screen that showed her cool expression. She was amazed she wasn’t shaking in reaction, more like, or falling to pieces—but she could do that later. When she was alone again, in this gray little prison she’d made for herself without him. When there was no one around to disbelieve everything she said, because there was never anyone around at all. “But you’re not understanding me.”
“I doubt I’ve ever understood you,” he growled at her. “Why should that change in the course of one call I knew better than to take?”
“I’m filing for divorce, Theo,” she told him evenly. “I will cite our estrangement as cause and I will further claim that you were the one who broke our vows.” She shrugged when he muttered something filthy in Greek. “I will be believed, of course. You were a famous playboy who’d slept with most of Europe. I was an inexperienced country girl on her first holiday abroad, completely out of my depth with you.”
He ran a hand over his face. “Clearly.”
She ignored his caustic tone. “The choice is yours. If you meet with me the way I’ve asked you to do, I’ll consider not taking a majority share of Tsoukatos Shipping in the divorce.”
Holly had thought he was angry before. But the look he turned on her then was like lightning, electric and hair-raising, and she was suddenly very glad she was safe in Dallas, thousands of miles away from him and all the things that look of his could do.
Not that distance made her safe. Nothing could. Not when Theo looked at her like that. Not when he thought such things of her. But at least distance could minimize the damage.
Or so she hoped. The way she felt at the moment, it could go either way.
“Fine,” he bit out after a long, simmering pause. It took everything Holly had to sit still, to keep her expression impassive, to keep up the sickening pretense. “You want to meet with me in person? I’ll subject myself to it, though I should warn you, you may find this reunion significantly less pleasant than you imagine.”
“Less pleasant than four years of insulting calls about credit card bills to remind me whose leash I’m on or today’s charming philosophical exploration of the meaning of the word whore?” she asked drily, her impassive demeanor cracking more than she’d intended. She could feel the way her own eyes filled with a furious heat. Nothing so simple as tears, but telling all the same. “I find that hard to believe.”
Something lit his gaze then, and she felt it like fingers down the length of her back, as if she’d unwittingly made herself his prey. Whatever works, she told herself resolutely. Either you’ll find a way back to him or you’ll finally be free to move on with your life, such as it is. It doesn’t matter how that happens, as long as one of them does.
But of course it mattered. Nothing else mattered at all.
“I’ll choose the venue,” he continued, that odd tension in him making him seem bigger again, and far more dangerous.
“If you feel like that makes you in charge of this, then by all means,” she began, deliberately patronizing him, purely because she knew it would get under his skin.
“Barcelona,” he said softly, cutting her off. And something of what she felt must have showed on her face then, as surely as if he’d kicked her in the stomach. Because he had. And she could see by the glint in his dark eyes and the harsh curve of his mouth that he knew it. That she wasn’t the only one who could play these nasty little games. “The Chatsfield Hotel in three days’ time. I believe you know it well.”
He knew she did. He’d taken her there four and a half years ago for the best month of their marriage. Of her entire life, before or since.
“You want to discuss our divorce in the same place we had our honeymoon?” she asked, stunned out of her usual careful iciness, too taken aback to guard her tone or her expression. And for a hectic moment, she didn’t care what he saw. Their weeks in Barcelona were the last, best memories she had of those long-ago days with him. Of the only real happiness they’d ever had, she’d often thought, and she’d held on to the silly idea he’d felt the same. “Theo...”
“Barcelona in three days’ time, Holly, or not at all,” he said with evident satisfaction, and then he finally ended the call with a single harsh sweep of his hand.
Leaving Holly to sit and stew in the mess she’d made.
Again.
* * *
Theo strode into his suite at The Chatsfield, Barcelona, behind the efficient porter, frowning down at his mobile as he swept through his endless stream of messages and email, only to come to a swift stop when he recognized where he was.
He knew this suite. He’d spent an entire month here, and more than he cared to remember of that time without stepping outside. He knew every goddamned inch of it.
The same soaring ceilings. The same view over the fashionable Passeig de Gràcia, the Spanish answer to the Champs-Élysées, with the gleaming Mediterranean Sea in the distance. The same delicately luxurious furnishings that made the whole space sparkle with the restrained elegance The Chatsfield was known for all over the world. The small hallway adorned with bold local art leading to what he knew would be a master suite dominated by a wide, suggestive bed and a private balcony he’d used every last millimeter of back when. Every single millimeter. The same open lounge area scattered here and there with the same delicate rose petals that he remembered quite distinctly from four and a half years ago.
It was like stepping back in time. And he could hardly categorize the wild thing that surged in him then, chaotic and maddening. He only knew it nearly took him down to his knees.
This is unforgivable, he thought—but then, this was clearly Holly and her handiwork. There wasn’t a single part of what she’d done to him in all these years that wasn’t unforgivable. Unforgivable is what she does.
At moments like this he thought it was who she was.
Just like your father, said a small voice inside of him. She doesn’t care how much she hurts you. She doesn’t care at all.
“Is this the honeymoon suite?” he asked the porter. More brusquely than he’d intended, he realized when the poor man jerked to a stop as if Theo had slapped him across the face. Theo’s hand tensed as if he really had.
“Yes, sir,” the porter said. The man launched into a recitation of the room’s many amenities and romantic flourishes, only to taper off into a strained silence when Theo merely stared back at him.
Theo eyed him for a moment, then turned his attention back to the room—and the low table before the arching windows that let the gleaming Barcelona lights inside, where a bottle of champagne chilled in a silver bucket. He didn’t have to go over and look at it to know at once that it would be the very same vintage as the one he’d had waiting for them years ago. The one he’d poured all over Holly and then drank from her soft skin. From between her breasts, from the tender, shallow poetry of her navel. From the sweet cream heat between her legs he’d still believed, then, was only his.
