Kitabı oku: «Mediterranean Mavericks: Greeks», sayfa 16
But no, the past was done. She had to look forward to the future.
Collecting herself, Leah looked up at him. “Tell me what I have to do.”
He studied her for the longest time. Each falling second twisted her gut. “Live with me for three months and prove that I can trust you.”
“No.” The table rattled with the force of her movement.
“This is the only way I will even consider it.”
“What do you expect me to do these three months?”
“Convince me that you’re serious about this fashion design career, that you won’t drain your inheritance on some trumped-up business.”
“The vote of confidence in your tone is really inspiring.”
That hardness in his eyes didn’t budge. “I’m giving you a real choice. If you fail, our marriage stands. You’ll be my wife in every sense for as long as one of us is alive.”
A violent tremble started at the base of her spine and spread upward and outward. The happy voices around her buzzed as if they were noise feedback. And in that space between them, a charge built up winding and changing with every breath they took.
Leah struggled against it, rationalized against it. He met his lover every week. He could not be attracted to her. Nor she to him.
This charge was antagonism that had gone unaddressed for so many years, hatred and resentment and their struggle against this very fate that was spilling over into something else. Maybe it would be true if she believed it enough, she thought desperately.
Because thinking of Stavros in this way—when even her juvenile crush on him had always left her feeling inadequate, was the last thing she needed in life.
Through sheer will, she forced herself to break his gaze, to focus on the fact that he was giving her a real chance. That Giannis would be far removed from their deal was positive.
“If I do prove that I’m everything that is virtuous and sweet and biddable and completely without personality?” His scowl deepened and since needling Stavros was the only thing she had control over in the sinking confusion of her world, she continued, “I’m just a little bit worried that you might not want to give me up then.”
His laughter clanged in the open café. It was a sound Leah had so rarely heard that she stared at him, her breath caught somewhere in her throat.
That lean chest rumbled as if he couldn’t contain it. From the long column of his throat to the sharp grooves in his sliced cheeks…he was gorgeous to behold.
It seemed the café froze around them to take in the sight.
A woman at the next table stilled with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth, her gaze eating him up. Still laughing, he pushed back the thick lock of jet-black hair that fell onto his forehead.
And the solid gold band on his finger glinted in the streetlight.
The twinkle of the metal struck Leah in the chest as if it were an arrow.
The wedding band… He was wearing his wedding band?
The ring she had slipped onto his finger while tears had pooled in her eyes. The ring that had bound her to him in the holiest of bonds and yet was nothing but a shackle…
Why did he wear the damned ring? Had he worn it that day aboard Dmitri’s yacht?
Had he worn it over the past five years?
Anxiety rippled over her, like a flurry of ants had skittered over her skin.
Just like her, the woman’s gaze also fell on the ring and then shifted to encompass the both of them. Leah felt her curiosity like a prickle, could see her trying to calculate where Leah fit into Stavros’s life.
Nowhere, Leah reminded herself. That he wore that ring was probably nothing but a reminder of his duty to Giannis.
Did he keep it on when he made love to the regal Helene? What would it be like to be the woman he respected, he adored, the woman he promised his utter devotion to? Would his passion run just as deep as his sense of duty?
“Even in the most unlikely chance that I find you that irresistible…” Utter mockery resonated in every word, crashing her down. “I will sign the divorce papers, release your inheritance. You’ll be free.”
Three months with Stavros…
“The freedom to live my life as I want is my basic right. I shouldn’t have to prove anything for it nor should I have to threaten…nor do I have to do despicable things.”
“So you’re not completely without conscience?”
She refused to answer that when he was the one who had pushed her to it. “You’re not the lord of my life.”
“Apparently, I am. And you lost all rights to your own life when you threatened it by living so recklessly.” His very stillness as his gaze burned with frustration was disconcerting. “Theos, Leah…Calista died and Giannis almost did because of the heart attack you gave him. How can you sit there and defend yourself?”
“I can defend myself because…” Clutching the metal edge of the table, Leah breathed deeply. His accusation was unfair, so wrong, and yet, the guilt it brought was no less suffocating.
And to dig into the past, to tell him the truth would mean exposing herself to a man who tolerated no weakness, knew no fears.
Would he laugh at her as he had done just now or pity her?
So she gave in. “Fine. I’ll do as you demand and earn that right back.”
Silence met her acceptance.
He hadn’t expected her to give in so quickly. Did he think it was an admission of guilt?
His arrogance that he knew everyone and the best for everyone had riled her from day one. Not once had he tried to figure out what or how she had felt. He’d only made assumptions, and then ordered her around.
He dropped some bills on the table, and extended his hand for her. “Let’s pick up what you need for a few days. The movers will bring the rest of your belongings later.”
Panic ran free in her gut as Leah shook her head. “No. I…I can’t just pack up everything I need in ten minutes. I need a few days.”
She couldn’t just move in with him in a matter of hours. She needed to get used to the idea first. Needed to get her head screwed on right.
He checked the glinting Rolex on his wrist and then looked back at her. “I’ll have someone come by to give us a hand. In the meantime, we can get started.”
“You’re actually, physically going to help me pack?”
“Is that a problem?”
“Yes, of course it is,” she sputtered, refusing his outstretched hand. “I don’t want you in my…I just… The flat is a mess, and you’ll instantly judge me and tell me I shouldn’t be allowed to live by myself or some such nonsense.”
The hateful man had the gall to smile at her. To actually smile, showing his perfectly even teeth and the dimple in one cheek that should have made him look effeminate yet only added to that austere masculinity.
“What if I tell you that housekeeping is not a criterion I’ll count?”
Desperation coated her throat. “I…I’m not comfortable with others touching my personal stuff.”
“Neither am I about welcoming you to my estate…” With his hand at her elbow, he made it imperative for her to stand up. “I won’t touch anything. You can pack and I’ll supervise.”
“You’ll lord it over me, you mean?” she said, using sarcasm to hide the trembling beneath.
In all the years she had known him, he had, in turns, aggravated her, captivated her and in the end, had ended up ruling over her life. And that was when there was no direct relationship between them.
How was she supposed to survive through three months of living with him?
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE HAD BEEN lying blatantly, of course.
Stavros didn’t know what shocked him more. The fact that she would tell such a white lie about something so trivial or the reality of her lifeless, joyless flat.
It was as if she had intentionally designed herself a sterile prison cell, had punished herself.
Everything inside him recoiled that she had lived like this for five years. Why? Why live as though she was punishing herself when she had argued with him so furiously that she wanted it to end?
Had Calista’s death scared her so much? Had it really changed her?
There was not a single thing out of place in the living room, or the small kitchen, or in the glimpse he had caught of her bedroom. She had everything she required.
The cupboards were full of silverware; a plasma television adorned the wall in the living room, yet was coated with five layers of dust.
There were no decorative items, no knickknacks. Just the bare essentials wherever he looked. The walls were a pristine white exactly as he had remembered from five years ago, when he had inspected the building and the flat, a week after they had married.
It screamed of loneliness, detachment.
Leah was a firestorm and it seemed only a ghost of that girl lived here.
The first year and a few months into the second after she had come to live here, he had had things delivered to her. Boxes of clothes and shoes, handbags and other accessories Helene had told him a young woman would require. He had even sent her things that had once belonged to her mother, found when he and Dmitri had gone through Giannis’s old estate after his heart attack…
But she had sent every box back, stubbornly refusing to accept any of it, and so he had stopped trying. Even the box with her mother’s things.
He had, conveniently, shrugged off his duty toward her. To the point of ignoring her very existence.
His gut twisting into a tight, unforgiving knot, he followed her into her bedroom. There was a nightstand next to the bed. A tissue box, some pencils and loose paper, and a tiny photograph of her father, he assumed from the same brown eyes, were on it.
Stretching on her toes, she pulled a bag out of her closet that was already half full. Turned around and stilled as he stayed at the entrance.
“I have someone bringing up boxes. Not that it seems you need any.”
“The work room has lots of stuff I need.”
He nodded and waited, his thoughts in an unprecedented jumble.
“I don’t have to stay in your house for this…this test of yours, Stavros. I could just continue here.”
He prowled into the small room, feeling on edge. He was angry at himself, he realized slowly. And he was angry at her. It was irrational, and yet he couldn’t loosen its grip over him.
“Why not?” The taunt in his words shamed him.
The brown of her eyes transforming into a dazzling color, she glared at him. Her pulse at the neck fluttered belying the anger in her eyes. “Because I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“You can’t stand me, for sins I know and some I don’t. And I…you’re arrogant, you’re a hypocrite and I…” she said with that standard animosity she seemed to reserve especially for him. Yet he heard the quiver beneath those words.
She was trying so hard to hide her awareness of him. So hard to fight it.
The Leah that he knew, that he thought he had known, had never fought anything she felt. Gave in to every juvenile urge, every self-serving impulse until she crashed and burned.
And had dragged Calista down with her.
This effort now…it sparked a curious fire in him just as much as the fluttering pulse at her neck did.
He came to her bed and leaned against it, blocking her. “So that you could continue to live in this hole like some damned martyr?”
A silk skirt in hand, she turned that gaze to him again. “It is what you chose for me.”
“I never meant for you to live like a prisoner. I sent you everything you needed.”
“To do what with?” Throwing the skirt and a couple more things into the bag, she zipped it up vehemently. “I have no friends, Stavros. No family…”
“You rejected the one you have for years. You still do,” he couldn’t help but point out, a gnawing frustration in his gut.
She didn’t even flinch as she continued. “Even the staff at the fashion house, people I have been working with for five years, they treat me with this—” he saw her swallow and a wave of tenderness, shocking and acute, rose inside him “—nauseating combination of dislike and affected regard.
“I don’t know if they think my designs are really good or if they are just saying that because I’m Leah Sporades, the wife of the textile magnate of Greece, a shame he hides from the world.
“You married me even though you despised the sight of me. You…you kissed me in front of the media that day for the express purpose of warning away my friends, the entire world. You might as well have branded me like they do livestock.”
“Leah—”
“No, Stavros…I was nineteen. I lost the one friend I had, Giannis had just had a heart attack…”
“Whom you still refuse to see,” he cut in.
Do not give up on my Leah, Stavros. Please…she is very fragile…
Fragile was the last thing he had ever thought of Leah…She had barely ever sat down for five minutes with him, yet even surrounded by tubes and equipment, she’d been all Giannis could think about.
Every inch of her slender frame vibrating with anger and pain, she clutched the lapels of his shirt. “…and in the next two days, you took my entire world away from me. You locked me up here and promptly forgot about me.
“Did you ever feel even an ounce of shame that you coerced a nineteen-year-old into marriage?”
Stavros felt her words dig into him like the serrated edge of a blade, drawing blood.
For five years, he had ignored her very existence, had let her live like this, had informed Giannis again and again that Leah was well…
How had he committed such an unforgivable mistake?
“Answer me.”
“No, I don’t regret it. I would have done anything to save you from that drug-induced-drink-all-night-reckless-party life.”
No denial rushed out of her this time. Instead, she closed her eyes and bent her head to his chest. The raw intimacy of the gesture flayed him, reaching a part he didn’t know he possessed.
Her shoulders pushing at his chest, the scent of her coating the air he breathed, her lithe form was so tempting. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, he wanted to bury his mouth in… Feeling like an iron anvil was sitting on his chest, he clasped her wrists to push her away.
Instead, the pad of his thumb moved over the plump vein of its own will.
Her breaths came in a slow rasp until, suddenly, she looked up. His lungs burned for air as her fingers laced around his, as a blunt nail raked the center of his palm, her molten brown gaze clung to his lips.
Something so desperate and wanting flashed in her gaze that Stavros dropped her hand.
It was so unlike Leah that a shiver raked down his spine.
Jerking away from him, she drew a deep breath. “Deal with the consequences of what you did then,” she said, moving her hand over the room. “Alleviating your guilt about this…it’s not my responsibility.”
It was the most adult thing she had ever said to him. And just like that, his world tilted an infinitesimal inch.
A world in which Leah was right and he was wrong. A world in which he had let himself be led by pain and resentment until he had neglected his duty…neglected the vow he had made to Giannis.
“You’re right. It’s not.”
“What?”
“I said you’re right,” he said willingly, the bright wonder on her face drawing it out of him. “What I did that day had consequences that I didn’t own completely.”
“Am I actually hearing this?” Her brows rose into her hair, her mouth opened in a long O. Mirth overflowed in those eyes, making her look absolutely stunning. “Boom!” The scent of her skin swirled around him, drugging him so insidiously that his blood became sluggish. “Did you hear that, Stavros? I think the sky just exploded…”
He stole another greedy look at her. And like a snake waiting to strike, the most incredible urge to press his thumb against the lushness of her lower lip, struck him.
He collected himself slowly and stepped out, wondering if this sinuous desire for her was his true penance.
“Show me your workroom,” he said, over his shoulder.
Her workroom knocked the breath out of Stavros.
It was as though a veil, the veil that separated Leah from the rest of them, had been lifted. A tentative smile on her face, she walked around touching things here and there in the chaotic room, eons different from the Leah who usually glared at him with such hatred.
Sunlight poured in streams into the high-ceilinged room, exposing the beams. Everywhere he looked, there was color, such a vivid contrast to the rest of the apartment that it took him a few moments to actually see it.
Two racks hung around the back, with evening gowns in different degrees of completion. An old sewing machine lay on a table in the other corner. One whole wall was covered with sketches made in pencil, illustrations, even cutouts from fashion magazines.
Swatches of fabric were pasted on another wall. Reams of it spilled over from a rickety shelf in the corner—satin and silk and cotton, pretty much every fabric he knew of in his ten years in the textile industry.
Something tightened in his chest.
“The retail buyer that you were talking about, what is she interested in?”
“I’m putting together a collection of evening wear for her—cocktail dresses, formal gowns, and the prize of the collection will be one bridal dress.”
“That’s quite a workload for one designer…”
“Slash seamstress,” she finished, fingering the sheer fabric of one unfinished dress.
“You’re going to…”
An utterly confident smile dawned on her face. “Actually cut and sew the dresses, yes. I custom-design and sew every dress myself and that’s what I would like my brand to be. When the buyer was talking about what she would like, what she liked about my previous designs…I could see the concept from start to finish.”
Color flushed her skin.
He walked around and touched the cut bodice in ivory silk. “Has she seen the flat sketches?”
She shook her head. And he saw the surprise in her eyes that he knew the term. “We have had two discussions around it.”
“Leah, it’s a huge risk to create an entire collection for one woman’s tastes at this stage.”
She tilted her jaw aggressively. “You gave me your word not ten minutes ago.” Her lithe frame vibrated with her growing panic.
“And I will stand by it. But I’m also a businessman and in case, you have forgotten, I run a group of textile factories that export all over the world. All I’m doing is pointing out the pitfalls, as I would do with any business I want to invest in. Creatives have a tendency to run the business into the ground with their half-realized dreams.”
“But I’m not creating exactly what she wants. More like my vision of what she has in mind.” She turned to him, a frown on her face. “Anything I tried to design with some freedom at the fashion house ends up changed for the brand of the house. I want this collection to be mine. And I need cash upfront for all the raw materials.”
He nodded. “I want an expense report including quotes from all the vendors you’ll be sourcing the raw material from. I want every penny accounted for.”
“I will send you my spreadsheet.”
“You have one already?”
“Surprised, aren’t you? I’ve been having problems with one vendor based in Brazil though. He keeps upping the price of the cotton I need from him.”
“I can help with that,” he said, the fire in her eyes stunning him. “Do you plan to hire another seamstress?”
“Not at this point.”
“But it’s too much work for just one person.”
“I don’t want anyone else involved in this…in my first collection.”
“Fine,” he said, noting that the stubborn streak of independence was still there. Also that whatever advice he gave now, she wouldn’t heed it. “You’ll have the money within the hour. I will be gone next week, and during that time—”
Walking back into the kitchen, she pulled a bottle of water from the fridge. “I’ll be watched by your housekeeper and your new security head. Poor Dmitri, along with his arm candies, will be reduced to babysitting duties. Although, I don’t mind him.”
“No?” The question left his mouth before he knew he had thought it.
“Dmitri?” An almost dazed kind of smile glimmered in her expression. And he cut the irrationally possessive thought her expression evoked before it could form fully. “Of course not. He was always kind, even when Calista…” Sudden tension dawned in her gaze and she looked away from him.
“When Calista what, Leah?”
She cleared her throat and started again but resolutely kept her gaze away from him. “This one time, we snuck into his room and stole a bottle of whiskey. Only he caught us…”
“Whiskey, Leah?”
“We were just goofing around, Stavros. We were seventeen.”
“My father was an alcoholic who stole from his own parents, sold our house just so that he could drink, and drove my mother away. Calista wasn’t supposed to even touch that stuff.”
Shock flared in her gaze, widening those beautiful eyes. Only then did he realize how much he had betrayed. “I had no idea, Stavros.”
“What did he do, Leah?”
“Oh, he told us we could drink the whiskey—” color stole into her cheeks and she wouldn’t meet his eyes “—as long as we were also going to join him for a threesome after.”
“Cristo! Of all the things to say to—”
As if expecting his reaction, Leah sighed. “We dropped the bottle where we stood and we ran, Stavros. Dmitri was used to…he knew how to deal with us.”
Unlike you, her unsaid accusation screamed.
He had a feeling Dmitri definitely understood Leah far better than he did. A mistake he had to rectify…
If Giannis had asked me… He pushed away the scenario provoked by Dmitri’s taunting remark from his head and focused his mind on practicalities.
“Leah…fashion design is extremely hard to break into. On a given day, there are tens, if not hundreds, of designers launching new labels. And I don’t know whether you actually have any talent for this.”
“I know that. All I’m asking is a chance to do it, to access the resources that I do have.”
“And when—” he checked himself as she threw that trademark glare at him “—if you fail in this venture?”
“Then it will be my failure. All mine. Just as the success would be. It will be something I have put my heart and joy into, something that doesn’t scare me.”
“I thought nothing scared you, Leah.”
She offered him a perfunctory smile, and Stavros realized how much he didn’t know about the girl he had thought his bitterest penance.
