Читать книгу Greek's Last Redemption - Caitlin Crews - Страница 10

CHAPTER ONE

THEO TSOUKATOS SCOWLED when his office door swung open despite the fact he’d given strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He expected his orders to be followed—and they usually were, because no one who worked for him enjoyed the consequences when they were not.

He was becoming more like his widely feared father by the day, he thought grimly. Which he could tolerate as long as that was only true here, in the business sphere. God help him if he ever acted like his father in his personal life.

Never, he vowed, as he had since he was a child. I will never let that happen.

“I trust the building is on fire?” he asked his secretary icily as she marched inside, because it could only be a crisis that brought her in here against his instructions, surely. He glowered at her. “Or is about to be?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” she retorted, appearing utterly unperturbed by his aggressive tone. Mrs. Papadopoulos, who reminded him of his hatchet-faced, steely-haired and pursed-mouthed aunt and acted about as enamored of Theo as Aunt Despina always had been, was meant to keep him from distractions rather than cause them. “But it’s early yet.”

Theo sighed his impatience. He was in the middle of compiling the rest of his notes on fuel efficiency and trim optimization strategies for the meeting that he’d be running in his father’s stead today, now that wily old Demetrious Tsoukatos was focusing more on his mounting medical issues than on the family business. He glanced out the wall of windows surrounding him and saw all of Athens arrayed at his feet, the sprawling commotion and hectic madness of the greatest city in Greece serving as a reminder, the way it always did.

That all that rose must fall—before rising again, stronger than before.

That was the unspoken Tsoukatos family creed. It was the story of Theo’s own life, certainly. It was built into every inch of the proud Tsoukatos tower, where Theo now sat. Just like the steel girders themselves that made the building an imposing physical testament to his shipping magnate father’s searing vision and ruthless success in the face of all obstacles, from sworn enemies to the faltering economy.

These days, the tower stood as a marker of Theo’s own growing reputation as a fearless risk taker and out-of-the-box thinker in a business cluttered by those who played it safe straight into bankruptcy. That wasn’t going to happen to the Tsoukatos fleet. Theo might have acted the spoiled heir apparent for most of his twenties, but in the past four years he’d dedicated himself to proving he was every bit as formidable and intimidating as the old man himself.

It turned out he was good at this. As if ruthless power really did run in his veins the way his father had always assured him it did. Or should.

And he’d decided he could emulate his father here, in the boardroom, where that kind of ruthlessness was a positive thing. Theo’s own personal life might have been a mess, such as it was, but not for the same reasons Demetrious’s had been. I may not be happy, he often told himself fiercely, but at least I’m not a liar, a cheater or a hypocrite.

He was surrounded by too many who couldn’t say the same.

Theo aimed his most ferocious glare at Mrs. Papadopoulos as she came to a sharp stop on the other side of his wide desk. She eyed him right back with her special brand of mild judgment and automatic condemnation, which, perversely, he quite enjoyed. The woman was his own, personal version of the proverbial hair shirt and Theo was nothing if not the kind of man who liked to keep his sins as close as possible to his skin.

“It’s your wife,” Mrs. Papadopoulos said crisply, speaking of his sins, and Theo stopped enjoying himself. With a great thud that he was momentarily worried was actually audible.

His wife.

Holly.

Theo was so used to that flare of dark rage, that thunderbolt of pure fury, that he told himself he hardly noticed it any longer as it careened through him, setting off a string of secondary explosions. It had been almost four whole years since he’d laid eyes on his errant wife. Almost four years since they’d been in the same room, or even in the same country. Four years since he’d last touched her, tasted her, lost himself in her—which he never would again, he reminded himself coldly, as it was, not coincidentally, also four years since he’d discovered the truth about her. And the mockery she’d made of their marriage.

You did not discover the truth about her, he reminded himself darkly. Pointedly. She presented her confession to you, as if on a silver platter...

But God help him, he couldn’t let himself go down that dark path. Not today. Not here, in his place of business, where he had become renowned for his icy calm under any and all forms of pressure. Not anymore.

Not ever again.

He should have been over this by now, Theo thought then, the way he always did. But instead he had to order himself to breathe, to unclench his fists, to relax the instant, furious tautness of his body against his chair and pretend he was as unmoved as he should have been after all this time.

“If it is my wife, then I am not only busy, I am uninterested,” he said, making no attempt to hide the crack of temper in his voice. “You know better than to bother me with such drivel, Mrs. Papadopoulos. My wife is to be diverted to voice mail or email, which I check as little as possible and certainly no more than once every—”

“Sir.” And Theo didn’t know what surprised him more. That the woman dared interrupt him or that, when he stared at her in astonishment, the rigid yet normally obedient Mrs. Papadopoulos stood her ground. “She insists that it’s an emergency.”

The last thing in the world Theo wanted to think about, today or ever, was Holly. His downfall—the more uncharitable might call her his comeuppance, and in his darker moments he found he agreed, because he’d married a liar just like the one he’d sworn he’d never become—in one smooth and deceitful and much too pretty female form.

Because the sad truth was that he already spent a significant portion of every day not thinking about her. His predawn hours in his private gym, beating his endless fury into the hanging bag or the occasional sparring partner. The brutal miles he logged on his treadmill. Not thinking about her betrayal of him with, she’d told him so distinctly, some tourist whose name she hadn’t bothered to catch. Not imagining those same sickening scenes over and over again, all etched into his brain as if he’d actually witnessed her betrayal himself. Not wondering how he could have fallen so completely for the lies she’d told him when he should have known better, when he should have been far too jaded to be taken in by her artless little act...

For four years he’d thrown himself into the family business with the express purpose of thinking of something other than the lying, cheating creature he’d married so foolishly and the many ways she’d ruined him. She’d made him a laughingstock. That smarted, but she’d also ripped out the heart he’d never been aware he’d possessed before her. That was infinitely worse. And more than that, she’d tricked him into reenacting his own parents’ doomed marriage, which he couldn’t find it in him to forgive. For four years he’d focused all of the feelings he refused to call by name into something tangible: the comprehensive decimation of all Tsoukatos business rivals and the unquestionable success of the company against what should have been insurmountable odds in these troubled times.

No one had called Theo Tsoukatos, once a proud member of Europe’s entitled dilettante contingent with the notches on his bedpost to prove it, a spoiled and pampered playboy in a very long while. No one would dare.

But Holly was his living, breathing, walking and talking failure. The crowning achievement of his wasted youth. The embodiment of the pointless creature he’d been back then, a grave disappointment to his father and an epic, permanent stain upon his family name.

He did not want to think about how hard he’d fallen for the dizzy little blonde thing from the United States who’d pretended to adore him at first sight, how desperately he’d pursued her after their initial week together on the island or how deeply and callously she’d betrayed him a mere six months after the wedding that he’d been blind enough to consider romantic not despite its speed but because of it.

He especially did not want to recollect the unpleasant truth: that he had no one to blame for any of these things but himself.

Everyone had warned him, after all. At length. Everyone save Theo had seen supposedly gauche and charmingly naive Holly Holt, touring Europe all on her own following her father’s death, for exactly who and what she was. One more American gold digger with Texas dirt on her feet and her calculating blue eyes set on the biggest and best catch she could find.

On Santorini that summer, that catch had been Theo.

“You are my successor and the heir to the Tsoukatos fortune,” his father had told him sternly, over and over again and to no avail. “This girl is nobody. This can never be anything more than a holiday romance, Theo. You must understand this.”

His father and his brother, Brax, had lined up to tell him not to be a fool, but Theo had hardly been inclined to take advice from the man who’d destroyed Theo’s own mother with his infidelities, much less a younger brother he’d thought of then as little more than a child. And then, when it was clear that he was determined to prove himself a colossal fool, anyway, they’d begged him to at the very least take the necessary steps to protect his fortune, his future, the company, on the off chance that he was thinking with his groin instead of his head... And Theo had ignored them all, the way he always had done throughout his hedonistic twenties, because he’d cared about nothing and no one but himself.

Nothing but himself and one curvy little blonde girl with deep blue eyes to rival the Aegean Sea itself. She’d had the widest, sweetest, most open smile he’d ever seen, and he’d lost himself in it. In her. And there had been nothing, it turned out, but a deceitful heart beneath all that sweet shine.

This, then, was his reward for his impetuousness. His penance. This humiliation of a marriage that he held on to only because he refused to give her the satisfaction of asking for a divorce, despite what she’d done to him and then thrown in his face so unapologetically. He refused to let her see how she’d destroyed him over the course of that long, rainy season on Santorini years ago.

It had been nearly four and a half years since they’d married in far too much haste in the height of the dry Greek summer, almost four whole years since they’d been within the same walls, and Theo thought he was still coldly furious enough to stretch it out to ten, if necessary. He might not want her any longer, he might have vowed to himself that he would fling himself from the Santorini cliffs before he’d let her work her evil magic on him again, but he’d be damned if he’d let her have her freedom from him unless she begged for it.

Preferably at length and on her knees. He was a simple man. An eye for an eye, and a humiliation for a humiliation.

“My wife has never had a minor upset she couldn’t fluff up into a full-scale catastrophe,” Theo bit out now, venting his spleen on his rigid secretary and not much minding if it made her bristle visibly. He paid her a not-inconsiderable fortune to tolerate him and his many black moods, after all. It was a great pity he hadn’t taken the same amount of precautions when choosing his first wife. “Her version of an emergency generally involves her credit limit.”

“I think this is different, Mr. Tsoukatos.”

Theo was losing what little patience he had left—a virtue for which he was not widely renowned to begin with. This was already far more focused and specific attention paid to Holly and thus his marriage than he liked to permit himself outside the stark truths he otherwise faced only in his gym. He could see emails piling up in his inbox out of the corner of his eye, he still had to sketch out the rest of his presentation and the last thing in the world he had time for was his own, personal albatross and whatever her latest scheme was.

“Why?” he asked, aware that his voice was unduly hostile when Mrs. Papadopoulos stiffened further, a feat which should have been anatomically impossible. He shrugged. “Because she said so? She always does.”

“Because she’s videoed in.” Mrs. Papadopoulos placed the tablet Theo hadn’t noticed she was carrying down in the center of his desk. “Here you are.” She stepped back, and her voice was as crisp as the look in her eyes was steely. “Sir.”

Theo blinked, then eyed the tablet—and the frozen image there—as if Holly herself might leap forth from the screen and stick another knife deep into his back. Deeper this time, no doubt. Perhaps a killing blow at last. It took him a moment to remember that Mrs. Papadopoulos still stood there, exuding her typical brusque disapproval, and when he did he waved her off before he betrayed himself any further.

A video call was certainly different. That was the truth.

And when it came to Holly, “different” was never good. “Different” always came with a heavy price and Theo always ended up paying it.

She was his costliest mistake, by far. Of all the many follies of his overindulged and deeply entitled youth, Holly Holt from somewhere as improbable to him as Texas ranch country, with the wide smile and the big laugh that had broken him wide-open and left him nothing but a goddamned fool in a thousand discarded pieces, was the one he regretted most.

And daily, whether he permitted himself to think about her directly or not.

“Control yourself,” he snapped out loud, glaring down at the tablet on the polished expanse of his desk before him.

He moved to end the call without taking it, the way he knew he should, but her image taunted him. Even frozen into place and slightly pixelated, she was like a hammer to the side of his head. He could feel her everywhere, her claws still in him, deep.

Hating himself for his weakness didn’t do a damned thing to change it.

And she wasn’t the raw, unformed creature she’d been when he’d met her, all sun-kissed limbs and that unsophisticated beauty that he’d found so intoxicating. So mesmerizing. He studied the frozen image before him as if it might offer him a clue to her—to the truth of her he’d spent years telling himself she’d already shown him. Gone was the exuberant hair, the cowboy boots she’d once told him she loved more than most people, the open and carefree expression that had made her shine brighter than the Santorini sun.

She’d grown sleeker over the past few years. He’d seen it in the photographs he couldn’t always avoid, scattered in this or that paper, but it was more obvious now that he was looking at her directly. That curvy figure of hers that had once made a simple bikini into a lush little scandal and had made him her slave bordered on skinny now. Her hair was still that sunny blond but it was straight and ruthlessly slicked back into a tasteful chignon today, her cosmetics minimal and wholly lacking in the sparkle or too-bright colors he remembered. Her dress was a masterful little exploration of classic, understated elegance and suited this new version of her perfectly.

Holly Holt was gone. Theo doubted she’d ever truly existed.

In her place was this woman. This shrewdly manufactured, ruthlessly accessorized creature. Holly Tsoukatos, who was such a committed philanthropist indeed with her absent husband’s money forever at her disposal, he thought derisively. Holly Tsoukatos, who’d made herself known as the gracefully estranged wife of one of Europe’s favorite former playboys, and who’d become more and more fashionable and sought after now that Theo was regarded as a force as dangerous and successful as his famous father.

He hated her, he told himself then, and he hated this. And most of all he hated the fact that he still wanted that gloriously over-the-top, unrestrained and uncultured little American girl who’d captivated a seasoned sophisticate like him in a single searing week.

But, of course, that Holly had been a lie. Why couldn’t he remember that? She had never existed outside the virtuoso performance she’d put on for him four and a half years ago. This version of his wayward wife, this studiously well-mannered ice queen who’d built herself an entire little empire of lies thanks to his money and her commitment to spending it, was the real Holly. Staring at her frozen image, Theo acknowledged the fact that he didn’t like remembering that harsh truth—it was one of the reasons he’d only spoken to her on the telephone and very rarely at that these past four years.

That and his unwieldy temper, which she alone seemed able to kick-start and send into overdrive with very little effort. But he hauled that dark, simmering, betrayed thing in him under control again, and he didn’t care if it left marks as he did it. He’d rather die than show her anything but his dislike—the colder and more distant, the better. It wasn’t the only thing she’d earned from him, not by a long shot, but it was the only thing he’d allow her to see.

He hit the button to unfreeze her and didn’t bother masking his irritation.

“What do you want?” he said by way of greeting after all these years of nothing but infrequent telephone calls. His voice was blunt and unfriendly and even that wasn’t enough to assuage the lick of his fury, that deep and dark current of a primal need to strike back at her however he could. “Have you managed to bankrupt me yet?”

* * *

This video call was a serious tactical error.

Holly realized it the moment the screen before her burst into life and color and sound again. Her courage and her determination—and much worse, her voice—deserted her in a sudden rush. This was a terrible mistake, the latest in a long line of terrible mistakes where this man was concerned...

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.”