by Tara Pammi
She’d never really tried to understand him, never tried to look beneath the surface. She’d expected grand gestures and sweeping statements. And like a little girl denied what she wanted, she’d made his life hell for it.
But—thinking about it now—he had been twenty-seven when they had married, had been estranged from his adoptive family. He had had a rough upbringing, and neither of them had much experience with romantic relationships.
Had she taken any of that into account? Had she ever tried to reach him in a different way?
Non. All she had wanted was a fairy tale without putting any work into the relationship.
A long, filthy curse exploded from him, polluting the sunlit breakfast room. “Dios, Valentina! You should’ve told me if hurt you.”
“You didn’t. You never hurt me, Kairos. Whatever we did in bed, I was a willing, enthusiastic participant. So don’t...don’t make it a thing you did to me. Instead of with me. I craved the...” the intimacy I found with you there “...the pleasure you gave me. I told you that enough times.”
His gaze darkened, a faint tension enveloping his muscular frame. Things she didn’t say swirled in that cozy glowing room.
He knew now how much she’d watched his every move, every gesture for meaning. How deprived she’d been for a single word of affection. Even a simple statement of his desire for her. For a word of praise—even if it was about those blasted pajamas she’d spent hours choosing. Or about her hair. Or her readiness for him whenever he wanted sex.
That he’d even liked her sexual appetite for him, was something she’d only realized when he’d cruelly commented on it on the yacht.
“You cannot doubt I found satisfaction with you.” His gaze held hers in defiance and something else. As if only now he realized how much he had hurt her.
Legs shaking, she walked to the buffet table and poured herself another cup of coffee she didn’t want. She took a sip just to force the lump in her throat down.
“I do not find relationships easy to manage.”
Stunned that he would even make that concession now, she stared at him. If the consequences of that hadn’t hurt her so much, she would have laughed at his mulish explanation.
“Those words would have meant a lot back then,” she said sadly. “All I ever heard from you was criticisms.”
“And every time I criticized you or compared you to Sophia or Alex, you fought back with an outrageous act,” he said slowly, as if he was finally figuring it out.
“Si.” Her cup rattled loudly when she put it down on the table. “It’s all in the past anyway.”
If he had forced the discussion to continue, she’d have fled the room.
He went to the buffet. The clatter of cutlery behind her calmed her nerves.
Her relief was short-lived when he reached her, clasped her wrist in his rough fingers, tugged her and pushed her into the chair. The plate he deposited in front of her overflowed with fresh strawberries, a slice of toast and scrambled eggs.
Her stomach growled.
Without thanking him, Tina dug into it. Within minutes, she had polished off most of the breakfast.
She noticed only as she swallowed the last piece of the toast. Toast he’d prepared for her. Almost blackened, slathered in butter.
Just the way she preferred it.
Warmth bloomed in her chest. He’d noted that much about her. She tried to remind herself that it was too little. But the truth was there now that she wasn’t in a fairy tale but real life.
Kairos had cared about her. It had been in all the little things he’d done for her. In the silences after they made love and the way he had held her as if she was precious, in the unsaid words between them after one of her escapades, in the way he had always encouraged her to come out from under her brothers’ protective umbrella and make something of herself.
But how could she ever overcome the fact that she hadn’t been enough? That she might never be good enough?
CHAPTER SIX
IT SEEMED IT was a day of shocks. No, a week of shocks.
From the moment he had set foot on the yacht and seen his wife dressed like a hooker to now, looking at the spreadsheet she showed him on her laptop screen.
Even the slide of her thigh against his couldn’t distract his attention this time.
There were reams and reams of data in her pretty pink sketchbook and laptop.
While she pulled up different files—her lower lip caught anxiously between her teeth—he took a huge notebook and flipped it open.
Maybe two hundred pages were filled with sketches—dresses and accessories. Outfits put together from cutouts of dresses and hats and handbags. Pictures of people they had both known—Conti board members’ wives and daughters and whatnot. And next to each person’s photo cutout from some society pages were notes about how they were dressed wrong. Little corrections to their outfits, makeup, hair, shoes... Kairos idly flipped through the book, then picked up four more like the first one.
There were eight sketchbooks in all. It was years and years of work, he realized, shock vibrating through him.
“When did you start doing these?”
She shrugged, juxtaposing two different spreadsheets on her screen. “When I was eleven, twelve? About two years after I came to live with Leandro and Luca.
“I didn’t really have a lot of clothes and accessories to play with until then. When they took me on that first shopping spree to this designer boutique...” Unadulterated joy filled her voice. She leaned back against the chair and closed her eyes, a smile playing at her lips. “It was like I was in heaven. I spent the whole day picking out dresses and shoes and hairbands and bows and belts and pins and more shoes... Leandro says I kept looking behind me every minute.”
“Why?” Kairos asked automatically, even as he understood.
An uncomfortable tightness descended in his chest.
He’d forgotten that she hadn’t always been this spoilt, rich Conti Heiress. It was the one time he’d wanted to go back for her after she’d walked out on him—when he’d heard the vicious rumor mill repeat the dirty truth.
Valentina Conti wasn’t truly a Conti, but her mother’s bastard with a chauffeur after she’d left the maniac Enzo Conti after years of abuse.
He had wondered who had leaked the news when the patriarch Antonio Conti and his grandsons Leandro and Luca Conti had hidden the truth for years; he wondered what it had cost Valentina to learn the truth.
A shimmer of doubt nagged at him.
“According to Luca, I was worried they would abandon me at the store and disappear. He says I was this little scrawny thing that would dig my nails in if he even loosened his grip around my hand.” She straightened in her chair, her tone so devoid of emotion that the hair on the back of his neck prickled.
“Why?” he asked again.
He’d been married to her for nine months and he’d known nothing about her. Christos, he hadn’t even been interested. He hadn’t loved her, but he also knew firsthand what came of negligence. Of how simply holding back belief in someone could destroy one’s belief in oneself.
Theseus had done that to him. And he had never recovered.
“I don’t remember clearly actually. Even the bits I do, it’s only because Luca would prod me softly. To make me remember. He said I would come running into his room or Leandro’s in the middle of the night, crying and in panic. That for years, they would find me sleeping at the foot of his bed, one of my hands on his ankle.
“All I know is that there were months after my mom’s accident before someone came looking for me. When Leandro found me and told me he was my older brother, he said I clung to him like a rabid dog.”
When she seemed to be lost in the memories of the past, he tugged her hand into his. She returned the tight clasp before she opened her eyes and met his.
Such strength shimmered in her eyes that he felt singed by it. He could see why her brothers were so protective of her. Could see that little feral thing in her
eyes. Could see the vulnerability that had always lurked beneath her dramatic personality.
Before he could say a word, she pulled her hand away.
“Valentina, who leaked the fact that you were not...a Conti?”
“I did,” she replied instantly, her dark gaze holding his.
He sat back in his chair, reality as he knew it shifting and sliding. “Why?” It seemed to be the only word he could speak around her today. “How did you find out?”
“Sophia knew I was...miserable with you.
“Luca had told her about the circumstances of his birth, about how our mother left his father after his monstrous actions for years. About how Leandro sought to protect me from the truth. About why you married me.
“For the first time in my life, I had a friend who truly cared about me, who trusted me to have the courage to face the truth.”
“What did she think it would solve?” He had always liked Sophia, but right now, he could happily wring her neck for interfering in his marriage.
“She thought the truth would free me from that downward spiral I was in because you...” Again that shrug. “She was right. When I learned I wasn’t a Conti, I realized how tightly I had clung to it because it had given me an identity when I’d been so scared and alone. When I learned about the alliance between you and Leandro...everything fell apart. If I wasn’t Valentina Conti Constantinou, I was nothing. Something you told me again and again. It would only be a matter of time before you learnt the truth too, before you realized you hadn’t gotten quite what you wanted. So I left.”
Before you left me, the unspoken words reverberated between them.
That he measured so little in her estimation burned his gut. “I didn’t leave you after Luca thwarted my fight to be the Conti CEO,” he said, knowing it was the utter truth, “and I wouldn’t have left you for not being the Conti heiress.”
Instead of pacifying her, his words just caused a flash of that old temper to glitter in her eyes. “Do you even realize how arrogant that sounds? As if you were doing me a favor by keeping me on? I wasn’t willing to find out what would drive you to leave me.”
“Valentina—”
“Kairos, please don’t pretend as if my leaving—once you get over your dented ego—didn’t fill you with relief. It was a circus and it is done. Let it go.”
It took every ounce of his self-control to let it go. Every inch of his pride to give in and admit failure. But her accusation that he was relieved...how dare she?
No, their marriage hadn’t been great. Not even close to normal. They hadn’t known each other at all.
But it was something he had begun to count on, even with her ridiculous, outrageous theatrics day after day.
She had become a constant in a life that had never known one.
The strength of the urge to punish her for disappointing him, for breaking her word to him, for thinking so little of him...the hurt driving that urge...it stunned him.
He fought the urge to swallow it away, to let it fester. If they were pulling skeletons out of the closet... “For what it’s worth, I did hold our marriage sacred, Valentina. I counted on you sticking with me for the next fifty years or more. To have children with me, to build a family of our own... You showed me a glimpse of a future I’d never wanted before. And when it didn’t work the way you wanted it to, you took it away, without even bothering to tell me. So don’t you dare tell me what I felt when you walked away.”
She had acted just as Theseus had once done. He had given Kairos everything and then snatched it away in the blink of an eye.
Maybe he should be glad that it was over with Valentina.
In nine months, he’d proved to himself—and her—that he didn’t need her.
He wouldn’t have seen her except for the divorce proceedings, if Theseus’s situation hadn’t forced him to seek her out.
And as she was so wisely reminding him, she had walked out. She had broken her promise. And that meant she wasn’t worth all this thought, much less his regard.
His wife was what he had thought her initially—impulsive, immature and without loyalty.
“Let’s just focus on the future like adults,” he finally said.
* * *
Her throat stung as Kairos’s words penetrated her defenses. For him to admit that her leaving had dented more than just his ego...
Her leaving had hurt him. So he had lashed out on the night at the yacht with cruel words. It didn’t excuse it, but it explained so much.
She had been right. Kairos felt so much more than he ever let on.
What was she supposed to do with that knowledge? Why hadn’t they ever talked like this before?
When she had talked about her childhood, she’d seen understanding.
Even a little flash of respect when she’d said she’d leaked that she wasn’t a Conti. As if he hadn’t thought her capable of shedding that safety blanket, that position of privilege. It was respect she craved with every cell in her body.
For a few minutes, he’d been kind. Understanding. Interested in her past and how it had shaped her. Interested in her—the person she was beneath the Conti tag—beyond what she could be for him.
But the admission about her leaving had cost him. The walls were back up, as if he had given her far too much.
Now, as she pointed to him several rows and columns, all she got was a polite stranger. The hard press of his thigh against hers, the graze of his corded forearm against the sides of her breasts as he pointed to the screen made her supremely aware of every inch of her body.
“What are all these names?” he asked pointing to the calls she’d highlighted.
“These are the names of the personnel I called at different couture houses—assistant buyers, vendors, designers’ assistants and more.”
He pulled the laptop to himself and browsed down. “There are almost...one hundred entries here. With times and dates.”
She tried to shake off the vulnerability that descended on her. This was almost a year’s worth of work. And she had nothing to show for it. For months, she would finish working a nine-hour workday, and then settle down to make calls. Humiliating chitchat, answering gossip about herself—she’d endured everything in the hope of getting the answer she wanted.
Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
“I kept a very thorough record.”
“I see that. But what is it a record of?”
“Calls I made to different people over the last few months.”
“You called all these people?” Disbelief rang in his tone, making her all prickly. When she tried to take the laptop from him, he resisted. “Answer me, Valentina.”
“Si. I called all of them.”
He ran a square-nailed finger against the column of Yes/No and the paltry maybes peppered through. “And what does this column mean?”
“It means whether they agreed to let me borrow the piece of clothing, the accessory or the shoes I called about. These are people who have access to the latest designer wear. Magazines and fashion houses and distributors and vendors, etc...”
“Why do you need all these? I thought you turned your back on things you couldn’t afford? To attend parties with your pimp?”
That he still thought so little of her made her want to thump him. “I need a portfolio. As a stylist, whether a personal client or a house of design, it’s the first thing clients and businesses want to see.
“I roped Nikolai into helping me do the photoshoot, and even enlisted an up-and-coming model to pose for me. But I don’t have access to any clothes or shoes. Without that I have nothing.”
“Weren’t some of these people your friends? That one and that one...that guy?”
“Si.”
“But it says no against their names.”
Tina gritted her teeth. “Are you being dense on purpose?”
One look at him told her he wasn’t.
She sighed and rubbed her temple. “It’s because they said no. They didn’t say no to my face. Half
of them wouldn’t return my calls. And when I showed up at their workplace anyway, they had their minions tell me they were busy.”
“Why?”
“I guess because word had spread that Leandro and Luca had abandoned me and that you dumped me after learning that I wasn’t the esteemed Conti heiress. Only Nikolai would even talk to me. He got me that job. It took me a month to understand that none of my so-called friends were really friends. Just as you pointed out. Sophia, of course, offered the Rossi connections but I said no.”
“That was foolish. The business world is nothing without connections and networking. You think I chose to ally myself with Leandro because I lacked business acumen? That I chose to head the CLG board because of the politics? Your brothers and Antonio have connections unlike anything I’ve ever known. I knew that if I wanted to go further in the business world, I needed more. I needed the powerful connections Leandro brought with him. I needed the old families to accept me into their circle.”
It was the first time he had mentioned the agreement he had come to with Leandro. The agreement that had led to their marriage. It didn’t sound as ruthless a transaction as she’d imagined.
“Are you giving me an explanation for why you did what you did? Perhaps asking for my forgiveness?” Dios, she was such a fool.
“No. The agreement we entered into is not that unusual. Leandro knew me. He knew that I would treat you well. And I—”
She glared at him. “But you didn’t treat me well.”
“Name one thing I deprived you of during our marriage.”
“Respect. Affection. Regard.” Love.
His silence was answer enough for Tina. “If I let Sophia help, then Luca would get involved, too. And if Luca got involved, Leandro would move heaven and earth to open every door for me. And soon, I would be drowning once again in my brothers’ favors. I would forget why I started all this. I would become that Valentina.”
He closed the laptop with a soft thud. With a glare, she hugged the thing to her chest. He took the laptop back from her clenched hands with exaggerated patience and set it down on the table. “Why did you start all this?”