by Tara Pammi
“Will you forgive me, Kairos? Will you forgive my foolish hope in thinking that she would change, for thinking she deserved one more chance every time? Will you forgive me for not loving you as I should have?”
She was openly sobbing now, and the sight of it broke his heart.
Kairos took her in his arms and she came with a soft cry. Tears pooled in his own eyes and he held them back by sheer will. “Shh... Maria. I cannot bear to see you like this. I forgive you. Of course, I forgive you.” His words rushed out of him, a jagged crack in his heart healing over.
A lightness he had never known filled his chest. “I... I’ve been fortunate enough to have two mothers, Maria. I never realized how fortunate I was. I... Please, calm yourself. I can’t bear to see you cry. I did everything to shield you and Theseus from her. I... She’s left me no other way to stop her. I never wanted anything that should have been hers. All I wanted was to make you and Theseus proud of me. All I wanted was...” He forced himself to speak the words he’d always denied himself. To acknowledge the need inside. To admit that loving Theseus and Maria had only made him stronger, not weaker, as he had always believed. “...your love.”
She wiped her tears and looked at up at him with sad eyes.
“I know, Kairos. I know you did more than a flesh-and-blood brother would have done for her. I know all the allowances you made for Helena. I know that, despite all the stupid games she played with you, you’ve never spoken a word against her to Theseus. You took your cue from me. You gave me even more loyalty and love than you gave Theseus. I didn’t realize that until he pointed out. Until he said we did have a child who loved us more than anything in the world. You don’t owe her anymore.
“There’s a certain freedom in letting go, isn’t there? She came to see me yesterday, you know. I told her in no uncertain terms that I would be part of her crazy schemes no more. Theseus told me about the trust fund idea you set up and you’ve been more generous than even he would have been. So let us hope this time she will truly change, ne?”
Kairos simply nodded, unable to form words. Unable to staunch the love that flowed within his veins. His world already felt different, lighter, brighter. He felt as if he were a new man, as if everything was possible now.
As if he could let himself—
“What is this?” Maria said, taking the sheaf of documents he had left on the table. “Divorce proceedings? You and Valentina are separating?” Shock punctured very word. “I thought she left because she missed her brothers. She promised Theseus she would see him for Christmas. She...”
He had no idea what she’d seen in his eyes before he looked away. “She left me even before I came back here, before Theseus’s heart attack.”
“You said it had just been a small misunderstanding. Why did you bring her here then? Oh...to tell us that you were already taken.” Her hand on his shoulder turned him. “Did she want to leave again when you’d accomplished everything?”
“No.” Even then, she had willed him to understand. Even then, she had given him another chance. Then another chance. What a heartless man he was to have turned her away! What a coward! “I sent her away.”
“And she went away dutifully? For some reason, that doesn’t suit her. Why did you send her away?”
“It was for her own good. I... Valentina...she’s like a storm that ravages everything in its path, in a good way. I... I have nothing to give her, Maria. She deserves better than a man like me.”
Something sad flitted in Maria’s eyes. She took his hands in hers, and the simple touch calmed the furor in his gut. But nothing could ever fill the void his wife had left in his life. In his heart.
“A more honorable, kinder man, Kairos? A man who could love her more than you already do? A man who needs her so desperately that he walks around like an empty shell?”
Something jerked in the deep crevices of his being. His denial froze on his lips. He could not lie. Not to her, and not to himself.
For he did love Valentina. With every breath in him. With every cell in his body.
He had fallen for her long before he had even understood what it meant.
“I rejected her one too many times. I starved her when all she’d needed was a kind word. I hurt her again and again until whatever she might have felt for me died. I don’t know how to love her, Maria. I don’t know if I can give her what she needs. I don’t know if I could bear it if she...if she stopped loving me. She would destroy me then.”
Maria enfolded her arms around him. It was a mother’s embrace, something he had longed for for so long, something he had needed for so long. The fear and anguish he had been fighting for weeks flooded him.
“Oh... Kairos. Trust yourself, trust the bond between you two. And trust her love for you.”
He nodded, hope unfurling within him. His wife had a generous heart. He had to trust his into her keeping. He had to take the biggest risk of his life if he wanted her.
And he did want her.
Pulling back from the hug, Maria laughed. “How about you and I make a pact? We shall be brave and beg for forgiveness from the ones we love, ne?”
He laughed at her suggestion, sobered at the wary glance she cast toward Theseus’s bedroom. He kissed her cheek, breathing in her scent one more time. Willing her to lend him a fraction of the courage she had.
“We will be brave in love, together,” he whispered.
She nodded, kissed both his cheeks. “You will not stay away for another seven years, will you, Kairos?”
“No, I won’t. This is not goodbye, Maria. Valentina and I will spend Christmas here.”
She nodded and hugged him again, and in her embrace, Kairos found the strength he needed.
The strength to love the woman who had stolen his heart a long time ago.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LAST THING Kairos wanted to face, when all he wanted was to see and touch Valentina, was a battalion of overbearing, interfering, annoying Contis.
Yet when he had finally bulldozed his way into Villa De Conti on the banks of Lake Como almost three weeks later, on a crisp November evening, the family, including the patriarch Antonio, were assembled around the ornate dining table, all staring up at him, mostly with varying degrees of anger, mistrust and doubt.
Except Leandro’s little girl Isabella, who instantly wrapped her arms around him for a quick hug.
“Hello, Isabella,” he said returning her hug.
Sophia stared at him with searching eyes. Whatever she had seen there, she pushed her chair back and embraced him.
“I’m not going to ask you how you are,” she whispered, only for his ears. “You look awful.”
“You know what she’s capable of,” he answered in kind, not even pretending to misunderstand.
“You deserved it.”
Suddenly, panic-fueled urgency filled him. “Do I have a chance, Sophia?”
She betrayed nothing. “That’s for her to tell you, Kairos.” She smiled fondly then. “Always calculating the odds before you take the leap, si? It will not work in this.”
He could never understand how smart, sensible Sophia could tolerate the charming scoundrel that was the Conti Devil, but then he still didn’t understand what his vivacious wife had ever seen in him to love.
“Being married suits you,” he said with a smile.
She blushed before going back to her place next to her husband.
“What the hell do you want now?” Luca growled at him from the top end of the table, sitting exactly opposite Leandro on the other side.
“I wish to speak to my wife.”
“She’s not here.”
“You’re lying. And I will beat you to a bloody pulp and mar that pretty face if you get in my way again.”
Utter silence descended over the table.
“Don’t you think you’ve hurt her enough?” Again from the crazy genius. “Not counting the fact that you endangered her by letting loose that woman on Tina.”
Kairos didn’t kno
w what he was doing until he had Luca’s shirt bunched in his shoulders. The fear inside him knew no bounds. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Something in his tone must have communicated itself to him, because Luca’s voice softened. “Helena came to see Valentina at work and caused a huge scene. I was there thankfully, and I think Tina talked some sense into her.”
“Also, Tia Tina told me she slapped that horrible woman,” Izzie piped up. “Oops, I wasn’t supposed to tell you guys that.”
Thee mou, what had Helena done to hurt Valentina?
Luca loosened his shirt from Kairos’s grip. “I honestly don’t think you’re right for her. All you have caused her so far is pain.”
The barb stuck home but Kairos forced himself to ignore Luca. Instead he addressed Leandro, who had always been the more sensible one.
“I have been trying for three weeks to see her. To contact her. She’s still my damned wife. I should have been told Helena was here. It is I who brought Valentina into her focus. I should have been—” He couldn’t even get the words out.
“Tina forbade us, Kairos,” Sophia added softly.
“You’ve no right to stop me. To block my attempts.” The stunt that Luca had pulled a week ago when he had ferried Valentina away on his beastly bike while Kairos had been waiting in the front lounge made his blood boil.
Leandro sighed. “She doesn’t want to see you. And I will not lose her by interfering again, just when she is back in our lives.”
“I’m not asking for your interference. I’m asking you to stay out of this. She is mine—to protect and to hold on to.” The ragged words escaped before he could stop them.
Every gaze looked upon him with varying degrees of shock and pity now.
Leandro’s wife, Alexis, shrugged. “He has a point, Leandro. You’re still protecting her.”
“Have you seen the look she gets in her eyes when she thinks no one’s looking at her?” Luca demanded of Alexis.
“Si, Luca. We have all seen it,” Sophia responded, with a hand over his shoulder. “And that tells me more than anything that we should give Kairos a chance. We all make mistakes.”
“Not the same one, twice,” Luca added meaningfully.
“She’s in the garden,” Alexis added hurriedly. “And she has a guest, so maybe you should wait.”
“Who?”
“Ethan King,” Luca said with a wicked smile, twisting the knife a little in Kairos’s gut.
Sophia sent him a warning glance. “He’s been talking to her about investment opportunities in her new boutique.”
Kairos had heard enough. With a muttered curse, he made his way to the garden when Izzie pointed out, “They’re not in the garden anymore. I saw them going up the stairs, into her bedroom.”
* * *
Valentina had barely settled in the sitting room of her suite and pulled up her website analytics with Ethan when her hand hit the glass of white wine she had poured for him.
Cursing to herself, she mopped up the wine from the sofa and was about to hand him the napkin when the door of her bedroom opened with a hard slam. It hit the wall, then swung forward until Kairos stopped its momentum.
His gaze took in her outstretched hand over Mr. King’s shirt and thunder dawned in the silver gaze.
Before she could think, she guiltily snatched her hand back. And then regretted the move.
He had no rights over her. She had done nothing to be guilty about, either.
He stared at her with such naked emotion shining in his eyes that it took her a few minutes to process the surge of her own feelings. And then pathetically, once again, she landed on hope in the end.
Her heart pounded with that same eagerness that she had tried to curb since the moment she had realized he was back in Milan. That he had been trying to see her.
But she was so tired of that hope. Exhausted from the weight of it.
“I would like to speak with you,” he said, almost successful in packing away all the emotion radiating from him. “In private. At length.”
“I’m not free right now,” she offered softly. “Ethan only has this one hour before he leaves for the States. I’ve been waiting for weeks for a chance to speak with him.”
His gaze flew to her open laptop and then back to her. Uncertainty and hesitation and something else flickered in his gaze. He had never looked so vulnerable.
“Take as long as you need. I will wait outside,” he said and her heart slipped a little.
Over the next few minutes, she tried to corral her thoughts. But the business proposal she had put together with Sophia’s help blurred. The statistics she meant to show Ethan zigzagged, her heart focused on the man waiting outside the door for her.
He had never waited for her. He had never looked at her as if his heart was in his eyes.
Sick of the turmoil in her gut, she finally apologized to Ethan and the gentleman that he was, he was nice about it and excused himself from the room.
The door had barely closed behind him when Kairos reached her.
A white shirt and black trousers hugged his powerful physique. Dark shadows circled his eyes and instead of the satisfaction she wanted to feel, all she suffered was a soft ache.
He looked so tired. She knew how hard he worked. But more than that, she knew what a toll it would have taken on him to finish what he had started with Helena and the company.
She ached to hold him, to love him, to offer him the comfort he desperately needed. But he wouldn’t allow it. He needed her but he would never admit it.
“Why is it that I always have to chase you—” his nostrils flared “—and then find you with a man in some intimate situation?”
“Maybe the question you should be asking is why is it that you’re always chasing me,” she countered. “What is it that you do that makes me run from you in the first place?”
He flinched and she wrapped her arms around herself. She had promised herself she wouldn’t do this. She wouldn’t beg. She wouldn’t complain. She would want nothing from him.
But seeing him after so many weeks, she could barely breathe, barely keep herself together.
How had she forgotten how he dwarfed everything with his presence? How he took over her very breath when he was near?
“I saw the clip from the talk show. And the vlog...that was a stroke of genius.”
“Si?”
“I knew you had it in you. I’m glad for your success, Valentina.”
“I owe it to you,” she said softly.
“That internship with Chiara—”
“No, it was your criticism that I was doing nothing with my life that egged me on. I wanted to prove you wrong. To show you that I could be successful, too. Only I realized how much I enjoy it. That I’m good at it. You did teach me that I could be more than the shallow, vapid Valentina, more than what the Conti genes amount to. But you also made me realize that my value as a person doesn’t depend on whether I’m a success or a failure. That I’m my own person and it is your loss if you can’t love me.”
How many times could one’s heart break?
When she tried to step back, he clasped her arm to stop her. “Don’t—” he cleared his throat “—do not retreat from me, Valentina.”
Her heart crawled into her throat at the rough need he couldn’t hide in his voice. “Why are you here, Kairos?”
“First, please tell me Helena didn’t hurt you.”
“Is that why you’re here? To make sure she didn’t do me lasting damage? Out of guilt?” She couldn’t keep the disappointment out of her voice.
“No, I didn’t know until Luca told me a few minutes ago. I’m sorry, Valentina. I should have realized—”
“She didn’t hurt me, Kairos. I was actually recording the vlog when she stormed into the studio at Conti Towers. I don’t think even she realized how far gone she was. She ranted that you were cutting her off, that she would make you pay for it. And that she knew how to make you suffer. I couldn’t take it. I slap
ped her so hard that my arm still hurts. It was dramatic, almost soap-opera-like, but sometimes that’s what it takes, si?
“I told her I would tell Theseus everything she had ever done if she didn’t quietly accept what you were giving her. And then she would truly be on the streets. I told her I would set my powerful brothers loose on her if she ever came near you again. If she ever hurt you again. And I think it was helpful that Luca looked exceptionally scruffy and dangerous that day—he’d been on one of his days-without-sleep composing binge, and I think for once my threats got through—”
“I love you.”
“Got through to her and she...she...” Words stuck in her throat, lodged beneath her heart. Had she imagined the words? Had she... “What did you say?”
“S’agapao, Valentina. So much that it terrifies me. So much that I can’t sleep or eat or drink.”
He fell to his knees in front of her, and Tina thought she might be hallucinating. She was afraid that she was only imagining this, that it was another dream haunting her sleep...no words came.
Until he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her belly. So tight that she could barely breathe.
The scent of him hit her like a thunderstorm, sinking into her pores.
He was real, this was real. The arms holding her...the soft kisses he was planting on her belly, the huffs of his breath feathering over her skin, it was all real.
He looked up then and the love shining in his eyes stole her breath all over again. “I’m crazy about you. I love your teasing smiles, your penchant for drama, your unswerving loyalty, your generous heart.” His palm rested on her chest. The thud of her heart was loud enough to roar through the room. “I love your long legs, your small breasts, your perfect skin, but more than anything I love you, agapi mou. I love how you love me. I love that you fight so bravely for the ones you love. I love that you make me a better man, that you fill my life with so much color and drama and noise—”
She laughed at that and he laughed and then she was in his arms. Kissing him hungrily amidst sobbing. He tasted of love and acceptance and home. Palms clasping his jaw, she kissed him until she couldn’t breathe anymore. But the tears refused to stop.