He stood there staring at her for so long, his eyes gleaming hot. And then he reached for his briefcase. “I have nothing to give you, Lucilla. Nothing.”
Christos was bitterly angry. His life had always made sense to him, but now he couldn’t find his equilibrium. He’d let Lucilla leave him in Greece. He’d watched her climb onto the helicopter, telling himself it was the right thing to let her go. She’d looked upset. There had been dark shadows under her eyes, hollows that he knew he’d put there, and he’d told himself it was best if he complied with her request to leave.
He’d intended to return to London with her, and then to begin his tour of the Chatsfield locations. But he couldn’t make himself get on that helicopter, couldn’t endure a long flight where he no longer had the right to touch her or kiss her or lose himself in her warmth.
The next day, rather than return to London, he’d begun his tour. And it had worked for the first few days. He’d thrown himself into the job, evaluating the businesses and making much needed changes in New York and San Francisco. He’d congratulated himself on his ability to focus on work.
But the nights were hell. He kept thinking of Lucilla, kept imagining her there with him, her beautiful smile, her lush body, the sounds she made when she shattered, the way her body pulsed around him. He’d wanted her and he’d missed her, and that both stunned him and angered him.
Christos did not need anyone. He’d spent a lifetime not needing anyone. He’d learned, in the hell of his youth, that needing made you vulnerable. He couldn’t go there ever again. It was too dangerous, too frightening.
It was so much easier not to love people. They couldn’t disappoint you when you expected nothing from them. They couldn’t hurt you when you didn’t care.
He rubbed a hand over his chest, wondering why it ached when it wasn’t supposed to. Lucilla was nothing special. She was a woman, like all women. Yes, he was intrigued by her. Yes, he wanted her still. He wanted her beneath him, wanted her voice in his ear, his name on her lips.
But how was he supposed to have these things when she wouldn’t comply? When she demanded he give her things he would give to no one? Things he no longer possessed?
He didn’t have a heart, dammit. He’d carved it out in juvenile detention, and he’d kept the space where it was supposed to be empty as he’d moved through his life, ruthlessly slashing and burning everything in his path.
He was precisely what he’d wanted to be. Successful, rich, emotionless, unattached to anyone or anything. It was safe.
He let himself into his apartment and dropped his briefcase on the floor. It was quiet, empty, and for the first time he could ever remember, he didn’t like the emptiness. Maybe he would get a cat. Not a dog, because dogs needed to be walked, but a cat, a creature wary and remote like himself.
Christos swore as he went over to the liquor cabinet and poured a finger of Scotch into a tumbler. He was thinking of cats now? Of acquiring one and spending his nights cooped up with the creature in this apartment? Had it really come to this?
He stalked through the apartment and into the library where an easel stood draped in cloth. He stared at the cloth, wondering why he’d bought the damn thing beneath it and if he dared to look at it.
Furious with himself, he whipped the cloth away from the painting. A woman laughed at him from the canvas. A woman who looked very much like the one he’d left standing in his office at the Chatsfield.
She was lovely, but not as lovely as Lucilla. He looked at the way her head tilted, at the way the artist had painted her laughter. She seemed happy, yet she’d harbored so much unhappiness that she’d abandoned her family twenty years ago and never returned. He understood that kind of unhappiness.
Christos tossed the liquor back and it scalded his throat as it burned a path into his belly. He turned away from the portrait and stalked out of the library. He’d learned a long time ago that the only way to deal with pain was to confront it head-on. And then to obliterate it.
Lucilla did not see Christos for the next several days. He returned to the office, but she avoided him completely. She didn’t even make the morning staff meetings. And Christos did not summon her. He sent her emails. She replied to the ones she had to reply to and let Jessie answer the rest. Jessie had been handling everything well enough in Sophie’s absence that Christos insisted he didn’t need another assistant just yet.
Christos rescheduled the shareholders’ meeting and Lucilla accepted it on her tablet’s calendar, already thinking of possible excuses to miss it. But she knew she could not. It was the one meeting where she had to face him and she would do so with steel in her spine.
But, oh, how she missed him. She was so furious with herself, and furious with him. He’d told her he missed her, but he clearly did not miss her enough. She was replaceable in his life and she kept waiting for the moment when he would appear in the tabloids with another woman on his arm. It was inevitable and she told herself she would survive it.
Though she’d been looking at vacation packages just in case. She had brochures for Mallorca, Hawaii, Tenerife, Saint Kitts. Any of them would do in a crisis, though Hawaii was the most remote and perhaps the best fit because of it. She fingered the brochure again, stroked the glossy photo of a palm tree at sunset and a woman in a grass skirt. Paradise. Peace.
If only it were that easy.
The morning of the shareholders’ meeting dawned and Lucilla dressed carefully in a tailored suit the color of eggplant. She put on a pair of tall nude heels, swiped on fresh lipstick and started to wind her hair into a bun. But as she looked at herself in the mirror, she made the decision to leave it down. Christos liked it down. Not that she was doing it to please him. No, she was doing it because she wanted to. Because she liked the way the color looked against her suit jacket and because it made her feel pretty.
Then she squared her jaw, grabbed her purse and briefcase and headed for the office.
The meeting was being held in one of the main ballrooms of the hotel and it was packed with attendees. Lucilla walked in with her head held high and took her seat in the front row. Christos stood on the platform that had been set up for the purpose, his head bowed as he went over his notes. Her heart skipped a beat as she watched him. The light shone down on his glossy black head, picked out the lines of his handsome face. He wore a tie today. She imagined loosening it, tugging it free, and closed her eyes as pain washed over her.
She would never be that close to him again. She couldn’t bear the thought that she wouldn’t, but what choice did she have? She would not live half a life with him, always waiting for their affair to end. She couldn’t.
“Good morning, everyone,” Christos finally said when the ballroom was packed. “Welcome to the annual general meeting of the Chatsfield Group. There are the usual reports to go over, naturally, and then you must vote for your board of directors, the same as every year. You have the candidates’ bios before you.” People riffled through the papers in the folders they’d been given. “As you are aware, the board of directors appoints the chief executive. I therefore must make an announcement before we continue.”
Lucilla’s heart began to thrum hard. And then Christos’s head came up and his eyes met hers across the sea of people. It was as if they were alone in the room together and she wanted more than anything to tell him not to say another word, not to do whatever it was that he was about to do. She didn’t know what he would say, but she shot to her feet as if doing so could prevent him from speaking.
“Today, I offer you my resignation,” Christos said, his gaze still holding hers. “And I submit to you that Lucilla Chatsfield should now be your CEO.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE BALLROOM ERUPTED. It was no murmur that swept over the crowd. It was a rush of sound, like a wildfire, and it spread to all corners of the room simultaneously. Christos was only aware of Lucilla. She stood in that sea of people as they tugged on her sleeves and pelted her with questions, but she didn’t take her gaze fro
m his.
Her eyes, those lovely brown eyes with the golden flecks, were wide and wounded. He knew it even from here. It was hot in the spotlight but he didn’t shrink from its glare. There were reporters in the room—there were always reporters at the annual meetings—and they were frantically writing in their notebooks and on their tablets. A few tried to get to Lucilla, who was not at all prepared for the onslaught, and that was the moment when Christos knew he had to get this meeting back on track.
By the end, she would have accustomed herself to the idea and she would know what to say to the reporters. But first they had to get through the meeting.
Christos raised his voice, thundered into the microphone and asked everyone to sit. It took a few moments, but the room grew silent again. Lucilla had sunk into her chair, but her eyes hadn’t left his face. As much as he wanted to only look at her, he had a job to do.
“There is much business to be done this morning,” he said tightly. “There will be time for questions after.”
He began the process of conducting the meeting but his mind was only partly on what he was doing. The rest was on Lucilla. He’d realized in the past week that he could no longer stay in London. He couldn’t work in the same building and not want her. He couldn’t live in the same city and not ache for her. He didn’t know what the hell this was, but he had to break away from it.
And he had to give her back the inheritance that was rightfully hers. She was capable of running the Chatsfield empire, of overseeing the vast holdings and making the right decisions for the company. She was the one Chatsfield he believed in. The one he trusted. And he would no longer stand in her way.
She wanted him gone. If he gave her nothing else, he would give her that. It was the least he could do for her.
When the AGM was over, he exited the ballroom by a rear door and wound his way through the offices until he could emerge onto the street and into the waiting limo. The driver sped away just as a crowd boiled out the doors to the Chatsfield HQ.
His phone started to ring in earnest and he glanced at the display. He recognized the company name but rather than take the call he shut the phone off. He knew this game. Someone had heard he’d resigned from the Chatsfield and wanted to snag him before another company did. His phone would ring incessantly as the offers poured in. He did not want to field them today.
The limo dropped him at his loft apartment and he went inside, debating whether to stay in London a few more days or hop on his plane tonight. He could go wherever he wanted, but he was unaccustomed to having nothing to do. He’d been working since the day he’d left the juvenile-detention facility. Always in the past when he’d left a job, it was for a better job.
He’d never quit because of a woman before. He stopped in the middle of his living room and blinked as the import of what he’d done hit him. He’d made the decision earlier in the week. He’d drank himself into a stupor—very unlike him—and then, in the middle of the night when he’d been at least half-sober, he’d called a cab and ridden to her apartment. He’d stood in the street beneath her building, staring up at her window, and wondered what in the hell he was doing.
She tangled him up inside. Made him feel things he wasn’t supposed to feel. Made him want more than he knew was safe. He’d wanted, desperately, to go up to her apartment and take her in his arms.
And because he’d wanted it desperately, he’d climbed back inside the cab and gone home. Now, he went into his bedroom and took a suitcase from the closet. He was accustomed to leaving everything behind and moving on. Today was no different. He would take his time, pick a new company to rescue and have his things sent when he was ready for them.
He finished packing the suitcase, rang for a car and then went into the library and stopped in front of the painting. He had not covered it back up. He’d forced himself to live with it, day in and day out, as if he could inoculate himself to the pain by doing so.
But he was finished with it now, like he was finished with everything here. He would have it wrapped up and sent over to Lucilla. Anonymously, of course. She need never know that he had purchased it that night. He still didn’t know why he’d done so, or what he’d thought he might do with the painting once he had, but she’d been so sad and affected that he’d known he couldn’t let it go to someone else.
He’d never quite planned beyond the moment, but he’d never intended to keep it, either.
He heard the elevator open and he turned, annoyed that the doorman had let the driver come up. He did not need help to carry his bags. But when he walked back into the living area, it wasn’t a uniformed chauffeur standing there.
Lucilla looked furious. And so beautiful she made his heart contract into a tight knot in his chest.
“You coward,” she grated. “You bloody, stupid ass. What were you thinking?”
Lucilla’s entire being trembled with fury and fear and hurt. Christos stood across the room from her, his body tall and erect, his handsome face as remote as ever. She wanted to throw herself at him and claw his eyes out. And she wanted to sink to the floor and ask him why. Why couldn’t he love her? Why was he so determined to ruin everything he’d begun by pulling that stunt at the AGM?
He arched a cool eyebrow. “I believe I was giving you what you have always claimed to want. My absence.”
She stalked toward him. And then she stopped before she got too close, before she lost control of her emotions simply from proximity to him. “You could have asked me what I wanted.”
He looked surprised. “Ask you? You have made it clear from the beginning what you wanted. I did not imagine that had changed simply because I forced you to come to Greece with me.”
She’d been asking herself for the past two hours, since he’d made that announcement, just why she was so upset with him for it. Because she had wanted to be the chief executive. Because she believed she was the right person for the job. She’d wanted it so much she could taste it, but when he’d handed it to her on a platter, she found she didn’t like the taste all that well, after all.
“I thought we had something in Greece,” she said, and then cursed herself for sounding so sad and needy.
He swallowed, and her heart skipped a beat at that little chink in his armor. Maybe she was too hopeful, but she couldn’t help it.
“We did.”
A wave of feeling washed over her, bathing her in heat and despair. “Then why, Christos? Why did you push me away? And why are you leaving?”
He shoved both hands through his hair and then shook his head softly. “I don’t know how to do this, Lucillitsa.”
She took a halting step toward him. “How to do what?”
His gaze speared into her, his icy blue eyes hot with emotions she’d never seen there before. He seemed on the edge of his control, and it gave her a perverse kind of hope that she didn’t dare to believe was real.
“I don’t know how to be with you. How to … love you.”
The lump in her throat swelled. Her eyes blurred. “I believe you do.”
He was shaking his head. “It’s better if I go. Better for both of us.”
Lucilla stiffened her spine and glared at him through her tears. “Until today, I’ve never thought you a coward, Christos. But you are. You can’t face the truly difficult tasks. You told me I couldn’t make the hard decisions, but it’s you who cannot make them. You who would run away when you should stay, you who would give up—”
Here, her voice choked off. She tried to finish the sentence, but her vocal chords refused to obey. Christos didn’t say a word.
She backed away from him, turned to go. It was useless. He was determined not to feel anything for anyone, and she couldn’t force him to do so.
Strong arms wrapped around her, pulled her backward until she was wedged tightly to his body. She hadn’t heard him move, but she slumped against him, giving in to the pleasure of his embrace. Even if it was the last time. Even if it was nothing more than this simple touch.
“Lucilla.�
� His breath ruffled her hair, and then his mouth was at her ear. “I am damaged, Lucilla mou. Broken. I don’t know how to give you what you want. I wish I did, but I would only hurt you in the end.”
She shuddered in his arms as his warm breath washed over her skin. She wanted to turn, wanted to kiss him, wanted to make him realize the truth of this thing between them. But he wouldn’t let her. So she settled for the only weapon she had.
“I love you, Christos. I love you.”
His grip on her tightened. And then it fell away, as she knew it must. She took advantage of it to turn, to cup both his cheeks in her palms.
“Allow me to make my own choices, Christos. You told me I wasn’t willing to make hard choices, but I am. And if loving you is a hard choice, then I’m making it.” A tear spilled free to slide down her cheek. “You can’t stop me from loving you. You can leave and you can pretend like it never happened, but you can’t stop me. I will love you no matter where you go.”
He shuddered beneath her touch, his long eyelashes dipping down to cover his eyes. She had no idea what he was thinking, no idea what was about to happen. But she couldn’t let him go without telling him how she felt. She’d always played things safely, always tried to take care of everyone else but herself. Well, maybe this wasn’t quite taking care of herself, but at least she would know she’d done everything she could. She would not second-guess herself once he was gone.
“I don’t know if I can love you,” he said softly. “I don’t know if I can love anyone.”
She had to hold back the anguished cry that begged for escape. “You can, Christos.” She said it firmly. “I heard it in your voice in the cemetery. I saw it in your eyes. You loved someone and you lost her, but that doesn’t make you dead inside.”
His eyes were a brilliant blue. “I feel dead inside, agapi mou. I always have.”
Heiress's Defiance Page 14