by Tara Pammi
“Fix me to be worthy of you?” she said, anger coming to her defense.
“No, I thought I should give us both time...” Something gripped his features and Leah knew that he knew it. “But then you didn’t need to be changed, ne?”
So many years, she had wished she had had the courage to tell him the truth. That he would, for one second, see the real her. And yet now that he did, she felt naked, terrified.
The sudden silence in the long hall made her heart thud so much louder in her ears. The show had begun.
“I’ll miss the show,” she said, moving away. But he pulled her back. Trapped her between the pillar and his body.
“Tell me about Calista.”
Her gaze flew to him. “Stavros, I—”
His hand under her chin tilted her up. “I deserve to know the truth, Leah. If you have never used drugs, that means you didn’t introduce her to them.”
She closed her eyes, holding back tears. “No.” His silence drove her to open them again. “I went to every party you forbade me from, I drank even though most of the time I couldn’t even keep it in, I flirted with boys who didn’t care an iota about me because it would enrage you, I spent money only because you said not to, but I...I never touched drugs. I didn’t even know that crowd...” She stopped, once again, skating the line of lies. “I didn’t know where she even got it...God, if I had...”
The confusion, the guilt in Leah’s eyes far too real, Stavros didn’t need to ask her why she had never told him the truth before.
Because he wouldn’t have believed it. He had been so blind, he had been in so much pain that he had shut everyone out. Only his failure had mattered, not the why of it.
He had so conveniently blamed Leah for it, absolving Calista of any fault.
“Then why do you carry such guilt in your eyes?”
“Because I loaned her that money a couple of days before. I was so angry with you for cutting my trip to New York short. I...hated you so much. So when she said that she needed cash, that you would never agree to give her so much, I gave her every last penny.”
She flopped against him, her body shaking. Feeling as if there was an anvil on his chest, Stavros wrapped his hands around her.
Calista had borrowed it from Leah, knowing that he would not like it, probably even aware that he would take it out on Leah. What had she been thinking?
He hadn’t known his sister then. It hung like a boulder around his neck, choking his breath. Leah had been right in this too.
* * *
Leah couldn’t speak for the pain in Stavros’s gaze, in his sudden withdrawal.
She had hated Stavros for being so tough on her and Calista, but Calista hadn’t once mentioned her unhappiness or her problems to him.
With him, Calista had almost been a different person. Loving, smiling, obedient...as if she had just slipped into a different skin.
Now she wished she had gone to Stavros and blurted it all out.
Calista had been troubled, she realized that now. Maybe even depressed.
With hindsight, she wondered how much of that had fueled her own antagonism toward Stavros, because it had been so scary and powerless to see Calista like that. She had been mired in her own pain about her dad’s death and Stavros had been a convenient target to lash out at. And yet she hated having to tell the truth now, hated this power that she had over him.
She didn’t want to cause Stavros any pain.
He was rigid, he was stubborn and arrogant, but God, he had loved Calista in his own way. He had tried so hard to keep Leah away from her because he had thought her a bad influence on her. He had given Calista everything except...except listening to her.
But how could she tell him that now? How could she tell him that Calista had already been in trouble long before Leah had come into her life? That Leah had followed Calista’s lead always?
The man she knew now, he still dominated, even used her attraction but hadn’t she pushed him to it by dangling the truth in bits and pieces?
Calista was gone. There was nothing to be done now. There was nothing to be achieved by digging into the ugly truth.
So, she swallowed all the other truths back, bolstered her own courage and looked into his eyes.
Managing a smile, she squeezed his hand. “She was not unhappy, Stavros. I think, just restless. She...she definitely hated your rules as much as I did.” She forced a smile to take the bite out of it. “But she...loved you.”
He remained silent. And Leah wondered if he knew that she was quaking inside. When she had lied to him before, it had been to protect herself. This time, it was to protect him.
“I think that night whatever she took...it must have been a one-time thing. Something she thought she would try and then walk away. I’m so sorry that I gave her that money.”
“You were barely nineteen, Leah. And I...made it so hard to come to me with anything, ne? I found fault with you at every turn, I curbed all your freedom, and then I—”
“Why?” The question barreled out of Leah.
By his actions toward her, his efforts to again and again control her, change her, he had made it so easy to hate him, so easy to hide the truth about Calista from him.
She had wanted to not care about anyone ever again in her life, had pulled the act so well that Stavros had believed all of it.
He had started a war between them, and Leah was the one who had kept feeding it. To better hide her attraction, to better fight whatever risk he presented to her emotions, she realized now. “Why did you always hate me so much?”
“I didn’t hate you.”
“In the beginning, I thought it was because Giannis brought me here. Because you resented my being the heiress to such a vast fortune. Which, it turned out was a big joke. You were the one, along with Dmitri, who turned Katrakis Textiles into a multimillion-dollar business. So what was it, Stavros?”
His expression shuttered instantly. “It was wrong of me, Leah. Isn’t that enough?”
“No, it’s not. I have a right to know. I...”
“You just...your actions—your neglect of Giannis, they reminded me of someone. But it was no excuse to—”
“Of whom?” Leah couldn’t let go. Not when she was finally so close to understanding him.
“Of my father. All he cared about was himself, his next drink and how he would gain it. My mother, instead of kicking him out, instead of caring for her kids, walked out without looking back. Neither Calista nor I mattered. They left us with our grandparents who weren’t equipped to raise us. All they had was a small farm. I managed fine. But Calista...
“She would watch for her at the gate for so many hours...and then one day, we got news of my father’s car crash.” He rubbed his face. “I remember thinking that it was a blessing for her.” His mouth twisted into a bitter curve. “He died and all I could think was Calista wouldn’t suffer anymore.”
That said so much about his own state of mind. “And then Giannis came for you?”
“Yes, my grandfather wrote to him about my father’s death. I fought so much to bring her with us. But he said he had failed with his own daughter and that he couldn’t bear to fail again. I—” such pain impinged on his features that a lump formed in her throat “—I...promised her I would come back for her. And I did... It took me two years to convince Giannis. Two years to go back for her.”
“What was she like when you went back?”
He frowned at her sudden question. “Why?”
“Never mind,” she replied, faking nonchalance. But her head hurt, and her chest felt so tight.
My brother—I can’t disappoint him, Calista had admitted once to her. Had she been afraid he would not come back? Had she been afraid to show her true self to him?
“Leah, why—”
Sinking
her hands into his hair, she pulled him down for a kiss. His hands on her waist, his taste on her lips, made her feel she was owned by him. She wanted to take away his pain, to ease the confusion in his eyes every time he talked about Calista.
Drowning in his taste, she could forget all the truths bearing down upon her, she could swallow the truth forever.
His arms tightened around her while his mouth continued its passionate assault.
Just as all the other times, he was the one who finally stopped. The heated rush of their breaths mingled as he rubbed a gentle finger over her mouth.
“What was that for?”
“I have no more truths to tell. The show, I don’t want to miss it, Stavros.”
“Go,” he commanded, a thoughtful look in his face. “But we are not through, Leah.” All kinds of promises lingered in his words.
And Leah fled.
She muddled through the darkness of the auditorium and found her seat. Up-tempo music blared as the runway dazzled with one magnificent creation after the other.
But it was mostly lost on her. He didn’t join her in the adjacent seat, and Leah, still shaken by everything they had talked about, was glad for a reprieve.
Now, she wished she hadn’t asked. She wished she hadn’t seen that vulnerability in his eyes. That she hadn’t seen the ache when he mentioned his parents.
She wished she didn’t know how committed he was to his vows.
Wished she didn’t understand what made Stavros the way he was. She wished she had never started on this path at all.
Because understanding Stavros meant wanting Stavros with a cloying, all-consuming madness.
Already, she saw admiration, respect in his eyes when he looked at her, she saw that flash of curiosity when she evaded his questions.
If he showed such commitment, such respect for the vows he had made to the selfish, immature girl she had been, what would he be like if she shared her fears, if she followed her heart and gave this relationship of theirs a chance?
Because, suddenly, she wanted to be that woman more than anything she had ever wanted in her life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN LEAH HAD woken up that morning in her sun-kissed bedroom, she had already known it was a new kind of day.
Despite her efforts to protect herself, which she saw clearly now, it seemed Stavros actually saw her, the true her.
He knew that she hadn’t ever touched drugs in her life. He knew that a career in fashion design meant the world to her. He knew that Giannis meant a lot to her.
It had been almost two in the morning when she had finished meeting with everyone she wanted to see. And all the while, Stavros had loomed large in her mind.
Both emotionally and physically tired and strung out by Helene’s positive initial reaction to her designs, she had fallen asleep within moments after he had started the powerful engine.
It had been the best night of her life.
She felt like she was standing in front of him without a shield for the first time. It was a moment of both power and fear, for he could so easily bind her to him always, he could so easily make her...
Pushing her hair away from her face, Leah walked to the window. Fueled by that growing need to see him, she showered and dressed in a sleeveless yellow blouse and a long, flowy skirt. Braided her half-wet hair into a plait, pushed her feet into comfy flip-flops and made her way down.
She was at the last few steps on the winding staircase that opened to the main foyer when the deafening silence finally registered.
His collar undone, his cuffs rolled back, Stavros still wore the same shirt as last night.
His hair was unkempt and his pallor a ghostly white under that olive skin. His nostrils flared as he saw her at the steps; something slithered across his face but he held her gaze, almost as if willing her to only see him, as if making her oblivious to the rest of the world.
And he was such a commanding figure that it almost worked.
Except she had lived half her life with moments like this, with that gut-twisting fear that something always went wrong when she found happiness.
Nausea pushed its way up her throat.
She gripped the balustrade so tight that her knuckles turned pale against the dark sheen but she forced herself to break his gaze and look beyond him.
Dmitri emerged from her grandfather’s room, his features ravaged. A half-empty bottle of scotch dangled from his hand, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked at her, blinked, and then walked away without another glance.
He looked like he was coming apart at the seams, the complete contrast to Stavros’s frozen withdrawal, to the tight ropes with which he held himself.
“What happened?” Her words were loud, almost a scream in that dignifiedly morbid silence. She flew off the steps when he didn’t answer.
Launched herself at Stavros like a crazy dog. Like an immovable wall, he absorbed all her rage, all her blows as she pummeled at him. “What happened, Stavros? Tell me or I will—”
Pulling her into him so hard that the breath was knocked out of her, Stavros hugged her. Hugged her so tight her chest hurt with the effort to breathe, her head was dizzy...until all she could focus on was getting air into her collapsing lungs.
Only then did he loosen his hold on her. Tucking a finger under her chin he pushed it up to meet his gaze. “I’m sorry, pethi mou. Giannis is gone, Leah.”
Leah flopped onto him, the words stealing into her with a sickening thud. “No...” she whispered, futile tears filling her eyes.
“Look at me, galika mou,” he pleaded with such tenderness that she did.
Clasping her cheeks, he looked into her eyes. “He passed with a smile on his lips, Leah. He said he loved you, that he...he was so happy that you spent the past few days with him. I have never seen such peace in his eyes in all the years I have known him. You brought such joy to him.”
“Why didn’t you wake me? Why didn’t you at least let me say goodbye?” She pushed away from him, bitterness and anger and pain all roping together. “He was my grandfather. You and Dmitri...I had just as much right to be with him.”
The pads of his thumbs caught her spilled tears. “He insisted that I did not disturb you, Leah. Said you were not fond of goodbyes.”
A sob rising through her, Leah ran back upstairs without another glance at Stavros.
He had known. Her perceptive grandfather had known how scared she had been, he had known what it had cost her to reject him again and again...
In just a few weeks, Giannis had become such a huge part of her life and now, he was gone...Leaving her alone again to mourn him.
And for once in her life, Leah didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to be ruled by fear. For once, she wanted to reach for the man she desperately needed. She wanted to lean on his strength, she wanted to take everything he would give of himself, everything she had always been too scared to ask.
* * *
It was almost evening when Stavros entered Giannis’s house again that day. He came to a halt in the vast foyer, the image of Leah standing at that last step, her expression of such fear and pain, the first thing he saw.
He had never seen her like that. Never heard that desperation in her tone. Over the last couple of weeks, he had accepted the fact that he had been wrong about Leah on so many levels. Yet he realized tonight that he had been no closer to truly understanding her.
She had desperately wanted him to say anything other than what he had, he knew. And the force of his own need, of his own desire to offer her anything but the hard truth, it had knocked him where he stood.
He wanted to wipe away those tears, he wanted to protect her from that grief, he wanted to...and all of it, it had nothing to do with duty.
The silence tonight was so different from all the other
nights. He had done everything he possibly could to do all that Giannis had asked of him. All the arrangements had been put in place for the funeral to happen in a few days.
He was about to call for his housekeeper, instruct her to check up on Leah when she emerged from his office, rubbing her eyes. The yellow top that had looked so bright this morning was rumpled. Her hair was tangled all around her and dark circles hung under her eyes.
“Leah, were you waiting for me?”
Grabbing her hair away from her face, she pulled it tightly at the back. “Yes.”
The innocent action thrust her breasts up and he swallowed his hunger.
Cristo, this was not the time for his control to shred. He was literally shivering with need.
It had been easy to offer comfort this morning. Yet now, he couldn’t move, couldn’t form a coherent thought. The shock of losing the one man who had ever tried to understand him, who had tried to care for him hit him hard in that moment. And he felt curiously weak, as if a strong gust of wind could knock him down.
He must have swayed because suddenly Leah was almost bowed back trying to support his weight. Her breasts rubbed against his side, her scent kicked him in the gut.
Her eyes were molten pools of concern and vulnerability as she held onto him. “You look like you are ready to fall apart. Have you sat down for a minute since last night?”
Putting her away from him, Stavros searched for his fragmented willpower. “I just need some sleep. What did you want?”
Would she ask to leave tonight? What would he do if she did?
The three months were almost up. After seeing her with Giannis these past two weeks, after talking to her about Calista, he had questions about himself.
He was drowning and he so desperately needed the very woman he had doubted.
“Nothing important. Come, I’ll walk you to your room.”