by Julia James
Anger. Anger to match his.
He was speaking again, still in that same clipped, demanding voice.
‘I have to speak to you—and I need answers!’
With a lithe, fluid movement he got to his feet. The suddenness made her start, and she stepped back. Then hated herself for the gesture of retreat. She would not retreat from him—she would stand her ground.
Yet her heart was beating like a trapped bird, her newly showered skin was damp and clammy. Though her towelling robe was thick and fleecy, she was burningly conscious of her bare body beneath.
Memory stabbed again, coming between the defences she kept against it, driven through by the presence of the man standing there.
Madness possessed her just for a moment—an instant of madness, of wanting to hurl herself at him, to throw herself into his arms and feel them wrap around her, holding her, folding her close against him, cradling her face and lifting her mouth to his …
She felt faint with it—faint with the knowledge that it could never happen. Angelos Petrakos would never touch her again. Never in all her life.
She waited for the feeling of relief that thought must bring—but it did not come.
Why doesn’t it come? Why don’t I feel the relief I should feel—must feel!—knowing that Angelos will never touch me again?
‘Why did you go before I could speak to you?’
His words, harsh and grating, cut through her torment. Her eyes widened disbelievingly.
‘You expected me to stay?’ A rough, scornful laugh rasped in her throat, tearing past the vocal cords that had contracted painfully. ‘My God, you really thought that? You underestimate how good a teacher you are, Angelos! You taught me well—taught me everything I need to know about you! Taught me that when you want to destroy me you do it—whatever the method is.’ She had to force the words out now, her throat tighter than a drum. ‘Even the one you used this time.’ Her voice dropped and she swallowed, as if a stone were blocking her lungs. But she made herself say the words—the words he had said to her in his moment of triumph. ‘Showing me the truth about myself …’
Dark light flashed in his eyes. ‘Truth? Don’t use that word to me—’ Greek broke from him, vehement and harsh. A hand slashed through the air and she flinched. ‘You nearly died that morning! Refusing to take my hand even to save your own life!’
She stepped towards him, hands clenching, face contorted. ‘Take your hand? Take your hand? After what you’d done to me?’
His expression changed. Color drained from his face, leaving it stark and gaunt.
‘I didn’t know,’ he said. His voice was stiff, dragging, as if he didn’t want to say what he was saying. ‘I had no idea—none.’ His eyes met hers, with that same reluctance in them. ‘I had no idea you’d been served alcohol at dinner.’
She stared blankly. Not understanding.
A brief, humourless laugh came from him as he enlightened her, his voice still harsh.
‘You didn’t realise? But why should you? You have no idea of the effects of alcohol, have you? No idea how it can … lower resistance to temptation.’ His eyes rested on her. He inhaled sharply. ‘You drank apfelwein—apple wine. Not apfelsaft—apple juice—that night. Johann served you, and he didn’t know you never drink alcohol. And you—you didn’t know the difference because you’ve never tasted alcohol, have you? And then I saw you inhaling my cognac fumes. Did you try drinking any of that as well?’ He saw her expression and nodded. “Thee mou! Cognac—neat spirits—on top of wine, and your system totally unused to alcohol! No wonder you—’
He stopped. Took another sharp, razored inhalation, his eyes boring into hers like spears. Knives were slashing inside him. They had been at work since he’d been told she’d walked out of the clinic and, all the time since then, waiting to hear from his security staff the moment, the moment she appeared at her flat again, as he had been counting on her to do. And now—finally—she was here, and he was—finally!—confronting her with the truth.
The truth he’d discovered far too late …
She was staring at him. Her face was without expression, her voice without expression as she finished the sentence for him.
‘No wonder I came on to you the way I did.’
Angelos’s voice was heavy, forced from him. ‘If I had known, I would not have touched you.’
She looked at him, her eyes withering. ‘No—you’d have saved it, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t want me to have the excuse that I was drunk when I fell into bed with you!’ Her mind was in a tumult, emotions scything inside her head—what Angelos had done to her, what she had let him do, and, pouring in over the top of that, what his disclosure had done to her. Words blurted from her, anguished and tormented. ‘But you’ve won more than you ever dreamt!’
His brows snapped together. ‘Won?’
She gave a high, demented laugh, eyes wild. ‘Yes! Your triumph is even greater than you know! You wanted me back in the gutter, back down in the pit I’d crawled out of, and now you can boast you’ve done it again! You’ve proved everything you could possibly want to prove! That I can never, never escape my past—never escape!’ Bitterness scoured her mouth. ‘I’m like my mother, and her mother before her! As weak as they were! Self-indulgent and self-destructive!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Angelos demanded. He took a step towards her, but she lurched backwards.
‘You didn’t know, did you?’ Her eyes were blazing with loathing, but it was not for him alone. ‘My God, you missed a trick there! You could have threatened me with so much more than you did! Threatened to expose me to Giles for even more than what I did to you as Kat!’ Her words were vicious, stinging like hornets. ‘My mother was a junkie, my grandmother an alcoholic!’
He stilled. ‘That’s why you never drink.’ It was not a question. It was a statement.
‘I wasn’t going to go their way—I was never going to go their way!’ Her voice was low and bitter, and filled with loathing. Loathing for her mother’s weakness, her grandmother’s weakness. Her own weakness. Her own deadly, fatal weakness that had brought her to this pass.
He held up a hand. ‘Two glasses of wine and a taste of cognac does not make you an alcoholic!’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘It makes me a fool …’ Self-loathing choked her. ‘A fool,’ she repeated, excoriation in her voice. ‘A fool who let you show me the truth about myself—that I was too weak to resist you even after everything you’d done to me. That my stupid, pathetic protest to you, claiming that I couldn’t bear for you to touch me, was just empty bravado! You knew you could prove otherwise! You knew for five years! Ever since I stood there in your hotel suite and let you help yourself to me, kiss me and touch me and call me a whore!’
Her chest was heaving, breath like razors in her lungs, eyes distended as she was emptied, silenced.
Angelos stood there quite motionless, only the muscle above his cheekbone working.
‘But you weren’t, were you?’ he said. There was nothing in his voice, nothing at all. As if that were the only way his words would come. ‘Because how could you have been a whore, Kat, five years ago—when you were a virgin?’
The silence was absolute. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. He was speaking again, and still there was nothing in his voice.
‘When you left my bed to escape me I saw the evidence. I didn’t want to believe it—how I didn’t want to believe it—but it’s the truth, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
He saw the answer in her eyes, and now his voice was harsh as he went on.
‘So hearing me denounce you like that in my hotel suite five years ago made you angry. Your temper got the better of you and you took my watch to get back at me, out of furious pique.’
Thea’s breath incised her, eyes lashed at him. ‘My God, you conceited fool!’ she spat. ‘You think I acted out of pique? When out in the street was—’
She stopped. Cold iced around her as memory hit. The terror that had possessed her
, the shaking desperation.
In the total silence Angelos’s eyes were suddenly alert. Super-focussed. Trapping her in a beam of laser light.
Then he spoke.
‘Go on, Kat,’ he said. His voice was measured, but with a note in it that curdled her. ‘“When out in the street was …”?’
She wouldn’t answer. Couldn’t. Heard again the sick, twisted words that Mike had spoken to her so long ago.
‘Tell me, Kat.’ Angelos’s voice pulled her back to the present. ‘Why did you steal from me? Not out of temper and pique—so why? What made you risk breaking the law, a gaol sentence—worse?’ His mouth twisted. ‘My anger at you?’
Her face contorted. Words broke from her. ‘I was desperate, that’s why! I needed money, that’s why! That’s why I came to your suite! That’s why I crawled to you, grovelled to you and begged you to give me back that job you’d taken away on a bloody whim! Because I needed money! Money the job would pay me—money I could give to a sick psycho so he wouldn’t take his razor to me! He was waiting for me downstairs, on the street outside the hotel, and I had to give him something. Either the promise of a lucrative job so I could use the money to pay him with—or something else. Anything else! Anything that would have placated him—bought me time! Kept his razor off my face!’
For an endless moment there was complete silence. Then she began to shake.
Slowly, as if her arms weighed heavy like lead, she wrapped them around her body, as if to hold herself upright. Angelos stepped forward. His hands closed around her arms as they bound her. Words came from his mouth, but she did not understand them. Then he spoke again, in English this time. His voice was controlled. Very, very controlled.
‘Who was this, Kat? Who was threatening you?’
She spoke through gritted teeth, a throat that would hardly let breath pass. Her eyes stared past Angelos, back into the past.
‘His name was Mike, and he was a photographer. He was always creepy, but a friend persuaded me to let him do my first model portfolio. What he wanted …’ her voice shook a moment ‘… was to take porn shots—and to pimp me to other men. If didn’t co-operate he … he … threatened to cut my face. I knew he would carry out his threat.’ She swallowed. It was like swallowing glass. ‘Because he’d already cut my friend—scarred her for life, to punish her. So—so I had to buy him off. It was all I could do. I needed that job you’d offered me. It would have paid me enough money to keep him happy for a while. When you kicked me off the shoot I came to you to beg for it back. When you refused, I panicked—I stole your watch. It was something—anything—to give to Mike, waiting outside on his motorbike. I knew it would be worth a few thousand—it must be, or a rich man like you wouldn’t wear it. It would keep Mike happy. Buy me time.’
She stopped talking. There was silence. Only the dim noise of the cars outside on the street below.
Angelos’s grip around her arms was like steel. ‘What happened when you left the police station? Did he find you?’ There was no emotion in his voice. Only the question.
There was none in hers as she answered him. She could not look at him, only stare beyond him at the far wall. Into the past.
‘No. He was dead. He smashed his bike into a brick wall, following me down to the police station when I was arrested. I heard a traffic cop telling the desk sergeant. I saw the photo on his driving licence.’ She was silent. Then, ‘So it was all for nothing. I stole from you for nothing. I tried to save my skin, knowing that with Mike dead it was the law I had to fear having stolen. So I lied my way out of being charged with theft. And then …’ Her voice hollowed. ‘Then I discovered there was still something else to fear—your vengeance. Destroying everything I’d made of myself. Pushing me back into the pit I’d climbed out of. Leaving me with nothing. All over again.’
Silence stretched between them. Unbridgeable. Angelos’s hands fell from her and she felt herself sway, as though he had been keeping her upright. Then, slowly, as if forcing himself, he spoke.
‘Why did you never tell me this?’
Now she looked at him. His face was stark, etched from stone.
Her voice sliced with scorn. ‘What possible reason would I have for thinking you could be moved by pathetic pleas from me? I’d already begged you to give me back the job you’d taken from me—hiring me one day and chucking me away the next! What would you have cared about a psycho out to get me?’
The expression in his face changed. ‘Do you not know why,’ he asked slowly, his eyes never leaving hers, ‘I dropped you from the campaign?’
She turned away, shrugging, breaking eye contact. It disturbed her.
‘I was too mouthy. Too common. A street rat—just as you called me when you stopped me marrying Giles.’
‘None of those things. I dropped you, Kat, for the same reason I took you to Switzerland.’
She rounded on him. ‘I know why you took me there! So you could throw it in my face, rub my nose in it, that you could make me want you! And you did,’ she finished bitterly.
‘Just as,’ he replied, ‘you’d made me want you five years ago.’ His mouth twisted. ‘You were like no other female I’d ever met. Oh, not just that incredible body and that face of yours—that beauty you wear as carelessly as if you didn’t know you had it! But the woman behind the beauty. The one with the attitude, the raw edginess, the beautiful, insolent mouth that answered me back, that made me think there was only one way to silence it. That’s why I dropped you from that campaign.’
His eyes were branding her, boring into her.
‘I didn’t want a woman like that in a publicity campaign for one of my businesses.’ His eyes held hers for one moment longer. ‘I wanted her in my bed.’ He took a sharp, indrawn breath. ‘But I never mix business with pleasure, Kat. I never let the women I take to my bed use me for their careers. Never. So I knew that if I wanted you for myself I could not let you do that shoot. When I made my decision to make my relationship with you personal, not professional, I countermanded my instructions to my campaign director. He’d already notified your agency of my first decision, and so had to issue a cancellation. I was going to contact you the following day, and tell you, but you,’ his voice turned into a blade, ‘pre-empted me by arriving at my suite that same evening. Offering me your body to get the job back.’ Now the blade of his voice was cutting his own flesh. ‘I did not realize how desperate you had cause to be. I only knew that I was angry, so very angry with you, because you’d made it impossible for me to have an affair with you by showing me how you would try and use it to advance your career.’
There was contempt in his voice, but it was not for her.
She was staring at him. ‘I never,’ she said slowly, each word biting, ‘never offered myself to you! You accused me of it, but I never did. I never would.’ She took a painful scissoring breath. ‘I told you my mother was a junkie, my grandmother an alcoholic.’ She looked at him. Looked at him unflinchingly. ‘How do you think they funded their addictions?’ She paused. ‘They were prostitutes—both of them. Raised in care, like I was. And when I discovered that about them—I vowed I would never be like them! So I started to make something of myself—started modelling, because there was nothing else I was qualified to do. But I never touched a drop of alcohol, or touched drugs of any kind, and I never, ever let sex anywhere near me. Never! Until—’
She stopped, shame flooding through her like a drowning tide. Shame like she had felt when she had stolen from him. But then she’d had desperation, terror, to fuel her theft. What had fuelled her into falling into Angelos’s arms, his bed, that night in Switzerland?
He gave her the answer himself.
‘Until you drank wine and cognac and it washed away your guard.’ His eyes shadowed. ‘It was the only way you’d succumb to me.’ He turned away, walking across to the window, pulling back the curtain halfway to stare down into the street. The car he’d arrived in, black and sleek, was hovering by the kerb. He would go down to it, drive away, leave her
. Get out of her life for ever. Free her from the curse he had been to her …
He heard his own voice echoing in his head.
The mountains expose the truth …
The words mocked him like a whip on bleeding skin. He’d thought he’d expose the truth about her—find whether she had truly changed from the woman she had been five years ago. But she had never been that woman …
He’d known nothing about her. The woman who had walked the mountains with him, at his side, remained as hidden from him as she had always been. He thought of the life she’d had—growing up with the bleak, damning knowledge of her background, her determination to break free of it. He thought of how that life had tried to suck her back into its fetid, filthy pit when some foul, psychotic scum had threatened her, and what she’d done to try and save herself.
What it had cost her to do so.
He heard his voice speaking to her as if from very far away.
‘I ruined you. When you stole from me I ruined you without knowing why you’d done what you had—what had driven you to do it. Ruined you because I presumed you had come to me to sell your body. Ruined you in my anger and my arrogance. And then I ruined you all over again when I saw you with a man you wanted to marry—a man who would have given you security and a place in the world, a place you’d earned. Despite what I did to you, you made yourself get up off the floor again, when I’d thrown you down on to it, and you remade yourself as Thea.’
He shifted his weight, moving his shoulders as if the tension in them had become unbearable.
‘And in Switzerland …’ His voice was harsher now, serrated. ‘My arrogance triumphed yet again. I wanted to test whether you had indeed remade yourself—turned yourself from Kat to Thea, turned your back on all that Kat had been, paid your dues for all that she had done. And—’ he took a harsh, ragged inhalation of breath ‘—above all I wanted to force you to admit the truth. The truth I’d known for so long, for five long years, since I first met you. The truth you’d denied, hurling defiance at me, forbidding me to touch you, lying that you could not bear it … could not bear my touch! It became my whole aim to keep you with me, to disarm you day by day, get you to lower that fierce, ferocious guard against me, get you to trust me—get you to admit your desire for me. The desire I knew with absolute certainty you felt but would not admit.’