“Or, possibly, be slightly less aggressive and mocking,” she retorted, her blue eyes flashing—though he imagined that was as much because he was touching her as because she’d found her tongue again. “To start.”
Better not to think about her tongue.
“I don’t believe a word you say,” he told her then, crooning it to her, as if he was murmuring an endearment. “You showed me who you were when you left me, Holly. You’ve spent four years proving yourself to me, bill by bill. There is nothing on earth that can convince me this sudden about-face is anything but another act.”
“That doesn’t make what I told you any less true.”
Theo laughed again and let go of her, watching her without any kind of pity when she stumbled back a step, then caught herself with a hand against one of the great pillars. A shaky hand, he noticed, and then promptly shoved aside.
His jaw felt like stone. “I hope, for your sake, that it is not.”
She shook her head, as if she was dizzy.
“I don’t understand,” she said, but her voice was thick. She coughed to clear it. If this was real, if she was real, he’d have thought that was distress. But that wasn’t possible. “Wouldn’t you prefer that I made it up?”
He didn’t mean to move but suddenly he was so close to her that he could see the panic and need on her face, the flush of color that told him too many things he had no intention of acting upon. Theo shoved his hands deep in his pockets to keep them off her, but he didn’t back up. He liked that look of uncertainty on her face. He liked knowing that she had no idea what he’d do next.
Whatever else she might be faking, she couldn’t fake this thing that still spiked the air between them. And he could use that as well as she could. Holly had made him feel powerless four years ago. She never would again. No one would.
“There is no doubt that you are a creature made entirely of deceit,” he said softly. Lethally. “The only question is, what kind? Either you lied about who you were four and a half years ago when you vowed you could be faithful, or you’ve lied ever since. One makes you a con artist. The other makes you insane.” He leaned in closer, putting his mouth to her ear and drinking in the faint tremors he could feel move through her body, telling himself he was the one manipulating her here, that he wasn’t simply drawn to her again the way he always had been. “And I doubt very much a lunatic will manage to wrest a majority share of my family’s company from an unsympathetic Greek court. If I were you, Holly, I’d stick to the tarting about and leave the supposed flashes of honesty to those who can pull it off.”
But being close to her had its own perils, and he’d underestimated them, Theo discovered when he went to pull himself away. It was harder than it should have been. He was weaker than he liked.
He indulged himself instead. He propped one hand against the pillar beside her and angled his head closer, inhaling her scent. Letting it move through him, delectable memory and fresh need. Past and present. And then her hands came up—to push him away?—but she didn’t. She only kept them there, hovering between them, as if she was more afraid to touch him than of what he might do.
Good, he thought. She should be.
“Efharisto,” he muttered against the tender shell of her ear, keeping himself from tasting her the way he wanted to do by sheer force of will alone. “Truly, I thank you, Holly.”
Then he pushed himself away from her and took a deep satisfaction in the way her chest rose and fell, as if she’d been running a race. Telling him everything he needed to know about that heat that still swirled between them. Telling him that keeping himself in check was worth the near-painful desire that raged in him now.
“For what?” Her voice was thick and flat and breathy at once and that, too, was a victory.
“For all of this.” He thrust his hands back in his pockets. “For your lies, then and now. For playing your little games with honeymoon suites and your bouts of supposed conscience. You make this easy.”
He turned and started not for the elevators but the front door.
“Where are you going?”
Theo had never pretended to be a good man, so he didn’t waste time beating himself up for the dark thrill that moved in him then, at the confusion in her voice that even she couldn’t feign so convincingly. He stopped and looked at her over his shoulder, framed by the marble pillar and the gleaming Chatsfield lobby all around her. She looked lost. Truly lost, this time. He liked it.
Hell, he reveled in it.
“Out.”
“Out?” As if she didn’t understand the word.
“I don’t want to have a meal with you, Holly,” he told her, and he made no attempt to temper the steel in his voice, or the harshness he could feel in his gaze, and he didn’t care if every last person in the lobby overheard him. “I didn’t want to have half a drink. You’re only good for one thing, and the truth is, I have no idea where you’ve been, do I? I think I’ll take my chances in the clubs instead.”
She looked dazed. “But...”
“If you do the same, I’d suggest you dress less Manhattan cocktail party and more Ibiza party girl,” he advised her silkily. “Or I doubt you’ll attract the kind of tourist trade we both know you prefer.”
“I want to make sure I’m understanding you.” She was pale, and he liked that. He wanted this to hurt. He liked that it did. It felt like balance, after far too long. “I’m standing right here, I told you that our separation was based on an awful lie I told four years ago and you’re leaving to go pick up other women at some nightclub.”
And Theo smiled, enjoying himself for the first time since his secretary had marched into his office a few days ago with Holly on video, wrenching him back into their complicated and unwelcome past.
This part, he could do. This part, he was small and petty enough to revel in.
And it still wasn’t the least of what she deserved from him. But he supposed he’d find a way to accept that, too, because he was finished with this. With her.
“I am,” he said, making no attempt to keep that dark amusement from his voice, his face. “But no need to be so glum, Holly. I keep telling you. I don’t give a toss what you do. You’re welcome to come along and watch.”
* * *
She stood there for a long time after he left, utterly frozen. Her back was pressed hard against the marble column and her heart seemed to slam back into her chest with every beat, and she couldn’t catch her breath.
But he didn’t come back. Just like four years ago, he hadn’t come after her.
Holly supposed it shouldn’t surprise her, but it did.
Theo had waited for her to respond and when she hadn’t, when she’d only stared back at him in that same confused daze that had felt a great deal as if she’d turned to stone herself, his smile had deepened. And it had hurt much, much worse.
“Suit yourself,” he’d said in that low voice of his, and then he’d laughed at her, mocking and horrible. Again.
And then he’d turned and walked away from her. Out into the street and the soft Spanish night.
It took Holly much longer than it should have to accept that he really, truly, had left her there. When she did, she told herself that what she felt then—that great heaviness plummeting through her and leaving deep, deep gashes as it careened off her insides—was anger. Righteous indignation. She’d spent all of this time feeling terrible for how she’d treated him when, in reality, he truly was the awful man so many of his business rivals liked to claim he was when he beat them.
But by the time she made it back to her hotel, the lovely Harrington in Barcelona’s historic Gothic Quarter, she’d run out of ways to convince herself that she was angry at Theo. She was more angry with herself.
“What did you expect?” she asked herself as she walked toward the hotel’s front door, not realizing she was s
peaking out loud until the doorman raised a quizzical brow at her. She smiled tightly and walked inside.
The Harrington was smaller than The Chatsfield, less like an opulent cathedral and more like an intimate and elegant little church, and yet she felt as graceless here as she had standing dumbly in The Chatsfield’s lobby. She might have felt instantly comfortable in The Harrington when she’d checked in yesterday evening in a way she never had at the glamorous Chatsfield, not even years ago with Theo, but even so she’d been unable to get that damned honeymoon suite out of her head. She’d thought that was such a clever thing to do. A way to pretend she was keeping Theo on edge when, really, she’d hoped the leftover echoes of their time there might soften him.
But of course, like everything else, it had only made all of this worse.
And not only because even the thought of Theo in that suite again made all the memories of their month there together sweep over her, like a storm front coming in, fast and lethal and infinitely destructive. Making her ache, molten and needy and still so alone. After all these years, after plotting her way into the same room with him, after finally telling him the truth, she was still alone.
She didn’t know what that great pressure was that threatened to explode inside of her then, right there in the hushed lobby of The Harrington, but she knew better than to let it take her over in a public place. Barcelona might have felt like a very long way away from Dallas or even Athens, but Holly knew that there was nowhere on earth truly safe from the paparazzi. Not when Theo was involved—and she still bore his name, didn’t she? She’d insisted on it, telling herself it was another way to poke at him—but the truth seemed so obvious now. Obvious and pointless.
She’d kept his name because she hadn’t wanted to let go of him.
His name doesn’t make you his, that low voice inside reminded her, sounding so much like her father again that the great sobs inside almost flooded her where she stood in the bright lobby. Never did. Only you can do that, baby girl, and you chose to play these running games instead.
It only occurred to her now, standing in the wreckage of her marriage, that her father might have been addressing the detritus of his own when he’d said things like that. That he’d spent all those years when it was just the two of them talking to Holly’s absent mother, not really to her.
She’d spent so much time alone and missing someone that really, she thought now, a little wildly, she should have been used to it. She should have been good at it.
Holly made her way up to her well-appointed and cozy suite and stripped off her clothes in the bedroom, throwing her dress across the four-poster bed and then yanking all the pins out of her hair, shaking her head until the heavy weight of it swirled all around her. And only then did she feel as if she’d caught her breath—and beaten back that terrible, jagged thing inside of her that still pressed too hard and threatened to swamp her entirely.
At least for the moment.
She checked the slim gold watch on her wrist and saw that it was a little before ten-thirty. She reminded herself that she was almost certainly jet-lagged, like every other time she’d ever taken the long flight to Europe from Texas, and she called down to the hotel kitchen for a late dinner. And blamed the events of the evening and her own outsize reaction to Theo to the time change and the wine she’d drunk while waiting for him to appear.
Tomorrow will feel better, she told herself fiercely, the way she had when she was a kid and she’d worked so hard to help her father save their battered old ranch, as little as it had been worth saving. The way she had when she’d been a teenager and had finally realized that her mother, who’d taken off with a minor rodeo star when Holly was six, had no intention of ever coming back or making things right. The way she had when she was older still and her father had been in the hospital, so frail and yet still so stubborn, and he’d refused to take the money she’d made.
The way she had in those early days after she’d left Greece and her marriage and Theo behind and had thought it might actually kill her, how much it hurt.
And if the next day hadn’t actually been any better, well, eventually a day dawned that had been slightly more bearable. As far as Holly could tell so far, life was all about holding on until that next, nonterrible day, and sometimes that took a while.
Why should this be any different?
She ate the exquisite food they whisked up to her, seated out on her small balcony, in the midst of all the magic of a Barcelona night. The lights, the energy, which she could almost taste in the air around her. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back and let it all flow into her. Then, when she’d finished gorging herself on the local cuisine, she drew herself a bath in the luxurious, claw-footed tub and soaked herself until she was calm and shriveled in equal measure.
It was after midnight when Holly brushed out her hair, rubbed cream into her skin and then crawled into her bed, confident she’d drift off at once and sleep like a log until morning.
But instead she lay there, wide awake and scowling at her ceiling.
Theo was here. In this same city, right now.
Right now.
Out in one of the clubs, dripping with all of those beautiful Spanish women, and still as furious with her as he’d been four years ago.
She couldn’t stand it.
Holly was up and out of the bed before she knew she meant to move. She ransacked the wardrobe she’d brought with her, pulling on a short skirt and pairing it with a pair of dramatic wedges that laced up around her calves and made her legs look edibly long, and then tossing on a filmy, slithery top she usually only wore to the beach. She raked her hands through her hair and let it turn into thick waves, added some drama and mystery to her eyes, and when she was done, she looked a great deal more like the half-gypsy traveler she’d been four and a half years ago than the elegant member of elite society she’d been pretending she was since.
She told herself that was merely a coincidence.
But deep inside, down low in her belly and lower still, where she was still nothing but a wild heat and all of it for Theo the way it always had been and always would be, she knew better.
She always knew better.
* * *
Holly found him in the third club she visited and, by then, it was well after two in the morning and Barcelona was only just getting started. This particular club was on a little stretch with several others down near the water. She’d peered into several of its scattered VIP rooms before she heard the unmistakable sound of his laughter from behind a group of scantily clad young girls, all dancing suggestively.
Or maybe she’d imagined it, she thought after a moment, looking around the moodily lit room and not seeing anything. Not seeing Theo. There were only beautiful people dancing another endless Spanish night away, carefree and heedless, and there was a part of her that didn’t want to find Theo at all. A part of her that wanted nothing more than to melt into the driving, soaring music and let it carry her off to whatever place all these people inhabited with such apparent ease. Somewhere that hurt less. Somewhere that permitted nothing to matter at all save the music that ebbed and coaxed and slid all around them. Somewhere as effortlessly beautiful as they all were...
And then the small crowd in the VIP room shifted, and there he was.
Theo.
He was still wearing his dark suit and looked even better all these hours later, his hair disheveled and that lazy, indulgent look on his face that she remembered so well from Santorini. He stood with one perfect shoulder propped up against the wall, a small smile on his lush mouth as he watched a smoothly gorgeous brunette dance beckoningly before him.
The air between them was filled with sexual tension. It was hot, intimate.
It was Holly’s nightmare, and she’d walked straight into it.
And then he glanced up and saw her, that dark gaze of his slamming
into her, hard enough it nearly knocked her off her wedges.
He went still. His face changed from sexily amused to harsh and starkly furious in an instant, and Holly wanted to turn on her heel and run back across the city to the bed she never should have left in the first place. So she had no idea where she gathered up the courage to walk straight up to him instead. What demon it was that spurred her on.
Easy to be bold when there’s nothing to lose, came her father’s voice in her head, though if she was honest, he’d never quite taken his own advice.
“Looking for fresh meat?” Theo asked, hideously, when she drew near enough to hear him.
But Holly felt like drawing a little blood herself, and so she only laughed. She’d collect all the wounds he caused and count them later, she told herself, when she knew how this ended.
“You might have to update your definition of the word whore,” she said, and smiled sweetly at the brunette when the girl launched herself at Theo and clung to his arm like some kind of barnacle. “Because I think you’re the one who fits the bill, mi querido esposo.”
That last, in what little Spanish she knew, for the benefit of the girl.
My dear husband.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE GIRL, PREDICTABLY, blanched and let go of Theo.
Theo only held Holly’s gaze, his own dark and furious and lit with a kind of warning she had no intention of heeding. Barcelona had woven its way into her skin, she told herself, and she felt like the night itself, a little bit reckless and a little bit seductive, capable of anything.
And it didn’t help that she’d seen that look on his face as he gazed at that other woman—that look he’d once told her was only hers. She wasn’t the only one who had lied, she knew now, with the benefit of hindsight and a little more life experience. It was just that Theo’s lies had been the typical kindnesses between lovers, little signs of respect threaded into promises of forever, while her lie had been the nuclear option. The escape hatch.
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