“Not at all,” Theo said. “Merely realistic.”
He reached over and took her hand, playing idly with the rings he’d put there, the way he always had. As if he was reclaiming her, or her hand—or simply reminding himself, perhaps. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. When he looked up at her again, there was a certain resolve in his dark gaze, a particular set to his mouth.
And Holly wasn’t ready.
She didn’t want realism. She didn’t want answers. There were no shadows tonight, no disappearances. They were here, together. He was warm and real, and she still wanted him so badly it made her quiver inside, and that, she thought, should be the only thing that mattered. It should be the only thing she let sway her, one way or the other.
“I want to dance,” she told him, before he could speak. “This is Barcelona, is it not?”
His dark eyes gleamed in the gathering dark. “It is.”
“Then I want to dance until dawn and then I want to roll around in a bed with you, naked and wild like it’s our own kind of dancing, and I might want to do it all over again tomorrow. And then again.” Holly slid her arms up around his neck and she held on when he went still, letting her body graze his, letting that sweet electricity burn hot between them the way it always did. She held on because she thought that if she didn’t, she might fall off the side of the world entirely, and this time she doubted she’d come back. “What about that for reality?”
Theo’s hands came to her hips and held her there, gently enough. His dark, dark gaze saw much too deep. Holly found she was holding her breath, waiting for him to render judgment in that ruthless way of his, but then, impossibly, that hard mouth of his curved.
It felt like a reprieve. Like a bone-deep relief.
“As you wish, agapi mou,” he said, quiet and rich. “You have two days.”
And though his voice was low and dark, it was the first time he’d said those words without the sarcastic, mocking edge she’d come to expect.
My love.
Almost as if he meant them. As if this was real, after all. Holly shivered again. Harder, and it made her breasts scrape against his chest. It made her knees feel watery. It made her burn for him, hot and needy and wild. It made her want all kinds of things she was afraid to admit she wanted.
But Theo only smiled, as if he knew that, too.
CHAPTER NINE
Is this a second honeymoon for Theo and Holly? Or a calculated attempt at a honey trap in the city where it all started?
HOLLY SIGHED AT the sight of yet another tabloid headline screaming at her from a newsagent’s tucked into an alcove in the busy Gothic Quarter.
It had been two more days, as Theo had promised. Two perfect days in beautiful Barcelona, and she and Theo had spent most of that time lost entirely in each other. Wandering the romantic streets, partaking of the marvelous food. Dancing in the clubs as Holly had requested, then exploring each other later, until it all blurred together into a potent mix of sex and touch, rhythm and music, the sea and the sun. The architectural magic of Gaudí that made the city into something out of a dream, the look on Theo’s dark face when he moved inside of her and drove them both insane...
She wrenched her attention away from the shrieking paper and was glad she was wearing sunglasses large enough to disguise her face to some degree—though there was no disguising Theo. He turned heads wherever he went, cutting a swath through the crowds as tourists and locals alike tripped over themselves to get out of his way, and then to gawk at him as he passed. He had that much obvious power stamped deep into every inch of his athletic body. That much offhanded intensity.
“I don’t understand the tabloid fascination,” Holly said in an undertone, pressing closer to his side as they navigated around a group of British girls taking jubilant self-portraits down an ancient street with the Barcelona Cathedral rising up in the background. “Surely there’s a surly pop star behaving badly somewhere. Thousands of minor celebrities clamoring for attention. Why does anyone care what we do?”
Theo had spent the better part of their rare breakfast outside of the bedroom firing off emails and messages from his mobile, and had only concluded a phone call—conducted in low, emphatic Greek that had not sounded at all friendly—moments before. He slid her a look then that reminded Holly of the way he’d woken her up earlier in her wide, soft bed at The Harrington, sliding deep inside of her from behind and bringing her halfway to bliss before she’d completely woken up to find herself, quite literally, in his hands.
He smiled when she flushed hot at the memory, and she was struck—not for the first time—with the sense of losing her place, somehow. As if, should she only allow herself, she could tip over into that dark gaze of his, tumble deep into him and never surface again. It had always been like that. And some part of her had never wanted anything else.
Some part of her still didn’t, no matter how much that frightened her at the same time, down deep into her bones.
“I doubt anyone particularly cares about us in specific,” he said after a moment as they turned a tight corner and started down another old and echoing street, packed with pedestrians as the morning inched toward another stunningly blue midday. “Not really. I suspect it has a great deal more to do with where we’re staying.”
Holly blinked at that. “Why would anyone care where we’re staying?”
Theo’s mobile buzzed in his hand. He glanced at it, but then returned his attention to Holly, considering her for a moment as he slipped it back into his pocket. Or perhaps it was his own words he was considering, she thought, as he appeared to choose them much more carefully these days.
“Do you not know?” he asked in that cool way of his that made her think of the boardrooms they claimed he dominated merely by entering, just as his legendary father always had done. Chrome and glass towers, powerful men and Theo in the middle of everything, ruling over it with this new iron will of his he wore so easily and wielded so matter-of-factly. If possible, she found this incarnation of his even more compelling than the Theo she’d thought she’d known before, though she hardly dared admit it. “I assumed that was why you chose to stay at The Harrington in the first place. To pick a side in their fight with The Chatsfield, in this as in everything else.”
Holly didn’t realize she’d stopped walking until he took her arm, drawing her out of the flow of foot traffic into the mouth of a winding little alley, tucked between two medieval buildings in the maze of the old city. She didn’t know why she felt almost breathless, as if she’d been running, or climbing up a steep hill.
As if he’d accused her of something significantly more terrible than her choice of accommodations.
“I can confidently assure you, Theo, that if a couple of hotel chains are having pitched battles in the streets—if it’s West Side Story but with a lot of concierges and bellhops—” she held his gaze as she continued “—as delightful as that sounds, I am blissfully unaware of it.”
It was only when Theo studied her face for a long moment rather than replying that she recognized her tone was, perhaps, a shade or two too strident. She thought he might call her on that but he didn’t, though she felt the heat of his stare deep inside of her, kicking up brushfires she wasn’t sure she cared to examine too closely.
“The Chatsfields are trying to take over the Harrington Hotels,” he said. He propped a shoulder against the far wall of the narrow alleyway, he never shifted his gaze from hers and she felt she needed to dig her fingers into the wall behind her to keep from plummeting so far into him she’d never come out again. “I believe an initial offer was somewhat unexpectedly refused. Feelings of betrayal, an enduring struggle between two forces, complicated negotiations.” He shrugged, with his mouth as well as his shoulder, in that deeply Mediterranean way of his that, despite herself, she found fascinating. “I suppose our troubled marriage must seem like an excell
ent metaphor.”
“For a set of boring corporate shenanigans?” Her voice was dry, and she ignored how she felt about his use of the word troubled, how it echoed around inside of her and then sank hard, like a stone. “Yes. Very metaphoric indeed.”
His gaze seemed to sharpen then, and something changed in the air between them, so dramatic she thought for an instant it was the weather. A sudden summer storm, perhaps, swept in from the sea. But the blue sky above remained bright and perfect, and only Theo’s dark gaze altered at all.
“These are family businesses, Holly,” he said, and though his tone was mild, that look in his eyes was anything but, and she wished she couldn’t feel that the way she did then. As if it was reproof and challenge at once. As if it hummed through her, making everything inside of her shudder precariously in its wake. “Everyone involved tends to take what happens with them quite seriously. And very personally.”
She could have told him she knew all about pointless family businesses, such as they were, and the heartbreaking struggle to maintain them in the face of one impossible obstacle and staggering setback after the next. She could have mentioned that it was all an exercise in futility, in the end. That the entity with the most money always, always won. In the case of her father’s ranch, that had been the bank, no matter how hard Holly had worked to raise money to help pay off the mortgage. In the case of her marriage, it would always be Theo, as her battered heart attested every time she looked at him. Why should a set of luxury hotels escape the same sad fate?
But she suspected Theo didn’t want to hear all that.
“Then I imagine the family members involved would make a far better focus for intrusive tabloid articles, wouldn’t they?” she asked him instead.
Except she wasn’t really asking. And there was no pretending that wasn’t an aggressive tone of voice, completely inappropriate for a quiet conversation about things that shouldn’t matter to her in the least, like the Chatsfield and Harrington hotel dynasties. She tilted her chin up, and that, too, was belligerent. She felt it, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. And Holly thought they would topple over the cliff of this strange tension straight into one of the flash fights they’d used to have so often four years ago, and some part of her yearned for it, because they’d always ended the same way, all of that fury and temper and volume rolling right over into the nearest bed...
But instead, Theo reached across the alley and picked up a strand of the hair she’d left down this morning because she knew he liked it better that way, wrapping the blond wave around and around his finger.
For a moment, that was the whole world.
They both stared at his hand, and the spiral of her hair he wound tighter and tighter around his index finger. Outside their shadowed, surprisingly private alley, the old city bustled and swirled, its insistent energy making its own kind of music and swelling around them. Up above, the Spanish sky beamed. And here in their tiny little circle, Holly’s heart beat so loud and so hard she was certain it drowned out all the rest. Maybe the entire planet.
“What is it that distresses you so much about the tabloid attention?” Theo asked after a moment—or perhaps a decade—inched by. But she couldn’t seem to find her voice, and he kept on. “Is it that you worry the focus on our relationship will force you into finally making a decision about this marriage? Or that it may well compel me to do so for the both of us?”
It was panic that rocketed through her then, making her pulse a wild scream, her chest so tight it hurt.
“If our marriage survives or fails based on the fantasies of tabloid writers, then we deserve whatever we get,” Holly whispered fiercely, and she tried to shove the panic back down into a box inside her, to hide it away, to pretend it was something else.
Sex. Fury. Something.
He tugged gently enough on that strand of her hair, and she felt it like an electric current, making everything inside of her clench tight. As if all she’d ever been, or would become, was stranded here in this tight little space with him, waiting for whatever came next.
Waiting for him to make the decision so you don’t have to? a little voice asked, sounding as snide as those tabloid articles did, as judgmental and arch, and as damaging. Is that what you’re hoping will happen here?
“Or is it that you don’t like all this speculation about your motives?” Theo asked quietly, his words like stones, dropping through her one after the next. “After all, they only claim I am a fool for a pretty face. They suspect you of a far darker agenda. Does it hit a bit too close to home?”
And Holly couldn’t help the misery that flooded her then. It came on so fast and so hard she understood it had never been far away at all—it had only been waiting. It washed over her, swamping her, and she couldn’t hide any of it. He was right there, watching as it moved through her, with those dark, clever eyes of his that had always seen far too much, anyway.
It was as if he was inside of her, as if there was nothing that could keep him out, and Holly still didn’t know if she craved that connection or feared it. She still didn’t know what she wanted. Only that she couldn’t seem to live without this man, no matter how torn she felt when he was near.
“You don’t understand,” she said unsteadily now, casting around for some kind of explanation when she feared there was none. None that made sense, not even in her own mind. “My father loved my mother so much. He was crazy about her. She was everything to him. She left him when I was a little girl and our entire lives were arranged around it. Not the fact of her absence, but his bedrock certainty that she would return. She never did.” She pulled in a ragged breath. “And still, when he died, right there at the end, he called out her name.”
Theo didn’t say a word, he only watched, steady and unyielding, and Holly didn’t question why that made her feel more balanced. Why he made her feel strong when she was deeply afraid he was her greatest weakness. But whatever it was, that dark patience of his made her capable of taking another deep breath, and then continuing.
“When I met you, I fell so hard I think I had bruises for months afterward. Maybe years.” She shook her head. “I didn’t know anything. I was all alone in the world, and then there was you, and over the six months we were together I got lost in that. Completely lost. I was terrified that I’d end up just like my father.”
“Surely that would only be cause for concern had I left you,” Theo said, and on some level, Holly understood that only a couple of days ago, he would have said that with a harsh edge, calculated to draw blood. That it would have sliced her in half and he would have reveled in the cutting.
Today his voice was soft. Quiet.
She swallowed. “People leave each other all the time, Theo.”
“So this was, what? A proactive attempt to forestall pain by inflicting it yourself? Before I could make your history repeat itself, somehow?”
It would have been different if he’d sounded angry. Even hurt. But he only sounded curious, and that was why she could keep going.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “All I knew was that I had to get away from you before there wasn’t any of me left.”
His gaze kindled into a kind of blaze, but he didn’t move. His expression remained calm, and she wondered what that cost him. And deep inside of her, Holly felt something crack wide-open.
“Theo,” she whispered, unable to stop herself. Unable to think better of what she was doing. “I’m so sorry. I hope you know that.”
He slid his hands up to hold her cheeks between them, and she’d never seen the look he wore then. It was a naked thing, as if she wasn’t the only one breaking open—an idea she couldn’t quite accept.
“I am, too,” he said in a very low, very gruff voice that seemed to wind its way deep into her bones.
“That I left you?”
“That, yes.” Something that looked like pain move
d across his face, and it echoed within her, making her feel warped. Altered. “And that I chose to respond to it in such a childish, tit-for-tat way. Who did that serve? Just because I thought you’d broken your vows, that didn’t mean I should have, too.”
“Theo...”
But that fierce light in his gaze stopped her.
“I meant it when I said forever, Holly,” he whispered harshly. “I hope you believe me. I really did.”
And then he bent his head and finally—finally—fit his mouth to hers.
He kissed her as if he’d never stopped loving her. He kissed her as if the taste of her was precious. He angled his jaw to take the kiss deeper, he held her face in his hands and he kissed her as if it was a new vow. As if it was an apology and a prayer at once.
A new start. As if the past didn’t matter at all, and couldn’t hurt them any longer. As if it was finally behind them, where it belonged.
As if, after everything, he trusted her again.
And so Holly melted into him, kissed him back, and for the first time in four and a half long years let herself believe things might be all right, after all.
* * *
“Well?” Demetrious Tsoukatos’s gruff voice was more belligerent than usual over the phone line, which did not bode well. “Have you sorted out your marital issues yet? Or can I look forward to even more of this tabloid nonsense to give me indigestion?”
Theo stood out on the private balcony that ran along the side of the Chatsfield honeymoon suite, his eyes on the sun in the distance as it sank down into a riot of spring color arrayed along the horizon, and ordered himself to remain calm.
Or as calm as anyone could remain when talking to his father.
“You cannot possibly imagine my marriage is any of your business,” he said when he was certain he could sound cool and unbothered, completely in control. “Let me assure you, if you are confused on that score, that it is not.” He even laughed. “With all due respect, Father, yours is not the counsel I would ever voluntarily seek when it comes to matrimony.”
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