by Lucy Monroe
Her eyes closed, but moisture leaked from the corners and it made him feel helpless, not a sensation he was used to. And certainly not one he liked.
“Except the emotion I’ve spent my whole life living without.” She turned on her side, away from him. “All the things you offer should come from love, but you will give them to meif I ask . There’s a difference, even if you can’t see it. I know that difference intimately.”
He put his hand on her shoulder, needing to comfort the raw pain he heard in her voice. “Explain.”
Her shoulder rose and fell beneath his hand. “My father feels responsibility for me, but he doesn’t love me. I figured that out when I was little. He’s never loved me. Everything he has ever done for me has been out of duty. Now, you are telling me you want to do the same…you will give me what I say I need out of duty as my husband.” She turned back to face him and the deeply embedded pain he heard in her voice was in her moisture filled eyes. “There’s never been anyone like that for me. No one to love me. No other family after my grandparents died. No long-term friendships to fall back on. Life without love is so lonely, Sandor. I don’t want that kind of loneliness in my marriage.”
He did not know what to say. He’d always had his mother’s love and before his grandfather had died, the old man had loved him, too. In his way. Even so, Sandor had never valued love because he considered it responsible for too much pain.
Ellie was saying the lack of it was just as painful, but she was wrong that it had to be lonely.
“Do you feel lonely now, Ellie?”
She didn’t answer, but something in her eyes said she was lonely…deep inside. Even after they had made love so beautifully. He did not understand it. He felt more connected to her than he had to any other person. How could she not feel the connection?
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life waiting for the people I love to love me back,” she said into the silence between them.
“Are you saying you love me, Ellie?”
The moisture in her eyes overflowed, tracking down her cheeks in a stream of tears and she whispered, “Yes.”
Had he considered it two days ago, he would have said that her falling in love with him would help him convince her to marry him, but now he knew it was far more likely to cause her to turn her back on what they could have. She was genuinely afraid of being hurt by him. Because he did not love her.
Something squeezed inside him, making it hard to breathe. He knew what it was to hurt. As impossible as it should be, he was hurting right now. For her. But also for himself.
Her uncertainty was tearing at old wounds. Memories best forgotten, but that haunted him all the same. He had spent his childhood rejected for what he was. The illegitimate son of a Greek woman and her American lover. The best in sports and academics, his schoolmates and even his teachers had still looked at him as if he did not measure up because he did not share his father’s last name.
No amount of effort on his part could force their full acceptance, or his grandfather’s unconditional approval. And he could not force Ellie to accept him, either. He did not want to even try. She deserved to come to terms with their relationship on her own, but he also needed to know that the choice had been completely hers.
Would her love be like his grandfather’s, tempered by expectations and needs Sandor had little hope of fulfilling? Or would it be like his mother’s love…unconditional and willing to accept him for who he was? He was self-aware enough to realize that while he did not need her love, if he had it, he wanted it to come with acceptance.
He said nothing in response to her declaration. He did not know what to say that would not hurt her further. He could not return the words in all honesty and it seemed wrong to thank her for something he was not sure would not end up hurting him as love so often did.
So, he kissed her instead. Gentle, coaxing kisses that lasted until she stopped crying and slipped into sleep, her arms wrapped tightly around him, her head resting on his shoulder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ELLIE SAT ON THE BEACH, looking over the ocean as the sun slowly sunk in the sky behind her. She was tired from the long plane ride and two-hour drive from Barcelona to the small coastal town that boasted its own castle and a pebbly beach perfect for sunbathing.
It was empty of sun-worshippers now, the small town’s night life in full swing. It felt strange to be truly alone and she could not remember the last time she’d gone anywhere without her security detail.
She’d woken that morning in the bittersweet comfort of Sandor’s warm embrace, her own hold on him just as strong. While her eyes were closed and his arms held her so securely, she could pretend he loved her. Once he’d woken, he’d made love to her and then…he’d left. After telling her that she had the weekend to think.
It was so typical of him to put a time limit on her ruminations, but the fact that he was giving her that time without further argument shocked her. It really did. It was so out of character for him.
Or was it? How well did she know him? She loved him, but that didn’t mean she had an automatic in to the way his mind worked. Her dad would never have given an opponent time to regroup. Sandor hadn’t even tried to tell her she had no reason to be scared. He’d said he expected her to come to terms with that truth on her own.
He’d stood there in front of her door, his big hands cupping her face and said, “You will either accept me for who and what I am, what I am capable of giving you, or you will not. You will either realize you have nothing to fear from me, or you will allow your fears to derail our future. It is your choice.”
Then he’d kissed her and walked out the door.
While she doubted she would come to the conclusion that she had nothing to fear, she was rapidly approaching the one that life without him seemed much bleaker than life with him and without his love. Her own love was the biggest weapon against her in this battle. A battle that no matter how much the wounded parts of her heart left bleeding by her dad’s lifelong indifference told her she had to win, she was uncertain of. Because the stronger, more complete part of her heart—the part that loved Sandor and believed in life’s possibilities no matter what pain her past held, said the battle was in living and she was better off fighting for love than against it.
Sandor was everything she could imagine in a lover, but so much more, too. He was loving…to his mother. He was caring…with her. He was fair. He was honorable. And he was just so darn good. She couldn’t believe the way learning he could never lie to his mother had impacted her.
His grandfather’s strictures on integrity had taken deep root inside Sandor Christofides. And that just impressed Ellie to death.
Her dad had no problem lying to Ellie when he thought it was for her own good, but then he didn’t love her. Not really. She’d wondered before if he’d ever loved anyone. Her mother? She got the feeling that losing her mom right after Ellie’s birth had destroyed his heart. But she could be wrong. She had no way of knowing.
Both sets of her grandparents had died by the time she was six years old. Her dad’s father had died of a heart attack at work the year Ellie turned six and his mother had been gone before Ellie had ever been born. Her mom’s parents had died in a car accident caused by a drunk driver going the wrong way on the freeway two years before that.
She hadn’t told Sandor the complete truth last night. She had been loved once. She could remember the warm feel of her grandmother’s arms around her when she was really little. The way her grandpa had smiled at her as if she was the sunshine in his sky, but it had been so long, sometimes she forgot what it was like to be loved.
She remembered that warmth when she was around Hera, though. The older Greek woman made Ellie wonder what it would be like to have a mother. And part of her craved marriage to Sandor because she knew that if she married him, his mother would become her mother and someone in the world would actually love her. Sandor, who refused to acknowledge the emotion had no idea how very lucky he was to have had
not one, but two people love him in his life.
And now she loved him, but she didn’t know if she loved him enough to give the emotion freely without expectation of its return. If she couldn’t, would their marriage work? Could it work? Was she strong enough to love unrequited and not grow bitter? And if she wasn’t, howreal was her love?
The answer to many of her questions lay in her response to her dad. She looked inside herself and felt a measure of peace steal over her. Because while she got frustrated with her dad and sometimes the pain of not being loved like she needed hurt more than she wanted to admit, she’d never, ever hated him. She didn’t hate him now. She never would.
And for all their similarities, Sandor was not a carbon copy of her dad. He paid her more attention than her dad ever had. He also showed tolerance for family priorities with his mom. That was something. Because Ellie wasn’t going to raise her children alone, a work-widow. She got the feeling that Sandor would think it was doubly important for him to be there as a dad for his children. Because his own father had not been there for him.
She couldn’t help wondering how he was going to react to learning she’d guaranteed herself more than a weekend to make her decision. She’d taken the week off from work, managed to fool her security detail into thinking she was still in her apartment and flown to Barcelona. She hadn’t had any real destination in mind when she arrived at the airport; she’d simply taken the first international flight available.
That had landed her in Barcelona, where again she’d made her travel plans based on availability and hopped the first outbound bus with an empty seat. That had brought her to this small coastal town. She’d never ridden a bus before and it had been kind of neat.
She’d checked into an older hotel, the kind that still used high ceiling fans instead of air-conditioning to control the heat. Her room was small, but clean and the decor was old world with a charm often missing in the upscale hotels she stayed at when traveling under her father’s aegis. She liked it, too.
Just as she enjoyed sitting on the beach for this short moment in time as if she was just anyone, not the daughter of a super wealthy businessman. But it couldn’t last. She had to go back to her life eventually.
When she left Boston, she’d been running, she freely admitted. From Sandor. From her own feelings. From the decision she fatalistically realized was a foregone conclusion. Especially since allowing Sandor into her body. He’d been right. She’d been arguing semantics. Once she’d given herself to him, there had been no hope.
Not for a future without him if he wanted to share hers.
Remembering back to just before they first made love, she’d had that moment of lucidity…the point at which she’d realized the outcome if she gave in. Stupidly…or courageously? Or simply unavoidably…she’d given in anyway.
She knew that sex didn’t mean the same to women that it did to men. She didn’t need her own painful past to learn that, the media screamed the message in every medium. But that sure knowledge had not saved her. Simplybecause sex meant something so different to her, she’d had no chance. If it was only her body she was holding back, she could have done it, but once her heart was involved, she was lost.
She was going to marry Sandor. The alternative…life without him and life without the mother’s love she would be gifted with in Hera, was an untenable choice.
Her heart beat a rhythm of hope as she accepted the decision. Sandor wasn’t her father. He loved his mother, which meant he was capable of the emotion. And he cared about Ellie. He was afraid of love as surely as she feared the emptiness of a life without it. She would teach him that love did not always hurt, that it could be the biggest blessing in a person’s life. She’d seen it in the lives of others and she had known in that place all certain knowledge is born, not learned, that it would be the same for her if she had it.
He had reasons for his fear, just as she had reasons for hers, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t learn something new. She was taking a chance.
She refused to believe he had any less courage than she.
Ellie stayed in Spain for the rest of the week, missing Sandor, but reveling in the freedom. The security team didn’t catch up with her until Thursday. After a very different return trip to Barcelona, this one in a chauffeured car, she flew home, this time first-class, Friday afternoon.
Sandor flipped open his cell while he clicked the send button on an e-mail to a subordinate in Taiwan. “Christofides here.”
“Sandor, it’s Hawk.”
“Have you found her?”
“Yes.”
Something in the other man’s voice alerted him. “Where?”
“She’s in Spain.”
“She said she wanted time to think. Apparently she decided she needed distance, too.”
“And other things.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Check your fax machine.”
Sandor lithely jumped to his feet and crossed the room to where his personal fax whirred. Two sheets were in the printer tray. He picked up the top one, it had Hawk’s company’s logo and said, “For your review.”
The sheet underneath was a newspaper clipping in one of the smaller European tabloids. It was obviously not a cover shot, but an interior article. It showed Ellie dressed much more provocatively and trendily than her usual attire. She was with an attractive dark-haired man standing beside a casino table. The man had his arm around Ellie’s shoulder and his expression was nothing short of possessive.
For some strange reason, Sandor felt like he couldn’t breathe.
“Go back to your computer. I sent additional photos in an encrypted file.”
Sandor didn’t know how the other man knew he’d gotten to the fax machine and had looked at the tabloid picture proclaiming a well-known playboy had a new plaything, who had been labeled as nothing more than his “woman of mystery.”
Evidently Ellie’s identity was unknown. Considering the fact that she did not court publicity, he was not surprised. And if the playboy was as wealthy as he looked, he could keep her name from even determined reporters.
Sandor checked his e-mail and there was the one from Hawk. He opened it, typed in the password Hawk fed him over the phone and a picture materialized on the screen. It was of Ellie and the man kissing on the beach. He scrolled down and the pictures got more condemning. Ending with one obviously taken through a window of the couple together in bed…naked.
“Destroy the pictures at your end,” he barked.
“Done.”
“Thank you, Hawk.”
“I’m sorry, Sandor.”
Sandor nodded and hung up the phone, realizing as he did so that Hawk would not have seen his head’s movement.
The pain of betrayal tore through Sandor as he tried to wrap his mind around the evidence presented to his eyes. Ellie had slept with another man.
He muttered a very ugly Greek word.
It did not help.
He’d believed she was a woman of integrity. He had believed her when she said she loved him. So, what had this been? A last fling before marriage? He could not accept that. He wanted nothing of marriage to a faithless woman.
The pain coalescing inside him was from disappointed hopes he told himself. It had nothing to do with a lacerated heart. His heart had stopped bleeding a long time ago.
George Wentworth called an hour later. “The security team have located her.”
“In Spain?” Why he asked when he had the evidence of the pictures right in front of him, Sandor did not know.
“Yes. She’s flying home today.”
“Thank you.”
“So, are we on target for the merger?”
“We will discuss it after I have spoken to Ellie.” Why he felt compelled to tell her that the relationship was over before he told her father, he did not know.
She’d shown that their relationship meant nothing to her.
“Fine, fine. I’ll talk to you Monday then.”
S
andor allowed George to think all was well and hung up the phone. They would talk on Monday, but it would not be about the full merger that would be based on marriage between Ellie and Sandor.
Ellie called Sandor when she arrived at her apartment Friday night. It was late and she was tired, but at peace about her decision.
Silence greeted her at the other end of the line when he picked up. It was his cell, maybe the connection was bad. Though she’d noticed that his cell phone had problems much less frequently than hers. Sandor just seemed to control whatever was around him better than the average person.