It turned out he was good at this. As if ruthless power really did run in his veins the way his father had always assured him it did. Or should.
And he’d decided he could emulate his father here, in the boardroom, where that kind of ruthlessness was a positive thing. Theo’s own personal life might have been a mess, such as it was, but not for the same reasons Demetrious’s had been. I may not be happy, he often told himself fiercely, but at least I’m not a liar, a cheater or a hypocrite.
He was surrounded by too many who couldn’t say the same.
Theo aimed his most ferocious glare at Mrs. Papadopoulos as she came to a sharp stop on the other side of his wide desk. She eyed him right back with her special brand of mild judgment and automatic condemnation, which, perversely, he quite enjoyed. The woman was his own, personal version of the proverbial hair shirt and Theo was nothing if not the kind of man who liked to keep his sins as close as possible to his skin.
“It’s your wife,” Mrs. Papadopoulos said crisply, speaking of his sins, and Theo stopped enjoying himself. With a great thud that he was momentarily worried was actually audible.
His wife.
Holly.
Theo was so used to that flare of dark rage, that thunderbolt of pure fury, that he told himself he hardly noticed it any longer as it careened through him, setting off a string of secondary explosions. It had been almost four whole years since he’d laid eyes on his errant wife. Almost four years since they’d been in the same room, or even in the same country. Four years since he’d last touched her, tasted her, lost himself in her—which he never would again, he reminded himself coldly, as it was, not coincidentally, also four years since he’d discovered the truth about her. And the mockery she’d made of their marriage.
You did not discover the truth about her, he reminded himself darkly. Pointedly. She presented her confession to you, as if on a silver platter...
But God help him, he couldn’t let himself go down that dark path. Not today. Not here, in his place of business, where he had become renowned for his icy calm under any and all forms of pressure. Not anymore.
Not ever again.
He should have been over this by now, Theo thought then, the way he always did. But instead he had to order himself to breathe, to unclench his fists, to relax the instant, furious tautness of his body against his chair and pretend he was as unmoved as he should have been after all this time.
“If it is my wife, then I am not only busy, I am uninterested,” he said, making no attempt to hide the crack of temper in his voice. “You know better than to bother me with such drivel, Mrs. Papadopoulos. My wife is to be diverted to voice mail or email, which I check as little as possible and certainly no more than once every—”
“Sir.” And Theo didn’t know what surprised him more. That the woman dared interrupt him or that, when he stared at her in astonishment, the rigid yet normally obedient Mrs. Papadopoulos stood her ground. “She insists that it’s an emergency.”
The last thing in the world Theo wanted to think about, today or ever, was Holly. His downfall—the more uncharitable might call her his comeuppance, and in his darker moments he found he agreed, because he’d married a liar just like the one he’d sworn he’d never become—in one smooth and deceitful and much too pretty female form.
Because the sad truth was that he already spent a significant portion of every day not thinking about her. His predawn hours in his private gym, beating his endless fury into the hanging bag or the occasional sparring partner. The brutal miles he logged on his treadmill. Not thinking about her betrayal of him with, she’d told him so distinctly, some tourist whose name she hadn’t bothered to catch. Not imagining those same sickening scenes over and over again, all etched into his brain as if he’d actually witnessed her betrayal himself. Not wondering how he could have fallen so completely for the lies she’d told him when he should have known better, when he should have been far too jaded to be taken in by her artless little act...
For four years he’d thrown himself into the family business with the express purpose of thinking of something other than the lying, cheating creature he’d married so foolishly and the many ways she’d ruined him. She’d made him a laughingstock. That smarted, but she’d also ripped out the heart he’d never been aware he’d possessed before her. That was infinitely worse. And more than that, she’d tricked him into reenacting his own parents’ doomed marriage, which he couldn’t find it in him to forgive. For four years he’d focused all of the feelings he refused to call by name into something tangible: the comprehensive decimation of all Tsoukatos business rivals and the unquestionable success of the company against what should have been insurmountable odds in these troubled times.
No one had called Theo Tsoukatos, once a proud member of Europe’s entitled dilettante contingent with the notches on his bedpost to prove it, a spoiled and pampered playboy in a very long while. No one would dare.
But Holly was his living, breathing, walking and talking failure. The crowning achievement of his wasted youth. The embodiment of the pointless creature he’d been back then, a grave disappointment to his father and an epic, permanent stain upon his family name.
He did not want to think about how hard he’d fallen for the dizzy little blonde thing from the United States who’d pretended to adore him at first sight, how desperately he’d pursued her after their initial week together on the island or how deeply and callously she’d betrayed him a mere six months after the wedding that he’d been blind enough to consider romantic not despite its speed but because of it.
He especially did not want to recollect the unpleasant truth: that he had no one to blame for any of these things but himself.
Everyone had warned him, after all. At length. Everyone save Theo had seen supposedly gauche and charmingly naive Holly Holt, touring Europe all on her own following her father’s death, for exactly who and what she was. One more American gold digger with Texas dirt on her feet and her calculating blue eyes set on the biggest and best catch she could find.
On Santorini that summer, that catch had been Theo.
“You are my successor and the heir to the Tsoukatos fortune,” his father had told him sternly, over and over again and to no avail. “This girl is nobody. This can never be anything more than a holiday romance, Theo. You must understand this.”
His father and his brother, Brax, had lined up to tell him not to be a fool, but Theo had hardly been inclined to take advice from the man who’d destroyed Theo’s own mother with his infidelities, much less a younger brother he’d thought of then as little more than a child. And then, when it was clear that he was determined to prove himself a colossal fool, anyway, they’d begged him to at the very least take the necessary steps to protect his fortune, his future, the company, on the off chance that he was thinking with his groin instead of his head... And Theo had ignored them all, the way he always had done throughout his hedonistic twenties, because he’d cared about nothing and no one but himself.
Nothing but himself and one curvy little blonde girl with deep blue eyes to rival the Aegean Sea itself. She’d had the widest, sweetest, most open smile he’d ever seen, and he’d lost himself in it. In her. And there had been nothing, it turned out, but a deceitful heart beneath all that sweet shine.
This, then, was his reward for his impetuousness. His penance. This humiliation of a marriage that he held on to only because he refused to give her the satisfaction of asking for a divorce, despite what she’d done to him and then thrown in his face so unapologetically. He refused to let her see how she’d destroyed him over the course of that long, rainy season on Santorini years ago.
It had been nearly four and a half years since