She could see it stamped in the fascinating iron set of his harshly masculine jaw, could even feel it deep inside her own body, like a shiver. Like a seismic warning. As if she should count herself lucky indeed that they were separated by computer screens, the internet and some six thousand miles.
As if he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened if they were ever in the same room again, and Holly felt suspended in the thick, dark promises she could see in the furious heat he trained on her then, the glare of all that threat and power and fury, even after all this time.
What did you expect? that little voice inside of her that sounded a lot like her beloved father’s, God rest his soul, whispered then. He hates you. You made sure of that. That’s what happens when you leave.
She should know that better than most, after living through all those long, lonely years with her father after her mother’s defection when Holly had been a little girl. Her father wouldn’t have called how he’d mourned his wife’s betrayal hatred, of course. He’d have called it grief. Or holding a torch. But Holly had always felt it like a burning thing, changing their whole world. Charring what was left.
And now here she was, all these years later, staring at that same fire directed straight at her. In high-definition.
Theo lounged before her in a leather chair in a sleekly furnished office, his thick, dark hair looking disheveled and too long, the way it always had. He was more beautiful than she remembered him, and she remembered him as very nearly a god with all that lean, leashed power packed into his solid boxer’s form, as if he could have been a fighter had he been the son of a man with lower aspirations. He wore a crisp white shirt that strained to contain his corded, solid shoulders, that wonder of a chest and the tautly ridged abdomen she knew lay beneath. He looked powerful and furious and his own, special brand of lethal, and Holly hated herself all over again.
For what she’d done. For what she’d claimed she’d done. For the great big mess that was her whirlwind, ill-conceived, overwhelming marriage to this man and that big old dark hole in the center of everything that she’d come to realize was pure and nauseating regret. Greasy and enveloping, and so thick she truly believed it might choke her one of these days.
Though it never did. Not quite.
Instead, worse, she had to live with it.
She wanted to reach forward, through the screen, and test the heat of his smooth olive skin against her palms again. She wanted to run her fingers through his thick, dark hair and play with that hint of curl that had always made her silly with desire. She wanted to taste that full and talented mouth of his again, salt and fire, longing and need.
But there was no easy road here. Holly knew that. There was no way back to Theo that wouldn’t rip open old scars and make ancient wounds bleed fresh. That wouldn’t hurt, and badly. She’d been so terrified of becoming like her father that she’d become her mother instead, and she couldn’t live with that any longer. She couldn’t. She had to try to do something about it, no matter what.
Holly had thought she’d accepted how hard this was going to be already—but that had been before she’d seen him again. Somehow, the years had dulled him in her memory. Dimmed him.
Seeing him again, even through a screen, was as blinding as the first time she’d laid eyes on him. In that tiny restaurant in Santorini where she’d been sipping an afternoon coffee, unaware that her entire life had been set to collide with his when he’d shouldered his way inside and claimed the table next to hers.
Like a comet, she’d thought then, even on a sun-drenched Greek island with nothing but dizzying blue and whitewashed walls on all sides and then this man in the middle of it all, like a dream come to startling and powerfully sexy life...
“Holly.”
His voice tore into her, dark and impatient and yet still, that little lilt to her name that made her whole body shimmer into instant, almost painful awareness. She was glad he couldn’t see the way she tensed in her seat in automatic reaction, her legs going tight as she dug her toes into the floor beneath her desk. Or that bright little light inside she knew was the most dangerous, most doomed, thing of all. Hope.
“I don’t have time for this today. And even if I did, I have nothing to say to you.” His hard mouth moved into some lethal approximation of a smile, and her curse was, it made him no less attractive to her. Quite the opposite. “Nothing polite, that is.”
It was so tempting to simply lose herself in him, or to let herself break down and start telling the truths she already knew he wouldn’t believe, not when she’d spent these long years trying so hard to force him to let her go by any means possible. She’d made him detest her, if not release her. She had to remember the game she needed to play here or she’d lose before she started.
So Holly smiled at him. Not the way she once had, when she hadn’t had the faintest shred of self-preservation in her body, when she hadn’t been able to help herself from falling into him and for him like the proverbial ton of bricks, her innocence indistinguishable from her stupidity, to her recollection. But the way she’d perfected in these past few lonely years, the smile that made it possible to play the role she’d created for herself out of the ashes of the marriage she’d burned to the ground with her lies. The role she’d thought would make it so simple for him to wash his hands of her, to discard her, to divorce her and free them both.
She’d been wrong about that, too. She’d finally, painfully, faced the fact that she’d been wrong about everything, and that she’d done nothing here but reenact her own painful history. But he wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. He would think it was nothing more than another game, and he’d made it clear he wouldn’t play them with her, hadn’t he? Perfectly, coldly clear.
Which meant she had no choice but to play one last game with him, this one with the highest stakes of all.
“Busy?” she asked, letting her drawl take on a life of its own, a Texan specialty. “Doing what, exactly? Still playing the crown prince in your daddy’s great big kingdom?”
Theo’s expression went from furious to something like thunderstruck, then back to a hardness that should have left her in tatters. Maybe it did. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t tell the difference any longer.
“I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy, but there was no mistaking the threat beneath it. “I didn’t realize it was time for our long-overdue conversation regarding each other’s character flaws. Are you certain you’re ready for that?”
“Blah blah blah,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving a hand dismissively, wishing she felt even a tiny bit that relaxed or casual. “Just call me a whore already, Theo. You’ve been dancing around it for almost four years now.”
THEO’S DARK EYES blazed to a molten fury and it amazed Holly that he could still make her lose her breath, that easily. Even when he thought so little of her.
And she was such a fool—because a sane woman, Holly knew, having done what she’d done, having lied so extravagantly in order to escape this man the only way she’d thought she could, would not have looked at that flare of fury in his dark eyes and read it as some sliver of hope for the future she’d torpedoed herself.
Because fury wasn’t the same thing as indifference. Fury meant he still felt something for her, no matter how twisted and painful.
But then, Holly was aware that a sane woman wouldn’t have gone ahead and married the dark Greek lover who’d swept her up in a kind of sensual tornado that summer, either, stealing her innocence and her heart and her good sense along with it. So maybe sane wasn’t in the ballpark here.
Maybe she should stop pretending it had ever been a possibility