“I want to see you,” she said, before he could cut her off. Before she lost herself in these tiny little moments and the daydreams that went with them and completely forgot why she was doing this. Because she didn’t need him to tell her that he wouldn’t answer a call like this again. She knew it.
Theo shifted in his chair then, in a way that suggested he was preparing for a fight, those dark eyes seeming to laser into her. He seemed bigger, suddenly. Darker. “You’re seeing me right now. Witness the glory of technology. And my surpassing joy.”
“In person.”
He laughed, a harsh scrape of sound that lodged in places it shouldn’t. “No.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled again, even more icily, because this was how she had to play this. No matter how tired she was of it or how sick it made her. “That wasn’t a request. Did it sound like one?”
“It wouldn’t matter if it was a formal summons from God himself,” Theo remarked, almost idly, but she could see his expression and knew there wasn’t anything idle about this man any longer. Had she done that, too? “The answer is still no.”
“Theo.” She shook her head as if he disappointed her, hiding her clenched hands in her lap, out of sight. “There’s no reason we can’t pretend to be civilized. Some things require a face-to-face meeting whether you want to admit it or not. You don’t want to make me do this on a video call, do you?”
“It has been perfectly clear to me and to most of the world, I’d imagine, that I can’t make you do anything,” he replied in that lethally soft tone that sent spears of ice down the length of her spine and a hot curl of shame deep into her belly. “Certainly not behave as a wife should. You couldn’t even manage to remain faithful to me for six short months. What, pray, could I possibly make you do now?”
Holly didn’t flinch. How could she, when she’d told that lie to his face? Deliberately and with a full understanding of what would happen once she did? She was all too aware she’d brought this on herself.
“I want a divorce,” she said now. Simply and distinctly.
As if it were true.
“My answer is the same as it has ever been,” he replied in the same cool tone with all that rampaging fire beneath it. “You can’t have one. Is that the reason for all this theater today? You could have spared us both. In future, I suggest you do.”
“We don’t have much of a future left, is the thing,” she told him then, as his hand moved toward his screen again. Again, he stopped. When he only glared at her, she summoned that hard-edged smile again and aimed it at him as if this was all somehow amusing to her. As if she really was the woman she’d pretended to be these past four years. The woman, she knew, he fully believed she was. “I know that we’ve had fun these past few years—”
“Is that what they call it in Texas?” he asked, his voice even softer but no less vicious. “That is not the word I would choose for any of this.”
“—playing all these games, scoring points, all this tug-of-war nonsense.” She shrugged. “But all good things come to an end, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not giving you a divorce, Holly. I don’t care what argument you trot out. And, as I believe I’ve made perfectly clear with your generous monthly allowance and the life you live without any interference from me, I really don’t care what you do. Or who.”
“So you say,” she murmured.
But she didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe him. A harsh, predatory light flared in his eyes then, turning them volcanic with that edgy fury of his, making Holly’s heart jolt and then catch inside her chest. Once again, she chose to call that hope.
“The only thing I will not give you is your freedom.”
“And why is that?”
“Because it is the only thing I know you want, agapi mou,” he said, his voice harsh and cold, especially when he called her my love. Holly couldn’t let herself dwell on the way the endearment sounded now, when he didn’t mean it at all. Not when she was sure they could both remember too well how he’d sounded when he’d meant it with every last shred of his heart, his soul. Not now, while he could watch her reactions. “Aside from my money, of course.”
“Goodness,” she drawled, and put a theatric hand to her chest, because that was the best way to cover the sensation of it being ripped straight out from behind her ribs and then stamped on. She ought to be used to that by now, having done it herself the first time. “So possessive, Theo. Be still my heart. I’m tempted to believe you still have feelings for me.”
“I don’t.” His voice was a growl. “I told you this four years ago, and I meant it. Spend my money. Embarrass me. I don’t care. You can have anything you want except a divorce. That’s not negotiable. If I have to live with this marriage, with the unfortunate choices of our tattered past, so do you.”
“Except you’ve run out of time.” She shrugged when his glare intensified. “That’s Greek law, Theo.” She made a show of picking up a piece of paper on her desk and reading from it, though she didn’t have to read the words there. She knew them by heart. “Divorce is granted in cases of marital breakdown. And if the spouses have been separated for at least four years there is the presumption of that breakdown, regardless of whether or not you’d prefer to continue torturing me across whole decades.”
“We are not separated. You left.” His dark gaze licked over her, fire and fury, and what was wrong with her that she felt it echo within her—as if it was some kind of caress? “You can always return to me, if you are feeling unaccountably brave. Or foolish. I’ve told you this for years.”
Dared her, more like. Come back and face your sins, he’d told her years ago, a dark and terrible promise of retribution in his low voice. Who knows? Perhaps I am more merciful than I appear.
But they both knew better than that.
“The four years is the sticking point, I’m afraid.” Holly forced herself to hold that penetrating gaze of his, reminding herself that this was the easy part. That this would all be much, much harder if she got what she wanted and they did this face-to-face. If she’d been any good at dealing with this man in person, after all, if she’d been able to say what she felt instead of running away, none of this would have happened. “All I have to do is prove that we’ve been continuously apart for all that time, which we have and which has been exhaustively documented in at least three different tabloids, and then it won’t matter what else happened between us...”
“If you spend your days telling yourself fairy tales about how you were the victim in this, I certainly can’t stop you.” His voice was made of granite then, and it landed on her, hard. “But on the occasions that you speak to me of our marriage, and I pray they remain rare, let’s not hide in all the vague asides about ‘what else happened.’” He leaned closer to the screen, his beautiful face harder than before, as if it was carved from the same stone as that harsh voice he used. “You happened. You are a liar. You deceived me from the start and then, when that was not enough for you, you slept with another man and threw it in my face. Then you left me under cover of night rather than deal with what you did, and you’ve trotted about the world happily spending my money ever since. I won’t call you a whore, as I have some respect for the oldest profession in the world. At least it is an honest transaction. You are nothing like honest. You are far lower than any whore, Holly. And you offend me in every possible way.”
And she merely smiled back at him, pretending that wasn’t one mortal blow after another. Pretending she could block out the disgust in his voice, the contempt on his face. Telling herself this would all be worth it in the end, that there was no point defending herself until they were in the same room again. Until she could see if it was still the same—that brilliant, soaring comet. That