Every feature on his face was taut but his eyes were hard. ‘If you’re so determined to go, then go. Take the time to think. When you get back we can discuss this like rational adults and find a way to thrash out a marriage that suits us both.’
‘There’s no way thrashing anything out will change my mind. We’re over.’
He got back to his feet and strolled past her and into the spare room. His room. He’d never wanted to share hers. He shut the door behind him with a slam.
Blinking back tears which served no useful purpose other than to blind her, Alessandra scraped her hair into a tight ponytail, carried her suitcase into the living area and quickly gathered her work stuff together.
Dio, Dio, Dio, get me out of here before he comes back out. Please, before my strength deserts me and I throw myself at his feet and beg for his love.
She left the building and walked straight into a media scrum.
Dozens of paparazzi swarmed her, closing in, leaving her trapped between them and the door she had already closed.
‘Alessandra, when is the baby due?’
‘Alessandra, how do you feel about becoming a mother?’
‘Alessandra, was the baby planned?’
She never got the chance even to think of a response or a way to escape. The door behind her flew open with such force she lost her footing. Were it not for the strong arms there to catch her, she would surely have fallen. As it was, Christian gathered her to him, protecting her with his strength, and marched her and her luggage deftly through the mob and into the back of the waiting cab.
Her last glimpse of him was when he tapped the top of the car to indicate the driver should leave, turned on his heel and marched back through the swarm, parting it as if he were Moses and they were the Red Sea.
Christian poured himself another bourbon.
He should check himself into a hotel and out of Alessandra’s apartment. She’d spelt out in no uncertain terms that this was her home. Not theirs. His homes weren’t enough for her.
He wasn’t enough.
Did it really matter if they divorced? He’d still have his legal rights with regard to their baby. He would still be a father. Alessandra would never deny him access; that he knew with as deep a certainty as he knew anything. She would do the right thing by all of them.
So why did it feel as if his world had toppled upside down?
And why did he feel so full and nauseous?
He finished his drink and poured another. The bottle was now empty.
Yes. Time to leave.
The freedom and space he’d always cherished so much but had gladly sacrificed for his unborn baby was his again to do with as he pleased.
Under normal circumstances he would hunt down Rocco, Stefan or Zayed and talk them into a night out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Not for any of them. Rocco would sooner spit on him than see him. Stefan had recently shocked them all by marrying Clio—he hadn’t seen that coming—while Zayed was spending increasing time in Gazbiyaa, preparing to take over the throne.
All their lives were changing.
He went to grab his briefcase, which he’d left by Alessandra’s corner office. Instead of picking it up and leaving, he found himself sitting at her desk, flipping through the portfolios of her work.
As much as he admired all her work, it was their wedding album he spent the most time looking through. These were the unofficial ones taken by Alessandra, a timeline from the start of their wedding week, when their first guests had arrived, right up to the moment they’d got on the dance floor for the Kalamatianos. His lips quirked to see a picture of a particularly beautiful but notoriously moody actress smiling for the camera with something black in her teeth.
His heart jolted when he turned the page over to find a montage of photos of the same face. All different angles, all different moods: some smiling, others distant, a couple frowning… One in particular held his attention. The face was staring directly into the camera, a wide, relaxed grin on the face, a soft yet suggestive look in the eyes, as if the person wanted nothing more than to take the photographer to a private room and make love to them.
Not have sex.
Make love.
The subject of the photographs was him.
Christian pulled up outside Villa Mondelli. Turning off the engine, he stared at it in the same way he had stared at it as a poor eighteen-year-old boy on the cusp of becoming a man. He’d seen lavish splendour before, had walked past the mansions in the most affluent parts of Athens vowing that, one day, he too would live in a home like these. Villa Mondelli was the first of that particular type he’d actually been invited into. Not only invited to cross the threshold but to stay there for a week—and many more weeks later on throughout his life, but of course at the time he wasn’t to know that. The Mondellis had welcomed him, Stefan and Zayed into their home and treated him as if he were their equal, as if he were more than a dirt-poor gutter rat raised by a single woman with callused hands.
Now, fourteen years later, with homes every bit as opulent as the villa and wealth beyond his dreams, he still felt that same tug in his heart. But this tug was for Alessandra.
When he’d first visited he’d been full of envy for the people who lived there, brought up with such easy wealth. Or so it had seemed to his eyes.
Alessandra had lived in this house almost her whole life, brought here when her father had lost his own house and abdicated responsibility for his children onto his own father. Alessandra had been a baby. She’d grown up feeling responsible for her mother’s death, shunned by her father and raised by an often austere man who’d thought his child-rearing days long finished with. Her only source of love had been her older brother whom, despite all her grumbles at his interfering, she worshipped. For much of Alessandra’s life in this home, that same brother had been absent, away in the US studying, graduating to become a workaholic.
More often than not, her only company in this vast house were the staff, people sharing a roof with her because they were paid to.
All the envy he’d felt fourteen years ago had gone, replaced with the sad knowledge that even the richest of people could lead the poorest of lives.
Look at him. He, Christian Markos, was now regarded as one of the richest men in the world. He had all the wealth and all the trappings such wealth brought, but in his heart he was still poor.
It was only now, at the age of thirty-two, that he’d discovered the path to true richness.
He hadn’t even placed a foot on the bottom step when Rocco answered the door.
Christian looked up at him. ‘I’m here to see Alessandra.’ He hadn’t seen her in a fortnight. They’d exchanged a couple of text messages. She’d agreed to meet him in Milan for her next obstetrician appointment, but until then she wanted some space.
He’d needed space too, to get his head together. To get his heart together.
Rocco looked him up and down. ‘And what if she doesn’t want to see you?’
‘Has she said that?’ A puff of relief escaped from him. His hunch had been right. For all Alessandra’s proclamations that she’d rather live in a convent than stay with her brother, this was the first place Christian had looked when she’d failed to return to her apartment after her Tokyo trip.
He’d