“What if I tell you that housekeeping is not a criterion I’ll count?”
Desperation coated her throat. “I…I’m not comfortable with others touching my personal stuff.”
“Neither am I about welcoming you to my estate…” With his hand at her elbow, he made it imperative for her to stand up. “I won’t touch anything. You can pack and I’ll supervise.”
“You’ll lord it over me, you mean?” she said, using sarcasm to hide the trembling beneath.
In all the years she had known him, he had, in turns, aggravated her, captivated her and in the end, had ended up ruling over her life. And that was when there was no direct relationship between them.
How was she supposed to survive through three months of living with him?
SHE HAD BEEN lying blatantly, of course.
Stavros didn’t know what shocked him more. The fact that she would tell such a white lie about something so trivial or the reality of her lifeless, joyless flat.
It was as if she had intentionally designed herself a sterile prison cell, had punished herself.
Everything inside him recoiled that she had lived like this for five years. Why? Why live as though she was punishing herself when she had argued with him so furiously that she wanted it to end?
Had Calista’s death scared her so much? Had it really changed her?
There was not a single thing out of place in the living room, or the small kitchen, or in the glimpse he had caught of her bedroom. She had everything she required.
The cupboards were full of silverware; a plasma television adorned the wall in the living room, yet was coated with five layers of dust.
There were no decorative items, no knickknacks. Just the bare essentials wherever he looked. The walls were a pristine white exactly as he had remembered from five years ago, when he had inspected the building and the flat, a week after they had married.
It screamed of loneliness, detachment.
Leah was a firestorm and it seemed only a ghost of that girl lived here.
The first year and a few months into the second after she had come to live here, he had had things delivered to her. Boxes of clothes and shoes, handbags and other accessories Helene had told him a young woman would require. He had even sent her things that had once belonged to her mother, found when he and Dmitri had gone through Giannis’s old estate after his heart attack…
But she had sent every box back, stubbornly refusing to accept any of it, and so he had stopped trying. Even the box with her mother’s things.
He had, conveniently, shrugged off his duty toward her. To the point of ignoring her very existence.
His gut twisting into a tight, unforgiving knot, he followed her into her bedroom. There was a nightstand next to the bed. A tissue box, some pencils and loose paper, and a tiny photograph of her father, he assumed from the same brown eyes, were on it.
Stretching on her toes, she pulled a bag out of her closet that was already half full. Turned around and stilled as he stayed at the entrance.
“I have someone bringing up boxes. Not that it seems you need any.”
“The work room has lots of stuff I need.”
He nodded and waited, his thoughts in an unprecedented jumble.
“I don’t have to stay in your house for this…this test of yours, Stavros. I could just continue here.”
He prowled into the small room, feeling on edge. He was angry at himself, he realized slowly. And he was angry at her. It was irrational, and yet he couldn’t loosen its grip over him.
“Why not?” The taunt in his words shamed him.
The brown of her eyes transforming into a dazzling color, she glared at him. Her pulse at the neck fluttered belying the anger in her eyes. “Because I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“You can’t stand me, for sins I know and some I don’t. And I…you’re arrogant, you’re a hypocrite and I…” she said with that standard animosity she seemed to reserve especially for him. Yet he heard the quiver beneath those words.
She was trying so hard to hide her awareness of him. So hard to fight it.
The Leah that he knew, that he thought he had known, had never fought anything she felt. Gave in to every juvenile urge, every self-serving impulse until she crashed and burned.
And had dragged Calista down with her.
This effort now…it sparked a curious fire in him just as much as the fluttering pulse at her neck did.
He came to her bed and leaned against it, blocking her. “So that you could continue to live in this hole like some damned martyr?”
A silk skirt in hand, she turned that gaze to him again. “It is what you chose for me.”
“I never meant for you to live like a prisoner. I sent you everything you needed.”
“To do what with?” Throwing the skirt and a couple more things into the bag, she zipped it up vehemently. “I have no friends, Stavros. No family…”
“You rejected the one you have for years. You still do,” he couldn’t help but point out, a gnawing frustration in his gut.
She didn’t even flinch as she continued. “Even the staff at the fashion house, people I have been working with for five years, they treat me with this—” he saw her swallow and a wave of tenderness, shocking and acute, rose inside him “—nauseating combination of dislike and affected regard.
“I don’t know if they think my designs are really good or if they are just saying that because I’m Leah Sporades, the wife of the textile magnate of Greece, a shame he hides from the world.
“You married me even though you despised the sight of me. You…you kissed me in front of the media that day for the express purpose of warning away my friends, the entire world. You might as well have branded me like they do livestock.”
“Leah—”
“No, Stavros…I was nineteen. I lost the one friend I had, Giannis had just had a heart attack…”
“Whom you still refuse to see,” he cut in.
Do not give up on my Leah, Stavros. Please…she is very fragile…
Fragile was the last thing he had ever thought of Leah…She had barely ever sat down for five minutes with him, yet even surrounded by tubes and equipment, she’d been all Giannis could think about.
Every inch of her slender frame vibrating with anger and pain, she clutched the lapels of his shirt. “…and in the next two days, you took my entire world away from me. You locked me up here and promptly forgot about me.
“Did you ever feel even an ounce of shame that you coerced a nineteen-year-old into marriage?”
Stavros felt her words dig into him like the serrated edge of a blade, drawing blood.
For five years, he had ignored her very existence, had let her live like this, had informed Giannis again and again that Leah was well…
How had he committed such an unforgivable mistake?
“Answer me.”
“No, I don’t regret it. I would have done anything to save you from that drug-induced-drink-all-night-reckless-party