Which was the real Leah?
“He was in a foul temper because I came away with you without taking his advice. Not knowing how autocratic you can be, he thinks I gave in too easily.”
Stavros wanted to figure her out, put her in a category and move on with life. He didn’t want this curiosity, didn’t know how to arrest this indulgent self-awareness that she incited in him.
“I think he sees his piece of pie from your fortune dwindling away.”
She walked around the table like a cornered prey. “Because he befriended me with nothing but an eye toward what I’m worth?”
“Yes. Your fortune always attracts those kinds of men.”
A sigh escaped her, but she wasn’t spitting in fury as he had imagined. As if he were the despot she could hate again. “And of course, you know everyone and their intentions best.”
“No, I know Philip Cosgrove better than you do. He has had two broken engagements—one with an American candy heiress and the other with a princess from a minor South American nation. He has also been having an affair with a client.”
Hands on hips, she looked like a wildcat. “You had him investigated?”
“You should know the truth about him.”
“Truth about his personal life? He’s a friend and my lawyer, Stavros. Not my lover. If he was going to be one, I’m sure he would have volunteered that information. And even if he didn’t, it’s my decision to make.”
The thought of Leah with any man…he wasn’t prepared to ponder his reaction to that. “Now you know what decision to make.”
“About whether I want to screw him or not?” she said crudely, even as color darkened her cheeks. “You don’t have the right to police me on who I sleep with.”
“Discussing my rights and privileges when it comes to you is not a conversation you will like, agape mou.”
“No, I won’t. Because you’re a hypocrite. Do you tell your lovers that you have a wife you hide as if she were a stain on the very fabric of your life, Stavros?” Her fingers clutched his hand and pulled it up, a startling tremble in it. The contact jolted through him. “Do you take it off when you undress your lover? Do you—”
“I don’t have to tell them anything,” he whispered, dragging her against him. She was stiff against him, yet just the drag of her body set his muscles curling with need.
Ever since she had entered his life, there had been no escape from the shackles his own sense of honor bound him with.
Strange then that he had resented it and fought it for so long.
Was it because, as he had always known, Leah would never be the kind of wife he had imagined for himself—someone calm and dependable like Helene? Even then, had he known that she would incite him to this kind of reckless, unwise need?
“Anyone who’s someone knows I have a wife. Which also means I don’t have to fend off women with marriage on their mind…”
She stared, unblinking. Her nostrils flared. “You’re…disgusting.”
It was addictive to play her own game with her, so compelling to watch the different expressions pass through her eyes. In that moment, there were no lies she could tell him. In that moment, the connection between them was as explosive and destructive as the wildfire that had wrecked through the surrounding acreage a few years ago.
A fire that was going to need feeding soon if he didn’t it to want it to consume him, as it had already begun to…if he didn’t want to lose all sense of right and wrong.
And what was wrong with wanting his own wife in his bed? Maybe if he gave in to the fire, he could function normally again.
“You wanted to know,” he goaded her.
“No, I didn’t. I was just trying to make a point.”
“You sounded like a nagging, jealous wife. Just what I wanted my marriage to be.”
All color fled from her face, leaving her gaze stricken. Tears pooled in her eyes. And the sight of those big brown eyes brimming with moisture punched him in the gut.
“Theos, Leah—”
“I hate you. I hate that you’re keeping me here. I hate that you have so much power over my life and that you use it at every turn to put me in the wrong. And I’m such a pathetic coward that I still stand here, day after day, hoping that you will change your mind. I forget that all you want is to punish me, and yourself, for what happened to Calista.
“That’s all this is, isn’t it? Duty, righting a wrong…nothing touches you beyond that.”
She cast another desperate glance at him, swiped her hands roughly over her eyes and walked away.
Her words sliced at Stavros rendering everything she said about him a lie.
It did hurt, he realized with a strange new awareness. What she said about him mattered because he hadn’t meant to hurt her today. Christos, he had never meant to hurt Leah.
He had been powerless about her influence on Calista, he had despised her willful rejection of Giannis’s love, he had resented that she had sealed his fate the moment she had walked into his life but he had never meant to hurt her.
Not even the day when he had spoken his vows to her utterly petrified form.
Yet, it seemed it was all he had ever done.
That Leah could be vulnerable when it came to him, instead of making him powerful, felt like a curse.
Giannis had saved him from a life of misery and poverty and yawning emptiness and all he had done in return was make his granddaughter’s life miserable.
He wouldn’t forsake his duty, but neither did he want to hurt Leah anymore.
Leah leaned against the wall in her workroom, shame ringing in her ears. She couldn’t believe she had betrayed herself like that. She didn’t even care that he had investigated Philip or about what he had found.
But when he had called her a nagging, jealous wife, it was as if she could see their future like that…as if he would never see her true self. As if he would never know the real her.
Standing up, she reached for a jug of water. Poured herself a tall drink and guzzled it down.
It couldn’t matter this much, not when she would be gone soon.
She couldn’t be so vulnerable to him, couldn’t get so emotional. The only way to accomplish that was to accept him this way. He would watch her, hover over her, dictate her life forever, if she wasn’t careful now.
She would give up a little now for the long run.
It wasn’t as if the news of Philip’s past engagements affected her.
For as long as she had understood herself, only one man had always stubbornly occupied the space in her head. And still, only one man could set her heart racing, only one man could make her hate herself that she wasn’t smarter or calmer or even stronger, that she wasn’t a match for him in any way.
For the next week, Leah barely slept. The retail buyer, Mrs. DuPont, set up an appointment to see what Leah had for her so far. The conversation that followed, where Leah explained to her that she was now living at Stavros’s estate and her reaction to the fact that she was that Textile Magnate’s wife, had been extremely awkward. As if suddenly Leah’s worth as a designer