The peace he had found on his estate, the rules he had set in place all his life, everything was shattered. He felt empty within and he hadn’t even known that he had something so precious.
It was as if Leah had breathed life into him, showed him what it was to laugh, love and live.
For days, he let himself remember every bleary moment from when his mother had left to when his father had died, and he grieved for Calista. Grieved for the innocence he had never had. For days, he sat in the study in his estate, wandered into Leah’s empty workroom.
And slowly, her words gained strength in him, shifted and morphed his very view of himself.
For the first time in my life, I lied, not for myself, but for you, Stavros. I lied to protect you, to spare you from this pain.
I lied because I…care about you. I lied because, somehow, you have given me the courage to live without fear, I lied because you made it impossible to not love you.
Leah loved him, she had protected him. When had anyone ever thought of him like that?
The Leah that wouldn’t leave him alone the night of Giannis’s death, the Leah that had so innocently and full of hope, asked him if he was happy, the Leah that had teased and aroused him with such stark, possessive need…that Leah who refused to let him deny what they both wanted, needed when he had worried that it was becoming an obsession, a madness, the Leah that had held him tightly, when in the aftermath of making love to her he had confided that he didn’t remember how his mother looked, the Leah that had believed in the sanctity of marriage…
That woman was worthy of a fight, was worthy of a man he could be.
She had made him love for the first time in his life, she made him care, had made him live for himself, made him want with such gnawing hunger.
Had given him a taste of happiness, of pain, of ache, of loss.
She had made him feel everything he had shied away from his whole life. And he wanted to live like that again. He couldn’t go back to being an automatic machine.
Shaking at the very chill in his bones, he leaned his forehead against the glass door looking out into the estate.
In a moment of utter desolation he had admitted to Giannis that night that he had been wrong about Leah, that he had ruined her life. Even facing death, Giannis had smiled, had said that Leah needed him, that he, Stavros, was a man worthy of her… Those words pushed through to the fore, crushing his self-doubt.
Maybe he hadn’t deserved Leah five years ago.
But now, facing his own incapability to love Calista as she had needed, and accepting that, despite his every effort, his parents had somehow damaged him, forgiving himself for not loving Calista as she had needed, he deserved Leah now.
He deserved to be happy, he deserved to think about himself after a lifetime of thinking about everyone else.
Suddenly, Stavros couldn’t live without telling Leah that, couldn’t bear that she was thousands of miles away. Not when he loved her so much.
HER COLLECTION AT the Independent Fashion Week in New York had gone better than Leah could have imagined in her wildest dreams. Her designs had been called modern, colorful, yet sophisticated. Just last week, with Helene’s advice, she had invested a load of money into creating a lookbook that incorporated line sheets, one that gave buyers and fashion magazine editors a view into her brand.
After a crazily hectic two weeks, she had returned to Athens. When she had knocked at Mrs. Kovlakis’s door and requested the keys to her old flat and the dragon had simply handed them over, she had been both shocked and relieved. One look at the news and she found Dmitri and Stavros and herself at the front and center of it.
Hiding and barely eating, she had slept for a week. All of a sudden, she would find herself awake and looking at her phone, before she realized she was waiting for his call.
Had he so thoroughly washed his hands of her? Had she truly meant nothing to him?
She had cried until she had been disgusted with herself, moped around the flat until one afternoon, Dmitri had almost broken the door down when she hadn’t heard his knocking.
He had taken her out to lunch, plied her with food until she had eaten enough for a month, inquiring if she needed anything.
Did he send you? she had asked, pitifully desperate.
No, he had said with unflinching honesty. You’ve truly proved yourself to him.
Words she would have embraced before now seemed like punishment.
At which point, she had cried and he had sighed and hugged her, and point-blank asked her if she meant to spend the rest of her hard-won freedom like a howling puppy, if she meant to spend the rest of it as the discarded wife of Stavros Sporades, hiding from the world.
Hating him and loving him for it, she had decided enough was enough. After fighting Stavros tooth and nail, she refused to let him win, refused to let herself become a shadow.
She had her whole life in front of her. She had decisions to make about where she would operate, about staff to hire, preparations to make for the winter collection, about her finances and how much of her inheritance she could invest in her business and how much she needed to save for a rainy day. She couldn’t live in some distant, unfamiliar corner of the world because Stavros was here.
The freedom to make her own choices, once she had begun, was heady, exhilarating.
More than one designer house approached her with offers to join them. Loath to compromise her creative vision, she refused all of them in a bold move.
Just as she finally embraced the fact that she was a shareholder in her grandfather’s textile companies, that she was part of his legacy.
She had walked into the legendary Katrakis offices in downtown Athens and attended her first board meeting, her heart threatening to rip out of her chest at the thought of facing Stavros.
That Stavros was absent and she was present created a stir that had made Dmitri smile wickedly. Whispers and innuendoes abounded large, about Dmitri, about Stavros, about her. And the worst of all, about the state of her marriage to Stavros.
It had taken everything she had possessed to get through the day. Especially after she received a message from Stavros’s assistant that he would like to meet her before she left on her trip to Milan the next day. The requisite paperwork would be sent to her lawyer if she could provide a name, she had been told.
Nausea rising in her throat, Leah had headed straight to the ladies’ room.
That was that then. He was going to divorce her. After five years, the bond between them would be broken. He would be free of her and she…of him. He would not be hers, even for a moment, ever again.
That night she went to bed, an ache in her gut.
She dreamed of him, intense, vivid dreams that woke her from restless sleep, breathing hard and aching, damp with need, inconsolable that he would never hold her again.
Violently furious that after demanding that she show him the real her, he had not believed the biggest truth she had ever told him.
He didn’t deserve her, she decided, the lie hollow to her own ears.
Leah arrived at Stavros’s office thirty minutes after ten, having finally fallen into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. Her head hurt, her muscles ached from having thrashed so much.
So when she grabbed the