Clasping his cheeks, she pushed him back, stared at the storm gathering in his gaze. He wasn’t untouched by this. But it wasn’t enough. Nowhere near enough.
She was greedy, she wanted all of him.
“No.”
“Stay, bella.” Even now, he only commanded with that hard look in his eyes, even now, he held his heart locked away from her.
Even now, he scowled at her because she had dared to fall in love with him.
Smiling through the tears in her eyes, Clio shook her head. “I would have, a few hours ago. I would have danced with joy, thrown myself at you. But I can’t now. I don’t want your money, and I don’t want the little you offer of yourself. Have a nice life, Stefan. And thank you for teaching me my own worth.”
Without looking back, Clio stepped out of the tent and into the open grounds.
A thousand sounds and scents greeted her, but nothing could touch her past the audacious hope ringing through her that he would chase after her, that he would kiss her and hold her and tell her that everything would be fine. Tell her that he had made a colossal mistake and that he wanted her in his life.
That he wanted to be loved by her.
But he didn’t.
And the emptiness around her only made her realize what she wanted that much harder.
She wanted the Stefan who had admitted to having a wild, reckless thing for her.
She wanted the Stefan who admired her and respected her.
She wanted the Stefan who had been one of the warmest, most openhearted men she had ever met.
She wanted to lose herself in his arms and be the woman he lost his control over.
She wanted to be the woman that made him smile, laugh and she wanted to do it for years to come.
She wanted them to be friends, lovers and so much more. She wanted the contract ripped and burned, she wanted his millions and her penury to never come into the equation between them, in any form.
She wanted it to be just her and him and their love for each other.
Clio wanted all of him, every breath and every cell, every thought and every sigh, every kiss and every touch.
And the want was so deep, so raw that it was a physical ache in her gut. That want was so desperate that she shook all over, waves of pain splintering inside her.
But this time, she would not settle. She would not let a man, even the one who she loved with every breath, define what she was worthy of.
Because she deserved all of him.
* * *
Stefan sank to the divan, reeling under Clio’s angry accusations, reeling under the weight of her confession.
So in love with you…
Those words pierced him even as he recoiled at the fury that had been shining in her glittering gaze, even as he couldn’t believe the truth of it.
How could she love him? How could he begin to believe her when there was nothing to love, when he had given her nothing but pain?
How could she ruin everything by bringing that word between them?
He had no use for her love. He had nothing to give her back. And the one thing that he had wanted to give, the one gesture he had made because he cared about her, she had thrown in his face.
How could she let her claim destroy what they had?
He wanted to call it a dent to her pride, a tantrum she was throwing because he had hurt her with offering her money.
But Clio never threw tantrums and Clio didn’t have any fascination with his wealth.
Clio didn’t drop hints for gifts, Clio didn’t ask to be introduced to his powerful friends. Clio didn’t flirt with other men to make him jealous.
Clio didn’t dangle sex as a bargaining chip.
In only a few weeks, Clio had made him laugh more than he had in a decade. He had lived more and for the first time in years, he had made love to a woman instead of seeking physical release.
Clio was the farthest from what Serena had been.
Clio was Clio—generous, kind and vibrant. Clio was the first woman, other than his own mother, who cared about his happiness, who cared that he smiled.
Clio had walked through the fire of his distrust and Jackson’s treachery and emerged whole.
And he… Dio, he had treated her worse than he had treated any other woman in his life from the moment she had set foot in it. Had punished her for his own demons, put her through so much because of his own insecurities.
Because somehow, through her struggle with Jackson, through her struggles with herself, through her determination to remind him of what he had been once, Clio had become a mirror in which he saw what he had become.
The picture he saw of himself over the past few weeks, he despised it.
But it was too late.
He buried his head in hands and growled, a chasm of pain opening up in his gut. The tent reverberated with her words, her pain, with the rawness and purity of her emotions. With the darkness of his own poison, with his loneliness, with his utter desolation.
He had done just as Zayed as predicted. He had ruined the most wonderful thing that had come into his life, shattered any chance of happiness with his own hands.
All I wanted was one sentence that you wanted this to be real between us.
But he hadn’t been able to ask that small thing. He hadn’t been able to give her even a small part of him. He hadn’t been able to take the warmth and generosity and the wonder that was Clio.
He still couldn’t. He couldn’t take that step and open himself to pain and agony again.
Wasn’t that why he had offered her that settlement instead, even if he had realized it too late?
Even after all these years, even as he had found the perfect woman, the woman he had dreamed about his entire teenage years, the woman whom he would have loved for the rest of his life, he still couldn’t take that final step, couldn’t find the courage to be the man who laid out his heart.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ALMOST TWO MONTHS LATER, Stefan was in the midst of a meeting in his Hong Kong office when his laptop pinged. Still listening to his main accountant drone on and on about their Asian holdings, he looked at the screen and stilled.