Bought for Her Innocence(28)

If she loved him, wouldn’t she want to spend her life with him?

He finished his coffee and turned toward the door. To hell with civilizing himself.

She was the one person in the world who knew what he was beneath the mask he showed the world. She hadn’t even relented until he had showed himself to her. Had goaded him, challenged him...had made him feel so much again.

There was no way he was just letting her walk away from this.

He had almost reached the door when Stavros spoke. “She’s not here, Dmitri.”

The words hit Dmitri as if they were fists he couldn’t evade. His breath knocked out of him. He didn’t think, even for an infinitesimal second, that Stavros might be talking about Leah; he couldn’t delude himself even for a second that his entire world hadn’t just cracked under his very feet.

And fury came to his aid, filling the hollowness in his gut. “What do you mean she left?”

“Leah said Jasmine was waiting for her when she came down. That she begged her to help her leave. That she couldn’t stay another minute here. So I had the jet readied and she left.”

His gut dropped. “You let her go back to that pit that she calls home?”

“Jasmine said she never wanted to go back there, asked Leah if she had a job for her, even carrying coffee back and forth at her factory. Since she has the screen test in two days, Leah insisted that she stay at her old flat in Athens for a little while. She went with her because Jasmine looked as if she was barely keeping it together.”

Dmitri exhaled a relieved breath, once again eternally glad that Leah and Stavros had such generous hearts.

And the relief was followed by a cavern of longing ripping open in his gut.

He slid into the chair and buried his head in his hands. He should be glad she was gone, shouldn’t he? If she was safe, why didn’t the weight on his chest lift?

When had wanting to keep her safe changed to missing her as if he had lost a vital part of himself?

If this was what it felt like to lose Jasmine after a mere matter of weeks, what would it feel like after a month, a year or a decade of the marriage he had proposed? What would it feel like to lose her forever, to become the man who had pushed her into losing herself?

And suddenly, he understood her panic. He understood how hard he had made it for her, how strong she was to have walked away.

He realized the truth in her words. It had not been about protecting her at all, just as she had said.

It had all been about him. About pacifying his guilt, about his selfish needs, about keeping her in his life, about taking everything she gave without reserve but giving nothing of himself.

Was that what he had always done? Had the gut-wrenching pain of his mother’s death made him a self-fulfilling prophecy, a man who only chose the shallowest of relationships, the most ephemeral of things to fill his life?

Could he reach for more now? Could he risk that pain, knowing that he might have lost his chance with Jasmine? Wouldn’t that pain still be better than this emptiness?

He felt Stavros’s arm on his shoulder, feeling as though nothing would ever touch him again. “I thought you would be angry with me for interfering,” Stavros said softly, as if he knew how raw Dmitri felt inside. “I thought you would come at me with your fists.”

But then, nothing in the world had ever laid him this low.

Breathing through a throat rough with emotion, Dmitri shook his head. “Because you did what I was unable to do and cared enough about what she wants? I was determined to not let the past matter, Stavros. I was determined that it wouldn’t leave a mark on me. And yet...”

“It is a part of you, Dmitri.”

“I hurt her and I don’t know how to fix it now. I don’t know how to tell her that I need her in my life, and not for all the reasons I made her believe.

“Theos, everything we have built, everything I told myself I needed to fill my life, they mean nothing to me if she’s not there.”

Stavros squeezed his shoulder and left without another word. As if he understood, for once, that there was nothing he could do to help Dmitri.

Long after noon gave way to dusk, Dmitri sat there in that vast kitchen in that house that Giannis had given to him, where he had learned to be civilized, where he had learned that he didn’t have to live with pain, where he had learned that not all men were alcoholic, out-of-control cowards like his father. Where he had learned that he could be more than the product of his genes and his father’s abuse.

But more than anything else, Giannis had tried so hard to give Dmitri back his self-worth. Suddenly, Dmitri was filled with purpose, hope and a yearning.

If he had to spend the rest of his life waiting for Jasmine, proving to Jasmine that he needed her in his life, that he absolutely couldn’t breathe for knowing that she was somewhere in the world and not his...

He would do it. He would show her his heart; he would show her that his life was empty without her.

* * *

Fashion photographers, Jasmine discovered to her utter shock over the next few weeks, were apparently a whole other species who thought they didn’t have to follow the dictates of polite society.

One week into her new career and she felt as though she had been steamrolled, turned inside out for everyone to see.

Maybe it was that she had gotten used to seeing the very obvious appreciation and lust in her customers’ eyes when she had taken the stage at the nightclub, even though she’d hated it at that time. Or maybe because, apparently, she was the twenty-three-year-old village idiot, who knew nothing about how the fashion industry worked, amidst models, both men and women, younger and more experienced than her.

That first week after she had left Dmitri—because her whole life was now clearly demarcated by that one event, before Dmitri and after Dmitri, as if nothing else could even come close to holding significance in her life—had been a seamless blur of outward activity, more than she had seen in the past five years of her life, and a growing sense of stillness within.

She found herself asking the same question during the strangest moments during the day.

Had she thrown away her only chance at life with the man she adored in the name of weakness? Had she traded the happiness of at least a few days for the emptiness in her gut?

The agency had loved her after the screen test, calling her their next big find. With help from Stavros’s lawyer, without whom she would have signed away her entire life, she signed a very tight, time-limited exclusive contract with the agency.

Sick of moping around the flat while she waited, she had made a habit of visiting Leah every day at her factory after a rigorous workout at the gym next door to keep in shape, and really, to keep the ever-gnawing void in her stomach at bay.

There wasn’t a minute that she didn’t think about Dmitri, a day where she felt like she would ever be normal again.

It had been a month of torture, as she started calling it.

Because while she had been crying herself to sleep every night, Dmitri, it seemed, was taking the media and the world by storm.

It had begun when she had heard that the huge charity event organized by Anya Ivanova, the model he had helped, had sported his custom-designed Bugatti bike.

The next week had been an expose about his yacht, which apparently was currently being bought by a Russian oil billionaire. And the most shocking thing of all was when a courier had arrived at her doorstep one evening, following a call from Dmitri’s executive assistant, to pick up the diamond set he had gifted her and she had never worn.

Then came another lengthy phone call with his lawyer about setting up steps for her to pay off her debt to him. Something she had insisted on.

What was he doing? she wondered, going half-mad. Was he moving? Desperate to understand what he was up to, she spent countless hours trawling luxury real estate websites to see if he had put Giannis’s beautiful estate also up for sale.

But not once had she heard anything from him, even indirectly through Leah, whom she saw regularly.

Had he decided that he had had an easy escape?

Then came her first client, a lifesaver in so many ways.

In the first week of the photo shoot as the new face of a small Italian shoe company, she had learned what a stressful, hardworking slog it was. Especially if it was something you fell into as an escape from throwing yourself at the man who didn’t love you.

Her first shoot with the photographer, apparently a Spanish genius called Eduardo de Cervantes, had been the worst. Eduardo possessed no polish like Gaspard had, whatever monster he was in his personal life, kept losing his temper when she couldn’t get a pose or expression right, and at the end of the longest three hours of her life, had called the whole shoot utterly useless and walked away, spewing curses in Spanish.

If she had been the type to burst into tears, that moment had been it. But somehow, or maybe because her heart felt as if it was already encased in ice, she had made it through it without turning into a puddle.

They had finally had a breakthrough on the third day when he had once again snarled at her about not having a sensuous bone in her body and she, smarting about the one thing she was good at, had grabbed his hand, marched him over to the next floor where she had heard they had been shooting a firemen-themed calendar, had then proceeded to show her particular talent with a pole.

It had been quite the glorious thing to see Eduardo’s jaw hit his chest. And the transformation in his demeanor and her response to it had been thrilling. Suddenly, it was as if he knew what to say to her, how to tease her into a pose, how to make her pout, and she’d eased into the rapport they’d suddenly had going, put her trust in him.