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.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
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 handle and pushed the door open, she was feeling particularly bloodthirsty, as he put it once.
There was no one in his office room. Her heels clicking on the marble floor, she walked around. Her nape prickled and she turned.
Standing at the entrance to his private suite, Stavros studied her.
He looked as he always did, arrogant, implacable, larger than life, except for the haunted look in his eyes. He wore jeans that molded those powerful thighs and a gray shirt that stretched against the muscled expanse of his chest.
He was so achingly gorgeous, so painfully beautiful that her throat closed up. She just stared at him hungrily for several minutes.
“I found the land you were looking at to build a factory.”
Leah flinched at the sight of him, at his raspy voice, at his blank expression. That was the first thing he said to her? Not even hello?
“I don’t need your help,” she said flippantly. “Where are your lawyers?”
“We don’t need them.”
“Then why did you summon me here? Why not just sign the papers and be done with it? Or have you gotten addicted to me begging you for things like cash, sex and the minimum courtesy that you believe me?”
Something slumberous glinted in his gaze. “I don’t remember you begging me for sex.”
“Maybe because it held no meaning to you except for relief after five years of...” He prowled toward her with such dangerous intent that she stopped talking.
“I remember every moment, pethi mou. I just don’t have a memory of you begging me for it. All those nights, and days, not once.” A dark current tinged his words as if he was very much fantasizing the prospect of it now. “You teased me, you taunted me, you seduced me...and I just gave in every time, your willing slave.”
“I’m leaving,” she said, his strange mood making her weak everywhere.
He blocked her way. “Dmitri told me that you attended the board meeting. That you caused quite a stir. A walking powerhouse, that’s what he called you.”
She sent a silent thanks to Dmitri for hiding the ugly crying from Stavros.
“Are you surprised? I will not slink away from what is mine like a coward anymore. I will sit on the Katrakis board, I will launch my label from Athens. I will not hide as if the fiasco of our marriage is my fault.
“I won’t let you browbeat me into anything I don’t want to do ever again.”
He looked tortured, his mouth pinched. “Forcing you to marry me was the biggest mistake I have ever made, thee mou. I can’t believe—”
She had no idea that she had thrown herself at him. That with her weight and fists she had pushed them farther into the rear room of his private suite. Pain, and ache and a bone-deep hunger, everything deluged her.
Tears flew freely down her cheeks as she continued attacking him.
How dare he call knowing her a mistake? How dare he hurt her when all she had wanted was to protect him? How dare he be so heartless when she cared so much about him?
“Do you, agape mou?” he whispered when she hit him in the gut and she realized she had been screaming the words at him. “Do you care so much, Leah?”
She wouldn’t say it again, wouldn’t beg for his love when it had to be hers, when it was what she deserved.
“Leah, pethi mou, look at me,” he begged continuously, yet she couldn’t stop.
She was so afraid that he would disappear if she stopped, so afraid that she would wake up and realize it was a dream. That she would be achingly alone again.
“I’m sorry, yineka mou,” he whispered, without even trying to stop her. “I’m so sorry that I sent you away. I’m so sorry that I didn’t listen to you.”
“You’re a heartless bastard and I should hate you,” she said, with another push and then they were falling into the bed.
“Theos, no more than I hate myself, Leah,” he said on a ragged whisper.
Her breath jarred out of her as Leah landed on top of him. Fear and relief gave way to something else as her mouth lodged in his neck and his arousal pressed against her belly. Moving of their own accord, her legs straddled him, until his hardness pressed against her heated core. Her thighs shivered with the repressed need to ride him.
Her hands in his hair, Leah lifted her head and looked into his eyes.
Their harsh breaths thundered in the silent room, joined by the whisper of the satin sheets.
“I want you to sign those papers and get the hell out of my life. I want to never see you again.”
“I can’t,” he said, sounding almost regretful.
“I do hate you,” she said again, every inch of her desperately craving what he could give.
Only him. Always, only Stavros.
She closed her eyes to lock away the tears and touched her mouth to his.
Familiar and intense, the taste of him made her shiver violently, sent a jolt of electricity through her very veins. She continued kissing him softly until her heart was beating a loud tattoo against her chest, until tears blocked her throat again.
Until all she could touch, breathe and feel was him, until she could be sure that he was here, with her.