Mediterranean Mavericks: Greeks. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ as he had remembered from five years ago, when he had inspected the building and the flat, a week after they had married.

      It screamed of loneliness, detachment.

      Leah was a firestorm and it seemed only a ghost of that girl lived here.

      The first year and a few months into the second after she had come to live here, he had had things delivered to her. Boxes of clothes and shoes, handbags and other accessories Helene had told him a young woman would require. He had even sent her things that had once belonged to her mother, found when he and Dmitri had gone through Giannis’s old estate after his heart attack…

      But she had sent every box back, stubbornly refusing to accept any of it, and so he had stopped trying. Even the box with her mother’s things.

      He had, conveniently, shrugged off his duty toward her. To the point of ignoring her very existence.

      His gut twisting into a tight, unforgiving knot, he followed her into her bedroom. There was a nightstand next to the bed. A tissue box, some pencils and loose paper, and a tiny photograph of her father, he assumed from the same brown eyes, were on it.

      Stretching on her toes, she pulled a bag out of her closet that was already half full. Turned around and stilled as he stayed at the entrance.

      “I have someone bringing up boxes. Not that it seems you need any.”

      “The work room has lots of stuff I need.”

      He nodded and waited, his thoughts in an unprecedented jumble.

      “I don’t have to stay in your house for this…this test of yours, Stavros. I could just continue here.”

      He prowled into the small room, feeling on edge. He was angry at himself, he realized slowly. And he was angry at her. It was irrational, and yet he couldn’t loosen its grip over him.

      “Why not?” The taunt in his words shamed him.

      The brown of her eyes transforming into a dazzling color, she glared at him. Her pulse at the neck fluttered belying the anger in her eyes. “Because I don’t think it’s a good idea.

      “You can’t stand me, for sins I know and some I don’t. And I…you’re arrogant, you’re a hypocrite and I…” she said with that standard animosity she seemed to reserve especially for him. Yet he heard the quiver beneath those words.

      She was trying so hard to hide her awareness of him. So hard to fight it.

      The Leah that he knew, that he thought he had known, had never fought anything she felt. Gave in to every juvenile urge, every self-serving impulse until she crashed and burned.

      And had dragged Calista down with her.

      This effort now…it sparked a curious fire in him just as much as the fluttering pulse at her neck did.

      He came to her bed and leaned against it, blocking her. “So that you could continue to live in this hole like some damned martyr?”

      A silk skirt in hand, she turned that gaze to him again. “It is what you chose for me.”

      “I never meant for you to live like a prisoner. I sent you everything you needed.”

      “To do what with?” Throwing the skirt and a couple more things into the bag, she zipped it up vehemently. “I have no friends, Stavros. No family…”

      “You rejected the one you have for years. You still do,” he couldn’t help but point out, a gnawing frustration in his gut.

      She didn’t even flinch as she continued. “Even the staff at the fashion house, people I have been working with for five years, they treat me with this—” he saw her swallow and a wave of tenderness, shocking and acute, rose inside him “—nauseating combination of dislike and affected regard.

      “I don’t know if they think my designs are really good or if they are just saying that because I’m Leah Sporades, the wife of the textile magnate of Greece, a shame he hides from the world.

      “You married me even though you despised the sight of me. You…you kissed me in front of the media that day for the express purpose of warning away my friends, the entire world. You might as well have branded me like they do livestock.”

      “Leah—”

      “No, Stavros…I was nineteen. I lost the one friend I had, Giannis had just had a heart attack…”

      “Whom you still refuse to see,” he cut in.

       Do not give up on my Leah, Stavros. Please…she is very fragile…

      Fragile was the last thing he had ever thought of Leah…She had barely ever sat down for five minutes with him, yet even surrounded by tubes and equipment, she’d been all Giannis could think about.

      Every inch of her slender frame vibrating with anger and pain, she clutched the lapels of his shirt. “…and in the next two days, you took my entire world away from me. You locked me up here and promptly forgot about me.

      “Did you ever feel even an ounce of shame that you coerced a nineteen-year-old into marriage?”

      Stavros felt her words dig into him like the serrated edge of a blade, drawing blood.

      For five years, he had ignored her very existence, had let her live like this, had informed Giannis again and again that Leah was well…

      How had he committed such an unforgivable mistake?

      “Answer me.”

      “No, I don’t regret it. I would have done anything to save you from that drug-induced-drink-all-night-reckless-party life.”

      No denial rushed out of her this time. Instead, she closed her eyes and bent her head to his chest. The raw intimacy of the gesture flayed him, reaching a part he didn’t know he possessed.

      Her shoulders pushing at his chest, the scent of her coating the air he breathed, her lithe form was so tempting. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, he wanted to bury his mouth in… Feeling like an iron anvil was sitting on his chest, he clasped her wrists to push her away.

      Instead, the pad of his thumb moved over the plump vein of its own will.

      Her breaths came in a slow rasp until, suddenly, she looked up. His lungs burned for air as her fingers laced around his, as a blunt nail raked the center of his palm, her molten brown gaze clung to his lips.

      Something so desperate and wanting flashed in her gaze that Stavros dropped her hand.

      It was so unlike Leah that a shiver raked down his spine.

      Jerking away from him, she drew a deep breath. “Deal with the consequences of what you did then,” she said, moving her hand over the room. “Alleviating your guilt about this…it’s not my responsibility.”

      It was the most adult thing she had ever said to him. And just like that, his world tilted an infinitesimal inch.

      A world in which Leah was right and he СКАЧАТЬ