Blackmailed By The Greek's Vows. Tara Pammi

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СКАЧАТЬ her name sent a curl of longing through her “—that I did not believe all your passionate avowals of love, ne?”

      Something vibrated in the smooth calmness of his tone. The presence of that anger was a physical slap. Her eyes wide, she stared as he continued, his mouth taking on a cruel tilt.

      “No more pathetic displays of your jealousy. No grand declarations of love. No snarling at and slapping every woman I’m friends with. Now we both can work with each other on the same footing.”

      Dios, she’d always been a melodramatic fool. But Kairos, his inability to feel anything, his unwillingness to share a thought, an emotion...it had turned her into much worse. “Non, Kairos. No more of that,” she agreed tiredly.

      She didn’t even have cash for a taxi, but if she’d learnt anything in the last nine months of this flailing about she’d been doing in the name of independence, it was that she could survive.

      She could survive without designer clothes and shoes, she could survive without the adulation she’d taken as her due as the fashionista that Milan looked up to, she could survive without the Conti villa and the cars and the expensive lifestyle.

      She picked up her clutch from the bed, her phone from the floor. “If you won’t leave, I will.”

      He blocked the door with his shoulders. “Not dressed like a cheap hooker, strutting for business at dawn, you’re not.”

      “I don’t want—”

      “I will throw you over my shoulder and lock you up in the stateroom.”

      It should have sounded dramatic, emotional. But Kairos didn’t do drama. Didn’t utter a word he didn’t mean. And if he so much as touched her...

      “Fine. Let’s talk.” She threw her clutch back on the bed and faced him. “Even better, why don’t you call your lawyer and have him bring divorce papers? I’ll sign them right now and we won’t see each other ever again.”

      He didn’t exactly startle. But again, Tina had the feeling that something in him became alert. She had...surprised him? Shocked him?

       What did he think her leaving him had meant?

      He stretched out his wrists, undid the cufflinks on his right hand—platinum cufflinks she’d bought him for their three-month anniversary with her brother’s credit card—and pushed back the sleeve.

      A shiver of anticipation curled around her spine.

      He stretched his left hand toward her. Being left-handed, he’d always undone the right cuff link first. But the right hand...his fingers didn’t do fine motor skills well. She’d noted it on their wedding night, how they had felt clumsy when he tried to do anything.

      For a physically perfect specimen of masculinity, it had been a shock to note that the fingers of his right hand didn’t work quite right. When she’d asked if he’d hurt his hand, he’d kissed her instead. The second time she’d asked, he’d just shrugged.

      His usual response when he didn’t want to talk.

      She’d taken his left hand in hers and deftly undone the cufflink on their wedding night. And a thousand times after that.

      It was one of a hundred rituals they’d had as man and wife. Such intimacy in a simple action. So much history in an everyday thing.

      Tina stared at the blunt, square nails now, her breath ballooning up in her chest; the long fingers sprinkled with hair to the plain platinum band on his ring finger; the rough calluses on his palm because he didn’t wear gloves when he lifted weights. It was a strong, powerful hand and yet when he touched her in the most sensitive places, it was capable of such feathery, tender movements.

      A sheen of sweat coated every inch of her skin.

      Dios, she couldn’t bear to touch him.

      Without meeting his gaze, she took a few steps away from him. “What do I have to do to make you believe that I’m done with this marriage? That my behavior is not dictated anymore by trying to get you to acknowledge my existence?”

      He smirked, noting the distance she’d put between them. “Is that what you did during our marriage?”

      She leaned against the opposite wall and shrugged. “I want to talk about the divorce.”

      “You really want one?”

      “Si. Whatever we had was not healthy and I don’t want to live like that anymore.”

      “So Leandro enlightened you about the fat settlement you will receive then.”

      “What?”

      “Your brother made sure you would receive a huge chunk of everything I own should we separate. Bloody insistent, if I remember correctly.” His shrug highlighted those muscle-packed shoulders. “Maybe Leandro knew how hard you would make it for any man to stay married to you.”

      “You think that will hurt me? Leandro...” Her voice caught, the gulf she had put between her brothers and her a physical ache. “He practically raised me, he loved me when he could have hated me for our mother deserting him and Luca. And I still cut him out of my life because he thought so little of me that he had to bribe you to marry me. In the grand scheme of things that I’ve lost and learned, this marriage and anything I get by dissolving it...they mean nothing to me, Kairos.”

      He was upon her in the blink of an eye. The scent of him—a hint of male sweat and the mild thread of his cologne—hit her first. Awareness pooled low in her belly. He didn’t touch her, and yet the heat of his body was a languid caress.

      “How will you afford your haute couture and your designer stilettos then?”

      “I haven’t touched your credit cards in months. I haven’t taken a single Euro from Leandro or Luca. Even the clothes I wear belong to Nikolai.”

      “Ah...” His gaze raked down the length of her body. The edge of cruelty in it stole her breath even as her skin tingled at his perusal. He nodded toward the happily snoring figure behind him on the bed. “Of course, your pimp dresses you now.”

      “Nikolai is not a pimp and he tricked me into believing tonight was just a party.”

      “I have to admit, only Valentina Constantinou could make a tacky, slinky dress look stylish and sophisticated. But that skill is not really helping, is it? Paris chewed you out and threw you back to Milan after a mere two months. Since then, you’ve been licking the boots of everyone at that fashion magazine. Fetching coffee for those bitchy socialites, when you had once been their queen bee, running errands in the rain for photographers and models that salivated over you for years...” His gaze swept over her in that dismissive way of his. “Have you had enough of reality? Are you ready to return to your life of luxury?”

      She wasn’t surprised he knew what she’d been up to in the last few months. “I don’t care how long it takes, I mean to—”

      “Is that why you decided to try your hand at the oldest profession in the world?”

      “You’re the one who bought me from Leandro, remember? If anyone made СКАЧАТЬ