The Greek Bachelors Collection. Rebecca Winters

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       CHAPTER TWELVE

      THEO SAW THE hurt Jaya made no effort to disguise and suppressed a flinch of guilt. At the same time, his heart pounded like a pile driver. He and Demitri had their moments, but he’d never been as close to getting physical with his little brother as a few seconds ago. Violence was wrong, but if Demitri had touched Jaya, had scared her...

      Such a rush of complex emotions strangled him, his instinct was to turn around and walk out, find somewhere private to pull himself together and come back when he felt in control again.

      Maybe if Jaya had been angry and accusing he could have walked away from her. Instead she had that vulnerable look about her, the one that wrenched his heart. Like she was exposing her throat and it was up to him to prove he wouldn’t rip it out.

      “Zeph sleeping?” he asked.

      “He went down twenty minutes ago.”

      His wingman wouldn’t provide a distraction then.

      He rubbed his face, trying to push his expression back into stoic when he was still unsettled by what he’d walked into. Amazing how he’d become addicted to entering cheerful disarray where a woman and baby greeted him with smiles, maybe some homey smells, and he had to pick a path across scattered toys, but always found a reward of physical affection at the end.

      “Theo?” she prompted.

      He squeezed the back of his neck. This was why he’d kept to superficial relationships for so long. One-night lovers asked surface questions with easy answers.

      Still, the more time he spent with Jaya and Zeph, the more he craved. He liked hearing her sing in Punjabi to their son, liked the homemade food she cooked, liked the way she drew attention when they were out, pulling it off him as people took in her exotic beauty. She’d always been pretty, but with the professional styling taking her appearance up a notch, he had himself a knockout of a fiancée and couldn’t wait to have her legally tied to him as his wife.

      He was surprisingly impatient to lock in that life and now realized what had subconsciously been driving him.

      But to admit it all to her? Hell.

      “It’s humiliating,” he said, tossing his key card on a side table and moving into the suite a few steps, then halting in frustration. He could feel her rebuff from here. An invisible wall sat between them, dense as lead and heavy enough to compress his chest.

      “When?” she asked in a strained voice. “Since Bali? Because I never heard anything about you getting married while I was working there. I’m sure I would have.”

      “It was years before that,” he dismissed

      That detail seemed to relieve a fraction of her distress, but she still stared at him, willing him to provide more details.

      “My father arranged it,” he forced himself to say.

      “Arranged. But you were so disparaging when you thought I was quitting to go to France for an arranged marriage.”

      “That’s why.” Everything in him ached for distance and privacy, but a different, unfamiliar compulsion kept him frozen here, longing to close the gap between them. He was learning the only way was to pick his path through the minefield of his past. He hated it, but for her, he did it.

      “Did you love her?” The tentative edge in her voice told him how hard that was for her to ask.

      “No,” he assured with a disgusted exhale. “She was a socialite, a party girl, the daughter of a well-respected New York businessman who was down on his luck. They wanted the connection to our family, my father wanted an heir...”

      “You said you never wanted to be a father!”

      “I didn’t,” he said, recalling such heavy dread it had stuck with him until he’d learned how it really was to have his own child. “But I didn’t have a choice.”

      “Men always have a choice,” she said with resentment. “They’re never as helpless as women in these situations. She was probably under more pressure to go through with it than you were.”

      “No, I don’t believe that.” He never went back over those memories, they made him feel too pathetic, but she forced him to with her accusation. “You’re right that I could have walked away from my inheritance,” he allowed, “but I couldn’t do that to Adara. Not after what happened to us once Nic was gone.”

      No one would ever know how close he’d come despite that. He’d forgotten how his sister had been the tipping point for him. He’d been scared for her. If he hadn’t been there to protect her, no one would have been. His unhappiness with a marriage to a woman he didn’t care about had seemed like nothing against Adara’s safety.

      Somehow, remembering his motive loosed the old shame off him. Yes, he’d been browbeaten and yes, it had been his choice to allow it. But he’d had a good reason.

      “Demitri said he slept with her,” Jaya said.

      “He did.” He felt nothing making that admission because the act had become the mortar he used to thicken and heighten the walls he used to protect himself. From then on, he’d held everyone even more firmly at a distance, even his siblings. Why in hell would anyone want to be close to him? He was second best to his outgoing, funny younger brother. Everyone preferred Demitri, given the choice.

      Except Jaya. Maybe the seeds of his deep admiration had been born in seeing her deflection of men who came onto her, especially the ones who took for granted they could impress with a grin and a flash of money. She had smiles for everyone, but she reserved her warmest for grandfathers with arthritis or little boys who got off the elevator on the wrong floor.

      “Why would he do that? Just to prove he could or...?” She shook her head in bafflement. “To hurt you?”

      He drew in a breath that burned. “It wasn’t just once for bragging rights. They had an affair. I don’t know who started it and God knows I won’t СКАЧАТЬ