‘I imagine that is the point of this charade, is it not?’ Theo was stroking that wineglass the way he’d once stroked her body and Holly was certain it was deliberate. That he knew exactly what that slow sweep of his tapered, too-strong fingers against the glass did inside of her. ‘What do you want from me?’

‘I told you what I wanted.’

It was hard to keep her voice even when he was on the other side of such a tiny little table, his intense physicality, his rampant maleness, like an industrial-force magnet. Holly had forgotten that, somehow. She’d forgotten that so much of being near Theo was being utterly helpless and under his spell. In his thrall. She’d had to leave him or disappear into him, never to be seen again, and she remembered why now. She could feel it, like a black hole, sucking her in all over again—the same way this same kind of destructive love had sucked in her father all those years ago. She’d watched how this ended before. Why did she think it could be different now?

She kept her gaze level on Theo’s and tried not to think about her parents. ‘A divorce.’

Greek’s Last Redemption

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally utilises the MA and PhD in English Literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in California with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at www.caitlincrews.com.

To Pippa Roscoe, for being her fabulous self, especially in Texas.

And to Kelly Conroy, for sharing her Barcelona with me. I hope I brought it to life, at least a little bit!

Contents

Cover

Introduction

The Chatsfield

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

Harrington Family Tree

Chatsfield Family Tree

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Extras

Extract

Endpages

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

THEO TSOUKATOS SCOWLED when his office door swung open despite the fact he’d given strict orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He expected his orders to be followed—and they usually were, because no one who worked for him enjoyed the consequences when they were not.

He was becoming more like his widely feared father by the day, he thought grimly. Which he could tolerate as long as that was only true here, in the business sphere. God help him if he ever acted like his father in his personal life.

Never, he vowed, as he had since he was a child. I will never let that happen.

“I trust the building is on fire?” he asked his secretary icily as she marched inside, because it could only be a crisis that brought her in here against his instructions, surely. He glowered at her. “Or is about to be?”

“Not as far as I’m aware,” she retorted, appearing utterly unperturbed by his aggressive tone. Mrs. Papadopoulos, who reminded him of his hatchet-faced, steely-haired and pursed-mouthed aunt and acted about as enamored of Theo as Aunt Despina always had been, was meant to keep him from distractions rather than cause them. “But it’s early yet.”

Theo sighed his impatience. He was in the middle of compiling the rest of his notes on fuel efficiency and trim optimization strategies for the meeting that he’d be running in his father’s stead today, now that wily old Demetrious Tsoukatos was focusing more on his mounting medical issues than on the family business. He glanced out the wall of windows surrounding him and saw all of Athens arrayed at his feet, the sprawling commotion and hectic madness of the greatest city in Greece serving as a reminder, the way it always did.

That all that rose must fall—before rising again, stronger than before.

That was the unspoken Tsoukatos family creed. It was the story of Theo’s own life, certainly. It was built into every inch of the proud Tsoukatos tower, where Theo now sat. Just like the steel girders themselves that made the building an imposing physical testament to his shipping magnate father’s searing vision and ruthless success in the face of all obstacles, from sworn enemies to the faltering economy.

These days, the tower stood as a marker of Theo’s own growing reputation as a fearless risk taker and out-of-the-box thinker in a business cluttered by those who played it safe straight into bankruptcy. That wasn’t going to happen to the Tsoukatos fleet. Theo might have acted the spoiled heir apparent for most of his twenties, but in the past four years he’d dedicated himself to proving he was every bit as formidable and intimidating as the old man himself.

It turned out he was good at this. As if ruthless power really did run in his veins the way his father had always assured him it did. Or should.

And he’d decided he could emulate his father here, in the boardroom, where that kind of ruthlessness was a positive thing. Theo’s own personal life might have been a mess, such as it was, but not for the same reasons Demetrious’s had been. I may not be happy, he often told himself fiercely, but at least I’m not a liar, a cheater or a hypocrite.

He was surrounded by too many who couldn’t say the same.

Theo aimed his most ferocious glare at Mrs. Papadopoulos as she came to a sharp stop on the other side of his wide desk. She eyed him right back with her special brand of mild judgment and automatic condemnation, which, perversely, he quite enjoyed. The woman was his own, personal version of the proverbial hair shirt and Theo was nothing if not the kind of man who liked to keep his sins as close as possible to his skin.

“It’s your wife,” Mrs. Papadopoulos said crisply, speaking of his sins, and Theo stopped enjoying himself. With a great thud that he was momentarily worried was actually audible.

His wife.

Holly.

Theo was so used to that flare of dark rage, that thunderbolt of pure fury, that he told himself he hardly noticed it any longer as it careened through him, setting off a string of secondary explosions. It had been almost four whole years since he’d laid eyes on his errant wife. Almost four years since they’d been in the same room, or even in the same country. Four years since he’d last touched her, tasted her, lost himself in her—which he never would again, he reminded himself coldly, as it was, not coincidentally, also four years since he’d discovered the truth about her. And the mockery she’d made of their marriage.

You did not discover the truth about her, he reminded himself darkly. Pointedly. She presented her confession to you, as if on a silver platter...

But God help him, he couldn’t let himself go down that dark path. Not today. Not here, in his place of business, where he had become renowned for his icy calm under any and all forms of pressure. Not anymore.

Not ever again.

He should have been over this by now, Theo thought then, the way he always did. But instead he had to order himself to breathe, to unclench his fists, to relax the instant, furious tautness of his body against his chair and pretend he was as unmoved as he should have been after all this time.

“If it is my wife, then I am not only busy, I am uninterested,” he said, making no attempt to hide the crack of temper in his voice. “You know better than to bother me with such drivel, Mrs. Papadopoulos. My wife is to be diverted to voice mail or email, which I check as little as possible and certainly no more than once every—”

“Sir.” And Theo didn’t know what surprised him more. That the woman dared interrupt him or that, when he stared at her in astonishment, the rigid yet normally obedient Mrs. Papadopoulos stood her ground. “She insists that it’s an emergency.”

The last thing in the world Theo wanted to think about, today or ever, was Holly. His downfall—the more uncharitable might call her his comeuppance, and in his darker moments he found he agreed, because he’d married a liar just like the one he’d sworn he’d never become—in one smooth and deceitful and much too pretty female form.

Because the sad truth was that he already spent a significant portion of every day not thinking about her. His predawn hours in his private gym, beating his endless fury into the hanging bag or the occasional sparring partner. The brutal miles he logged on his treadmill. Not thinking about her betrayal of him with, she’d told him so distinctly, some tourist whose name she hadn’t bothered to catch. Not imagining those same sickening scenes over and over again, all etched into his brain as if he’d actually witnessed her betrayal himself. Not wondering how he could have fallen so completely for the lies she’d told him when he should have known better, when he should have been far too jaded to be taken in by her artless little act...

For four years he’d thrown himself into the family business with the express purpose of thinking of something other than the lying, cheating creature he’d married so foolishly and the many ways she’d ruined him. She’d made him a laughingstock. That smarted, but she’d also ripped out the heart he’d never been aware he’d possessed before her. That was infinitely worse. And more than that, she’d tricked him into reenacting his own parents’ doomed marriage, which he couldn’t find it in him to forgive. For four years he’d focused all of the feelings he refused to call by name into something tangible: the comprehensive decimation of all Tsoukatos business rivals and the unquestionable success of the company against what should have been insurmountable odds in these troubled times.

No one had called Theo Tsoukatos, once a proud member of Europe’s entitled dilettante contingent with the notches on his bedpost to prove it, a spoiled and pampered playboy in a very long while. No one would dare.

But Holly was his living, breathing, walking and talking failure. The crowning achievement of his wasted youth. The embodiment of the pointless creature he’d been back then, a grave disappointment to his father and an epic, permanent stain upon his family name.

He did not want to think about how hard he’d fallen for the dizzy little blonde thing from the United States who’d pretended to adore him at first sight, how desperately he’d pursued her after their initial week together on the island or how deeply and callously she’d betrayed him a mere six months after the wedding that he’d been blind enough to consider romantic not despite its speed but because of it.

He especially did not want to recollect the unpleasant truth: that he had no one to blame for any of these things but himself.

Everyone had warned him, after all. At length. Everyone save Theo had seen supposedly gauche and charmingly naive Holly Holt, touring Europe all on her own following her father’s death, for exactly who and what she was. One more American gold digger with Texas dirt on her feet and her calculating blue eyes set on the biggest and best catch she could find.

On Santorini that summer, that catch had been Theo.

“You are my successor and the heir to the Tsoukatos fortune,” his father had told him sternly, over and over again and to no avail. “This girl is nobody. This can never be anything more than a holiday romance, Theo. You must understand this.”

His father and his brother, Brax, had lined up to tell him not to be a fool, but Theo had hardly been inclined to take advice from the man who’d destroyed Theo’s own mother with his infidelities, much less a younger brother he’d thought of then as little more than a child. And then, when it was clear that he was determined to prove himself a colossal fool, anyway, they’d begged him to at the very least take the necessary steps to protect his fortune, his future, the company, on the off chance that he was thinking with his groin instead of his head... And Theo had ignored them all, the way he always had done throughout his hedonistic twenties, because he’d cared about nothing and no one but himself.

Nothing but himself and one curvy little blonde girl with deep blue eyes to rival the Aegean Sea itself. She’d had the widest, sweetest, most open smile he’d ever seen, and he’d lost himself in it. In her. And there had been nothing, it turned out, but a deceitful heart beneath all that sweet shine.

This, then, was his reward for his impetuousness. His penance. This humiliation of a marriage that he held on to only because he refused to give her the satisfaction of asking for a divorce, despite what she’d done to him and then thrown in his face so unapologetically. He refused to let her see how she’d destroyed him over the course of that long, rainy season on Santorini years ago.

It had been nearly four and a half years since they’d married in far too much haste in the height of the dry Greek summer, almost four whole years since they’d been within the same walls, and Theo thought he was still coldly furious enough to stretch it out to ten, if necessary. He might not want her any longer, he might have vowed to himself that he would fling himself from the Santorini cliffs before he’d let her work her evil magic on him again, but he’d be damned if he’d let her have her freedom from him unless she begged for it.

Preferably at length and on her knees. He was a simple man. An eye for an eye, and a humiliation for a humiliation.

“My wife has never had a minor upset she couldn’t fluff up into a full-scale catastrophe,” Theo bit out now, venting his spleen on his rigid secretary and not much minding if it made her bristle visibly. He paid her a not-inconsiderable fortune to tolerate him and his many black moods, after all. It was a great pity he hadn’t taken the same amount of precautions when choosing his first wife. “Her version of an emergency generally involves her credit limit.”

“I think this is different, Mr. Tsoukatos.”

Theo was losing what little patience he had left—a virtue for which he was not widely renowned to begin with. This was already far more focused and specific attention paid to Holly and thus his marriage than he liked to permit himself outside the stark truths he otherwise faced only in his gym. He could see emails piling up in his inbox out of the corner of his eye, he still had to sketch out the rest of his presentation and the last thing in the world he had time for was his own, personal albatross and whatever her latest scheme was.

“Why?” he asked, aware that his voice was unduly hostile when Mrs. Papadopoulos stiffened further, a feat which should have been anatomically impossible. He shrugged. “Because she said so? She always does.”

“Because she’s videoed in.” Mrs. Papadopoulos placed the tablet Theo hadn’t noticed she was carrying down in the center of his desk. “Here you are.” She stepped back, and her voice was as crisp as the look in her eyes was steely. “Sir.”

Theo blinked, then eyed the tablet—and the frozen image there—as if Holly herself might leap forth from the screen and stick another knife deep into his back. Deeper this time, no doubt. Perhaps a killing blow at last. It took him a moment to remember that Mrs. Papadopoulos still stood there, exuding her typical brusque disapproval, and when he did he waved her off before he betrayed himself any further.

A video call was certainly different. That was the truth.

And when it came to Holly, “different” was never good. “Different” always came with a heavy price and Theo always ended up paying it.

She was his costliest mistake, by far. Of all the many follies of his overindulged and deeply entitled youth, Holly Holt from somewhere as improbable to him as Texas ranch country, with the wide smile and the big laugh that had broken him wide-open and left him nothing but a goddamned fool in a thousand discarded pieces, was the one he regretted most.

And daily, whether he permitted himself to think about her directly or not.

“Control yourself,” he snapped out loud, glaring down at the tablet on the polished expanse of his desk before him.

He moved to end the call without taking it, the way he knew he should, but her image taunted him. Even frozen into place and slightly pixelated, she was like a hammer to the side of his head. He could feel her everywhere, her claws still in him, deep.

Hating himself for his weakness didn’t do a damned thing to change it.

And she wasn’t the raw, unformed creature she’d been when he’d met her, all sun-kissed limbs and that unsophisticated beauty that he’d found so intoxicating. So mesmerizing. He studied the frozen image before him as if it might offer him a clue to her—to the truth of her he’d spent years telling himself she’d already shown him. Gone was the exuberant hair, the cowboy boots she’d once told him she loved more than most people, the open and carefree expression that had made her shine brighter than the Santorini sun.

She’d grown sleeker over the past few years. He’d seen it in the photographs he couldn’t always avoid, scattered in this or that paper, but it was more obvious now that he was looking at her directly. That curvy figure of hers that had once made a simple bikini into a lush little scandal and had made him her slave bordered on skinny now. Her hair was still that sunny blond but it was straight and ruthlessly slicked back into a tasteful chignon today, her cosmetics minimal and wholly lacking in the sparkle or too-bright colors he remembered. Her dress was a masterful little exploration of classic, understated elegance and suited this new version of her perfectly.

Holly Holt was gone. Theo doubted she’d ever truly existed.

In her place was this woman. This shrewdly manufactured, ruthlessly accessorized creature. Holly Tsoukatos, who was such a committed philanthropist indeed with her absent husband’s money forever at her disposal, he thought derisively. Holly Tsoukatos, who’d made herself known as the gracefully estranged wife of one of Europe’s favorite former playboys, and who’d become more and more fashionable and sought after now that Theo was regarded as a force as dangerous and successful as his famous father.

He hated her, he told himself then, and he hated this. And most of all he hated the fact that he still wanted that gloriously over-the-top, unrestrained and uncultured little American girl who’d captivated a seasoned sophisticate like him in a single searing week.

But, of course, that Holly had been a lie. Why couldn’t he remember that? She had never existed outside the virtuoso performance she’d put on for him four and a half years ago. This version of his wayward wife, this studiously well-mannered ice queen who’d built herself an entire little empire of lies thanks to his money and her commitment to spending it, was the real Holly. Staring at her frozen image, Theo acknowledged the fact that he didn’t like remembering that harsh truth—it was one of the reasons he’d only spoken to her on the telephone and very rarely at that these past four years.

That and his unwieldy temper, which she alone seemed able to kick-start and send into overdrive with very little effort. But he hauled that dark, simmering, betrayed thing in him under control again, and he didn’t care if it left marks as he did it. He’d rather die than show her anything but his dislike—the colder and more distant, the better. It wasn’t the only thing she’d earned from him, not by a long shot, but it was the only thing he’d allow her to see.

He hit the button to unfreeze her and didn’t bother masking his irritation.

“What do you want?” he said by way of greeting after all these years of nothing but infrequent telephone calls. His voice was blunt and unfriendly and even that wasn’t enough to assuage the lick of his fury, that deep and dark current of a primal need to strike back at her however he could. “Have you managed to bankrupt me yet?”

* * *

This video call was a serious tactical error.

Holly realized it the moment the screen before her burst into life and color and sound again. Her courage and her determination—and much worse, her voice—deserted her in a sudden rush. This was a terrible mistake, the latest in a long line of terrible mistakes where this man was concerned...

Because she wasn’t prepared for him in all his almost violent perfection. She never had been.

Because he was Theo and he was right there on her enormous desktop computer monitor after all these years, big and brooding and beautiful, bursting straight into her lonely little life with all that force and fire...

And he was still so very angry with her.

So deeply, encompassingly, seethingly angry, it felt like being plunged into a dark cloud without his having to say a single word. Though the words hurt, too—harsh and furious, each like a separate slap.

Looking at him was like a contact sport. It always had been. It was worse now, with all that fury making him seem to burn right there before her eyes.

Holly had heard it on the phone during their short and hostile calls regarding her deliberately outrageous credit card bills these past years—always spaced out according to his ever more busy schedule, one per quarter at most and never long enough for any kind of real discussion. But now she could see it, burning like a fierce heat in his eyes as dark as the Greek coffee he’d made for her back in the early days of their brief marriage, before she’d ruined everything.

She could see it stamped in the fascinating iron set of his harshly masculine jaw, could even feel it deep inside her own body, like a shiver. Like a seismic warning. As if she should count herself lucky indeed that they were separated by computer screens, the internet and some six thousand miles.

As if he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened if they were ever in the same room again, and Holly felt suspended in the thick, dark promises she could see in the furious heat he trained on her then, the glare of all that threat and power and fury, even after all this time.

What did you expect? that little voice inside of her that sounded a lot like her beloved father’s, God rest his soul, whispered then. He hates you. You made sure of that. That’s what happens when you leave.

She should know that better than most, after living through all those long, lonely years with her father after her mother’s defection when Holly had been a little girl. Her father wouldn’t have called how he’d mourned his wife’s betrayal hatred, of course. He’d have called it grief. Or holding a torch. But Holly had always felt it like a burning thing, changing their whole world. Charring what was left.

And now here she was, all these years later, staring at that same fire directed straight at her. In high-definition.

Theo lounged before her in a leather chair in a sleekly furnished office, his thick, dark hair looking disheveled and too long, the way it always had. He was more beautiful than she remembered him, and she remembered him as very nearly a god with all that lean, leashed power packed into his solid boxer’s form, as if he could have been a fighter had he been the son of a man with lower aspirations. He wore a crisp white shirt that strained to contain his corded, solid shoulders, that wonder of a chest and the tautly ridged abdomen she knew lay beneath. He looked powerful and furious and his own, special brand of lethal, and Holly hated herself all over again.

For what she’d done. For what she’d claimed she’d done. For the great big mess that was her whirlwind, ill-conceived, overwhelming marriage to this man and that big old dark hole in the center of everything that she’d come to realize was pure and nauseating regret. Greasy and enveloping, and so thick she truly believed it might choke her one of these days.

Though it never did. Not quite.

Instead, worse, she had to live with it.

She wanted to reach forward, through the screen, and test the heat of his smooth olive skin against her palms again. She wanted to run her fingers through his thick, dark hair and play with that hint of curl that had always made her silly with desire. She wanted to taste that full and talented mouth of his again, salt and fire, longing and need.

But there was no easy road here. Holly knew that. There was no way back to Theo that wouldn’t rip open old scars and make ancient wounds bleed fresh. That wouldn’t hurt, and badly. She’d been so terrified of becoming like her father that she’d become her mother instead, and she couldn’t live with that any longer. She couldn’t. She had to try to do something about it, no matter what.

Holly had thought she’d accepted how hard this was going to be already—but that had been before she’d seen him again. Somehow, the years had dulled him in her memory. Dimmed him.

Seeing him again, even through a screen, was as blinding as the first time she’d laid eyes on him. In that tiny restaurant in Santorini where she’d been sipping an afternoon coffee, unaware that her entire life had been set to collide with his when he’d shouldered his way inside and claimed the table next to hers.

Like a comet, she’d thought then, even on a sun-drenched Greek island with nothing but dizzying blue and whitewashed walls on all sides and then this man in the middle of it all, like a dream come to startling and powerfully sexy life...

“Holly.”

His voice tore into her, dark and impatient and yet still, that little lilt to her name that made her whole body shimmer into instant, almost painful awareness. She was glad he couldn’t see the way she tensed in her seat in automatic reaction, her legs going tight as she dug her toes into the floor beneath her desk. Or that bright little light inside she knew was the most dangerous, most doomed, thing of all. Hope.

“I don’t have time for this today. And even if I did, I have nothing to say to you.” His hard mouth moved into some lethal approximation of a smile, and her curse was, it made him no less attractive to her. Quite the opposite. “Nothing polite, that is.”

It was so tempting to simply lose herself in him, or to let herself break down and start telling the truths she already knew he wouldn’t believe, not when she’d spent these long years trying so hard to force him to let her go by any means possible. She’d made him detest her, if not release her. She had to remember the game she needed to play here or she’d lose before she started.

So Holly smiled at him. Not the way she once had, when she hadn’t had the faintest shred of self-preservation in her body, when she hadn’t been able to help herself from falling into him and for him like the proverbial ton of bricks, her innocence indistinguishable from her stupidity, to her recollection. But the way she’d perfected in these past few lonely years, the smile that made it possible to play the role she’d created for herself out of the ashes of the marriage she’d burned to the ground with her lies. The role she’d thought would make it so simple for him to wash his hands of her, to discard her, to divorce her and free them both.

She’d been wrong about that, too. She’d finally, painfully, faced the fact that she’d been wrong about everything, and that she’d done nothing here but reenact her own painful history. But he wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. He would think it was nothing more than another game, and he’d made it clear he wouldn’t play them with her, hadn’t he? Perfectly, coldly clear.

Which meant she had no choice but to play one last game with him, this one with the highest stakes of all.

“Busy?” she asked, letting her drawl take on a life of its own, a Texan specialty. “Doing what, exactly? Still playing the crown prince in your daddy’s great big kingdom?”

Theo’s expression went from furious to something like thunderstruck, then back to a hardness that should have left her in tatters. Maybe it did. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t tell the difference any longer.

“I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy, but there was no mistaking the threat beneath it. “I didn’t realize it was time for our long-overdue conversation regarding each other’s character flaws. Are you certain you’re ready for that?”

“Blah blah blah,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving a hand dismissively, wishing she felt even a tiny bit that relaxed or casual. “Just call me a whore already, Theo. You’ve been dancing around it for almost four years now.”

CHAPTER TWO

THEO’S DARK EYES blazed to a molten fury and it amazed Holly that he could still make her lose her breath, that easily. Even when he thought so little of her.

And she was such a fool—because a sane woman, Holly knew, having done what she’d done, having lied so extravagantly in order to escape this man the only way she’d thought she could, would not have looked at that flare of fury in his dark eyes and read it as some sliver of hope for the future she’d torpedoed herself.

Because fury wasn’t the same thing as indifference. Fury meant he still felt something for her, no matter how twisted and painful.

But then, Holly was aware that a sane woman wouldn’t have gone ahead and married the dark Greek lover who’d swept her up in a kind of sensual tornado that summer, either, stealing her innocence and her heart and her good sense along with it. So maybe sane wasn’t in the ballpark here.

Maybe she should stop pretending it had ever been a possibility where proximity to Theo was concerned.

“Let me guess,” he said, his voice controlled in a way that made her wonder exactly how he’d grown in all these years. Exactly how he’d changed, when the Theo she’d known had been as impetuous and wild as he’d been rich and pampered. She’d been completely out of her league with this man from the start. “You decided to purchase a jet. An island. A couture house and half of Paris to go with it. I don’t care, Holly. Your allowance is yours. Do what you want with it and leave me the hell alone.”

He moved in his chair, his hand reaching toward her, and she knew he was about to end the call. That there was nothing tender there in that gesture, despite what it looked like for a brief second—what she wanted it to look like, fool that she still was.

“I want to see you,” she said, before he could cut her off. Before she lost herself in these tiny little moments and the daydreams that went with them and completely forgot why she was doing this. Because she didn’t need him to tell her that he wouldn’t answer a call like this again. She knew it.

Theo shifted in his chair then, in a way that suggested he was preparing for a fight, those dark eyes seeming to laser into her. He seemed bigger, suddenly. Darker. “You’re seeing me right now. Witness the glory of technology. And my surpassing joy.”

“In person.”

He laughed, a harsh scrape of sound that lodged in places it shouldn’t. “No.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She smiled again, even more icily, because this was how she had to play this. No matter how tired she was of it or how sick it made her. “That wasn’t a request. Did it sound like one?”

“It wouldn’t matter if it was a formal summons from God himself,” Theo remarked, almost idly, but she could see his expression and knew there wasn’t anything idle about this man any longer. Had she done that, too? “The answer is still no.”

“Theo.” She shook her head as if he disappointed her, hiding her clenched hands in her lap, out of sight. “There’s no reason we can’t pretend to be civilized. Some things require a face-to-face meeting whether you want to admit it or not. You don’t want to make me do this on a video call, do you?”

“It has been perfectly clear to me and to most of the world, I’d imagine, that I can’t make you do anything,” he replied in that lethally soft tone that sent spears of ice down the length of her spine and a hot curl of shame deep into her belly. “Certainly not behave as a wife should. You couldn’t even manage to remain faithful to me for six short months. What, pray, could I possibly make you do now?”

Holly didn’t flinch. How could she, when she’d told that lie to his face? Deliberately and with a full understanding of what would happen once she did? She was all too aware she’d brought this on herself.

“I want a divorce,” she said now. Simply and distinctly.

As if it were true.

“My answer is the same as it has ever been,” he replied in the same cool tone with all that rampaging fire beneath it. “You can’t have one. Is that the reason for all this theater today? You could have spared us both. In future, I suggest you do.”

“We don’t have much of a future left, is the thing,” she told him then, as his hand moved toward his screen again. Again, he stopped. When he only glared at her, she summoned that hard-edged smile again and aimed it at him as if this was all somehow amusing to her. As if she really was the woman she’d pretended to be these past four years. The woman, she knew, he fully believed she was. “I know that we’ve had fun these past few years—”

“Is that what they call it in Texas?” he asked, his voice even softer but no less vicious. “That is not the word I would choose for any of this.”

“—playing all these games, scoring points, all this tug-of-war nonsense.” She shrugged. “But all good things come to an end, I’m afraid.”

“I’m not giving you a divorce, Holly. I don’t care what argument you trot out. And, as I believe I’ve made perfectly clear with your generous monthly allowance and the life you live without any interference from me, I really don’t care what you do. Or who.”

“So you say,” she murmured.

But she didn’t believe him. She couldn’t believe him. A harsh, predatory light flared in his eyes then, turning them volcanic with that edgy fury of his, making Holly’s heart jolt and then catch inside her chest. Once again, she chose to call that hope.

“The only thing I will not give you is your freedom.”

“And why is that?”

“Because it is the only thing I know you want, agapi mou,” he said, his voice harsh and cold, especially when he called her my love. Holly couldn’t let herself dwell on the way the endearment sounded now, when he didn’t mean it at all. Not when she was sure they could both remember too well how he’d sounded when he’d meant it with every last shred of his heart, his soul. Not now, while he could watch her reactions. “Aside from my money, of course.”

“Goodness,” she drawled, and put a theatric hand to her chest, because that was the best way to cover the sensation of it being ripped straight out from behind her ribs and then stamped on. She ought to be used to that by now, having done it herself the first time. “So possessive, Theo. Be still my heart. I’m tempted to believe you still have feelings for me.”

“I don’t.” His voice was a growl. “I told you this four years ago, and I meant it. Spend my money. Embarrass me. I don’t care. You can have anything you want except a divorce. That’s not negotiable. If I have to live with this marriage, with the unfortunate choices of our tattered past, so do you.”

“Except you’ve run out of time.” She shrugged when his glare intensified. “That’s Greek law, Theo.” She made a show of picking up a piece of paper on her desk and reading from it, though she didn’t have to read the words there. She knew them by heart. “Divorce is granted in cases of marital breakdown. And if the spouses have been separated for at least four years there is the presumption of that breakdown, regardless of whether or not you’d prefer to continue torturing me across whole decades.”

“We are not separated. You left.” His dark gaze licked over her, fire and fury, and what was wrong with her that she felt it echo within her—as if it was some kind of caress? “You can always return to me, if you are feeling unaccountably brave. Or foolish. I’ve told you this for years.”

Dared her, more like. Come back and face your sins, he’d told her years ago, a dark and terrible promise of retribution in his low voice. Who knows? Perhaps I am more merciful than I appear.

But they both knew better than that.

“The four years is the sticking point, I’m afraid.” Holly forced herself to hold that penetrating gaze of his, reminding herself that this was the easy part. That this would all be much, much harder if she got what she wanted and they did this face-to-face. If she’d been any good at dealing with this man in person, after all, if she’d been able to say what she felt instead of running away, none of this would have happened. “All I have to do is prove that we’ve been continuously apart for all that time, which we have and which has been exhaustively documented in at least three different tabloids, and then it won’t matter what else happened between us...”

“If you spend your days telling yourself fairy tales about how you were the victim in this, I certainly can’t stop you.” His voice was made of granite then, and it landed on her, hard. “But on the occasions that you speak to me of our marriage, and I pray they remain rare, let’s not hide in all the vague asides about ‘what else happened.’” He leaned closer to the screen, his beautiful face harder than before, as if it was carved from the same stone as that harsh voice he used. “You happened. You are a liar. You deceived me from the start and then, when that was not enough for you, you slept with another man and threw it in my face. Then you left me under cover of night rather than deal with what you did, and you’ve trotted about the world happily spending my money ever since. I won’t call you a whore, as I have some respect for the oldest profession in the world. At least it is an honest transaction. You are nothing like honest. You are far lower than any whore, Holly. And you offend me in every possible way.”

And she merely smiled back at him, pretending that wasn’t one mortal blow after another. Pretending she could block out the disgust in his voice, the contempt on his face. Telling herself this would all be worth it in the end, that there was no point defending herself until they were in the same room again. Until she could see if it was still the same—that brilliant, soaring comet. That wild joy that had nearly taken her out at the knees every time he’d looked at her, every time they’d touched. That beautiful thing that had terrified her so deeply and so profoundly she’d gone to such extraordinary lengths to escape it, fearing—knowing—it would swallow her whole.

“Noted,” she said calmly, amazed that she could sound so unmoved by what he’d said, and look it, too, in that tiny little box in the corner of her own screen that showed her cool expression. She was amazed she wasn’t shaking in reaction, more like, or falling to pieces—but she could do that later. When she was alone again, in this gray little prison she’d made for herself without him. When there was no one around to disbelieve everything she said, because there was never anyone around at all. “But you’re not understanding me.”

“I doubt I’ve ever understood you,” he growled at her. “Why should that change in the course of one call I knew better than to take?”

“I’m filing for divorce, Theo,” she told him evenly. “I will cite our estrangement as cause and I will further claim that you were the one who broke our vows.” She shrugged when he muttered something filthy in Greek. “I will be believed, of course. You were a famous playboy who’d slept with most of Europe. I was an inexperienced country girl on her first holiday abroad, completely out of my depth with you.”

He ran a hand over his face. “Clearly.”

She ignored his caustic tone. “The choice is yours. If you meet with me the way I’ve asked you to do, I’ll consider not taking a majority share of Tsoukatos Shipping in the divorce.”

Holly had thought he was angry before. But the look he turned on her then was like lightning, electric and hair-raising, and she was suddenly very glad she was safe in Dallas, thousands of miles away from him and all the things that look of his could do.

Not that distance made her safe. Nothing could. Not when Theo looked at her like that. Not when he thought such things of her. But at least distance could minimize the damage.

Or so she hoped. The way she felt at the moment, it could go either way.

“Fine,” he bit out after a long, simmering pause. It took everything Holly had to sit still, to keep her expression impassive, to keep up the sickening pretense. “You want to meet with me in person? I’ll subject myself to it, though I should warn you, you may find this reunion significantly less pleasant than you imagine.”

“Less pleasant than four years of insulting calls about credit card bills to remind me whose leash I’m on or today’s charming philosophical exploration of the meaning of the word whore?” she asked drily, her impassive demeanor cracking more than she’d intended. She could feel the way her own eyes filled with a furious heat. Nothing so simple as tears, but telling all the same. “I find that hard to believe.”

Something lit his gaze then, and she felt it like fingers down the length of her back, as if she’d unwittingly made herself his prey. Whatever works, she told herself resolutely. Either you’ll find a way back to him or you’ll finally be free to move on with your life, such as it is. It doesn’t matter how that happens, as long as one of them does.

But of course it mattered. Nothing else mattered at all.

“I’ll choose the venue,” he continued, that odd tension in him making him seem bigger again, and far more dangerous.

“If you feel like that makes you in charge of this, then by all means,” she began, deliberately patronizing him, purely because she knew it would get under his skin.

“Barcelona,” he said softly, cutting her off. And something of what she felt must have showed on her face then, as surely as if he’d kicked her in the stomach. Because he had. And she could see by the glint in his dark eyes and the harsh curve of his mouth that he knew it. That she wasn’t the only one who could play these nasty little games. “The Chatsfield Hotel in three days’ time. I believe you know it well.”

He knew she did. He’d taken her there four and a half years ago for the best month of their marriage. Of her entire life, before or since.

“You want to discuss our divorce in the same place we had our honeymoon?” she asked, stunned out of her usual careful iciness, too taken aback to guard her tone or her expression. And for a hectic moment, she didn’t care what he saw. Their weeks in Barcelona were the last, best memories she had of those long-ago days with him. Of the only real happiness they’d ever had, she’d often thought, and she’d held on to the silly idea he’d felt the same. “Theo...”

“Barcelona in three days’ time, Holly, or not at all,” he said with evident satisfaction, and then he finally ended the call with a single harsh sweep of his hand.

Leaving Holly to sit and stew in the mess she’d made.

Again.

* * *

Theo strode into his suite at The Chatsfield, Barcelona, behind the efficient porter, frowning down at his mobile as he swept through his endless stream of messages and email, only to come to a swift stop when he recognized where he was.

He knew this suite. He’d spent an entire month here, and more than he cared to remember of that time without stepping outside. He knew every goddamned inch of it.

The same soaring ceilings. The same view over the fashionable Passeig de Gràcia, the Spanish answer to the Champs-Élysées, with the gleaming Mediterranean Sea in the distance. The same delicately luxurious furnishings that made the whole space sparkle with the restrained elegance The Chatsfield was known for all over the world. The small hallway adorned with bold local art leading to what he knew would be a master suite dominated by a wide, suggestive bed and a private balcony he’d used every last millimeter of back when. Every single millimeter. The same open lounge area scattered here and there with the same delicate rose petals that he remembered quite distinctly from four and a half years ago.

It was like stepping back in time. And he could hardly categorize the wild thing that surged in him then, chaotic and maddening. He only knew it nearly took him down to his knees.

This is unforgivable, he thought—but then, this was clearly Holly and her handiwork. There wasn’t a single part of what she’d done to him in all these years that wasn’t unforgivable. Unforgivable is what she does.

At moments like this he thought it was who she was.

Just like your father, said a small voice inside of him. She doesn’t care how much she hurts you. She doesn’t care at all.

“Is this the honeymoon suite?” he asked the porter. More brusquely than he’d intended, he realized when the poor man jerked to a stop as if Theo had slapped him across the face. Theo’s hand tensed as if he really had.

“Yes, sir,” the porter said. The man launched into a recitation of the room’s many amenities and romantic flourishes, only to taper off into a strained silence when Theo merely stared back at him.

Theo eyed him for a moment, then turned his attention back to the room—and the low table before the arching windows that let the gleaming Barcelona lights inside, where a bottle of champagne chilled in a silver bucket. He didn’t have to go over and look at it to know at once that it would be the very same vintage as the one he’d had waiting for them years ago. The one he’d poured all over Holly and then drank from her soft skin. From between her breasts, from the tender, shallow poetry of her navel. From the sweet cream heat between her legs he’d still believed, then, was only his.

Every last damned drop.

He thought for a moment that his temper might black out the whole of the city, if not the entirety of the Iberian Peninsula, the shock of it was so intense.

“Thank you,” he growled at the porter when he was sure he could speak without punching something, dismissing the man with a handful of euros.

Only then, only when he was alone, did Theo prowl over to the table and swipe up the card that sat there next to the silver bucket.

What a perfect place to begin our divorce at last, it read in Holly’s distinctively loopy handwriting, as if she really was the madcap, innocent thing she’d fooled him into thinking she was when they’d met. How clever of you to suggest it!

And beneath it, she’d jotted down the mobile number that he’d committed to memory a long time ago, though he hadn’t dialed it of his own volition in years. He was hardly aware of doing it now, but then it was ringing and then, worse, her husky voice was there on the line. And he was still standing by himself in a room where, the last time he’d been here, he’d thrust deep inside of her on every single available surface, again and again and again, because he hadn’t known where he’d ended and she’d begun and it hadn’t mattered. It had been pure joy.

Here, in this room, he’d truly believed he would spend the rest of his life enjoying that particular pleasure.

It was as if she’d catapulted him straight back into a prison built entirely out of his past illusions and he was certain she was well aware of it.

“How do you like your suite?” she asked as confirmation. Not that he needed any. And he supposed this was his fault for picking Barcelona in the first place.

“Come see for yourself,” he suggested, and there was no hiding the fury in his voice. Or the other, darker things beneath. “You’ll have to tell me if the furnishings are as you remember them. You were the one bent over most of them, as I recall, so you’d be the better judge.”

Holly only laughed, and it wasn’t that great big laugh of hers that he’d used to feel inside him as if he’d stuck his fingers deep in an electric socket. This was her Holly Tsoukatos laugh, more restrained and significantly less joyful, suitable for charity events and polite black-tie dinners.

Only a short, dull blade, then, as it cut into him.

“What a lovely invitation,” she murmured. “I’ll pass. But I’m down in the restaurant, if you’d like to come say a little hello. After all this time. As a casual introduction to our divorce proceedings. Who says we can’t treat this like adults?”

“In public,” he noted, and it took every bit of self-control he’d taught himself over these past years to tamp down on the roaring thing inside of him that already had him moving, as if the magnetic pull of her was too strong to resist. As if it had only ever been kilometers that separated them, nothing more. Nothing worse. “Do you think that’s wise?”

Her laugh then was a throaty thing, and his hand clenched hard around his mobile even as every part of him tensed, because he remembered that sound too clearly. It dragged over him like a physical touch. Like her wicked fingers on his bare skin. He remembered her legs draped over his shoulders and her hands braced against these same windows as he’d ridden them both into wild oblivion. He remembered her laughing just like this.

He remembered too much. There were too many ghosts here, as if the walls themselves were soaked through with the happy memories he’d spent four years pretending had never happened.

“Nothing about us has ever been wise, Theo,” Holly said then, and he blinked, because that sounded far too much like sadness in her voice—but that was impossible. That was the product of too many memories merging with the soft Spanish evening outside his windows, wrapping around and contorting itself into wishful thinking.

It took him long moments to realize she’d ended the call. And Theo stopped thinking. He simply moved.

He hardly saw the polished gold elevator that whisked him back down to the grand lobby. He barely noticed the hushed elegance, the well-dressed clientele, the tourists snapping photos of the marble floors and the inviting-looking bar, as he made his way toward the attached restaurant. Nor did he pause near the maître d’—he simply strode past the station in the entryway, his eyes scanning the room. An obviously awkward date, a boisterous family dinner. A collection of laughing older women, a set of weary-looking businessmen.

Until finally—finally—he saw her.

And that was when it occurred to him to stop. To think for a moment with his head, not the much louder part of him that was threatening to take him over the way it had the first time he’d looked up in a crowded place to see her sitting there, somehow radiant, as if light found her and clung to her of its own volition.

Before it was too late all over again.

Because she was so pretty. Still. Theo couldn’t deny that and there was no particular reason that should have enraged him. And yet it did.

She looked smooth and edible in another one of those perfect little dresses that flattered her figure even as it made her look like a queen. Regal and cool and something like aristocratic, with her sweetly pointed chin propped in her delicate hand, her gaze focused out on the street beyond, and her other hand—the hand that still featured the two rings he’d put there himself, he noted, his temper beating in him like a very dark drum—toyed idly with the stem of her wineglass.

It reminded him—powerfully, almost painfully—of that too-bright afternoon on Santorini so many summers ago. He’d careened out of a strange woman’s bed at noon and staggered out into the sunlight, as was typical for him. He hadn’t headed to his family’s villa for another lecture on his responsibilities from the exasperated father he’d stopped listening to years before, when the issue of the old man’s character had been made abundantly clear. He’d walked up the hill to his favorite restaurant to charm the owner, one of his oldest friends, into plying him with good food to chase away the remains of another too-long, too-excessive night.

Instead, he’d found Holly, with her startled laughter and her bright, beckoning innocence, and his entire life had changed.

And she’d been sitting exactly like this.

Theo finally stopped moving then, right there in the busy aisle of the intimately lit restaurant, and forced himself to breathe. To think. To note that all of this was part of the little performance she was staging for his benefit—to achieve her own ends, at his continuing expense. She’d chosen to sit at one of the tables in the open windows over the busy, popular street, and Theo understood this was all part of her plan. Not simply to meet him in public, in a restaurant like their very first meeting a lifetime ago, but to do so while visible to the entire city of Barcelona, as if that might keep her safe.

She thought she was controlling this game. She thought she was controlling him.

It was in that moment that Theo decided to play. And to win.

He walked the rest of the way to her table and then slid into the seat across from her. He helped himself to her wine once he threw himself down, since they were dealing in echoes of the past. Why not do his part? He took a long pull from her glass, the way he would have back then, his mouth pressing against the small mark her glossy lips had left behind and then eyeing her over the rim.

He couldn’t read her dark blue eyes tonight. He couldn’t see her every last thought on her face the way he could have back then. Then again, given the way she’d played him, perhaps he’d never seen what he thought he had. It didn’t matter, he told himself then. This was a new game, and this time, he knew from the start that he was playing it.

There would be no surprises here. Not this time.

“Kalispera, Holly,” he said, and when she blinked at him, he got the distinct impression she’d known he was there the whole time, despite the fact she’d been looking in the other direction. From the moment he’d entered the restaurant, even. He stretched out his legs and was instantly aware of how she shifted, to keep her own out of his reach, as if even that mild a touch might set them both on fire. She wasn’t wrong and that, too, added fuel to the anger inside of him. And to his determination to win this thing, no matter the cost. “You look well enough. Spending my money clearly suits you. Is that polite enough to start?”

CHAPTER THREE

SHE’D DREAMED THIS a thousand times. More.

This is really happening, Holly told herself, trying to keep her expression blank. Or failing that, calm, which wasn’t easy with the wild and erratic dance her heart was doing inside her chest. This isn’t one of those dreams.

“Hello, Theo,” she said calmly, as if this wasn’t the first time they’d spoken face-to-face, in the actual flesh, in touching distance, in nearly four years. As if being back in Barcelona, at The Chatsfield of all places, meant nothing to her. As if she felt nothing at all—as if she really was the person she’d gone to such lengths to convince him she was. Just a little bit longer, she promised herself. “Did you have a pleasant flight?”

“Of course.” He was so much more in person. She remembered the way his sheer presence had always seemed to scrape the air thin all around him, and it was worse now. As if he claimed more than his fair share of oxygen, simply because he could. Because he was Theo. “I do not maintain a private plane with my own staff for an unpleasant flight, do I?”

“I feel that way about closing down shops on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive to make use of your black Amex card.”

“So the dizzying bills remind me each time I see them.”

His face was still so fascinating. Harsh and male and undeniably Greek, yet so intensely beautiful she wasn’t surprised to see the way women and men alike reacted to him. The double takes. The second, longer glances. And none of them, she was sure, could see that ferocity in his dark eyes. The hint of violence she knew he’d never direct at her. Not physically, anyway, not in a way that would truly hurt her.

Sex, of course, was a different story—but she couldn’t let herself think about that. About that last time, right after her “confession,” so raw and possessive and furious...

“Is this small talk?” he asked softly. She wasn’t fooled by that tone. She could feel its lethal power deep in her bones, tightening around her like a noose. “I haven’t grown any more interested in such things, Holly. I told you four years ago what we would discuss if you dared face me again. Is this really where you’d like to have that conversation?”

“Far be it from me to direct you in anything,” she replied, angling her body back so she looked far more at ease than she was, and it was harder than it should have been to remember what she was doing here, when he was right there and her instinct was to protect herself. To keep him hating her, which hurt more in the moment but was safer in the long run. Safer and colder and emptier. So much emptier. Hadn’t she spent all these years proving that to herself—in case her childhood hadn’t taught her that lesson first? “I know it’s so important to you that you remain in control.”

“I imagine that is the point of this charade, is it not?” He was stroking that wineglass the way he’d once stroked her body, and she was certain it was deliberate. That he knew exactly what that slow sweep of his tapered, too-strong fingers against the glass did inside of her. The streaks of fire. That deep, hard clench within. “The honeymoon suite, the clever little rose petals, like a forced death march down memory lane straight back into the fires of hell. And you have always done hell with such flair, have you not?” His gaze slammed into hers then. “What do you want from me?”

“I told you what I wanted.”

It was hard to keep her voice even when he was on the other side of such a tiny little table, his intense physicality, his rampant maleness, like an industrial-force magnet. Holly had forgotten that, somehow. She’d forgotten that so much of being near Theo was being utterly helpless and under his spell. In his thrall. She’d had to leave him or disappear into him, never to be seen again, and she remembered why, now. She could feel it, like a black hole, sucking her in all over again—the same way this same kind of destructive love had sucked in her father all those years ago. She’d watched how this ended before. Why did she think it could be different now?

She kept her gaze level on Theo’s and tried not to think about her parents. “A divorce.”

“I told you I wouldn’t give you one. And it has not yet been those magical four years that would release you, anyway. You shouldn’t have come to Barcelona if that was really what you wanted. This resets the clock, does it not?”

“What does it matter if we’re in the same city?” she asked, more bravado than anything else, and she threw in a little scoffing sound, just to maintain the brittle facade a few minutes more. “We’re not staying together. We’re not even staying in the same hotel.”

That surprised him. Holly could see it in a brief flash of something before he shuttered that dark gaze of his, and that made her decision to stay in The Harrington, a luxurious boutique hotel in Barcelona’s famous Gothic Quarter, seem that much smarter. As if she was getting good at handling him, after all.

After so many years apart, perhaps she’d finally learned something.

“I’ll repeat—what do you want?” Theo’s voice was clipped, his gaze when it met hers again uncompromisingly direct. “It was obviously important to you that we do this. Here we are. You have three seconds to tell me what your agenda is.”

“Or what?”

Holly made her voice a taunt, though the truth was, she didn’t recognize this version of Theo, and that was making her feel far more uneasy than she’d imagined she would. He wasn’t the lazy, sun-drunk lover she remembered, and even though she’d read enough about him over the course of these past few years to have expected that on some level, the reality was much different. He had an edge now. He wasn’t remotely tame. Back then, he’d reminded her of nothing so much as a great, lazy cat—tonight, he was all claws and fangs. Maybe that was why she was drawing this out instead of coming clean immediately.

Or maybe she was still too afraid. That he wouldn’t believe her.

That he would.

“What can you possibly do to me that you haven’t already done?” she asked instead.

“Excellent,” he said silkily. “We’ve moved on to the blame portion of this conversation. And so quickly. Are you truly prepared to pretend that I carry any of it?” He laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It rushed over her, making her skin prickle and feel too tight. It was as dangerous as he was. “I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to the performance. Please, Holly. Tell me how I betrayed you.”

She couldn’t breathe. His gaze was too hot and too condemning, his mouth too grim. It was as if he’d chained her to her seat with the force of his fury alone, and she felt a dangerous weakness steal over her. As if she could simply surrender, right here...

But she knew better.

“I’m prepared to talk about our marriage,” she said then, when she’d battled herself back from that cliff, down to something resembling calm. Or, at least, a good facsimile of it that might propel her through these last, crucial moments. “Are you? Because the way I remember it, the last time we broached the subject there was nothing but yelling and punching walls.”

And then that wild, insane thing that had exploded between them, nothing as simple as mere sex—but she didn’t say that. Neither did Theo. But it was between them all the same, the terrible heat and the violent blast of it as intense as if it had only just happened. That indelible claiming. Holly could hear the sound of his shirt tearing beneath her hands, could feel his skin beneath her teeth, the rage and the fire, the betrayal and the thick, twisted emotion like a hundred sobs pent up inside them both, and then that slick, perfect thrust of him deep into her, rough and complicated, their own painful little poetry. Their own goodbye.

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