Chapter One
Twelve Months Later…
Poppy pushed up the sash window. The air was too stifling. Too close, her mother would have said. As if the air itself was closing in.
It was a warning the storm was near.
Soon the heavens would open.
The sky would tear with lightning bolts.
The thunder would roar.
But outside, there were no signs of an incoming storm.
All was as it had been for the last year.
Picturesque. Not a cloud was in the sky.
The sun shone over Paris in a blanket of warm orange.
The Champ de Mars was a forest of green beneath the Eiffel Tower.
A postcard picture she only viewed from inside.
Hidden behind the glass. Safe inside her temporary home.
She’d always known it would be temporary. Yet she wasn’t ready to leave. She wasn’t ready to face the world outside the haven this place had become to her. A place to heal.
She exhaled sharply.
She knew the closeness of the storm wasn’t making her skin clammy, though. It was the telephone meeting taking place a few rooms down.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear.’
Léon Durand. Her old employer had opened his home to her without condition, but with empathy. They’d both lost so much. They’d…talked. Of their losses. Of hers.
Léon was a blessing. He always had been.
Her very first employer straight out of university.
Durand Cruise Liners never should have hired her.
She’d been too inexperienced, despite her double degrees and her aptitude for languages, to be a personal assistant to the head of a conglomerate.
But it was an unusual position no experienced PA would have agreed to.
His son, Caleb, had taken over the family business.
Léon’s position within his own company had become redundant, his staff had been reduced or transferred, and yet he stayed in his office.
He refused to officially retire. Caleb had confided he did this because no one was at home any more.
His wife had died. He was alone in a six-storey mansion.
And so he stayed in his second home. Durand Towers.
Poppy was hired to keep Léon…company. A companion.
And now they were each other’s.
‘There’s nothing I can do,’ Léon said quietly from the doorway. ‘There’s no way to stop it.’
Her mouth ran dry.
‘The lawyers have delayed as much as they can, but they have come to the end of the road. There are no more loopholes to use.’ He swallowed thickly. ‘The takeover is imminent.’
She nodded, and turned her gaze away from where he sat in his wheelchair.
Guilt pressed down heavily on her heart.
She never should have put Léon in this position, but she hadn’t known about the loan. Hadn’t known how close the spider was coming to wrapping its silken threads around Léon.
She picked up her pruning shears. She’d spent the last year honing in on the things she enjoyed.
Flowers. Arranging them into subtle bouquets—large ones, fantastical ones.
Léon’s home looked somewhat like a florist’s shop now.
But they both enjoyed the scent. The scent of hope the greyness of grief would dim.
‘Use this as an opportunity, Poppy,’ Léon said behind her. ‘Face him.’
The pruning shears slipped from her fingers onto the mat-lined table. White petals fell from the long-stemmed roses she was arranging in the vase with the thud of metal on wood.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘You must at least talk—’
‘I don’t want to talk to him,’ she interjected sharply. Too sharply.
‘If only to end it,’ he pressed. ‘Divorce him.’
She closed her eyes. Shut out the view of Paris in front of her. Shut out the voice of reason behind her.
‘You can’t hide forever.’
She sighed. ‘I’m not ready.’
‘We are never ready for these things.’
Poppy opened her eyes. For a year, she’d waited for it. For strength. But she wasn’t…strong.
She fingered a thornless stem with her left hand. A year later and still it felt wrong not to be wearing her rings. Her hand—her fingers—they were unbalanced without them.
‘We both know you can’t continue to live like this,’ he said, rolling his wheelchair beside her. ‘You cannot live with me as you have done. As if the world outside doesn’t exist. It exists, Poppy, and it’s coming inside. He is.’
A tremble raked through her. ‘How long do I have?’
‘A week. Maybe.’ He reached for her hand. Enclosed it between both of his. Such a simple gesture of reassurance that he was here. With her. Her friend. ‘I’m in no position to delay him.’
She looked down into his weathered face.
He looked so much older than he had when she’d met him almost a decade ago.
She recognised the deeper lines. She had them too.
Scars of sadness. Grief. Both had aged him ten years above his seventy.
As for her…she didn’t feel thirty. She ached in places no thirty-year-old should.
Her eyes welled. ‘You shouldn’t have to,’ she said, placing her free hand on top of his. ‘I never meant to stay this long.’
His face twisted. ‘I was selfish to keep you here. Selfish not to push you to do this sooner. But you—your memories of Caleb—’ His voice broke.
Her throat clogged. Poppy had worked for the Durands for twelve months before Léon retired.
Then she’d become Caleb’s third assistant.
Caleb had never been anything more to her than an employer, although she had seen his determination to keep the business and his family from bankruptcy.
But by her fourth year working for the family the business had come under real strain, despite his best efforts, and he started letting staff go…
She never should have taken Konstantinos’s job offer.
But she had. Konstantinos had seen in her something no one else ever had.
The potential to be…more. Potential he’d highlighted in a meeting when she’d suggested a workable time-line so Konstantinos and Caleb could work together to ease the worries of a cargo business they’d intended to take over, together, to minimise the monetary risk to their individual businesses.
Especially as Durand was looking into new ventures to stabilise the company’s income.
He’d told them a young woman brave enough to speak out in a meeting where she should be taking minutes needed to be given the opportunity to grow. There was no room for professional growth in a business that was letting staff go, closing departments and taking risks on new ventures.
Konstantinos hadn’t stolen her away. He wasn’t underhand. He’d asked them if he could have her. They’d agreed to let her go.
She’d become PA to the richest shipping magnate in the world. Konstantinos had given her an opportunity no one else had, an opportunity to grow, to be more, but still her eyes had chased his lips into every room—watched them until London.
He’d pushed her in the office to take charge of her professional growth, and every chance they had he pushed her in bed too—to demand more. To tell him what she liked when he kissed the skin beneath her ear. When he put his hand between her thighs.
He’d made her feel free to be honest, when all her young life she’d held her tongue, considered the consequences of her honesty.
She didn’t have to consider the consequences with him.
He’d become her lover. Her friend. She’d told him things she’d told no one. Her father was an adulterer. She’d spent her childhood holding her breath.
He’d promised she’d never have to hold her breath with him.
She never had to be scared.
When he’d asked her to marry him…it had been the happily-ever-after she wanted. Not love, but friendship. Trust.
‘Caleb was a good man,’ she said, pushing those memories of Konstantinos down.
Konstantinos wasn’t the man he made people believe he was. He wasn’t trustworthy. He wasn’t on her side. He’d left her side the minute the pregnancy test had shown two vivid pink lines. He’d abandoned her completely when she was grieving. Sick.
Postpartum depression. What a cruel thing for her body to do to her. To give her all the emotions of a woman who’d carried her baby into the third trimester, twenty-eight weeks, and amplify them with grief.
‘And a terrible businessman,’ Léon said.
She dropped her stiff shoulders. None of this was Léon’s fault. He’d given her refuge. He’d done everything in his power to hide her in plain sight.
‘We can’t all be good at everything,’ she soothed.
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. ‘I should have held on to the reins a little longer,’ he said. ‘I should have—’
‘You did nothing wrong, Léon.’
‘If I’d done things differently…if I hadn’t retired…’ His lips thinned. ‘Your husband would never have had to bail us out. Save my company from bankruptcy. You wouldn’t be in the position you are in now.’
‘No one put me in this position but him.’
She’d thought she was safe with Konstantinos.
‘You came when I had nothing and no one.’ Léon’s eyes shimmered.
‘I had no one either,’ she said.
‘You have a husband,’ he corrected.
‘He stopped being that the minute he was unfaithful.’ Fury burned beneath her skin. ‘He betrayed me.’
Léon scowled. ‘I’m sorry, Poppy. Sorry I didn’t push you to at least end it. Close the door on your marriage before it came to this point. Critical.’
‘You gave me what I needed,’ she corrected. ‘A friend.’
‘Our time is up.’ He paled. ‘He will take over Durand’s. He will come.’
‘I’ll leave.’
‘I have an estate.’ He frowned. ‘It is rural. Deep in the countryside. It’s yours, if this is what you wish.’
She leant down and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll do everything in my power to give you what you…need.’
Twenty-four hours later…
Konstantinos Ariti was no saviour.
He was the devil.
And tonight he’d come to collect.
He rang the gold bell, and within seconds the black iron doors of the six-storey French mansion in the seventh arrondissement of Paris opened.