Chapter Two
Poppy understood it for what it was.
A battle cry.
Rough and accented, the roar of her name swept over her skin and called every hair on her body to rise to it.
For months she’d hidden from this fight, and she didn’t want it. She wasn’t ready.
Eyes forward, she ran. Her feet faltered with the hiccup of her heart. But she wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t turn back.
She wasn’t stupid. At her fastest, she couldn’t match his stealth. She couldn’t outpace him. But she could hide.
Ahead, the unmarked border between the seventh and fifteenth districts called to her.
She ran beneath a broken streetlight and slipped into the alley between two tall buildings.
She scanned what loomed above her on either side. Apartments. Metal balconies covered each wall with a crisscross of diagonal steps. A pull-down ladder hovered above her. A fire escape?
She jumped—missing the first rung by too many centimetres.
She scanned the lower walls—the white doors. She tugged at a silver handle. Locked.
She turned her gaze to the end of the alleyway.
Her heart stopped.
Metal gates barred her way. She ran to them. Yanked at the padlock. Futile. Her gaze lifted. Her stomach dropped. She couldn’t climb the twisted metal with its sharp, dagger points.
‘Poppy,’ a voice said behind her. It was quiet. Lethal.
Her heart slowed. Her panting lungs ceased to breathe.
She whipped around.
His frame filled the entrance to the alleyway. Blocked any chance of escape. Dressed all in black, he was an all-consuming shadow in the darkness.
And he was getting closer.
‘Ahh!’ A noise left her mouth that should have been a scream, but it wasn’t. It was a yip that sounded too much like excitement. As if it wanted to be caught, and it enjoyed the thrill of the chase.
Her body was confused. It was too tightly coiled. Too tense.
It was not excited!
She hated confrontation—had hidden from it since she was a child for fear of exposing her father’s double life. She’d run tonight because it was instinct to run. The way it had been when she’d been young. Run away from the lies her father told her mother. The heated arguments that followed. But…
She swallowed. Hard. But there was no moisture to smooth the motion. No way to ease the tightness drawing her every muscle taut. But never had the threat of confrontation felt so…internal.
It was bone-deep. It throbbed in her temples, in her chest. And down lower. Between her thighs.
His step didn’t falter. Graceful and slow, he closed the distance between them with effortless ease.
The amber light from the windows up on high threw a light down on him—sharpened his edges.
His black hair was scraped back with precision.
Each strand in place. Perfect. His broad forehead drew her gaze to his eagle nose, his clean-shaven sculpted cheekbones, his thick, naturally pouting mouth.
The open collar of his black shirt exposed his wide neck, taut and pulsing.
His black suit, his jacket unbuttoned, sat on his shoulders like a second skin.
He was everything she remembered, and everything she’d tried to forget.
A beautiful liar.
He stopped in front of her.
‘You will come with me.’ He raised long, tanned fingers.
Was he trembling?
No.
Konstantinos didn’t tremble.
He felt nothing.
She stepped back out of reach. Her back met metal. ‘Don’t touch me.’
She didn’t want his hands on her.
She didn’t crave his touch.
She didn’t miss the sweep of his fingers on her skin.
She didn’t yearn for the all-encompassing heat of his body enveloping her.
She didn’t long for the security of his arms.
He wasn’t safe.
His gaze narrowed. ‘Don’t touch you?’
Her stomach flipped. ‘Go away, Konstantinos.’
He inched towards her. Invaded her space. Swallowed the air and replaced it with him. Only him. And it washed over her. A scent so familiar, so earthy.
She wouldn’t breathe him in!
But she already had. Too deeply. All she could taste was him. And he tasted of the shattered shards of broken vows.
‘I’m going nowhere without you.’
‘Why would I go anywhere with you?’
Dark eyes burrowed into hers. ‘You abandoned me—imploded my life. Devastated my reputation,’ he said on a heated hiss. ‘You owe me an explanation.’
She wouldn’t feel guilty.
He deserved it!
He was a fraud.
Just like Dad.
‘I owe you nothing.’
‘Oh, but you do, poulaki mou.’
The endearment thrust her back to too long ago, to a once-upon-a-time fairy tale that had never existed.
‘I’m not your little bird.’ She spat out the lie, because she had been his. Only his.
The mighty Konstantinos Ariti had given her a chance to be…more. He’d said she was like a little bird tapping on the window when she’d spoken in that meeting. And he’d opened it.
It had done something to her. Stroked a part of her she’d thought she’d buried. The need to be chosen. Her dad had never chosen her. He’d never given up his other family. But Konstantinos had chosen her.
Each stage of their relationship, he’d sucked her in.
Offered her a job no one else believed she could do.
First assistant. A personal assistant to a formidable Greek.
He’d eased her into a twelve-month affair.
Tempted her into marriage. And for eighteen months before she fell pregnant it had been everything he’d promised.
He’d made her believe for the first time in her life she was safe. She could trust in the life she was living. The life she’d chosen to live with him.
He’d made her believe he could be trusted.
And then… Isaak.
He’d changed everything. Changed her. But Konstantinos had shown his true colours. He was cold. Detached. He’d never cared for her. Never cared for the baby they’d made. And she…she had cared. Deeply. So very deeply had she cared for them both, she realised.
She’d broken no rules. She had not fallen in love. But caring?
She’d carried his child. Wasn’t she supposed to care?
Wasn’t he?
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘You’re not a little bird any more.’
His gaze travelled over her. His slow appraisal, the flick of too long eyelashes, swept over every part of her body.
It was too intimate. It licked at her flesh. Made her burn.
Lean, long fingers rose to her cheek. Feather-light, his thumb grazed her cheek and pushed the stray hairs behind her ear. ‘You are my wife.’
Electrical currents zapped her senses. The possessive statement, the imprint of his thumb on her over-sensitised skin, hardened her abdominal muscles. Her breasts felt heavy. The tight tips of her nipples pushed against the cotton of her shirt.
Whatever was happening inside her body was nothing more than muscle memory. Her body remembered, that was all. But his hands on her body. His touch on her skin…
It repulsed her, she assured herself.
He did not set her soul on fire.
The coil inside her, suppressing everything, popped.
‘Get your hands off me.’ Red rage misted her gaze. Never again would she welcome his touch on her body. ‘You…you lying bastard!’
His hand fell to his side. ‘I have never lied to you.’
Did he really think she didn’t know?
The heat drained from her limbs—blanching her tightened cheeks.
He knew what he’d done. He knew, even if she’d never confronted him with the photographs. He was there. He didn’t need to see them.
Images of skin, dark and flawless, so different from her freckled, pale skin, flashed in her mind.
Isabella, she’d like her. Hired her as her replacement. She’d trained her.
The roll of tyres burst the tension between them.
Her gaze flicked to the black limousine blocking the entry to the alley.
‘You will come with me,’ he said again.
She thrust out her chin defiantly. ‘I won’t.’
‘I have searched the world to find you. I thought you were dead, but here you are, very much alive.’ His black eyes shot flames. ‘This doesn’t end with me leaving you all alone in the dark.’
She needed this to end.
Them to end.
So, what choice did she have?
She hadn’t been trying to heal these last months.
She’d been hiding. All her life she’d hidden from the moments she shouldn’t have. The moments she should have stiffened her spine and planted her feet and spoken. However nasty it was to tell it. To say it out loud. The truth.
Léon was right. Right to make her face him. She needed to. But…
Her stomach dropped.
How many times had she run from confrontation? Away from her father? Hidden under the bed when she was too young to leave the house? Hidden in the park when she knew that was the furthest she could go on their estate? She’d never confronted him. Never told her mother the truth…
Poppy understood she hadn’t kept her father’s secrets only to protect her mother. She’d kept them to protect herself. To keep her father where he belonged. With her.
She’d wanted her daddy. His love.
What ten-year-old didn’t?
It wasn’t a special kind of love. He wasn’t a special man.
He had no admirable qualities other than that he was there.
So many of the children at school…their families were broken.
Divorced. They’d teased her because she was the odd one out with her traditional family.
Two parents. They’d warned her it wouldn’t last. Her daddy would leave. Just as their daddies had left them.
For so long she had thought her daddy wasn’t like other daddies.
She’d joined the dots in her teens. They weren’t simply other children she played with in the park on her Saturday afternoons out with her father. They were her family. Her half-siblings. Her father had a second family.
She’d wanted to tell her mother. Tell her the truth. Her father was splitting his time between two lives. Both a secret from the other. But she’d been afraid. Afraid to break up her family, however heavy the lie.
She wasn’t na?ve any more.
Everything she loved about her father had been a facade.
He’d lied. To everyone.
He’d cared for none of them. Only himself.
Just like Konstantinos.
She stepped back.
‘I hate you,’ she said, her voice devoid of anything.
The pulse throbbed in his clean-shaven cheek.