Chapter Five
The boned bodice of Poppy’s dress felt like a too small cage.
Hunched over the laptop on her dressing table, she heaved, her chest pressing too tightly against the lace-ruffled trim.
She stared unblinkingly at the screen.
Konstantinos, he looked…
He didn’t look like him.
She closed her eyes. Shut out the hundreds of images on her screen. Images of him. Endless open tabs of Konstantinos over the last year looking dishevelled. Distracted. In each photograph he looked…tortured.
She opened her eyes, looked down at the largest image in the centre of the screen. Konstantinos walking up the steps to his private jet. He’d turned. His black eyes shadowed. Unseeing.
The paparazzi had snapped him.
Never had she seen Konstantinos with a beard so unkempt.
Never had she seen him looking anything but pristine in public or private.
Image. It was everything to Konstantinos.
So why was he not himself in any of these photographs?
If his image was everything, why hadn’t he cared what he looked like when he knew the paparazzi would create those awful articles?
Articles she’d read all afternoon. They’d analysed his every frown. Every inch of his too long hair…
The knock at the door sent her pulse into overdrive.
Poppy’s eyes snapped to the door.
It opened. He stood in the doorway in his perfect tux. She took in the sharp, angular jut of his jaw. His perfect face.
Still, she caught her breath.
Still, her stomach flipped.
He stepped into the room. ‘It’s time.’
‘I need my shawl,’ she said thickly.
His gaze flicked to the screen at her back.
She turned to it. Closed the lid. Collected her silver shawl and diamond clutch from where they sat next to the laptop. She turned back…
Her hand reached out automatically to steady herself. Solid heat met her palm. Her gaze flicked up to his.
His eyes dropped to her hand on his chest. ‘I have something for you.’
‘What?’
He didn’t answer. He caught her wrist and brought it between their bodies. His touch was a light hold, barely there, but it snatched the air from her lungs.
He reached into his pocket. ‘Did you really think I wouldn’t recognise them?’ To the tip of her ring finger he held her engagement ring. A green emerald and diamond trilogy set in silver platinum, and her wedding band.
‘I found them in Mael Bijoux.’
She gasped. The famous French jeweller only specialised in unique antique jewellery. She had not sold them to that jeweller. She’d known it would be a risk to do so.
‘How?’ she breathed. ‘How do you have them?’
He slipped them on. ‘Jewellery of this calibre is sold to those who know its worth, not—’ he released her hand and stepped back ‘—to common street traders who lend money to the poor at inflated prices for their television sets.’
She flushed. She’d chosen a common brand of French pawn brokers and taken a much lower price than their value, she knew, but…
‘I needed the money,’ she confessed huskily.
‘You would have needed nothing if you’d taken your purse,’ he answered coldly.
‘My team tracked the rings when they came up for auction. I bought them back. But after the rings, the trail was dead.’ He spread his hands wide.
‘I bought this place and waited for the trail to be resurrected. Little did I know you were so close all along.’
She spread her fingers. Looked down at the rings. Her hand felt…balanced.
She looked at him. Took in his perfectly styled hair, combed back from his face.
The clean-shaven jaw. He hadn’t looked like this in the photos.
A too long beard had hidden his face. He’d looked like someone else.
And the press…the speculation… They’d questioned everything.
His business decisions. Their marriage. Her role in his dishevelled appearance—his mental health.
They’d ripped into every aspect of his life.
What had been their life… They’d used the photo of her again on the cliff, and concluded Konstantinos was either a madman who’d locked his wife up to keep her away from the public, or he’d lost her with his son and was keeping the news out of the press that she’d taken her own life.
The death of his father, they’d called the ‘final blow’.
He’d built an empire on the foundations of protecting his people. This narrative would have destroyed him. To be accused of covering up her death. To be compared to his father. He hated his father. Everything he represented. Brutality.
She’d asked Léon not to tell or show her anything.
No newspapers, no internet. She’d barricaded herself inside with nothing but her flowers and talk shows discussing other people’s problems, and she’d ignored her own.
Ignored how her disappearance had affected him.
But seeing Konstantinos like that…almost… sad…
She’d never seen him sad. Never seen him cry, not with a sleeping Isaak in his arms, not at the funeral when she hadn’t stopped crying. Not when she’d fallen to her knees from the weight of grief in her chest at the funeral.
But in these photos…he was visibly…distraught.
Emotion threatened to choke her.
She sidestepped him and hurried to the lift. She cradled her clutch to her chest as he took his place beside her. As the door opened and they stepped inside. Stood side by side, so close, but so far apart.
The lift doors opened. She stepped out into the marble foyer of twisted columns, and she kept walking under the stained-glass-roofed reception area.
The click of her heels echoed behind her as they made their way to the waiting limousine.
Doormen with dipped heads opened the doors. They climbed into their opposite sides.
The doors closed them in.
The car moved.
Paris, it blurred in front of her like a too fast fairground ride. Bright. Vivid.
Colour. She’d dotted her life with it. With flowers. With scents of hope after Isaak died. But she had been nothing but a shadow these last months. Living a monochromatic existence. And now he was taking her into the light. Taking her off life support and demanding she…live.
Konstantinos rattled something off in French to the driver.
The divider closed. And it was too small—the back of the car—it was too claustrophobic. Too full of him. Too full of the past.
She closed her eyes briefly.
The images and articles she’d scoured swirled in front of her eyes.
She resisted the urge to cover her mouth with her hand, and hold in her muffled cry of thick guilt in her throat.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘What’s wrong, Poppy?’
‘I looked at the articles about you. About me. About us.’
‘And?’
‘They were…’ She turned from the window.
He observed her with an intensity both sharp, and acute. ‘They were what?’
‘Disgusting.’
‘They were,’ he agreed. ‘That’s the point, Poppy. Tonight, we change the narrative and call them all liars.’
‘Everything they said about us…you,’ she said unevenly. ‘I knew the articles wouldn’t be good, but I hadn’t expected them to be so…vile.’
‘It’s nothing you haven’t seen them do before,’ he dismissed. ‘That’s the nature of the press, unless you control them. We will squash the rumours I’ve hidden your suicide from the public. We will call every single one of their articles a lie. That is our PR strategy. Simple. Effective.’
She wanted to claw their eyes out. The soulless paparazzi who’d hounded him. She wanted to make sure they could never look through their camera lenses again and hurt him.
‘I don’t want you to talk about it any more,’ he dismissed.
It was a gut punch.
He never had. Not when her body was broken. Not when her soul was shredded. Not when all she’d had was her words. Her heart squeezed. He’d paid someone else to listen for him. But…
‘You asked me what was wrong,’ she reminded him.
He moved in closer, until his thigh pressed against hers. It was firm. It was warm. It penetrated her. The solidity of him. ‘And now you have told me the problem,’ he said. ‘I am done listening.’
She snatched a breath. There he was. The man she had run from. The man he really was. Cold. Before the baby he would have listened to her. Late at night, tangled in the sheets, he would have let her speak. About her mum. Her dad. Her feelings.
Images of every time she’d wanted to talk about the baby growing in her womb—the baby who was in danger inside her—flashed in her mind.
The moment they’d been told the baby was at risk if she didn’t have complete rest, he’d diagnosed her physical needs, provided the room, the bed, the nurse and closed his ears to her worry—looked away from her need to talk about it.
To talk about Isaak.
‘You’re a cold-hearted bastard!’
He shrugged. His hand rose. He claimed her chin between his thumb and forefinger. It was not a hold that hurt, but it was firm. He let the heat from his touch penetrate her skin. ‘Do I feel cold to you, poulaki mou?’
Her every nerve—her every synapse—responded to it. His closeness.
He dipped his head.
It was instinct.
A demand of her body she couldn’t deny.
She closed her eyes. ‘Konstantinos…’ she said, and she didn’t know what it meant. His name on her lips. Was she warning him? Or herself?
He pressed his mouth to hers. And she knew she shouldn’t move her lips. She should shut her mouth tightly. But she didn’t. She leaned into the pressure of his mouth. His swiped against the entrance of hers.
And the hands which, somewhere in her consciousness, she knew she should raise to his chest and push him away, didn’t. They left her lap and moulded to the solid wall of his chest. She smoothed her fingers over every rippled indentation.
His fingers released her chin. Feathered across her jaw. ‘Glikia mou,’ he said into her mouth.
His lips moved. Pressed harder. Forced her mouth wider. With the open palm of his hand on the nape of her neck, he pulled her in closer. Nearer. And she felt…enclosed. In heat. In sensation.