Chapter Nine
One Week Later…
Konstantinos had hired a team to organise the ceremony.
She’d taken over the planning.
She needed this.
Something to focus on.
Something to take her mind off…him.
She took a step back. Stared at the table arrangements. She’d taken over the lounge. Presentation boards, three of them, stood at the centre of the arched floor-to-ceiling window. Papers were scattered on the wooden floor beneath them.
She’d missed this. Organising things. Mapping events to bring people’s lives together seamlessly. She’d been good at it. Her job. And that was how she was trying to look on the ceremony. As an event. An abstract thing where she wouldn’t be the focal point, and neither would he.
She hadn’t missed working for so long. Still didn’t. Not really. She knew this was a distraction at best. But so far, the distraction wasn’t working.
She knew what he’d done at Versailles. She’d done it. So many times.
He’d run away.
She took another flower and pinned it with a forceful jab into Table 27.
She hadn’t missed working when she’d married Konstantinos.
She’d given up her job with ease the minute she’d accepted his proposal.
Being a wife—his wife—she’d enjoyed it. All of it.
The clothes, the jewellery, the social engagements, the business dinners, or intimate meals with CEOs and their wives, where she hadn’t had to take notes, or arrange a docket of who was attending to inform Konstantinos what he should know about their personal lives—the birth of a grandchild, or the death of a cousin.
She’d slipped into her new role, she knew, because of him.
He’d held her hand and led her into the spotlight of his life, and never had she felt as if she didn’t belong there. As if she wasn’t wanted. As if she was someone to be kept a secret. In the dark.
She’d never known if her father wanted her or them.
Which family was his family? Both or neither?
Was she the dirty secret he kept away from her siblings—from their mother?
Which one of his families had been the mistake?
Had he cared for any of them? Had they all been unwanted by her father so he could live his carefree life regardless of who he hurt? Had he ever wanted her?
Konstantinos had wanted her. He’d needed her to secure the honourable life he wanted to lead.
She’d found strength in their relationship.
A safe marriage where no one could get hurt.
A successful relationship, measured by respect, trust, and safety. Rules.
Isaak had shaken the foundations of their marriage.
Obliterated their every rule. Smashed the agreed-upon foundations they’d thought were so very strong. She had. But…after… The extravagance of her life—the financial safety of it—what Konstantinos provided…
It was a hollow thing after Isaak’s death. Empty. A lonely place. Superficial.
Everything she’d thought she needed to feel safe had meant nothing in the face of her loss.
The pain. Nothing had felt safe. But she’d never asked Konstantinos for what she needed.
Him. She’d expected him to be there. To want to be there for her.
He hadn’t. But she’d never said those words.
Never told him she needed him. Not with words.
She’d stopped being honest with him the minute they’d conceived their baby. She hadn’t been ready to be vulnerable. Not on purpose. Not by choice. When she was sick she had been vulnerable. Exposed. It hadn’t been a choice.
And it had revealed how weak their relationship was.
Their marriage, it wasn’t strong. It couldn’t withstand the unexpected harshness of reality, because what held them together, sex, and conversations that never went beneath the surface, it didn’t make them friends.
Not real friends. And that was why they hadn’t survived.
The rules they’d bound themselves to had pushed them apart.
At Versailles, he’d shut down. Removed himself from the conflict brewing between them. Just as she had a year ago. Just as he had when she was sick. When Isaak had died…
He’d looked away from her distress, and she’d looked away from his.
They couldn’t carry on like this.
They needed to talk about the divide between them. Address what lived inside it.
Isaak.
Wood creaked.
Poppy turned towards the doors.
The gold handles moved. Downwards. The doors opened inwards.
His gaze narrowed, moved over her cut-off denim shorts, her bare legs, unpainted toes, and flicked to her boards.
‘How’s the planning going?’
Her heart raced. ‘I don’t want to talk about the ceremony.’
He stepped into the room, and with a graceful flick of his white-cuffed wrist Konstantinos closed the doors behind him. ‘Why not?’
‘I want to talk about what happened at Versailles.’
He shook his head. A graceful swipe. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘Nothing happened,’ she corrected. ‘You didn’t let it happen.’
‘But you wished it did?’ He stalked closer.
‘You wish something happened between us?’ he asked, his eyes holding hers fast. ‘You no longer wish to enforce it, Poppy?’ He stood in front of her.
Six-feet-plus of nothing but tight, defined muscle standing before her.
His black suit moulded to his muscular frame. ‘The contract?’
The contract had left her wide open. She’d tried to protect herself with her no-sex clause. He’d turned it into a weapon to win control. She’d retaliated.
There would never be closure, unless they both did what had to be done.
‘No, I don’t,’ she admitted tightly.
‘You wish to have sex?’
Her mouth ran dry. She wasn’t prepared. For the smell of him. A cologne both bitter and sweet. A scent her body responded to. Her pupils widened. Her nostrils flared. Heat arrowed to her pelvis.
She swallowed. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. At Versailles she’d wanted him. She wanted him. Still. But sex…it wasn’t what they needed. Not now.
His eyes blazed. ‘If not for sex, why do you no longer wish to enforce the contract?’
‘We need to forgive each other. We need to heal, Konstantinos,’ she told him on a breath. ‘We need…closure. But we can’t have any of those things,’ she continued, ‘if we keep doing what we always do.’
‘What we always do?’ he repeated.
‘Start conversations and end them in bed.’
‘We haven’t slept in a bed together for longer than I can remember.’
‘If we take this conversation to bed—our marriage, even after the divorce, will be…unresolved. We owe each other—’ she held her hands up wide, palms forward ‘—more than this. More than a contract that divides us further. Because if we keep it up, this power play for control, someone will lose. And haven’t we lost enough already? ’
He flinched. An almost imperceptible jump of his flesh. But she saw it. Felt it.
Her lips grappled with the air. ‘I still want a divorce, Konstantinos,’ she said. ‘Too much has happened for us to do anything else. But I want to trust that you’ll give one to me, without a contract.’
His jaw clenched. ‘Why? It will change nothing.’
‘I… I should have trusted you to do the right thing. I… I lost my head at the ball, but you kept yours,’ she reminded him.
‘You kept your word, even though I didn’t want you to.
’ She bit her lip. ‘I trust you, Konstantinos. I want you to trust I’ll do everything you have asked me to do.
We always trusted each other before everything… imploded.’
His pupils flared, until there was nothing but black rings of intensity holding her captive.
‘What exactly do you want from me, agape?’
Her command to her lungs to breathe slowly, deeply, disobeyed her.
Confrontation, still, it made her heart pump, her stomach twist, but this was the only way.
He’d abandoned her on a private jet after Versailles. Abandoned her. Sent her back to Greece. Alone. To be guarded by a team of strangers. Security that patrolled the island’s borders. Staff to feed her. Clean up after her. Just as she had been living for weeks—months—before and after the funeral.
She wanted to show him she wasn’t the wife he’d married. She wouldn’t be amenable. Compliant to the rules that no longer served him or her. She wasn’t her any more. The woman he could leave on the other side of the monastery all alone.
She was here.
He was here.
She wanted—needed—to have the conversations they hadn’t.
She wouldn’t leave their marriage open. Unresolved.
She needed closure.
‘I want to talk about what happened at the ball,’ she repeated. ‘I want to talk about why you left. Why you needed to get away from me.’
‘You know why,’ he growled.
She walked past him—broke the too tense pull between them. She sat down on the sofa, pressed her knees together, and looked up at him from her seated position.
If she wanted him to talk, she had to lead by example. She had to let herself be open to change. She had to let herself be vulnerable. Nothing would ever be different between them unless she did things differently. If things never changed, she’d never have closure.
‘I do,’ she agreed. ‘And we need to talk about it.’
She dragged in a fortifying breath.
‘We need to talk about Isaak.’
‘He’s gone, Poppy.’ He gritted his teeth to stem the burn in his throat. ‘There’s nothing to discuss.’
She flinched.
He closed his eyes. Shut out the image of her waiting for him to expose his feelings.
As if his hurts could fix hers. They couldn’t.
They hadn’t helped his mother. Once, he’d felt.
Once, he’d loved. Once, he’d offered his small arms to his mother.
Tried to wrap them around her. Hold her.
But it hadn’t helped her. His feelings had drowned her.
‘You said you needed closure with your dad,’ she reminded him, ‘but you didn’t get it.’
His eyes snapped open. ‘We are not,’ he said and paced a step closer to the sofa, ‘talking about my father.’