Chapter Twelve
CHAPTER TWELVE
L UCIE SAW THANASIS’S lips move but heard no sound above the roar in her head.
Time had faded away, the world spinning around her and then ebbing to a crawl, everything that had happened between them since she’d woken in her hospital bed flashing like picture stills in her vision.
Slowly, slowly, the present began to weave back into her consciousness, her eyes clearing to soak in the dark stubble on Thanasis’s jawline, and the dark hairs of his chest which were so soft in stark contrast to the hardness of the muscle and bone beneath them, the nerves of her hand registering the tenderness of the giant hands holding hers… She had no recollection of him taking them or even of him sitting up to face her. She heard, too, the tenderness in his voice.
‘Lucie, say something, please.’
Her head was pounding.
Slowly, she forced herself to meet his stare.
His green eyes were stark with torment.
She tugged her hands free and whispered, ‘I need to use the bathroom.’
Twisting to the edge of the bed, she groped with her foot for the floor then fought to keep her legs upright as she staggered away from him, suddenly aware that she was cold. Cold and naked.
Naked from their lovemaking.
A whimper rose up her throat but she smothered it, dragging her legs to the door he’d silently indicated, suddenly desperate to cover her nakedness.
Oh, dear God help her, had it all been a lie?
There was a grey robe on the door but she couldn’t bring herself to touch it, and she wrapped a bath towel around herself before splashing water on her clammy face.
She was shaking. Her whole body.
The memory she’d been searching for finally flashed before her. Lucie and her mother alone in her hospital room.
‘Mum, how do Thanasis and I get on? The nurse seems to think…’
‘Seems to think what?’
‘She thinks he’s in love with me.’
‘It has been obvious to us all that strong emotions have developed between you.’
But her mum hadn’t met Thanasis before Lucie’s accident. It had been a lie. One of many, many lies.
She rammed her fist into her mouth to smother the scream fighting to break free.
Oh, God, how could she face seeing him again?
She had to face him. There was no other choice.
When she finally left the bathroom, he’d thrown on a pair of shorts and was sitting at the end of the bed rubbing his head.
She sank her weak legs onto an armchair facing him and forced herself to meet his gaze. ‘Was any of it true? You and me? The great unexpected romance?’
There was a bleakness in his stare. ‘No. None of it was true. It was a lie we fed you to stop you leaving me again.’
She gripped hold of her knees and hung her head in an effort to fight against a world trying to spin itself off its axis around her again. ‘Again?’
He gave a taut nod. ‘I hated you. I made your life a misery.’
She turned her face away, his blunt admittance slicing like a knife through her heart.
The spasm of pain on Lucie’s face lanced him. Drawing in a long breath, Thanasis filled himself with resolve.
She deserved the truth.
And he deserved whatever retribution came from it.
Especially now.
God forgive him.
‘I hated your entire family. I agreed to the marriage because it was the only viable way of saving my business and saving my family from destitution, but I hated you before I even set eyes on you and when I did set eyes on you and realised you were the woman from the party I’d searched the streets of Athens for, I made damned sure that you hated me too.’
Her gaze turned back to him, her distressed black eyes wide.
‘Oh, yes,’ Thanasis said grimly. ‘I was deliberate about it. I had mentally allocated two years of my life to our marriage, and then it would be dissolved and I would find myself a real wife to build my real future with. Georgios Tsaliki’s stepdaughter was never going to be that woman.’
God that he could take it all back. Rewind to when he’d opened his bedroom door to find her naked and tell her the truth then, before he’d lost himself to the heat of his passion for her and shared the most incredible and fulfilling emotional and physical experience of his life with the woman whose heart had connected to his and which he now needed to break.
He could only pray that Lucie could find it in herself to forgive him. He would never forgive himself.
‘In my wildest, most secret dreams, the woman I would build my future with was the tiny waif with a mass of black curly hair who’d captured a piece of my heart all those years ago…’
Her chin wobbled. She made the smallest of whimpers.
God that he could lift all her pain from her. He would not close his eyes or his ears to it.
‘And then I found she was you.’ His mouth twisted in self-loathing. ‘I cannot tell you how much I hated you for being her, or how much I hated myself for still wanting you. I even hated you for your selflessness—you were giving up your life and independence to save the fortunes of a monster and getting nothing in return. You asked for nothing in return. Nothing.
‘You and I spent two months in a war I instigated and fed. I treated you despicably and in turn you treated me with loathing and contempt, but to reiterate—it all came from me. You’d been prepared to give me a chance… I’d seen it in your eyes and I hated that about you too. This was all on me. Everything that was toxic about our relationship came from me, and I will regret my behaviour and the way I treated you for the rest of my life.’
She closed her eyes.
Theos , she looked so small. So lost. The towel she’d wrapped around herself was swallowing her up.
If only she would let him reach across…
Her eyes opened and clamped onto his. ‘What happened at the end?’
His stomach lurched. He pulled his lips together.
‘What else?’ she said, her voice hardening. ‘I know there’s something else and I know it involves Athena.’
Of all the things he’d never wanted Lucie to relive, this had been at the top of his list.
To relive it meant she would have to relive her pain and distress.
But he couldn’t hide it from her or try and sweeten it. The truth he owed her was the full truth.
If he’d been a better man, he’d have said to hell with consequences and told her the full truth a week ago.
But a week ago he hadn’t known he loved her. Hadn’t known Lucie’s happiness and peace of mind would come to mean more to him than anything.
‘Did you sleep with her?’
He didn’t drop his stare. ‘No, but she led you to believe that I did.’
Whatever little colour that had returned to her cheeks vanished.
‘When we first discussed marriage between the two families, it was agreed, at my suggestion, that I would marry Athena—she was Georgios’s only blood daughter so it made sense to me. But just as I wouldn’t entertain Alexis marrying Lydia, Georgios refused to let Athena marry me. Marrying you was at his suggestion. The fact the world has always regarded you as his daughter meant our marriage would have the same effect. At some point Athena learned she’d been first choice.’ Now he did close his eyes. ‘She came to me.’
‘Came to you?’ she croaked. ‘What does that mean?’
‘She came to my offices.’ He forced himself to look back at her. ‘After everything about the marriage was agreed and you moved to Greece, you spent a lot of time with her. She knew you and I hated each other and seemed to think my suggestion of marriage to her meant that I must want her. She tried to seduce me.’
A pulse was throbbing in the base of her throat. ‘Tried?’
‘Yes. Tried. She kissed my neck, I pushed her away and told her to leave. She left. The first I knew that she’d gone straight to the apartment to see you was when I got home. You were waiting for me. You checked the collar of my shirt, saw the lipstick mark she’d left on it and that was it. You hit the roof. You refused to let me explain myself. You stole my car keys out of my hand and told me the wedding was off.’
‘I didn’t believe you?’
‘You wouldn’t let me speak to explain. You were in a terrible state.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I thought then that it was anger but it was distress. I think Athena hurt you very much. The things she said to you. She told you about Georgios insisting that you be the one to make the sacrifice of marriage for the sake of the family. Told you why.’
Her pretty eyebrows had drawn together. ‘Why would Athena do that to me? Our relationship has always been fractious but I never thought she hated me.’
‘She is poisonous.’
‘She’s been a sister to me since I was three years old.’
‘Sisters because your mother stole her father from her mother.’
Her eyes squeezed shut.
‘In Athena’s eyes, it is the truth,’ he said.
‘But I was a child .’
‘Her mother is poison. The whole Tsaliki family and anyone who marries into them is poison or becomes contaminated by it. They are all selfish and out for themselves—it is why our fathers fell out and separated the business into two. My father learned Georgios was taking bribes. Athena saw a chance to hurt you and she took it. To her, it was a bit of mindless entertainment to ease the boredom of her life. She had no care for your feelings because she is incapable of caring for anyone but herself.’
‘Then you should have taken what she was offering because you have no care for my feelings either,’ she whispered.
‘Your feelings matter more to me than anything.’
Her gaze levelled back on him. ‘Oh, I think I’m as expendable to you as I so clearly am to everyone else.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘Why not? We’re speaking truths, aren’t we? You let me believe you were holding back from me because you didn’t want to take advantage of my missing memories…’ Lucie closed her eyes, fighting with everything she had to hold on to her composure.
She’d instigated their lovemaking. She had. Not Thanasis. Right until the very end, he’d fought away from it.
Oh, God, she couldn’t bear to remember how beautiful it had been. How beautiful he had made her feel. How loved he’d made her feel.
She’d given him everything she had to give and all along…
She’d thought she’d been taking control but she was the one who’d been controlled, right from the moment she’d woken up in that hospital bed.
She snapped her gaze back to him. ‘I’m sure you can soothe your conscience by telling yourself that you tried to resist the chemistry between us, and, quite honestly, I can imagine living with you was like living in a form of war zone. I’m a prickly bear when people are mean to me—you lash out at me and if I’ve got nowhere to hide then I lash right back, and I know perfectly well that if you of all people had been cruel to me then my self-defence mechanism would have kicked in, and when I say you of all people I mean it’s because I spent six years painting you in my head as this romantic hero, luckily not to the extent where I fancied myself in love with you or anything, but enough that it would have hurt to learn you really were the unmitigated bastard the Tsalikis always painted you as being, and I am trying so hard right now not to lash out at you and call you every vile name under the sun for what you’ve done to me and for all the lies you’ve been feeding me…’
‘I’ve tried very hard not to tell you outright lies.’
‘Oh, aren’t you a regular saint?’ she scorned bitterly, needing to be scornful, needing to keep speaking because something was swelling inside her, pushing into her chest and throat, something hot and ugly and dripping with the pain that every word uttered by Thanasis had made her bleed with.
‘Everything apart from our past has been the truth, I swear.’
‘Quick, polish your halo. But as I was saying, I’m trying very hard not to call you all the vile names that are lining up on my tongue, and trying even harder not to imagine breaking your nose and, and…and…’ She couldn’t contain the agony a second longer. Before she could stop them, tears were pouring down her face and Lucie was on her feet and charging at him, pushing as hard as she could into Thanasis’s chest to send him falling back onto the mattress, climbing on top of him, straddling him as she screamed obscenities and pounded her fists at his chest.
‘How could you?’ she sobbed when all her obscenities had dried up but not an ounce of the agony had been purged. ‘How could you, how could you, how could you? How could you do that to me? I did nothing to any of you except love you and you all lied, and you, you bastard, you pretended that you loved me and cared for me when all along you hated me…’
Finally, he grabbed her wrists to control her and flipped her over, pinning her down. ‘No, Lucie, I have never hated you, never believe that. I only thought I did, and it’s only now that I look back and can see it was a lie I fed myself.’
She shook her head wildly. ‘Every word out of your mouth has been a lie!’
‘No.’
‘You made me fall in love with you, and all so you could save your bastard business when you didn’t even need to tell me the lie!’
‘I know, but once the lie had been fed I had no choice but to go along with it.’
‘You’re Thanasis Antoniadis,’ she screamed. ‘Of course you had a choice! The only person in this whole sordid affair not given a choice is me because all the choices I made were choices based on lies because I’m the expendable one, the one who never fits in anywhere so who bloody well cares about Lucie?’
‘I care, more than anything.’
‘Well, I don’t. I don’t care about you and I don’t care about the Tsalikis. You can all rot in hell together—you deserve each other, now get off me, get off me, get off me!’
Breathing heavily, he let go of her wrists and moved off her.
In a flash, she’d scrambled off the bed and was out of the door before Thanasis had managed to haul himself off the mattress to chase after her.
He slammed her bedroom door open. The room was empty but he could hear her throwing things around in her dressing room and snatched a tiny breath of relief that she hadn’t run off naked into the night.
He stood by the door. ‘Lucie, please, I know you’re hurting, but please don’t do anything rash. Hate me, hit me, punch me, do all the things you want, just don’t go. Not like this. Stay with me. Please. Just give me a chance to put things right.’
She appeared in front of him hugging her overnight case to her chest, a broken Aphrodite with bloodshot eyes and hair like a nest and a thin black dress she’d put on back to front. ‘Put things right so I’ll marry you and keep the public lie going?’
‘I don’t care about the wedding,’ he roared. ‘All I care about is you, and right now I’m terrified you’re going to go off and do something stupid like you did the last time.’
There was a moment of complete stillness before Lucie slowly straightened, seeming to grow and magnify before his eyes, as proud and as powerful as Hera herself.
‘The only stupid thing I’ve done other than believe your lies is fall in love with you,’ she said with deadly, ice-cold precision. ‘But, believe me, I’m over that now, and if you think I’m going to do something rash that puts me in danger then you’re the stupid one because you’re the last person in the world I’d hurt myself over. Do not follow me, do not ever make contact with me again. I have nothing left to say to you.’
This time, Thanasis let her go.
* * *
Lucie sat on a rock by the harbour watching the sun rise. She would never now have the chance to watch it rise on the mountain’s summit. Never mind. There were lots of things in life she would never get her chance at. Getting married was but one of them, and it was with that philosophical thought in mind that she got to her feet at the sight of the boat approaching the harbour with supplies for the wedding that would never take place.
An hour later she was sailing away from Sephone.
She didn’t look back.
* * *
Thanasis watched the boat containing the woman he loved disappear on the horizon.
The world swayed beneath his feet and he had to squeeze his eyes shut to ground himself.
Heading in the other direction, sailing towards him, the first of the many yachts sailing to Sephone for the wedding of the century.
He rubbed at his raw, gritty eyes.
So much to do. A wedding to cancel. All the people who needed to be notified. The press, who needed to be managed.
He didn’t have the heart or energy to do any of it.
It no longer mattered what he lost. He’d already lost the only thing that mattered.
This time, there would be no reprieve. No third chance.
Lucie was gone for ever.