CHAPTER TWELVE
DURINGTHEHOURS her husband had been missing, Emmie had been tortured by thoughts of a car accident, a heart attack, a violent mugging—all the tragedies of life that could happen at any time.
When Theo had appeared in the doorway, her fear had melted away. He was safe. She told herself she’d been foolish to worry.
But looking at his guilty, haunted face, she’d felt a flash of something she didn’t want to admit, even to herself. Something dark.
Now she knew what it was. She loved him. She’d somehow thought, if she sacrificed her needs for his, if she was a perfect wife and gave him everything she had, he might someday love her back. Now she knew she’d been lying to herself.
“I want an alliance of equals,” he’d told her in Paris. “Where we each can live the life we desire, and no one has to sacrifice. No one gets hurt.”
There was no such alliance. Emmie had sacrificed in Paris, working for months on a project she didn’t care about, when she’d wanted to be home getting ready for their baby. And Theo had sacrificed, too, leaving his Paris dream project barely started and returning to New York, a place he clearly didn’t want to be.
Theo didn’t want her life. She didn’t want his.
But still, in spite of everything, some part of Emmie had hoped desperately that they could find a way to be happy together. That somehow, either she would stop loving him—or he’d start loving her...
Now, all those hopes came crashing down.
“You didn’t want to be here?” she choked out.
Theo looked down at their sleeping baby in his powerful arms. Holding their newborn against his bare, hard-muscled chest, he was the picture of sexy masculinity.
Except he lacked the joyful face of a new father. For the first time, Emmie noticed the hollows beneath his dark eyes. He had the expression of a man trapped in his worst nightmare. He didn’t answer.
“You...don’t want our son?” she whispered. Waves of grief and hurt slammed into her.
His black eyes glittered. “He deserves better.”
“You’re his father. And my husband. Who better to—”
“Someone. Anyone.” Standing up, he carefully placed their sleeping baby back in her lap. He took a step back from her bed. “I’m sorry.”
Blinking back tears, she tried to breathe, to find her sympathy and compassion. But she couldn’t. He wasn’t just rejecting her. He was rejecting their son. “No.”
“I’m no good, Emmie. I’ve tried. But the truth is I can never be the man you want. The man he needs.”
As he picked his shirt up off the floor and put it back on, she stared at him in the dark quiet of the hospital room.
“You’re leaving us,” she breathed.
Now that it had finally happened, she realized she’d always known this was how it would end. She would love him; he would leave her. And yet part of her still couldn’t believe it. “But you’re the one who wanted us to be a family. I was marrying someone else! You interrupted my wedding and wouldn’t take no for an answer!”
Head bowed, Theo stood silently next to the bed, hands in his trouser pockets, black shirt only half-buttoned. His hard face was shadowed by the lamplight. “I know.”
“Just because I said I loved you?” she cried. The baby woke and started to whimper. She felt like whimpering, too.
Theo took a breath, started to say something, then just shook his head. “It’s more than that.”
“Then, why? Tell me why!”
Theo’s eyes were bleak. “What do I know about being a father?” He turned toward his distorted reflection in the window. “My father died when I was a few months old. My mother told me he overdosed on pills, trying to sleep over my crying.”
Emmie sucked in her breath. “She told you that?”
His lips curled. “She was trying to explain why being a parent was so hard. Love was hard for her, too. There was a parade of men through my childhood. She shared drugs with them and fell madly in love.” His voice held no emotion. “There was a different man every few months, some of whom she married, none of them very good, often stoned or drunk or stealing her money. And then...”
“Then?”
His dark eyes shadowed. “When I was ten, she met Panos Papadopolous. He was older, and rich. She said she’d met her soulmate who’d take care of her forever. He proposed to her the night they met, and we moved to his ancestral home on Lyra. My mother returned from the honeymoon with two things—a black eye and my sister in her belly.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged, twisting the gold band on his left hand. “They fell into a pattern. He’d get mad and smack her around. They’d do drugs together, and he’d graciously forgive her. After Sofia was born, it was worse. Whenever he felt upset about his failing business, or someone disrespected him, or he was worried about his dwindling family fortune, he dealt with it by beating my mother. Just because he could.” Looking down, he said in a low voice, “That’s what love means to me. Either kicking someone when they’re down. Or being the victim on the ground.”
Emmie’s heart was pounding. Her family life had been chaotic and stressful sometimes, with five children, a sick mother and bills not always paid. But never abusive. Never that. She’d always known her family loved her. “It’s horrible. How did you get out?”
“When I tried to protect my mother, he’d beat me, too. Until I became taller than he was. One day, when he punched me, I punched back. We nearly killed each other. I begged my mother to grab my sister and leave, but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t survive on the street with two children and no husband. So she sent me off to a boarding school in England. A school for problem boys. Not to protect me.” His lip twisted in a sneer. “To protect him.”
“Theo...” she breathed, agonized.
He paced across the hospital room’s linoleum floor, looking back blindly at the dark window faintly smeared with the lights of Midtown Manhattan.
“I came home from school the summer I was fifteen and found my mother in the hospital with two black eyes and a purple bruise around her neck. He’d gotten notice from the bank that they were foreclosing on the house, so he’d decided to strangle her. And I saw Sofia...” He closed his eyes.
She felt a chill. “What?”
“With me away at school and my mother in the hospital, Sofia was the only one left for him to hurt. I found her hiding in her bedroom closet. He’d wanted money for drugs so he’d demanded her gold locket. Sofia loved that locket. She hugged it whenever our mother was gone because it had her picture inside it. But Panos screamed threats about beating her black and blue and ripped it out of her hand. She was quivering, hiding from him in the dark. She was five years old.”
“Oh, no...” Emmie looked down at her sleeping baby and wondered how any parent could hurt their own child.
Theo set his jaw. “Panos had left to find his supplier, so I took Sofia to stay with neighbors in the village. When I returned, I found him high as a kite, smoking and frying honey fritters on the stove. I told him I was taking my mother and sister away for good and if he tried to follow us, I’d kill him.”
“What did he do?”
“He screamed insults and threats. When I didn’t back down, he picked up the pan of burning oil and threw it at me. I ducked.” He glanced down toward his ankle. “Mostly.”
“Your scar,” she breathed. “It didn’t come from an engine fire in a car race.”
“No.” He gave a grim smile. “I dodged the pan then punched him in the mouth. His cigarette fell into the spilled cooking oil and started to burn. Panos grabbed a kitchen knife and lunged at me. But he slipped and fell. Either the fall knocked him out or the drugs did. I don’t know. But when I tried to lift him, to drag him out, I couldn’t. He was twice my weight—”
“You tried to save him?” Emmie said, astounded.
He shook his head. “The kitchen filled with smoke, and I could feel the heat burning my skin. I couldn’t budge him off the floor. So I turned and ran. I left him to die, Emmie.”
“Good. The man got what he deserved,” she replied vengefully. He blinked at her vehemence. Looking down at her own baby, who’d fallen back to sleep, she said, “You have nothing to feel guilty about.”
His jaw was tight as he looked down at his hands. “Don’t I?”
“It’s over now, Theo,” she tried again. “It’s all over.”
He looked up at her bleakly.
“It’ll never be over,” he whispered.
Theo wanted to flee the hospital and run twenty miles, to punch a bag until he collapsed, to start a fight with someone who’d knock him bloody. Anything rather than face the tenderness and pity and love he saw shining from his wife’s face.
His hands clenched at his sides. “The fire was already climbing the walls when I left him. I ran onto the beach and watched the red and orange flames consume the house, crackling and spiraling embers up into the night. As the house burned, I felt glad. I thought we were free. Then I heard my mother behind me.”
Emmie’s lovely face was wan as she listened. He had to tell her the worst. She had to know. His throat was tight.
“Mama was still in her hospital gown and covered with purple bruises, but she’d worried about him, now I was back. She’d come to save him. From me.” He still remembered her agonizing shriek.
“Where is he? Theo, what have you done? You’ve killed him!”
Emmie took a deep breath, her violet eyes luminous with sympathy.
He closed his eyes, not wanting to remember. “She screamed his name and tried to run into the house. When I stopped her, she slapped me in the face, clawing at my eyes, kicking me till I backed away. ‘I love him!’ she kept screaming. She ran into the house. She was barely inside before it collapsed, exploding into fire.”
Theo’s knees felt weak, as if he were still that boy again.
Emmie sucked in her breath. Then, still sitting on the bed with their baby, she reached out her hand.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered. She held out her hand to where he stood alone in the hospital room. “You were fifteen. You did everything you could to protect her. She made her choice.”
He didn’t move. “Because she loved him.”
Dropping her hand, Emmie looked startled. “That’s not love.”
“Love means putting someone else’s needs ahead of your own. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes, but—”
“The police ruled the fire an accident. But they’d often come to the house after he’d beaten her. She’d always refused to press charges, so I think they felt bad for us. For Sofia, at least.”
“And you. You were just a child, too.”
“Yeah.” His lips curved sardonically. “Well. A neighbor was willing to adopt Sofia. But no one wanted an angry fifteen-year-old. I couldn’t go back to boarding school. There was no money. I ran away from a state orphanage and lived on the streets of Athens for a while. I thought I was tough, until a bunch of older boys beat me into a bloody pile on the street because they thought I’d stolen their food. Which I hadn’t.” Rubbing the back of his mussed hair, he gave her a wry grin. “Though, I’d wanted to.”
Theo looked across the hospital room at his sweetly sleeping baby boy. “The funny thing was, they did me a favor. A social worker found me at the hospital and told me my uncle from America had been looking for me.”
“See?” Emmie said warmly. “That’s another example of love—”
“My uncle was lonely. His wife had just left him. He wanted a companion who wouldn’t leave. I started learning his business, property development. My uncle was kind, in his way. But weak.”
“Weak, how?”
Theo thought of his Uncle Andrew’s face as he’d taken him to his small, shabby office in Upstate New York.
“I’ll teach you how to pitch. Work is the thing that can save us. That will never leave you. It’s cold and logical. Live to work, and no one can ever hurt you.”
And Theo had learned that well. He’d thrown himself into business like an anchor into a bottomless ocean. Over the last twenty years, he’d turned his uncle’s small business into a global empire.
He sighed. “Even after his ex-wife married another man, Uncle Andrew never got over it. When he was sad, he’d drive by her house. When he was drunk, he’d look her up online. Other than that, he’d work, but he didn’t even do that very well, since he was distracted by his yearning for her, like a missing piece of his body.” His jaw tightened as he looked at Emmie. “That’s what love does to you.”
She looked away. “You’re right. Love is awful. But also,” she said and lifted her gaze, her lovely face filled with emotion, “it’s the only thing that makes life worth living.”
Theo staggered back a step, looking at the light and love shining in her eyes.
“I wish I could love you,” he whispered. He shook his head hollowly. “My life has burned my heart out of me.”
“But you told me everything—didn’t you?” At his trembling nod, she gave him a slow-rising smile. “There are no more secrets between us. Now you’ve trusted me that much, maybe things can be different. We can be different.”
“I don’t want you to be different, Emmie. You’re sweet and good. I won’t have you throwing your love away on someone without a heart. I’m not going to drag you down.” His gaze fell to their son. He said softly, “Or him.” He turned away. “Good-bye.”
“Theo!”
At the agony in her voice, he froze. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t look back and see her imploring face. If he did, he knew he’d never have the strength to leave. But he had to. For Emmie. For his son. He pressed his fingertips against his eyes.
“Forget the prenup,” he whispered. “You can have anything you want. Money, cars, houses. Just take it. Everything I have is yours—”
His voice caught, and he fled the room. He didn’t look back. Stumbling down the hall, he couldn’t wait for the elevator so ran down ten flights of stairs. At the ground floor, he knocked the exit door against the wall in his desperation to escape. Staggering into the street, he hailed a yellow cab, feeling like he was going to die.
Knowing that the best part of him just had.