45. Garrett
Chapter Forty-Five
GARRETT
H e thought about the end of his first marriage, trying to pinpoint the reason it was over. It was an embarrassment of riches. Just not the good kind.
“So many things,” he said. But he stuck to the highlights.
“In addition to the drinking, Ekaterina was fond of drugs. Lots of Ecstasy and other party drugs. I dabbled, but I wasn’t that into it.”
“Waking up married after too much drink might have soured you,” she said philosophically.
“You have no idea,” he agreed. “Sobriety had more appeal after that. I cut everything out but alcohol.”
“That explains a lot.”
“I’m sorry,” he said and meant it. “I don’t mean for this prejudice to affect you. I hate seeing you in pain and I know that you need the medication.”
Emma nestled in his arms, getting more comfortable. “I don’t like that it bothers you so much.”
“It’s my issue, Em, not yours. Please continue to do what is best for you. I want you to take your pills whenever you need them. But I also want to make sure that they are the best option available. ”
“I get it. You’re worried I’ll become an addict because you’ve seen someone go down that path before.”
It had been far too late for that. “Ekaterina was already an addict before I met her. But she hid it under a lot of glitz. And what she didn’t—well, her wealth absolved a multitude of sins.”
“Wow.” Emma blinked up at him. “That sounds… messy.”
“It’s not a pleasant tale,” he said, leaning in to smell her lemony shampoo. Talking about this usually made him feel soiled, used, but being with Emma felt cleansing. That was the miracle of her.
With Emma, there were no unspoken expectations. Even with her health issues, she didn’t make unreasonable demands. In fact, her independence meant he had to chase her, to ensure she leaned on him when she needed help.
But even that wasn’t a drain. Their relationship renewed him.
If he hadn’t already married her, he would propose right then and there.
“A few months in, I realized I was not a husband. I was Ekaterina’s caretaker, her fixer, and her cleanup crew.”
Another woman’s sympathy would have grated. But coming from Emma, it was a healing balm. “That must have been disappointing.”
“At the time it felt more like…” He stared into the distance. “A suitable punishment.”
Emma sat up. “How so?” she asked.
He was never going to live this down. “Well, it may have reinforced some stupid ideas I had at the time on the trustworthiness of women and letting your guard down around them. These are things I do not currently believe. At all.”
“ Ah . I’m sorry.” She reached out to stroke his cheek, automatically absolving his past idiot self. He leaned against her like the damn cat staring and judging him from the foot of the bed.
Garrett needed to figure out a way to keep that animal out of their bedroom.
“Don’t be sorry. I learned a lot from Andreas. And even though Ekaterina frustrated the hell out of me, I don’t hate her or bear her any ill will. But even after rehab and counseling, she showed no signs of maturing. I didn’t want to be responsible for her my whole life. Especially after what happened in Mykonos.”
Her eyes widened. “That sounds ominous.”
“Only a little,” he said, downplaying what had been a monumentally triggering episode for him.
“You see, I was working on a project with her father. I didn’t officially work for him, but he was pleased with how I’d handled some smaller things and wanted to see if I could play in the big leagues. It was the most complicated negotiation I’d ever taken charge of at that point. There were multiple parties with conflicting interests and huge profit potential.”
“So, basically, Garrett’s wet dream?”
He laughed so hard she winced because he’d jostled her head too much.
He stopped immediately, stroking her hair. “Oh, I’m sorry, baby!” he said, pitching his voice low to avoid adding to her pain.
She breathed in and out slowly before collapsing on him a little more heavily. “It’s okay now. Let’s just avoid moving that part of me.”
“Deal,” he said from behind clenched lips, staying very still.
“I meant big movements,” she snickered, poking him. “Just don’t laugh that hard or push me off the bed and we’ll be fine.”
“Okay.” It took him a minute, but he finally relaxed, continuing when she pressed him for the story.
“I worked on that pitch for weeks,” he said, recalling his earnest enthusiasm. “I honed and refined that plan until I had every angle covered—even some that would never come to pass. Then the night before I was supposed to fly to Athens for the meeting, Ekaterina slipped some Ecstasy into my drink at dinner.”
“Oh my God!”
Garrett gripped Emma’s arms, holding her still so her shock wouldn’t hurt her.
“I can’t believe she did that.”
Neither could he at the time, but it made perfect sense to him now.
“I had tried Ecstasy once or twice before then, but I didn’t understand what was happening to me at the time.”
“God, I can only imagine,” she said. “One minute you’re fine, digesting your souvlaki, and then the next, the room is melting.”
“I think that’s more a symptom of dropping acid, but close enough. All I knew was that I felt very wrong. I became convinced I had botulism or had been poisoned. I called emergency services and ended up in the hospital, getting my stomach pumped.”
Emma’s hand gripped his arm, alarm and anger in her expression. “Did you call the police too?”
“No, but it’s okay,” he soothed. “Because I called the ambulance, I was never in any real danger. It wasn’t that large a dose. I just didn’t have enough experience with E to tell the difference.”
If Emma had been capable of moving, she would have gotten out of bed and marched out to the airport to hunt his ex down. That was how angry she was. “She should never have done that to you.”
“I agree. It was a violation.”
He still felt that way, although the anger and bitterness he felt over it was gone.
“Why the hell did she do it?”
Again, he boiled it down to what he considered the essential takeaways. “She didn’t like that I was accepting her father’s help or the praise he occasionally bestowed on me afterward. Which was a little two-faced. She happily spent his money and played the dutiful daughter whenever he was around. She just didn’t want me to be on good terms with him.”
“And she probably wanted her boy toy back,” Emma observed. “I bet she didn’t want you to have any other ambition but pleasing her.”
“Yes and no. I think she wanted it both ways—a doting husband at her beck and call. But also a successful one she could point to with pride. A man in the same mold as her father.”
Emma scowled. “Then she shouldn’t have sabotaged you.”
He no longer agreed. “In retrospect, I’m glad she did. I filed for divorce in the aftermath. And because of what happened, Andreas didn’t argue, for which I was grateful. He could have made things difficult but chose not to. ”
“Really?” she asked, incredulous. “He would have tried to talk you out of it?”
Garrett had thought about that quite a bit. If his daughter hadn’t put him in the hospital, Andreas would have fought him on the divorce, squeezing him until he caved.
The man had wielded a lot of power when Garrett had none by comparison. And Andreas was used to getting his way.
“Of course he would have,” she said, answering her own question. “He was losing his free caretaker.”
“Exactly,” he agreed. “But it also helped that I didn’t ask for money. I was happy enough to escape with what I’d brought into the marriage—and the things I’d learned from him.”
Andreas couldn’t take those away, although he might have tried had he not felt his daughter had shamed him with her actions.
Emma understood perfectly, as usual. “He knew he didn’t have the right. Not after what she did. But how did she take the divorce?”
“She threw a screaming fit. Broke a few priceless antiques.”
He’d been caught off guard at the violence of her reaction. Unlike many of the other tantrums he’d witnessed, that last one hadn’t been performative. Ekaterina had been genuinely upset.
“I still don’t know why she wanted to stay married to me. It wasn’t as if she respected me.”
Emma ran a hand down his bare chest, tracing the lines and ridges of his six-pack. “Gee, I wonder. What could it have been?”
He laughed while trying not to move, a surprisingly difficult task. “She didn’t regret me for long. Believe it or not, there’s a long line of handsome wannabe playboys eager to be at the beck and call of a rich heiress.”
“I doubt Andreas liked them as much. Do you ever hear from him?”
“We exchange Christmas cards, but that’s about it. He’s getting on in years, but he remains a powerful figure overseas. He’s not the type to dwell on past failures. If he learned anything from the experience, it was that Ekaterina needed help. I told him I wouldn’t sue for alimony if he sent her to rehab. It was a ploy, of course, and he saw right through it. But he acknowledged it was time to do something.”
“She went?”
“Twice actually, to avoid being cut off. She remarried after the second time, to a fellow patient. Needless to say, it didn’t last. But I have no doubt she’ll marry again.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Mostly relieved. Also a bit guilty for feeling that way,” he admitted. “She was a mess. But I wasn’t qualified to help her. Not really. With addiction, you need to decide to help yourself.”
“No one could expect more from you than what you did,” she said, tightening her hold on him. “Tying yourself to that kind of selfish narcissist would have eaten you up inside. It’s good that you broke it off when you did. You would have been surrounded by vice and excess. Little by little, you would have ended up compromising more and more until you were at the bottom of the slippery slope, wondering how the hell you got there.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t learn my lesson on that score right away,” he confessed. “There was a hard partying phase after my divorce too, I’m afraid. But it passed on its own—no matter what Rainer says.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What does Rainer say?”
“He thinks I was inspired to clean up my act by his grand romance with George. That it made me realize there was more to life than partying and making money. In truth, it was a phase I’d outgrown before they met. He was just too busy to notice.”
She shifted, her soft skin stroking his. Damn, he hoped her headache was gone because she was getting him too hot. He was supposed to be comforting her, damn it.
“I am glad you were done with that phase before I met you,” she said. “Especially all the women who were no doubt all over you during that period. I wouldn’t have liked the competition.”
Wow, she still had no idea.
Garrett pressed his lips to her hair, settling her more comfortably against him.
“Emma, baby,” he said, “you have never had any competition.”