Chapter Two #2
With her head held high, Poppy walked past him, and ignored the drag of his scent on her senses as she missed grazing his shoulder by millimetres.
She zeroed in on the limousine—ignored his looming presence at her heels.
The driver opened the door, and she climbed inside.
Her gaze locked to the figure closing in.
She yanked the door closed before he could get in beside her.
With a heavy exhale, she settled herself into the luxurious interior, let the plush cream leather support her newly found backbone.
She’d demand a divorce.
Konstantinos’s skin prickled.
He didn’t need to turn around to know her gaze was locked on him. It bored into his back. So aware was he of his wife, of her smell, her presence, his body hummed from the balls of his feet to his scalp.
He swallowed thickly and pulled free a crystal stopper from the decanter, and spilt two fingers’ worth of a deep amber-coloured spirit into two glasses. He collected them, and only then did he turn.
Her back straight, her knees together, she sat in a high-back, winged chair. Her slender arms resting on the white velvet, she met his gaze dead on. She didn’t look towards the floor-to-ceiling window, or the view of the Eiffel Tower right outside.
He’d tracked her here. Her rings. He’d lost her again, the trail cold, but he’d known she was still here. In France. He could feel it. He’d bought this penthouse, because so sure had he been he’d find her. In this place they’d met. Paris.
Never would he have considered she was with Léon.
He gritted his teeth. He should have stayed away all those years ago. Away from the Durands. Away from her. Because when the opportunity had arisen to claim her, he had. He’d offered her a job close to him. Everywhere he’d gone, so had she.
He’d thought that would be enough.
He’d convinced himself the more he saw of her, the more she’d become commonplace. Invisible. It would ease, he’d told himself. The need to have her. But it didn’t. In London, her mouth had been too near. The pink pout, burnt onto his retinas, had been too tempting.
He’d leaned in too far—
Fire shot through his veins.
He’d noticed her long before she’d come to be in the meeting at Durand Towers.
He’d feared she was the reason he kept going back, doing deals he never usually would for a glimpse of her.
But he’d dismissed it. He did not want blindly.
His lovers were usually widows—women who didn’t want what he wouldn’t give. Marriage.
Their affair had been like nothing he’d ever experienced. He’d met no one like her. So strong in her convictions had she been. Her rules. Their relationship would not interfere with her job. She wanted him. Only sex. She didn’t want love or emotion. She didn’t want marriage, or children.
She had been his mirror image.
Rules. They were so important to them both.
Her dad had been an adulterous bastard. He’d made Poppy feel unsafe in her own home.
In a home that should have been her haven, he’d made her walk on a knife’s edge, waiting for the next affair.
Always making her feel at risk he’d leave.
That was the power of love. It was selfish. It made others hurt.
It killed them.
His love had killed his mother.
He’d promised he would never hurt Poppy.
He would never have the power to, because he’d never love her, as she had promised never to love him.
They’d both wanted the same thing…a life led honourably alone.
He had told her things—confessed things he’d told no one. His hatred for his father. It was their commonality.
She’d become his confidante. His friend.
She’d been hiding in plain sight. Out there. So close.
He walked towards her.
She didn’t blink, and neither did he.
She wouldn’t bolt again.
Not until he knew she was safe.
He wouldn’t have another death on his conscience. His mother’s death pressed on his shoulders every day. A weight he carried through each stroke of his morning swim.
In another life, he would have saved his mother.
In this life, he would have to save everyone else.
He’d tried to save Poppy.
He knew she battled with her own current. He knew the tide had been too strong for her when Isaak had died. It had taken her under with him. Into darkness. Her mental health after the funeral was so very…poor.
Was it still?
He stood before her.
Flowers.
The scent flooded his senses. Burnt its way into his nostrils.
Theos mou…
He handed down the glass to her sitting form. ‘Drink this.’
Her slender fingers rose, long and elegant, and she tentatively took it from his grasp, cupping it from the bottom and purposefully missing his fingers.
He released it to her.
Together, they brought the thick crystal to their mouths. In sync, their lips opened as the crystal tilted. The amber fire spilt onto his tongue. Her throat flexed.
His drained, the glass fell from his mouth, and he placed it down on the long-legged occasional table beside her.
She finished the rest of her drink, and put it beside his. And oh, so slowly, she put her hands, palm side down, on the armrests of the chair. She pushed her knees from their bent position.
So small, she stood before him.
She looked like his wife. She smelt like her. But…she was different. Changed.
An unknown—unfamiliar—energy vibrated from her too slight frame.
And it was…too big.
She didn’t look like the Poppy on the cliff.
Her eyes glittered.
The silent drag of breath through her slightly flared nostrils made her chest rise too slowly. And it pulsed in the silence between them.
Anger. But his Poppy didn’t silently seethe. His Poppy didn’t recoil from his touch. His Poppy would have opened her mouth and caressed his fingers with her tongue. Sucked them.
His wife would have let him have her in the alleyway.
His wife did not hate him. The man he was with her. The man he’d spent years honing. An honest man. A man who promised to protect. A man who’d tried to protect her.
You failed her.
You failed him.
He wouldn’t think of the tiny casket.
He wouldn’t think of the weightless box on his shoulder as he carried it to a grave too small.
He would not again admit the truth that he had manifested his infant son’s death. He’d caused it, because never should he have allowed it. For him to be conceived when he knew his genes were defective.
His jaw firmed.
He was dead.
His death did not matter.
He had never been part of the plan, anyway.
His stomach revolted at his declaration of indifference.
She raised her neck too sharply, and said, without inflection, ‘I want a divorce.’
He caught it. The fall of his jaw.
‘You do not want a divorce,’ he dismissed, keeping the edge from his tone.
‘I do.’ Shoulders back, she stepped forward.
He stepped back. Fractionally. He wouldn’t give her the space—the room—to claim an opportunity to run again, but he’d give her the illusion she wasn’t trapped.
‘Why would you want to keep me?’ Naturally, arched eyebrows rose. ‘I hate you,’ she repeated, the French roll of her vowels enunciating each sharp point of her words.
‘You already said,’ he replied flatly, but he flinched inwardly.
How many times had his mother called his father a liar? A bastard? Told him she hated him? His father had deserved her hate. Her venom. He’d broken her. Driven her into the sea. But he didn’t deserve…this.
He’d never hurt Poppy.
Didn’t you?
His breathing faltered.
No. He’d stuck to the rules. He’d done everything he’d promised.
Poppy wasn’t herself.
She hadn’t been for too long.
He dipped his gaze to the pulse thrumming beneath her skin. He wanted to touch it—feather his fingers down her throat and close his palm over the pulse he knew beat for him.
‘It isn’t hate you feel.’ His gaze flitted back to hers. ‘It’s want.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she spat.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
‘You disgust me.’
‘I do not disgust you,’ he said, too tightly. Too breathlessly.
She leaned in. ‘You do.’ She feathered her fingers across his right pectoral.
Hunger he’d repressed too deeply flooded through him. Acute and intense, it pulled tight every muscle in his body.
‘But if you need me to…’ Her breasts brushed against him.
The tightened tips beneath her shirt, making his jaw tighten to stem the itch to do what he wanted.
Pop each button of her cotton shirt, pull down her bra, and expose them to his mouth.
His tongue. Her flushed pink aureoles. Her taut nipples.
A hunger he’d only ever known with her speared through him.
He closed his eyes.
It had been too long…
His body pulsed. The memory of the last time he’d been with her shredded the curtain of time. His mind remembered and his body felt it. The thought of burying himself inside her after months of abstaining tightened his groin.
Months, and he hadn’t touched her.
She had not touched him.
He’d understood the dangers of sex while she was on bedrest. He knew her body needed to be protected so she could nourish their son. But after the funeral, still she had not come to him. Her depression so heavy, he’d left her to the professionals. The nurses. The doctor. The therapist.
Guilt prodded his temples.
Had he helped her enough?
Yes. He alone hadn’t been enough to save her. He could not break the cycle of depression. He didn’t know how to. He hadn’t known how to end her grief. And so he’d stayed away.
But that day, so famished for the silken fist of her body, he’d driven himself inside her in agonised thrusts of desperation.
He hadn’t even taken her panties off. He’d pulled them aside, lifted her against the wall, and she’d wrapped her legs around him. Welcomed his heat with a scream he had caught in his mouth. Swallowed into his lungs.
He’d lost control.
They’d both come so hard. So fast.
The first time they’d had sex in months.
The last time he’d had sex for over a year now.
She hadn’t come to him again. Not long after that day, she’d left him.
He opened his eyes. Met the wide blue of hers.
‘If I need what?’ he pressed stiffly.
She tilted her neck to look up at him. Her lips were so close. The cool, sweet air leaving her mouth feathered his own, and his lips parted of their own volition. He needed only to dip his head and taste her.
‘Proof,’ she said, and rose on the balls of her feet, ‘why I’d never want you again.’ The palm of her right hand on his shoulder, her other hand swept further along his chest and disappeared inside his jacket.
His mind scrambled. Her touch, her parted lips… They contradicted her every word.
He swallowed. So quickly did she turn him on. So quickly did she undo him.
He hardened. Everywhere.
His brain turned to fuzz as everything pulsed. ‘What are you talking about?’ he husked, his body an assault of senses.
‘This.’ She stepped back, and clenched tightly in her hand was his phone.
Her head ducked. Her hair fell forward as she illuminated the screen with the flick of her thumb.
‘You little pickpocket,’ he breathed.
‘Tell me the pin.’
‘Why would you steal my phone?’
‘You wouldn’t have given it to me if I’d asked.’
‘But why do you want it?’
‘I don’t have mine,’ she answered flippantly.
‘I’ll retrieve yours for you.’
‘Pin?’ she repeated.
His gaze narrowed. He took in the heightened flush to her cheeks. The tremble in her fingers holding his phone.
‘Fine.’ He rattled off a number.
He watched her open apps, enter codes for a long minute, before her fingers stilled.
She held out his phone. ‘Look familiar?’
His gaze flicked to the screen. It was him. ‘Of course.’
He remembered that afternoon. How could he forget? His father had died.
In the photo, his shoulders were too tight as he sat outside, because the smell indoors, he could no longer demand his lungs to inhale it. The smell he could never quite wash off. Cloying, it lingered in his hair—his clothes—inside the walls of his nostrils. Death.
‘And what about this one?’ Her thumb swiped against the screen. Another photo appeared of the same place, same time, with Isabella’s lips pressed against his.
He dragged his gaze to hers.
The accusation in her eyes…
He snatched air into his lungs.
Clarity. It bled into his consciousness. It flooded through him with razor-sharpness.
She wasn’t sad.
She wasn’t sick.
He’d believed she’d left him because of Isaak. He’d believed every time she looked at him, she saw what she’d lost. What he could not save. Their son.
The air left his lungs in a rush.
‘You think I was having sex with her?’
‘I don’t think anything,’ she said, her gaze locked on the screen between them. ‘I know.’