Chapter Four
Poppy’s nose pinched.
She wouldn’t cry. But it threaded through her, the need to release the tension pulling her face muscles tight.
What had she expected? That he’d let her go without damage control? Damage control was his personality. To take control. To fix everything. For everyone.
She let out a self-mocking laugh.
She’d liked that about him in the beginning—was attracted to his unwavering need to make decisions that were fair for everyone, but this wasn’t fair.
When had his every decision become so self-serving? Selfish?
When had Konstantinos become a…stranger?
She didn’t recognise him any more. Not the man who had been in Léon’s dining room and not the man demanding she go to bed and wake up as his wife.
She tugged her bottom lip between her teeth.
He’d become someone different the minute she’d told him she was pregnant. Distanced himself. Ended every conversation when she’d still been speaking. Taken control when all she’d needed was for him to listen.
And she’d let him.
She’d let him put her in a room at the furthest point of the monastery when the doctor had told him she needed complete bedrest. She’d let him hire nurses to stand guard at her bed. Not their bed any more. Not their room.
He’d played God from a different room—ordered her life into something manageable where he didn’t have to take an active part. He’d managed her. He’d pushed her away—forgotten about her—until she simply wasn’t there.
Until she’d run.
Her eyes travelled to the gold doors of the private lift.
She could run again.
She snatched a too shallow breath through her nostrils.
He’d find her.
He needed her back.
He needed her to lie for him.
But what did she need?
Not this. She didn’t want to be in the public eye again.
She didn’t want to be his wife again, but maybe she was being selfish, too.
Didn’t she owe him a little damage control?
Didn’t she owe it to herself? To close the door on the last five years of her life and know she never had to open it again?
Never had to look over her shoulder to see if her past was catching up with her?
She’d run away and buried her head. Pretended it would all go away. As she always had.
Konstantinos wasn’t going away.
Unless she…
She could let herself pretend, couldn’t she?
Just this once. He was the Konstantinos she’d met so many years ago.
She could appeal to him. Offer him a fair contract as he had offered to her.
She’d offer him a deal where everyone got what they wanted.
Where everyone got to walk away with their pride intact.
And Léon?
Her heart clenched.
He was her only friend now.
She owed him.
She would get him out of it, too.
She’d get them both out.
Heart hammering, Poppy went to find her husband.
The corridor was a maze of doors, but only one stood ajar.
She moved towards it.
She stopped before it, raised her hand, formed it into a fist and…
The door moved.
Inch by inch, it opened.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said, before he came into view, and she changed her mind.
He stood in the doorway. His jacket had been removed, another button on his shirt undone, revealing a dusting of fine dark hairs.
She swallowed tightly—ignored the embers of heat low in her stomach.
‘Do what, glikia mou?’ he asked, as if it was already decided.
‘I’ll play whatever game you want to play to mess with the press,’ she said, because they deserved to be duped. ‘I’ll help you change whatever narrative the paparazzi have imposed on your life about our separation.’
‘And what do you want in return?’
‘Your signature on our divorce papers,’ she demanded, ‘and I want Léon’s debt signed over to me.’
‘To do what with it?’
‘To rip it up,’ she said honestly.
His gaze narrowed. ‘Why did you go to him?’
She squared her shoulders. Looked him dead in the eyes and told him the truth. ‘He understood the grief of losing a son.’
And she waited for it. For words he’d never given her. Words she’d needed. An acknowledgement he’d lost Isaak, too.
The thump in his throat quickened. His angled chin jutted forward, only a fraction.
He said nothing.
Her heart hiccuped.
She couldn’t force him to say words he didn’t mean. Words her heart longed for.
‘It’s a good offer,’ she said. She hated the tightness in her throat. ‘It’s a fair offer. Reasonable. Everyone gets what they want—what they need,’ she said thickly. ‘I’ll be your adoring wife in public in exchange—’
‘And in private?’ he interjected, his voice a low husk of temptation that arrowed straight to her pelvis.
He stepped aside.
Her eyes flicked to the four-poster bed behind him.
It was magnificent. Bare oak, carved in intricate spirals.
Her insides twisted into knots of hate and desire.
Oh, how easy it would be to offer her traitorous body to his treacherous plum lips.
She shook her hair behind her back and straightened her spine. ‘Nothing happens,’ she proclaimed.
Thick brows rose. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, but his eyes, they spoke to her flesh. To her lips. To the body that yearned to be his one last time.
Her eyes locked on to the bed. The big white pillows, the crisp cotton…
Loneliness. It was the worst hurt. It was visceral. A war inside her that demanded she surrender to it. Crawl into bed with him. And let him—what?
He’d never offered his arms when she’d needed them most.
She wouldn’t need him now.
Her throat dried. ‘I’m sure,’ she said, but words were easy to say, and easier to forget. ‘If we do this, I want it in writing, Konstantinos. I want a contract.’
‘A contract?’
‘Legal documentation.’
The pulse in his jaw throbbed. ‘My word isn’t enough?’
‘Not any more.’
The first time they’d got married in a spectacular event in an Athens cathedral, she’d needed only his word. She’d thought their agreement would last forever, with no need for a way out. A way to end them.
She needed it now.
‘I don’t trust you,’ she admitted. ‘I want it in black and white. A contract outlining Léon’s debt, and that you’ll sign it over to me. I want to know the duration of the agreement and a list of what events I must attend, details of our sleeping arrangements—’
‘And the sex?’
‘The sex?’
‘Am I to add a no-sex clause for the remaining duration of our marriage?’
Poppy held her breath and counted to ten.
If she didn’t build a divide now, would she want to later?
She couldn’t take that risk.
She didn’t trust him not to change the rules if they weren’t written down. But most of all she didn’t trust herself.
‘Yes.’ She released a steady stream of air through her lips. ‘Add it.’
It had been a tease. A flippant counter-argument to ask her if she wanted a no-sex clause in her preposterous request for a contract.
Konstantinos hadn’t expected her to agree to it—to demand it.
He’d told her the truth. She’d dismissed it. As if it didn’t matter. As if the reason she’d walked away—left him behind—was still reason enough to request a divorce. She didn’t want him to touch her.
His chest heaved.
She didn’t trust him.
Not to keep the vows of the marriage.
Not with her body.
A rage so hot—so ferocious—erupted inside Konstantinos’s chest. Whatever chains had held him back—held his tongue in check—snapped. He couldn’t contain it—couldn’t hold back—the fire rising in his throat.
‘This is not a business negotiation,’ he said, each word a rough growl spoken from his chest. ‘I am your husband. You are my wife. And you treat me like a stranger. As if I would take advantage of the things you don’t want to give.’
Heat bloomed on her cheeks.
‘You request these things as if I do not know the beauty spot beneath your left breast,’ he continued, because he couldn’t stop. ‘As if I haven’t kissed it with my mouth—felt its texture with my tongue.’
He watched the emotions flit across her face. The rise of heat blooming on her chest deepen the pinks on her already warm cheeks. The flare of her nostrils…
She wanted him. Still.
Her hands, so small, rose to her midriff, and she entwined her elegant fingers. Pressing her fingertips into her knuckles.
‘You are a stranger to me, Konstantinos.’
It speared him in the chest.
Her dagger of indifference.
‘I’m no stranger to you,’ he hissed. ‘I know every inch of your body. I know your scent. I know…you.’
‘I don’t recognise you,’ she corrected.
‘I have not changed,’ he growled. ‘I’m the man you—’
‘You’re cold, Konstantinos. Selfish. You don’t care how hard it will be for me to go out there—’ she waved towards the lift at the end of the corridor ‘—in front of them.’
‘You did not consider me, agape,’ he said darkly, ‘when you left me to answer questions I did not know the answer to.’
‘You lied to me.’ She placed her palm to the centre of her chest. As if he’d hurt her there.
Something inside him shifted. Dropped.
‘I did not lie,’ he said. Roughly.
‘You didn’t tell me about your dad.’ She closed her eyes.
Her chest rose sharply. Up and down. ‘It doesn’t matter.
’ She sighed. Opened her eyes. ‘We’re not the people we thought we were any more.
And what you did to Léon tonight…’ Her shoulders rose.
Squared. ‘That is proof you’re not the man I married.
You’re taking over Léon’s company with no consideration of what that will do to him.
You would have considered it… before. But now… you care for nothing but yourself.’
He closed his eyes—let the pump of his heart drown out everything.
He hadn’t changed. He’d been everything he’d promised he would be. He’d protected her. She had changed. Every day with the swell of her stomach. She’d pushed him away.
Rage…it heated his skin.
Never did he lose his temper.
Never did he lose control.
It was a point of pride. To be in control of his emotions.
His actions. His parents had been so reckless with theirs.
His mother’s despair. His father’s relentless search for the ultimate power.
It had corrupted them both. These…emotions.
They had overwhelmed every aspect of their lives until they couldn’t see anything else.
They couldn’t see you.
Yes. It had been a hard truth in his childhood. It had been a hard truth when he had tried frantically to stay above the water with his mother’s weight in his arms as the sea took him under. Again. And again.
He had felt it that day. Emotion. So thick. So overwhelming.
Emotion had caused his mother to drown.
He’d let her drown because he’d panicked.
He’d lost control.
He’d sworn never again to panic. Never again would he not see what was right in front of him. Never again would he be too late to protect those he loved because emotion had frozen him to the spot.
And so he’d chosen never to feel.
Never to love.
But it had seeped from his pores the moment he’d come home to find Poppy gone. He’d searched the world to find her, to put everything back where it was. Restore the life he’d built. And now she was here, and still he did not have it.
Control.
Blood roared in his ears.
He would have it.
He would take back his control.
But she was right.
He wasn’t the man she’d married.
‘Konstantinos?’ Her voice was tentative—quiet—but it boomed in his ears, and his eyes, they opened.
His gaze drifted across the vulnerable softness of her mouth. He lifted his gaze, met the deep blue of hers. And her eyes, they were questioning. Wary.
Her distrust mocked his whole life.
It was a betrayal of his entire existence.
It erased the man he’d made himself become. An honest man. A man she could rely on. Trust. But she was abandoning him anyway. She wanted to leave him behind as if he was nothing. Like everyone else. His father. His mother…
It was because she saw it, didn’t she?
She hadn’t been running from the darkness in herself for all these months.
She’d been running from the darkness in him.
She saw what he’d tried to hide his whole life. The man beneath the suit. A man capable of unthinkable things. Not the man who tried to fix the world. Not the man who had wanted to fix her. But a man ready to let it fall to ruin, so he could stand on the apocalypse beneath him as king.
He’d never wanted to fix her, had he? She had been nothing but a cover-up. A facade to keep the lie of himself alive. He’d wanted to find her so he could continue to live the lie that he wasn’t his father’s son. But he was. And he couldn’t be trusted.
He swallowed down the burn of rage in his throat.
‘Then it is agreed,’ he said, his voice a brutal husk.
‘What is?’
‘I’ll give you all you have requested.’
She frowned. ‘You will?’
He nodded. A too tight dip of his head. ‘The agreement will last for one year.’
Her brows rose. ‘A year?’
‘Three months of public appearances until the renewal of our vows,’ he declared with an ease he didn’t feel.
‘And then?’
‘You will stay on the island for the rest of our contract. Alone.’
Shadows grew inside the blue swirls of her irises. ‘Alone?’
‘I will commit to working engagements abroad.’
‘You’ll be working in another country?’ Her nostrils flared. ‘And I’ll be…there?’
For the last year, they’d been apart. Not by his choice. This was his choice now. He was in control. He would use this year to restore everything she’d broken. And yet the idea of her in their home without him… It tugged at something in his chest. Made it ache.
He dismissed it.
‘I will, of course, return in those nine months for the odd engagement where we will be seen together. We will have to continue to be seen in public as man and wife, but sporadically to make enough of a convincing PR campaign,’ he said, changing tack, and that something in him eased.
A little. ‘At the end of the year, my reputation restored, we’ll divorce.
Quietly. We’ll tell them the truth, that our marriage could not recover after the death of our son,’ he continued, the admission in his mouth a heavy thing.
Isaak had shattered everything. ‘Then I’ll set you free, poulaki mou. ’
The silence pulsed.
‘A year it is, Konstantinos,’ she agreed.
He swallowed. Heavily. ‘The contract will be ready tomorrow,’ he said, and he knew in the morning he’d have figured it out. A way to take back the control she’d stolen from him.
So far, the plan was primitive.
He’d give her everything.
Then he’d take it all away.
‘Goodnight, Poppy.’
Konstantinos closed the door in her face.