Chapter Two
THEO COULD HAVE gone a very long time without ever hearing the name Langley again. Annie had been one of the biggest miscalculations of his existence—and Theo didn’t generally make mistakes, particularly not with people, and certainly not with trust.
Yet, he had trusted her. She’d worked her way through his carefully maintained defenses, wearing him down with persistence, and her insistence that she wasn’t what he thought. So he’d let her in, bit by bit.
When Annie had turned eighteen, she’d drunk too much champagne with her snobby friends and begged him to kiss her.
It had been a dare, he’d later found out, from the redhead she was always with—Bianca someone or other.
They’d thought it was funny, how much Annie moped about after him with her oversized crush—given that he was just a street kid who’d moved into a mansion next door and never really belonged.
He was certainly not someone anyone in that clique thought good enough for Annie Langley.
He’d refused to touch her.
She was barely more than a kid, and he hadn’t been interested in providing entertainment for her entitled social circle.
But at twenty-one, it had been different.
She was older, more experienced, completely sober, and as far as he knew, begging him to kiss her was all her own idea.
Her friends were nowhere to be seen. And by then, he was the heir apparent to the Georgiades’s fortune—his foster parents, having no children of their own, and having been blown away by Theo’s business aptitude, had signed everything over to him.
He was his own man, making his way in the world.
So, he’d kissed her.
That should have been the end of it. Except, even then, there’d been something addictive about Annie Langley. Something dangerous, too, because she seemed like the kind of person who could make him want what he’d never wanted before: to be needed. Loved. To want to stick around.
Theo had more than an average amount of experience with women; only Annie hadn’t been anything like the women he usually slept with.
She was so innocent and artless in her reactions, so responsive and hungry for him.
It was a miracle they hadn’t slept together that night—even more so that they hadn’t slept together at all. Waiting had seemed right, with Annie.
At first, he’d done everything in his power to control their relationship.
He’d wanted to keep Annie boxed into a single partition of his life.
He enjoyed spending time with her, but he wouldn’t let her shift his focus.
Already, he’d made sweeping changes to his foster parents’ business model, revolutionising their core values, increasing their wealth.
He owed it to the child he’d once been to continue working towards his business success.
Yet night by night, in ways he still didn’t understand, she pushed at the walls of the partition he tried to keep her contained in, so that while it still existed, it morphed into something so much larger than he’d ever intended.
She became the first thing he thought of when he woke up, the person he went to call when he had a success.
And then, she’d ended it, because her parents had told her he wasn’t good enough for Annie.
The worst part of it was that he knew her parents thought that, because her father had told him.
Had tried to buy him off to end the relationship; had told Theo that he was the kind of man Annie needed to steer clear of.
Didn’t Theo understand that Annie was aristocracy?
She was destined for greatness, and Theo was certainly not that.
He could never forget that conversation.
As a street kid, he’d been called a lot of things, but somehow, hearing them from Elliot Langley had cut him to the quick.
Because deep down, he’d wanted the other man’s acceptance.
The more he came to care for Annie, the more he knew it would be essential to earn her parents’ approval to keep her in his life.
‘Do you think I would ever allow my daughter to become serious with a man like you?’ He’d jabbed a finger in Theo’s direction.
‘You are scum, from the darkest slums of the street. The Georgiadeses might have been fooled by your business acumen, but what do I care for that? My daughter can trace her lineage back to William the Conqueror, and who the hell are you? Do you even know, boy? How dare you so much as look at her, much less touch her. Much less think you have any right to get serious about her. If you ever speak to Annie again, you’ll be sorry. ’
It had gone on, and on, in that vein, but Theo had blocked most of it out by then.
He’d focused on assuming a mask of non-concern, sneering with half of his lip—and his insolence only angered Elliot further, so in the end, he was all but threatening to call the police for the very fact that Theo had once upon a time lived rough.
Theo hadn’t taken the threat seriously. What could Elliot Langley do to him, after all?
By then, Theo had been worth an absolute fortune, and in dating Annie, he wasn’t breaking any laws.
It wasn’t the threat that shocked him, so much as the tone of his voice.
The entitlement of the man had chilled Theo’s blood, reminding him of how often he’d felt ashamed of his life on the streets, when he would walk past those incredible hotels and have wealthy couples turn up their noses at the sight of him.
He remembered one such person making a cruel remark about the way he smelled.
Another threw a half-eaten sandwich at him, where he sat on the footpath.
And everything Elliot Langley said, in that conversation, brought it all back, and made Theo realise: the Langleys were just as bad as those people had been.
But it was Annie’s betrayal that had stung, worst of all.
Annie’s betrayal that had made him feel foolish and stupid for ever having believed she was different to the rest of those moneyed bastards.
When the next morning she arrived and told him it was over—coldly determined—he’d known instantly what her reasoning was.
She was dumping him because her father had found out about them and insisted upon it.
And Annie hadn’t had the strength of character to stand up for their relationship.
Whatever promises she’d made, whatever he’d thought they’d shared, had just been a construct of his mind.
Annie wasn’t what he’d believed: she was just as superficial and snobby as her parents.
He swore that was the last he’d ever see of her, no matter what, and he’d stuck firm to that.
He’d sold the Georgiades’s house, having no interest in returning there, lest he happen to run into Annie again—or her father.
He’d put her from his mind, focusing everything on business, his success, and yes, on other women.
Yet now, after a brief ten-minute conversation in an overcrowded bar, she was suddenly back, bursting through the partitions of his brain just as quickly as before, taking over his thoughts in a way he bitterly resented.
He glared at the sweeping views of Sydney Harbour afforded by his penthouse suite, before finally giving up on resisting.
He stalked across to his laptop and stabbed in the USB drive.
He had fully intended to throw it out, but whenever his hand curved around the plastic to do just that, he saw the anguish in her eyes, heard the plea in her voice, and he shoved it back into his pocket.
Fine.
So he’d take a look.
What harm was there in seeing what her family’s business was about? Even when he knew one thing for absolute certain: he would never, in a billion years, for all the money in the world, get in bed with the enemy. And that’s what the Langleys were, and always would be, to him.
Annie really hadn’t expected to hear from him again. His face had been the definition of immutable, his eyes chilling, his jaw locked in an expression that might as well have been a verbalised rejection.
Yet the next afternoon, his assistant had reached out to arrange a meeting. Annie could well have been knocked over with a feather, but she’d kept her voice as steady as possible as she’d agreed to the details.
Not in an office, as she’d expected, but in the penthouse apartment Theo was based out of while overseeing the crucial phase of development approvals and design for a high-rise in the CBD.
A keycard had been left for her at the front desk, so that she could access his private level of the hotel, and as the elevator whooshed Annie upwards, she barely had twelve seconds to contemplate what this meeting would involve, and to quell her nerves.
She kept her focus on the necessity of this though, and on the hope that his agreeing to meet was a positive sign. She doubted he’d have arranged a meeting just to hand back the USB.
Yet, with Theo, and the way he’d been the other night, the animosity that had sparked from him to her, she couldn’t rightly say what she was expecting when the elevator opened to reveal a huge tiled foyer with only a single door in it.
She moved towards it a little hesitantly, cleared her throat then lifted her hand to knock, before realising there was a doorbell.
She pressed it once, then stepped back and waited, hands fidgeting at her sides.
She was just about to ring the doorbell again when the door was pulled inwards and Theo was revealed on the other side, dressed almost the same as the other night—in a suit that had been dressed down. This time he wore no shoes, as well.