Chapter Thirteen
THE ROOM SERVICE came a little earlier than she’d expected, then again, she’d lost track of days and nights.
It might have been a quiet Monday, for all she knew.
She pushed out of bed, her limbs feeling heavy, and made her way down the carpeted corridor to the front door of her hotel room, pulling it inwards without noticing that the usual ‘room service’ announcement hadn’t been made.
And stumbled backwards at the sight of Theo on the other side of the door, his face a mask of barely contained darkness. Anger? Fury? Worry? What? She didn’t know. Only he was staring at her with those glittering eyes, his jaw clenched so tight it was practically squared off.
‘Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?’ he demanded, striding through the open door and putting his hands on her forearms, holding her still so he could stare down at her face, as though needing to reassure himself that she was in fact standing right in front of him, alive and well.
Annie shook her head, shaking all over, unable to find any words.
‘You disappeared, Annie. You disappeared. We had no idea where you were.’
She pulled away from him then. Moments earlier, she’d been facing the reality of how desperate she was to be held by him, to feel his strength one last time, but now, it was the cruellest thing, because it meant nothing.
‘I’m fine,’ she lied, moving into the hotel room and looking around with a grimace. At least it looked tidy—she’d barely unpacked, much less touched anything besides the bed.
‘You look—’
She didn’t want to think about how she looked. She whirled around, trying to cling to anger instead of the spasming pain inside of her. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting company or I might have gone to a little more effort.’
‘Annie,’ he groaned, and he dropped his head, pressing his hands to his face, so she stopped whatever tirade she’d been about to dredge up and looked at him properly. Saw his stance for what it was—desperation. Misery. Relief.
With legs that were shaking, she moved to the bed and sat down, needing the support.
‘I have spent the last week imagining you—I don’t know. I had no clue. It was only that your father remembered an old credit card, thought you might have been using that, that led to you being discovered.’
Her stomach dropped. ‘My father? Tell me he doesn’t know about any of this.’
Theo strode towards her, crouching between her legs. ‘Why did you run away, Annie? Why did you try to hide from me?’
‘I didn’t run away,’ she said, hollow. ‘You ended our marriage, I simply left, as I said I would.’
‘But you didn’t use normal bank accounts. You have been hiding here.’
‘I have been taking some time,’ she said, sniffling. ‘And why is this your business? You made it very clear that you didn’t want any part of this marriage.’
‘Yes, I did,’ he said, a muscle jerking in his jaw. ‘And do you have any fucking idea how much I have wanted to take those words back ever since? How much I have wanted to fix what I broke? How much I have needed to see you to make this right?’
She sucked in an uneven breath.
‘Annie, you were right. Everything you said was right. When I met Paul Georgiades, it felt like I knew him before, like I had no choice but to go with him, to keep going back to him, but it was never really about Paul and Stephanie, as much as I respected and cared for them. It was always about finding my way to you. My other half. My beautiful, perfect other half, my reason for being, my reason for everything.’
She shook her head then, tears slipping down her cheeks, landing heavily on her thighs.
‘I spent a long awful week on the island, and you were there, in my bloodstream, whispering your love to me, making me wake up and realise what I wanted. And then, I knew I had to fix this. I had to start by facing up to my hatred for your father, by trying to fix that, because you cannot live in a marriage where your husband and your father are sworn enemies.’
She sucked in another breath, the sound a wrenching half sob.
‘How did you try to fix it?’
‘By admitting the truth to him. But a strange thing happened. In telling him what I thought was the truth, I realised I’d been wrong all along.
All I wanted, from the minute you walked into my life, was to keep you right here, with me, where you belong.
I made it sound like it was about revenge, when in reality, it’s always been this. It’s always been you.
‘When we were seeing each other, before, I felt as though I had been given the greatest gift known to man. Losing you was agony. I suppose I have been trying to insulate myself from that risk, to handle this on my terms, but I’ve been so wrong.
So wrong. Even now, I stand before you begging you to come home to me, to tell me I’m not too late, that you can still love me after what I’ve done, when there is a huge part of me that wants to let you go, because I don’t deserve you. Because I could never deserve you.’
‘You’ve always had to protect yourself, Theo. I know that.’
‘Yes, but that’s no excuse.’
‘Isn’t it?’ She caught his face with both hands. ‘I don’t need you to be perfect, Theo. I don’t need you to get it right all the time. I didn’t.’
‘You?’
‘Do you think you’re the only one with regrets?
Breaking up with you was the worst decision I ever made.
I know why I did it. At twenty-two, with my mother in hospital having suffered a heart attack, I was desperate to fix everything.
That’s how I’d been raised. But I was young, and I didn’t understand the ramifications of that decision. It’s not one I would make now.’
‘You were acting out of love for your family. Your decision was born of decency and goodness, of caring for someone else. Mine was purely selfish.’
‘You’ve been through more than one person should ever have to in a lifetime, Theo. It’s okay to want to take care of yourself.’
‘Please, don’t be so forgiving. I deserve to feel this guilt.’
She laughed softly then, and the sound was such a surprise to her, that her heart seemed to bubble in answer. ‘Theo, do you love me?’
He answered immediately. ‘With absolutely the entirety of my heart.’
‘Then can you do something for me?’
He hesitated longer then, though. ‘Yes. Anything.’ The second word was said with more conviction, and she knew he meant it. She knew that if she asked him to walk away, he would. But Annie had no intention of doing that.
‘Would you just leave the past in the past, now? We both made mistakes. We’ve both been hurt.
But there is no one else I want to be with, no one else I want to wake up next to, no one else I want to share my hopes and fears, and future, with than you.
If you feel the same, don’t we owe it to ourselves, and each other, to just… be happy?’
‘Happy,’ he repeated, like it hadn’t really occurred to him. But then, slowly, a smile spread across his face, broad and genuine and so filled with hope that Annie’s heart did thump almost out of her chest.
‘Yes, happy,’ she agreed, leaning forward, so her lips were just a hair’s breadth from his. ‘For as long as we both shall live.’
‘Yes, my darling, my dearest, most beautiful Mrs Leonidas. For as long as we both shall live.’
Theo had not come to Sydney alone. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. By that point, out of sheer necessity, he and Elliot Langley had become a unified force, focused solely on their shared need of finding Annie and knowing that she was safe.
When Theo got the call that Annie had been discovered, via a forgotten-about credit card, it was his private jet that had flown them halfway across the world. And locked in that plane together for twenty-four hours, Theo and Elliot had had very little option but to talk.
Theo had always found it hard to open up about his life, his childhood, and particularly with a man like Elliot, and yet, for Annie, he did so.
He explained what his life had been like, why Elliot’s insults had fundamentally changed him, had turned him so utterly bitter, had made him turn on Annie, too, to the point, and much to his shame, that when her mother died, he hadn’t even reached out to her.
He’d been so angry, it was a miracle to think she’d found it in her heart to love him after that.
And yet she did, because she was Annie, full of light and love, full of compassion.
Elliot was an aristocrat to the core, and he found it hard to shake his views, but as he spoke about his daughter, who had died, and his and his late wife’s hopes for Annie, Theo came to understand him better.
To see that he’d been right about the older man.
While his love for Annie was not as Theo would have wished, it was still love.
‘I suppose even the royal family are allowed to marry commoners,’ Elliot had conceded, as the plane came in over Sydney. And then, with a frown, as if he was reshaping his views of the world, bit by bit, ‘Let’s go find our girl, Theo.’
It was entirely surreal for Annie to be in Sydney, sitting beside her husband and opposite her father, over a high tea the following afternoon.
Even stranger to hear her husband and father talk about the business, about the direction Theo was taking it in—and for Annie to see her father revitalised in those conversations, showing a genuine interest in the business for the first time in years.
By the time they finished tea, Annie felt almost as though she’d stepped into an alternate dimension—and she wasn’t complaining.
They left Sydney the next morning, but almost as soon as touching down in Athens, and having Elliot disembark, Annie and Theo left once more, this time, returning to the island.
Where their first trip there had been marked by long stretches of silence, this trip was the opposite.
They talked the entire journey to the island, and once they arrived, instead of walking on eggshells, they were floating on air.
It was as though by finally accepting that he could love Annie, and accept that opening himself up to their relationship fully made him strong rather than weak, he stepped into a whole new reality.
One in which he wanted her to understand everything about him, to know his entire truth, his childhood, the despair of it, because he was no longer grieving it—it was a part of him, and all those parts had led him to Annie, and the most all-consuming joy he could ever have imagined.
A year later, as they marked their first wedding anniversary, they were celebrating not only the fact that they’d found their way back to one another, but also the floating of the Langley company on the stock exchange as one of the highest offerings of all time, thanks to Theo’s tireless efforts to turn it around.
As for Annie, she was on the brink of opening her art gallery, and Theo was her biggest supporter and champion.
His own achievements didn’t get a look in: everything he said and did was about Annie, and how proud he was of her.
In its first year of operation, the gallery took the art world by storm, and though that brought Annie no small measure of joy, it was the discovery, three months after opening the doors, that their happy pairing was about to become a trio.
Two years later, two more babies turned them into a five-person family, and five years after that, quite by surprise, another little Leonidas flew into their nest.
Though they loved and lived the rest of their lives in the fullness of those happy hearts, Annie and Theo devoted a lot of their time and money beyond their family, to street children.
They raised money and awareness, built shelters, developed education programs, employment opportunities and therapy assistance.
From the wreckage of Theo’s childhood had come something wonderful, and even as a very old man, Theo almost couldn’t believe how rich and happy his life had become, all because he’d finally opened himself to love.
Keep reading for an excerpt from BODYGUARD’S ROYAL TEMPTATION by Abby Green.