Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
H ELENA ’ S HEART POUNDED as if she’d run a marathon. Breath heaved in and out of her chest. Every part of her was vibrating at an almost invisible level, but altogether it made her whole being hum at a frequency that only Leo could ignite.
The first kiss had been a shock—an assault to her senses. She had fantasised so much and for so long that she couldn’t believe it was happening.
But it was the second kiss—the one that hadn’t been Leander kissing his wife, but Leo kissing her—that shifted the sands beneath her feet. It was a drugging kiss, lowering her defences and igniting her desires. His tongue stroked her into submission, filling her in a way that only partially satiated her desires, whilst igniting more. She felt how much he wanted her. Straddling his thighs, the hard ridge of his arousal pressed heavy and hot against her core and it wasn’t nearly enough. From this position she was above him, Leo reaching for her, pulling her down onto him, and it made her feel invincible—wanted and needed in a way she’d never experienced before.
When he finally pulled back, desire blazing in his eyes like a forest fire, one that matched her own, flame for flame, it was she that wanted to go back for more.
Until she heard Mina saying, ‘Get a room.’
Shock snapped her back into the present, back into the VIP room, where a few other guests had seen them and broken into gentle giggles and one wolf whistle.
‘Careful, Mina,’ Leo warned his ex-fiancée over Helena’s shoulder, desire morphing into disdain. ‘Your jealousy is showing.’
‘Me?’ Mina practically screeched. ‘Jealous of her? You’re kidding, right? She was never anything more than a puppy that followed you and your brother around, picking up whatever scraps of attention you dropped on the floor.’
And just like that, Helena was back outside Leo’s bedroom, listening to the conversation that had broken her teenage heart. Hurt bloomed beneath the truth of Mina’s words. She had followed them around, desperate for whatever attention the Liassidis twins would give her.
‘Mina,’ Leo warned, the tone of his voice enough to raise the hair on the back of Helena’s neck.
But it was too late. Helena’s memories crashed around her in a red haze, the desire filling her chest replaced with a thick, painful ache. That last Christmas she had spent on the Liassidis island with her parents before everything changed. Before Leo started to treat her like a stranger, before he and Leander began to argue in earnest. Before her father had passed away and her mother had ruined everything.
All of it followed on from that one overheard conversation that had fed painfully into insecurities already burgeoning within her teenage sense of self.
‘She’s just a child. She’s nothing to me.’
Helena clenched her teeth to stop the tremor of tears from creeping onto her tongue, to keep her mouth from wobbling.
‘Do you have to dress like that?’
‘Do you have to wear that?’
‘Do you have to want so much, Helena?’
‘You should be able to do this on your own. I can’t do everything for you.’
Her mother’s voice mixed with the memory and it became louder than a drumbeat. She slipped from Leo’s lap, cold and shivery from the stark difference in mood and tone, and looked up at the woman currently glaring at her with such undisguised jealousy it actually hurt to look.
It was clear that Leo’s ex-fiancée had her own demons and it wasn’t Helena’s responsibility to carry them. But she wanted Mina to know. To know that she had heard what Mina had said that day. And perhaps a small, devastated part of her wanted Leo to know too.
‘Well,’ Helena said to Mina, finding her strength, ‘I guess someone trained me better in the end. Because even though I’m just the daughter of Giorgos’s business partner, I’m the one wearing a Liassidis ring.’
Mina’s eyes flashed in the dark of the nightclub, clearly realising that Helena had overheard her conversation with Leo. It was a petty shot and she shouldn’t have said it, but Helena was hitting back at all her childhood hurts any way she could.
Beside her, Leo flinched but Helena didn’t pay it heed. ‘It takes a really troubled woman to blame a girl of fifteen years old, Mina. And as for Leo. If I remember rightly, you left him. You chose to walk away from him because it looked like he could lose his company. You walked away because you couldn’t see his worth. It had nothing to do with me.’
‘Nothing to do with you? You and your mother—’
‘Enough,’ Leo said, standing up, cutting off Mina’s words before she could do any more damage. ‘He knew, Mina,’ he announced with cold disdain. ‘Leo knew what kind of woman you were. He might not have realised it at the time, but the moment you left, it was a blessed relief for him.’
His words caused goosebumps to scatter over Helena’s skin, beginning the healing of a part of her she had refused to acknowledge. Leo turned and held his hand out to her and she took it, leaving Mina, open-mouthed with shock, watching them as they left the club.
They stepped into the night, emotions so thick between them they were almost visible, like hot breath on a cold winter’s night. She could all but feel the fury rolling off Leo in waves.
‘Leo?’ she asked uncertainly as he pulled her along practically at a jog out into the night.
‘Not here,’ he growled. ‘I will not talk about this here,’ he went on, his words harsh and final. A car pulled up to take them back to the helipad and Leo was silent all the way back to the villa.
Leo stalked into the villa, wanting to slam doors and punch walls. He hadn’t been like this since those first few years after Leander had walked away from everything they’d planned—from the company that they were supposed to take over from their father together. From the lives they were supposed to lead together.
And somehow all of it had been made worse by the Haddens and it had just become a jumbled mess in his mind that he’d refused to think on. Only now it seemed that the fates were conspiring against him and finally forcing him to face it all.
He crossed the living area to the wet bar in quick strides, wanting only to feel the burn of the alcohol in his throat rather than the aching hot twist of shame that had sprung the moment he’d realised where he’d heard Helena’s words before. When he’d heard them.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded, unable to look at her, staring at his white-knuckled grip around the glass.
‘Tell you what?’ Helena asked from behind him.
He clenched his jaw and turned, pinning her with a stare. He hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on when they’d got back, but the gentle glow of the solar-powered garden lights lit the room through the floor-to-ceiling windows, picking out the glittering sequins on her dress and the sparks of defiance in her eyes.
‘Why didn’t you tell me that you overheard our conversation that day?’
He watched her expression change into something like incredulity. She let out a burst of air that sounded alarmingly like a scoff, but he could still see the pain she was valiantly trying to hide from him.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘You’re angry because I didn’t tell you?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he slammed back. Knowing that it was a lie. That wasn’t why he was angry at all. He was angry because he’d been in the wrong that Christmas Eve. He should never have said those things to Mina about Helena. And he should never have allowed his girlfriend to say such things. But being in the wrong didn’t fit the story that he liked to tell himself about what happened back then—that every wrong thing was Leander’s fault and that he had been the innocent victim.
‘Why on earth would it have been my responsibility to let you know that I’d overheard you and your horrible girlfriend comparing me to a dog?’
Shame was a hard slap across the face that might as well have left red palm prints across his cheek, the fierce blush there was just the same. He braced himself against the sight of the tears welling in her eyes. He deserved every minute of her pain. And that wasn’t even the worst thing he’d said.
‘I wasn’t... I didn’t. Ever.’ Not the way she’d made it sound.
‘A puppy following you around? That was what you said. Those were your words, Leo,’ she returned, and he couldn’t deny it.
‘I was twenty-one years old,’ he defended.
‘And I was fifteen! I looked up to you!’ she cried.
‘But I didn’t know what to do with that! You looked at me like I hung the damn moon and I didn’t know why.’
The confession burst out of his chest from a place he’d never looked at, never wanted to see. Because Leander had turned his back on him only three years before, and he’d still been searching for a reason why. Helena had openly adored him and it had been confusing and painful and joyous all at the same time. He’d relished those moments, he finally allowed himself to remember now. But then, Mina had noticed.
‘Our families always joked about us getting married. And I didn’t even care that they teased me about your crush. But Mina did. And when she did, I just...needed to keep you at arm’s length.’
‘Oh, so you treated me like a stranger for my own good?’ Helena demanded. ‘Do you think that I didn’t realise you weren’t interested in me in that way?’
‘Lena, you were a child,’ he said, his stomach twisting. ‘I never once—’
‘I know that!’ she yelled. ‘I know that you and Leander saw me like a sister. And yes, I may have had some silly crush—’
‘You barely saw us two months out of the year, Helena,’ he dismissed.
‘Don’t do that. Please don’t do that,’ she all but begged. ‘Don’t undermine what having you and Leander in my life at that time was like,’ she said, and her words struck him hard. Her words conjured the past he had kept hidden behind a locked door because he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what he’d lost—Leander and Helena.
Those summers had been endless and idyllic in a way that seemed remarkable now. Lazy days spent out on the Aegean, the sea breeze and sounds of laughter, the seagulls flying overhead and the simplicity of eating fish caught from the back of the boat.
But then he remembered why it was that he and Leander would take Helena with them.
Because her mother had been too busy focusing on her own interests, and her father had been more interested in business. Yes, they’d entertained her in a kind of absentminded way, but while her father had softened Gwen’s coldness, both brothers had felt their rejection of her and tried to protect her from that.
‘It devastated me, losing your friendship,’ Helena said, unaware of the blows that she was landing on his heart. ‘Losing what I looked forward to the whole way through the crappy school year at that god-awful boarding school. No, Leo, I didn’t have schoolgirl fantasies of kissing in the rain or something stupid like that. I had dreams of coming to the island and playing on the beach. Lighting fires and swimming in the sea with you and Leander. But when you two fought, all that stopped. There was nowhere to hide from the tension between you, and no way to avoid the heated conflict that would come any time you were in a room together. Which meant that there was nowhere to hide from the fact that...the fact that...my parents didn’t treat me the way that Cora and Giorgos treated you. Didn’t treat me as if...they wanted me there.’
His heart twisted and turned to see her eyes glistening at her confession. He’d always wondered how much she’d been aware of her parents’ casual neglect. He’d hoped that he and his brother had countered it in some way, but now he was realising that the consequences of his fight with Leander had stretched beyond his family. Her emotional confession was raw in her eyes, as if admitting their fighting had cost her too. And he hated seeing that in her, the price she’d paid for their mistakes.
‘Lena—’
She shook her head, as if trying to navigate around the emotional boulder that must have been far too heavy to bear. And watching her pull herself together was both remarkable and painful at the same time.
‘That was why I hoped you and Mina would work out, even though I didn’t like her,’ Helena pressed on, breath coming harder and quicker. ‘No, she didn’t make you laugh like Leander did, but she made you smile again after the separation between you, and that was enough for me. You seemed almost happy again.’
Christós. He’d thought he’d hidden his feelings better. He’d had no idea how obvious he’d been. His parents hadn’t wanted to speak about the separation widening between their sons, hoping that it would blow over. Leo had told himself he’d hidden the wrenching pain that was threatening to tear him apart at having been severed from the person he’d thought he knew better than himself. The person who had been almost half of himself.
‘I really didn’t mean to overhear your conversation,’ she said apologetically.
He huffed out a painful laugh. He should have been the one apologising.
‘What were you doing there anyway?’
Helena bit her lip. ‘I wanted to give you your Christmas present.’
He frowned, remembering more of that day than he had before. ‘You didn’t get me a present that year.’ He’d remembered it because...because of the present he’d bought her.
She inhaled a shivery breath and gave him a sad smile. ‘I didn’t really feel like giving it to you after...’
Leo nodded. ‘I can see that,’ he admitted roughly. ‘What happened to it?’ he asked, curious.
She shrugged, sending a ripple of glitter across the sequins. ‘I put it in the hiding place.’
The cubbyhole. It was a place where he and Leander used to leave messages or stupid little things in the house on his parents’ island. They’d shown it to Helena when she was little, but he hadn’t thought about it for ages. He certainly hadn’t looked in it since well before that Christmas.
‘It’s probably still there,’ Helena said as she walked past him to gaze out at the nightscape beyond the window.
He shook his head. Presents, painful misunderstandings. He thought of the peony necklace, the one that Helena thought was from Leander. The delight that she’d expressed in that moment, looking up between him and his brother; he remembered it now like a punch to the chest. It was the last time he’d seen her look like that in his presence.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, the words shuddering out of him. ‘There is no excuse for my behaviour that day or for what I said.’
Helena stared at the small circles of light punching holes into the darkness, illuminating unfamiliar shapes of shrubs and flowers that were beautiful and bright in the day and bleached and alien in the night. Her arms wrapped tightly around her waist, holding herself together, holding the tears back.
She’d never said that out loud. About her parents. Certainly not about the father that she’d hero-worshipped. Not even to Kate, who seemed to understand without her having to explain. But Leo had been there, he knew. And she wasn’t sure that she could hide it any more.
But acknowledging it didn’t change anything. It didn’t stop her still hoping that one day her mother might soften just that little bit more. Like she had at the wedding. Each time she saw a glimpse of it, of the love there, she wanted more, like an addict only given enough to get by. So, was it na?ve to keep hoping for something that might never happen?
Was it na?ve to let Leo’s apology soften the blow of his words that day? Because if she let that happen, if she allowed him to soothe that hurt...then what would be left to keep her feelings in check? What would stop her from—
She shook her head at the thought. The seesaw of emotions from that evening alone were almost enough to knock her out for a week. Seeing Leo at the club, relaxing and talking to Leander’s friends—even if it was just for show—it had seemed for a moment that he was almost having fun. Then dancing with him on the dance floor, running into Mina, the kiss...
She hadn’t even had time to think about the kiss.
A kiss that was just for show.
It hadn’t felt like it was just for show.
She had felt wanted. Desired. Needed.
But hot on the heels of such an argument? She shivered, tiredness and cold creeping up her skin, wrapping around Leo’s apology. There was too much past between them, too much hurt.
‘You were having a private conversation with your girlfriend, Leo,’ she said in response to his apology. ‘There’s nothing to apologise for. It’s not your fault I overestimated my value to you in my imagination,’ she said quietly, making it easier for him. For them. Because now, when Leo was more dangerous to her than ever, she had to have done that. Had to have overestimated her value.
Leo pulled her back round to face him, a frown marring those startlingly gorgeous features. ‘You didn’t. You should never think that. You were hugely important to us.’
Then why was it so easy for you to push me away?
Helena couldn’t bring herself to ask the painful question. In part, because she didn’t want to hear the answer. It was a question that was all too familiar to her, one that had littered her childhood, not about the twin Liassidis brothers but her parents. When her father was too busy to come to piano recitals and ballet performances. When her mother was present, but so much more absent than her father. Each time they’d failed to show up for her making it both worse and easier to bear at the same time. And then Leo had pushed her away and even now, with Kate—
No. She wouldn’t let herself think that. Kate was following her dreams and nothing, nothing , would make Helena begrudge her that.
‘Helena...’ Leo tried.
She shrugged him off. ‘It’s fine. It was a long time ago,’ she said, looking down so that he couldn’t see how much she lied.
He placed a finger under her chin and lifted it so that her gaze met his. ‘It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. I hurt you and I’m sorry.’
His words were a balm she didn’t know she’d needed and certainly not one she’d expected, shifting old hurts and unfurling old feelings. She bit her lip to stop the emotion from escaping, but when his eyes dropped to her mouth, she remembered.
She remembered everything about the kiss in the club. Her heart pounded in her chest, a flush crept up her body inch by startling inch, and all the while he watched her with an intensity that she couldn’t hide from.
He was barely touching her. Just one point of contact, the tip of his forefinger, but she felt him . The way that he’d taken possession of her, the way that she’d not cared if she took another breath, the way he’d made her feel alive. Her nipples pressed against the inner lining of her dress, and damp heat spread from her core. The way he’d made her feel, the things she wanted him to do, they all crashed together in a want, a desire so strong that it stole her breath.
His gaze flickered between her eyes and her lips as if he were unable to help himself. Her hands gripped her waist to stop herself from reaching out to him. But it didn’t make a bit of difference. Because in her mind erotic images flickered against the backs of her eyes like a multicoloured kaleidoscope... Her hands thrust into his hair as he teased her nipples with his tongue. His open mouth against her skin, his hands around her chest, holding her to him as she rose above him, the shift of his legs as he settled in between her thighs...
Her eyes drifted closed against her will, desperate to cling onto the images for just a little longer. A sigh escaped her lips at the same time she imagined her name falling between them. But that’s all it must have been her imagination. Because when she opened her eyes Leo released the tentative hold he had on her and took a step back, and the draught of cold air left in his wake was enough to return her sanity to her.
What was she thinking?
She had married Leander. Even if it was a fake marriage, even if it was just so that she could access her inheritance, and even if, for one second, Leo felt just half of what she did, she had just married his brother in front of one hundred and fifty guests and it had been covered by several international news outlets. The press had been filled with stories about their childhood sweetheart marriage. And if there was even a chance they were discovered it would ruin them both.
And even had she not married Leander, this was Leo .
Leo, for whom nothing was more important than Liassidis Shipping, including his brother and his ex-fiancée. Leo, who would ensure that nothing, nothing , jeopardised the company he had given so much to, certainly not her. Wasn’t that precisely why he was doing all of this? To get her shares away from her?
‘We should talk about the kiss,’ Leo said as if it were the last thing he actually wanted to do.
‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ Helena replied, drawing a line that couldn’t be crossed, no matter how much she wanted to. Because, as she looked into his eyes, she saw that he knew it too. It couldn’t happen. Nothing could happen between them. ‘I’m going to bed. I have an online meeting in the morning.’
Leo saw the resolution in Helena’s eyes and didn’t like the frustration he felt because of it.
‘Helena. It can’t happen again,’ he ground out, the words burning his mouth as they came out.
‘I know. It was just for show. Don’t worry. I didn’t mistake it for anything else,’ she said, her words scratching against his conscience. ‘You did what you had to do because we both thought that Mina was going to out us in public. So, no. It won’t happen again.’
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He wanted it to happen. Needed it like a feral thing in his blood. It was a ferocity that shocked him to his core. He’d never felt like that about a woman before, not even his ex-fiancée. It felt stronger than a craving. An addiction even. Which was what made it so dangerous. A thing that needed to be leashed. Because he knew what was at risk. His company. Hers.
It had taken years to crawl out of the damage done to Liassidis Shipping’s reputation after the betrayal of a client was made public knowledge. Years of not putting a foot wrong, or stepping once out of line. He’d been the perfect businessman, determined, focused only on his company and his clients. Focused on doing it his way and by himself.
Even if Helena and Leander publicly split and waited years , Helena would be seen as his brother’s wife for ever. And really, there were only a few sins greater. So, no. It didn’t matter what he wanted, or what Helena wanted.
It was simply an impossibility.
The realisation felled him. And he wondered whether, if he was able to go back in time, would he do things the same way that evening? Would he kiss her the way he had?
Yes. A million times yes.
The answer was swift, determined, ruthless, and demanded more. But Leo had more control over himself than most and he wouldn’t give in to a selfish desire that would burn through the fragile hold both he and Helena had on the situation that Leander had thrust them into.
‘It’s okay,’ she said to him with a brave smile. ‘Tonight we drank to new beginnings, remember? So that’s what tomorrow will be. A new beginning.’
She was offering them a lifeline. A fresh start without the weight of the past or the intoxication of the kiss between them in the present. And he both wanted it and loathed it, but it was what they both needed if they had any hope of getting what they wanted from the future.
She held his gaze for one more second before turning to leave the room.
Clenching his jaw and unable to watch her go, he turned back to the window, reaching for a glass of whisky that was now an unappealing room temperature. He heard her steps on the marble floor, taking her further and further away from him.
But, before he could let her go, he needed to know one thing.
‘They were good times, though. Weren’t they?’ he asked her before she could completely disappear.
‘Yes,’ she said after a moment. ‘Yes, they were.’
‘You had fun?’ he pressed. He held his breath.
‘No one made me laugh like Leander did,’ she admitted, and he waited, knowing there was more, and knowing that he wouldn’t like it.
‘And no one made me cry like you did.’
With that final, devastating blow to his heart, she left the room.