THE SCOOTER WAS where they’d left it. Theo climbed on. Helena followed suit behind him and immediately wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek into the small of his back. He closed his eyes and savoured the warmth of her body against his. It would be for the last time.
When they reached the lodge he headed straight to the terrace. Elli had left a bottle of ouzo, a jug of iced water, two short glasses and two tall glasses on the table for him, as he’d instructed.
‘Drink?’
‘Just water for me, please.’ She smiled softly as she pulled a chair out and sat on it gracefully. ‘I think I’ve drunk enough alcohol for one weekend.’
Wishing she would look at him with the suspicion and venom she had blasted him with when he’d first brought her back to the peninsula, wishing he’d never embarked on this whole rotten act of vengeance, Theo poured her water then a large measure of ouzo for himself and raised his glass to her.
She clinked her glass to his. ‘What are we drinking to?’
‘To the successful completion of the plans.’
She blinked slowly. ‘Really?’
‘Nai. Everything is exactly as I envisaged.’ It was exactly as they had dreamed together three years ago. The perfect house in which to raise the perfect family in the ultimate luxury.
She put her glass to her mouth then hesitated. Placing it down on the table, she reached for the ouzo and poured herself a measure almost as large as the one Theo had poured for himself.
He watched her take a large sip, close her eyes and grimace. Then her eyes opened and her head shook ever so slightly before her shoulders relaxed a little. ‘I’m glad you’re pleased with it.’
‘You have more than fulfilled your brief. The completion payments will be sent to your account and your company’s account in the morning.’
‘You haven’t signed it off yet. I still need to produce the final draft...’
‘The blueprint is perfect. The 3D model you made brings it to life.’
‘Yes, but I still need to send them to Savina for—’
‘That won’t be necessary.’ Now he’d set the ball rolling to free her for good, he would not torture himself by prolonging their goodbye. Like a surgical procedure, it was best to sever it cleanly and precisely to prevent collateral damage.
Her brow furrowed. ‘It’s totally necessary.’
Theo closed his eyes and had a large gulp of his ouzo. ‘I’ve changed my mind. The house will not be built.’
It would never be built. He could never live in it. He couldn’t live in it without the woman he loved and he’d been a fool to ever think he could.
He would gift the lodge to Elli and Natassa and build a smaller dwelling for his grandmother to enjoy if she wished.
Time seemed to hang in suspended animation. Helena did nothing but stare at him, fingers continually squeezing and releasing her glass.
When she finally spoke, the strain in her voice was apparent. ‘Are you serious?’
Theo took a deep breath then gave a sharp nod. ‘It is too far from my business. It is impractical.’
‘Since when do you care if things are practical or not?’
He hooked an ankle over his knee. ‘It is a lot of money to spend on a party pad that will rarely be used.’
Her laughter sounded as strained as her voice. ‘Since when do you care about wasting money? You own properties you haven’t even spent a night in.’
‘They are properties that will one day serve a purpose.’
She fell into silence again, putting a finger to the bridge of her nose, another furrow appearing on her brow as her finger found no spectacles to push up. Helena hadn’t worn her glasses since they’d returned from his villa on Agon. ‘Forgive me for being dense, but I don’t get why you’ve spent all this money on something you’ve suddenly decided isn’t going to happen, and I’m not just talking about the fees you’ve paid me and my company. The levelling of the land, the sculpture commissions, Savina’s fee—you’ll have to pay her for her time at the very least or she’ll have every right to sue you.’
‘Savina will be recompensed.’ Theos, the thuds of his heart beat like a physical pain. ‘No one will suffer financially for my change of mind.’
‘Good.’ Biting into her bottom lip, she tucked her hair behind her ears then raised confused eyes to his. ‘What about your grandmother? How does she feel? Have you told her the house you promised to build on the land she gave you is not going to happen?’
‘I will explain the situation. She will understand.’ She would be upset, he acknowledged painfully, but his grandmother was not one for making judgements on people’s lives. All the same, he knew he’d built her hopes up. Her daughter—his mother—had never had any interest in returning to the island of her birth, so to discover her grandson falling in love with it had delighted her and she’d looked forward to seeing his new home there in all its glory.
‘I’m glad you’ll make her understand but I’m afraid I don’t understand. We’ve spent weeks working on this and now you’re saying it was all for nothing?’
‘I’m sorry.’ How he kept his voice calm when his insides were shredding into tiny pieces he would never know. ‘I appreciate it must be disappointing to learn your plans will never come to fruition but you can take pride in the work you produced.’ The slightest crack echoed in his voice when he added, ‘It’s spectacular. You, matia mou, have one hell of a career ahead of you.’
Her voice hardly above a whisper, seemingly not having heard his heartfelt compliment, she said, ‘What happens now?’
‘We’ll sail to Agon in the morning. I’ll arrange for my flight crew to fly you back to London on my jet. Take the plans and 3D model with you. They’re yours. Add them to your portfolio.’ He didn’t think he could bear to look at them. He didn’t think he could look at anything associated with Helena again.
Something flickered in her eyes. ‘You’re too kind.’ She drained her water and put the glass on the table. Then she fixed her stare back on him. ‘Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me if you ever had any intention of building the house.’
‘I did.’ When he’d been too filled with pain-twisted vengeance to think straight.
She gave a short burst of mirthless laughter. ‘And perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me if you want to see me again. Or should I assume your plan to pack me off to London tomorrow means this is goodbye for us?’
‘Helena...’
‘We’re back to calling me Helena, are we?’ Another even shorter burst of humourless laughter. ‘Well, if that doesn’t answer my question, nothing will. But I do have one more question,’ she added before he could interject. ‘When you hired me, was it your sole intention to seduce me, make me fall for you again and then dump me?’
If she hadn’t been watching Theo so closely she might have missed the slight blanching of his features. The coldness that had been creeping through her veins throughout this whole wretched conversation suddenly spread into every cell of her body.
‘That’s what this has all been about, hasn’t it?’ she whispered when she managed to unfreeze her vocal cords. ‘Revenge for me having the temerity to jilt you.’
There was nothing subtle about his wince this time.
Rubbing her arms madly to try and inject some warmth into them, she stared at his now unreadable face. ‘I knew you had an agenda but I thought it was to watch me squirm while I designed the house we had once planned to live in together. I thought you wanted me to have a taste of everything I threw away, but it was more than that, wasn’t it?’
Please, she prayed, don’t let it be true. Please, don’t let it be true.
‘Yes.’
That one word was enough to make her stomach plummet to the floor.
‘Yes?’ she echoed.
Dropping his head, he kneaded his forehead with both hands. Then he looked back up. His eyes held hers as he steadily said, ‘Yes. Everything you said is correct. I brought you back here for revenge. I wanted to seduce you into falling in love with me again, display you on my arm to the world and then dump you.’
Her head swimming, she rubbed her arms even harder. She couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold. ‘I never realised you hated me so much.’
‘I thought I hated you.’ His features were stark. ‘One minute we were going to marry, the next you were gone. You cut me out of your life like I was nothing, like I’d never meant anything to you.’
‘And you didn’t cut me out of yours?’ Anger rose like a snake inside her. ‘You didn’t call me once. You were in another woman’s bed within weeks. While I was going out of my mind missing you, you were getting on with your life like I’d never been a part of it. You go to all this trouble for your petty revenge and for what? You never loved me. How could you have loved me if you were happy to sleep with other women so soon after I’d left? Dear God, I couldn’t even bring myself to kiss another man, not in all the years since I left you.’
‘You think I moved on?’ There was anguish in the gravelly tones. ‘I never moved on. God knows I tried but it was impossible. You were like a ghost in my head.’
‘And this is your exorcism?’ She couldn’t believe how blind she’d been, how stupid she’d been. ‘Make me fall in love with you again and then drop me from a great height for better impact?’
His throat moved. ‘Yes. I’m sorry. I’ve been cruel...’
‘That’s one way of putting it. Life’s just one big game to you, isn’t it?’ She was shaking so hard that when she got to her feet and put her hands on the table, the tremors shook it. ‘I thought you’d changed but you’re still the same spoilt bastard you always were. Everything has to be your way and you hate losing at anything. Well, congratulations. You’ve won!’
‘I have won nothing,’ he bit back, a spark of anger rising in his voice and glowing in his eyes. ‘I know I deserve your anger but you leaving me...it destroyed me. You weren’t marrying a statue. You were marrying a man who loved you and wanted only to make you happy. You threw that away, Helena. Not me. And for what?’ He shook his head in despair. ‘All I see is a lonely existence with a computer for company when there is so much more to you...’
‘Don’t you dare think I want advice on how to live my life from a charlatan like you,’ she spat.
Theo stared at her and felt his thimble of anger die. Helena was as unreachable as she’d been the day she jilted him.
There was far more than humiliation and rage flowing from her. There was pain there too. A lot of pain. And he was the cause of it.
‘I promise you cannot hate me more than I hate myself,’ he said bleakly.
‘Hate doesn’t begin to describe how I feel. You set out to seduce me and make me fall for you just so you could publicly dump me!’ There was a flash of confusion in her dark eyes. ‘Why are you ending things like this? Where’s the grand finale you planned? You had me where you wanted me. You could have strung me along a few more days, taken me to a couple more high-profile places and really got your pound of flesh. Did you get a fit of conscience? Or did you figure out that my love for you was punishment enough?’
‘Helena—’
‘Don’t ever speak my name again,’ she suddenly screamed, her hands flying to her ears. ‘Everything has been one big fat lie. You wanted to hurt me and you’ve succeeded, more than you could ever know. You’ve also reassured me that I did exactly the right thing in not marrying you, you selfish, narcissistic bastard!’
Unable to look at him or breathe the same air as him a second longer, Helena turned on her heel and fled. She needed to get as far away from Theo as quickly as she could and to hell with dignity and pride.
Running as fast as her legs would carry her, she soon left the perimeter of the lodge and the safety of its nightlights and was plunged into darkness. She didn’t care. Let the darkness of the moonless night take her where it wanted. Nothing could be worse than the pain she was feeling now.
How could Theo have done this? And for what purpose? Why?
Pebbles crunched beneath her feet as she ran the dirt trail that stretched to the small harbour. Wildly, she thought of jumping into the rowing boat and sailing to Sidiro.
Oh, God, please, never let her have to face him again. She couldn’t.
Everything they’d shared this past month, all the tenderness that had developed between them, all the laughter, all the joy, it had all been a lie. She had let Theo back into her heart and it had been a lie.
She had no idea how long she’d been running when the burn in her thighs and lungs forced her to stop. Doubling over and putting her hands on her knees to keep herself upright, she tried to catch her breath.
‘Helena!’ Theo’s voice bellowed out of nowhere.
He’d followed her.
Panic pulled her into its grip. She dragged as much air through her ragged throat as she could. She needed to get moving before he caught her...
‘Helena!’ The bellow was closer. A light emerged through the darkness. ‘Please, matia mou, come back. It’s too dark. It isn’t safe.’
His distinctive footsteps drew nearer. The light got brighter. Either side of the trail were low, prickly bushes and rocks of differing sizes. There was nowhere to hide.
‘Leave me alone!’ she finally managed to croak. Her legs were trembling too hard for her to take another step.
And then, when the light hit her, the footsteps stopped.
His distant form behind it was little more than a shimmer.
‘Helena...’ His voice was shakier than she had ever heard it. It carried through the night sky. ‘I’m sorry. I wish I could say I never intended to hurt you but I did. God forgive me, I wanted to hurt you in exactly the way you hurt me.’
Her legs finally giving up on her, Helena crouched down onto her haunches and covered her ears. His voice still penetrated.
‘You think I moved on with my life...’ She heard a long intake of breath. ‘There has been no one else. I couldn’t.’ A mirthless laugh. ‘I was basically impotent. I blamed you for emasculating me but it was much worse than that. I’d bound my heart to you so tightly my body is incapable of switching on for anyone else. All those women you saw me with...it was all a front. Another lie. I never stopped loving you. I missed you every single minute we were apart.’
She pressed her hands even tighter to her ears. She didn’t want to hear this. No more lies. She couldn’t bear it.
But still his voice sounded through the barriers of her hands.
‘You asked why I didn’t go through with my plan to humiliate you. I couldn’t. It wasn’t a change of heart. More an awakening. Much as it pains me to admit this, matia mou, you were right to leave me. I am a control freak when it comes to you. Even the years we were apart I kept tabs on your career. I told myself it was because I was biding my time for the perfect opportunity to strike, but it was because I needed the reassurance that you were okay.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘That you were safe.’
Silence stretched out.
Only when his voice rang out again, stronger, did Helena realise she’d lowered her hands.
‘You are the only person I’ve let into my heart since my parents died. I was so scared of losing you like I lost them that I suffocated you. I was so desperate to make you mine and tie you to me for ever that I steamrollered you into the wedding.’ Another pained laugh. ‘I refused to believe you had gone. I stood at that altar waiting for you even though I knew damn well you were already back in England. I was in complete denial. When the reality of the situation sank in, I lost my mind. I see that now.’
He sighed. ‘Please don’t think I’m making excuses or putting the blame for my actions on my parents’ death because I’m not. Even if they had lived I would be greedy and possessive of you. I take full responsibility. It’s all on me. I want you to know all this because you deserve the truth. I owe you that much.’ His voice faded into silence.
The flashlight moved in the blackness and was laid on the ground.
‘I’m going back to the lodge now,’ he said through the blackness. ‘I’ll leave my phone for you so you can see your way back.’
His footsteps crunched away and then stopped again.
‘I have behaved appallingly. I don’t expect your forgiveness but I really am sorry, matia mou. I promise I will leave you to get on with your life in peace, but please, I beg you, live it.’
Only when the crunching of Theo’s footsteps faded into nothing did Helena’s bottom hit the ground.
Deep inside her, something sharp and acrid roiled violently and rose within her until it reached her throat, escaping from her mouth as a desolate scream.
Curling herself into a ball on the dirt trail, she wept until there were no tears left to cry.