One Night to Risk It All(21)

“Only because you’d never had passion.” He’d been the one to show that to her.

“Don’t be so smug—it’s nasty. Truly, I wouldn’t crow about it if I were you. Is there an easier conquest than a woman who’s still a virgin at my age? ‘Hard up’ doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

“That’s not what it was though. I myself was not particularly hard up, as you call it, and I still felt the electricity between us.”

She stopped short, arched one eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“Yes,” he said. “Don’t deny that you felt it.”

“No, I mean, ‘oh, really, you weren’t hard up?’ What does that mean? When was the last time you were with someone else?”

“Jealousy, Rachel? I didn’t think you liked me.”

“I’m not jealous. I’m curious.”

“And if I tell you, you won’t be angry?”

“I’ve been angry at you for a solid month, Alexios. I’m not making you any guarantees on that score. You could breathe funny and make me angry at this point.”

“Don’t be dramatic. It had been a couple weeks by the time I met you.”

She sniffed loudly as she’d done at the airport, a sign of her pique, he was realizing. “It had been twenty-eight years when I met you, but whatever.”

“Are you saying I’m special, Rachel?”

“Heck. No. I am not saying that. I am not saying that even a little bit. I’m just saying—some of us don’t run around with our pants around our ankles all the time.”

“And you’re sure that Ajax was celibate the whole time you were together?”

“I...I just... I... Yes.”

“Probably you’re delusional,” he said. “As you were about marrying him in the first place.”

“Okay, Alex, answer this question. Has there been a woman since you were with me?”

“No.” She looked far too triumphant when he admitted that. This honesty thing where she was concerned really had to stop.

She seemed to bring it out in him. He’d held back next to nothing since he’d met her. He’d told her. About why he’d seduced her, about his mother, about why he hated Ajax.

Well, he’d told her most of it. There were things he couldn’t bring himself to speak out loud into an empty room. Much less share with with anyone else.

His house came into view. He’d had it custom built when the island passed into his control. It was completely modern. Square, with hard, clean edges, windows that faced the sea. There was no gilded excess, no old-world opulence.

That would have reminded him too much of the Kouklakis compound. And he had no interest in that. It was too much in his mind as it was.

Stale, filthy opulence. And a carpet stained with blood.

“It’s certainly different,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Very...minimalist.”

“I’d had enough Persian rugs and intricate carvings to last a lifetime. I wasn’t interested in living in it for the rest of my life.”

“Oh.”

“What about you?” he asked. “What sort of architecture do you prefer?”

Rachel paused on the path, his question hitting a nerve for some reason she couldn’t really identify. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what sort of house you would have liked to live in one day?”

“Ajax’s house,” she said, bristling. “And his penthouse in the city. All nice places. And nothing not to like about them.”

“And before that?”

“I had an apartment. In New York.” She’d liked her apartment a lot, but she’d given it up before the wedding, naturally. But it hadn’t been a place for entertaining. It had been a place just for her. Giving it up had been a lot harder than she’d anticipated, in truth, but it wasn’t worth crying over. “And when I come to Greece I stay in the family vacation house.”

“If you were going to have a home built, what would it be like?”

“I don’t know, okay? I’ve never thought about it, but what does it matter? I was going to have a beautiful home with Ajax. Now I may very well end up being homeless because I just walked away from a deal that was essential to both my father and to Ajax. Because... Because...”

Suddenly her fists tightened. “You knew,” she said, her tone getting cold. “You knew and you’re over here pretending to be all honest and ‘marry me’ and crap, but you knew.”

He didn’t blink, his blue eyes focused on her.

“Whoever marries first gets my father’s company. That’s what you want. It’s not me, or hurting Ajax by taking my virginity or whatever else. It’s that you were going to try and get me to marry you so that you could screw him out of Holt. You’re trying to take my family business!”


“Rachel...”

“You—”

“If I had wanted that, if that was the route I’d decided to take, I would have sweet-talked you back in Corfu when you saw my ID. As it is, I let you go.”

“And then you came back. Were you going to make some sort of declaration of love and try to woo me away from the wedding and to...Vegas or something?”