DMITRI DIDN’T KNOW how he had made it through the night.
He remembered pacing the study like a caged animal. It was how he had felt in that first year when Giannis had brought him to this very house. He had once called it house-training a wild animal.
He had, through will hanging by a thread, kept himself in the study. Every cell in him wanted to convince her the only way he knew but then he told himself she deserved better.
So he paced and drank and paced some more, trying to think of ways to stop her. It was now morning and he was no closer to a solution.
Except the renewed resolve to keep her in his life. And the panic that flared at the thought that he might fail, that he had somehow lost Jas irrevocably, and that it was nothing compared to all the losses he had lived through...
For a man who had floated through most of his adult life loathing his inability to feel anything, loathing the fact that his father had stolen more than his mother from him, it was like drowning after being parched for years.
* * *
He needed dark, blistering coffee to ground himself, to make sure he didn’t do anything that he would regret later. His shirt half undone, his hair in disarray, he reached the breakfast room.
The scent of sweet pastries and coffee filled the room, the house blissfully silent after last night.
Dressed in a long-sleeved sweater and slacks, his hair still wet from the shower, Stavros looked like the very picture of matrimonial bliss. Their gazes met and held.
Stavros poured some of the thick, dark coffee and pushed a cup toward Dmitri. “You look terrible.”
“Why aren’t you in bed with your wife, Stavros? Or better yet, why aren’t you gone yet? This is my estate now.”
A brow raised, Stavros stared at him. “I was waiting for you.”
Dmitri took a long sip and felt marginally human again. He ran a hand over his jaw and felt the bristle. Theos, he must look like the savage he felt like. He would have to shower and shave before he went up to see her. He still didn’t know what he was going to say.
Do you love me, Dmitri?
He had offered her everything and she had asked for the one thing he didn’t know how to do.
Fear and confusion like he had never known before gripped his insides.
It felt as though overnight he had lost something, something precious he hadn’t even known he had. Not for a moment had he thought she would say no.
If she loved him, wouldn’t she want to spend her life with him?
He finished his coffee and turned toward the door. To hell with civilizing himself.
She was the one person in the world who knew what he was beneath the mask he showed the world. She hadn’t even relented until he had showed himself to her. Had goaded him, challenged him...had made him feel so much again.
There was no way he was just letting her walk away from this.
He had almost reached the door when Stavros spoke. “She’s not here, Dmitri.”
The words hit Dmitri as if they were fists he couldn’t evade. His breath knocked out of him. He didn’t think, even for an infinitesimal second, that Stavros might be talking about Leah; he couldn’t delude himself even for a second that his entire world hadn’t just cracked under his very feet.
And fury came to his aid, filling the hollowness in his gut. “What do you mean she left?”
“Leah said Jasmine was waiting for her when she came down. That she begged her to help her leave. That she couldn’t stay another minute here. So I had the jet readied and she left.”
His gut dropped. “You let her go back to that pit that she calls home?”
“Jasmine said she never wanted to go back there, asked Leah if she had a job for her, even carrying coffee back and forth at her factory. Since she has the screen test in two days, Leah insisted that she stay at her old flat in Athens for a little while. She went with her because Jasmine looked as if she was barely keeping it together.”
Dmitri exhaled a relieved breath, once again eternally glad that Leah and Stavros had such generous hearts.
And the relief was followed by a cavern of longing ripping open in his gut.
He slid into the chair and buried his head in his hands. He should be glad she was gone, shouldn’t he? If she was safe, why didn’t the weight on his chest lift?
When had wanting to keep her safe changed to missing her as if he had lost a vital part of himself?
If this was what it felt like to lose Jasmine after a mere matter of weeks, what would it feel like after a month, a year or a decade of the marriage he had proposed? What would it feel like to lose her forever, to become the man who had pushed her into losing herself?