“What if I tell you that housekeeping is not a criterion I’ll count?”
Desperation coated her throat. “I...I’m not comfortable with others touching my personal stuff.”
“Neither am I about welcoming you to my estate...” With his hand at her elbow, he made it imperative for her to stand up. “I won’t touch anything. You can pack and I’ll supervise.”
“You’ll lord it over me, you mean?” she said, using sarcasm to hide the trembling beneath.
In all the years she had known him, he had, in turns, aggravated her, captivated her and in the end, had ended up ruling over her life. And that was when there was no direct relationship between them.
How was she supposed to survive through three months of living with him?
CHAPTER FIVE
SHE HAD BEEN lying blatantly, of course.
Stavros didn’t know what shocked him more. The fact that she would tell such a white lie about something so trivial or the reality of her lifeless, joyless flat.
It was as if she had intentionally designed herself a sterile prison cell, had punished herself.
Everything inside him recoiled that she had lived like this for five years. Why? Why live as though she was punishing herself when she had argued with him so furiously that she wanted it to end?
Had Calista’s death scared her so much? Had it really changed her?
There was not a single thing out of place in the living room, or the small kitchen, or in the glimpse he had caught of her bedroom. She had everything she required.
The cupboards were full of silverware; a plasma television adorned the wall in the living room, yet was coated with five layers of dust.
There were no decorative items, no knickknacks. Just the bare essentials wherever he looked. The walls were a pristine white exactly as he had remembered from five years ago, when he had inspected the building and the flat, a week after they had married.
It screamed of loneliness, detachment.
Leah was a firestorm and it seemed only a ghost of that girl lived here.
The first year and a few months into the second after she had come to live here, he had had things delivered to her. Boxes of clothes and shoes, handbags and other accessories Helene had told him a young woman would require. He had even sent her things that had once belonged to her mother, found when he and Dmitri had gone through Giannis’s old estate after his heart attack...
But she had sent every box back, stubbornly refusing to accept any of it, and so he had stopped trying. Even the box with her mother’s things.
He had, conveniently, shrugged off his duty toward her. To the point of ignoring her very existence.
His gut twisting into a tight, unforgiving knot, he followed her into her bedroom. There was a nightstand next to the bed. A tissue box, some pencils and loose paper, and a tiny photograph of her father, he assumed from the same brown eyes, were on it.
Stretching on her toes, she pulled a bag out of her closet that was already half full. Turned around and stilled as he stayed at the entrance.
“I have someone bringing up boxes. Not that it seems you need any.”
“The work room has lots of stuff I need.”
He nodded and waited, his thoughts in an unprecedented jumble.
“I don’t have to stay in your house for this...this test of yours, Stavros. I could just continue here.”
He prowled into the small room, feeling on edge. He was angry at himself, he realized slowly. And he was angry at her. It was irrational, and yet he couldn’t loosen its grip over him.
“Why not?” The taunt in his words shamed him.
The brown of her eyes transforming into a dazzling color, she glared at him. Her pulse at the neck fluttered belying the anger in her eyes. “Because I don’t think it’s a good idea.
“You can’t stand me, for sins I know and some I don’t. And I...you’re arrogant, you’re a hypocrite and I...” she said with that standard animosity she seemed to reserve especially for him. Yet he heard the quiver beneath those words.
She was trying so hard to hide her awareness of him. So hard to fight it.
The Leah that he knew, that he thought he had known, had never fought anything she felt. Gave in to every juvenile urge, every self-serving impulse until she crashed and burned.
And had dragged Calista down with her.