* * *
For the first time since Giannis had brought him to Athens years ago, Stavros did not return to work after Leah left.
He let Dmitri’s calls go unattended, told his assistant to cancel everything indefinitely, heard from his head of security that a particularly treacherous board member, a distant cousin of Giannis who had always resented that Stavros and Dmitri were the topmost shareholders on the Katrakis board, was planning a coup to take over.
Rumors swirled about that Dmitri and he had fallen out, causing the stock for Katrakis Textiles to sink.
But Stavros, try as he did, still clinging to his wretched sense of duty, couldn’t give a damn. He and Dmitri had slaved night and day to build it into a multimillion dollar industry for over a decade, given it their all because they had wanted Giannis’s legacy to mean something...because they had both wanted something to anchor their lives.
And yet, he did not care if it all crashed and burned. All he wanted to do was shrug off the world and retreat. And he did.
Yet, wherever he turned, there were signs of Leah at his estate.
From the workers at the vineyard to the seamstress who asked if Leah was taking New York by storm, from the trails she had loved running through to the small, inconsequential things she had left lying around the house, like her iPod. She was everywhere.
She was under his skin, in his every breath, she had somehow become an irrevocable part of himself.
The peace he had found on his estate, the rules he had set in place all his life, everything was shattered. He felt empty within and he hadn’t even known that he had something so precious.
It was as if Leah had breathed life into him, showed him what it was to laugh, love and live.
For days, he let himself remember every bleary moment from when his mother had left to when his father had died, and he grieved for Calista. Grieved for the innocence he had never had. For days, he sat in the study in his estate, wandered into Leah’s empty workroom.
And slowly, her words gained strength in him, shifted and morphed his very view of himself.
For the first time in my life, I lied, not for myself, but for you, Stavros. I lied to protect you, to spare you from this pain.
I lied because I...care about you. I lied because, somehow, you have given me the courage to live without fear, I lied because you made it impossible to not love you.
Leah loved him, she had protected him. When had anyone ever thought of him like that?
The Leah that wouldn’t leave him alone the night of Giannis’s death, the Leah that had so innocently and full of hope, asked him if he was happy, the Leah that had teased and aroused him with such stark, possessive need...that Leah who refused to let him deny what they both wanted, needed when he had worried that it was becoming an obsession, a madness, the Leah that had held him tightly, when in the aftermath of making love to her he had confided that he didn’t remember how his mother looked, the Leah that had believed in the sanctity of marriage...
That woman was worthy of a fight, was worthy of a man he could be.
She had made him love for the first time in his life, she made him care, had made him live for himself, made him want with such gnawing hunger.
Had given him a taste of happiness, of pain, of ache, of loss.
She had made him feel everything he had shied away from his whole life. And he wanted to live like that again. He couldn’t go back to being an automatic machine.
Shaking at the very chill in his bones, he leaned his forehead against the glass door looking out into the estate.
In a moment of utter desolation he had admitted to Giannis that night that he had been wrong about Leah, that he had ruined her life. Even facing death, Giannis had smiled, had said that Leah needed him, that he, Stavros, was a man worthy of her... Those words pushed through to the fore, crushing his self-doubt.
Maybe he hadn’t deserved Leah five years ago.
But now, facing his own incapability to love Calista as she had needed, and accepting that, despite his every effort, his parents had somehow damaged him, forgiving himself for not loving Calista as she had needed, he deserved Leah now.
He deserved to be happy, he deserved to think about himself after a lifetime of thinking about everyone else.
Suddenly, Stavros couldn’t live without telling Leah that, couldn’t bear that she was thousands of miles away. Not when he loved her so much.