CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HER COLLECTION AT the Independent Fashion Week in New York had gone better than Leah could have imagined in her wildest dreams. Her designs had been called modern, colorful, yet sophisticated. Just last week, with Helene’s advice, she had invested a load of money into creating a lookbook that incorporated line sheets, one that gave buyers and fashion magazine editors a view into her brand.
After a crazily hectic two weeks, she had returned to Athens. When she had knocked at Mrs. Kovlakis’s door and requested the keys to her old flat and the dragon had simply handed them over, she had been both shocked and relieved. One look at the news and she found Dmitri and Stavros and herself at the front and center of it.
Hiding and barely eating, she had slept for a week. All of a sudden, she would find herself awake and looking at her phone, before she realized she was waiting for his call.
Had he so thoroughly washed his hands of her? Had she truly meant nothing to him?
She had cried until she had been disgusted with herself, moped around the flat until one afternoon, Dmitri had almost broken the door down when she hadn’t heard his knocking.
He had taken her out to lunch, plied her with food until she had eaten enough for a month, inquiring if she needed anything.
Did he send you? she had asked, pitifully desperate.
No, he had said with unflinching honesty. You’ve truly proved yourself to him.
Words she would have embraced before now seemed like punishment.
At which point, she had cried and he had sighed and hugged her, and point-blank asked her if she meant to spend the rest of her hard-won freedom like a howling puppy, if she meant to spend the rest of it as the discarded wife of Stavros Sporades, hiding from the world.
Hating him and loving him for it, she had decided enough was enough. After fighting Stavros tooth and nail, she refused to let him win, refused to let herself become a shadow.
She had her whole life in front of her. She had decisions to make about where she would operate, about staff to hire, preparations to make for the winter collection, about her finances and how much of her inheritance she could invest in her business and how much she needed to save for a rainy day. She couldn’t live in some distant, unfamiliar corner of the world because Stavros was here.
The freedom to make her own choices, once she had begun, was heady, exhilarating.
More than one designer house approached her with offers to join them. Loath to compromise her creative vision, she refused all of them in a bold move.
Just as she finally embraced the fact that she was a shareholder in her grandfather’s textile companies, that she was part of his legacy.
She had walked into the legendary Katrakis offices in downtown Athens and attended her first board meeting, her heart threatening to rip out of her chest at the thought of facing Stavros.
That Stavros was absent and she was present created a stir that had made Dmitri smile wickedly. Whispers and innuendoes abounded large, about Dmitri, about Stavros, about her. And the worst of all, about the state of her marriage to Stavros.
It had taken everything she had possessed to get through the day. Especially after she received a message from Stavros’s assistant that he would like to meet her before she left on her trip to Milan the next day. The requisite paperwork would be sent to her lawyer if she could provide a name, she had been told.
Nausea rising in her throat, Leah had headed straight to the ladies’ room.
That was that then. He was going to divorce her. After five years, the bond between them would be broken. He would be free of her and she...of him. He would not be hers, even for a moment, ever again.
That night she went to bed, an ache in her gut.
She dreamed of him, intense, vivid dreams that woke her from restless sleep, breathing hard and aching, damp with need, inconsolable that he would never hold her again.
Violently furious that after demanding that she show him the real her, he had not believed the biggest truth she had ever told him.
He didn’t deserve her, she decided, the lie hollow to her own ears.
* * *
Leah arrived at Stavros’s office thirty minutes after ten, having finally fallen into a fitful sleep in the early hours of the morning. Her head hurt, her muscles ached from having thrashed so much.
So when she grabbed the handle and pushed the door open, she was feeling particularly bloodthirsty, as he put it once.