Your move, Kairos...keep up your side of the bargain.
LIKE A LOVESICK teenager, Kairos stared at Valentina’s text for the millionth time since the night they had arrived. Like she used to say when he had taught her chess.
True to form, he was a master at strategizing, never betraying himself with a look or gesture, laying out traps to lure her in. And she, impulsive, bloodthirsty and eager for mayhem, would charge forward with everything she had, would mount attacks without thinking them through and had always walked into his traps.
It had been a delight to teach her, to see her fight her innate nature and try to stay at least one step ahead of him.
But yesterday, the week since he had seen her on the yacht had been nothing like guessing her chess strategy. The woman he had married was nothing if not unpredictable.
He’d expected her to throw a tantrum right in front of the steps when Helena had hugged him and kissed him in a provoking display. Helena’s actions had been purely for Valentina’s and Theseus’s benefit.
And yet Valentina had recovered. Quickly and smoothly. Had kept her composure as he’d never seen her do before.
And there had been no questions. At all. About his past. About his past relationship with Helena. About his history with Theseus and Maria.
Nothing.
He’d seen her during dinner, then kissed her cheek good-night. Like the quiet, poised wife he’d always wanted, she’d retired without a word at the appropriate time. When he had finally gone to bed around midnight, she’d been asleep.
When he’d gone outside at five the next morning for his run, he had found her running laps around the house already. When he’d quietly joined her, she’d barely blinked.
It had been the same for four days. Since he’d been gone for more than a week to fetch her, work had piled up. So he had left her mostly in Maria’s care, knowing that she would treat Valentina with kindness, at the least.
Even as he wondered how long this new serenity would last, he missed the Valentina he’d married. The Valentina that had given voice to every feeling that had crossed her mind, the Valentina that lived through every emotion fearlessly, the Valentina that had, again and again, vowed that she’d always love him.
The Valentina that he only realized after she had left him had brought so much color and noise to his life.
The realization unsettled him.
Designer clothes, haute couture heels and reigning over her little clique—that had been the extent of her interests.
You have made me face reality, she had claimed.
And the weight of that statement hung around his neck. He hadn’t wanted the weight of her love nine months ago and he didn’t want the burden of the new direction her life had taken now, either.
Attachment and affection only brought the worst out in all people, as Theseus had taught him seven years ago. And Kairos never wanted to experience the pain that came from people letting him down. Of people taking away what they had given, when it was not convenient anymore.
But of course, all this was dependent on the fact that Valentina had changed. And that he still could not believe.
Just as he was about to check where she was, Valentina walked into the sunlit breakfast room.
Desire punched him anew, a sharp pulse of longing that he didn’t quite understand beneath the voracious hunger.
She stilled at the buffet laid out on the side table, like a doe caught in the sights of a predator. Slowly, her breath evened out, her expression assuming that calm he was beginning to detest.
There were a lot of changes in his wife and this was the most aggravating. She’d never been able to hide her emotions before. Christos, there’d been moments when her open longing for him had embarrassed him, when he’d wished she had a little control over herself.
Only now, when he couldn’t decipher what was running through her mind, did he appreciate how refreshingly guileless and unflinchingly honest she had been. Only now when she was scrunched up in a corner of the bed did he realize how much he’d missed her warmth in his bed.
“Kalimera, Valentina,” he said, his tone husky.
“Buongiorno, Kairos,” she greeted sharply, and turned away toward the food.
He didn’t drop his gaze from the delectable picture she made. The tight clench of her shoulders covered in thin straps told him she was aware of his gaze.
Black trousers followed the line of her long legs lovingly—legs that she had wrapped around his shoulders more than once. An emerald green blouse showed off her toned arms.
The wide V-neck gave no hint of a cleavage—had she finally abandoned those ghastly bras that had hidden the curve of her soft flesh from his fingers but exposed the bones in her chest?
She had always been more muscled than soft or fleshy because of her runner’s build but she bordered on scrawny now. Even last night, as she had cozied up to him unknowingly in sleep, he had noted she was all sharp angles and bones. Not that it had made any difference to the erection he had sported in a matter of seconds. It was as if he had no control over his lust when it came to her. Lust he needed to address soon.
She had fashioned her glorious hair into some kind of tight braid, pulling it away from her face. It only made her features sharper.
He frowned at her grapefruit and coffee. And the way she settled down at the chair farthest from his. “You have lost weight.”
She shrugged, raising those bony shoulders. “I didn’t eat much in the last few months.”
“Or sleep much?” The dark shadows under her expressive brown eyes were still there after a week. “You missed me so much that you couldn’t eat and sleep?” he said, wanting to see a smile on her lips. Wanting that wariness in her eyes gone.
“I didn’t know you were capable of cracking a joke,” she taunted. Then sighed. “I would think you wouldn’t want to engage in a discussion about our marriage where Theseus or his family could walk in or overhear.”
“Theseus took Maria and Helena out first thing in the morning for a tour of the estate as it’s Saturday. To give us the privacy we’ve been denied for the past week.”
“That was kind of him,” she replied. “Is he well? He looks like my grandfather—” she shook her head, a raw glitter in her eyes “—like Antonio did after his heart attack.”
A tightness gathered in his chest at the clear distress in her gaze. “Antonio said words to you about your mother?” He knew how much importance the Conti patriarch put on his bloodline.
“He didn’t dare say a thing to me. Not in front of Leandro and Luca.” The flat tone in which she spoke revealed how much it really did matter to her. “But I finally realized why he’d always been reserved with me. I always wondered if it were the fact that I was a girl that he cared so little for me.
“Now I know it’s because I’m not really his blood.” She pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “Tell me about Theseus.”
Why did her pain reach him like a hand into his chest when nothing she’d ever done had? Because he’d never even thought her capable of this depth? Kairos cleared his throat. He didn’t know how to handle her emotion. Or maybe he didn’t know how to handle this new Valentina at all.
“Theseus had a heart attack nine months ago. Maria says his health had been suffering for a while. An almost successful hostile takeover at his company, I think, precipitated the attack. For a while there, we weren’t sure he’d make it through.”
“He sent for you then?”
“Something like that.”
“You’ve been here all these months?”
“Yes.”
“And the hostile takeover?”
“I stopped it.”
“He thinks the world of you, doesn’t he?”
He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what he thinks. I...have a duty to him, that’s all.”
Kairos waited for a question about Helena to come his way. He waited for the cloak of zen around her to disappear now that she knew they’d have no audience.
Time ticked on, seconds gathering into minutes. Only silence.
Disappointment curdled in his stomach.
She took a sip of her coffee. “I...wasn’t making enough to buy nice meals and afford the rent on the flat,” she said, answering his earlier comment. “Even shared four ways, it was steep.”
Her guilelessness in openly admitting failure after he had taunted her shamed him. Scraped him raw, too. “Was it so awful to remain married to me that you preferred walking away from every luxury I offered? From the penthouse suite and an unlimited credit card to live in some hovel with three other women and barely enough to eat?”
“Si, it was.”
Blunt, and without the theatrics. Everything about this...new her unsettled him.
“I’m to believe that neither of your overprotective brothers smothered you in money and comforts? Not even a care package from Luca?”
“Luca respects my wishes. Leandro...” Her throat moved, her knuckles tight around her coffee cup.
Longing vibrated in her voice. This—this rift with her brothers, obviously enforced by her, more than anything else made him wonder about the change in her.
Leandro, Luca and Valentina shared a bond unlike anything he’d ever seen before. Even more astonishing, for it had been revealed that Valentina only shared a mother with her brothers.
Was that why he had gravitated toward Leandro’s offer when there had been so many?
No, he hadn’t been looking for a ready-made family. He had been burned enough with the one he had considered his.
It was Valentina that had caught his attention from the first moment Leandro had pointed her out to him. Valentina whom he had wanted to possess.
She rose, put away her untouched grapefruit. “I told Leandro our rift will be permanent if he interferes in my life again.”
That she meant it was clear. That it tore at her was also clear.
He had wished so many times that she was more intellectual, more contained...more everything she was not. Yet now that she was like a shadow of her former self, he felt protective of her. “You barely ate anything.”
“Since when do you—”
He watched, fascinated, as she shook her head, took a deep breath that made her chest rise invitingly and then met his gaze. “I want to talk about what you’re going to do for me. I made a list of—”
“I can do a lot of things for you, Valentina, if only you’d quit this whole ‘Independent Valentina’ project.”
“Wow! Jokes and innuendoes, I don’t know if you’re the Kairos I married or not. All I usually got were nods and sighs and grunts. And oh, that look you used to get when you wanted sex.”
Seeing Kairos disconcerted was like an adrenaline shot to her body.
Dark color stole under his cheeks and for the first time in months, Valentina laughed.
He pushed his chair back and stretched his long legs. His running shorts pulled back, exposing the hard muscle of his thighs. Greedily, she drank in the hair-roughened legs, and the calves. Her breath halted in her throat. Until she’d seen Kairos’s muscled calves, she hadn’t thought of a man’s calves as sexually arousing.
But then, every inch of him was made to be appreciated. Touched. Stroked. Licked...not that he’d ever given her a chance to do all those things. Even in that arena, he had held the strings.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His words tugged her out of the sensual haze. “In my defense, you usually talked so much, fought so much, bitched so much that all I could interject was nods and grunts.”
Even his cruel remark couldn’t dampen her spirits. “You would get this strange glitter in your eyes. First, you would fight it. As if wanting to sleep with your wife was an urge you had to conquer. Then a run, followed by a shower. Then you would walk into our bedroom and stare at me. For a while there, I thought you found my pajamas distasteful. Then you—”
“You thought I found those little shorts with bows on the sides and sleeveless, braless tops you wore distasteful?”
“You’d sit in the chaise, elbows on your knees, and rub your neck,” Tina continued as if his words hadn’t sent a shiver of pleasure down her spine. “If you ran your fingers through your hair three times, I knew I was going to get laid that night. If you swore during all this aforementioned waiting time, it meant...”
Stillness surrounded him. Dark slashes of color in his cheeks. “It meant what?”
“Never mind,” she dodged.
“What did it mean, Valentina?”
“It meant you would be demanding and a little...rough. It meant you would draw it out until I had no breath left in me. Until I was begging for you to grant me release.”
It meant he would punish her. For his own loss of self-control as he saw it. For pushing him to the edge, Tina realized, trembling from head to toe. Because he couldn’t even put into words how much he needed her.
Why hadn’t she realized how much of his true self Kairos had revealed during sex? The power balance in their relationship—had it been more fluid than she’d thought?
She’d never really tried to understand him, never tried to look beneath the surface. She’d expected grand gestures and sweeping statements. And like a little girl denied what she wanted, she’d made his life hell for it.
But—thinking about it now—he had been twenty-seven when they had married, had been estranged from his adoptive family. He had had a rough upbringing, and neither of them had much experience with romantic relationships.
Had she taken any of that into account? Had she ever tried to reach him in a different way?
Non. All she had wanted was a fairy tale without putting any work into the relationship.
A long, filthy curse exploded from him, polluting the sunlit breakfast room. “Dios, Valentina! You should’ve told me if hurt you.”
“You didn’t. You never hurt me, Kairos. Whatever we did in bed, I was a willing, enthusiastic participant. So don’t...don’t make it a thing you did to me. Instead of with me. I craved the...” the intimacy I found with you there “...the pleasure you gave me. I told you that enough times.”
His gaze darkened, a faint tension enveloping his muscular frame. Things she didn’t say swirled in that cozy glowing room.
He knew now how much she’d watched his every move, every gesture for meaning. How deprived she’d been for a single word of affection. Even a simple statement of his desire for her. For a word of praise—even if it was about those blasted pajamas she’d spent hours choosing. Or about her hair. Or her readiness for him whenever he wanted sex.
That he’d even liked her sexual appetite for him, was something she’d only realized when he’d cruelly commented on it on the yacht.
“You cannot doubt I found satisfaction with you.” His gaze held hers in defiance and something else. As if only now he realized how much he had hurt her.
Legs shaking, she walked to the buffet table and poured herself another cup of coffee she didn’t want. She took a sip just to force the lump in her throat down.
“I do not find relationships easy to manage.”
Stunned that he would even make that concession now, she stared at him. If the consequences of that hadn’t hurt her so much, she would have laughed at his mulish explanation.
“Those words would have meant a lot back then,” she said sadly. “All I ever heard from you was criticisms.”
“And every time I criticized you or compared you to Sophia or Alex, you fought back with an outrageous act,” he said slowly, as if he was finally figuring it out.
“Si.” Her cup rattled loudly when she put it down on the table. “It’s all in the past anyway.”
If he had forced the discussion to continue, she’d have fled the room.
He went to the buffet. The clatter of cutlery behind her calmed her nerves.
Her relief was short-lived when he reached her, clasped her wrist in his rough fingers, tugged her and pushed her into the chair. The plate he deposited in front of her overflowed with fresh strawberries, a slice of toast and scrambled eggs.
Her stomach growled.
Without thanking him, Tina dug into it. Within minutes, she had polished off most of the breakfast.
She noticed only as she swallowed the last piece of the toast. Toast he’d prepared for her. Almost blackened, slathered in butter.
Just the way she preferred it.
Warmth bloomed in her chest. He’d noted that much about her. She tried to remind herself that it was too little. But the truth was there now that she wasn’t in a fairy tale but real life.
Kairos had cared about her. It had been in all the little things he’d done for her. In the silences after they made love and the way he had held her as if she was precious, in the unsaid words between them after one of her escapades, in the way he had always encouraged her to come out from under her brothers’ protective umbrella and make something of herself.
But how could she ever overcome the fact that she hadn’t been enough? That she might never be good enough?