THEY ARRIVED AT a large estate on the island of Mykonos around six in the evening in a tinted limo.
A grove of dark green olive trees beckoned as the car drove up the curving driveway.
Lush green surrounded the whitewashed villa nestled in a picturesque setting. Blue beaches stretched as far as the eye could see.
But Tina barely took it in for her gaze stuck to the myriad expressions crossing her husband’s usually expressionless face.
His chest had risen and fallen with a deep breath at the first sight of the villa. His jaw clenched tight at the sight of a green sports model Beetle. Tenderness and ache and grim determination flashed across his silver eyes at the sight of the three people—an older man and woman and a young woman—waiting at the top of the steps.
Tina felt as if she was standing in a minefield. She’d never seen Kairos show so much emotion, much less such varying reactions.
“Kairos?” she said softly, loath to disturb the glimpse she was getting into a man she’d thought felt nothing, held nothing sacred.
His gaze turned to her from the opposite seat. And in the seconds it took him to focus on her, his expression became blank, as easily as if he’d donned a mask, completely shutting her out yet again.
But she couldn’t scream or fight him for his usual response. “What exactly does this debt to Theseus entail, Kairos?”
Hesitation like she’d never seen flickered across his face. “There are some duties I need to fulfill. That’s all you need to know.”
Curiosity ate through Tina even as she told herself to stay out of it.
In ten months of marriage, all she’d learned about him was that he was an orphan who had grown up on the streets of Athens. That he had had a mentor who had given him an education. That was it, no more.
Getting her husband to talk about himself, his past, or his emotions was like getting blood out of stone. She’d honestly never met a man who talked so little.
Something about the tension wreathed in his face made her say, “You’re not going to murder someone and ask me to lie for you in court, are you?”
His mouth twitched. “So you haven’t stopped watching American soap operas.”
“Sell me to land a business deal like that guy did in Indecent Proposal?”
He laughed. The warm sound enveloped her in the dark interior.
“Oxhi... No,” he clarified. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t think there’s a man living who’d know how to handle you, Valentina.”
“I know oxhi means no,” she said, trying to think of his statement as a compliment. “I plan to say it quite a lot to you over the next few months. In English, Italian and Greek,” she added for good measure.
Memories permeated the air between them, bringing a smile to her own lips.
For the first month of their marriage, they had had hilarious moments, teaching each other Italian and Greek. But they had both settled on English in the end.
Except when he made love to her. Then he slipped into Greek—guttural, pithy words that even now sent a shiver through her insides. Words she’d never hear again.
No, words she didn’t want to hear, she clarified for herself.
“Cold?” he asked, his head dipping down toward her as she exited the car.
She shook her head but he draped a muscled arm around her shoulders, pulling her flush against his side. A clamor of sensation rose inside her. But still, she was aware of a pair of eyes drilling holes into her.
The younger woman, she knew instinctually.
A sliver of apprehension clamped her spine. “Kairos, this feels—”
He cut her off with the press of his lips.
It began as a soft nuzzle. A tender hold of her jaw. A warning to play along in his eyes. Barely a slide of his body against hers.
A show. He was putting on a show. For that woman, Helena.
And yet, as their lips met, as her chest grazed his, as his hand descended to her hip to keep her steady, everything changed.
Nine months of deprivation came pouring out. Desire rose—swift and spiraling.
Heat and pleasure radiated from where their lips grazed and pressed. Air left her lungs. Her knees wobbled and she clutched his arm. A whimper fell from her mouth when he licked the seam of her lips.
He cursed against her lips and Tina instantly opened up. The masterful glide of his tongue against hers made her moan and press harder into his hard body. Her hands crawled to the nape of his neck, her fingers pushing into his rough hair.
The world around them dissolved. Colors burned behind her eyelids, desire making her blood heavy. She could feel the defined contours of his body digging into hers. Images and sensations from memory drowned the little thread of her will: the cradle of his hard hips bearing her down into the mattress; his rock-hard thighs pushing against the soft flesh of hers; the utterly masculine grunt at the back of his throat when she dug her nails into his back.
Heat bloomed low in her belly as he swept over every inch of her mouth with glorious, knowing strokes. No tenderness. No holding back.
Purely carnal, he thrust in and out of her mouth with his tongue.
Pockets of heat erupted all over her, her clothes caging the sensations against her hot skin.
One hand around her neck and one encircling her hip, he held her the way he needed for his onslaught, only letting her come up for air briefly before he claimed her mouth again. He bit her lower lip with such aggressive possession that she moaned. Pleasure and pain wound around her senses.
Instantly he gentled the kiss, laving the hurt with his tongue.
Softer and slower. Ache upon ache built in her lower belly, spinning and spiraling. Tina whimpered against his mouth, craving release. Craving this closeness with him.
“Enough, Kairos! Introduce us to your little plaything.”
The venom in that voice, hidden beneath a vein of sweet playfulness, was ice water over Tina’s head. She pulled away, heart thundering a million miles an hour in her ears. Her lips stung, her entire body thrummed with need.
“Helena, please be...polite,” came another soft voice.
His fingertips trailing lazily against her jawline, his chest rising and falling, Kairos let out a soft growl that reverberated along her trembling body. Tina sensed his shock as her own senses began to clear.
“Nine months...” he whispered against her mouth, his forehead touching hers in uncharacteristic affection. “Even if I hadn’t needed you here for this day, pethi mou... You and I are not through.”
The words were feral. Possessive. And not meant for their audience.
Tina licked her lips and tasted him there. But all he meant was for sex, she reminded her sinking senses. She frowned. “It is just one kiss.”
Masculine arrogance etched into every line of his face. “You will come to me, pethi mou. I simply shall not allow it to be otherwise.” He rubbed her lips with the pad of his thumb. “I might, however, decide not to give you what you want. As a punishment.”
She saw it now. He meant to use these months to work her out of his system. He didn’t like it that he still wanted her so much. And then, he would walk away.
And if the kiss had been any indication, he was right. She hadn’t even mustered a token protest. “This is a game to you, isn’t it? Like who will blink first, or who will draw first and shoot the other person?”
* * *
“You’re the one who always plays games.”
Anger and frustration pulsed through her. “No more,” she said, tilting her head toward the woman waiting. She rubbed at a piece of nonexistent lint on his shirt, felt the thundering of his heart under her palm. “My days of fighting for you are over, Kairos. That woman and you are welcome to each other.”
“I have never loved you, Valentina. When we were married, I could barely stand your theatrics and tantrums. But believe me when I say the only woman I have desired since I met you, the only woman that drives me insane with lust, is you. I want only you, glykia mou.”
The truth of his declaration reverberated through Tina, leaving her shaking. His own disbelief that he still wanted her, his frustration at his inability to understand it, much less control it, saturated his words.
She barely processed it—four sentences about what he felt or didn’t feel from Kairos was like a long speech from any other man—before she felt the younger woman right behind them. Her subtle floral perfume carried to them on the air.
His shoulders tensing, Kairos moved them toward the couple who had come down the stairs but who waited at a discreet distance. His arm remained at her waist in a possessive grip.
“Valentina, this is Theseus Markos and his wife Maria. They are—” his Adam’s Apple bobbed as he hesitated “—friends of mine.” Tension built in the older couple’s faces at his label. Jaw tight, he nodded to the younger woman. “And this is their daughter Helena. My wife, Valentina Constantinou.” Possession was imbued in the softly spoken words.
He addressed the greeting mainly to the man.
With a head full of thick gray hair, Theseus looked to be in his sixties. He had a heavy, beefy build but even in the afternoon sun there was an unhealthy pallor to his skin. As if he had spent the last few months away from it.
Tina shook his hand, which was warm beneath her fingers. “We have been very curious about you, Valentina,” he said genuinely, the wariness melting from his gaze. Unlike Kairos, his accent was thick. “Welcome to our home. We hope you are not angry with us for taking your husband away from you for so long. Kairos has been an immense help here.”
“Of course I’m not,” Tina said as if she knew all about it.
This was her chance to dig in and ask questions. True to her self-centered mindset, she had simply assumed that Kairos had been away because he hadn’t cared about her fleeing their marriage.
But knowing that he had been here in Greece where his presence was needed and appreciated so much, changed her view.
Maria Markos was more subdued in her welcome, though no less honest. She seemed...anxious and distracted.
Tina thanked them for their welcome.
Only then did she allow herself to look at the woman standing at the periphery. She was a striking contrast to her parents—in both health and attitude. And older than Kairos’s twenty-nine.
Thick, wavy black hair was expertly styled around contrastingly waif-like features. A pale yellow sleeveless dress hugged every inch of her big breasts and tiny waist, and fell to above her knees. Familiar with the latest fashions, Valentina instantly noted the designer of that dress and the three-inch wedge platforms she wore. A simple gold necklace with a big diamond pendant shone at her neck. As did matching diamond studs at her ears.
She was short and voluptuous, almost overflowing out of her dress.
Instead of meeting Tina’s eyes, Helena threw herself at Kairos. Kairos didn’t let his displeasure show, but it was there all the same in the tightness of his mouth, in the way he immediately bowed his body so that only their shoulders touched.
She shouldn’t have required the evidence after his statement. Yet, something in her calmed to see that he didn’t want nor welcome Helena’s attention.
Neither did the woman miss it. She still kissed his cheek, and squeezed his biceps, with a long-drawn sigh, as if she were welcoming a long-lost lover home.
Tina looked at Helena’s parents and saw their discomfiture at their daughter’s unseemly display toward Kairos in front of his wife. She cringed.
Hadn’t she behaved just like Helena at one time?
Becoming jealous and irrational every time Kairos had spent one-on-one time with another woman? Hadn’t she tried to stake her claim over him—just as Helena had just done—in a party full of guests, because she’d been insecure and impulsive?
Dear lord, she’d slapped her now sister-in-law because she’d learned of Kairos’s regard for her. Thankfully, Sophia had been kind, seeing Tina’s insecurity and had befriended her despite her awful behavior.
The outline of Helena’s lipstick on Kairos’s cheek called to her now, invoking her rash temper, that possessive urge to show that he belonged to her. And only her.
She trembled from the will it took to control herself.
Fortunately, before she could make a fool of herself, Theseus claimed Kairos’s attention and Maria followed them up the stairs.
The silence became fraught as Helena stared at her openly. There was no overt animosity in her stare, yet it was all there.
“Valentina Conti Constantinou,” Helena said her name with a flourish, ignoring the hand Tina offered. “Although the Conti is apparently not quite true, ne?” She didn’t wait for Tina to reply. “Poor Kairos. He assumed he was getting the rich Conti heiress, and instead ended up with...a talentless, fortuneless hack. I have heard that even your powerful Conti brothers have deserted you. I wonder why, after all these months, he brings you back into his life.”
It shouldn’t have hurt. She’d heard the same from countless mouths, people she’d considered friends, who had assumed the same of her situation and his actions innumerable times.
Hearing that Kairos had ended up with a talentless, poor, bastard of a wife—and that it was her—hurt like a piece of glass through her flesh.
Because it was all true. It was what she thought about herself in the worst moments.
She’d never taken a fight lying down but no words came. Like the little girl she’d once been, grieving for her mother, she wished her brothers were here, that she had Leandro’s arms to cocoon her in safety, that Luca was at her back bucking her up, that more than anything she had the respect and trust of the man she had once loved so desperately to throw back in the spiteful woman’s face.
But she had none of them around her. She had nothing but the truth to face.
Swallowing the deep ache in her belly, she considered the woman staring at her.
Again, she saw the similarities between her and Helena. The insecurity beneath the beauty, the expensive clothes and shoes, the pampered, spoilt attitude that screamed that what she wanted, she would have.
But neither did she feel sympathy for Helena. “Maybe Kairos realized that even without all the trappings of wealth and fortune, he still wants me. He needs me desperately.” Just saying the false words was a punch to her middle.
As if she hadn’t spewed the most hateful things to her face, Helena looped her arm through Tina’s and propelled her forward. “In the end, he will discard you again, you know. He will choose me. We have too much history between us. It would be better for you if you accept that.”
“What history?” The question escaped her mouth before Tina could bury it forever.
Helena laughed. A gentle, tinkling sound. “He hasn’t told you? Then I can’t, either.”
With a smile, she wandered off, leaving Tina at the entrance, wondering at the sanity of the woman. And her own, as well.
What the hell had Kairos dropped her in the midst of? What was it that he wanted of her? To scratch and scream at the woman who so boldly touched her husband in front of her? And if she did, how much would be for pretense and how much for real?
Unless he did want to win Helena’s hand in the end and was only using Tina to make her jealous, to cement his grip over Helena? To get a better deal?
Bile crawled up her throat.
No! She wasn’t going to torture herself like this.
He was welcome to the woman, if that was what he really wanted.
Her skin prickling, she looked up.
Kairos was standing at the balcony with a wine glass in his hand, studying her openly while Theseus talked to him from the side. His shirt was undone at the cuffs and to his chest, owing to the summer heat. The sun glinted off the dial of his platinum watch—her six-month anniversary gift to him, bought with Leandro’s money.
That he had kept the watch didn’t mean anything. All the thousand tiny things didn’t mean anything when he hadn’t come for her.
It was her mantra.
He raised the wine glass to her in a mocking toast, his brows raised inquiringly.
She knew what he could see in her face—her longing for him, her distress that he might want Helena, her frustration that he still had this much power over her.
She chased away every expression from her face. Took a deep breath. Even affixed a smile to her mouth.
She pulled her phone from her clutch and texted him, then waited for him to see her text.
The shock in his gaze, the smile fighting to emerge around his mouth...it was a balm to her soul.
Shocking Kairos was her barometer in her fight for independence and if him raising his wineglass to salute her was any indication, she had won this round.