This wasn’t going to plan, but she didn’t care. Christo didn’t believe her words, so she’d show it with her body. In bed, she’d prove how worthy he was.
He took her hand. They began walking towards the house. At the French doors leading inside he looked down at her tenderly. ‘Should I carry you?’
Carry her over the threshold? The meaning loomed large.
Yes.
But before she could answer Sergei rounded the corner with Anna. They stopped.
Christo glared at the interruption. ‘What?’
Anna looked at her toes. Sergei merely stared straight ahead. When he spoke, his voice was impassive.
‘Mr Callas. It’s your father.’
If time could stand still, he’d have chosen hours ago. Out on the terrace with Thea’s arms around his neck, her eyes burning into him. The words ‘You’re worth more than you know...’ on her lips.
But time had stopped here. In a darkened room, with an old man.
Christo sat in a chair by the bed. Wherever he’d gone now, at least his father looked peaceful. That was what the nurse had said. It had been a good death, whatever the hell that meant.
He’d sped here and he’d been too late. A private nurse had sat with him in his final moments. Laid him out. Christo didn’t know how he felt about that. It was as if his insides were hollowed out. His skin and bones a mere shell around nothingness.
He stood and walked to the door. The nurse hovered outside. ‘Once again, Mr Callas, I’m sorry.’
Christo nodded. ‘My father did things in his own way and in his own time.’
‘He left me a note to give you. For this moment.’ She handed over a white envelope and placed a hand on his arm. ‘It was my pleasure to look after him for you.’
She smiled. Patted him and walked away. Leaving Christo alone in the long hallway.
He strode out of the house as if death itself was chasing him. His chest heaved with the need for air. He burst out through the front door and bent at the waist, gasping for breath.
It was over. Time to go and start making arrangements. Try to maintain the lie of his father’s legacy.
Christo slid into the car he’d parked at the front of his father’s house and drove through the darkened streets. The whole world lay asleep, which was what he wanted to be too. Insensible to everything.
He drove through the gates of his home into the garage, where he sat for a moment. The white envelope taunted him from the passenger seat. He tore it open and read.
Dear Christo,
Now is a time to dwell on the living, not the dead...
There were instructions for the funeral. Who to invite, who to forbid. Advice on the allowance made for his mother, which would keep her in some style, but would not be enough to make either her or her lover happy. There was some talk about his joy at his son’s marriage and his hope for grandchildren.
Hope. For a future which wasn’t Christo’s to have, not knowing how to love. Selfishness was the only lesson taught to him.
He crushed the empty envelope in his hand. Turning over the letter, he read the final page.
I know you won’t grieve for me. That I was not much of a father.
I can’t change how harshly I treated you, though the past is what made you the man you are now. But of all the hopes and regrets a foolish man has at the end, the one message that stays with me is this:
Never believe you weren’t wanted.
What did that mean? He hadn’t been wanted by his mother. She’d barely even acknowledged his existence once her future was secure. And as for his father—unloved by the wife who’d craved the money and not the man, searching for love again and again and in the process almost destroying Atlas.
The capacity to love didn’t run in his parents’ veins. Their blood had been passed to him.
And now he’d tried weaving Thea into his poisoned web of selfishness and subterfuge. He’d effectively held her captive. Then she’d offered to make love to him without protection. She had to know that meant the risk of pregnancy. That if she conceived their child there was no letting her go.
But now the reason to keep her had gone.
He dropped his head to the steering wheel. The gnawing ache of realisation filled him with endless torment.
He didn’t know how long he sat there. Only that his muscles were stiff and the world was cold.
A shadow crossed the driver’s window and the door cracked open.
‘You can’t stay here all night.’
Thea’s voice was a soft caress on his wounded soul. She took his hand and led him through the darkened house to his room, where she peeled off his clothes, stripping him layer by layer. Then she lay down on his bed. Inviting him to her. Inviting him home.
He fell into her. This woman who gave and gave. But if she stayed too long he would take everything, leaving her a husk.
The leaden weight of the evening crushed him. He couldn’t move. Wrapped in comforting arms which smoothed over his body, curling around him as if she was bandaging all the pain, he’d rest a while. Let the beautiful light of her soul illuminate all his dark places.
He still had time. Because just before his darkness extinguished her flame he would let her go.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A WEDDING. A FUNERAL. Christo knew what came next but had been putting off the inevitable. The will had been read, his mother’s hysterics managed and the estate divided. There was no reason to cling to what couldn’t be.
Coward.
He knotted his tie, tightening it like a noose around his neck. As he did so Thea rose from the bed naked and wrapped her body around his, wishing him a good day at work in the best
