‘How?’
‘I don’t know...’ She thought wildly. ‘You’re fun. You’re generous. You’re protective. You’re easy to talk to. You don’t judge.’ Everything her father wasn’t.
‘All the wonderful qualities you ran away from.’
‘I didn’t run, I walked, and I would walk again because the flip side is that you’re a control freak.’
Her assertion was so offensive that for a moment Theo’s mind went blank. ‘I am not.’
‘Theo, you wanted to control everything. Look at my career—you took it on yourself to arrange for me to finish my studies at Agon University and arranged a placement with an Agon architecture business for my final year. Your insistence that we marry immediately, your wish for me to start popping babies out...even down to when we would make love for the first time. You knew best. You always think you know best.’
He took a long moment to compose himself against the violent emotions coursing through him at this outrageous rewrite of history. Speaking through gritted teeth, he said, ‘You let me believe you wanted to live in Agon with me and have babies. If I overstepped the mark in trying to make that happen then I’m sorry...no, I’m not sorry.’ Absolutely not. That would imply an acceptance of blame. ‘I never forced you to do anything you didn’t want to. I hated the thought of you going back to England to finish your studies but I would have moved heaven and earth to make the distance between us work if it had come to it. I only got the information together for you because you told me that was what you wanted.’
‘I did want it,’ she admitted softly. ‘But you were like a whirlwind without a stop button. You just went ahead and arranged everything.’
‘You never once complained.’ Not by word or gesture.
She dropped her stare. ‘I know. I should have done. I should have told you to let me sort things out for myself.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I was scared.’
Shocked, he had to take another moment to compose himself. ‘Scared of me?’
‘No...’ She looked back at him, her face scrunched up. ‘Sorry, scared is the wrong word. It just felt like I was being controlled.’
While there was relief that she hadn’t been scared of him—he would rather have died than ever make Helena feel unsafe—her words landed like a blow, the implications immediately, nauseatingly clear. ‘In the same way your father controls your mother?’
She nodded. ‘And the same way he controlled me. That’s what scared me. I was too young and unworldly to see that I needed to stand up for myself and just tell you to back off and slow down.’
Theo could feel the pulse in his jaw throbbing to match the throb in his heart.
If she’d confided the truth about her parents’ marriage and her fears about what she perceived as his controlling behaviour, he would never have gone full blazes into arranging everything so they wouldn’t have to be parted. He would have slowed down and held off, if only she had voiced her fears.
She hadn’t trusted him enough to confide her fears. He’d taught her how to let her hair down and unbutton herself and he’d taught her the joy of arguing—he was Greek; his compatriots had turned shouting into an art form—but the arguments they’d had up to that final one had been arguments over trivial matters, like whether or not Brunelleschi was the greatest architect of the Renaissance. Helena was for yes; Theo was for no. Their arguments had never been of a personal nature against each other. When Helena had thrown her engagement ring in his face and screamed that she never wanted to see him again it had never crossed his mind that she meant it.
And now it was too late. All too late. This was a conversation they should have had three years ago.
The past was written and nothing either of them did or said now could change it. The love that had bound them together had been irrevocably broken...
But the passion hadn’t. Their passion still blazed brightly. Their passion was the only thing that mattered now. His passion for her and her passion for him.
Breathing deeply, filling his lungs with her scent, he adopted a silky tone. ‘I seem to remember you wanted things to happen faster in the bedroom. You didn’t want me to back off there.’
‘But that’s another thing I felt controlled over,’ she said, failing to grasp the opportunity to switch the conversation to a lighter tempo. ‘I was desperate for us to make love.’
‘You should have told me.’
‘I did!’
‘You should have told me you felt controlled,’ he clarified.
‘I didn’t feel controlled at the start of our relationship, but after you proposed and everything suddenly started moving at breakneck speed I was too indoctrinated into a believing a man’s word is law to say we needed to slow down, and then as the wedding got closer my anxieties crept up on me. When my parents joined us...it was as though all my fears that I would end up with a marriage like theirs crystallised, and I panicked.’
‘Are they the same fears that stopped you forming another relationship?’
Startled eyes met his. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You stayed a virgin.’ He looked her squarely in the eye. ‘Or am I wrong?’
He didn’t know if he wanted to be wrong. Or right. If he was right then Helena had spent the past three years without a warm body beside her, just as he had, but their reasons would be very different. He hadn’t had a choice. He’d been unable to move on, not with Helena lodged in his psyche, preventing him from finding desire for another.
If Helena had stayed single, then it would have been a deliberate choice.
‘Shall I take your silence as an admission?’ He drained his cocktail. ‘You should have told me.’
Helena would rather have shaved off her hair than tell him. It would have been tantamount to admitting she’d spent the past three years pining for him, which she hadn’t, of course, but Theo
