‘That they are made to be broken. Or bent...’
She couldn’t stop herself from twisting back around to look at him.
His eyes pulsed and he moved away from the wall and stalked towards her. ‘What is to stop us from sharing a bed here too? As professionalism is so important to you, I can promise to keep my hands to myself during office hours.’
She dug her fingers into the table, eyes squeezed shut, suddenly holding on for dear life while his caressing words penetrated her senses.
‘But when the night comes...’ His words dangled in the air between them and then the air itself shifted.
Helena opened her eyes and found him within arm’s reach. He leaned down to look directly at her. ‘Or we could sail back to Agon every evening. Elli and Natassa would, I’m sure, be grateful of the extra privacy... As would I.’ Then he straightened, a wicked gleam playing in his eyes. ‘I’m going to get changed.’
And then he sauntered out of her office before she could unglue her vocal cords enough to speak.
Theo showered briskly and changed into a pair of shorts. And nothing else.
Time to go and torture Helena a little more. He didn’t think he could ever tire of making her blush.
There was a fizz in his veins when he walked the short route back to her office, where he found her at her desk once more, working on her computer.
She didn’t acknowledge his arrival. But she noticed. He saw it in the way she shifted in her seat and had a large gulp of her coffee.
Smiling to himself, he sat on the sofa closest to her and pressed his phone to check his emails. A fresh batch had recently landed from his American employees, who were just waking up to the new business day. Theo enforced a strict policy within all his companies that, unless specifically trading with different time zones, all work communications were muted from eight p.m. until seven a.m. He’d wanted to enforce it from six p.m. but had been advised it would be unenforceable. There were people out there so desperate to get ahead they would forgo a social life to climb another rung on the corporate ladder. He didn’t understand the mentality. His father, a hugely successful entrepreneur, had always made sure to be home to share the evening meal with his family. Weekends were sacrosanct. His father had worked hard and played hard, a policy Theo had wholeheartedly adopted. He paid his staff well and was generous with paid leave and other perks because he was a firm believer that staff with happy, fulfilled personal lives were more productive at work.
It made his stomach knot to know his best work had come in the months after Helena had jilted him, when he’d had to occupy every minute of every hour to stop himself from losing his mind. The inheritance he’d quadrupled in the years after his parents’ death had increased by a further five-fold in the three years after she’d left him.
Helena, he would bet, took her work home with her. Her upbringing had been similar to his in that they were only children, both had stay-at-home mothers and both shared their evening meals with their parents, but there the similarities ended. Family meals in the Nikolaidis household had been noisy affairs with plenty of disagreements and shouting, especially if his paternal grandfather joined them. Now in his eighties, he could still win awards for shouting. But those meals had been fun and the thing he had missed the most when his parents died.
Any fun in his life had been forced, he now realised. He’d thrown himself into the party lifestyle in part because he couldn’t bear being in the huge house without them. The silence of their absence had been acute. Not until he’d met Helena had he experienced true joy again. She’d seamlessly filled the gaping hole his parents had left in him. Before he’d met her, he hadn’t had a night in since his father’s great heart had given out. The doctors said an undetected abnormality had been the cause of it but Theo knew better. Nursing his mother through her battle with cancer and then the pain of losing her had caused it. His father had died of a broken heart. Theo, eighteen years old and suddenly the possessor of a great fortune, had found relief from his grief in drink, women, exercise and work—and not necessarily in that order. For years he’d tried to escape the pain, never closing his eyes for sleep unless certain he was exhausted enough or inebriated enough to slip into oblivion.
Helena had stopped the merry-go-round. In her he’d found someone to share his life and raise a family with. His parents’ marriage had been strong and he’d been certain he and Helena had the same strength to replicate it. Before he’d met her, he hadn’t even known he was searching for her.
Once he’d accepted she had left him for good, his grief had speared him. The hole had ripped back open, far bigger and deeper than before. He’d hidden himself from the pain the only way he knew how: by throwing himself back into his old lifestyle with a vengeance. And vengeance had been on his mind too. All the love he’d lavished on Helena had twisted into something ugly. He’d used it as fuel while biding his time for the perfect moment to strike.
He’d never stopped to think of the pain Helena must have gone through too. It had been too easy to see her as the villainess who’d humiliated him when he should have seen the warning signs. They’d been there. If only he had paused a moment to read them.
He remembered her agitation in the days leading up to her parents’ arrival before the wedding. He’d assumed she was worried he would dislike them and so had made an extra effort to get on with them and ingratiate himself with her father. His
