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He needed a drink. He needed his bed. His bed, alone. Not with her. Not with the wife whose very presence was taunting him—the woman whose image he had clung to as if his sanity depended on it as he had lain in prison listening to the sounds of the o
ther prisoners, hundreds of men all breathing the same air. He needed to stop all these chaotic thoughts.
He didn’t realise that he’d been pacing the room until he felt Anna’s gentle hand on his forearm, stopping him almost midstride.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, concern easy to read in her eyes.
‘Go to bed, Anna,’ he ordered, hating that his own words sounded so harsh.
‘No,’ she said, cocking her head to one side as she looked at him, as if she was trying to understand a puzzle.
‘I need you to leave.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
* * *
The growl that emerged from lips thinned by anger and something else Anna couldn’t quite identify should have been chilling, but instead it fired her own determination to understand her husband. She could see the pain, the fury emanating from him. So, instead of turning and fleeing, she stepped towards Dimitri’s potent frame, relished the powerful vibrations coming off him in waves, allowed them to fill her, to imbibe her with that same sense of energy and power.
‘What is it?’ she demanded.
The indecision in his eyes tore at her heart. If he couldn’t trust her, then what would that mean for their marriage? Because that was what she had begun to think of it as. Not just some blackmail scheme to access his daughter...but a partnership. But if she couldn’t get Dimitri to see that, she didn’t know how much longer they’d be able to go on.
‘It’s... Ever since...’
Anna was shocked. She’d never seen her husband speechless before, grasping for words. Even in his fury he was eloquent and impossible.
‘It’s okay,’ she assured him, closing the distance between them, placing her hand on his arm—the muscles beneath her palm locked tight.
‘It’s not okay. None of it’s okay, Anna.’ He spun out of her hold and left her standing in the living room. But she wasn’t going to let him get away that easily. She followed him through the side door—ignoring the palatial master suite—and out onto the balcony, where Dimitri was now standing, fingers gripping the balustrade, the white of his knuckles clashing with the stone.
‘You’re not going to let this go, are you?’ he demanded.
‘No.’
Dimitri turned to see her standing, strands of her dark hair caught on the gentle breeze, proud, immovable, determined. She had changed. It was as if after their wedding night she had taken something within her, inside her, keeping her strong, making her fearless. Or perhaps she had always been that way, and he had only just seen it now.
If he were any kind of man he would match her strength, and that was enough of a thought to loosen the words that had clogged his throat in the living room, that had stuttered to a stop before escaping.
‘I don’t like being in enclosed spaces. It’s too much like being in prison.’ He looked at Anna, this woman who wanted more from him, demanded more from him...but just how much he was willing to give he wasn’t sure any more. ‘White-collar crime. That’s what they call it in America.’
‘Why did you go to prison there and not in Greece?’
‘The clients Manos chose to steal from were American, and he did it through the American branch. He believed that the Greeks had lost too much already. It was, apparently, the only altruistic thought he’d ever had—but don’t for one second take him as a Robin Hood figure. He couldn’t have been more of a cliché if he’d tried, using the money to fund his drug addiction, prostitution, a lifestyle even more lavish than this,’ he said, gesturing to his stunning apartment.
He was surprised when Anna came to stand beside him, desperate to cling to the warmth of her body heat, allowing it to warm him as his words, memories, turned him cold.
‘You were in prison for fourteen months,’ she said, more of a prompt than a query.
‘Between being released on bail and the court case, I spent a total of four hundred and twenty-seven days in prison.’
‘But you were innocent.’ Her outrage was a pale echo of the one he had nursed for what felt like years now.
‘Yes, but so was every single man in there.’ Her frown drew a grim smile from his lips. ‘It’s what they all said.’
‘But for you it was true.’
‘I remember the first time the lead investigator’s questions changed. They had enough evidence to convict me, but I had two very good witnesses for one occasion when it was simply impossible for me to have taken the money.’ An unspoken question rang loud out into the open air. ‘No, Anna, not bedfellows. Antonio and Danyl. Even the FBI couldn’t argue with the Sheikh of Ter’harn.’
