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It hadn’t, of course. Her errant husband had been too busy indulging his new love to ever consider going back to the old one. He’d been too blown away by all that new sex to realise that his young bride was working her way through his fortune with an efficiency which might have been almost admirable, had it not been so destructive.
‘The crazy thing was that nobody was happy,’ he said slowly. ‘My father slowly realised he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. That what he had experienced was lust, not love. He married a woman who spoke a different language—who was from an entirely different culture. Her values were not his values. I was estranged from him for years and could only watch helplessly from the sidelines as my mother’s health deteriorated and his fortune was bled away by my …’
‘Stepmother?’ she prompted softly.
‘No, not that!’ His grey eyes blazing fire, his words were bitten out with ruthless precision. ‘I would never call that woman mother—for she made a mockery of the word!’
‘What … what happened?’ asked Emma tentatively as she saw his face grow dark and stormy with memory.
He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. As if it had been nothing to him when, in fact, it had been everything. ‘I cared for Nat during our mother’s illness and after her death—and I cared for my father when that bitch left him without a penny to his name. And then, slowly, I built up the Constantinides fortune all over again.’
Emma was silent for a moment as much of his behaviour now became clear. How helpless he must have felt as he’d watched the deterioration of his previously safe world. The divorce, the death and then the loss of money and status. To a proud man like Zak, it must have been almost unendurable.
Yet didn’t those events explain his need to control and to stamp his influence on everything around him? He had been left to care for his little brother and his protectiveness for Nat suddenly became understandable. And so too did his overwhelming drive to succeed. She’d thought that he had inherited the Constantinides fortune—she hadn’t realised that he’d built it up from scratch.
She sat looking into the darkened pain of his grey eyes wondering why he’d opened up and told her all this, when his next words made it clear.
‘Does that answer your question about why I’ve never settled down and married?’
There was a pause. ‘I don’t remember asking you that question, Zak.’
‘No. But you were thinking it.’ His grey eyes bored into her. ‘If not now—then some time in the past.’
She thought how easy it would be to adopt an air of outrage—to accuse him of having an unspeakably large ego. But Emma thought about what he’d just told her and suddenly she found that she didn’t want to retaliate, no matter what the provocation. He’d been hurt, she realised. Badly hurt. Couldn’t she show him a little thoughtfulness without wanting anything in return? Couldn’t she tell him the truth?
‘Yes, I was,’ she admitted. ‘And I’m probably not the only woman to wonder why a man who seems to have it all—should be so unremittingly single.’
Zak was taken aback by her candour and even more surprised by another urge to elaborate. He picked up his glass and drank some claret. ‘You talked about equality earlier—well, in my experience there is no true equality in relationships between the sexes. One person always loves too much and the other not enough.’
‘Is that what happened with Leda?’ she ventured boldly, remembering the woman with the short dark hair she’d seen in London. The woman who had persuaded him to turn a room of his New York hotel over to weddings.
Remembered, too, Nat’s words to his brother … that everyone had thought they would marry one day.
‘Leda was the closest thing I ever got to what most people settle for, yes,’ he said roughly. ‘But I liked her too much to ever want to hurt her—and I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t do that.’ He raised his glass in silent toast. ‘Anyway, she’s marrying someone else now—so it’s all worked out for the best.’
Emma wondered if she was imagining the regret in his voice—but she suspected he had told her as much as he was going to. It had been a brutally honest assessment but she guessed it was also a warning to her. Don’t get too close to me, he seemed to be saying. Because nothing will ever come of it.
‘So now you know all about my past … does it shock you?’ His eyes lanced her a question and when she didn’t answer, he continued, ‘Some people don’t do long-term relationships, Emma, and I’m one of those people. It frustrates the hell out of women and they spend a lot of time trying to change my mind—but they never do. Which leaves me wondering whether you still want to spend the night with me?’
It was, as they said, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Emma met the pewter gleam
of his eyes. He was promising nothing—he couldn’t have made that clearer if he’d tried. But knowing that didn’t change a thing because the answer was that she didn’t really have a choice.
Hadn’t she waited all her life for a man to make her feel the way that Zak did? And even if it was doomed not to last—was she really willing to turn her back on it now that she’d found it?
‘Actually, I do,’ she said, in as light a tone as possible. ‘And this time I’ll stay all night.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
FOR the first time in her life, Emma felt like somebody’s girlfriend. Like one of those women for whom life was ‘normal.’ Just an ordinary woman who was seeing a man, while deciding how much they liked each other. And she’d never had that before.
With Louis, everything had been so hush-hush and hidden away. His management had worried that another marriage might dent his latest reinvention as rock’s sexy bad boy and, consequently, she’d been kept out of view as much as possible—at least until the wedding had taken place. Then she’d been brought out at every opportunity—her youth a testimony to her husband’s supposed virility. But she’d only ever had a fraction of her husband’s attention. The women who eagerly pressed their phone numbers into his hand were often greeted with a smile rather than a rejection.
With Zak it was different. She’d thought he might tire of her after one or two dates. Or that he’d try to see her as little as possible—and then mainly for sex. But he had surprised her. His chivalry, she’d realised, had not been a one-off.
He’d taken her to some amazing restaurants and galleries and once to a concert at Carnegie Hall. He’d managed to get tickets for Broadway’s hottest show and she had found herself laughing at the corniest musical she had ever seen until tears had run down her cheeks. And then she’d looked up to find Zak watching her, shaking his head in slight bemusement as he’d pulled a perfectly laundered white handkerchief from his pocket and solemnly handed it to her.
