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“My editor wrote that piece,” she said urgently. “I quit and he took my research, used it to patch together what he could.”
It felt so good to unburden herself of that – to confess what she’d wanted to tell him for years. To say what she’d tried to tell him when it had all happened, and he’d refused to speak to her.
“I know.” The words were dragged from deep in his soul but they shook her to the core.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think I didn’t try to sue the paper? To sue everyone?” His expression was grim. “My lawyers subpoenaed your paper, the article. I knew you’d quit.”
“When?” She asked breathily, desperate now to understand.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said with a gruff shake of his head.
“How can you say that? You know I quit, that I realized I couldn’t publish the article. You know I never meant to hurt you…”
“For God’s sake,” he said loudly, and then swept his eyes shut, while bringing his temper under control. “We subpoenaed everything, Eleanor. Everything. I saw your notes, all those meticulous recordings of conversations I believed to be utterly private.” He took a step away from her, out into the corridor of the plane, his hands on his hips, his head dipped forward in a strangely defeated gesture for a man such as Apollo Heranedes. “I bared my soul to you, and you were just using me.”
“No!” Her denial was instantaneous. “Apollo, that meant everything to me. What started off as opportunistic journalism very quickly became something else. I fell in love with you…”
“Stop.” He held a hand up to silence her and the defeatist expression she’d glimpsed earlier was long gone. He wore a mask of determined resolve now, a mask of constrained distance. “I meant what I said – I never wanted to see you again, and I still wish there was another way to handle this.”
“You could leave me here,” she said with a small shiver.
“Not wanting to see you again isn’t the same as wanting you to rot in a foreign prison,” he said with a shake of his head. “Though God only knows why I care.”
Eleanor’s heart turned over in her chest. “Where are we going?”
The engines began to hum and a soft beep sounded before a disembodied voice emerged from overhead: Mr Hernandes, we’re ready for take-off. If you take a seat, refreshments will be brought to you shortly.
He waited for the voice to cease and then dropped his attention back to Eleanor’s face.
“I told you: somewhere I can make sure you can’t cause any trouble. Or get into it, for that matter.”
It was madness, bringing her here. He looked out of the airplane window with a gut that was sinking in time with the plane’s descent over prâsino nìsi, his private island jewel in the Mediterranean. His bolthole.
He’d spent almost a year here after it had happened – running from his own part in his father’s death. Running from the fact that letting his guard down for the first time in his life, and opening up to someone, had directly led to Stavros’s heart attack.
Over time, he’d come to realise that Eleanor was some kind of witch – surely. Magical, enchanted, utterly terrifying – because when he was with her, he lost all sense of time, place, duty, responsibility. There was a reason he’d kept his father’s secrets for so long – a reason he’d kept those secrets even from his own sister, pushing her away with everything he had, protecting her from the shame of their father’s truth.
No one should have known what kind of man Stavros Heranedes was. Hell, if Apollo had had his way, he wouldn’t have known. But Stavros hadn’t only been a despotic, power-hungry billionaire with a twisted and insatiable sexual appetite: he’d been determined to indoctrinate Apollo into his lifestyle.
A hooker had been Stavros’s idea of the perfect fifteenth birthday present for Apollo – a beautiful, exclusive Manhattan call-girl, flown in for his ‘private use’. Apollo grimaced now, his reaction to the ‘surprise’ only natural given his hormonally-charged state. It had been years before he’d become enough of a man to refuse such gifts, to refuse to be groomed into the second-coming of Stavros Heranedes.
Oh, in business acumen he had always been pleased to take after the old man. Exceed, in fact, for Stavros had the skills of his father without the emotional ambivalence. He was smart, driven, ruthless, but could make decisions from the cold-place of certainty, rather than the heat of ego.
At least he could with everything except Eleanor.
Which brought him back to his first question: what the hell was he doing, bringing her to prâsino nìsi?
His eyes lifted of their own accord to the doorway that led to the rear of the plane. It was all too easy to imagine her in the bedroom. Lying down, that beautiful tangle of dark hair around her captivating face, eyes swept shut, so that only her long, dark lashes fanned her cheeks – cheeks that had been kissed by the sun often enough to birth a happy brigade of freckles across the bridge of her nose – appreciable only when you were close enough to kiss her.
Which he’d been often in the time they spent together. To kiss her, to hold her, never to sleep with her.
He expelled a sigh borne of anger and frustration now.
Eleanor had seemed the very opposite of everything he was: the fast-paced lifestyle Stavros lived was full of wealth, glamour, beautiful women clamoring to become his mistress, women for whom sex was cheap and life was a rapid succession of parties and men. Eleanor had been the total opposite. So shy and nervous when they’d first met – a meeting which he now understood to have been a brilliant construct.
