* * *
Loukas walked out of the airport before he created a scene. Anger, disappointment and some other nameless emotion were boiling inside him in a toxic mix the like of which he had never quite experienced before. The
sense of powerless was overwhelming. He wanted to pick Emily up and carry her fireman-style back to his villa—to give her no choice but to stay with him. He could be ruthless when he needed to be, but her confession of love had stunned him.
Why had she had to throw that in the mix? Surely it was just fanciful on her part? Good sex did that to women. To be fair, it did it to men too. But just because the sex was great didn’t mean he was in love with her. He had never been in love with anyone. Her confession shouldn’t have surprised him so much. She was an affectionate and giving person. Loving came naturally to her. She didn’t have to think about it. Guard against it. Block it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t capable of love. He loved his mother, his sister and his friends but in a remote and hands-off way. Getting close to someone didn’t come naturally to him. Maybe it was the way his personality was wired, or maybe it was because of the trauma he’d gone through with his parents’ acrimonious divorce and custody battle, not to mention the harrowing guilt he felt over the accident with his sister.
Loving someone scared the hell out of him.
It scared him to be that vulnerable. The odds of losing someone escalated the more you cared about them. The odds of hurting them were even worse.
He remembered how he used to lie in bed at night as a small child listening to his parents argue bitterly. The sense of insecurity had been sickening but he had always comforted himself that no way would his mother ever leave him. His father, yes, but never his mother.
He still remembered the day when his father had taken him roughly by the hand and all but dragged him to the waiting car. Loukas had fought against the tears, not wanting to make it any worse for his distraught mother but, more importantly, not wanting to let his father know how upset he was at leaving his mother behind. His father would have enjoyed that too much. He would have relished in the pain and suffering he was inflicting. Loukas had schooled his features into a mask, just as he had done just now with Emily. But he could still picture his mother running after the car, her hands reaching out to him, her hair flying in disarray about her tear-ravaged face.
Such intense emotion had terrified him then and it terrified him now. He sought refuge in anger because anger was something he could control. He could lock it down and tie it up like a wild animal. He could wait it out. Let it cool off before he looked at it again.
What had Emily been thinking, offering her hand to him like some mild acquaintance? They’d had smoking-hot sex together. They’d made a baby together, for God’s sake. How dared she reduce their relationship to an impersonal press of hands at a gate lounge? She had no right to do this when he’d offered her more than he’d offered anyone.
He didn’t want to hurt her but how could he pretend to feel things he had never felt for anyone? That was why he had given her the get-out option on their marriage. He had never promised her ‘for ever’.
He wasn’t that person. He could never be that person.
He wondered now if he ever had been.
CHAPTER NINE
EMILY HAD BEEN back in London a week when the doorbell rang. Her heart leapt as if it were bouncing off a trampoline. Could it be Loukas? Had he changed his mind? Did he love her after all? She had heard nothing from him other than a brief text to make sure she’d got home safely. She had thought about texting him, especially since she couldn’t find the little key to the jewellery box, but she didn’t want him to think she was using it as an excuse to contact him. The key probably had been lost at the security checkpoint at the airport or when she’d dug out tissue after tissue from her bag on the flight home.
But in a way the box symbolised her despair over Loukas’s inability to love her. His heart was as locked as that box. Day after day had gone by and she had watched her phone with bated breath, hoping the next time it rang it would be him. But he never called.
She rushed to the front door of her flat but her heart sank to her feet when she opened it. ‘Oh... Mum... I can’t talk right now...’
‘I just got back from my eight-day yoga retreat and turned on my phone to read your engagement’s been called off! What’s going on?’
Emily found it hard enough dealing with everyone else’s disappointment, let alone her own, so she had only sent the text the day before because she hadn’t wanted her mother to counsel her as if she were one of her clients. She had told Allegra about her decision to leave Loukas as soon as she’d got back home and, while Allegra was concerned and sad for her, she knew Loukas well enough to know it was pointless hoping he might change.
She couldn’t stop her bottom lip from trembling. ‘Oh, Mum. My life is such a terrible mess.’
Her mother stepped inside and closed the door then, after a brief hesitation, held her arms out. ‘Tell me everything.’
Emily stepped into her mother’s hug that for some reason didn’t feel as stiff and awkward as normal. She sobbed her way through the story of the last few days. ‘He was only offering to marry me out of a sense of duty. But I love him. How could I marry him, knowing he doesn’t love me back?’
Her mother patted her back and made soothing, cooing noises as though she were settling a fractious baby. ‘You can’t. You did the right thing in putting an end to it.’
They moved to sit together on the sofa and her mother kept handing her a steady supply of tissues. ‘It’ll be okay, poppet. You’ll get through it.’
‘But I’m so unhappy!’
‘I know, I felt like that when I broke up with my fiancé. I literally wanted to die.’
Emily lifted her head out of her hands to stare at her mother. ‘Your fiancé? When were you engaged?’
Her mother gave her a sad, twisted little smile. ‘It was a couple of months before I went to the music festival. His name was Mark. We were madly, passionately in love—or at least, I was. He clearly wasn’t. We were getting married but then he broke it off a week before the wedding. He married another girl a few weeks later. She was from money—heaps of money. I didn’t take it well. I kind of...lost myself there for a while.’
She let out a long sigh. ‘Drugs, sex, rock and roll—you name it. But then, getting pregnant with you turned my life around. Sort of.’ She squeezed Emily’s hand. ‘I know I’m not the best mother in the world. But after Mark broke my heart I couldn’t settle to anything for long. I lived with a constant fear of it being snatched away from me. So I became the one who moved on before someone could do that to me again. I even kept you at arm’s length because I was frightened I might lose you too.’
‘Oh, Mum.’ Emily hugged her mother close. ‘I had no idea. Why didn’t you tell me about him before now?’