What if he had let himself believe her when she’d claimed to love him?
Nikos growled under his breath, cursing himself in every language he knew. Now that he had done what he set out to do, he could not see how it had consumed him for so long. What had he won? What had he achieved? Why did it all feel like so much wasted breath and misery, for absolutely no reason?
How could he have prized a loyalty to people who had disdained him over what he should have owed to Tristanne—the only person in all his life who had looked at him with joy in her eyes, however briefly? She had told him that she loved him, and he had responded by abandoning her at the altar. He was no better than an animal. He was exactly the kind of scum he had spent his life attempting to distance himself from. He, who had always vowed that he would never be Peter Barbery, had become something far worse. At least Peter had ended things with Althea himself—he had not allowed his absence to speak for him.
What kind of man was he, that he could have done what he had done?
“She is not worth it, my friend,” the bartender said, shaking Nikos out of his brooding contemplation of his whiskey.
Nikos focused on him, surprised that the man dared to speak to him after weeks of careful silence.
“Is she not?” he asked lightly. “How do you know?”
“She never is,” the man said. He shrugged. “What do they say? You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them, yes? It is always the same old story.”
He moved down the bar to answer another patron’s demands, but Nikos felt frozen into place. It was as if a light had gone off inside of him, and he finally, finally understood.
He was not a man who wallowed—nor one who ever backed down from a challenge, even if the challenge was of his own making. He had more money than he could ever spend. He had homes in every city that had ever caught his eye. He had come from nothing, and now he had everything. And none of it meant anything to him without Tristanne. He could not live without her scowl, her defiant chin, her thoughtful brown eyes. He did not want to live without her, no matter what her last name was, no matter who her family were, no matter what.
He could not feel this way. It could not continue. He could not live without her. It was as simple as that.
Everything else was negotiable.
Tristanne was not surprised, necessarily, when the sleek black car pulled to a stop beside her as she walked back along the avenue toward the little house she and Vivienne had rented when they’d first arrived back in Vancouver. She was not surprised when Nikos unfolded himself from the back of the car, his long, hard frame as lethally graceful as she remembered.
But that did not mean she was happy about it, either—to look up from her life and see him. To feel him steal all the light from the world and the breath from her body. She stopped dead in her tracks, a carrier bag swinging from her arm, and stared.
He had commanded all the light in the sunlit glory of the Mediterranean; on a street in a Vancouver neighborhood, gray with the start of the fall rains, he was magnificent—like a supernova, for all that he was dressed in black. Dark black sweater, charcoal-colored trousers and that sleek black hair that very nearly tousled at the ends. Tristanne ignored the wild tumult of her heart, her nerves, her stomach as he moved toward her. He looked graver than she remembered—more grim. No hint of that half smile on his full lips, no gleam at all in his tea-steeped eyes.
She told herself she was glad. That it made him a stranger to her. And there was no need at all for her to talk to a stranger.
“I imagine you hate me,” he said, coming to a stop in front of her.
For a moment she could only blink. Then Tristanne felt a wave of something deep and messy wash over her, through her. Rage? Grief? She could not distinguish between the two.
“No preamble?” she threw at him. “No greeting, even? Do I deserve so little from you, Nikos? Not even the sort of courtesy you would extend to a stranger?”
She started moving then, jerky and rough, but she could not stay there. She could not look at him. She needed to barricade herself in her new bedroom, cry into her pillow and tell herself that she did not still yearn for a man who could treat her like this. She could not.
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked. He kept pace with her with no apparent effort, which made her even more furious.
“We said a great many things, you and I,” she muttered, scowling at the ground. “One of us meant what was said and the other was nothing but a very practiced liar—so you will have to be more specific.”
She could not seem to keep her composure any longer. She had cried more in the past weeks than she had in the previous long years of her life. She hardly recognized herself anymore. She was what he had made her—this smashed, ruined, broken thing.