I feel changed, as if the woman who entered this suite is not the same as the one who’s lying on her back now, with her lover sprawled on top of her. And I don’t know what to do. I should feel powerful and strong, perhaps, since I took matters into my own hands and did exactly what I wanted with the man I wanted it with. But I don’t feel powerful or strong. I feel as if I’ve given away a vital part of myself to Rafael Santangelo and it’s a part I’ll never get back.
He moves finally, letting go my hair and raising his head, looking down at me. His dark eyes are searching. ‘Did I hurt you?’ he asks, his voice rusty-sounding.
‘No.’ My own voice doesn’t sound much better. ‘No, you didn’t.’
He stares at me for a long moment and what he sees in my face I don’t know, but suddenly he turns away, shifting off me. ‘Georgios will be wondering where you are.’ He gets to his feet and adjusts his clothing. He’s very carefully not looking at me.
I sit up, confused and obscurely hurt though I don’t know why. ‘I already told you that I don’t care about him.’
He bends to pick up my discarded dress. ‘But your brother does.’
‘Again, I already told you that I don’t care about him either.’ I get to my feet, conscious that, not only am I completely naked, my emotions are all over the place and I feel weird.
Rafael comes over to where I’m standing, my dress in his hands, and makes as if to cover me with it. I jerk back, staring up at him. His face is utterly expressionless, and the heat has disappeared from his dark eyes. In this moment he’s never looked more like a stranger, not even when he was one. ‘So that’s it?’ I ask, not knowing what I’m even asking for. ‘We have sex and then you kick me out?’
‘I don’t have anything more to give you, Olympia.’ His expression doesn’t change. ‘And yes, that’s all I wanted.’
It feels as if he’s slid a needle into my side, a small, sharp splinter of pain. ‘But—’
‘But what?’ His voice is cold. ‘Your brother is a powerful man. He’s not an enemy I want.’
‘What’s my brother got to do with this?’ I demand, inexplicable hurt radiating out like cracks in a mirror, jagged and sharp. ‘This is about you and me.’
‘No,’ he corrects gently. ‘It’s just about you.’
My eyes prickle with unexpected tears, which makes me abruptly furious. I was supposed to be stronger than this. I was supposed to be better. I was supposed to be able to handle anything the world could throw at me, and yet all it took for me to crumble was first-time sex with a strange man.
I snatch my dress from his fingers and turn away, angrily blinking back my tears, determined to hide them from him so he will never know how much this has hurt me. And it has hurt me. I am letting it matter, attaching some importance to it that it shouldn’t have, and he’s right. That’s about me, not him.
He’s silent behind me as I pull on my dress and I don’t turn back once it’s done. I don’t look over my shoulder at all as I stride on shaky legs to the door of the suite.
‘Dragonfly,’ he says softly. ‘Wait.’
But I don’t.
I pull open the door and walk through it without a backward glance.
CHAPTER FIVE
Rafael
It’s Christmas Eveand I’m sitting in a plain black car parked in one of Athens’ narrow back streets near the Acropolis. I have a jewelled hair clip in one hand and it glitters in the cold light that comes through the windows, all blue and red and gold. A dragonfly. A souvenir from that night in Singapore nearly four months ago and from the woman who turned my revenge plans upside down.
I shouldn’t have kept it, but I felt I deserved something for the sacrifice I made when I made sure she left me without looking back. Despite all my good intentions to use lust to cement an obsession with me, in the end it was I who was in danger of becoming obsessed. And I couldn’t allow that to happen. I couldn’t even allow the possibility in case it distracted me from my ultimate goal of breaking her bastard of a brother. So instead I made sure she walked away from me and stayed away.
Except nothing turns out the way you expect.
She’ll be coming soon—my driver is tracking her phone—and she’s close by. I called her this morning, asking her to meet and, after she’d got over her shock at hearing from me, she agreed. I didn’t tell her why I needed to see her, and she didn’t ask, but we both knew the reason.
There were consequences from our night in Singapore, consequences that I had confirmation of only a couple of days ago. I should have thought that night, should have been more aware, but she managed to make me so hungry that the thought of protection didn’t even cross my mind.
It has been nagging at the back of my brain for weeks, the sense that I missed something, that something isn’t quite right, yet it wasn’t till a couple of months had passed that I’d woken in the middle of the night with the answer front and centre in my head. No condom.
The first thing I did the next day was to attempt to contact her or someone close to her, but she’d retreated from the world again, back into her brother’s house and protected by his security. She might as well have been on the moon, that’s how unreachable she was to me.
But I’ve never been one to give up, so, after months of enquiries and bribes being exchanged for the information, I learned that she’d been to see a doctor recently, and not her usual one. Alarm bells were already ringing by the time I finally tracked that doctor down, and again, money talked—the good doctor had debts to pay—and I received the confirmation I’d been dreading.
My dragonfly is pregnant and the child is mine.
