Something she was not remotely grateful for when the first person she ran into, upon entering the decadent ballroom, was her ex-husband, and his date.
‘Well, well,’ he drawled, lips flickering with undisguised distaste as he pulled the woman at his side closer. She was very beautiful, in the way all James’s mistresses had been, and wore clothes she knew to be to James’s taste.
A sense of pity squeezed Genevieve’s heart, and she fought an instinct to tell the other woman to run a thousand miles in the opposite direction.
‘Senator,’ she said, voice clipped, before stepping around him, to leave.
‘How’s the fiancé?’ he asked after her, and her eyes squeezed shut on a wave of fresh pain. Desperate, aching pain. Nikos. The man she thought of as hers, who never really had been.
She turned around though, and forced a smile. ‘Fine. I’m sure he’d want me to say hello. He really did enjoy that little chat you both had,’ she added.
James’s eyes narrowed and she knew that had it not been for the threat of Nikos hanging over his head, he might have said something horrible. Threatened her in some way. Instead, he stood there silently, face turning a shade of puce.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me how I am, James?’ she prompted, anger stirring inside her at how this man had belittled her, all their marriage.
‘I don’t particularly care.’
‘You never did,’ she said, with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘And I spent so long wondering what I’d done wrong, to make you so cold, and uncaring. But now I see you for what you are: a psychopath.’
He looked as though he wanted to slap something.
‘I truly have no idea what I ever saw in you.’ She dragged her gaze over his body, and she couldn’t help thinking of all the ways in which he didn’t match up to Nikos—and never could.
‘Have a nice night,’ she aimed at his date, before turning and moving swiftly into the crowd, to the area cordoned off for the press. She recognised a couple of journalists she knew, and settled herself amongst them, already enervated by the need for small talk.
It didn’t last long. With the precision of a Swiss clock, the president arrived as scheduled, the crowd falling silent with respect. He began to speak of his hopes for a piece of upcoming legislation around childhood hunger, and then began to speak about the government’s charity partners, operations that were working in the field, donors to the cause.
‘In particular, I would like to thank, as I welcome to the stage, one of the biggest patrons in this space, a personal friend of mine, Nikos Konstantinou.’
Genevieve dropped her phone to the tiled floor, and felt her journalist colleagues’ eyes turn to her. Fortunately, the applause somewhat muted the sound as Nikos’s name was mentioned. It was little wonder his appearance had caused such a stir: he was famously reclusive. To have him appearing at an event with the president was a huge coup.
Her pulse exploded. Her heart went crazy. Her eyes stung. She knew her face must be a blotchy mess of pale and pink, she could feel the heat and clamminess growing on her, and it only got worse as Nikos,her Nikos, strode on stage, more charismatic than any man had ever been, and stood behind the lectern, though his size dwarfed the thing.
‘Here,’ someone beside her said, passing the phone to her numb fingers. She stuffed it in her pocket without responding. She couldn’t. Every single part of her was focused on Nikos as he began to speak, in his beautiful, accented English, his eyes sweeping the crowd and somehow not landing on her. Not seeing her.
And why would he think to look for her? He didn’t know what she was doing for work, nor that she’d be there. Which meant he’d come to Washington and not reached out to her. He’d come to the city he knew she lived in, and made no attempt at contact.
‘Oh my God,’ she whispered, closing her eyes on a wave of renewed pain.
All this time, she’d been pining for him, craving him, missing him with all her soul, and he’d been getting on with his life. Having paid off her debts, he’d clearly absolved himself of any thoughts of her.
She took a step backwards.
‘Hey,’ a woman snapped with annoyance.
‘Sorry,’ Genevieve murmured, holding up a hand. But she needed to get out of there. ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she fibbed, figuring there was no better way to clear a cordoned-off space than that. Sure enough, despite the density of journalists, a path formed for her, so she kept her head down and moved quickly towards the edge, and then along the back wall of the room, head down, towards the doors of the venue.
Her heart was racing as she broke out into the warm evening air, her skin flushed, her insides twisting.
But her feet refused to take her further. Her legs were shaking; her breath was hurting. She looked around, in frantic need of a seat, and instead settled on one of the elegant pillars, to lean against. She pressed her back to the cool stone, and closed her eyes, as she tried to process what the heck had just happened. And how she could ever, ever forgive him for this.
Nikos had seen her the moment he’d walked on stage, and it had taken every single piece of his willpower not to cut through the crowd then and there and pull her into his arms. But though he’d come to the States to see Genevieve, this was a presidential event, and he had no intention of being disrespectful to his friend and the holder of that office.
So he’d begun to speak about the cause, his donations to the charity, keeping his remarks as brief as he possibly could, all the while wondering what she was thinking, how she was, if she was looking at him and missing him as he was her.
He had no way of knowing.
Theo had been able to source minimal information on Genevieve, since her leaving Greece. He knew only where she worked.
