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It would be vicious when they found out about this, and no matter how she played this, she would come out the villain. She knew it for certain. But she didn’t have the strength to have it happen in front of an audience. To let Alex say his piece like that, in front of all those guests and reporters, without any control for what was said or how.
The thought of it... It felt like her whole life, the life she’d taken such great pains to build from the time she was seventeen, was slipping through her fingers. She had become The Holt Heiress. Rachel Holt, style icon and media sweetheart. Eternal hostess, role model and...and what else she didn’t know.
That night with Alex had brought something out in her she hadn’t known had existed, and she was paying for it dearly now.
Stepping off that straight and narrow path had proven to have some pretty permanent consequences. And right now, she was taking a temporary leave of absence from those consequences. Because this way, she didn’t have to look at Ajax’s face when he found out. Or her father’s.
Or Leah’s.
She took her phone out. “I have to text Leah at least.” She thought of her sister, who was all set to be maid of honor in the wedding. Her lovely, sweet sister who’d always gotten such crap from the press, but who was one of the best people Rachel had ever known.
It made her sick to think how Leah would worry.
How her father would worry.
And Ajax...
She had ruined everything. She was going to panic. She was officially on the verge of a panic attack.
“Don’t text them until our plane is about to leave. And why am I insane?”
“Because everything is insane!” She exploded. “And you want me to marry you. I am not marrying you. I don’t know you. I don’t like you, either.”
“How can you dislike me if you don’t know me?”
“Fine. I don’t know you very well, and what I do know about you, I don’t like.”
“You like my body.”
“And if you were only a body, maybe that would matter. But there is, unfortunately, a personality beneath those hard muscles and it freaking blows.”
“Does it?”
“You’re a liar. You’re hell-bent on ruining my fiancé’s life, and I don’t even know why, and you used me to get revenge on him.”
“And then didn’t do anything about it.”
“You came today.”
“Yeah, so I might have done something. But I wasn’t going to come to the wedding so I wasn’t planning on doing anything anymore. It’s just...it’s just that then I ended up coming. And it was a good thing I did.”
“It was not.”
“You would have married him then?”
“No.”
“I thought not.”
“Why do you hate him, incidentally? It seems like this might be really important to my future.” She looked down at her hands and noticed they were shaking.
“As I told you, Ajax Kouros is a created name. A created identity. Hell, mine is, too, for the most part. Christofides is anyway. I was never called by a last name at all.”
“How is that possible?”
“I was the son of a woman who couldn’t remember her real name. Or if she did, she chose never to use it. ‘Meli’ was all she ever called herself. Honey. I think it was a double entendre of some kind. We lived in Ajax’s father’s compound. The infamous Nikola Kouklakis.”
“What?”
“I suppose you’ve heard of him.”
“The depth of that trafficking ring was...horrendous. When it was broken up a few years ago...”
“Yes, it was shocking. So many people. So many lives ruined. My mother wasn’t one who was kidnapped. She was seduced. By the drugs. By the money. By love of some kind. We lived in the compound. As did Ajax. I remember seeing him and thinking he was quite something with his suits. The cars. But I learned very quickly to be afraid of him, because he was the big boss’s son. Because what if he saw me causing trouble?”
“Alex...I don’t... This can’t be.”
“What? You think I goad him for fun? I goad him because I don’t think he deserves any of what he has, not while so many of us live with the lasting wounds of where his fortune came from.”
“But he didn’t earn any of it from...anywhere bad. He came to my family when he was a boy. He got work with my father. He built up from nothing.”
“You don’t know him like I do. You think you do, Rachel, but you don’t know him.”
“I do.”
“Why had you never slept with him?”
“He’s not...very passionate. And I figured I wasn’t, either, so fine.”
He chuckled, a dark, humorless sound. “I witnessed some of his behavior back at the compound. He was with the women there. He’s certainly not passionless, and knowing his background I find it worrisome more than anything that he hasn’t touched you. Perhaps he was just going to savor your virginity.”
Her face heated, anger and anxiety shooting through her. “He didn’t know I was a virgin. I had a...a relationship before him, and I didn’t... I obviously didn’t sleep with him, but it wasn’t chaste. Okay? And Ajax and I never discussed it, so he really didn’t know.”
“Trust me, agape, he knew.”
“You didn’t.”
“I only knew you for an afternoon.”
“It had some lasting consequences,” she said, leaning against the window of the car and watching the scenery fly by. “Why am I going with you again?”
“You don’t want me destroying your reputation in the press? Or destroying Ajax at the altar, though I can’t imagine why.”
Her head was swimming. She couldn’t even imagine the Ajax she knew, the man who seemed to spend twenty-four hours a day in a crisply pressed suit, prowling the halls of a drug house and mingling with prostitutes. It didn’t make sense.
“I only know what I know about him.”
And that of all the things that she felt right now—which were blessedly cushioned by shock or she would be rocking in a corner— heartbreak wasn’t one of them. So the other thing she could add to the list of Very Obvious Things She Knew was that she did not love Ajax, for certain.
That part of her was relieved to be fleeing the wedding, even if it was with Alexios Christofides.
Even if she was having his baby.
Her stomach pitched. No, she wasn’t relieved about that. She couldn’t even really think about all that.
“You aren’t going to hold me prisoner, are you?” she asked when the car pulled up to the airport.
“If I wanted to do that, I would have done it back in Corfu.”
“I suppose.”
“There’s no suppose about it. I had you wrapped around my finger, agape mou.”
She gritted her teeth and opened the door to the car. He followed, and an employee came out for their bags. Not the normal treatment, even when she flew, and she was accustomed to first class.
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