Kidnapped by the Greek Billionaire (15 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Kizzy stumbled along in a daze as Andreas propelled her mercilessly to the foot of the tower. He put an arm down into a clay urn that was beside the imposing door and retrieved a large iron key.

“You could have done this yourself if you’d been more dishonest and devious,” he said, turning the key noisily in the lock, throwing open the door she had only ever seen closed.

As he guided her up the dark, musty stairwell inside, he shielded her shoulders from the coarse stone walls by wrapping an arm around her and squeezing her to his body.

“Just a few more steps,” he muttered in a voice that seemed different from the one she was used to. He came to an abrupt halt. “Stay here and don’t move.”

Kizzy obeyed him—it seemed to her that they were both breathing heavily in the silent gloom of a stone tomb. Thin shafts of gray-brown light were the only hint of an outside world until Andreas wrenched open the first set of wooden shutters. Her hands flew to her eyes as she struggled to adjust to the fierce burst of sunlight streaming in.

Another shutter was flung open, followed by another and another until she was drowned in summer light that burst into every crevice of ancient gray stone. Looking around in bewilderment, she blinked her eyes into focus: a battered chair; a tumble of old jars; crumpled-up newspapers in every corner, and a pile of filthy rags.

“Satisfied now?” Andreas asked stiffly. He indicated that she should look behind her.

Satisfied?

Slowly, Kizzy turned and smothered a shocked gasp. “I had no idea that you—th-that—it’s beautiful!” She took a tentative step toward a huge canvas fixed to an easel.

Her gaze ran excitedly over the bold swirls of color and she inhaled the unfamiliar smell of artists’ materials—oil paints and turpentine. Brutally aware of his stony silence behind her, she resisted the almost overwhelming urge to brush her fingertips over the thick ridges of oil paint on the canvas and folded her hands together beneath her chin to keep them away.

It was an incomplete work but what he was trying to achieve was clear. A disturbed sky as stormy and gray as the wall surrounding it was slashed into focus by a tumbling heap of burning gold, red, amber, and black. Four horses, still tethered to a chariot, were falling and twisting toward earth in a firmament being torn apart from all sides. Winged creatures were trying to hold the beasts back, but failing in the fiery blaze of destruction, and there was the beginning of a body falling from inside the chariot—a pale foot was as far as the artist had gotten.

“This is your work?” Kizzy asked in wonder as she turned to face the dark storm of his expression. “
This
is what you do in here?”

He nodded silently and then looked pointedly out the nearest window, a muscle working rhythmically in his jaw. “There you have it. My dark, shameful secret…”

“What?” Kizzy fixed him with an unyielding look of fascination. “I don’t see anything shameful about this.”

“It’s a weakness. The forbidden fruit I’ve never been able to leave alone, however much it cost me.” His face twisted. “At least that was the case until you came on the scene. I’ve not managed a single brush stroke since I met you.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No,” he said more gently. “It’s a good thing.”

“It is? But I don’t understand, you obviously have such talent—”

“Then I will explain it to you. Step by shameful step, every single detail, if that’s what you genuinely want. Do you want to know
everything
, Kizzy?”

She nodded, despite being aware that she might be opening a forbidden box of secrets. It was as if a great shadowy beast was approaching both of them from some outer ring of darkness, ready to pounce and tear them to pieces, but she refused to run from it, not so long as Andreas needed her. Transfixed by what she had seen in his face, she took a deep breath and waited to hear his explanation.

“Any artistic inclinations that I showed as a child were forbidden by my father. There were no pencils or paints in our house, just a couple of ink pens locked away in his study. If he caught me so much as etching a line or two in the sand he would tell me I was pathetic—a mommy’s boy who needed to toughen up. Then of course he would beat the living daylights out of me.” He swallowed hard. “I pressed some flowers between the pages of a schoolbook once. He found out and had our cat put down as punishment.”

Kizzy gulped back a lump in her throat. “Andreas, I—”

“You wanted this, now hear me out.” He placed a hand on the edge of the canvas, staring blindly down at his own work. “I know I should put all this behind me, that I’m stronger than my father now, yet I can’t seem to shake off those feelings of shame. Every time I pick up a paintbrush, it feels like I’m doing something dirty and furtive—I still have to hide myself away, ensure that no one ever discovers what I do up here.”

“But you know in your heart that’s not the case, don’t you?” Kizzy reached out to touch his hand, and he moved it away. The thought hurt her deeply but she persevered, hoping to salvage something from their relationship. She could only guess how he was feeling. “There is nothing wrong or bad about creating such beautiful work.”

He gestured toward the dark, swirling colors of the painting. “This has become a twisted form of punishment for me, for what happened to my sister, an attempt to remind myself how weak and selfish I am—how unworthy of any genuine respect.” He placed his fingertips over Kizzy’s mouth as she began to protest. “No, hush. Do you know I even let my father hound me into an arranged marriage that no one but he and his second cousin wanted?”

Kizzy’s sharp intake of breath made his fingers drop from her lips.

He looked away.

“My father told me that he was terminally ill, and that if I married Sophia he could die happy, that he would forgive me all my supposed transgressions. He even got my mother to back up his story with tears as added leverage. So I did it. I married Sophia.”

“What happened?”

The musty air hung with thick silence. “My father made a miraculous recovery after the wedding and Sophia went straight to Ibiza on my credit card to be with her current girlfriend. Our marriage was never even consummated. All the same, she couldn’t resist humiliating me with her druggy, swinging antics spread all over Europe’s gossip magazines.”

Suddenly, he seized Kizzy’s chin, twisting her face away from his own and pointing it toward the painting. “Do you recognize these images, Kizzy? You really should.”

Kizzy blinked back the shock she felt at the intense pressure of his fingertips and pulled herself free. She had recognized the scene almost immediately.

“It’s Phaëthon’s Fall.”

“Very good.” He inclined his head, studying the painting with hard eyes. “That degree has come in useful after all. Yes, mischievous, bigheaded Phaëthon disobeyed his father, took the sun chariot out for a spin but couldn’t control it, and almost destroyed the world. Until Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt.”

“You should finish it,” Kizzy ventured carefully. “It’s incredible—”

“I can’t,” he replied abruptly and pointed to the unfinished corner with the foot. “Because I can’t decide if this person here, the one where the demigod should be, should look like me or Callista.”

Slowly the pieces began to fall clumsily into place. Kizzy looked back at him warily. This canvas was a cathartic ritual for Andreas, a punishment as he’d said, all tied up somehow with his father, the too-fast Lamborghini, and his sister’s death.

“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to Callista. It was a tragic accident.”

His voice deepened alarmingly. “You know nothing about it.”

“Dorinda told me. Your sister crashed your car trying to rush Diablo to the vet. It’s as simple as that. It was a tragedy but not your fault. You have got
to stop blaming yourself for it and move on.”

“You discussed me with Dorinda?” He shot her a look of disgust. “What makes you think
she
knows everything that happened that day?”

Kizzy opened her mouth to try and calm the inner forces that were making him look so angry, but it was clear he was not going to allow her to speak.

“I’ll spell it out to you once and for all. I couldn’t be bothered to take the bloody cat to the vet myself—I was too busy. I was always
too
busy trying to better myself, to make more money, to be the best. Callista went on and on about the cat until I got so annoyed I threw her the keys and told her to get on with it. She was just like you, Kizzy. Stubborn and rebellious to the end. She took the keys and, well, you know the rest.”

He stooped to pick up a stray paintbrush from the floor and put it carefully in an earthenware jar. “She’d only been driving a year and couldn’t control a car as powerful as the Lamborghini. I might as well have doused her with gasoline and set her on fire myself.”

“Oh no, stop.” She made a grab for his hand. “This is all wrong—”

“Don’t lecture me, Kizzy!” he said, pulling away. His voice shook. “You have no idea what it feels like to lose a sister and know that you are responsible.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she replied, and heard an answering tremor in her own voice. “I lost a sister too. A half-sister. Alice came into the world a month too early and I only had a few minutes to love and hold her before she slipped away.”

“Not your fault, Kizzy,” he said and rubbed the back of his neck ferociously. “No comparison.”

“But I think it is! Mum only stayed with my stepfather because of me. He gave us a roof over our heads, a chance of an education for me, an awful sham of stability. I never told her that I didn’t care about those things and that I wished we could just run away.”

Kizzy took a step toward him, desperate for his touch, some morsel of warmth to soothe away the terrible ache building to a crescendo inside her body. But all she could register was the dull, black look in his eyes that spoke of something beautiful that had died before its time. Or was just about to.

“She stuck it out and protected me from some terrible things—my stepbrothers were animals—but she paid a terrible price for that protection.” A tear began to seep from the edge of her lashes. “Alice was violently conceived and her death was just as brutal. My stepfather pushed Mum down the stairs during one of his drunken rages, and she went into premature labor.”

…

Andreas saw the acute pain and bewilderment on her face and his stomach constricted.

Kizzy was hurting and he couldn’t help her, because he was in as much pain himself, selfishly consumed by his own raw feelings. She had forced him into an emotional corner, drawn out the hidden poisons that had dominated his life for so long, and now he just wanted to get away from her, to hide his vulnerability. But that wasn’t how Andreas Lazarides worked.

He felt his heart pulse with renewed shame and humiliation. He was used to fighting back. Fighting dirty. He was used to slamming down the lid of the sarcophagus that held his heart.

“I’m sorry about your sister. I had no idea—any more than you knew the secrets of my life, the details you’ve just forced me to reveal. Things I wanted to keep secret.” He took a sharp breath. “It was a bad idea to get into all this, and it only happened because you refused to trust me. It should all have remained unspoken—buried in the past. You should have trusted me, Kizzy. You should have let it all be.” He paused. “I hope you’re satisfied now.”

Andreas turned and walked silently to one of the open windows. He leaned both hands on the rough ledge and stared out to sea, the light breeze lifting his hair. He couldn’t face her a moment longer, was unable to bear the revulsion that would inevitably overshadow her face. He couldn’t keep looking at those deep blue eyes, knowing he would only add to the distress and suffering within them. His unrestrained anger and resurgent feelings of uselessness would chip away at her, catching at the open wounds she already had.

And she wouldn’t be the first person he would ruin. His sister had died because of his negligence, his mother following closely behind, consumed by grief. Even his own father despised him with the few functioning brain cells he had left.

Yet he loved Kizzy.

Andreas loved her more than anything he had ever known, and it would be like ripping out his own heart to allow her to leave.

But he had to. It suddenly became clear to him that the best way to demonstrate his love was to let her go before he polluted her any further with the darkness in his soul. Somehow he had to stop himself from taking her in his arms and telling her that he would take care of her and make everything wonderful. Because he couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t end up making her life as miserable as her mother’s had been.

He had already tried to force Kizzy into marriage so that she would stay with him. So he could keep her in close captivity like a beautiful, caged bird.

“You’re right, Kizzy. I should have listened to you from the start. Of course we shouldn’t marry—it would be a disaster. Not because I would stray, but because I simply don’t have the time to work at it.” His fingertips scraped the stone of the window frame until he felt the skin split and bleed. “A marriage between us could never work.”

“But, Andreas, it
can
work!” she replied breathlessly and took a hesitant step toward him. “Now we have no secrets, now that I know I can trust you—”