Greek's Last Redemption by Caitlin Crews Page B

didn’t ask you for your permission, Holly.”
    â€œWhy not pretend none of this ever happened?” she suggested, ignoring his tone and pretending that everything else that had gone on tonight wasn’t crowding out her ability to think clearly. “We’ll divorce and go on our merry way. We can start by you
not
walking me inside like this is some sick parody of a good date.”
    â€œYou came on my hand not an hour ago,” Theo retorted icily, and turned that too-black gaze on her again, making her feel still and small. “Yet an escort to your hotel room is an intimacy too far?”
    She didn’t respond to that. She didn’t trust herself. Holly climbed from the car and let him accompany her in a grim march across the lobby—though she wasn’t certain
let
was the right word. How could she have stopped him? How could she have stopped any of this? Once she’d decided to leave him four years ago, had all of this darkness and despair been inevitable?
    It made her feel something like seasick to think so.
    They didn’t speak on the endless, deeply fraught ride in the paneled elevator, nor the long walk down the hushed corridor to her room. She glanced at him when she went to swipe her key card, but he only stared back at her, stone-faced, with that vengeful glitter in his dark gaze and his hands thrust deep into his pockets.
    â€œOpen the damned door,” he said when she paused, his voice soft but like nails even so. “I will not discuss any more of my private life in these open public places, filled as they are with so many eyes and ears.”
    A thousand hurtful replies to that swirled inside her then, but his glare only intensified.
    â€œDon’t push me, Holly,” he advised her in that same tone. “Not tonight.”
    She opened the door and it felt like the worst kind of capitulation, but she wasn’t sure she knew herself anymore. She felt like a marionette. As if her limbs were responding to some far-off controller and she could only do as she was bid.
    Then again, maybe that was one more way to avoid taking responsibility for the mess she’d made of her marriage.
    And then they were standing there in her hotel suite, which had felt comfortably spacious while she’d been in it alone. But Theo roaming through it, looking angry and male and
too much
in the midst of so much quietly assured elegance, made her feel trapped. Or perhaps that was the sudden lump in her throat, restricting her breath.
    The insistent pulse of her own shame, her own deepening guilt.
    Tonight you have made me exactly like him.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she forced herself to say, though she felt nothing so easy or uncomplicated as
sorry
. “I realize you acted only on the information you had. I have no right to blame you for that. I have no right to be hurt by what you did.”
    He’d moved over to the windows and he turned back then, something terrible on his face, caught there in his dark eyes.
    â€œI cannot process this,” he told her after a moment. “I cannot make sense of it. You have not only done a monstrous thing to me, to us—you made me into the very creature I vowed I would never become. I could not bear the first betrayal, Holly. I have no idea how I am to come to terms with this one, the one that makes me worse than you by any emotional arithmetic.”
    Her hands were in fists again, tight and hard against her thighs. “Is that what this is about? Who’s worse?”
    â€œI have no idea what this is about.” His voice was harsh. “I cannot imagine you do, either, or it would not be this convoluted.”
    Everything had shifted. The room was so bright where the night and the club had been so dark, and Holly couldn’t ever remember feeling so naked before. So wide-open and on display. She wasn’t shaking any longer, but she felt even more broken than before, and looking at Theo made it that much