Page 28 of The Marakaios Marriage (The Marakaios Brides 1)
He shook his head. ‘We’ve been taking it in turns to sit with her.’
‘Oh, Antonios.’ She rose from her desk and put her arms around him. Antonios pulled her to him as he had before, fitting her body to his. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I know.’
They remained in a silent embrace, needing no words. Then Antonios eased back. ‘I’ll need to start making arrangements for the funeral.’
‘Of course. If there is anything I can do—’
He shook his head and left. Lindsay glanced back at her laptop.
Thank you for your email. I am honoured to...
With a sigh, she closed the laptop and went to find Antonios’s sisters.
The funeral was two days later, at the Orthodox church in Amfissa, with a large crowd of townspeople along with all of the family, staff and employees of Marakaios Enterprises. Lindsay saw how Antonios and Leonidas stood apart from each other, their sisters like a barrier between them, as the coffin was lowered into the hard, stony earth.
There was a sombre reception back at the house, painfully reminiscent of Daphne’s name day party, yet without her holding court in the centre of the room.
Lindsay helped organize things in the kitchen, glad to be out of the spotlight and knowing Antonios and his siblings needed time together. Her husband, she saw, was still not talking to Leonidas, never mind attempting some kind of reconciliation.
By the end of the day she was exhausted and aching in body and spirit, grateful to retreat up to their private wing. She hadn’t seen Antonios for the last hour and had assumed he was closeted somewhere with his siblings.<3
He opened the door to their bedroom before her hand had touched the knob, causing her to give a small gasp of surprise.
‘I didn’t realize you’d come up—’
‘Yet here I am.’ Antonios’s voice was clipped, his expression grim. Lindsay closed the door behind her.
‘Is everything...’ she began, only to have Antonios fill in unpleasantly,
‘All right? No, Lindsay, it is not. It is not all right. It is not fine.’ The last word was spoken in a sneer, a mockery of the times she’d insisted she was.
Lindsay shook her head. ‘Antonios, what—’
‘When,’ he asked, his voice turning savage, ‘were you going to tell me?’
Lindsay blinked as he glared at her, his whole body taut with fury, his fists clenched at his sides.
‘What...’
‘You haven’t forgotten, have you?’ he enquired silkily. ‘The job offer you’re so honoured to accept?’
Her jaw dropped. ‘You read my email—’
‘You left it up on the screen. And I’m not going to apologize for some imagined invasion of your privacy when you’ve been keeping such things from me.’ He shook his head, his features twisting with bitterness. ‘When were you going to tell me you were leaving, Lindsay, or were you just going to slip away again?’
CHAPTER TWELVE
EVERYTHING IN HIM HURT. Antonios heard his own ragged breathing as he stared at Lindsay and saw the truth in her face. She had deliberately kept the job offer from him.
And why? It felt painfully obvious: because she’d been intending to take it up, to leave him.
Lindsay had gone pale, her breathing shallow. ‘Don’t have a damned panic attack now,’ Antonios growled. ‘I won’t have an ounce of sympathy for you if you do.’
Her mouth compressed and she swallowed. ‘Good to know.’
‘Why?’ he asked, and heard a world of hurt in his voice, making him cringe inwardly even as fury fired through him. Theos, but he’d been here before. Only this time it felt a thousand times worse.
‘Why what, Antonios?’ Lindsay asked quietly. She had composed herself, and even that infuriated him. She seemed unaffected by his own agony, but then he hadn’t been able to read her before, had had no inkling of the anguish she’d tried so hard to hide.
Perhaps he hadn’t changed as much as he’d thought and hoped he’d had.
‘Why,’ he clarified, ‘did you not tell me you had a job offer from a university in New York? A job offer you were thinking of accepting—’
‘I haven’t accepted it.’
‘You’re thinking about it, though, aren’t you?’ Antonios returned. ‘In the email you haven’t finished the sentence about just what you’re honoured to do, and why was that? Because you aren’t sure.’
Lindsay’s face was pale but when she spoke her voice came out calmly. ‘No,’ she agreed, ‘I’m not.’
And somehow her calm admission hurt all the more, and turned his anger into despair. His shoulders sagged and he felt an unbearable weariness sweep through him, making every muscle he had ache. ‘And you couldn’t even tell me that.’
‘I was going to.’
‘When?’ He shook his head. ‘Theos, what kind of marriage do we have, if we cannot be honest with each other?’
‘I don’t know.’ Lindsay took a deep breath. ‘But I’ll be honest now, Antonios. I’ll tell you exactly what’s in my heart because if I don’t, I don’t think we have a marriage. I don’t think there’s much point in going on.’
‘You always are quick to give up, aren’t you?’ he said, the words coming out before he could stop them and hitting Lindsay where it hurt.
He saw her flinch but then she composed herself, straightened her shoulders and lifted her chin. ‘I’m not giving up. And being honest with you feels like fighting for my marriage, Antonios. For us. It would be easier in some ways to just ignore the things that are hurting you, pretend everything is fine. I did it before, and I’m not going to do it again. Because I love you. Because I want our marriage to succeed.’
He shrugged her words aside, too raw to do anything else. ‘So, tell me then. Be honest about whatever it is you have to say.’
‘Receiving that email made me realize that I do miss being part of an academic community,’ she began. ‘Teaching seminars, talking to people who are excited about what I’m doing. But I also knew that I’d committed myself to you, and your life is here in Greece.’
‘Such a dilemma,’ he cut in, his voice sharp with sarcasm, and she stared at him.
‘Are you even going to try to understand?’ she asked, and inwardly Antonios cringed.
He was lashing out because he was afraid Lindsay was going to leave him. Just as she’d once been afraid he would leave her. Theos, the things you did out of fear.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. Please, continue.’ He swallowed hard, jammed his hands in his pockets and forced himself to listen without speaking. But if she told him, in that calm and cool way of hers, that she was leaving...
‘When you brought me to Greece, Antonios,’ Lindsay said quietly, ‘I was unhappy. So unhappy I didn’t notice, didn’t even consider, that you were unhappy, too.’
He stiffened, thrown by the sudden change in subject. ‘What are you talking about—?’
‘I’m talking about how you don’t sleep at night. How the moment you drive through the estate gates your whole body tenses and a shadow comes over your face. How you work so hard but you don’t even seem to enjoy it.’
Each word felt as if she were stripping him bare, flaying him. He stared at her, shaking his head. ‘You’re reading too much into something that is temporary...’
‘What’s temporary, Antonios? This bitterness between you and Leonidas? That’s been going on for years. The stress and strain of your job? I see it now and, looking back, I should have seen it before. You weren’t just blind to my anguish, Antonios. I was blind to yours.’
Anguish. The word captured him, felled him. Because he knew she was right and he hated it. Hated it because it meant he’d failed.
‘I don’t see what any of this has to do with your job offer,’ he said finally, his voice flat.
‘Because when I read that email I thought of you. I thought of us and how maybe we would be happier, you would be happier, away from here. Away from Marakaios Enterprises.’
Emotion leapt inside him but he refused to name it. ‘That’s a very convenient justification for following your own desires.’
‘Tell me you’re happy here, Antonios,’ Lindsay answered. ‘Tell me you don’t want to leave. Tell me this is what you want for the rest of your life.’
‘I have no choice,’ he said, the words torn from him. ‘Don’t you see that? My father named me as his successor. This is what I was born to do, what I have to...’ He broke off, his chest heaving, his fists clenched.
‘Who says?’ Lindsay said quietly. ‘Why can’t you control your own destiny, choose your own life? And choose one that makes you happy?’
‘There is such a thing as duty.’
‘There is also such a thing as your brother,’ Lindsay reminded him. ‘Someone who wants more authority, who is already working for—’
‘Theos, enough.’ He flung out a hand to stop her from saying any more. ‘Happy or unhappy, my life is here. It has to be here. But if you choose not to share it, then tell me so.’
‘I want to share it,’ Lindsay answered, her voice trembling. ‘Of course I want to, but you don’t want to share it with me.’