Page 51 of The Billionaire's Demand

We knew from the start that Paris was only to set ourselves free from the past—nothing more.

Now the stab went deeper. Mocking him even more. Yes, his wanting to be free of her, to stop her haunting him, tormenting him, had been the reason he’d taken her to Paris. He’d wanted nothing else. But now—after those carefree, contented days with her, those incandescent nights with her...

Is that still what I want?

Her final words tolled in his head.

Nothing more.

His eyes flared open, bleak and empty. And those words tolled again.

Nothing more.

Each one was a stab to his throat.

Eliana was at the bank, her face set. She was going to have to raid her minuscule pot of savings, assiduously hoarded out of what had been left of her allowance and her earnings. With a grim expression, she made the payment she had gone there to make. Then headed back to her apartment. Not that she could afford to live even there now.

She felt a flicker of unease. What she was doing was risky—but she had no choice. Her finances demanded it.

Her mind flitted back, like a magnet seeking true north, to where it longed to go—where she longed to go. But that was barred to her now.

I took the ‘now’ that was offered to me knowing that it could not last. And now that ‘now’ is gone.

Regret mingled with guilt—a familiar toxic mix. But now it was not for the past of six years ago. It was for the past of only the day before yesterday. But there was nothing she could do about it. Only endure it. Endure it as she had before—six years ago and every year since then. And now once more.

This time it was more unbearable. More agonising.

To break her heart a second time...

The taxi pulled up outside the run-down apartment block and Leandros got out, his face set. Why had he come here? He should have stuck to writing Eliana out of his life—again. But after one sleepless night in Athens he had flown up to Thessaloniki.

Wanting answers.

She owes me that.

The words of the totally inadequate note she had left incised in his brain.

Why? Why did she have to come back? After what we had in Paris...

Someone was coming out of the block, and he used that opportunity to get into the shabby lobby. The elevator had a notice on it saying it was awaiting repairs—the same notice as last time—so he vaulted up the stairs, chipped and stained.

He gained Eliana’s floor. Rapped on her door.

Demanding entrance.

Eliana paused frowningly in the act of closing her suitcase. The landlord’s agent? Come to inspect the premises before she left?

She went to open the door, not wanting a confrontation, but steeling herself for one all the same.

It came—but not with the landlord’s agent.

She gave a gasp.

Leandros strode in, turned. But not before he had seen the suitcase on her bed, the larger one already closed and standing by the door. He took in the stripped bed, the absence of any of her belongings. His eyes swept back to hers. Skewered them.

‘Moving out?’ he said.

His voice was calm, but it made a hollow inside her for all that.

---