Bound to the Greek Read Online Free PDF Page B

better.’
    ‘So you expect me just to forgive and forget,’ Jace surmised, his voice sharp with sarcasm.
    Now Eleanor did laugh, a short, humourless bark. ‘No. I’m the one who can’t. Forgive
or
forget.’ She hoisted her bag on her shoulder and gave him a grim little smile. ‘Goodbye, Jace.’
    And somehow,
somehow
she managed to walk from the room with steady legs, her head held high.
    Jace watched Eleanor walk away from him in stunned disbelief. He heard the click of the door shutting, the surprised murmur of his PA, the whoosh of the lift doors. And he still didn’t move.
    I’m the one who can’t forgive or forget.
    What the hell had she been talking about?
    Muttering an angry oath, Jace whirled towards the window. What could Eleanor Langley possibly have to forgive? All right, perhaps he’d been ruthless in the way he’d cut her outof his life, leaving Boston—leaving her—so abruptly and absolutely. But he’d done it because the realisation that she’d been deceiving him all along had been too terrible to bear. He’d felt quite literally gutted, empty and aching inside. And meanwhile she
—she
had been trying to foist another man’s child on him. Living a lie all along. She’d never really loved him.
    Yet apparently Eleanor did think she had something to forget. To forgive.
    What?
    Impatiently Jace turned away from the window where a few random snowflakes had begun to drift down onto the asphalt. He felt restless, angry, uncertain. The last was what bothered him the most; he’d never felt doubt before. How could he? He’d known since he was fifteen years old that he was infertile.
    Sterile. Like a gelded bull, or a eunuch. As good as, according to his father. For what good was a son who couldn’t carry on the family name? Who had been unmanned before he’d even reached his manhood?
    What use was a son like that?
    Jace already knew the answer, had known the answer since his test results had come back and his father’s dreams of a dynasty had crumbled to dust. Nothing. A son like that—like him—was no use at all.
    He’d lived with that grim knowledge for half of his life. Felt it in every quietly despairing stare, every veiled criticism. His own infertility had consumed him before he’d even been ready to think of children, had dominated him as a boy and become part of his identity as a man. Without the ability to have children, he was useless. Worthless.
    And yet now, with Ellie’s words, doubt, both treacherous and strangely hopeful, crept into his mind and wound its tendrils of dangerous possibility around his thoughts. His heart.
    What did Ellie have to forget? To forgive? What had she been talking about?
    Half of him wanted to ignore what she had said, just move on. He’d get a different event planner, forget Eleanor Langley even existed. Never question what she said.
    Never wonder.
    Yet even as these thoughts raced through his brain, Jace knew he couldn’t do that. Didn’t even want to. Yes, it was saner, safer, but it was also aggravating as hell. He didn’t want to doubt. Couldn’t let himself wonder.
    He needed to know.
    Eleanor walked all the way back to Premier Planning’s office near Madison Square Garden, oblivious to the cold wind buffeting her face and numbing her cheeks. She was oblivious to everything, every annoyed pedestrian, cellphone clamped to an ear, who was forced to move around her as she sleepwalked the twenty-three blocks to her office. She felt numb, too numb to think, to consider just what Jace had said. What he’d thought all these years.
    She stood in front of the building, still numb, still reeling, and realised distantly that she couldn’t return to work. Lily would be waiting, anxious for a report—or worse. Perhaps Jace had already rung. Perhaps her job was already in jeopardy.
    Either way, she couldn’t face it. She turned her back on ten years of professionalism and went home.
    Back in the apartment she dropped her bag on the floor, kicked off