Page 16 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
‘Until dinner,matia mou,’ he whispered.
By the time she came back to her senses, Thanasis had disappeared from the room leaving her with the sense that she’d just been hypnotised as effectively as a cobra would be by a master snake charmer.
CHAPTER FIVE
SEPHONE WAS THEone place Thanasis had ever felt a true sense of peace. Growing up, life had always been busy even during times of relaxation. Each evening, the family had congregated around the dining table to feast on the delicious food cooked fresh by the staff; grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins frequent guests at the table along with numerous workers and business associates his generous parents would invite to break bread with them. The business had been central to Antoniadis life, an extension of their family, and it had always felt like Thanasis’s family to him. He would never say it had been his destiny to one day run it, but it had never crossed his mind to do anything else.
It would never have crossed his mind to purchase his own island either, if he hadn’t visited his friend Leander’s island for a weekend of partying and found himself struck with the solitude one early morning while everyone else slept off the night before’s excess. By the time the others started surfacing, he’d already determined to buy his own island and create a sanctuary for himself. Within two years, his sanctuary had been found and bought and the domed villa designed and built. It had been worth every cent of the vast sum spent on it, something his family and close friends agreed with as they all made liberal use of it too.
This was Thanasis’s first visit to his sanctuary since the press had first splashed on just how toxic and dangerous the rivalry between his father and Georgios Tsaliki had become. He’d been in damage limitation mode ever since, barely coming up for air as he’d juggled investor concerns with stepping into his father’s shoes and keeping an eye on his immediate family who were all suffering under the enormous strain of it all. And then there had been his need to be publicly visible with his new ‘fiancée’ to cement the idea of their ‘love’.
It was the presence of his ‘fiancée’ that had stopped his lungs opening wide as he’d stepped off thePersephoneand stopped the long exhalation that usually followed as all the pressures of his life lifted from his shoulders. The knowledge, too, that at the rear of the villa an army of people were transforming his landscaped garden into a wedding venue and that, dotted around the island, luxury yurts were being put up to accommodate the guests who wouldn’t be travelling to the island on their own yachts and who there wasn’t the room to accommodate in the villa.
But mostly it was Lucie herself. He’d never been able to breathe properly in her company. Always that cramped tightness in his chest, and as he did his best to compose himself in anticipation of her joining him at the poolside dining area, he took a long drink of his wine in another effort to wipe the taste of her from his mouth, and closed his eyes to wipe the image of her face as he’d last seen it.
She’d been as affected by those two barely-there kisses as he’d been.
Damn it.
Those two kisses had been too fleeting for any of Lucie’s essence to seep into him but seep into him she had, a dark sweetness of breath that lingered, and he drained his wine, glancing at his watch. Two more minutes and she would be with him and he would have to pull himself together and carry on with the charade.
He’d had to kiss her. He’d read her surprise at their separate rooms. Read too her relief…and that flare of disappointment. He’d needed to placate her and stop doubts about their relationship fermenting, and he’d done it successfully. He should be in self-congratulatory mode because this was how it had to be, something he grimly reminded himself of as he refilled his glass. Whatever vulnerabilities Lucie might currently be suffering, that didn’t change that this whole situation was ofhermaking. She was the one who’d refused to listen, hadn’t even let him explain. She’d seen what she’d wanted to see because it had suited her. She’d wanted out of their agreement and had run at the first opportunity, something else he needed to remind himself of if guilt at how he was playing her should bite a little too sharply.
She hadn’t officially ended the engagement. That was yet another thing to remind himself of. As far as he knew—and he hoped like hell that his gut was correct on this—she had confided nothing about ending their engagement with anyone. For all he knew, if she hadn’t crashed his car she might have let off all her steam thrashing it around and then come back home, thrown her Medusa glare at him, thrown some more choice insults at him and then carried on as if nothing had happened. God alone knew they’d had enough white-cold rages between them that had ended in that way. Always there had been the unspoken agreement that whatever their personal feelings for each other, their respective families and businesses were bigger than those feelings. It was the only thing apart from their mutual loathing of the press that they’d ever agreed on.
Some internal antennae lifted a moment before the bespoke French doors slid open and Lucie stepped out onto the patio.
The sun was giving its last goodbyes for the evening but even with little natural light to see by, he noted the slash of colour stain her cheeks as their eyes met.
She bit into her bottom lip and tentatively raised a hand. ‘Hi.’
The beats of his heart strangely weighty, he exhaled slowly before rising to his feet.Theos, she looked stunning.
‘Kalispera, matia mou.’
The beautiful smile she’d spent two months determinedly not bestowing on him lit her face, and she walked to the table, the stiffness of earlier much lessened. It wouldn’t be long, he judged, before the bounce in Lucie’s gait returned and she returned to full, glowing health.
She’d changed into another of her favoured black dresses, a strapless, floaty number that perfectly suited her tiny, slender frame. Her black, curly hair had been piled on top of her head in the style he so loathed because he was incapable of looking at it and not wanting to pull out the clip holding it together just to watch it all tumble down. When she slipped into the chair he held out for her, he wasn’t quick enough to stop his face twisting in fresh loathing as the scent of her perfume engulfed his senses.
Thanasis despised all of Lucie’s perfumes but this was the one he’d once considered stealing out of her bedroom and incinerating. Only his absolute refusal to enter her private space had stopped him acting on this urge.
This was the perfume, more than all the others, that amplified her natural scent and gave off a sensuous, musky aroma that made him want to bury his face into her neck to inhale it deep into his lungs. It was the scent that turned sexual awareness into a charge so strong that he became unable to stop all the heady fantasies hovering beneath his consciousness from rising up and tormenting him with their vividness.
It was the perfume that turned his hunger into a craving.
* * *
Lucie had barely taken her seat before two members of staff appeared with a variety of mezes for them to dive into. While they fussed over both her and the table, placing the dishes into a perfect diamond formation between her and Thanasis whilst pouring her water and offering her a variety of alcoholic drinks that she thought it best to refuse considering the current state of her head, Lucie took the opportunity to regain the composure that had come within a whisker of being blown to smithereens with one look at Thanasis.
Heavens help her, hedidsomething to her, and in less than a week she was going to be married to him. In a life she had no memory of, they’d made plans to spend the rest of their lives together, and all she really knew about him was what he’d chosen to show her, and all she really knew for certain aboutthemwas that her pulses were still racing and lips still tingling from those fleeting kisses barely an hour before.
But she had learned something concrete about him that day. She’d learned he was a gentleman. You only had to look at him…although she wasn’t quite certain how looking at him allowed her to determine this…to know he was a highly sexual being. Despite Thanasis practically oozing testosterone and sexuality, he’d guessed that she’d geared herself up for sharing his bed and guessed too how frightening a prospect it had been for her, what with him being a stranger to her, and so had reset things between them to put them on an equal footing. So that made him a gentleman, and it made him empathetic. More proof, not that it was needed, that he wasn’t the monster she’d been raised to believe him to be.
Could that be the reason for his rigidity around her? she suddenly wondered. While he was understanding of the loss of her memories, he still had his own, and she took a moment to put herself in his shoes. If their roles were reversed and she was the one who had not only all the memories of their time together but all the feelings too…
To unexpectedly find mutual love with someone and then find that person’s love for you had been wiped out as if it had never occurred? Oh, but it must be one of the most awful things in the world.
‘Are you okay?’
