Page 2 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
She inched her face to the straw. Before taking a much-needed drink, she said, ‘I know you’re Thanasis Antoniadis but I don’t know why I’m in hospital, seemingly in Greece, or why you of all people are with me.’
Something flickered in his eyes. ‘Me of all people? And drink slowly or you will make yourself sick. Take sips.’
His heavily accented English was excellent, she thought absently as she savoured the crisp coolness of fresh water in her mouth and hoped it didn’t react to the nausea swirling in her stomach. Lucie’s Greek was fluent but nowhere near as good as Thanasis’s English. ‘Thank you.’
He gave a tight nod of acknowledgement and put the beaker back on the table without his stare leaving her face. ‘Me of all people?’ he repeated.
‘Why would you be here? Where’s my family?’ The more pertinent question, she dimly supposed, was why she wasn’t terrified to have woken with the son of her stepfather’s enemy by her bed; a brooding near-stranger who had to tower over her by well over a foot in height and probably weighed twice as much to boot. All that weight would be muscle, something she knew by the way his light blue shirt stretched across his chest. This man was in prime physical fitness. If he wanted, he could snap her bones with the ease of a cruel child snapping a bug’s wings.
Instead of quailing at the thought, she had an absurd sense of certainty that Thanasis Antoniadis would never lay a hand on her, not in malice nor in anger. Absurd because she didn’t know this man at all, only knew of him, and yet her certainty went hand in hand with the sense coming to life inside her that shedidknow him, as if they’d met before in a different life or a different world.
That must be some potent cocktail of drugs being pumped through her system, she thought. Her aching brain was beingwild.
After a long pause, he said, ‘Your mother is here and has gone to get something to eat, but tell me, why would I not be here?’
‘Because we’re strangers?’ But there was uncertainty, the whisper of a memory floating in her aching head that could have been a dream. A busy restaurant. Alexis, Georgios and her mother.
There was another flickering in his eyes. ‘What is the last thing you remember?’
‘Getting back from work…’ She blinked as the specific memory refused to form. ‘No. Making myself a frittata.’ She’d loaded it with feta—to Lucie’s mind, there was no such thing as too much cheese—but try as she might, she couldn’t conjure the memory of eating it, nor the mound of sweet potato fries she’d made to accompany it.
A sliver of fear snaked into her bloodstream. ‘What date is it?’
The intensity of his stare increased, his full, sensuous lips tightening along with the skin around his fabulously high cheekbones. ‘The twenty-eighth of July.’
She jolted in shock, the fear tightening its grip. How could it be the end of July?
‘What date did you think it was?’
Lucie thought hard, remembered adding a meeting into her work planner. ‘The twentieth of May.’
She blinked again. She hadn’t eaten the frittata because her mother had called. She’d been in London and wanted to take Lucie out to dinner to discuss something…
The busy restaurant floated in her vision again. Her mother. Georgios. Alexis.
‘They want me to marry you,’ she blurted out, the words forming a beat before the memory. She met Thanasis’s stare again. ‘My family want me to marry you to save Tsaliki Shipping.’
His green eyes didn’t blink. ‘What else? What else do you remember?’
She shook her head in fear and frustration. ‘Nothing. There’s nothing else.’
The next pause stretched for an age. When he finally spoke, Thanasis’s voice had lost the taut edge she’d only been barely aware it contained. ‘Lucie, look at your wedding finger.’
Her heart seemed to go into stasis as she unclenched her hand and carefully lifted it, mindful of the medical line running through it. And then every atom in her body contracted with shock to see the sparkling diamond ring on it.
* * *
‘This isn’t possible,’ Lucie whispered.
‘You agreed to marry me,’ he said quietly. ‘Our wedding is in nine days.’
She could only gape at him.
‘In nine days our two families will come together to celebrate the marital union of an Antoniadis and a Tsaliki, and the war that has caused so much destruction to both our families and businesses will be officially over.’
All she could think to say to this was, ‘But Athena’s a Tsaliki, not me. I’m a Burton.’
‘To the world at large, Georgios considers you his own. You’re a Tsaliki daughter and sister in all but blood and name.’
