Page 22 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
He made the mistake of looking at her.
She was bent forwards, drying her ankles, but those big black eyes were glued to his face. ‘Sorry if you’ve already heard it all before—I’m guessing things are going to be like Groundhog Day for a while for you—but on the off chance I never shared my childhood with you, it was all pretty bonkers.’
She patted around her thighs…Theos, they were so exquisitely toned and slender…
‘My dad’s an accountant,’ she explained, now drying her arms, ‘and I spent the majority of my childhood living with him in a bog-standard ordinary house where everything was quiet and orderly and everything had its place and rules were strictly enforced, and then I’d spend the school holidays with Mum and Georgios and Athena and all the others, and life was just one big party and the only real rule was tohave fun. Dad expected me to be dutiful and studious and grow up to be an accountant or a doctor, and Mum expected me to be glamorous—I distinctly remember her plucking my eyebrows when I was nine—and trade off my looks and attract a billionaire of my own like she’d done. I’d get off the plane in England and the first thing I’d have to do was wipe off the makeup Mum had trowelled on my face because Dad would have gone spare to see me wearing it. In their own ways, they both wanted to control me, but I guess I must have an inbuilt independent streak because I always knew I never wanted what either of them wanted for me.’
And this was why Thanasis had spent two months avoiding Lucie’s company. He didn’t want to know her, didn’t want to have to think of his headstrong fiancée as anything but the woman she was today, most definitely didn’t want to think of her as a child constantly yo-yoing between two households and countries, a square peg in a round hole in both of them, didn’t want to hear anything from the husky voice that would knock at his defences and turn her into anything less than his enemy.
‘What did you want?’ he asked before he found the sense to end the conversation.
She shrugged and smiled and wrapped the towel around herself, and in the process wrapped the spell she was casting on him a little tighter too. ‘To be free to live my own life and make my own choices. What about you? Did you ever want to do anything different from what your parents wanted for you…? I’m assuming your parents always wanted you to one day take over the running of Antoniadis Shipping?’
‘They wanted it but they never put any pressure on me. If I’d chosen a different path, they would have been disappointed but they would have supported me.’
‘Good for them. I got it in the neck from both my parents when I went straight into work from school. Dad wanted me to go to university and Mum wanted me to get a boob job. Oh, well, at least I’ve disappointed them equally so no one can accuse me of favouritism.’
‘Your mother is a piece of work,’ he said scathingly, an utterance and tone he regretted as soon as it left his mouth.
‘She is who she is just as I am who I am,’ Lucie said with a small lift of her shoulders that did nothing to hide the sadness flickering on her face. ‘I will never be the daughter either of my parents wanted.’
Thanasis had to clench his jaw to stop himself placating her and pointing out that it was never a child’s job to live up to parental expectations, that it was the parents’ job to adjust those expectations to the individual child before them, just as his own parents had done with Lydia.
But none of this was any of his damned business. This was a conversation he should never have allowed to develop and he was damned if he was going to allow himself to feel empathy for a woman who’d given up the freedom she’d disappointed both parents by insisting on out of love and loyalty for the monster that was Georgios Tsaliki.
Time to extract himself from this situation.
Except there was no time to think of an excuse to rid himself of her, for Lucie, despite the towel wrapped around her hanging like a giant tent down to her feet, gracefully threw herself onto his outdoor sofa and with a smile said, ‘Can we order some breakfast now, please? I’m starving.’
* * *
Why the hell had he gone along with this? Thanasis asked himself moodily as he watched yet another slice ofbougatsadisappear into Lucie’s delectable mouth. The wedding was only days away and there was no end of things that needed his approval, and that was without considering all the business stuff that needed his attention. A hundred ready-made excuses and he’d failed to conjure a single one.
‘Do I get on with your family?’ she asked, wiping her mouth with a finger and then licking the crumbs stuck to it.
He leaned across the coffee table to refill his coffee. It was getting to the stage where he’d rather dive into the main swimming pool than watch her eat. Anything than have to watch her eat. Each bite thickened the spell of awareness and the only way to break it was to escape her company altogether.
He needed to get out of here.
‘It is too early to say,’ he replied evasively.
‘Ah, so they hate me.’
His gaze zipped back to her before he could stop himself.
She sighed and gave a rueful smile that shouldn’t have tugged at his chest. ‘Thank you for trying to spare my feelings but it really isn’t necessary—I’d much rather have the truth even if it does hurt. I’m not a Tsaliki but I understand why they would see me as one, and I get why that would cloud their judgement of me.’
About to deny it, he closed his eyes briefly and nodded. Once they were married, Lucie would learn for herself the depth of his family’s loathing of her and the entire clan of Tsalikis and hangers-on.
She gave another sigh and helped herself to what had to be her fourth slice ofbougatsa. ‘Oh, well, hopefully in time they’ll see for themselves that I’m not the Antichrist and that the feud has nothing to do with me at all, and just accept me for myself like you did.’
He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to hear or talk aboutanyof this and put himself in a position where he had to tell the barefaced lies that were so necessary but that were becoming increasingly difficult to form.
Holding on to his loathing of Lucie had been a damn sight easier when the loathing had been mutual and she’d wanted to escape his presence as much as he’d wanted to escape hers. A damn sight easier when she wasn’t half sprawled on his sofa with her pretty feet pointing at him, the towel having come loose and now lying half draped on the floor exposing her smooth legs, and with her beautiful face glued to his. Her hair drying in the rising sun was an untamed mass of curls pinging in all directions and damn if it didn’t make her even sexier. Damn if the modesty of her swimsuit didn’t make her sexier too, and it was taking everything he had not to let his eyes drift to the barest hint of cleavage on show.
It was like the forbidden fruit analogy but in flesh form, he thought, as he fought even harder against the awareness threading so heavily in his veins. The more flesh that was covered, the greater the desire to uncover it all. Most women’s swimwear left so little to the imagination that you didn’t need an imagination to know what lay beneath it. Not with Lucie. The bottom half of hers was more modest than the top half, wrapping around her skin like a pair of tight shorts and revealing not an inch of buttock…or anything else, and he could not stop himself from imagining what lay between those slender, succulent thighs.Theos, he kept inhaling that damned perfume even though he knew it was an impossibility and that not a trace of it remained on her golden flesh.
‘What about you and my family?’ his feminine temptation asked, bringing morebougatsato her lips. ‘I know I wasn’t fit for much when I was in hospital but I don’t think I imagined the tension between you and my mother.’
