Page 3 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
Wasn’t that along the lines of what Alexis had said during the meal when he’d thrown the bombshell that, to save Tsaliki Shipping, the family needed her to marry Thanasis? She had only had vague snippets of memory of that evening and everything that followed was a complete blank, but she remembered enough to feel what she’d felt then—a bloom in her heart to be considered a real Tsaliki.
A tight-knit group despite being born from varying wives, the Tsaliki siblings had always welcomed Lucie into the gang during the long school holidays she’d spent with them, and always made sure to include her in everything, but she’d always had the underlying sense they never truly saw her as one of them, a feeling that extended to her half-brother Loukas, the only child her mother had borne Georgios. She’d always had the same underlying sense at her father’s home too, a cuckoo in the nest who never fitted in, especially once her half-sisters were born.
Of all Lucie’s half-siblings and stepsiblings, the only one she’d felt a real sense of kinship with had been Athena, Georgios’s only daughter and the Tsaliki closest to Lucie in age, and even that sense of kinship had been dependent on Athena’s varying moods. If Athena was to swish into the hospital room now, she would come armed either with flowers and chocolate or with a syringe to needle at Lucie with. She often reminded Lucie of a cat imperviously swiping its claws at some unfortunate rodent for no other reason than that it was bored.
Smothering a yawn, Lucie gazed again into Thanasis’s eyes, wishing she could find in them the answers for everything her injured brain was refusing to reveal. She had to fight her closing throat to say, ‘Are you telling the truth? Did I really agree to marry you?’
He didn’t blink. ‘I do not lie.’
‘As any good liar would say,’ she pointed out. Thanasis was an Antoniadis, and, if Georgios was to be believed, all Antoniadises were born with forked tongues.
There was the slightest loosening of his full lips but before he could respond, the door opened and a nurse entered the room. When she saw Lucie’s eyes were open, she shot an accusatory glare at Thanasis, which she then quickly tried to cover by making effusive noises about Lucie being awake.
While the nurse checked the machine the things stuck to Lucie’s chest were attached to, Thanasis got smoothly to his feet, his phone gripped in his large hand. ‘I will let your mother know you’re awake.’
Utterly dazed, not entirely convinced she wasn’t dreaming, Lucie watched the man who’d once haunted her dreams leave the room.
* * *
‘She’s awake,’ Thanasis said curtly.
The reply was reverential. ‘Thank God for that.’
‘She remembers nothing.’
A silence that went on too long and then a slow, ‘Nothing?’
‘Her memories of the last two months appear to have been wiped out.’
More silence. ‘Have you filled her in?’
‘She knows only that she agreed to the marriage.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else,’ he confirmed.
Another long, long silence. ‘Then let us hope her memories stay wiped until after the wedding.’
Lucie’s mother ended the call.
* * *
‘He must be very much in love with you,’ the nurse confided as she shone a torchlight into Lucie’s eyes. ‘It is the first time he has voluntarily left your side.’
Of all the revelations that had been thrown at her in the short time she’d been awake, that one came as the biggest shock.
Thanasis Antoniadis wasin lovewith her?
‘Do you think?’ she asked doubtfully. Nothing in his body language had made that kind of impression on her, although, with the fuzziness of her mind and the gaping void in it, she couldn’t really be sure about anything. If anything, she’d had a vague impression of being scrutinised with a watchful wariness, as if she were some kind of unpredictable wild animal with Thanasis tasked as her handler.
The nurse turned the medical torch off and slipped it into her top pocket. ‘You have been here two days.’
This was certainly the day for shocks and revelations.
‘Seriously?’ That long?
‘We had to keep you sedated.’ A misty look came in the nurse’s eyes. ‘He has kept watch over you.’
