Page 24 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
Most importantly, she made no move to take that card from the place where he had stashed it. If she meant what she said, surely she would have ripped it away from her body and thrown it on the ground.
So he did something he would have sworn was impossible. He took one last look at his Saskia, risen from the grave, and he soaked her in as best he could.
Then he walked away, into the cottage, and did not go out again until she was gone.
He made some excuse about business to his father, in a text, and was back in London before nightfall.
But he didn’t go to his house on Hampstead Heath. He went to that flat in Chelsea instead. He let himself in with his key and then he stood there, drawing the scent of her that lingered there—or perhaps it was a phantom, but he didn’t care, it was still the only part of her he had—deep into his body.
He stayed there until dawn, tortured by the ghost of the Saskia he’d lost.
And, worse, by the terrible loss of the Saskia he’d found.
CHAPTER SIX
Selwen heard thatThanasis was gone with everyone else, at the formal dinner that Pavlos called hiscasual little supper table,when, in fact, it was a formal affair.
One he insisted upon, each and every night.
That first night she sat there with all of those harsh words that she and Thanasis had spoken resonating in her like some kind of tuning fork, even though he was now, by all reports, back in London.
“Thanasisrarelytears himself away from the pleasures of the Big Smoke,” one of Pavlos’s illegitimate daughters told Selwen with a sniff and a sharp Eastern European accent. “It is unlikely that you will ever see him again.”
This was said as an aside, and it was not an attempt to try to poke at Selwen about Thanasis. The suggestion was that Selwen’s marriage to Pavlos would be brief at best, something all of his mistresses’ children had been at pains to tell her—but it was the Thanasis part that made Selwen feel…strange.
She should have been delighted that he was rarely here. That dealing with him wasn’t something she would have to worry about with any regularity.
Selwen should have been celebrating his departure.Why aren’t you jubilant that you chased him away?she asked herself, but she couldn’t seem to get there.
It was that last expression on his face, she thought. It was the way he’d looked at her, as if she had shattered him as they stood out there in front of his cottage. She couldn’t seem to get past it. She could feel it inside of her in the middle of another one of Pavlos’s long dinners, like a melody she couldn’t quite name playing endlessly around and around in her head.
By the time the dessert course came, she wanted to dig that haunting tune out of her head with her fingers. She wanted to get back to the person she had been before Thanasis had turned up and claimed to know her. Selwen wanted to be the woman who had been perfectly happy to sit at this table, lost in her own thoughts. The woman who had deliberately not learned the names of Pavlos’s children, or these makeshift courtiers of his who laughed at the end of every sentence he uttered and were more than happy to debase themselves before him, if that would gain his favor.
But that woman had been concerned primarily with her own security, she realized as the days bled one into the next. That woman had thought that she’d finally found the very things that Ffion had always told her she needed. Safety. Her very own space. Art all around her, a soft place to land each night, and her heart’s desire in all things.
The woman she was now found her heart significantly more complicated than it had been when she’d met Pavlos, and she hated it.
The art studio that Pavlos had prepared for her was one of those cottages down toward the olive groves. In order to get to it, she had to pass the cottage where Thanasis had been staying—the one that the staff told her was his alone.
“It is kept ready for him always,” her favorite maid told her one day when Selwen asked, trying her best not to appeartoointerested. “No one is allowed in it, no matter how many people come to one of Mr. Zacharias’s parties.” She leaned closer, herdark eyes gleaming. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but only the housekeeper has a key. So that no one can slip in without the young Mr. Zacharias’s knowledge.”
Meaning, Selwen thought, Pavlos himself was barred from entry.
“Is that…normal?” she asked.
The maid made a face. “Before the young Mr. Zacharias insisted on this arrangement, his father would often…leave him all manner of presents in the cottage. Usually ones that were decidedly unwelcome, if you get my meaning.”
Selwen did not get her meaning. What present wouldn’t be welcome? But something in the way the woman said it kept her from asking. She had the strangest feeling that she didn’t want to know.
“What Iwant,”she muttered to herself after the maid took her leave, “is to stop thinking about that man.”
About the way that kiss had seemed to alter the cells inside her body. About the way his fingers, deep inside of her, had made her feel as if she was once again a complete stranger to herself, only this time it was somehow less scary.
She wanted it all tostop.
And yet every day when she walked down to the studio to sketch and paint, or, more often, to stare out the window toward the sea whilethinking aboutsketching or painting, she found herself thinking about Thanasis instead.
About the way his face had changed when she had thrown all those things at him. All her hot takes on a relationship she hadn’t taken part in. Because even if she was his Saskia, even if that really was who she’d been once, she couldn’t remember it now. So she might as well have been a stranger, dropping her opinions all over him with nothing to back them up but the worst possible interpretation of what he’d told her.
