Page 26 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
That night, she sat up late in her room and convinced herself that he’d simply forgotten. And she’d reminded him. And all was well.
Nothing had changed. She had made the right decision. He would respect it. Tonight was an anomaly, that was all.
“He has been nothing but kind to me,” she repeated, again and again.
Another week went by, with Selwen clinging on hard to these fantasies of hers, before reality came crashing in.
She had just about convinced herself she’d imagined the whole thing.
It was a normal morning. She woke up in her bed, smiled at the sun that poured in through the windows, and took her time with her breakfast. She liked her tea. She liked a bit of toast and some proper jam. When she set out for her walk, it occurred to her that she really ought to go and see Pavlos about another strange thing he’d said at dinner the night before—though she was sure she was mistaken. He’d been obviously intoxicated and he’d slurred something at her about weddings and cathedrals and honeymoons in Paris, where everyone could see them.
Selwen had smiled and convinced herself it was the drink talking.
She picked her way through the maze of halls, quiet all around her in the early morning. She knew her way all over the labyrinth that was his villa now, because she liked to walk until she got lost and then find her way back. She had once asked her husband-to-be why he liked a house like this that so many people got lost in, disoriented, and bewildered.
Once you enter, I decide when you leave,he had replied, and then he’d laughed in that big, bold way of his and she’d assured herself that he was joking.
Because he had to be joking.
It was easy enough to find her way to Pavlos’s vast suite at the highest point overlooking the ocean, with all of the various wings twisting off in different directions. She expected him to be up and working in the office he kept here, as he always claimed he did.
I work all morning so that I might play all night,he liked to say.
But when she let herself in to the atrium that contained his private pool, a set of hot tubs, and various other luxuries arranged on a terrace with the sea in the distance, so blue through all the archways and windows, she stopped dead.
Because Pavlos was up and awake all right, but he wasn’t working.
And he wasn’t alone.
Selwen felt as if she was having some kind of out-of-body experience.
She was standing there, watching the scene unfold before her, and she was also seemingly standing somewhere else, witnessing all of it. Herself, standing there. And then Pavlos and the woman she recognized as his massage therapist, neither one of them with a stitch of clothing on and a great deal of bucking and moaning and—
And she must have made some kind of noise. Selwen couldn’t understand how, even if she had, they could possibly have heard her over the ruckus they were making, but they both turned and looked at her.
A great many things became clear in that terrible moment.
The massage therapist did not look in the least bit surprised, or in any way worried about being caught with Pavlos by his fiancée. That was a critical bit of information, certainly.
But even more clarifying was the fact that Pavlos…sighed.
“My darling girl,” he said, making no attempt to…untanglehimself, “if you do not knock, you cannot be surprised at the things you might find on the other side of a door.”
And then, as she stood there with her mouth actually open, the two of them simply…continued.
As if they hadn’t been interrupted in the first place.
It took Selwen much longer than it should have to realize that they weren’t going to stop. That they didn’t care that she was there. That, on the contrary, Pavlos might actuallylikethe fact that she’d seen him. That she could no longer pretend he was someone else.
She staggered out of the villa and found herself wandering blindly about in the careless Greek sunshine with no idea how to process what she had just seen.
She felt sick.
And she felt something else that didn’t make any sense. It teetered a little too close to some kind of sharp-edged relief and she clung to that, because it felt better. If she could have, she would have scrubbed her eyes out so that she could get those images out of her head.
Down on that beach she definitely did not dream about, she considered it a little too intently.
Eventually she found herself standing outside Thanasis’s cottage and thought about the way she’d caught sight of himjust sitting there,that morning. Just waiting, and watching. And how determined she’d been to find that predatory.
