Page 35 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
And she was as sure as she could be without being inside his head that he could see it on her, too.
“I didn’t bring you here to make things worse,” he told her, though his voice was too low. The edge in it too deliciously rough. “And I won’t. Suffering my presence doesn’t go along with living here, Selwen. I promise you.”
And it was a good thing that he had his finger over her lips, because otherwise she might have been tempted to tell him thatsuffering his presencewasn’t what she was after at all. Everything inside of her was a mess, but one thing was clear.
It was impossible not to want him.
“If you need anything, you have the number to my personal mobile,” he told her, his voice gravelly.
He took his finger away and she felt her lips part of their own accord, though she didn’t really think she was breathing.
She wasn’t sure shecould.
For a moment, they stood there, the rain beating against the glass as they made their own heat, and that fire between them that seemed to blaze higher and higher by the second—
And she really thought that with their faces so close, he could easily, simply, bend his head and—
But he didn’t.
Thanasis simply looked at her like he had that same complicated ache inside him, and then he left her there.
All alone in this flat, as if the five years and whole other lives that had separated them had never happened at all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thanasis truly didintend to leave Saskia alone. To allow her to settle into that flat again—without him this time—and build whatever kind of life she wanted back here in London. He thought that was the very least of the things she deserved after losing her memory and ending up engaged to a man she should never have met.
He waited for his father to call and announce that his fiancée had run off, but Pavlos never did anything of the sort. Whether he was hiding it or simply hadn’t noticed yet, he didn’t bring it up in their unavoidable business meetings and Thanasis certainly felt no particular compunction to reach out to him.
The truth was, as much as he might have tolerated his father’s nonsense over the years, he didn’t really think that he had it in him to be civil to a man who had done something to make Saskia bolt. And he had a hard enough time separating his business dealings from his father’s. The last thing he needed to do was entertain the gutter press with a feud that would no doubt be reported widely, word for word.
He tended to his business. He haunted his office, jumping on things he normally left to his underlings, because he needed something to focus on that wasn’t the Saskia of it all.
Not that it worked.
Besides, Saskia was one of the few who had access to his private mobile and when she called, he made certain that he was available.
The first few times, she asked him questions about London. About the neighborhood. About what she should do and where she should go like she didn’t have access to the entire internet—
But then, the Saskia he knew had always been fiercely independent and capable. He had no idea what Selwen knew about London or how she felt about big, sprawling cities.
He answered her questions every time.
It was not until the third week of this that he began to wonder why it was she would call up a man she thought so little of for his thoughts on neighborhood eateries, shops, and nightspots.
“What sort of nightspots will you be frequenting?” he asked when she called the next time. He had walked out of a tedious meeting to take this call and he could look down the length of the office floor toward that meeting room, where he could see the tensions were rising.
But he didn’t care.
“As you know,” Saskia said into his ear, “I do like to dance.”
Thanasis had spent a lot of time thinking about the accusations that she had levied at him on the island. He could not dismiss them all out of hand, and that was what concerned him the most.
She could not remember what happened between them and, as a result, he could not trust his recollections.
In the meantime, he was fully aware that she had danced and danced and danced her way across the Greek Islands. She had danced so much that she had somehow come to imagine that his father was an excellent dance partner, and he had found that he had no choice at all but to sit there and torture himself with images of this dancing—sometimes it was really dancing though,more often, it was a euphemism for other things he wanted to think about even less—until he was beside himself.
He would pace and pace into the small hours, wearing grooves into the hallways of his house on Hampstead Heath.
