Page 42 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
“I think maybe I was too naive,” she said quietly. “I believed him.”
“But not enough to marry him,” Thanasis reminded her. “And in the end, really, this is what matters.”
She opened her arms then and watched as his gaze moved, as if he couldn’t help it, down the length of her body and up again.
“I’m dressed in all her clothes now,” Saskia said, and she was aware of the dissonance in her own head. And the fact that she was still lying to him. “But she wouldn’t have made the mistakes that I’ve made, would she?”
“She was very street-smart,” Thanasis said, though he seemed to hesitate before he used that word. “She could readpeople at a glance. She never would have believed my father, but then, I would have told you that she never would have left me, either. Not even for a dramatic effect in the middle of a fight.”
Saskia could hardly breathe. “And what if I can never be her again? What happens then?”
“You must be you.” Thanasis was still standing there, facing her. He didn’t shift his gaze from hers. “You are still you, Saskia.” He didn’t seem to notice that he said the wrong name. Saskia jolted, but he didn’t. “It doesn’t matter what you remember. It doesn’t matter if you ever remember. Do I wish you could remember everything that happened between us? Of course I do. What we had was special. But I thought you were dead for five years. You alive is what matters. If your memory doesn’t appear and never will, that is still all that matters.”
He meant that. She could see it. She couldfeelit.
She looked at him, her heart pounding. “What if there’s a way that I might remember?”
“I have studied this, a lot, since I walked into that villa and saw you there,” he told her then, and he rubbed a hand over his face and that, too, told her how much he meant what he was saying. It made her whole body shake, deep inside. “It could be anything. A bit of music. Coming back to this apartment. Anything.”
“Maybe you haven’t tried the right thing,” she suggested.
And then, because she was tired of punishing herself, she walked toward him. She watched his face change the way it had before.
Shock. A quick assessment. Then that long, slow burn.
She walked directly into him, wrapping her arms around his waist and arching herself into him. She tipped her head up, fully aware that doing so thrust her breasts into the wall of his chest.
It felt exactly as fantastic as she remembered.
“It sounds to me that the major way you and your Saskia communicated was sex,” she said, and she didn’t even stumble over theyour Saskiapart. “What if…?”
“You can’t be serious.” He shook his head, but his arms went around her and he held on tight. “You may have forgotten what happened on the beach, but I have not. I have no desire for you to look at me like that ever again. As if I could possibly…”
Thanasis shook his head.
“This is different,” she said. When he scowled at her, she pushed back from him and waved her hand around at the flat they were standing in. “There are pictures of us everywhere here. Did you think I wouldn’t notice that? You said that every trinket that was here was something I put here myself.”
His scowl only deepened. “You did.”
“I did this.” She pointed to the frames on the mantel, on the side tables. “I went and put these pictures of us, everywhere.”
It had been like being haunted all over again. Everywhere she turned, there was another picture. Candids. Posed shots. Funny little moments of them together.
It had been almost too much to bear.
No wonder she’d felt the need to call him aboutdancing,of all things.
“Saskia,” he began.
But he heard it that time, and he shook his head as if he despaired of himself.
“Selwen,” he corrected himself.
And she still did not tell him who she really was. Or what she remembered. There was something wrong with her, that much was perfectly clear to her.
But she couldn’t bring herself to care about that.
Instead, standing slightly apart from him, she kicked off the flats she’d been wearing on the plane. She shrugged out of the duster she’d been wearing to keep the weather at bay. She letthat fall to the floor, and made sure that he was looking at her as she peeled off the sweater beneath, then shimmied out of her jeans.
