Chapter 21
Xavier hears her before he sees her. Her voice has a different lilt to it when she’s speaking in rapid Greek, accented he’s sure, still way better than his, but he’d recognize her voice anywhere.
She’s arguing with someone and he knows that tone, the one that says she’s not going to be stopped.
So it doesn’t shock him when less than a minute later, her voice is getting closer – mere yards away when he finally turns to look, afraid that if he does, she’ll just be a figment of his imagination.
Wiping at the sweat on his forehead with a handkerchief he keeps in his back pocket, Xavier squints up at the blistering sun.
Maybe he is hearing things. It’s unseasonably hot for late May, climbing up into the nineties and the humidity not much lower, but despite the heat, sturdy boots and long pants are a must on an active worksite.
Evidence of their work is everywhere as they try to keep ahead of the ancient ruins’ continuous descent into actual ruin.
He doesn’t see her, not right away, but when he does, she’s not much more than a silhouette and he has to shield his eyes from the sun behind her.
And as his vision clears, she’s there and somehow more beautiful than when he left her less than a week ago.
A white romper hugs her curves and ties behind her neck, exposing her back when she turns to continue talking her way out of trouble from the guide berating her for ignoring him.
Her skin is glowing, her hair down, curls everywhere, and she’s wearing those wedged sandals that are a complete death wish on the uneven ground beneath her feet.
Fucking beautiful.
He raises his hand to interrupt. “She’s with me,” he says in his extremely beginners’ Greek, and a long-suffering guide named Yiannis rolls his eyes and heads back down to the tourist paths.
Bianca smiles at him, but he can see the hesitancy in it, like she’s unsure of her welcome, and honestly, he doesn’t have it in him to be anything other than completely gobsmacked (except maybe also a little bit turned on).
“How . . . how are you here?” he mumbles, moving closer to her, trying desperately to keep his hands at his sides and not reach out for her.
“I flew.”
He lifts a hand to the back of his neck, already sunburned from nearly a week at work in this heat, and rubs at it. The flash of pain tells him that this is real. She’s real. “That’s not what I meant.”
She just hums at him and looks around, taking it all in, and then raises a curious eyebrow at him. “So when you said you weren’t actually Indiana Jones . . .”
“I don’t wear the hat.”
“Xavier.”
“I might have lied,” he admits with a shrug.
“You think?”
The silence stretches between them, long and uncomfortable as she looks absolutely anywhere but at him and finally, he can’t take it anymore and he blurts out, “What are you doing here, Bianca?”
And that came out way sharper than he meant it to and he cringes as he watches her shoulders fall and her nose crinkle, like she knows she’s tilted his world off its axis and sent him spinning into an entirely new orbit. “I told everyone the truth, after you left.”
“Okay . . .” He trails off. That’s . . .
well, it doesn’t matter really, since he’d outed them before he got on his flight, a decision that had gnawed at his gut for days.
He’d waited, half terrified that every text he got was going to be from her, raging at him for giving away their secret, but it hadn’t ever come.
And that was worse somehow, he’d rather her be pissed off at him than completely indifferent.
But instead, she’s here. In person. Flesh and blood and absolutely beautiful, right in front of him.
And she probably didn’t fly halfway around the world just to yell at him, so . . . why then?
She answers the question without him having to ask. “They told me that I was an idiot for letting you go.”
He barks out a laugh at that and she rewards it with a smile, a real one now, wide and true, and his stomach does a somersault. “Somehow I don’t think that’s how they put it. Unless it was Frankie. She might have put it like that.”
“Okay,” she admits, “maybe they . . . they thought that I let you leave without telling you . . . or that you left because I didn’t tell you . . . and that wasn’t fair, to you or me . . .”
Whatever they thought she should tell him, it’s still not something she can easily say, and if that’s the case, then whatever it is is important enough for her to fly out here to do it, so he takes a wild guess and hopes he’s right.
“Boss?” he cuts her off.
“Yeah?” she asks, hating the half-hysterical note in her voice as she looks up into his eyes, and what he sees there – equal parts hope and fear – fuck, he can’t take that, has to ease it somehow.
“If I thought for one second you wanted me to stay . . .”
“No, that’s not . . . I didn’t want you to stay.”
Oh. Well, fuck. If that’s not it – and fuck, does it hurt that she didn’t want him to stay with her – then he’s even more confused than before.
“Bianca, I gotta admit, I have no idea what’s going on right now and you know how much I hate to admit shit like that.”
“I’d . . . I’d never ask you to give this up,” she says, sweeping her arms out wide to the ancient temple they’re standing in the middle of, tourists and workers milling around, completely oblivious to the drama unfolding between them. “It’s your dream. I could never get in the way of that.”
“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain . . .”
She cuts him off, looking up, her eyes bright and fierce as she says, “I want to be with you. I came here to be with you. If you want me to stay.”
Xavier has never felt two opposing emotions so strongly at the exact same moment. Joy floods his veins as much as guilt crashes through his gut. “I can’t ask you to . . .”
“As it was not so subtly pointed out to me, I can write a curriculum in Greece as well as I can in LA, at least until the semester starts.”
“Frankie?”
“Obviously.”
“Shit, Bianca, you got on a plane and came here without knowing . . .”
“Byrne,” a new voice calls out from behind him and he cringes.
Yiannis, the guide, is back, and with him, the site manager, Grigórios, who already kind of hates him because he hates everyone who isn’t Paolo or one of the post-docs he recruited himself for the project.
“What are you doing? Who is that? She can’t be here. ”
“It’s okay, it’s . . . I know her.”
“Bianca?” Paolo’s voice joins them, coming up around the other side of the site, stepping closer.
“Hi Paolo,” she says.
“You’re here. She’s here. I thought you said . . .”
Xavier shakes his head. “I . . . was wrong, I guess.”
“It was bound to happen sometime,” his boss says, his eyebrows lifting. “Why don’t you call it for the day? We’ll see you tomorrow . . . or maybe the day after?” Xavier snorts, but Paolo’s not done. “It’s lovely to see you again, Bianca.”
“You too,” she says sweetly, somehow, even though Xavier wants to throttle everyone around them and from the look in her eyes, she does too. They were finally getting somewhere.
“C’mon,” he says, taking her arm, helping her over those stupid rocks that nearly murdered her on her way up here.
“No, wait. I’m not . . . I can’t . . . What were you going to say?” she asks, spinning on the toe of her sandal, nearly losing her balance and taking a header off the side of the ledge, but he catches her easily, pulling her in close.
“Byrne, get her out of here!” Grigórios shouts again, further away now but still very clearly pissed off.
“Xavier, what were you going to say?” she asks, ignoring everything around them, her hands at his forearms warm except for . . . a cool metal touch from her left hand, and when he looks down, there’s her ring, glinting up at him, and it makes him braver than he ever thought possible.
“You know, don’t you?” he whispers, lifting a hand to tuck a wild curl back behind her ear and tracing a slow path from her temple to her chin with his thumb. “You’re a smart girl. The smartest I’ve ever met. You have to know.”
She leans into his touch with a soft shake of her head. “This isn’t something I can know unless you tell me. It doesn’t matter unless you tell me.”
“Byrne!”
Fuck. Okay, he needs to get them out of there. Needs to take her someplace where they can have some privacy. To talk or . . . not talk, or whatever the hell she came here for.
“We’re going, we’re going!” he shouts back over her shoulder. “Come on, before they fire me and I’m on the next flight back with you to LA.”
He leads her down off the more precarious parts of the site, but once they’re back on the relatively new and unsightly-as-fuck paved pathways around the ruins, his hand slides from her elbow to twine their fingers together, relishing the feeling of that ring pressing a mark into his skin.
She’s still wearing it.
That must mean . . . fuck, that has to mean something.
Everything else, they can figure out.
“You’re staying in the city?” he asks, as they weave their way through the tourists and head out onto the streets.
“Just a few blocks away.”
“It’s probably nicer than my place. Do you want to go there?”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “So we can talk.”
“Yeah, talk.”
Talking is not what he has in mind, at least not just talking.
They stroll through the streets and into her hotel lobby looking like any other couple on vacation, hand in hand to the elevators and up to her floor, never more than an inch or two away from each other until she unlocks her door and moves into the room away from him.
Xavier lets out a low whistle, hovering in the entry for a second, hands pushing into his pockets and rocking back on his heels. “That’s some view.”
The Acropolis rises in the distance, stark and imposing against the bright blue sky, the tourists and crew they left behind not much more than little dots navigating the paths around the hill.
“Frankie can’t help herself.”
He approaches her from behind as she stares out the sliding glass doors of her hotel room and can see himself in the windowed reflection, knowing she can too. When he’s just behind her, she leans back into his chest while he ducks his head down to inhale the sweet scent of her hair.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” he mumbles.
“I can’t believe I’m here either,” she says and sighs when his hands slide along the curve of her hips, holding her close.
He doesn’t know how long this is going to last and shit, they should probably talk about this, talk about the reason she’s here and the reason he wants her to be, but he knows and she knows and right now the only thing he can think about is how good she feels against him, how perfectly her body lines up with his, how much he wants her and, as she relaxes into him and tilts her head to the side, his other hand rises, almost of its own volition and twists into her curls, pulling them gently away from her neck so he can press an open-mouthed kiss there.
Fuck, her skin is so soft. He increases the pressure at her pulse point, reveling in the muted bruise still there from all those days ago as he does.
“I didn’t only come here for this,” she whispers as his mouth finds that spot that makes her arch against him, drawing a deep groan from his throat.
“I know. Do you want me to stop?” he asks and he will, if that’s what she wants.
“Don’t stop.”