Chapter Two #2
But she’d found herself searching his face, like she was trying to find someone else there.
She couldn’t make any sense of it. It was the strangest sensation, it only seemed to get worse the more time she spent with him, and she doubted very much that he was having a similar experience.
Really, it was hard to tell if Pavlos felt much about anything.
Selwen knew who he was. She hadn’t recognized him, but she’d known his name when he’d given it to her.
The night they’d met, she’d gone back to her hotel and had looked him up.
She’d seen headlines upon headlines, all of them about his wealth and his womanizing, and she hadn’t bothered to read further.
Intrigued or not, she expected him to irritate her. She hadn’t spent any time with men as far as she knew, but Ffion had always commented on the fact that she’d always seemed to particularly avoid the men in the village who had reputations for putting it about.
But he hadn’t been like any of them, lairy and red-faced with drink.
He had taken walks with her. He had showed her his olive groves, which she had half expected to be euphemistic but had, in fact, been a grove of lovely olive trees.
They had wandered together on this quiet island, far from the frenzy of a Santorini or Crete.
They had talked—or rather, he had talked—and she had gotten the vague impression of a man who felt his mortality pressing in on him and wanted something different from his last few years.
She’d felt enormously sympathetic to that, having just witnessed Ffion move through that same, last period of life.
And when Pavlos had asked her to marry him, quite unexpectedly, he delivered a long and rambling speech that had led her to believe that he considered her… Religious, perhaps? Innocent, certainly.
Things she wanted to argue about, but didn’t, since she couldn’t remember having ever been near god or man and didn’t particularly want to discuss that.
Will you accept me? Pavlos had asked, but not in the way of a man who was truly worried about her answer.
She had told him she needed to think about it.
And she had, sitting in her narrow bed in that hotel in the village with nothing but sea outside her window.
What she kept coming back to was that he didn’t seem to want much from her.
He had promised her an art studio. He had promised her a lifetime of all the art supplies she could ever want.
He’d reminded her that he owned an art gallery or two, should she ever have work she wished to present.
And the thing about it was that Selwen had always been the practical one. Ffion had pretended to be practical, but at her heart, she was a dreamer. She was all about the what if and the imagination.
Selwen had loved that about her friend—but she couldn’t spend the rest of her life dancing around on Greek islands.
She couldn’t go back to Wales, and not only because Ffion had forbidden it.
But because she’d sold the house, and now that she’d experienced the Greek sunshine, she wasn’t at all certain that she could tolerate the Welsh rain again.
And given that she was largely indifferent to all nonfictional men, she thought…why not?
Pavlos had always been kind to her. He did not speak of love, or passion, or anything that might have been alarming.
Besides, he was quite old. And not in the greatest health, and no, she didn’t think that was mercenary.
It couldn’t be, because he already had a will, and he’d told her that he would never change it.
She would have to sign documents when they married, but since she didn’t have an emotional investment in him, what did she care?
She could indulge the true passion of her life, her art.
And when she thought that, something seemed to shift inside her, like she was finally finding her way home. Like she was finally on the right path. Surely that was the kind of thing she ought to pay attention to.
Really, Pavlos felt like a happy, sunny place to land.
The only thing she had asked of him was that she be allowed to stay private. She didn’t wish to go with him to all those grand balls where he was always photographed. She didn’t want any part of his fame.
She wanted this. A Greek island where there was dancing and there was sunshine and where Ffion would have enjoyed herself tremendously. She wanted her art, quiet walks on the beach, and lazy wanders through Pavlos’s estate, in and out of the olive groves.
A sweet little life to replace the sweet little life she’d lost.
Because sweet little lives were all she had. Her memory stopped where Ffion started, and Selwen had given up trying to push through that. She’d read loads of books on the topic and had come to the conclusion that whatever lurked behind that wall of her memory was something she didn’t want to know.
So she was dedicated to keeping her life as sweet as possible.
Though that was difficult to remember now, surrounded by all these people with avarice in their gazes, and worse still than all the fluttery ones and the glittery ones and the giggling ones…was him.
She had seen him the moment he came in. There in that operatic archway, festooned with bougainvillea as if it was outside.
It was like her entire attention had been suddenly slammed straight to him, like a rope snapping taut.
She didn’t know what it was about him. He…disturbed her.
He disturbed everyone, she’d seen in an instant. She saw the way people moved away from him. The way he cut a swath through this party, dressed all in black and with a certain menace on his face, like a memory.
Selwen felt something like dizzy, but then again, she’d allowed herself to drink a little too much of the bubbly stuff. This was supposed to be a celebration, after all.
Maybe she wasn’t all that dizzy, because she had no trouble tracking him as he prowled across the floor, the guests who crowded her and Pavlos falling away from him like he was some kind of wild predator.
It took her a long moment to realize she was breathless. It was the strangest thing.
It was him.
He was entirely too tall. He wore a dark, obviously bespoke suit that clung to his body in ways that should have been illegal.
His shoulders were wide, and every part of his torso was hard as it narrowed down to his hips.
There was not an ounce of extra flesh on his frame, but that was only half of it.
It was more the way he moved.
He was sheer ruthlessness as he navigated his way through the crowd. She watched as whoever stepped up to talk to him fell away from him as if he’d struck them down with his gaze alone.
He was causing a commotion and it was clear he didn’t care and wasn’t trying.
When he moved closer, Selwen could see that his hair really was that black. His gaze was even blacker. He should have looked like a devil.
And she supposed he did, insofar as the devil was an angel fallen from grace.
Because this man terrified her. She could feel that terror inside her, like her own overheated blood. He was also the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.
She wanted to draw him. She ached to draw him. To capture, somehow, the powerful lines of his body, the power that seemed to emanate from him like a fact that no one dared deny, and the starkly sensual presentation of that face of his.
Selwen thought he would haunt her forever. She felt as if he already did.
All this, and he was looking at her with something like grief on that unbelievably perfect face of his, carved from stone and marble and yet very clearly made of flesh.
She had to look away from him then, because the announcement had been made. And Pavlos was standing beside her, accepting congratulations from his flock, none of whom looked as if they were actually all that happy for him.
They congratulated her, too, and she could see the sharp way they regarded her and was certain that if she didn’t pay closer attention, she might just get a talon in the back. More reason to not have parties like this, she thought.
“How extraordinary,” seethed a woman who she thought was his daughter, and who also seemed deadly. “To think of my father, marrying again after all this time. You do know, of course, that he treated his first wife shabbily. One mistress after the next, and never a care for her feelings.”
“Thank you,” Selwen murmured. “I’m sure we will be very happy.”
And for a while, she was lost in all these poisonous exchanges. The snide comments, the sharp little barbs. None of which felt particularly sweet, it had to be said, so she thought about her art instead.
She thought about that man’s astonishing, addictive face, and how she could use a charcoal to best exemplify the way those lines of his jaw—
“We must dance!” Pavlos cried from beside her.
He drew her out into the middle of the floor and then there was dancing, for a while.
This was better than verbal barbs, by a long shot.
Dancing was lovely, as it was always possible to drift off in the music and ignore everything else around her—though that wasn’t quite what happened.
Not tonight. Not when, look though she might, Selwen couldn’t seem to find that younger man anywhere in the watching crowd.
After the dancing was done, and women who very clearly wanted to tear her hair out cooed over the ring that Pavlos had put on her finger, Selwen stole away the first moment she could and left Pavlos to his minions.
It had gotten late. She had been too anxious— excited, she had told herself repeatedly, though it hadn’t taken—to eat anything in the party.
Her stomach grumbled as she moved through the maze that was this villa, winding her way around and around in what she thought was the right direction if she was headed to the kitchens.