Chapter Five
Thanasis staggered back .
It was as if she’d buried an axe in the center of his chest. Though he had to believe that an actual axe would have felt better than…whatever this was.
“What do you mean?” he demanded, his voice raw and strange because her words didn’t make sense. They couldn’t penetrate his brain, no matter how much his chest hurt. “Of course you weren’t running from me . Why would you say such a thing?”
But Saskia, no matter what name she called herself now, did not take back her words.
She crossed her arms. Her eyes were glinting with temper and despite his reaction to what she’d said, he recognized that.
He remembered it. And he preferred it, if he was honest. It was better than the fear he’d seen in her eyes on the beach.
Their relationship had been wildly passionate. Their rows had been the same.
There had never been any fear between them. Seeing such a thing, then seeing her run, had made him feel as if he’d swallowed broken glass.
He couldn’t believe she didn’t remember these things.
Or if she truly couldn’t remember, if she had suffered some injury—something else he could not bear to think about—then he could not understand how she couldn’t feel the truth inside her the way that he did.
It was magnetic. It was impossible and bright and intoxicating, this string that he felt binding him to her.
It was the same inexorable pull that had been there between them since the start.
But the truth was, he also couldn’t believe that she could jump to such a conclusion no matter what she could or couldn’t feel. She wanted to marry a man like Pavlos and she thought Thanasis was the one to fear?
Was this how twisted she’d gotten over the past five years?
At least this helps explain why she disappeared, he told himself, but that failed to make him feel any better.
“Let’s look at the facts as you lay them out,” Saskia suggested. Her chin jutted out and she spoke, a telltale sign that she was not happy with him and only too pleased to fight about it.
He tried to take that as a good sign. Because at least this was a Saskia he knew.
“You claim you have no memory,” he reminded her, and it felt almost too familiar, to stand before her and defend himself.
I have never hidden you, he had said to her years ago, and more than once.
You are hardly locked away in a tower, fos mou.
Is the dramatic language necessary? Looking back, it was possible he had deliberately said such things because he liked the way their passions came to the boil.
He could admit it. Now. “I’m the one, then, who knows all the facts.
And they are as I presented them to you. ”
“You are a man,” Saskia told him in a withering sort of tone that was…new.
And not, to his mind, any kind of improvement.
He stood straighter, something igniting deep inside him as he recalled the way he’d handled her in the past, when she’d been a little more careful with her mouth and the way she spoke to him.
Maybe they’d both been a little more careful, then.
Tempestuous, yes, but more careful with the things they said.
“Indeed I am,” Thanasis agreed, and he did not think that he was being quite as reckless as she was. Though the urge was there. It swelled in him like something much darker, much deeper. An incoming tide of too many memories of the ways they’d worked things out in the past.
The way he’d assumed they would have worked it out after that last night, too.
It had never crossed his mind that she might not come back.
“I don’t know what you think you told me,” Saskia was saying in the same too-hot tone.
“Let me tell you what I heard. You, in all your Zacharias state—” she did something with her hand that he could only describe as lowering and dismissive “—came upon an orphan girl who was merely trying to look at art. Which is, by the way, generally free. So let us assume that she was poor as well. A poor, lonely, orphan girl, all alone in the world. And then you came in and seduced her by the following evening.”
Thanasis laughed before he could think better of it. “I did not seduce you. That is not how that happened at all.”
Quite the opposite, in fact. He had been captivated by her, as he’d said. He had never felt anything like it. If she had insisted on public coffees forever, he suspected he would have gone along with it. He had wanted to spend time with her. He had wanted to simply drink in her presence.
He had been turned inside out where she had been concerned, and he had spent years wondering how long he would have let that go on. How long he would have played that part.
But he hadn’t had to find out.
She’d been the one to hold his hand on a dark street. She had interlaced their fingers and sighed at the sensation that had flooded them both. Then she had been the one to lean in, standing up on her toes to kiss him first.
Saskia had been the one to set them both on fire.
Thanasis had been burned through ever since.
“You seduced her and then you hid her away from the world,” Saskia was saying, with great confidence.
“I’m sure it’s a nice flat you chucked her in, but did she ever leave it?
You said you wanted to keep your relationship private but what it sounds like is that you kept her in jail.
Locked up tight.” In case he didn’t get the implication, she leaned forward, slightly, her steeped tea gaze on him. “Imprisoned.”
“I’m unaware of any jails that allow their inmates full and unfettered access to the entire city of London, a master’s program in a university, and free rein to go wherever they might wish at a moment’s notice—even an ill-fated train.
That’s not my impression about how incarceration generally goes in the United Kingdom.
But perhaps you, lately of Wales and with no memory older than five years, have a different view. By all means, Selwen, share it.”
He could see that she did not like the way he said that new name of hers. It was also possible she disliked his tone as much as he did hers, and he could not quite regret that.
“You imprisoned her.” Saskia said it again, like she wanted it to land, and hard. “Yet you seem to think that she should have somehow known what your intentions were despite this. Did you tell her those intentions?”
He had.
Thanasis was certain that he had.
But as he thought that, he wondered. A ripple of doubt wound its way into him, then became something more like a flood. Had he truly chased away her fears? Or had he held her, knowing full well that when their hands were on each other, it only ever led to one place?
And it was a magical place, but had that only made it worse for her? Had he underscored the things she worried about when he’d meant to wash them away?
Had she truly believed that all he wanted from her was a convenient body?
The very notion made him feel something like sick.
“What happened that night?” Saskia demanded. “Did she finally stand up for herself? You wouldn’t like that, would you. I can tell.”
Thanasis had to breathe then. Deep.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” he said, very carefully, when he could speak again. “And I mean that literally. I’ve spent the past two days doing a great deal of research on what I presume was a head injury and the memory issues that can follow.”
“I had no injuries,” Saskia snapped at him. Defensively, he thought, and he wanted nothing more than to pull her into his arms. To kiss her, run his hands over her, and make certain she really was all right.
But he knew that this version of her would detest that.
“It could also be trauma,” he said after a moment, when he could trust that he wouldn’t reach out for her anyway.
“The brain is a marvel. It is also fragile, like everything else that makes us human.” He shrugged, though he felt anything but casual.
“I thought she knew.” He heard the way he said that, and shook his head.
“I thought you knew, Saskia. You were the center of my world. I arranged my life around you. There was no shame in that. How could there be?”
“We are only talking about facts, not feelings,” she told him, maybe a little too fiercely.
She stood even straighter. Her dark hair was piled on her head today, and he liked it.
It made him think about pulling out the pins he could see she still used and watching them scatter between them.
It made him think of burying his face in the cloud of her hair as it came tumbling down.
She looked as if she’d been on a long walk and the loose-fitting, flowy clothes she wore were nothing like the wardrobe she had preferred back in London.
Then again, this was a Greek island like all the rest that dotted the Aegean, despite the presence of Pavlos.
It was a place to flow about in linen and light colors.
But the loose, flowing clothing she was wearing today only made her eyes seem brighter. More intense.
“Ffion found me walking with great purpose down the side of a motorway where no one usually walked. And certainly not if they were dressed the way I was. She thought it felt off, so she picked me up.” Those steeped tea eyes studied him for far too long.
“I couldn’t remember my name. Or where I was, much less why.
And we did look. We both concluded I probably wasn’t on the train, because I would have had to have walked miles from the derailment site.
Besides, I was no worse for wear.” Saskia frowned at him, possibly because he didn’t react to that. “People died.”
“Yes,” he gritted out. “I am fully aware that people died, Saskia. I thought you were one of them.”
He did not say, I grieved you. I bargained with the heavens and lost. Again and again and again.
He did not tell her that he had never slept again, not the way he had before. Not really.