Chapter Six #3
What she thought was, Everything Thanasis told me was true .
She felt herself vibrating with some great emotion she didn’t understand. Temper, perhaps. Outrage. But it wasn’t personal. She wasn’t pleased with herself for putting herself in this position, but she wasn’t hurt, either.
What she did not like was the fact that Pavlos did not seem to think that she could leave this island when she wanted.
She didn’t like that at all.
Selwen thought of the things she’d suggested—maybe more than simply suggested— Thanasis had done to some version of her that was lost to her, and had to bite back a shudder. The truth was laid out here before her now, and starkly.
She could believe anything of Pavlos, in this moment. The scales had fallen from her eyes, but she hadn’t been protecting herself from the reality of him. She had simply been invested in the story he’d spun for her about the life they could live.
Or her own blinders, more like.
But staring at a man who had probably not even showered since being with another woman, a woman he employed and had likely been sleeping with all along, made her realize that Thanasis was nothing like his father.
She simply knew it.
She felt it inside of her, the way she felt her ligaments move when she did. The way she knew she breathed without checking in on the mechanics of the act.
She just knew.
“I’m not going to fight with you,” she told this man, this fiancé of hers she had never bothered to get to know. Had she thought it wouldn’t matter because she knew herself so little too?
But there was no time to dig into that, because Pavlos laughed again. When he moved further into the room she probably should have been alarmed.
Even if she was—and she refused to accept that she was—she held her ground. She lifted her chin up. She did not drop her gaze.
She refused to allow herself any hint of a reaction when he drew close enough to reach over and pinch her chin between his fingers.
Not all that gently.
“Don’t worry,” he told her, and there was something worse than simply cold in his gaze. “You’ll learn.”
And then he kissed her.
It was not a nice kiss.
It was clearly meant to show her who was boss here, and she had the distinct impression that he wouldn’t mind too much if it made her cry, either.
All of that might have wrecked her, but it didn’t. It couldn’t.
Because something else was happening to her, like a great tide streaking across a sandy beach and washing it clean.
Though in this case, it was the opposite of clean.
Because this was the wrong mouth. This was the wrong man.
And when he finally pulled away, she clapped a hand over her mouth and did nothing but stare at him.
She could see that he was saying something, but she couldn’t hear him. His mouth was moving, his gaze was cold and dark, but she didn’t care.
Because she remembered.
She remembered everything.
She remembered who she was, at last, after all this time.
She remembered standing in that museum in London and being immediately aware of the man who came up beside her to stare at the same canvas that she’d already been baffled by.
Before he’d even spoken to her, she felt her entire body prickle into an awareness that she’d understood at once, even if she had never felt anything like it before.
My God, she remembered every single thing.
She remembered Thanasis, at last.
She remembered every single moment she’d spent with him, in vibrant, passionate detail—including the night she’d left.
Saskia, she whispered, if only in her own head. I am Saskia Gordon .
And he wasn’t wrong. Everything he’d told her was true. Especially the fact that she had been madly, wildly, head over heels in love with him.
I was madly, wildly, head over heels in love with him.
But she bit all of those memories back as she watched Pavlos sneer at her before he left the room.
Once he was gone, she felt her body reject that unwanted kiss even more. She ran to the bathroom, brushed her teeth and spat. Then again. And again.
And only when there was no trace of that man in her mouth did she go to find the card Thanasis had given her in the place where she’d hidden it away, because some part of her must have known that nothing was safe here. She pulled it out and she let her fingers trace over his name.
Thanasis Zacharias . No corporate logo necessary. Just his name and a number, because everyone knew who he was.
And now she did, too.
She knew exactly who he was to her.
And when she called, he answered on the first ring.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and she could hear that undercurrent of urgency, that dark imagining, right there in his voice. She could feel him all over her, and inside her. She knew who he was. “Has something happened?”
Everything, she wanted to say, but she couldn’t. She didn’t.
“I would very much like to leave the island,” she told him, sounding astonishingly prim when inside of her it was all fire and wonder and him. Them . “And I’m under the impression that that won’t be possible.”
On the other end of the line, she could hear Thanasis breathing, but he didn’t speak.
Her eyes fell closed, because she remembered all of him now. His naked body, drenched in sunlight, as he stood there beside the bed they’d shared. As he pulled her to him to wrap her legs around his waist and thrust deep and sure inside of her.
All of him, like that first time, when she’d kissed him on the street and he’d had to keep her hands from going where they shouldn’t, not out in public.
I don’t want to rush this, he’d told her.
I do, she’d replied, and nipped his perfect lower lip.
He had checked them into the nearest hotel, carried her over the threshold of the suite he booked on the spot, and only when he’d laid her out on that bed and come down beside her had she smiled at him and brushed her hand over that impossibly beautiful face of his.
Like she was learning it by touch.
I want to do this a great many times, she told him quietly. Intently. But you will have to be careful at first, because I’ve never done it before.
He hadn’t asked questions. He had gazed at her as if he could drink her down whole, or perhaps as if she was the answer to a prayer he hadn’t known he’d sent up in the first place.
Fos mou, he had said quietly. My light. I assure you, there will be nothing between us but pleasure.
And for so long, that had been true. For so very long, it had been enough.
She heard him shift on the other end of this line and tried to imagine where he was sitting. In that office of his that she’d snuck into once, late at night, so she could do unspeakable things to him and make certain he thought of her while he sat there ever after.
He’d made certain to punish her for that.
Deliciously.
“I will have a plane there within the hour,” he told her. “Meet it on the tarmac.”
When he rang off, she looked around at the things that she was packing up. Things that belonged to a traumatized Welsh girl who didn’t know who she was, who had picked a name that started with an S because that had felt right.
But she didn’t need the things Selwen did. She wasn’t the woman Selwen had been, lost but determined to do what her only friend had wanted her to do. In the end, she took only the things that Ffion had given her, tucking them away in her shoulder bag.
And then, unencumbered by the rest of the things Selwen had gathered, she walked out to meet her past.
Saskia again, at last.