Chapter Nine
London was cold and gray and as far Saskia could tell, completely missing the magic of Manhattan.
It had been painful to climb back onto the plane. To face the reminder she hadn’t wanted that there was a reality to return to. That all these fingers intertwined and hands held weren’t who they were.
That he still believed she couldn’t remember him.
Saskia still couldn’t seem to make herself tell him otherwise, and she tried. She kept trying. But she couldn’t seem to make those words come out of her mouth.
She sat in the belly of the plane with him, pretending not to watch him as he rolled calls and answered emails, in that same resolutely competent fashion he did everything.
This wasn’t anything new to her. He had always worked, constantly, in all the time she’d known him.
She had been the one with the schedule that was flexible, and she’d been only too happy to fit herself in around his.
Because it had seemed like what they had to do, together, to make sure they spent the most time together.
She had studied on this plane. She had painted and sketched on this plane. She had flown with him to far-off places and never exited the plane at all, waiting for him to finish his meetings and come meet her back here to fly some more.
Saskia was tired of these memories. She was tired of nostalgia. She was tired of second-guessing everything she said and everything she felt because she was still trying to pretend to be someone she wasn’t.
When the truth was, she had taken great pride, back in the day, of always being entirely herself. Because she had never had the option to be anyone else. She had never wanted to be anyone else.
But then she had met Thanasis, and she had wanted so badly to be his.
And she realized then—as they sat in the back of another town car, driving through the listless, damp London streets—that the only reason she was still concealing the fact that she had her memory back was because, on some level, she wanted to hurt him.
Because he had hurt her, all those years ago.
She had been so deeply in love. And she would have sworn that he was, too—she’d been certain he was—but he’d never said it.
He’d never said he loved her. He’d never said those words.
Oh, he’d said a million other things, and often, but never that.
Saskia had let it fester inside of her, like a wound.
Until she’d come to the unpleasant conclusion that, in the end, their entire relationship could be looked at in two completely different ways at the same time.
There was the story that they’d met and fallen for each other at first sight and had arranged their lives around that ever after, and she loved that story.
But there was also another way to look at it.
That Thanasis had seen her, claimed her, and then tucked her away where she could cause him no trouble at all. That he’d kept her meek, and a secret, so that he wouldn’t ever feel embarrassed by the fact that he’d fallen for a no-name orphan girl he’d met more or less on the streets.
She’d veered back and forth between those two stories all the time, in those years, depending on how kept a woman she felt she was at any given time. And eventually, the bad one had got its teeth in her.
And now, all these years later, she really couldn’t understand how she’d let that happen.
They’d walked through the streets of a foreign city and she’d felt that sheer, sweet joy in her chest, bubbling up like glory.
They had talked of nothing in particular and anything that occurred to them as they moved, and she’d forgotten that part.
The way it felt to have his arm slung over her shoulders.
The way it felt to move through the world with this man, constantly aware of him, and fascinated by him, and always attuned to his every movement, because that was how much she’d entangled herself with him.
She never knew what he might say next. She prized his smiles, and his rare laughter. And she didn’t believe that she would have been able to throw herself so completely into him if he didn’t feel the same way.
She’d seen the evidence in New York, hadn’t she?
There had been the way he’d danced with her, there in the crush of a crowded rooftop ballroom.
Around and around he’d spun her, but she had been close enough to see the intensity in his gaze.
As if he would throw himself down and allow everyone in the ballroom to stomp all over him rather than let go of her for even a moment.
Then there had been the way he’d led her through the crowd, that possessive grip on the back of her neck or on her bicep, guiding her so easily that she didn’t need to do anything but trust him.
There was even the way he’d walked her to the door of the rooms that had been set aside for her in the town house he kept in lower Manhattan. He’d stood outside her door and smiled down at her, and then he’d bowed, just slightly as he’d left her there.
I hope this nightspot met with your approval, he’d said.
It has a lot of potential, she’d managed to reply, feeling hot and flushed straight through. From the dancing. From the way they’d walked back together. From simply being close to him again.
And she hadn’t moved from the door, so she’d seen it when he’d glanced back over his shoulder. She’d seen when his face was no longer the picture of courtesy, his eyes alight with a need that echoed in her, low and deep.
Then at dinner their last night, where he’d told her about his mother—something he’d never told her before.
The way he’d played with her fingers, which wasn’t the heat that she was sure he could feel as easily as she could.
It was intimate, the way he touched her at that table.
The way she touched him back. There was that deep intimacy, in all of it.
She thought that they’d walked away from that restaurant changed, somehow.
They’d smiled at each other as they’d walked back downtown, weaving their way in and out of the crowds. A part of the bustle and roll of the New York streets.
But all she’d really been aware of was him.
Now, when they finally reached the right address in Chelsea in this gray city across the ocean from all that intimacy and light, she felt torn up inside from all these memories, all these sensations inside of her. She scowled at him when he made no move to get out.
“I think you’d better come up,” she told him.
He looked at her for a long moment, those dark eyes of his as unreadable as ever.
He nodded, slowly.
She thought that was ominous. It made her stomach hurt.
Maybe because of that, she made a point of gathering her own luggage and carrying it in with her, because she knew he usually had his driver do such things. It seemed necessary that she do it herself.
She didn’t want to ask herself why.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he told her as he followed her into the building, and took the garment bag and her small case from her.
For some reason, maybe because she was completely unable to handle herself the way she should have been able to, she found that ominous too.
Saskia climbed the stairs, entirely too aware of him at her back. Particularly because he didn’t seem to notice that he was heaving a case up the stairs with him. He was that fit. He always had been.
It set her teeth on edge, or maybe she just wished she could bite him a little—
She pushed that aside. It was unhelpful.
By the time they made it to the flat itself, Saskia was vibrating with a stress she couldn’t entirely name. She felt as if she might explode. Her skin felt strange, stretched too tight around her body, as if someone had come and switched it in the night.
She couldn’t help but think that if they’d stayed in New York, things would be different. Instead of walking back down to that town house and getting in a car to take them to the airport, would they have ended up in his bed?
Or hers?
Inside the flat, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest as if that could keep her heart in place, then she turned to face him.
“You were going to go back to your real house, weren’t you?” she asked.
“That seems like rather a loaded question.” One of his dark brows rose. “It is just a house. It is no more or less real than this one. The only difference I know of is that my house on the heath is—”
“Legitimate?” she interjected.
“Well-known,” he corrected her, with a certain pointed patience. “Particularly by my father. And all of my half siblings. They send the paparazzi there themselves. I have always wanted to keep you safe from these things.”
She felt strange again, this time as if something in her was ticking, like some bomb set to go off. “Your father promised me that I could stay private, but he was already talking about taking me to galas in Athens. Weddings in Paris cathedrals.”
Thanasis stood taller at that and she watched his jaw turn to granite.
“That would make sense, of course. Everyone knows him to be an unapologetic womanizer. His trespasses against my mother were exhaustively covered in every paper there was. Of course he would wish to make a spectacle of his second wife, who everyone would assume is too naive to know better.”
“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 read people 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.”