Chapter Three
CHAPTER THREE
B ACK HOME IN his Athens apartment, Thanasis set everything in motion so all Lucie’s medical needs would be taken care of upon her discharge. That done, he checked in with the chief wedding planner, uncaring that the sleepiness in Griselda’s voice meant he’d woken her. The extortionate price he was paying for her services meant she was on call twenty-four-seven.
The call finished with reassurances that Lucie was recovering well, and then Thanasis headed up to his room for a shower, passing Lucie’s room as he went. He’d get a member of the staff to pack her belongings. He would need them to pack a smaller case with clothes for her to choose from for when she was discharged too. It was inconceivable that he’d bring Lucie back here to supervise the packing of her possessions. If anything was going to trigger her memories, it would be this apartment, home to virtually every bitter exchange between them.
As per the detailed plan drawn up between himself and Alexis, she’d moved in a couple of weeks after the announcement of their engagement.
He’d installed her in the guest room furthest from his own but it hadn’t been far enough. The few public appearances they’d made together up to that point had been hell. Holding her hand without flinching and forcing his features into something that resembled that of a loving fiancé had taken acting skills he hadn’t known he possessed.
It had been Lucie who, off the cuff, had murmured to a cynical journalist that they’d fallen for each other during peace talks between the two families. A stroke of genius he hadn’t wanted to admire her for. He didn’t want to admire anything about her.
He could not bear to be enclosed in the same walls as her.
Being affectionate in public had taken acting skills on Lucie’s part too. In public, she’d played her part perfectly, all doe eyes and soft smiles even though having the paparazzi’s cameras aimed at her face was a form of torture for her. The moment they were alone, her black eyes would flash their loathing and her nose wrinkle its disdain. He’d lost count of the times she’d wiped her freed hand on her clothes as if wiping the feel of him off her skin, her back stiff and turned from him. Lost count of the times he’d done the same.
It had never worked, and that was what had made everything so much harder to endure. Every time their hands clasped, he felt the burn of her skin against his for hours after. Every time he slipped an arm around her waist as a show of affection for the cameras and she leaned into him for the same reason, he’d find himself breathing in the scent of her hair and find himself still inhaling it when alone in his bed. Still feeling the soft tickle of it against his neck. Still feeling the compression of her slight figure against his torso. Still feeling his heated blood coursing through his veins.
If they’d met under different circumstances, as genuine strangers with no entwined family histories and no bad blood, then things would be a whole lot different. He would bed her in a heartbeat and get this all-consuming ache for her out of his system.
It was the age-old conundrum of forbidden fruit, he acknowledged grimly as he stripped off his clothes. Being forbidden always made an object infinitely more tempting. As a child he’d been forbidden from using the swimming pool without adult supervision. The first time unsupervised opportunity had presented itself, he’d dive-bombed into the pool. If not for the racket his dive-bomb had made, the gardener would never have thought to look and would never have seen four-year-old Thanasis struggling to keep his head above water.
Lucie was more off limits than the swimming pool had been.
To Thanasis’s mind, marriage was the ultimate commitment two people could make, and sacred for it. When he made that commitment in the future, it would be for love and it would be for ever, and he would not allow any aspect of his temporary marriage to feel real enough to taint that future. When he made his real vows, he wanted to join his real wife in his real marital bed knowing it was the first time for him to make love as a husband.
His anger rising, he stepped under the shower.
Why the hell hadn’t he demanded a photo of Lucie before agreeing to marry her? Thanks to varying European privacy laws concerning minors, there were no pictures of her in the public domain, and the private life she’d lived in England since turning eighteen meant she’d escaped the paparazzi’s attention. If he’d known it was her, the woman who’d captivated him with that one look across a room all those years ago, he’d have played hard ball and demanded Athena or no deal. There would be no temptation of forbidden fruit there. Athena was beautiful too, but it was a beauty that left him cold.
And now he had to spend the next week walking a tightrope playing the devoted fiancé to a woman who made him feel anything but cold.
* * *
‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to spend a few days in Athens before we go to Sephone?’ Lucie said the next morning after the medical team left the room. Her latest scan results had been discussed, the doctor declaring her well enough to be discharged. This had resulted in her mother immediately diving into the carry-on case Thanasis had brought from the apartment for this eventuality and Thanasis getting straight onto the phone. It seemed her mother and fiancé were working in cahoots to get her out of this hospital room as soon as humanly possible.
‘Why would you think that, darling?’ her mother asked, shaking out a black summer dress with a wrinkle of her nose.
‘Maybe because the doctor just said one of the best ways to aid the recovery of my memories is by going to familiar places,’ Lucie pointed out drily. ‘I’ve never been to Sephone.’
‘The doctor also said you need to rest, and what better place than a peaceful island unless you want the paparazzi to stalk you?’
Lucie shuddered at the mere thought. If anything had tainted her childhood, it had been the paparazzi’s near constant presence during her time spent in Greece. Her mother’s love of the intrusive spotlight was but one of the many fundamental differences between them.
Her mother handed the dress to her. ‘Do you still not own clothes that aren’t black?’
Lucie looked at the tightly fitting, high-fashion, colourful attire her mother was wearing and chose not to answer. She was long past the rebellious teenage years when she’d adopted dressing from head to toe in black as a silent means of needling the woman who’d given birth to her, but old habits died hard. She’d added splashes of colour to her wardrobe in recent years but still felt most comfortable wearing black.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ Thanasis murmured, shifting from his position at the window where he’d been deep in conversation. ‘I need to make a call that might involve shouting.’
Startled at the glimpse of humour from a man she’d assumed didn’t possess one—in all their time in this hospital room, he’d been nothing but serious—Lucie grinned.
She’d woken with a clearer head than she’d had since coming round from the sedation and spent a blissful hour in peace and solitude with nothing but her thoughts to occupy her. But, instead of searching for her lost memories, she’d spent the time wondering what it was about Thanasis that had made her fall for him. Apart from his devastating dark good looks and perfect body that was. She’d had the odd date with good-looking men over the years but always something had put her off wanting a second date. Usually it was too much vanity or a lack of humour, often both—she found those two traits went hand in hand—and so she’d pondered what it was Thanasis had the others lacked and how she could fall for so serious a man, and now she knew. He did have a tiny, latent sense of humour behind the Mr Serious persona.
‘Is my phone in the case?’ she asked her mother once they were alone. It was the first time she’d even thought of it. She dreaded to think how many messages she’d have to reply to.
Sighing at the inconvenience, her mother had a quick rummage in Lucie’s case. ‘Not that I can see. Do you need help dressing?’
‘I could do with a shower first.’ Since being admitted into hospital she’d had to put up with the nurses giving her bed baths, which would have been the indignity from hell if she hadn’t been so spaced out on the drugs, but now she was actually compos mentis she’d rather pluck each individual leg hair out than put up with that again. She wanted a shower. A long, lovely shower.
‘There isn’t time,’ her mother dismissed. ‘Another patient will need this room.’
‘But the nurse said there was no rush.’
‘She was being polite. Come on, get that dreadful plastic gown off you.’
It took an incredible effort not to go into sulky teenager mode. ‘Underwear?’
Once everything had been placed on the armchair for Lucie to change into, she gave her mother a meaningful look. ‘Some privacy?’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘You always were a prudish little thing.’ Magicking a bulging makeup bag from nowhere, she disappeared into the adjoining bathroom with mutters of ‘touching up her face’.
Lucie glared at the closed bathroom door. She’d always hated it when her mother teased her for being a prude. Just because she’d made it to twenty-four with only one real boyfriend under her belt, and preferred wearing loose-fitting clothes that covered her breasts and backside rather than the tight miniskirts and low crop tops her mother favoured, did not mean she was prudish.
She stepped into her knickers, her grumpiness melting away as Thanasis filled her mind again. Had he seen her in these knickers? Stripped them from her?
What had it been like between them? Disappointing like her past experience? Or had it been good? Even pleasurable?
Thanasis knew his way around a woman’s body enough to make it pleasurable, she decided as she removed the dreadful—her mother had been right about that—hospital gown. You could just tell. Although she didn’t know how she could just tell.
Letting the gown fall to the floor, she reached for her bra, searching as hard as she could in the void of her brain for any memory of sleeping with him.
What had his touch felt like? Had she burned for him? Remembering how the touch of his hand had sent her heart rate spiking and how the gentle kiss he’d placed on her mouth the night before had turned her belly into mush, she thought she must have. Closing her eyes, she made a silent plea for those particular memories to come back. Even if all the other memories stayed lost for ever, please bring those ones back to her. Please, please.
‘Lucie, we—’
Not having heard or even sensed the door opening, she whipped her head round and caught Thanasis frozen in mid-step at the door. Slamming her arms across her exposed breasts, she gripped her biceps, bra dangling from her fingers, embarrassment at being caught semi-naked scorching her in a white-hot flame.
A beat that seemed to last a lifetime passed between them, the dark pulse in his stare turning the flame of embarrassment into a different kind of burn, the kind of burn she’d been imagining only moments ago when wondering what it had felt like being made love to by him.
And then he blinked and the dark pulse vanished as he took a step back and a visible shutter came down in his eyes. ‘I apologise—I should have knocked.’
Realising her reaction must make her seem like the prude her mum had just accused her of being, a fresh batch of mortification enflamed her skin, and she lifted her chin with a bravado she absolutely did not feel inside and went into default jocular mode. ‘No, no, it’s fine. Not your fault. Of course you didn’t need to knock. I’m your fiancée and it’s not like you haven’t seen my boobs before… It’s just that I don’t remember the before.’
His jaw tightened a fraction before he gave a brief nod and took hold of the door handle. ‘Understood. I’ll leave you to dress.’
He closed the door with the same stealthy silence he’d opened it.
Her heart now threatening to explode out of her ribs, Lucie sank onto her bed and tried to catch her breath.
* * *
Thanasis stood beneath the air conditioning unit and blew out a long puff of air. A sheen of perspiration had broken out over his skin.
Closing his eyes, he clenched his fists and refilled his lungs.
Theos , that body.
It was perfect. That was the only word to describe it. Perfect. Perfection enhanced by the plainness of her black underwear, which created such a strong contrast with the lightness of her golden skin. Perfect gentle curves. Small but perfectly shaped breasts he knew with one look would sit perfectly cupped in the palm of his hands.
He expelled another long, tortured breath and pressed his head against the wall, closing his eyes even tighter to drive the image of semi-naked Lucie from his vision.
Theos , from the heavy thrumming in his veins, you would think it was the first time he’d seen a pair of naked breasts in the flesh.
What made the rush of arousal pulsing through him more intolerable was the beat that had passed between them before he’d found his voice to apologise.
In that beat, the filter had slipped off them both and the unwanted, unacknowledged desire that had always simmered between them had been a shimmering, living entity.
* * *
A violent blush crawled over Lucie’s face the second she heard the tap on the door. She had no idea how she was able to call out, ‘Come in,’ in a voice that sounded in any way normal, and when Thanasis stepped into the room, she felt the blush deepen and spread.
To her immense gratitude, he gave not a single sign that he’d walked in on her practically naked only minutes earlier, and she was beyond grateful that he accepted and understood so well that everything they’d shared together was lost to her.
‘My driver is here,’ he said in that glorious deep, honeyed tone. ‘Are you ready to go?’
She nodded, still unable to meet his stare. ‘Before we leave, have you seen my phone?’
He cast his gaze around the room. ‘It isn’t here?’
‘Not that we’ve found. Was it recovered from the accident?’ The accident she still only knew the barest details of, namely that she’d borrowed one of Thanasis’s cars and crashed it. She’d been too fuzzy of head to think of asking more questions about it, but one thing she didn’t need to question was that she would have had it on her. Lucie never went anywhere without her phone.
‘All the personal possessions you had at the time of the accident were put in the cupboard by your bed.’
‘I’ve looked there.’
‘I will ask the garage where the car’s being repaired and see if they have found it.’
‘Can you do that now, please? I need to check in with my dad, and Kelly and…’ There was a pang in her chest to know she was no longer an employee of Kelly Holden Designs. Lucie had loved her job as an interior designer. Really loved it. Her resignation was another void in her brain. So too giving up her share of the flat tenancy. ‘Check in with my whole life really.’
Thanasis gave a brief, tight smile. ‘Of course.’
With everything that had been going on, he hadn’t given Lucie’s phone a second thought, but now he knew it was missing, he could only hope it stayed lost.
Thanasis’s family and the Tsalikis would all keep their mouths shut about the animosity between them but he had no way of knowing what she’d confided to others. He was confident she’d not betrayed the pact they’d made before their final argument but Lucie’s fury when she’d left his apartment that day was such that it was within the realm of possibility she would have called one of her many friends to vent about it.
The call to the garage was over within a minute.
‘I’m afraid your phone wasn’t in the car,’ he told her, relief filling him.
Fate, it seemed, was determined to continue working in his favour.
‘I have your father’s number,’ he added. ‘You can use my phone to check in with him.’ Thanasis had spoken to Charlie Burton numerous times since the accident and was confident Lucie had confided nothing in him.
‘If we stop at a phone shop on our way to the harbour, I can buy myself a replacement,’ she suggested.
He made a point of looking at his watch. ‘It’s a long sail to Sephone. The sooner we set off the better.’ And the more isolated he kept her, the less likely something or someone would trigger her memories. ‘I can have a phone helicoptered to you, if you wish.’
‘Can’t we take the helicopter ourselves?’
‘No flying until you are back to full health,’ he asserted firmly, and was rewarded with such a doe-eyed look that the guilt at his deception plunged a little deeper.
Damn Rebecca Tsaliki for letting her daughter believe they were lovers. And damn himself for going along with it.
Lying did not come naturally to Thanasis but what other choice did he have? Let his business be destroyed and his family face destitution?
And besides, if Lucie’s memories came back before the wedding, they were all damned however they played it. The resulting explosion would lead to a scorched earth.
It was only for another week, he reminded himself grimly. Not even that. Six days. Just until they made their vows. The most pressing thing was getting her to the altar and the world’s press witnessing Antoniadis and Tsaliki breaking bread together for the first time in forty years.
But as much as Thanasis needed to get Lucie swiftly away from Athens and to the solitude of his island, he would not disregard the doctor’s advice. Flying the short distance—and by helicopter, it was a short distance—should be safe for her he’d been assured, but to his mind should was not cast-iron enough. His feelings for Lucie were a hot mess of lust and loathing but he would never wish physical harm on her or do anything to put her in danger.
He could still feel remnants of the ice his blood had temporarily frozen into when he’d been told of the accident.
She thought his basic human concern for another person’s well-being was down to his ‘love’ for her, and he turned his face away so she wouldn’t see his revulsion, at her and at himself, and dredged his parents and sister into his mind’s eye. They were the people he needed to keep at the forefront of his thinking whenever the urge to rip off the mask of his deception became unbearable. Them and the thousands of Antoniadis Shipping employees. All those futures in his hands.
Turning his stare back to her, he smiled and held out one of the hands all those futures depended on.
There was only a small hesitation before her beautiful heart-shaped lips pulled into a shy smile and one of the tiny hands all those futures also depended on slipped into his and her fingers tentatively closed around his.
For the beat of a moment, he experienced the strangest sensation; the sensation of Lucie’s fingers closing around his heart.