Chapter Four
CHAPTER FOUR
F OR ALL THAT Lucie had said only her head hurt, there was a stiffness to her gait evident when they made the short walk along the harbour with the nurse who’d accompanied them from the hospital.
Keeping a supportive grip on her hand, like any supportive fiancé would, Thanasis shortened his usual stride to keep pace with her. There was something about her tentative but determined steps that highlighted her current fragility and tugged at his chest. For the first time since she’d walked into the hotel bar he was wholly aware of how tiny and delicate she really was. Only her determination hinted at the combative personality he’d spent two months sparring and clashing with.
The medics who’d attended the scene of the accident had said it was nothing short of a miracle that she’d escaped the wreckage with nothing more than a bleeding nose from the airbag. Those medics didn’t know how tough Lucie was. Thanasis could well imagine his car crumpling around her and then having second thoughts. The injury to her head had come about, so witnesses had attested, when she’d caught her foot stumbling out of the car. She’d been too disoriented by the accident to put her hands out to break her fall. It was nothing but bad luck that her head had landed on the edge of the pavement kerb.
He couldn’t bring himself to think of her head hitting the kerb as being his good luck, even if he was using her amnesia to his full advantage.
When they reached his yacht, she stared at it for a long time, silently taking it all in. ‘ Persephone … Is she where your island gets its name?’
‘Yes. My island was inhabited many millennia ago and all that’s known of the islanders is that they worshipped Persephone—there are ruins of a monument to her on the south of the island—which is where the island’s name comes from. It seemed fitting to name my yacht after her too.’
‘Wasn’t she Queen of the dead or something?’ Lucie asked dubiously, thinking the last person she’d name a yacht after was someone who represented death.
‘Queen of the underworld, but she was much more than that. Hades was the god of the underworld and stole Persephone from her mother to live as his wife there with him, breaking Demeter’s heart. Demeter was the goddess of harvest and fertility,’ he explained. ‘After much bad blood, Zeus decided Persephone would spend six months each year living with Hades and six months living with Demeter. The months with Hades were months of desolation where the land became barren and nothing grew because Demeter’s heart was so desolate, but the months Persephone returned to her mother were months where Demeter’s happiness shone on the earth and blessed the land with an abundance of fertility, the months we know of as spring and summer.’
Her stare still glued to the yacht she was about to embark, a shiver ran up Lucie’s spine. For a split moment certainty gripped her that this was all a trick and she was about to be stolen away just like Persephone had been.
And then she felt the comforting solidity of Thanasis’s hand clasped around hers and shook the feeling away. Her mother would never win any parenting award but even she wouldn’t send her daughter off to a remote island with a man to be stolen away. In any case, there would be other people on the island, household staff—she didn’t imagine Thanasis had ever lifted a domestic finger in his life—along with all the people setting up for the wedding. And until they reached it, there was the crew of his yacht, a handful waiting patiently in identical uniforms of navy polo shirts and black shorts on the front deck for them to climb on board.
Most of all though, was Thanasis himself, and the intuition that had been in her since she’d first come round after the accident that he’d become a major part of her life. That they meant something to each other.
* * *
Thanasis’s yacht, Lucie had to admit, was a lot classier than Georgios’s. Georgios’s yacht, a vessel she’d spent many of the long weeks of school summer holidays on, was a real party palace with everything geared around all ages having fun. Thanasis’s, by contrast, brought to mind an ultra-luxurious spa with everything designed to aid relaxation, and she spent the six-hour journey to Sephone doing just that, mostly because she wasn’t allowed to do anything else. In Lucie’s case, relaxing meant sleeping, but that had nothing to do with the Persephone ’s ambiance but was because of her jailers.
When Thanasis had said he wanted to ensure all her medical needs were taken care of, she hadn’t thought he’d meant turning a cabin of the Persephone into a hospital room with a doctor and two nurses in attendance for good measure. The cabin had a private balcony the strict medics grudgingly allowed her to sit out on, but she wasn’t allowed to stray any further.
Being so restricted meant boredom kicked in quickly, and while she’d slept enough for England and Greece combined these last five days, she ended up sleeping because there was absolutely nothing else for her usually active brain to do. She had no phone, no books to read and, having never been one for sitting down to watch films and binge on boxsets, no interest in her cabin’s television. Waking to be told by a nurse that they were minutes away from the island had her scrambling out of bed with an agility that was close to feeling normal. She was certain her earlier stiffness had come from her muscles not being used for days.
Released from her cabin, she was escorted by her jailers to a saloon with the same calming opulence that permeated the rest of what she’d seen of the yacht.
Thanasis, standing with his back turned at the far end of the saloon with a clear view of the nearing island, was discussing something with a member of his crew. There was something strange about his posture, but it wasn’t until he sensed or heard her presence and turned his head and the animation on his face fell and his hands dropped to his sides that she realised what the strangeness was. He’d been gesticulating.
Gesticulations were nothing out of the ordinary for the Greeks—in Lucie’s considerable experience, being expressive was part of the national DNA—but they were definitely out of the ordinary for the rigidly composed Thanasis.
There was a barely perceptible narrowing of his eyes and rising of his broad shoulders before his features relaxed and he headed towards her.
The same shiver of fear that had caught Lucie before she boarded the Persephone snaked freshly up her spine and stopped her feet moving forwards to him.
She didn’t know this man.
Her bruised brain and Thanasis’s ridiculously gorgeous face and wondrous scent had bamboozled her into believing that she knew him, but she didn’t. He’d been hiding himself from her, and because of that, she couldn’t read him. She didn’t doubt her intuition that they meant something to each other but what was that something if he wouldn’t let himself relax around her? How could she trust that something was a good something? It was absolutely in her mother’s interest for the wedding to go ahead. It was absolutely in Thanasis’s interest too. In fact, the only person in whose interest it wasn’t was her. Or hadn’t been. Lucie had led a fully independent life since finishing secondary school but the great job she’d adored and the funky flat she’d shared with three of her best friends were all gone. That all had to be the truth or why else would she be in Greece in July? No, make that August now.
He was only feet away from her.
Her heart thumped harder as his magnetic effect danced into her senses.
She was being irrational. What reason could Thanasis or her mother have to lie to her? She’d agreed to a marriage of convenience with him to save both families, so why embellish that?
He stopped before her and, his wondrous scent bamboozling her all over again, she suddenly realised just how big he really was, much more than she’d imagined from her hospital bed. He didn’t just top her five foot nothing height but towered over it. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder and that included her untameable mass of hair.
‘Good rest?’ he asked, his stare as serious and intense as ever.
Matching his intensity, trying without any success to see into his head, she nodded. ‘I think that was the most comfortable prison I’ve ever slept in.’
His forehead creased. ‘Prison?’
‘While you were having fun in the sun, my jailers refused to let me leave the cabin.’
‘I asked them to watch you closely.’
‘Did you impress upon them the need to watch me excessively closely?’
‘Of course.’ He folded his arms across his chest, biceps and pecs flexing with the movement. ‘You have suffered a nasty head injury and I make no apologies for wanting your recovery to be as smooth as it can be. If it is any consolation, I was working, not having fun,’ he added.
Trying very hard to concentrate on their conversation and not the swirl of dark hair visible through the opened throat of his black shirt, trying without any success to stop herself imagining those muscular arms enveloping her, Lucie lifted her chin and smiled sweetly. ‘No consolation at all. I find my work immensely fun.’
‘Then you, matia mou , are an anomaly. Work for me is work.’
‘Poor you, but if you want my recovery to be smooth, I suggest you rethink any plans you might have dreamed up of locking me away until our wedding day while you get on with your non-exciting work, otherwise you’ll find the wedding having to be postponed on account of me jumping out of a window and probably breaking my legs.’
There was another crease in his brow before his features loosened and he gave a short burst of laughter.
The only creases on his face now the lines around his eyes, he folded his arms and tilted his head. ‘Consider your comment noted.’
Absurdly thrilled at the sound of his laughter, probably because if she’d had to put money on it she’d have said his vocal cords didn’t stretch to laughing, Lucie mimicked his stance and riposted, ‘Consider your consideration of my comment noted.’
The amusement on his face lasting longer than any of his previous smiles, he inclined his head towards a door leading outside. ‘Now that we have noted each other’s comments, shall we go on deck so you can see your home for the next few weeks?’
* * *
Lucie’s home for the next few weeks—there were plans for them to stay on Sephone a week after the wedding too, for their honeymoon—was the most stunningly beautiful place she’d ever seen. Even before the yacht had moored she understood exactly why Thanasis had chosen this particular island as his private hideaway.
Sephone rose from the crystal-clear blue waters of the Aegean like the majestic goddess it was named after, the mountainous terrain thick with vineyards and olives groves, sheer drops creating coves where the sea lapped onto some of the palest, softest-looking sand she’d ever seen.
Travelling with Thanasis by golf buggy to the villa over a wide, snaking pathway that had to be manmade but seemed as natural as the sweet-smelling flowers lining it, Lucie breathed in the pure air with a sense of wonder she didn’t think she’d ever experienced before, and then she caught her first glimpse of the villa and nearly overdosed on it.
Nestled above a hidden cove with waters of the palest blue, multiple white domes with blue-domed roofs of varying sizes connected to create one palatial wonder amassed with an abundance of arched and circular windows, all blending into something not only beautiful but sensual, as if the architect had eschewed anything that could be construed as a straight line. It was like nothing she’d seen before, a home any goddess would be proud to inhabit.
‘Who designed this ?’ she asked, close to breathless with admiration.
‘Thomas Breakwell.’
‘No way. Thomas designed this?’
Although she was too busy gaping at the stunning villa, she felt Thanasis’s stare fall on her. ‘You know him?’
‘He hired our company to do the interiors for the showrooms of his apartment complex in Canary Wharf. I would never have guessed this was one of his.’
‘I put the tender out with the vision of what I wanted. He was the architect who most understood the feel of what I was seeking.’
‘Good for him…although now I’m wondering how come I didn’t know of it.’ At Thanasis’s questioning stare, she explained, ‘When we were pitching for the Canary Wharf project, Kelly got me to trawl through his company website. There is no way I would have forgotten this…’ Her spirits suddenly plummeted. ‘Unless there’s more holes we didn’t know about in my memories?’
‘You wouldn’t have seen it on his website,’ he assured her. ‘The project was undertaken in secrecy.’
‘How come?’
‘I didn’t want the world to know about the island. It only encourages tourists to try and find it.’
‘Then why are we marrying here? From what Mum was saying, the whole world and their dogs are coming.’
‘Sometimes it feels like that,’ he admitted wryly. ‘Sephone was chosen because it has the romantic feel we thought it necessary to portray when we marry. To work and soothe our business investors, our marriage needs to be believable.’
‘So you’re giving up your secret hideaway for the greater good?’ The tourists he’d bought the island to escape from would soon be poring over maps trying to figure out where in the Aegean Sephone was located.
‘Some sacrifices are worth making.’
‘Is that what I said when I agreed to the marriage?’
‘If I recall correctly, you said you expected a nomination to be given on your behalf to the Nobel Prize panel.’
Meeting his eye for the first time since they’d got into the golf buggy, she grinned even as her heart swelled. ‘That definitely sounds like something I would say.’
Thanasis, knowing she wouldn’t be smiling if she remembered the context of her comment, nonetheless curved his lips, and was saved from having to say anything further on the subject by their buggy coming to a stop in front of the huge semi-circular timber door.
Her Nobel Prize nomination comment had come at the end of their first meeting in the hotel bar. If he was remembering correctly—and his memory had never failed him before—her exact words, thrown at her stepbrother Alexis, had been, ‘If I pull this off and convince the world I’m in love with that…’ she’d glared at Thanasis ‘… man , and that everything between our two families is now all jolly hockey sticks and cream buns, then I’d better get a Nobel Prize nomination out of it.’
‘Would you like a nomination for sainthood too?’ Thanasis had asked acidly.
‘Only if I manage not to kill you.’
There had been countless times after when a look alone from Lucie would have sufficed to kill him stone dead.
There was no look like that or any kind of glare on her face now. Colour had returned to the cheeks made pale by her injury and there was a lightness in her expression, as if this whole thing was one big adventure for her and he was the man joining her on it. It was much like the shine that had been in her eyes when she’d bounced into the hotel bar, before his coldness had wiped it clean away. Much like the shine he’d gleaned when their eyes had met across the room all those years ago, that long, unbidden moment that had captured them tightly enough that they’d both remembered it years later.
* * *
Lucie gazed around at the most stunning room she’d ever been in. It was like she’d stepped into an airy white cave carved into paradise. Light poured in from multiple angles, bathing the enormous bed in golden light. She let her stare linger on it only a second before her heart turned over and she hastily looked anywhere else.
She wasn’t ready to think of sharing that bed with Thanasis, especially not when she could feel him watching her reaction to their room with that intensity she felt like a physical touch.
How were you supposed to behave around someone you were marrying in a week’s time and who you’d already shared months of a life building a relationship with, but who you had no memories of? The few displays of affection Thanasis had shown while she’d been cocooned in hospital had felt natural and thrillingly wonderful, but she’d been doped up to her eyeballs on drugs. It all felt very different and real now she was back out in the real world with nothing in her system to pollute her feelings or reactions, and she wished there were an instruction manual available to help her navigate it all so it didn’t feel quite so terrifying.
‘Seriously, who was the interior designer for this? Because I want to kiss them,’ she said brightly, going into jocular mode to cover the disquiet that felt like no disquiet she’d ever experienced before at being alone with Thanasis in a bedroom for the first time, even though she knew this wasn’t the first time because he’d been at her hospital bedside all that time, but that had been completely different because it was a hospital room, and that was not forgetting—even though she had forgotten—that she’d been sharing a bedroom with him for weeks and weeks, and now even her thoughts were going haywire and were on the cusp of making her head explode. ‘This is amazing.’
‘Helena Tatopoulos.’
‘Can you give me her number so I can ask for a job?’ she said, only half in jest.
He gave the flash of a grin. ‘After the wedding.’
‘Invite her to it so I can badger her there.’
He adopted a stern expression. ‘No business talk at the wedding.’
She made a pffting sound. ‘But business is the whole point of the wedding.’
Laughing lowly, he reached out to smooth down one of her curls sticking up at the ceiling, and her heart went haywire to match her thoughts even though he wasn’t really touching her, well, not any part of her that was living, because hair wasn’t actually alive, was it?
‘I am the last person to forget that.’ He released the curl and stepped back. ‘I will leave you to settle in. Does dinner in an hour work for you?’
‘The sooner the better—I’m starving.’ Or had been. Nerves had kicked in big time. Or what felt like nerves. Right behind Thanasis was the sprawling bed they’d be sharing and because her eyes were currently glued to his gorgeous face with a special focus on his full lips…oh, but the way they moved when he spoke sent her pulses as haywire as her heart and thoughts…the bed was in her peripheral vision, and with the way the falling sunlight shone through the multiple windows casting both Thanasis and the bed in its golden glow…
Soon, very soon, those full lips would press against hers in that very bed…
Oh, God, her efforts not to think of the bed she’d very soon be sharing with him had become a dismal failure because now it was all she could think of, and suddenly she realised that all the things she’d wondered about in her hospital bed would be wonders no more but her reality, that this was her reality, her and Thanasis, committed lovers, and as all these thoughts collided a glow began to build inside her, flutters of deep, pulsing warmth that had her clutching at the material of her dress around her stomach even though she didn’t know what she was clutching it for.
‘Good,’ said the full lips containing such sensuous promise that she was now caught on a tightrope between yearning for them to just kiss her, and wanting to throw herself out of a window to escape a fear she didn’t even understand. ‘Make yourself comfortable. Everything’s been unpacked for you but if anything’s been forgotten or there’s anything else you need, tell any member of staff. If they don’t have it, they will get it couriered over. If you feel unwell, the medical team are based in the room to the right of yours—pressing the green switches by your bed and dressing table sends an alert directly to them. There is also a switch in your bathroom.’
Lucie nodded as if she’d been paying attention to his words and not lost in fascination and fear at the movement of his mouth, and then realised exactly what he’d said and blinked. ‘Isn’t this our room?’
The mouth she’d been lost in fascination with twitched. ‘No, matia mou , this is your room. My room is to your left.’
Her heart and stomach shrank and plummeted as full comprehension hit her. ‘Oh, I thought…assumed…’
Assumed this was their room, words that went unsaid but which still echoed between the walls and between them.
Although Thanasis didn’t move—how could someone so big be so still ?—she sensed a shift within him, sensed him again reining in his composure to give nothing of himself away, and yet somehow the intensity of his stare increased, giving the sensation that he was searching inside all the compartments in her brain and plucking out the files hidden from herself and reading them.
‘I am thinking only of you,’ he murmured. ‘The reset between us that’s come about because of your injury…’ Exhaling through his nose, he closed the distance he’d created between them and gently captured her chin. The probing green eyes beginning to swirl. ‘I know you feel obliged to marry me, matia mou , but the last thing I want is for you to feel any other kind of obligation. That would be unconscionable of me.’
Heart caught in her throat, trembling inside and out and captured in a stare she couldn’t have pulled herself away from if she’d tried, Lucie held her breath as the mouth she ached to feel closed in on hers.
The warmth of his breath danced over her lips and then the soft and yet, oh, so firm mouth brushed over hers in a lingering featherlight caress that left her close to sagging with disappointment when he pulled away from it.
Catching a locket of her hair, he rubbed the tip of his nose against hers. ‘Let us be on an equal footing and start over as if we were both strangers to each other, and take our time in getting to know each other without any pressure or expectation.’ With a glimmering smile, he brushed another featherlight kiss to her mouth and huskily added, ‘There is no need to rush anything. I can wait for as long as you need me to, and I know the wait will be worth it because we have our whole life together to look forward to.’
And then he released the curl and stepped back, stealing the warmth she’d been barely aware of bathing in, leaving Lucie gaping at him, the fleeting kiss having struck her dumb,
‘Until dinner, matia mou ,’ he whispered.
By the time she came back to her senses, Thanasis had disappeared from the room leaving her with the sense that she’d just been hypnotised as effectively as a cobra would be by a master snake charmer.