Chapter Six
CHAPTER SIX
O N HER FIRST morning in Sephone, Lucie woke to the rising sun and to the remnants of a dream where Athena had been cruelly laughing in a strange yet somehow familiar living room. The unsettled, almost sick feeling the dream had set off in her was countered by the lack of waking fuzziness in her head, and she climbed out of bed with the spring in her step that had been missing since the accident.
Making herself a coffee from the posh machine in her room, she was about to carry it through the arched glass door that led out to her balcony when a tap on her bedroom door stopped her in her tracks.
Her heart tripling the rate of its beats, a wide smile had formed before she opened the door, a smile that faltered when she found one of the nurses standing there and not the man who’d been lodged in her mind as she’d fallen asleep and still been firmly ensconced there when she’d woken. The nurse must have stayed awake all night with her ear to the adjoining wall listening out for movement.
After whispering refusals of painkillers and all the health checks that apparently were still completely necessary, and insisting she was completely fine, Lucie softly closed the door on the poor nurse and padded outside.
Just as the villa itself was uniquely beautiful, her balcony was too, gentle steps leading down to a comfortable seating area fronted by a narrow swimming pool that appeared to snake the entire upper perimeter in a touch of aesthetic genius, winding through the adjoining balcony to her left… Thanasis’s sprawling balcony.
She only needed to think of his name for her pulses to go haywire.
Was he awake yet, an early riser like her, or was he like the majority of her step and half-siblings and a bear with a sore head if woken before midday? She’d caught a glimmer of the real Thanasis Antoniadis during the meal when he’d finally relaxed around her, and what she’d discovered had delighted her. He was on her wavelength! He hadn’t taken her silly comment about wanting to snog his chef seriously but had played along with it and while this was just a silly, minor thing it meant so much because there was nothing worse than having to explain a throwaway jest, something Lucie had way too much experience with as her humour often went over people’s heads, but Thanasis had got it and played along with it, and it had been wonderful.
Oh, but there were so many things to learn and discover about him, and she longed to knock on his door and continue all the learning and discovering, but it was too early for most humans to rise.
Close to giddy with anticipation for the day to begin, she decided to take a swim and hurried to her dressing room in search of a swimsuit, hoping whoever had packed for her had thought to pack beachwear.
Result!
Modest black one-piece squeezed into, she finished her coffee, grabbed a towel from her bathroom and bounded back outside.
Lowering herself into the cool water, trying especially hard not to give her usual squeak when the water level reached between her legs so as not to wake the rest of the household, soon she was at the pool’s edge gazing over the clear blue Aegean and the islands dotted in the distance.
Thanasis really had found paradise here. She’d never known such stillness before. Always there was noise in her life. Always. Here on Sephone, she could hear the birds singing their early morning chorus and the only sound to cut through it was the gently lapping sea rather than never ending traffic. The air felt cleaner, the sky crisper… She sighed with the pleasure of it all. Bliss.
Time to see if the pool really did snake the whole perimeter, but which direction to take? The route that took her past the bossy medical team’s room or the one past Thanasis’s? Decisions, decisions. She had the strong feeling that if either caught her, she’d meet disapproval, what with her ‘condition’ and all that. With at least one member of the medical team already awake and Thanasis likely still sleeping, her choice was made.
Swimming her preferred breaststroke, she set off with slow, lazy movements and made a studious effort not to turn her head to peek into Thanasis’s room. Her peripheral vision showed that his balcony was vastly bigger than hers, the far end formed of its own half-dome with panoramic views that provided shelter from both the sun and the minimal rain the island was subjected to.
The pool wound round, intermittent narrow bridges to swim under and a new vista for her eyes to feast on of high rugged terrains and the undulating verdant greens of the island’s olive groves and vineyards, and then she rounded yet another bend to the rear of the villa and hooked her arms over the pool’s edge to take it all in.
Dinner had been eaten at the main poolside’s dining area. She could just about make it out from her vantage point, but what she could see clearly now and had failed to notice the night before was the sensational sprawling grounds that had to be Thanasis’s garden. He must have used a landscape gardener of equal renown to his architect, she thought, awed at what had been created out of nothing and so cleverly and sympathetically designed that unless you knew better you’d assume you’d fallen into the Garden of Eden. This Garden of Eden had a giant marquee in its centre and hiding just behind it—although she knew it was an illusion and really it was situated a long way behind it—a solitary domed white chapel, identifiable by the giant cross sticking out of its white roof.
Her airwaves suddenly tightened, white noise filling her ears in a rush.
That chapel had to be where she and Thanasis would marry. That marquee had to be where they would host their wedding reception. And those sleepy-looking workmen traipsing across the lawn carrying long poles over their shoulders had to be part of the crew tasked with transforming the garden into a fairy-tale wedding venue designed to convince the whole world that the bride and groom were destined to live happily ever after.
Their marriage was no abstract thing. It was real. In less than a week she would be a married woman and she had absolutely no idea if the sudden rabid fluttering in her stomach was an indication of excitement or terror.
‘Please, tell me I am hallucinating.’
Still struggling to breathe, Lucie whipped her head round. Finding Thanasis by the side of the pool, all tousle-haired and stubble-faced and wearing a pair of baggy canvas shorts, made the struggle a whole lot worse.
He could have stepped off Mount Olympus for an early morning walk with the mortals.
Back off, Adonis , she thought dimly. Your replacement has arrived.
Adonis would take one look at Thanasis and retire on the spot.
She’d known he had a great body but even her vivid imagination had failed to paint it in all its glory. Thanasis had the broad muscularity gym bunnies around the world worked their socks off to sculpt their bodies into, but there was none of the bulging veins Lucie’s nose always wrinkled at. Instead, it was as if Mother Nature herself had decided to bless him with perfection, from the deep olive hue of his skin to the smattering of fine dark hair that covered his defined chest and abdomen.
Dear heavens, had there ever been a finer specimen of manhood in the history of the world? This was the man who in a few short days she would exchange vows with and pledge to spend the rest of her life with, and as all these thoughts tumbled in her healing brain and her pulses throbbed just to look at him, she understood the fluttering in her stomach contained not an ounce of fear.
This gorgeous, sexy man was her fiancé and he was in love with her, and last night she’d finally understood for the first time since waking in her hospital bed why she’d fallen in love with him in turn.
The full lips she’d been dreaming of as she’d fallen into her real dreams tightened. Folding his arms, he repeated in clipped tones, ‘Tell me I am hallucinating.’
She swam as close as she could get and held on to the poolside to look up at him. ‘ Kalimera to you too.’
‘Are you insane?’ he said in the same clipped tone that contained strong undertones of anger. ‘You have suffered a major head injury.’
‘So you keep reminding me.’
‘I shouldn’t have to keep reminding you. Swimming alone in your condition is the height of insanity. Anything could have happened.’
‘Erm…you know I can stand up in it, right? And I’m barely five foot.’
‘That is not the point,’ he virtually snarled. ‘You have recklessly endangered yourself.’
She was still filled with all the fizz she’d set off on her swim with, Thanasis’s appearance having added extra zing to it, and her good mood refused to dampen despite his obvious anger. ‘Are you always this overbearing or is it just an early morning thing?’
‘Over—?’ His mouth snapped shut and he took a visible deep breath.
‘Look,’ she said before he could open his mouth again. ‘I appreciate your concern, I really do, although quite honestly I’d prefer it without the headmaster tone, but as I told you last night, I’m not a child. I don’t just feel fine today, I feel normal, like properly normal. There was no danger at all in me taking a swim… By the way, how did you know I was out here? I swam past your room ages ago.’
‘This is the other side of my room,’ he said tightly.
‘Your room must be humungous.’
‘It’s big enough.’ He took another deep breath. ‘I know you think you are recovered but I gave my word to the medical team at the hospital that I would make you take things easy until the wedding.’
She couldn’t help but smile at how visibly he was trying to rid himself of his visible anger. ‘Poor you, thinking you could make me do anything.’
His jaw clenched and he raised his gaze to the heavens. ‘This isn’t a joke. I know you hate being told what to do but for once will you please just do as you’re asked and keep yourself safe?’
Absurdly, this pleased her, yet more unneeded evidence that Thanasis really did know her and more unneeded evidence that he really did care for her, even if he did need to work on how he expressed that caring. She got it though. If the shoe were on the other foot and she were in love with him and saw him doing something she considered reckless then she’d probably be all overprotective too.
Sidestepping on the tips of her toes to the nearest gently inclining steps, Lucie got out of the pool and gave a mock curtsey. ‘There. I’m being a good girl again, and if it makes you happy, I’ll make a good girl promise not to go swimming on my own without supervision or arm bands until our wedding.’
Even though his eyes were still raised and his body language all tight and controlled, to her delight, his lips twitched as a glimmer of amusement flashed on his gorgeous face.
‘And now that’s all cleared up, do you have a towel I can use please?’
His neck rolled before he gave a sharp nod and turned to an inbuilt shelving unit stacked with towels and toiletries, and for the first time she noticed that this section of balcony didn’t just have a long L-shaped sofa and coffee table but a Jacuzzi bath and an outside shower too.
Thanasis averted his eyes as he handed Lucie the towel. She was wearing what had to be the plainest, least revealing swimsuit he’d ever seen on a woman and yet his veins were as thick and heavy as they’d been when he’d caught that glimpse of her semi-naked in her hospital room.
He turned his face away so he wasn’t subjected to the torture of watching her rub the towel over her delectable body. He needed to cool his core temperature, not raise it.
He should have bribed the doctors to keep her at the hospital a few more days.
After a night of restless sleep, which he’d given up on when the sun had risen, he’d thrown himself out of bed with a renewed determination to avoid Lucie’s company as much as humanly possible… And then he’d glimpsed her swimming past his bedroom without a care in the world and clearly no care for the significant head trauma she’d suffered.
He’d come within a breath of bodily snatching her out of the water.
‘Have you always been this rebellious?’ he asked in a rougher tone than intended, but God help him he defied anyone in his shoes not to struggle containing their emotions when faced with someone who combined the beauty of Aphrodite with the discord strewn by Eris.
All the discord Lucie sowed lay entirely within him, and as Thanasis felt her stare fix on him and his awareness for her magnified, he thought she must have a touch of Hecate in her too. What else explained the growing sensation that he was being cast under a spell?
‘I don’t know about being rebellious,’ she said musingly. ‘I just know my own mind and have learned over the years how to assert it. I guess it was the whole growing up in two wildly different households thing.’
He made the mistake of looking at her.
She was bent forwards, drying her ankles, but those big black eyes were glued to his face. ‘Sorry if you’ve already heard it all before—I’m guessing things are going to be like Groundhog Day for a while for you—but on the off chance I never shared my childhood with you, it was all pretty bonkers.’
She patted around her thighs… Theos , they were so exquisitely toned and slender…
‘My dad’s an accountant,’ she explained, now drying her arms, ‘and I spent the majority of my childhood living with him in a bog-standard ordinary house where everything was quiet and orderly and everything had its place and rules were strictly enforced, and then I’d spend the school holidays with Mum and Georgios and Athena and all the others, and life was just one big party and the only real rule was to have fun . Dad expected me to be dutiful and studious and grow up to be an accountant or a doctor, and Mum expected me to be glamorous—I distinctly remember her plucking my eyebrows when I was nine—and trade off my looks and attract a billionaire of my own like she’d done. I’d get off the plane in England and the first thing I’d have to do was wipe off the makeup Mum had trowelled on my face because Dad would have gone spare to see me wearing it. In their own ways, they both wanted to control me, but I guess I must have an inbuilt independent streak because I always knew I never wanted what either of them wanted for me.’
And this was why Thanasis had spent two months avoiding Lucie’s company. He didn’t want to know her, didn’t want to have to think of his headstrong fiancée as anything but the woman she was today, most definitely didn’t want to think of her as a child constantly yo-yoing between two households and countries, a square peg in a round hole in both of them, didn’t want to hear anything from the husky voice that would knock at his defences and turn her into anything less than his enemy.
‘What did you want?’ he asked before he found the sense to end the conversation.
She shrugged and smiled and wrapped the towel around herself, and in the process wrapped the spell she was casting on him a little tighter too. ‘To be free to live my own life and make my own choices. What about you? Did you ever want to do anything different from what your parents wanted for you…? I’m assuming your parents always wanted you to one day take over the running of Antoniadis Shipping?’
‘They wanted it but they never put any pressure on me. If I’d chosen a different path, they would have been disappointed but they would have supported me.’
‘Good for them. I got it in the neck from both my parents when I went straight into work from school. Dad wanted me to go to university and Mum wanted me to get a boob job. Oh, well, at least I’ve disappointed them equally so no one can accuse me of favouritism.’
‘Your mother is a piece of work,’ he said scathingly, an utterance and tone he regretted as soon as it left his mouth.
‘She is who she is just as I am who I am,’ Lucie said with a small lift of her shoulders that did nothing to hide the sadness flickering on her face. ‘I will never be the daughter either of my parents wanted.’
Thanasis had to clench his jaw to stop himself placating her and pointing out that it was never a child’s job to live up to parental expectations, that it was the parents’ job to adjust those expectations to the individual child before them, just as his own parents had done with Lydia.
But none of this was any of his damned business. This was a conversation he should never have allowed to develop and he was damned if he was going to allow himself to feel empathy for a woman who’d given up the freedom she’d disappointed both parents by insisting on out of love and loyalty for the monster that was Georgios Tsaliki.
Time to extract himself from this situation.
Except there was no time to think of an excuse to rid himself of her, for Lucie, despite the towel wrapped around her hanging like a giant tent down to her feet, gracefully threw herself onto his outdoor sofa and with a smile said, ‘Can we order some breakfast now, please? I’m starving.’
* * *
Why the hell had he gone along with this? Thanasis asked himself moodily as he watched yet another slice of bougatsa disappear into Lucie’s delectable mouth. The wedding was only days away and there was no end of things that needed his approval, and that was without considering all the business stuff that needed his attention. A hundred ready-made excuses and he’d failed to conjure a single one.
‘Do I get on with your family?’ she asked, wiping her mouth with a finger and then licking the crumbs stuck to it.
He leaned across the coffee table to refill his coffee. It was getting to the stage where he’d rather dive into the main swimming pool than watch her eat. Anything than have to watch her eat. Each bite thickened the spell of awareness and the only way to break it was to escape her company altogether.
He needed to get out of here.
‘It is too early to say,’ he replied evasively.
‘Ah, so they hate me.’
His gaze zipped back to her before he could stop himself.
She sighed and gave a rueful smile that shouldn’t have tugged at his chest. ‘Thank you for trying to spare my feelings but it really isn’t necessary—I’d much rather have the truth even if it does hurt. I’m not a Tsaliki but I understand why they would see me as one, and I get why that would cloud their judgement of me.’
About to deny it, he closed his eyes briefly and nodded. Once they were married, Lucie would learn for herself the depth of his family’s loathing of her and the entire clan of Tsalikis and hangers-on.
She gave another sigh and helped herself to what had to be her fourth slice of bougatsa . ‘Oh, well, hopefully in time they’ll see for themselves that I’m not the Antichrist and that the feud has nothing to do with me at all, and just accept me for myself like you did.’
He didn’t want to hear this. He didn’t want to hear or talk about any of this and put himself in a position where he had to tell the barefaced lies that were so necessary but that were becoming increasingly difficult to form.
Holding on to his loathing of Lucie had been a damn sight easier when the loathing had been mutual and she’d wanted to escape his presence as much as he’d wanted to escape hers. A damn sight easier when she wasn’t half sprawled on his sofa with her pretty feet pointing at him, the towel having come loose and now lying half draped on the floor exposing her smooth legs, and with her beautiful face glued to his. Her hair drying in the rising sun was an untamed mass of curls pinging in all directions and damn if it didn’t make her even sexier. Damn if the modesty of her swimsuit didn’t make her sexier too, and it was taking everything he had not to let his eyes drift to the barest hint of cleavage on show.
It was like the forbidden fruit analogy but in flesh form, he thought, as he fought even harder against the awareness threading so heavily in his veins. The more flesh that was covered, the greater the desire to uncover it all. Most women’s swimwear left so little to the imagination that you didn’t need an imagination to know what lay beneath it. Not with Lucie. The bottom half of hers was more modest than the top half, wrapping around her skin like a pair of tight shorts and revealing not an inch of buttock…or anything else, and he could not stop himself from imagining what lay between those slender, succulent thighs. Theos , he kept inhaling that damned perfume even though he knew it was an impossibility and that not a trace of it remained on her golden flesh.
‘What about you and my family?’ his feminine temptation asked, bringing more bougatsa to her lips. ‘I know I wasn’t fit for much when I was in hospital but I don’t think I imagined the tension between you and my mother.’
‘Until you were hospitalised, the only members of your family I’d had face-to-face contact with were Alexis and Athena.’
She chewed morosely before she brightened and sat up a little straighter while at the same time straightening her right leg.
Her toes were now barely an inch from his thigh. Sexy toes painted blood orange.
God help him, when had he ever found toes sexy? But Lucie’s were. Pretty, sexy feet topped with pretty, sexy nails painted a colour filled with erotic imagery.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, clearly oblivious to the torture he was suffering, ‘I suppose it’s going to take time for the families to properly bury the hatchet.’
‘There is not going to be any burying of any hatchet. Once we’re married and the pictures of the two parties breaking bread together have been printed across the world, both families will return to their respective lives and go back to despising each other. The feud will be over on paper but not in hearts.’ He said all this in as even a tone as he could manage, and then, using sheer force, wrenched his stare away from her sexy toes…
Only to land it straight onto her beautiful face at the same moment the tip of her moist, pink tongue darted out to catch a flaky crumb stuck in the corner of her exquisite mouth, and he found himself suppressing a groan as a wave of desire he could neither staunch nor deny to himself punched through him and his body twisted closer to her before he was even aware of what it was doing.
Theos , every inch of her was exquisite. Every damn inch. She didn’t need to wear sexy clothes to be sexy or to spray perfume onto her skin to smell heavenly. She was Aphrodite, the goddess not just of beauty but of pleasure…of desire.
The eyebrows first plucked by her mother at the age of nine—what kind of mother did something like that? he wondered dimly—drew together as her gaze dipped to his mouth. ‘Do you really believe that?’
He leaned closer still. ‘Do you mean that you don’t?’ he whispered.
The black eyes flickered back up to meet his stare and widened. How had he never seen the flecks of gold in her eyes before, and now that he saw them, they were all he could see, tiny flecks of gold fire burning… hypnotising him.
Colour heightened her exquisite cheeks, the flecks of gold swirling. Her lips parted and she hitched a small breath. ‘I…’ She shook her head slowly, her voice barely audible even though her face was craning towards his. ‘I don’t know…but if you and I can…’
Her words tailed away as another thick throb of desire pulsed through him, all his senses soaking in the flawless beauty of the goddess who was drinking him in with the same dazed intensity with which he was drinking her.
He could smell the heat of her skin and the sweetness of her breath.
Barely aware of what he was doing, Thanasis wrapped his fingers around the warm, silken calf of her leg. A groan rose up his throat.
Theos , even her skin was flawless.
Her lips parted and released a quiet gasp, her wide eyes pulsed and her knee made the lightest of jerks.
That lightest of jerks was strong enough to snap him back to his senses, and in an instant he snatched his hand away and, heart pounding like a jackhammer, pulled his face away from the flawless beauty he’d been barely an inch away from kissing.