Chapter Seven
CHAPTER SEVEN
L UCIE SHOOK HER head in a futile attempt to clear it of the blood rushing through it and sucked on lips that barely a moment ago had been alive with anticipation of Thanasis’s kiss. She was trembling. Every part of her. Trembling and aching.
He rubbed a giant hand over his face and took a long breath.
Even through all the dazed sensations consuming her, Lucie had just enough wits left to recognise the torture Thanasis was putting himself through, and her ragged heart swelled at the control he must be continually exerting for her sake.
Pulling herself together as best she could, she shuffled over, closing the distance his sudden lurch away had created between them, and took hold of his hand. It stiffened at her touch.
The shutters were back in his eyes, his expression once again unreadable, and she gave a tremulous smile to see it…and to see the tic pulsing in his jaw.
On impulse, she scrambled unsteadily onto her knees and palmed his cheeks…her whole hands fitted on them, the thick stubble brushing deliciously into her skin…and brought her face even closer, dizzily breathing in the scent of coffee lacing his breath.
‘You don’t have to walk on eggshells or treat me like I’m breakable, Thanasis,’ she whispered. ‘My memories of us might be gone but something of what we shared must have imprinted in me because the feelings haven’t.’
Something flashed in the green eyes before they closed and his strong throat moved. ‘Lucie, I…’
She slid her fingers over his mouth and shook her head. ‘You don’t have to explain anything. I can see how hard this whole situation is for you.’ And then, because she could do nothing else, she slipped her fingers away from his lips and replaced them with her mouth.
If Thanasis had been still before, every muscle in his powerful body now tensed, and as her eyes closed and she sank into the sensations dancing over her mouth and into her skin at the compression of the lips she couldn’t stop fantasising about against hers, the control he was exerting made her swollen heart expand to fill every crevice inside her. Sighing into him, she slipped her hands round to clasp the back of his head and slowly dragged her fingers through hair softer than silk.
She sensed rather than heard the groan in his throat before the unyielding mouth flexed and his lips parted, only a fraction but fraction enough for his breath to fill her senses with a taste and heat so delicious that her brain shut down completely under the weight of sensation flooding her.
Thanasis could hear nothing above the roar in his head, could barely hear his own urgent commands to resist, to unclasp the hands clinging so tightly to his head and push Lucie away before he gave in to the hunger and melted into her honeyed temptation.
He must not fall into it. He must resist. Resist, resist, resist, and with this one thought pushing through the growing cacophony in his brain, he lifted his hands with every intention of pushing her away but instead found his fingers cupping her face as his head tilted to fuse their mouths into one. The tips of their tongues collided and a burst of lust like he’d never experienced in the whole of his life smashed into him, its force so shocking that, with a hoarse groan, he buried his fingers into her mass of soft curls and opened his mouth to her.
Fire raging through his veins, his tongue swept into her hot, sweet temptation.
Theos , she tasted even better than their few fleeting kisses had promised, a potently dark sweetness that fed and stoked his hunger, the gentle softness of her mouth an aphrodisiac that punched straight into his heavy, aroused loins.
His senses consumed with a ravenous hunger he’d never felt before, Thanasis swept his hands down the curve of her back, and crushed her flush against him, holding her tight as he laid her down, the searing fusion of their mouths and tongues deepening into something primitive as he feasted on the beauty who had taunted and haunted him for so long.
Fingers dug tightly into his skull scraped lower, through the hairs of his neck and over the planes of his shoulders, and he shuddered at the sensations scorching his skin, shuddered again when her thighs parted and she wrapped her legs around him, and as he dragged his mouth over the delicate skin of her throat and felt the heavy thump of her pulse beneath his lips, he cupped a breast frustratingly covered in her tight swimsuit and felt the arousal of her hardened nipple against his palm at the same moment she circled her hips and his own arousal jutted into her pelvis.
God help him, he had never known desire could be this swift and this potent and this greedy, and he brushed his lips lower, his tongue sweeping over a collarbone that was as perfect as the rest of the body writhing beneath him…even her moans of pleasure were perfect, soaking into his ears like music, close to drowning out the voice in his head distantly shouting that he had to stop this, right now, before things went too far.
The voice cut through again, even louder.
Stop.
Summoning every ounce of his strength, Thanasis wrenched his mouth from the nectar of Lucie’s flesh and pulled himself away from her.
The silence that followed was stark, the thumps of his weighty heart the only sound to cut through.
Theos , he could hardly breathe.
The sudden pleasure withdrawal of Thanasis’s ravenous mouth and the glorious heat of his body left Lucie completely disoriented. Dazed, she blinked up at him, hand fluttering to her pounding heart, barely able to snatch the smallest of breaths. Her body was on fire. There was a deep, throbbing ache between her legs as though the very core of herself had turned into lava.
Dear heavens, so that was what a real kiss felt like. Like your bones were melting into liquid.
As she watched the rapid rise and fall of Thanasis’s perfect chest and the pulse throbbing in his tight jaw, her other hand absently fluttered to her mouth, fingers exploring the delicate skin his lips had just ravaged. The trail his tongue had made against her neck burned deliciously.
‘That should not have happened,’ he stated heavily, breaking the stunned silence.
It was like he’d tipped a bucket of ice water over her head. All the heady, joyous zings careering through her blood froze in their tracks.
He twisted back to face her with a dark, forbidding expression. ‘Your feelings for me are false.’
Utterly confused, she scrambled upright and swallowed. ‘How can you say that?’
There was an implacability to the way he was looking at her. Only the heaviness of his breaths betrayed the effect their moment together had had on him.
‘Listen to me,’ he said roughly before taking her hands and placing them flat on top of his palms. ‘You feel that, yes? The touch of our hands?’
She almost wanted to deny it. It felt like Thanasis had given her a glimpse of heaven and was now denying it even existed.
‘You feel it because it is true and quantifiable. Whatever else you think you feel for me, it doesn’t exist because it can’t—without the memories, there are no feelings because there cannot be because there is nothing for the feelings to touch on.’
‘But they’re there. I feel them,’ she protested, and wrapped her fingers tightly around his hands. ‘I feel them the same way I can feel your skin against mine.’
He shook his head with that same implacable assurance. ‘No. You feel them because that is what you want to feel, because you feel you must for my sake, but they are not true. In time your real feelings for me will develop organically and they will be true, but you cannot force them and I will not take advantage of their absence.’
‘You can’t tell me I didn’t feel what I just felt then,’ she said, searching his eyes with something close to desperation. Could he be right? Was she trying to force feelings on herself? Whether he was right or wrong, all the sensations she’d just experienced in his arms… She had never, ever experienced anything like that before, a kiss that had made her come close to spontaneously combusting. ‘Or tell me you didn’t feel it too.’
God damn that Thanasis wished he could. And God damn that he wished he could just tell her the truth, and it unnerved him to know how close he’d come to telling her exactly that in the moment before she’d blown his mind with a kiss. A whisker. He’d been a whisker away from telling her the truth and blowing up his life.
He couldn’t tell her the truth but nor could he let her believe that any feelings she might have for him were ghosts of her past feelings, because those feelings had never existed.
A man had his limits and Thanasis had just found his.
‘Of course I felt it too.’ He groaned and tugged his hands away from hers, running them furiously through his hair.
He could still feel it, the entirety of his body alive to the flame that had just incinerated them both.
‘The chemistry between us has always been strong.’ So strong that they’d both fought it like warriors. ‘But chemistry isn’t what we’re talking about. All you know of your missing memories is what you’ve been told—you have nothing tangible to pin them to and nothing real to pin your feelings to, and until you do, I cannot in good conscience allow anything to happen between us.’ He fixed her with a stare. ‘I won’t.’
Never. Especially not under the weight of a lie.
God damn it, why had he let that happen? He’d known it would be hard keeping Lucie at arm’s length whilst playing the role of devoted fiancé but hadn’t guessed it would be impossible.
A noise too much like real life cut through the tension-filled silence, and it took a long moment for Thanasis to realise it was the sound of a reprieve.
With a silent prayer to whichever deity had taken pity on him, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his private phone. ‘I must answer this.’
Getting to his feet, painfully aware of the arousal still so tight in his loins and of the unsteadiness of his legs, Thanasis crossed the bridge of his pool.
‘Thanasis.’
He turned his head to the sound of Lucie’s voice.
Her eyes held his for a long breath before she gave a small smile. ‘Thank you.’
A cloud of emotion filled and pushed against his chest, and he closed his eyes briefly before continuing to the balustrade.
His back to her, he put the phone to his ear. ‘Yassou.’
‘How is she?’ Alexis asked, getting straight to the point.
It took everything he had not to turn back round to look at her.
Theos , he could taste her as fresh as if her sweet tongue were still dancing against his. Feel the softness of her skin beneath his fingers. The hardness of her nipple against his palm.
He swallowed to answer. ‘Doing well.’
‘She is with you?’
This time he couldn’t resist looking even as his hackles rose at the contemptuous tone Alexis used when referring to Lucie.
She was still sitting on the sofa. She’d pulled her knees up to her chest. Her stare was exactly where he’d known it would be. Even with the distance between them, he could see the concentration on her face, see her thinking with the same strength as the stare boring into him.
And then her lips curved into a smile. A real smile. Lucie’s Aphrodite smile. A smile she’d bestowed him with only once in their previous incarnation, on their very first meet, right before his deliberately acerbic dig about her boots.
He blew out slowly and turned away. ‘Yes.’
‘Any signs of her memories returning?’
‘No.’ He almost—almost—wished they would.
‘Good. Everything is contained this end.’
‘And this end.’ Dangerously contained.
‘The paparazzi took pictures of you two walking Piraeus harbour. Holding her hand was a nice touch.’
His hackles rose even higher. His voice gained an edge. ‘I’m glad you think so.’
‘I’ve discussed things with my father and Rebecca, and we’ve agreed on a million-euro payment for her silence. You will match it?’
Outrage at this speared so deeply that if Alexis Tsaliki had been standing in front of him, Thanasis’s fist would have connected with his nose without a second thought.
Breathing heavily to get a grip on his temper, entirely aware that Lucie was still watching him, Thanasis lowered his voice and growled, ‘Twenty million each.’
Alexis laughed.
‘One million is an insult .’
‘It will be two million if you match it, more than she would earn in her lifetime.’
‘Irrelevant,’ he snarled. ‘Your family might think her expendable but I will not see her paid off so cheaply when, without her, we would all have lost everything by now. Twenty each or I tell her the truth this minute and leave all our fates to the gods.’
He heard a sharp suck of air.
Good. Let Alexis think he meant it. He deserved it for his contempt and the cruelty of what all the Tsalikis were doing to her.
This wasn’t a game. This was Lucie’s life.
Bad enough that he was playing his part in it, but this was her mother and the people she regarded as family conspiring against her without any care for what the truth would do to her.
Thanasis had no control over what the truth would do but he could play his part in making it more palatable for her to live with.
After a long silence, Alexis finally said, ‘Okay. Twenty each. But you are playing a dangerous game, my friend.’
‘No, I am trying to save you from losing a sister.’ Hadn’t he warned Rebecca that she stood to lose Lucie? Clearly she’d not taken his warning on board or shared it with the rest of her family.
‘She is not my sister.’
An image flashed in Thanasis’s mind. Lucie’s face in that early moment in her hospital bed when he’d told her the world at large considered her a Tsaliki daughter and sister in all but blood and name. The amazement and delight in her expression.
Alexis might not regard Lucie as his sister but she thought of him as her brother.
Responding with a voice cold enough to freeze the Aegean, Thanasis said, ‘And you are not my friend. Goodbye.’
He disconnected the call then had to breathe all the way into his twisted guts to stop himself hurling his phone over the balustrade.
This was why he’d fought tooth and nail to keep Lucie at a strict arm’s length.
One kiss. One goddam kiss. It had softened him up and humanised her in the way he’d always known he must never allow, not with someone he despised with such strong passion because how could he keep his future marriage pure living with such heady, twisted temptation?
He pulled more ragged air into his lungs.
He didn’t know when his feelings for Lucie had first shifted but he was starting to understand that she’d never deserved his loathing any more than she deserved Alexis’s contempt.
Shifted feelings and increasing guilt or not, there was too much at stake to confess the truth before the wedding, too many lives and livelihoods at stake to walk away.
He might have thought this whole charade wrong from the start, but he’d gone along with it and would continue playing along because there was still no better option. He needed Lucie to marry him. They all needed her to marry him. Even Lucie did, and he must never let the chemistry between them win before the truth could be told.
He sensed movement behind him and turned to find her crossing the narrow bridge.
Blood filled his head, all his senses whirring back to life as she neared him. The taste of her in his mouth strengthened like a taunt.
She stopped before him like a proud goddess with her chin lifted and a hint of defiance ringing in the all-seeing eyes. ‘What you just said before your phone call, about all my feelings for you being false…’
The blood in his head began to pound.
He held his breath.
‘I don’t believe they are,’ she finished. And then she smiled her Aphrodite smile. ‘But I get why it bothers you that they are and why you need me to be certain—’
‘There can be no certainty until your memories come back,’ he interrupted roughly. ‘I could tell you anything and you have no way of knowing if it is the truth or not.’
Her Aphrodite smile didn’t diminish an iota. ‘You can tell me anything and I have no way of verifying it.’
‘Exactly.’ Now, at last, she was getting it. Thanasis might not be able to tell her the truth but he could damn well open her mind to the possibility that everything she’d been told about her missing memories could all be lies. Open her mind so when he revealed the truth on their wedding night, the shock would be absorbed.
‘But if you keep putting me at arm’s length, how am I ever going to get to know the real you and know if my feelings are true or not?’ she said, a glint of stubborn knowing in her eyes. ‘Because, let’s face it, my memories might never come back.’
Lucie laughed to see the frustration flash on Thanasis’s gorgeous face.
Once she’d got over her shock at his declaration that the most thrilling moment of her life was something that should never have happened, she’d realised nothing had changed and that he was still trying to protect her from both himself and herself.
Well, no more. She’d spent days trying to be compliant and behaving in a way she’d been told was for the best because of her head wound, and now it was time to take back control and narrate her own story rather than let others dictate it for her, and that included Adonis’s sexier replacement.
Reaching for Thanasis’s hand, marvelling at the power contained in it, she pulled it to her mouth and rubbed his fingers against her lips. ‘See?’ she said, gleefully gazing into a stare she could see fighting to put the shutters back down. ‘Whatever my memory issues, I still have free will, and I had free will when I kissed you, just as you had free will when you kissed me back and free will when you pulled away. We both know I will marry you whatever happens, so stop treating me with kid gloves. I promise you, I’m unbreakable.’
Jaw clenched tightly, he pulled his hand away. ‘No one is unbreakable.’
‘I made it through my childhood in one piece and with a hide built of rhino skin. Trust me, there is nothing you or anyone can do to hurt me on anything more than a superficial level, so gloves off and mask off—I want to know the real Thanasis Antoniadis and make up my own mind about the man he is and let my feelings develop in the organic way he suggested just twenty minutes ago.’
That had him, she thought with yet more glee that might be an effect of the giddiness of his kisses still streaming in her veins or might be due to finally snookering him with his own words.
Not allowing him time to interject, Lucie pointed in the distance to where the early morning sun was rising in an arc between the V created by two mountains directly in their line of vision. It was as if a straight line had been created from balcony to V, sweeping over the roof of the chapel for good measure. ‘First question. Is it coincidence that this section of balcony is completely aligned with the rising sun?’ She laughed at his disbelieving expression. ‘I want to know you , Thanasis. Everything about you. So get talking.’
Sometimes, Thanasis thought, a man had to know when he was beaten, and there was no doubt in his mind that on this occasion Lucie had outplayed him with nothing more than a twisting of his words.
The quick brain that never missed a trick was back in full functioning order, but this wasn’t the confrontational Lucie he’d spent two months despising. This was a different Lucie. This was the Lucie he’d spent all those long weeks determined not to know.
He hadn’t wanted to know her.
For all that she’d given as good as she’d got, he’d been the instigator of the war that had erupted between them. It had all been him.
But that was then and now everything had changed.
He could do nothing to change what had already passed but he could play along and give Lucie the chance his determination to hate her had meant he’d refused to give her before. Get to know the real Lucie Burton and not the warped picture he’d pre-painted in his head, a painting made with all the wrong colours and strokes. Now it was time to allow her real colours to shine through.
As painful as it was to admit, he owed her that much.
His mind set, he filled his lungs with clean Sephone air and met the expectant, sparkling black eyes. ‘Even though you have presented me with a closed question, I will enter the spirit of the game as the game was intended and give a full answer.’
She gave a full wattage beam.
‘The villa was designed with the rise and fall of the sun in mind. You have to get up early to see it, but when the sun first rises, the only light on the island comes from between those two mountains.’
‘So my balcony and the balcony on the other side of your room must face west, then?’
He nodded. ‘When the sun sets, our vantage point gives the illusion that it is melting into the sea.’
‘Okay, but whose idea was it to capture both the sunrise and sunset in the villa’s design? Yours or Thomas’s?’
‘Mine.’
‘Now we’re talking.’
He narrowed his eyes in question.
She rose onto her tiptoes and tapped the end of his nose. ‘It means that you appreciate the wonders of the world.’
His chest filling at the teasing but affectionate gesture, Thanasis took a step back.
While he was willing to play along with Lucie’s wish to get to know him better, and knew it was only fair that he should get to know the real Lucie better too, he could not in all good conscience allow himself to play along with the role of her lover. Not now. Not with the taste of her still alive on his tongue and the heavy weight of desire still so thick in his loins. It had taken more strength than he’d known he possessed to pull away from her, and he couldn’t be certain he would find that same strength again, not when she was so warm and passionate and willing and…
He snatched a breath.
He needed to keep Lucie at a physical arm’s length until they married. Just a few more days, that was all, and then the truth would be revealed.
It was even possible that she would forgive him.
‘I can’t say anyone has said that to me before,’ he murmured.
‘You must hide that part of your nature really well. Weren’t you tempted to build your villa up there?’ She indicated the slightly higher of the two mountains.
‘That is where I originally wanted the villa built, yes. The only thing that stopped me was the terrain—it would have been too dangerous for the building crew. There is a particular spot up there where you can watch the sun rise and set. It is the only vantage point on the whole island better than what we have here.’
‘Will you take me there?’
‘When you are better.’
She pulled an unimpressed face.
‘The golf buggies can’t reach it so you have to walk, and it’s a long, often steep walk,’ he explained. ‘Give yourself a few days to fully rebuild your strength.’
She eyed him for a moment and then grinned. ‘Okay. But only if you get Elias to make me more of those delicious keftedes for me to build my strength with.’
He couldn’t stop himself from grinning back. ‘You have a deal.’
But a deal he absolutely would not seal with a kiss.