Chapter Eight
CHAPTER EIGHT
T HE CHAPEL WAS much bigger than Lucie had anticipated from her vantage point on Thanasis’s balcony, but it was too hot to goggle at it from the outside and she practically threw herself through the arched door.
It was every bit as cool inside as she’d hoped.
‘Better?’ the hulk who’d entered the chapel with slightly more decorum asked drily.
On this, Lucie’s second full day in Sephone, she’d woken early again and had swum round to Thanasis’s east-facing balcony. He’d been waiting for her by the pool steps.
She’d grinned up at him. After all, he hadn’t actually made her give the promise not to swim unsupervised again.
He’d shaken his head in mock disappointment and handed her a towel to dry herself. And then they’d sat on his balcony sofa and watched the sun rise together over coffee and bougatsa as if it had all been pre-planned.
‘Much.’ She fanned herself with the back of her hand to rid her face of the last of the perspiration that had broken out on it during the short buggy ride from the villa. ‘I spent every summer in Greece during my schooldays. You’d think I’d remember how hot it gets here.’
‘When was your last summer spent here?’
‘When I was eighteen. Full time work unfortunately does not allow for long, lazy summers.’ Or didn’t. She didn’t have a job any more. Of all the things she’d given up to marry Thanasis and save their two families, her career was the only one she felt real pangs of regret over. Of all the memories lost, her resignation was the one she didn’t want to come back. She had a feeling it would be a scene too distressing to want to relive. In her six years there, the Kelly Holden Design team had come to feel like family. It was a family she’d gate-crashed her way into but still a family. Or a version of one.
No point harking back to something that was already done, she told herself resolutely, and craned her head around at the vast space with its high, ornate pillars and frescoed ceiling in which she and Thanasis would soon marry. It really was the most incredible and awe-inspiring of spaces, like someone had Greek-ified the Duomo, shrunk it to vaguely manageable proportions, and transported it to Sephone.
A thought struck her and she whipped her stare to Thanasis. ‘How can this be here if the island was abandoned millennia ago? I didn’t think they had chapels back then?’
‘I had it built alongside the villa.’
‘Wow. So it’s less than ten years old? It could have been standing for centuries.’
‘That was the feel I was aspiring to.’
‘You’re religious?’
‘Not particularly. It was for my mother. Church is a regular feature of her life. She always suffers guilt if she misses Sunday mass.’
‘I think that has to be the most thoughtful gift I’ve ever heard of,’ she said, astounded.
‘She’s my mother,’ he said matter-of-factly before pulling a musing face. ‘And it has come in handy for our purposes.’
‘There is that,’ she agreed. ‘Did you imagine you would marry in here when you built it? Or did it just work out that way when we settled on marrying on the island?’
He took a while to answer, and when he spoke, his words were slow. ‘When I saw it completed I knew it would be where I marry.’
‘Bet you never imagined it would be with me,’ she jested, and was rewarded with a short, non-committal laugh. ‘So who’s marrying us? Do you have a permanent priest here?’
‘No. There is a semi-retired priest in Kos who travels over whenever my mother’s here. He will be officiating.’
‘I assume the ceremony will be conducted in Greek?’
‘You assume correctly.’
‘Good.’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s fitting,’ she said. ‘It would be sacrilegious to have the service in English. This chapel, this whole island, it’s Greek to its core… What time are we actually marrying?’
‘Six p.m.’
‘Is that to escape the worst of the heat?’
‘Partly, but mostly because when the service is finished we will have the photos taken on the stretch of beach where the sun sets.’
‘So we’ll have the sunset as our background?’
‘Precisely.’
‘Sounds perfect and extremely romantic. The media will lap it up.’
He grimaced. ‘That was the idea behind it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she assured him. ‘First and foremost, this marriage is for business purposes and there’s no point pretending otherwise. That anything else has come out of it is just sheer good luck—let’s face it, it could have gone completely the other way. Can you imagine how awful it would have been if we’d hated each other?’ She imagined it would have been unbearable. Lucie always felt awkward and prickly when in the company of people who disliked her. Whenever Athena had gone through her spates of being mean to her, Lucie had always coiled into herself and grown defensive spikes. Thank God Thanasis had been prepared to give her a chance and not park her in the camp of being his enemy.
But his family hadn’t been prepared to do that. Strange how this hadn’t bothered her when she’d first guessed it but now, just a day later, it made her chest tighten. She supposed it was the fact of their wedding no longer being an abstract thing. She was here, in the thick of all the preparations and glued to the side of the man who would soon be her husband… Well, glued as much as he would allow.
There had definitely been a shift for the better in the way Thanasis was around her. There was a greater sense of looseness about him, not just in his frame but in his speech, less of a sense that he was weighing each word carefully before allowing himself to speak, more gesticulation and more glimpses of the good-humoured man she’d dined with her first night on the island. She was growing to like a lot about him. She liked his patience, of course…that had already been established. Liked that he was happy to play Getting to Know You for hours even though he must already know so much about her and had probably relayed many of the stories she’d coaxed out of him before. Small, mostly insignificant stories that built a picture of a man from the loving, stable background she’d once longed for. A man for whom family was everything, and she had the strong sense that once this controlled bear of a man loved you, there would be nothing he would not do for you and nothing he would not do to protect you, and Lucie supposed it was a sign of his love for her that he was trying to protect her from herself.
Because what she didn’t like was the physical distance he’d imposed between them. Even the small signs of affection had gone. If she stood or sat too close to him, he’d visibly stiffen and edge away. When she’d covered his hand over lunch he’d gently but firmly moved it away. When their ankles had brushed under the dining table he’d adjusted his position so his long legs were aimed in a different direction.
His control was impressive and infuriating because that heady, passionate kiss had unleashed something in her, an ache she carried everywhere, in every cell of her body. There was not a minute spent in his company when Lucie didn’t long for him to just touch her, a longing made worse knowing it had unleashed something in him too. She could feel it like a vibration, the tempered desire beating beneath the powerful body, and she could see it too, a dark pulse in his eyes before he snapped it away with a blink.
She knew he’d imposed this physical distance for her sake, and while she appreciated his reasonings, she would look around his glorious garden and the romantic fairy tale it was being transformed into for their wedding day, and experience that thrilling rush of emotions, and it all felt so real . Her and Thanasis. And if they were real then it meant the fact that his family hated her was real too.
Another family she didn’t fit in with.
She would make them like her, she decided resolutely. Well, try. After all, she’d had nothing to do with the war between the two families. In reality, only Georgios and Petros had. Everyone else was just a bystander. Collateral damage.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Thanasis asked, cutting through her ruminations.
‘Everything.’ She laughed and shook her head, wishing she could wrap her arms around him and breathe in his gorgeous scent. Wishing, if she did that, he would wrap his arms around her and not stiffen and then politely extract himself from her hold.
‘I was thinking about your cynicism about our two families ever truly burying the hatchet. I think it could happen.’
‘Our families have been at war for decades,’ he reminded her. ‘Too much has happened for it to be forgotten. The bad feelings run too deep.’
‘I know, but if you and I were able to see past all that and build something together…’ She lifted her shoulders. ‘There has to be hope the rest of our families can build bridges too, because otherwise what’s the point?’
‘The point is saving our respective businesses and fortunes.’
‘If that’s the case, if the hatchet isn’t actually buried, what’s to stop your father or Georgios picking it up and burying it into each other’s backs again once the businesses are saved?’ Saying this, Lucie knew not even a written guarantee would stop Georgios from going after his nemesis again if the mood struck him.
How the big-hearted man with an even bigger smile could be so vengeful was beyond her understanding, and that there were two elderly Greek men out there who’d been unable to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror and say a firm no when the ‘pranks’ they’d played on each other had turned so dangerous just blew her mind.
‘They know what’s at stake if they do,’ he assured her.
‘But there has to be more than that to stop them starting it all up again. Sure, with you and Alexis now in charge there’s not going to be the blatant sabotage of each other’s fleets—and I know I’ve probably said it before, but I was horrified when I learned Georgios was behind the fuel replacement in your ocean liners that destroyed all those engines. I love him dearly but that was a terrible thing to do—but what’s to stop them making it even more personal if they hate each other so much?’
And how would that affect them ? she suddenly thought with what could only be described as panic. Would things escalate to the extent she would be forced to choose between her new family and her stepfamily?
She might never have felt like a true Tsaliki but they’d all been good to her. Georgios had doted on her as if she were one of his own. The boys, all older except her half-brother, Loukas, had teased and looked out for her in the same way they’d teased and looked out for Athena. As for Athena, with her being only two years older than Lucie and the only girl in a household of boys, it was natural that they should have gravitated together. Sure, Athena could be a Grade A bitch and there were times Lucie would prefer to bury herself alive than be in her company, but when she was on form she was brilliant. When you knew and loved someone as much as Lucie knew and loved Athena, you forgave the less palatable sides of their nature.
How was she supposed to choose between all that and her new family who didn’t even like her? They hated her!
‘My father has given me his word, and Alexis has given his word to keep Georgios in line,’ Thanasis told her steadily.
She pulled a sceptical face and tried her hardest to swallow back the growing angst.
He folded his arms across the gloriously broad chest she ached to bury her face in, and rested his back against a marble pillar. ‘Trust me, matia mou . They both know how close they have come to losing everything. The hatchet might not be buried but, I promise you, the war is over.’
Loving and hating his endearment—loving how tender it sounded on his tongue but hating that it was the closest thing to affection he would currently allow between them—she expelled the last of her sudden panic with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot for a minute that you and Alexis put all the hard work in and dotted all the I’s and crossed all the T’s months ago. There would have been no point in you and I agreeing to marry in the first place if we didn’t have those assurances from them.’
‘Akrivos,’ he said. Exactly.
But now the mentions of her stepbrother had stirred something else in her brain. ‘Were Alexis and Athena really the only members of my family you had contact with before my accident?’
‘In a face-to-face capacity, yes. Why do you ask?’
‘I don’t know.’ And she didn’t, not really, more that her brain was trying to take hold of something in her memory bank, the whisper of a recent conversation…with her mother? It had to be. Who else had she spoken to that she cared for since being hospitalised other than Thanasis and her mother? She had no phone so hadn’t been able to make any calls since arriving on Sephone, and it occurred to her that she’d not given a single thought since her arrival of Thanasis’s offer to have a replacement phone flown over for her.
To her surprise, she found she didn’t want a replacement. Not yet. There was something quite freeing about being uncontactable here on this island paradise, and besides, everyone she loved and cared for would be part of the five hundred strong party that would be descending on Sephone in a few days’ time for the wedding.
For the first time since their kiss, Thanasis’s stare captured hers with the intensity of old. ‘Do you have a memory coming back?’
Returning to the whispers in her memory bank, Lucie shook her head in frustration. ‘I don’t think so. Whatever I’m searching for is recent but I think the drugs I was fed in hospital have blurred things for me.’ She shook her head again and tried to be philosophical about it. She had two months of her life missing and was fixating on one little nebulous thing? Sometimes she really needed to give her head a good wobble. ‘Oh, well, what’s another lost memory between friends…? Does that sound like a helicopter to you?’
She was quite sure she could hear a rotor.
Thanasis, his watchful eyes still on her, craned his ear and nodded. ‘That must be your wedding dress.’
‘Clever dress to fly a helicopter,’ she deadpanned, and was rewarded with a loosening of his features and that glorious spark that always zinged between them whenever he hopped onto her wavelength.
Wryly, he said, ‘For the amount it’s costing, I’m hoping it can cook steak too.’
Almost giddy to have shaken off the disquiet that had sneaked up on her out of nowhere, she had to practically glue her feet to the intricately patterned cool flooring to stop herself from reaching for him. ‘I guess that means it’ll soon be dress-fitting time… What kind of dress is it?’ Funny, she hadn’t thought to ask that before.
‘A wedding dress.’
‘Very helpful. I meant what kind of wedding dress.’
‘I do not have the faintest idea.’ Pointedly, he added, ‘I would assume it’s white but if your wardrobe is anything to go by, it might very well be black.’
She curtsied in her short, black, strapless playsuit and flat black sandals.
He laughed loudly, the deep sound bouncing off the chapel’s walls, a glorious sound that didn’t just soak into her ears but soaked into her skin and veins, feeding the longing for him it felt like she’d been carrying for ever, and meeting his eyes, the lines around them creased with his amusement, she could do nothing to stop the sigh of her longing from seeping out…
His eyes flickered at the sound and in an instant the laughter died. The lines uncreased and the light on his face dimmed.
The air enveloping them thickened and suddenly the chapel was filled with a silence more complete than anything Lucie had ever known. For one long, breathless moment, anticipation that he was going to unfold himself from his prop against the pillar and haul her into his arms held her hostage.
She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or scream when she watched the shutters of his eyes come down with one forceful blink, and when he unfolded himself from his prop against the pillar, it was with his usual languidness.
‘We should probably meet the design team so you can have your dress fitting, so shall we?’ He indicated the door as if nothing had just passed between them.
Lucie summoned a smile. Or something she hoped resembled a smile. ‘Sure, let’s go and fight our way through the furnace just so I can be used as a human pin cushion.’
The lines around his eyes creased a touch. ‘I’m sure that if you keep still and let the team do their job, Francois will be careful not to let them stab you too many times.’
‘A cheering thought, and as a reward for the patience I’m going to have to display whilst being used as a pin cushion, you can take me up into the mountains later to watch the sunset.’
Not giving him the chance to argue with her, Lucie sauntered out of the chapel and into the oven that was the great outdoors. It actually felt quite cooling compared to the furnace inside her.
* * *
To Lucie’s disappointment, she spent so long being used as a human mannequin that by the time she was released from the purgatory of the dress-fitting room, the sun was already starting to set. That wasn’t to say it had been a nightmare—her dress was gorgeous and entirely in a style she adored, which was to be expected seeing as she’d had a say in its design even if she didn’t remember having that say, and Francois and his team had all treated her as if she were a princess. As an added bonus, she hadn’t been stabbed once—it was just that trying to hold a conversation for three hours when all she could see and think of was the expression in Thanasis’s eyes before he’d pulled the shutters back down had been close to impossible. He was driving her crazy!
He continued to drive her crazy with his body language that night over dinner, all pulsing looks when she caught him unguarded combined with utter physical control of himself. They exchanged not so much as a touch of a finger between them. It was a torture that continued the next day, from the moment she swam to his balcony for breakfast right until the time came for them to head into the mountains to watch the sunset.
Changing, at Thanasis’s insistence, out of the sparkly black flip flops he’d decreed unsuitable for trekking in, Lucie shoved her feet into her only vaguely suitable footwear, her chunky black calf-length boots, and met him at the front of the villa. He was in the driving seat of the golf buggy they would use to take them as far and as high as they could go before they had to walk. In the back seat, an enormous backpack filled with food for their adventure.
His gaze flicked to her as she stepped out of the door, then dropped to her feet. There was a long moment of stillness, as if someone had accidentally pressed pause on him, and Lucie had a sudden certainty that came from nowhere that he was going to comment with, ‘Nice boots,’ before he blinked himself back to life and welcomed her with a smile instead of words.
She walked over and showed him the tube of sunscreen in her hand. ‘Can you put some on my back for me please? I can’t reach.’
She watched his reaction, noted the tightening of his smile and the subtle flicker in his eyes, and knew applying sunscreen to her flesh was the very last thing he wanted to do.
She almost laughed.
It was the first time she’d needed to ask him. Daylight hours on Sephone had been spent avoiding the scorching heat of the sun but the climb they were going to embark on would leave her exposed.
Bad luck, Thanasis. Got you with this one, haven’t I?
With a sharp nod, he held his hand out for the tube.
She passed it to him. For the first time since their legs had brushed two nights ago, skin met skin as the pads of their fingers touched. But it was no lingering touch. Thanasis practically snatched his hand away before climbing out of the buggy.
Turning her back to him, she lifted her hair with one hand and held her breath.
Thanasis gritted his teeth, squeezed some of the lotion onto his hand, and told himself to grow a pair. It was human skin, nothing more. So what if it happened to be Lucie’s skin? There wasn’t all that much flesh that needed to be covered, mostly the shoulders and down to the base of her shoulder blades. Her black vest with its thin straps covered the rest of it…the thin straps she lifted her free hand to tug down her shoulders so he could apply the lotion unimpeded, confirming what he’d spent the day determined not to notice. That Lucie wasn’t wearing a bra.
He took a deep breath to clear his suddenly constricted throat and put his hands to the top of her back.
With brisk, wide strokes, he rubbed the lotion into the silken skin, fingers sliding over the nape of her neck, over the slender shoulders, and lower down until every centimetre of exposed flesh was protected.
He would never know what compelled his fingers to trace up her spine or why her shiver compelled his mouth to drop a kiss to her ear.
Breathing heavily, he stepped away from her and forced his thrumming body back into the buggy.