Chapter Twenty-Two #2
Back in school, Gav had been the handsome rogue, the cheeky, happy-go-lucky guy whom all the girls fancied and who only had eyes for her.
Frankie saw that guy again now; those same sparkling eyes, that same reassuring height, and oh God, that same sudden spiral of excitement unfurling in the pit of her stomach when he paid her a compliment.
‘This, Gav. This is what’s been missing.
I thought it had gone for good, but now …
’ she trailed off, not even understanding what was happening here herself.
And then he dipped his head and kissed her, slowly at first and then not slowly at all, tentatively and then passionately and undone.
Frankie cried a little, because feelings she thought had disappeared had only been hiding all along, and Gav felt as if the broken pieces of his heart were magnetically pulling themselves back into one complete whole.
He led his ex-wife through to his room and laid her on his bed, then closed the door and pulled his T-shirt over his head.
A while later, he wandered into the kitchen to retrieve what was left of the champagne, because, at long last, Frankie and Gav had something precious to celebrate.
Stella flicked through a copy of OK! half-heartedly, looking at the pictures of celebs and their beautiful lives, until she reached the latest star-studded wedding centrespread and unceremoniously dumped the mag in the bin beside her unforgiving metal airport seat.
The huge ticking clock on the wall informed her that she had one more hour to go of her own beautiful sunshine life, and then it was back to England, where the current forecast was grey skies and an unseasonably cold easterly wind.
Whatever. Stella’s only plan was to check into the nearest Premier Inn, drink a bottle of wine, and then crawl into bed for a day or two before she set about the grotty business of reality again.
She should never have come to Skelidos in the first place.
She wasn’t a whim and exotic adventures kind of woman.
She was a go-getter and a ball-breaker, and she intended to live up to her name when she walked into her new job on Monday.
God. Monday . Her heart wasn’t just in her boots, it was beneath the soles of them, squashed into the tread like old mud and stones.
God, she was furious. Furious with herself for being so stupid as to believe in fairytale lives, and even more furious with Angelo for being the real reason she was leaving the island.
‘Stella!’
Yeah, there he was again. She wasn’t even surprised that every man sounded like him. She heard his voice all of the time in her head, and even though she kept telling him to piss off he seemed insistent on hanging around.
‘Stella!’
Right, so that was getting annoying. Piss off, Angelo.
You’re Greek, I’m English, and I’m leaving you here in this bloody airport when I get on that plane and I’m never going to even say your name again.
She drummed her polished nails on the metal armrests as her eyes scanned the boards to see if her gate had come up yet.
‘Stella.’
So this was a first. Her ears and her mind had been playing tricks on her for weeks, but up until now she’d been able to rely on her eyes at least to tell her the truth.
They seemed to be failing her now though, because they were showing her Angelo Vitalis, and he was on his knees in front of her looking out of breath and relieved and terrified and all kinds of gorgeous.
She blinked a few times. Be gone, demon man, be gone.
He didn’t go anywhere. He stared at her, real as you like in his pale-blue shirt and tie, and then he put his hands on her knees, warm and heavy, and she realised that her eyes hadn’t conjured him up from thin air and dogged longing, he was actually there, flesh, blood and beating heart.
‘What the bloody hell do you want?’
She went from shell-shocked to furious in a flash.
She’d been less than an hour away from escaping this godforsaken place, this place where every raven-haired man made her heart fleetingly hurt and every broad, suntanned shoulder made her remember being unceremoniously thrown over one and taken to bed.
And now he was here. He was here, and she wasn’t having it.
‘I’ve come for you,’ he said, never taking his eyes from hers. Didn’t he realise he sounded like the grim reaper?
She coughed, spluttered in fact. ‘You’ve come for me? Bollocks you have. Why? I didn’t ask you to come and I don’t want you here, so piss off.’
‘I’ve come to take you home.’
‘I don’t need an escort. I’m a big girl.’
‘Your home isn’t England. Your home is with me.’
Christ! Stella felt her knicker elastic almost literally twang. It was absolutely ridiculous and outrageous, but all the same, he was here and he was saying things he had no right to say and her traitorous body was reacting in a way that proved it hadn’t learnt a single lesson when it came to him.
‘All of those things you read about me were true,’ he said. ‘I was a stupid, lonely man looking for company in all the wrong places, including at the bottom of champagne bottles and at stupid parties with people I didn’t even like.’
Stella looked at his big, bronze hands clamped over her knees and felt her determination falter, because he could have been describing her own life before she came to the island.
‘And if the truth is all I have left to give you, then here it is.’ He pulled his mobile from the breast pocket of his shirt.
Clicking through it, he found what he was searching for and turned it towards her to show her the grainy image on the screen.
It took Stella a minute to understand what she was looking at, and then she felt her blood slowly start to boil in her veins.
‘Why do you have that?’
Angelo shook his head. ‘I’m not proud of myself, Stella.’
The image wasn’t salacious, or sexy. It was far worse than that in Stella’s eyes. It was a recipe carved into an old wooden bench. The secret recipe for Skelidos gin, carved into the bench in the cellar at Villa Valentina.
‘It’s dynamite stuff. The minute I tasted it I knew I could sell it.
If I could bring this back to the mainland I’d be able to recreate it, and everyone would forget about those newspaper spreads because all they’d be able to print about me would be about this remarkable gin, discovered by chance on an even more remarkable island.
It had the potential to be huge. Gin is the new black, Stella, you know that, and with a backstory like that?
You couldn’t make up anything better if you tried, could you? ’
All of the uncharitable thoughts she’d ever had about this man had been true.
He’d been using her to get information on their gin, and at some point he’d been in the cellar and spotted the recipe.
God . Her cheeks flushed at the memory of being in the cellar with him.
What a fool she was to have imagined he’d been there for her.
He’d been looking for that damn recipe all along.
He probably took the recipe shot while they were banging away and she was too delirious to notice.
And the worst of it was that she could well understand his drive, because she was a similar animal. She knew what it felt like to be on top in the boardroom, and she knew how shameful it was to be clinging to the edge of that table by your ragged fingernails.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you could have invented a better story.’ She was refusing to look at him.
‘Oh, but I can,’ he breathed. ‘I can invent one where I’m sitting in the boardroom with the other stuffed shirts about to hit them with my brilliance, and I realise in the nick of time that I’m about to make the most colossal mistake of my damn life, so I get up and walk out of that office, out of the building and out of my job.
And then I drive the truck containing the only stock of arbutus plants in mainland Greece out of the car park without revealing them to everyone as if I’m the gin fucking magician, and I don’t stop until I reach the port several hours later. ’
Stella wasn’t sure if her heart was even still beating. ‘What happens next?’ she whispered.
‘I’d make the ferry by the skin of my teeth, of course, and I’d take the plants where they should have been all along, and then I’d go inside and make wild passionate sex with the woman I love, because she’s kind and wise enough to accept me back despite all of my faults and my vanities.
She’d accept me exactly as I am, because the man I am with her is the man I want to be. ’
‘Make wild sex, huh?’ she said, half laughing and half tearful, aware that the mostly English package-tour holidaymakers around her had stopped what they were doing to listen in, rapt.
‘Except I was too late,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘She’d gone, and all of my plans would come to nothing because she’d already given up on me.’
Next to them, a woman groaned. Stella couldn’t blame her; it wasn’t the way fairytales were supposed to end.
‘What happens in the end?’ she said, looking into his soulful, coal-dark eyes and finding all of her own fears and hopes reflected right back.
‘Well, he dashes to the airport and catches her just in the nick of time, and then he falls on his knees and begs her to come home with him, because he doesn’t think his heart can stand even one more sunrise without her lying next to him.’
‘Oh my God,’ someone sitting nearby muttered. ‘If you don’t want him, I’ll have him.’ Murmurs of assent came from around the departure lounge.
‘This isn’t some soppy movie,’ Stella said, desperate to overcome her fears and believe him. ‘This is real life.’
‘I know, my love,’ he said. ‘I know. There aren’t any guarantees here after the credits roll, Stella.
I can only stand here and give you my guarantee, my love, and hope that you think I’m worth the risk.
’ For emphasis, he looked at his phone and then smashed it a few times against the table until it was well and truly out of service.
‘Do it, Stella!’ someone shouted. Actually shouted .
She was going to do it. Of course she was. She’d mentally ripped up her plane ticket the moment his warm hands landed on her kneecaps. Angelo stood up, and when he held out his hand she took it and let him pull her up.
‘Kiss! Kiss!’ two over-excited little girls screamed, and then Angelo swept her clean off her feet and did exactly that, so much so that the little girls’ mothers had to cover their daughters’ eyes as the lounge erupted into spontaneous, rowdy applause.
‘This is crazy,’ Stella laughed, a little bit embarrassed and a whole lot in love.
‘Come home and have wild sex with me?’ he murmured against her ear, making her shiver.
They broke off when a pensioner in a floral dress and sensible sandals approached them and touched Stella on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, dear,’ she said, and the whole lounge strained to hear what she was going to say. ‘Have you ever seen An Officer and a Gentleman ?’
Stella nodded, as did most of the other women in the lounge. Who hadn’t given a small slice of their hearts to Richard Gere at one point or another?
‘I don’t have an officer’s hat, but you’re welcome to my husband’s sun visor. It’s barely worn, and the forecast in England is for rain.’
The woman reached up and placed a bright orange plastic ‘Skelidos Forever’ hat on Stella’s head, and Angelo took his cue perfectly to swing her up in his arms and stride across the lounge with her to the exit doors.
‘Your shoulder,’ she laughed, trying to load her weight onto his uninjured side.
‘Is better now. Everything is better now.’
As the doors slid open, a hen party stood on their metal chairs clapping and tunelessly trying to sing ‘Love lifts us up where we belong’, as the bride-to-be hitched up her fake wedding dress and yelled ‘Way to go, Stella! Way to go!’