Chapter Eight #3
He shook his head. ‘Capaldi. He’d followed me. So I was a thirteen-year-old in charge of a ten-year-old on the streets of Athens.’
Her heart leapt into her throat. She glanced back at her peacefully sleeping son, dying inside at the horror of imagining him ten years from now suffering what Capaldi had. And when her hand moved to cover his it was a conscious effort of empathy and encouragement. ‘How did you manage to…survive?’
‘By the skin of our teeth,’ he rasped. ‘And sometimes with borrowed fortitude.’
‘Is that…when you met Andreas?’
He jerked out a nod. ‘On the very night when I believed my luck had run out. We were cornered in an alley with a gang who believed we were trespassing on their territory. Andreas happened to be hiding in the same alley. And he, it turned out, had more experience with gang warfare than I did.’ He didn’t elaborate and she didn’t ask.
He’d previously told her that Andreas’s story was his to tell if he wished, but she got the awful gist of it.
They remained in sombre silence for several minutes until she drew in a shaky breath. ‘What you said to me before, about my father’s flaws not being mine… You know that applies to you too, right?’
The corners of his mouth turned down but he remained in stoic, rigid silence. It felt essential that she try to get through to him. To break through the fortress of bitterness he’d built around himself.
‘Look around you, Nelios. See how far you’ve come. You’ve risen above the worst things thrown at you and triumphed. Don’t you think it’s time to let that little boy go?’
His smile was humourless. He didn’t follow her gaze, didn’t take in the evidence of all he’d achieved.
If anything his face grew more sombre, more resolute.
‘That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t intend to ever let that little boy go.
He’s the motivation that fuels me to remember what human beings are really capable of. How utterly despicable they can be.’
‘But keeping such a tight grip on the past means you can’t reach for a better future. Don’t you see?’ Again, the sense of urgency throbbing within her said she was pushing not just for him but for herself and Angelos too.
He glanced down at her, the blind fury in his eyes telling her he didn’t hear; that he was locked in that very same past. Several seconds passed before he controlled it.
‘Do you know, I kept track of those last foster parents? And, the second they found themselves a new hovel, they tried to round up the kids they’d endangered again. I made sure they never fostered again.’
‘How?’
His smile was filled with satisfied vengeance. ‘Turns out if you bombard a certain helpline with stories of abuse, even the laziest social worker eventually gets off their ass to do something.’
‘This just proves my point. You’ve done so much for others. Don’t you owe it to yourself to take that next step and put your past to rest?’
His jaw clenched tight in resolute mutiny.
She sighed. ‘Then you’ll never leave that alley. Never truly find peace. Is that what you really want?’
He snapped his gaze from hers and returned it to the glittering sea. ‘What I want is answers. And so I guess I should thank you for facilitating that.’
‘Once Agnes gives you all the answers you need? Then what?’
Another macabre smile etched his face for a single moment before it was gone.
‘Then I’ll use it as fuel to ensure I’m by far a better parent than they ever were.
Then I will be vindicated for cutting them out of my life.
I moved on a long time ago, Vayle. This will just confirm I was right to do so.
But moving on doesn’t mean the broken parts of me will eventually be fixed.
It’s too late for that. Sorry to burst your little bubble, but that’s never going to happen. ’
Shock rocked through her, keeping her rooted to the spot as he turned and walked away.
Far from believing she was breaking through to him, it seemed Nelios didn’t intend to budge an iota, despite his clear pain.
So, while her every instinct screamed at her to follow him, to keep battering at the fortress, her head overruled it.
Nelios was deeply entrenched in his ways and beliefs.
One conversation wasn’t going to overcome that.
If she had the time and patience, and it seemed she had eighteen years of it, then what was the hurry?
She turned from the blissful view and padded over to pick up her son. Hugging him close, smelling his baby scent, she told herself that, no, there was no hurry, even if that clock inside her whispered that time might not be the tool she needed in this endeavour.
That she might need…something else.
Something riskier.
If Nelios had expected an unhappy wife at the dinner table when he walked into his dining room after hours of steaming away in his study with an unhealthy amount of righteous indignation, he was mistaken. Pleasantly mistaken—perhaps that even unsettled him.
There was no hint in her manner that him walking away from her, after practically criticising her for bothering to find the silver lining in the cloud of his past trauma, had upset her. He knew his intractability hadn’t sat well with her if the dull light in her eyes had been any indication.
He nearly tripped over his own feet when she looked up…
and smiled. Not the blindingly fake one some women used to express their rabid glee to be in his presence.
Not the batting-eyelashes one that said a request for a favour lurked just beneath the surface.
It was heart stopping, groin stirring—not that he needed help for that to happen.
Not when she looked more breathtaking each time he saw her.
And with that smile… He sucked in a slow, control-restoring breath, which failed miserably.
She wore a white halter-neck dress threaded with gold that seemed to reflect off her smooth skin.
Her hair was down in gorgeous waves around her shoulders and those hoop earrings that had driven him insane in Buenos Aires were on show once more.
Her perfume, floral and exquisite, called to him and it felt positively sinful not to bend and place a kiss on her cheek.
Or on that gentle slope of her shoulder. So that was exactly what he did.
‘If it’s not against your infernal rules, can I say how beautiful you look?’ he said when he lifted his head.
Her smile remained in place but a breathless quality to her breathing surged pleasure through him, increasing the pressure in his groin.
Her teeth toyed with her lower lip and she tucked a strand of hair over her ear before shrugging. ‘I’ll allow it.’
It was absurd that something eased inside him then, as if he’d been on tenterhooks, when he was his own man and had earned the right not to need to placate anyone. Especially when he was in the right. ‘Efkharisto,’ he drawled as he sat down and shook out his napkin.
Equally disturbing—and the reason he’d spent hours staring into space when he was supposed to have been working—was that the decades-old weight he’d carried seemed somehow…lighter. A realisation that logic insisted had something to do with unburdening himself to Vayle.
But, now they were back on an even keel, he didn’t need to think about it any more. They were done with the quid pro quo of trauma-sharing. Now they could move onto better things.
She asked about his other humanitarian projects and he gladly told her about the one-thousand-strong children’s charity in Panama, the bird sanctuary in Lithuania and the children’s education funds in a dozen countries.
And, dearest to his heart, the camps for orphans and street kids right here in Greece, ably managed by Capaldi’s wife.
‘I’m not sure why I’m so stunned he’s married with kids. He seems so…’ Vayle’s voice trailed off.
‘Fearsome?’ he offered with a hint of a smile—another thing he was doing more and more around her. ‘It’s a prerequisite for working for me.’
She rolled her eyes as she smiled and, thee mou, he wanted to kiss that mouth more than he wanted his next breath.
Which made the words that came out of his mouth as they were enjoying coffee and dessert quite absurd. Because even he knew he was skirting the volcanic rim of temptation. ‘We’ll take the boat out tomorrow—explore the island some more, ne?’
She nodded, and her hair slid over her skin in a silken curtain he wanted to run through his fingers so badly, he had to curl them around his coffee cup to stall the impulse.
‘Sounds good.’
And so their surprisingly delightful evening went, followed by a nightcap in the salon and half an hour of television, until a wide yawn from her had him surging to his feet, his hand held out.
She blinked, a little warily, perhaps also fighting off the charged mood that hovered far too close. But she rose, put her hand in his and let him walk her to their suite door.
Together they checked on their son then, in tones echoing the unnerving yearning he didn’t want to voice, he wished her kalinikta. He watched her blink again before nodding, then she disappeared behind her own doors.
Leaving him standing there—a little shaken, a lot stunned. Because it seemed, in just under seventy-two hours, his wife had slid so effectively under his skin, and he would be so very hard pressed ever to remove her.
And he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.