Chapter Ten
NELIOS SAT ON the beach, arms resting on his knees, watching the sun rise and the waves crash from the sea he’d just swum in.
For a man neck-deep in the most pleasurable weeks of his life, his gut churned far too agitatedly for his liking. It was what had driven him from his bed when he should be wrapped around his wife.
But… The feeling of time running out wouldn’t leave him.
In all the years he’d thought of the parents who’d abandoned him, he’d never been this riled up emotionally.
Sure, there’d been much fury and bitterness, as was his right.
But it’d been ruthlessly overlaid with icy, implacable resolve.
And, once he’d divorced himself from the past and got down to the very real business of surviving, he’d locked any superfluous emotions away.
Yes, they’d been ruffled when he’d come face-to-face with his mother and tangled with Vayle and her last year. But control had soon reasserted itself, as it so often did, when he’d won and then triumphantly walked away.
He didn’t feel so much in control now. The growing emotions he didn’t really want to label as nerves and…panic…but couldn’t see any other way to describe them, tunnelled a different path through him.
The past weeks had been blissful—another term that greatly alarmed him, but admittedly in a good way. Vayle had come to him and they’d obliterated that terrible clause that would’ve made them both suffer unnecessarily. And, boy, had they taken advantage of it since then.
He’d enjoyed his wife anywhere and everywhere all over Apeiron, delighting in showing her different sexual experiences that left a deep flush on her cheeks and stars in her eyes.
As for him… Having been intent on eradicating any emotional fallout from the women he’d tangled with in the past, he’d never slept with the same woman for this long before. It was…novel, pleasurable. Satisfying, even.
He knew enough to know he didn’t want to upset that particular apple cart. He didn’t want Vayle upset. But also enough to know a giant spanner was heading into what had become a smooth operation.
You know the root cause of this situation—how to fix it.
He shifted and rolled onto his feet, impatient with the persistent voice. Then with the far too beautiful view that taunted him with its perfection, highlighting that his life was far from perfect.
Vayle’s admonishments about the consequences of living in the past rang in his ears. His thoughts were so busy crowding each other, he didn’t realise he’d walked all the way to his suite until she turned from viewing the sunrise on their terrace.
‘Hey, you were gone when I woke up. Are you okay?’ she murmured softly, examining his face in that way she had that made him think she could see his every bitter—perhaps irredeemable—thought.
That all this examining and hedging was if not now, then soon to be the very thing that wrote him off in her eyes.
‘No need to worry about me, glikia mou.’
There was a defensive bite in there that made him shift again, annoyed when he saw his glib remark hadn’t quite done the trick of reassuring her.
Silence stretched just a little too long.
He knew her well enough by now to recognize the slight tightening of her shoulders, the way she absently traced the lip of the coffee cup in her hand.
She was winding up to tell him something. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t have to.
‘Agnes called again,’ she said, voice low.
A muscle flexed in his jaw. He froze. Not visibly, not enough for anyone else to notice—but she would. She always did.
‘She left a message,’ she continued, careful now. ‘She’s in Athens. She wants to see you.’
He finally turned his head and met her gaze.
‘You should call her back,’ she pushed.
‘No.’ The word cracked out of him, too sharply, too desperately. The slipping sensation intensified.
She inhaled slowly, and he could feel her fighting to keep the peace. To keep this moment from detonating. ‘Nelios…we had an agreement.’
‘And I believe I said I would talk to her, but in my own time.’
She was quiet for a beat. ‘If not now, then when?’
Her words curled around something deep inside him, something old, scarred and better left buried. Only it wasn’t. She was raking it raw.
‘Why does this matter to you so much?’ he seethed.
‘Because I see what it’s doing to you,’ she said. There was no accusation, no pleading—just truth; soft, dangerous truth. ‘The way you lock parts of yourself away. The way you flinch from your past like it might still reach for you. She’s your mother, Nelios.’
His laugh felt acid-sharp. ‘She hasn’t been. Not for a very long time.’
‘Then ask her why. Because if you don’t…’
Something sliced deeper, sharper than a scalpel. The panic spurted, then gushed. He clenched his belly tight. ‘Be very careful what you say next, glikia mou.’
Her gaze lingered on the horizon for a beat, then two, then returned to his.
‘Maybe today is a day to be completely reckless.’ She folded her arms around herself—a shield.
‘I’m not trying to fix you, Nelios. I just want you to stop pretending you’re happy dwelling in the past when you’re not.
You’re still bleeding somewhere beneath the surface, and at some point it’ll be too late. ’
He rose, an instinctual move. He hated looking up at her when he was cornered like this. Hated even more the flicker of guilt in her eyes—because it mirrored the feeling inside him.
‘Have at it, if you insist. But you’ll be participating on your own,’ he said tightly. Then he turned, striding away from her.
‘Nelios!’
He didn’t stop. But each step dragged something heavy behind it. And, even though he didn’t look back, he felt the precise moment his time dwindled to zero in the silence he left behind.
She stood there long after he left.
The terrace felt colder now, as if the sea breeze had turned on her too. A single tear slipped down her cheek—not dramatic, not even bitter, just inevitable.
She lowered herself back into the chair, arms wrapped around her ribs, as if she could hold the crack in her chest closed with sheer will.
He’d walked away from her.
After the past weeks, despite knowing that harsh reality was waiting to pounce, that hurt more than anything else ever could.
It was time to accept that Nelios would keep guarding his pain as if it was the only thing that made him who he was.
She’d seen the shadows in his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking.
Felt the tension in his body when her fingers brushed too close to his heart.
Too close to the fortress he’d spent decades building and lovingly tending.
But love—real love—couldn’t survive in the dark.
And definitely not the love she now accepted that she felt for him. The kind that wanted to dance in the sunlight all day, every day. The kind that came with rainbows shortly after cleansing rain.
If he insisted on keeping that door locked, then maybe it was time to stop knocking.
Unfortunately, putting thought into action wasn’t as easy.
For the next week she withstood the frosty silence and heavy censure, broken in the dead of night in bed when Nelios almost unconsciously dragged her into his arms and they fell on each other with almost desperate abandon.
Despite the hollowness of it, she attempted to convince herself that maybe sex was the stepping stone to this marriage of convenience, based on a piece of paper she didn’t want.
Vayle suspected it was that abiding demonstration of care and affection for his son that made her own yearning so acute. That made her wish for more, damn it.
She wanted Nelios Petralis to throw off the pain from his past so he could decalcify his heart. So he could love her. Because, unless things changed, she was dooming herself to decades of one-sided longing and heartache. Or, she desperately feared, an even quicker exit.
Then a whole new facet to their journey struck.
Her heart swung like a pendulum, one side elation, the other desolation, as she stared down at the test stick in her hand.
Despite the care they’d taken, and the fact that she hadn’t had her period since Angelos’s birth, it seemed somewhere along the line, probably after one of those frantic, middle of the night, half-asleep couplings, nature had taken its course. And lightning had struck twice.
She was pregnant with Nelios’s child.
Again.
And, with the bombshell she’d just discovered ticking away furiously beneath her skin, she went in search of Nelios.
To find him packing a bag. ‘Wh-where are you going?’
His face was set in forbidding lines she’d hoped never to see again after those hours on his jet that first time. ‘To Athens. I have an urgent issue that’s arisen there.’
‘Were you planning on telling me? Or just sending another of your minions to tell me?’
Was that a wince or was she deluding herself, as she had been about everything?
‘I guess we haven’t come as far as I thought if common courtesy can fall away so quickly,’ she muttered.
‘Did you want something, Vayle?’
‘Of course. I always want something.’ The smile that accompanied her flippant words missed by a mile.
‘But alas it seems I’m destined to just want and not get.
’ She glanced at his case, her heart lurching.
‘And I thought you could work from anywhere on earth?’ she demanded, her fingers closing around the stick in her pocket.
He stiffened. ‘Some meetings are better had in person.’
She frowned, the sense that he wasn’t telling the full truth gripping her.
‘Nelios—’
‘Enough, Vayle. You say you’re not trying to fix me, but we both know that’s not true, don’t we? Because you keep eyeing that can of worms, itching to open it, ne? Even though I cannot give you what you want.’
‘And what is it that you think I want?’
He looked almost impatient, pained. As if he’d expected her simply to accept that and cower back into her corner. ‘What every woman with a ring on her finger seems to want.’