Chapter 3
Demetri clearly hadn’t been expecting me to ask that particular question. I’d never seen him look so flustered.
‘I’m sure I’ve told you before – she works at the farm.’ He held my gaze but not for long before he turned away.
‘Are you sure that’s all she is? I hear you talk to her and I know I can’t speak your language but your tone changes. It feels like there’s a little more to it than the fact that she’s just an employee.’
His cheeks started to colour, only a slight blush, but enough for me to notice.
Even though I hadn’t known him long, I felt like I knew him extremely well and the strange feeling I’d been pushing to the back of my mind was now on the tip of my tongue.
If there was a possibility that I was going to uproot my life for this man, I needed to know everything.
‘And there’s nothing more to it than that?’ My eyes locked onto his. Once more, he was the first to look away but this time I felt like I was getting a little closer to the truth.
‘No.’
A sudden coldness swept across the whole of my body.
My intuition was telling me something different.
I knew that the tone in which he spoke to her was different to how he spoke to other people in his life.
He was always quite matter of fact with his friends and colleagues.
I’d heard him on the phone with them many times.
It suddenly occurred to me that he talked to her the same way he talked to me. With love.
I took a deep breath and sat more upright. Half of me wanted to delve further, the other half wanted to bury my head in the sand, but I needed the full truth if I was going to make my decision.
‘So why is she the one who is looking after your mother?’
He smiled. ‘Katrina is a good person. Kind, gentle and she loves Mama like she was her own. She lost her own parents years ago and so kind of got adopted into our family. It was only because she took over some of the business tasks from Mama and me that it allowed me to come to England. But now Mama has had her stroke, she literally cannot run the farm and look after Mama. They are two full-time jobs. But she has her own life and that’s why it has to be me who must return to look after her now. ’
‘And that’s it, nothing else?’
‘I see her as a relative. It’s the truth, Michelle. It’s you I love. You I’m asking to come and live with me in Greece.’
‘OK, so where does she live? Is she far away? I presume she’s close by if she’s on call for your mother right now?’
It was his time to sigh, after a brief pause.
‘She lives on the farm. In the annexe in the grounds of the farm house.’
My eyes widened and I blew out air from my lips. I really wasn’t expecting that.
Honestly, I had no idea if I wanted to move to Greece.
I loved him dearly. He was the first person in years who had opened my heart, which I’d thought had been closed off forever.
The man who made my heart flutter with excitement, who made me feel like I could see a future.
But that future was in Cornwall, not on a little Greek island, however picturesque it sounded.
Now this had thrown everything up in the air; put doubt into my mind.
‘Do you love her?’
He hesitated.
My heart dropped.
His brief silence, a thousand unspoken words.
‘Not in the same way that I feel about you. I love her like I would love a sister. Nothing more.’
The question for me now was whether he was telling me the truth. Would he, if I had not delved deep and asked these difficult questions, have told me any of this?
He was basically asking me to uproot my life, in a place I knew and loved, to go and live in a house which sounded like it was in the middle of nowhere with not only his dying mother, but also a woman that I felt he knew better than he was letting on.
I stood suddenly and knew I had to get out of there. There were times when the beach called to my heart. When I would walk along the shore and work through the puzzles of my mind. This was one of those times.
I leant down to kiss him on the top of his head, my lips lingering there for a moment, savouring the scent of his familiar body wash and shampoo.
‘I’m sorry but I need to go and think. I’ll call you later.’
He nodded and gave a quivery smile.
My heart was aching.
And I was still no further forward with making a decision.
If I made the choice to go to Greece with him, I’d have to give up everything I’d built here in Sandpiper Shore: my beautiful new home, my thriving business, my fabulous, loyal friends.
If I made the other choice, to stay here, I’d be giving up a man I knew I had fallen head over heels for.
Would I be able to live with that decision? I had no bloody idea!