Chapter Twenty-Eight
Bea found herself hovering around the kitchen after breakfast on Tuesday. She’d done the dishes. She was as ready as she was going to be, but she couldn’t settle. She closed her eyes when Blane’s hand came down on her shoulder.
“You okay, darlin’?”
She turned and pressed a kiss to his lips. “I am. And I’m sorry I’m being so ridiculous this morning.”
He shook his head but didn’t comment, and she appreciated that.
She knew he wasn’t impressed with any of this, but he was supporting her anyway.
Her lawyer had called yesterday morning to say that he wouldn’t be able to meet until Thursday, and then Katerina had come by later to tell her that Nikos wanted to come today, in person, to apologize for frightening her.
Katerina had been a little wary of Blane, and Bea understood exactly why. He hadn’t said a word, but there had been an air of disapproval about him, which Bea thought was unfair—Katerina hadn’t done anything wrong.
She brought herself back to the moment. “He should be here soon.”
“Yeah.”
“And you promise you won’t…”
He smiled through pursed lips. “I promise. But only for you.”
“Thank you.”
She ran upstairs to change, not because she needed to, but because it gave her something to fill the minutes.
Blane was standing at the kitchen window with a mug of coffee by the time she came back down.
She hesitated in the doorway. He was watching the lane the way he watched most things, as though it might do something he needed to be ready for.
“You don’t need to glower at the road,” she told him. “Nikos isn’t due for another ten minutes.”
“I’m not glowering. This is just my face.” He didn’t turn around.
She came to stand beside him and bumped her shoulder against his arm, which was about as high as she could reach. “It’s a lovely face. It’s simply doing something very disapproving at the moment.”
He didn’t smile. “I still think this is a bad idea.”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“And I’ll no doubt mention it again.” He took a sip of coffee. “That man was in your courtyard in the middle of the night, Bea. Now you’re inviting him in for coffee.”
“I know, but… Katerina…”
“Katerina thinks he’s shy.” Blane let out one of those huffs of his. “Shy doesn’t put somebody outside your window in the middle of the night.”
“Technically, it wasn’t the middle of the night, Blane. It was late, but…”
His eyebrows drew together, and she let it go. He’d put forward his argument several different ways since he arrived, and in the strictest sense he was right. But being right about the facts and being right about the man were two different things.
“He’s coming to apologize,” she said, “and to explain. I’d like to hear what he has to say. You don’t have to like it.” She didn’t quite succeed in hiding her smile. “You don’t even have to be here for it.”
That earned her the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Damn right I do.”
The car came up the lane five minutes later. It was a dusty old hatchback that approached slowly and stopped a respectful distance from the gate, as though the driver wasn’t sure he was allowed any closer.
Bea’s stomach tightened despite everything she’d told herself. “That’ll be him.”
Blane set down his mug. He didn’t say anything—he didn’t need to.
He’d gone all still, he was in super-security mode, and it might have been alarming if she hadn’t known it was all for her benefit.
She went outside, and Blane came with her, settling into place half a step behind.
And she loved him for it. He was close enough to reach her if she needed him, but far enough back that it was clear whose meeting this was.
She didn’t need to wonder whether he’d done it deliberately. He absolutely had.
The man who got out of the car was smaller than she’d expected.
In her imagination he’d grown into something enormous.
In daylight he was perhaps sixty, wiry and weathered brown.
He held a flat cap in both hands, turning it slowly around and around by the brim.
He was clean-shaven. She noticed that, and for some reason found it incredibly touching.
He’d shaved to come and say sorry. He came as far as the gate and stopped.
It seemed fitting, somehow, that he stood there at the gate Blane had hung the morning he left.
She saw the exact moment Nikos registered that there was a second person in the courtyard. His gaze traveled up and up, and the flat cap went still in his hands. His mouth opened, but no words came out. Whatever apology he might have rehearsed apparently deserted him completely.
“Kaliméra,” she said as gently as she could. Her Greek still wasn’t wonderful, but she could manage a warm good morning.
Nikos didn’t answer. He was still staring at Blane the way a man might look at storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
She felt Blane shift his weight behind her and knew, just as she’d come to know so many things about him, that every instinct he had was telling him to step forward.
To put himself between her and the man at the gate and make it known that whatever happened here would happen on his terms. That was who he was.
And she could admit that it was a good deal of why she loved him.
But… She reached back without looking and rested her hand in the middle of his chest. Not trying to restrain him—good grief, she couldn’t restrain the man if she tried.
She just wanted to connect with him and somehow make him understand the words filling her head.
I’ve got this.
For a moment she could feel his heart beating fast and hard beneath her palm.
Then he breathed out slowly. The tension didn’t exactly leave him, but it stood down.
He stayed where he was. She didn’t dare look at him, because she knew that if she saw how much that restraint was costing him, she might cry.
“Nikos, thank you for coming. Would you like to come in? I’ve made coffee.”
Nikos looked from her to Blane and back again, then spoke slowly in careful, heavily accented English.
“You are not what Katerina says.”
Bea tilted her head. “What did Katerina say?”
“She says…” He paused, searching for the words. “A nice English lady on her own.” His gaze flicked toward Blane. “She did not say…”
“No,” Bea agreed. “I don’t imagine she did.”
Behind her, Blane made one of his huffing sounds, and this time she really hoped it was a strangled laugh and not the same sort of sound a bull made before it charged.
“This is Blane,” she told Nikos. “He’s… visiting.” It was such an absurd word for what Blane was that she nearly laughed. Nikos plainly didn’t believe her either, but he seemed to decide, sensibly, not to say so.
“I come to say sorry,” he said. “For the night. I did not want frighten you. I only…”
He gripped his cap tighter and looked past her, beyond the house toward the field and the little stone building at the far edge.
“I wanted to see.”
Bea followed his gaze to the shepherd’s hut, and something in the way he was looking at it made her heart hurt. “Come and sit down, Nikos. I think you’d better tell me.”
He sat at the table on the terrace, and Bea brought out the coffee pot. Nikos held his mug in both hands, as though he was grateful for something to hold on to.
Blane didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall a little way off. Close enough, but not too close, and Bea thought it was a fair bargain. He’d stand down for her, but he wasn’t going to sit and pretend this was a social call.
For a while, Nikos didn’t speak. He looked toward the hut, then at the house, then down into his coffee.
“My English is not good,” he said at last. “I am sorry.”
“It’s much better than my Greek,” Bea said. “Take your time.”
He nodded. Then, slowly at first, told her he’d been born in the little stone house at the edge of the field, not the big house.
Bea’s house had come later, when he was a boy, after his father had done well enough to build something better.
The small house—the one she had been calling the shepherd’s hut—was where the family had started.
Where his grandfather had lived, and his father after him.
Where his mother had given birth to him the winter the snow had been too deep to get down to town.
“Over the door,” he said, lifting one hand to sketch a shape in the air. “There is a stone. My grandfather cut it. His letters and the year. It is still there. You can see if you go close.”
Bea had seen it. She’d been out to the hut a dozen times, but she’d never once wondered whose initials they were, or why anyone had bothered to carve a date into the lintel of a building she’d been calling nothing more than a shepherd’s hut.
She felt her cheeks warm. “Go on,” she said quietly.
Nikos told her that Stavros had never loved the place the way he did. Stavros had wanted to move away, to go to Athens, to live a life that didn’t smell of goats and wood smoke. He’d wanted a bigger life. When their parents died, they’d left Stavros the house and the good land around it.
Nikos stared toward the hut again. “I was given the rest.”
“What’s the rest?” Blane asked, pushing away from the wall.
Bea glanced at him. It was the first time he’d spoken. Nikos looked at him too and seemed to decide that the big American might be safe to talk to after all.
“The mountain,” he said, his face a little bitter.
“High ground. Not good ground. There are rocks. The only thing it is good for is goats in the summer.” His chin dipped, and his grip on his cap tightened.
“My brother got the house, the water, the flat land.” He shook his head sadly. “I got the sky.”
“And you never thought Stavros had the right to sell?” Bea asked.