Chapter Three
Thanasis felt that crash and tug inside of him, and he couldn’t tell if it was the sound of the sea against the sand, or simply his reaction to the feel of her clenching tight on his fingers. Or the quivering that took over her whole body and left her sighing.
She made that noise he knew better than he knew his own name, slightly high-pitched and in the back of her throat. There was a time he had lived for that sound—that incontrovertible evidence that she came apart in his hands so easily.
That together they were fire and magic, no matter what might happen in the world outside the space they kept together.
He had no idea how he had lived this long without it. Without her.
What Thanasis knew—the way he also knew his heart pumped, his lungs breathed, and his bones held him upright—was that he had no intention of ever doing so again.
Whatever this situation was, and he did not pretend to understand it, there was no possibility that he would end up without her again. She was alive.
Saskia was alive and that was the beginning and end of everything that mattered to him.
Now it was simply a matter of sorting out the details. And what had happened over the last five years.
Not to mention, the fact she seemed to think she was marrying his father.
But first there was the sweet weight of her, limp in his arms. He could hear her breath coming in fast. He stroked her hair, still not entirely sure he wasn’t dreaming, which would mean he might wake at any moment. He didn’t think, this time, that he could bear it.
She straightened then, pushing herself upright while he took his time disengaging from her. When he stood, he found her eyes on him. And he could have sworn there was something very nearly accusatory there in those steeped tea depths, though he found he was not in the least apologetic.
He watched her swallow, hard. And there were many things he could have said. There were conversations to be had and he was fairly certain they wouldn’t be pleasant.
But this was. He decided to stay with this, then. Thanasis lifted his hand and without shifting his gaze from hers, he licked his fingers clean.
And had the distinct pleasure of watching her react to that. Her cheeks flooded with a bright red flush. Her lovely eyes went wide and something like stunned.
The heat between them seemed to hum .
It reminded him of when he’d first met her, in those early days when she was still so innocent and he had still been able to shock her. It reminded him of the pleasure he’d taken in that, in her, in the way she gave herself to him simply because she’d loved him.
Oh, how she’d loved him, in such a fast rush of utter certainty that he’d felt duty-bound to warn her against it. He’d been the worldly, sophisticated one. He’d tried to protect her from herself—
I don’t need your help, thank you, she’d told him, sitting astride his lap while the mercurial English sun teased its way through the windows of their flat in Chelsea. I will love you no matter how terribly you treat me, as important men of the world are wont to do.
She had been teasing him, then. She had laughed, and then she’d kissed him.
He remembered that too well because she hadn’t been laughing two years later. She hadn’t been laughing at all that last night.
But he forgot about that, because her taste was flooding through him again. Tart and sweet, it was quintessentially Saskia, and it removed any lingering doubts he might have had about who she was.
This was her. This was his Saskia, at last.
The taste of her made that abundantly clear. It also made him so hard it actually hurt, but he ignored that.
This was the woman he had lost five years ago. This was the woman he had believed he would never see again. He could taste her. He could smell her. He could touch her, and he had.
“Saskia,” he said urgently, “you must tell me what this is all about. What happened to you? Where were you going on that train and why have you hidden yourself away all these years?”
Her eyes widened even further. The flush in her cheeks faded as she blinked, then she shook her head as if she was trying to clear it. He thought she looked a bit pale, suddenly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Saskia—”
“Stop calling me that.” Her voice sounded strangled, unwell and uneasy. She stepped back and looked around wildly, as if she expected to find attackers on all sides.
It took him too long to understand that her reaction meant that she felt he was an attacker, too.
He took a step back himself.
“My name is Selwen,” she told him, very carefully, as if the name itself was made of glass. “I don’t know who you are. I think you have me confused with someone else.”
He might have thought so earlier. He had hoped so earlier, even.
But he had hoped for this more, and for much, much longer.
“I am Thanasis Zacharias,” he told her, the way he had once before, long ago.
There in an echoing chamber of the Tate where modern art he could not pretend to understand cavorted about shapelessly on the walls all around them, somehow making her eyes seem brighter.
He couldn’t recall what the exhibit had been or what he’d been meant to take from the viewing of it.
Because she had been there and that had been that.
“You know me, no matter what you call yourself these days.”
“Zacharias?” she echoed. “But that’s…?”
“Pavlos is my father,” Thanasis growled. “And you must know you cannot marry him.”
“I’m not who you think I am!” She threw that at him, her voice close to a scream, and then she ran.
And almost everything in him roared at him to chase her, to keep her with him, to never let her out of his sight again—
But there was another part. The part that had seen the confusion on her face and something like fear in her eyes.
And this was the woman he loved. This was the woman who he had thought for five years had died thinking he was ashamed of her. That he didn’t truly love her in return.
He could not also be the man who scared her. He could not live with that version of himself.
And so Thanasis made himself stand still in the moonlight. And he forbade himself from turning around to see what became of her.
Then again, he didn’t need to look. He knew.
It was as if he could see her through someone else’s eyes. As if she was once again a part of him the way she’d been back then.
Whatever it was, he knew that she ran up the stairs, scrabbled for the shoes he’d watched her kick off, and then stopped.
He knew—and he was sure that he knew it, that it wasn’t merely another a wish—that she turned back and looked at him, still breathing too heavily.
Still, he was certain, filled with the clamor inside her body thanks to his mouth and his fingers.
He could feel his spine prickle, and the urge to look was almost too much—
But he didn’t.
Instead, Thanasis waited on the beach as the moon took a leisurely turn across the heavens.
He waited there, letting his mind do what it did best. He let it go running down pathways, making new connections, trying to figure out how his adored and cherished mistress had turned into a woman with a different name, here on an island he avoided, looking at him as if they’d never met before.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, but eventually he’d had enough of brooding at the sea. Thanasis stripped off his clothes and waded in, letting the Aegean perform its magic all over him. Letting the water make him new again.
Letting the salt and the tide do what it needed to do so he was ready to stop playing with ghosts, so he could figure out how to remind his Saskia who she really was.
He swam and swam, let the current play with him, and found himself deeply grateful that he’d learned how to swim off this very same shore.
He was not afraid of the currents or the waves, and besides, there was always all the blazing light from his father’s villa there to beckon him back to dry land.
When he’d been a young boy, he’d swum out too far and there had been no one to watch him, much less save him. His father had been with one of his mistresses. His mother had been performing her furious piety in the local church.
He had choked and flailed. But he had survived.
Some might have stayed away from the water after that.
Thanasis had always been made of sterner stuff. He’d made himself swim every day, refusing to fear the water that was everywhere on an island like this. Refusing to fear anything, except the one thing in his life that he couldn’t change.
The one person who could always be counted upon to do his worst, deliberately.
It occurred to Thanasis then that this was something his father would absolutely do, deliberately. Hunt down his own son’s mistress, secrete her away for the express purpose of causing pain, and then marry her. Simply because he could.
But that didn’t explain the memory issue.
He floated on his back with the moon up high, and glared at the stars as if they might give him some clarity. When the truth was, he knew better. They had never done a damned thing but shine.
Thanasis thought through every possibility, but it all came back to the same thing.
He was tempted to think that she was only pretending she didn’t know him, but he couldn’t really make himself believe that. Saskia was no actress. No liar. He’d seen genuine emotion on her face. He had to believe she truly didn’t know who he was, however impossible he found that.
Once she remembered him, he had no doubt, he would have no need to convince her to leave his father. She would do it herself. With bells on.
That was who she was.
So what he had to do was figure out how to introduce her to herself, before it was too late.
The next morning, Thanasis tended to business matters abroad and then, when afternoon threatened, he went and found his father.