Chapter Four
Selwen spent the next two days hiding out in her room.
She told the staff she had a migraine, and they left her to it.
They left trays of food by her door and took them away again without bothering her when she left them largely untouched.
She kept the shades shut tight and all the lights out.
She lay in her bed, watched the ceiling fan rotate again and again, and asked herself what in the name of God she’d been thinking.
She went over every single detail of every moment that she’d spent in the presence of the overwhelming, disturbing Thanasis in forensic detail—over and over again—but she still couldn’t explain to her own satisfaction how she’d allowed…
any of that to happen. She had danced with too many men to count in too many tavernas to name.
She had laughingly brushed off their advances, such as they were, and gone on her merry way. It hadn’t even required thought.
And yet she had kissed that man in the moonlight as if she been starving for the taste of him all her life.
She could still feel that kiss all over her, and worse, like some kind of muscle-deep memory within.
Just as she could feel those hard, blunt fingers deep inside her, claiming her and shattering her with a certain confident insistence that made her breathless to recall.
More disconcerting by far, she could remember the way she’d clamped his hand between her thighs and ridden him as if that was the only possible response she could have given.
As if she’d done the same thing a thousand times before. As if her body knew him, and wanted him, and was desperate to welcome him.
The implications of that…frightened her.
Or rather, overwhelmed her, because she didn’t want to think through those implications. She didn’t want to think about all the things her responses could mean. Or the way he’d spoken to her. Or that disconcerting way he looked at her, as if he was waiting for her to recognize him.
Selwen preferred that her life remain blank before Ffion. She had grown used to it. She liked it that way.
On the third day, she snuck out of her room in the early morning. Because she thought it was high time she moved her body a little bit, lest she become welded to the bed. She might not have actually had a migraine, but that wasn’t to say she felt good. Because she didn’t.
That terrible feeling, something like anxiety and vulnerability mixed through with shame, sat on her hard.
She walked down to the beach again in the sweet morning light.
Once she walked down the steps, the breeze playing with her hair and tugging at her clothes, she frowned at the gleaming white sand as if it had personally betrayed her.
Then she blew out a breath—wishing she could blow away her memories of the other night as easily—stuck her hands in her pockets, and walked along the shore with no particular aim or direction as she tried to come to terms with this terrible thing she’d done.
Because it was terrible, wasn’t it? On the very night that her engagement to one man had been announced she had been out in the darkness, losing herself in the arms of another.
Not just any other man, for that matter. His son .
“It’s like you’re starring in your very own soap opera,” she muttered to herself as she walked, because that was what she would have said to Ffion if she’d been here.
Ffion, who had always maintained a deep attachment to her nightly soaps, would have been pleased with any extravagance but would have taken a dim view of any melodramatic behavior in her adopted niece.
Life is not the telly, she’d liked to say.
And she had strongly discouraged any telly-like behavior in her daily life.
The notion that she’d let Ffion down, even in death, made Selwen want to sob. Her eyes watered and she wiped at them furiously, because surely she didn’t deserve to cry when nothing had happened to her. She’d participated all on her own. That was the real problem.
That was what she was going to have to sit with.
She walked and walked, and only when she could no longer see the big villa on the hill from the waterline did she turn back around.
She cut inland then, up and over a different set of stairs cut into the bluff.
On the other side she found herself on what passed for a road on this island, an old dirt track better suited for carts and goats.
Now as she walked she could feel the sea all around, but could only glimpse it here and there, between the trees.
She knew she was back on Pavlos’s estate when she began to see the outbuildings and little cottages, scattered here and there.
Then the villa once more, taking over the horizon as she moved toward it.
She picked up her pace, happy that the walk had done its work and was making her feel a bit more like herself again—
But then she stopped dead.
Because there on the porch of the cottage directly before her, he was there.
Thanasis.
His name danced inside her like the breeze. Like a song.
She told herself it was a warning.
Selwen had the near-overwhelming urge to run. The same way she’d done that night. She could feel the adrenaline flood through her and she almost turned and set off, but something stopped her.
This was Pavlos’s son. His son, damn it. She couldn’t avoid him forever.
So instead of running, she squared her shoulders and marched straight toward him, instead.
She kept going until she reached the edge of his porch and then stopped there. Then glared at him as he sat there and did nothing but… look at her.
There was nothing to do but return the favor.
The moonlight, it turned out, had told no lies about this man.
Today he was dressed more casually. Still in black, she noticed, and she approved because she certainly felt like some level of mourning was called for.
This morning it was a black T-shirt over a pair of casual trousers in the same onyx shade.
He was not wearing shoes. He looked wildly, impossibly Greek, all that black hair and those impossibly dark eyes.
And he still looked at her in that same hot, insolent manner.
He was a fallen angel. There was no doubt about it. Selwen could think of no other explanation for how compelling he was, how breathtaking, when she knew exactly how dangerous he really was.
In the sunshine, the shocking beauty of his features was even more unpalatable than she’d recalled in the dark of her bedchamber.
It was like her eyes rejected what she was seeing, out here in all this tumbling sunshine, because it didn’t make sense.
It shouldn’t have been possible. How could he be very nearly pretty, yet so ruthlessly masculine that she could feel the adrenaline inside her become a long, slow shiver.
And then that shiver wound its way down between her legs, there where she stood before him, and bloomed—insistently—into a soft yet pressing heat.
“You owe me an apology,” she told him, because she was afraid that if she didn’t speak, she would simply…melt.
“I cannot imagine for what.”
He did not sound apologetic. He was lounging there in a chair, a laptop closed beside him on a small table. She felt unwieldy and strange in her own body and so made a small production of looking behind her, like she thought he must be staring at someone else.
But it wasn’t helpful. When she turned back, Thanasis merely lifted a dark brow.
And she now understood that he had seen her coming from a long way off. Something about that made that shivering heat inside her glow all the brighter.
“I decided not to tell your father what you did,” she said, though she had actually come to no such conclusion.
She didn’t even know where those words came from.
They simply exited her mouth without warning and then she was standing there, arms crossed and chin tilted up—belligerently, she could feel it—as she regarded this man before her.
Her beautiful nemesis.
“What makes you think that I didn’t tell him myself?” he replied, almost carelessly.
All of Selwen’s breath left her, as if he’d punched her, hard, in the stomach. She heard it go out of her in a rush, and the world spun a little, and then he was moving. He rose from his seat with an unnerving display of speed and grace and she didn’t know what he meant to do—
But she didn’t resist as he guided her up and onto his porch with him, then sat her down in the chair facing his.
When she could breathe again, Selwen found herself noticeably profoundly disappointed that guiding her to a seat was all he’d done.
And didn’t that tell her harsh truths about herself she didn’t wish to know?
“I didn’t tell him anything,” Thanasis told her after another moment—long or short, she couldn’t tell, because she was lost in that dark gaze. And now his voice seemed to match. “I only told him that I intended to stay here a while. And I do, Saskia. You and I have some history to work out.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” When his eyes flashed, she thought he might say something else, so she hurried on. “I don’t have any history. That’s the thing. There’s nothing to talk about.”
Thanasis regarded her for a long moment.
She had the same feeling she’d had in the grand hall the other night, and then again on the beach.
It was the disconcerting notion that he could see straight through her, when she couldn’t even see into herself.
It was more than simply disconcerting. It made her skin feel like it no longer fit.
It made her want to jump to her feet. Explode.
Run .
“I can see that you don’t remember me,” he said, in a voice that was too low. Too even. Selwen got the distinct impression that the words cost him. But she didn’t want to think about the possibility that this was hard for him .
It made something inside her turn over, uncomfortably.
“You’re right,” she said quietly, and not quite as evenly. “I don’t.”