Chapter Six
Selwen heard that Thanasis was gone with everyone else, at the formal dinner that Pavlos called his casual little supper table, when, in fact, it was a formal affair.
One he insisted upon, each and every night.
That first night she sat there with all of those harsh words that she and Thanasis had spoken resonating in her like some kind of tuning fork, even though he was now, by all reports, back in London.
“Thanasis rarely tears himself away from the pleasures of the Big Smoke,” one of Pavlos’s illegitimate daughters told Selwen with a sniff and a sharp Eastern European accent. “It is unlikely that you will ever see him again.”
This was said as an aside, and it was not an attempt to try to poke at Selwen about Thanasis.
The suggestion was that Selwen’s marriage to Pavlos would be brief at best, something all of his mistresses’ children had been at pains to tell her—but it was the Thanasis part that made Selwen feel… strange.
She should have been delighted that he was rarely here. That dealing with him wasn’t something she would have to worry about with any regularity.
Selwen should have been celebrating his departure. Why aren’t you jubilant that you chased him away? she asked herself, but she couldn’t seem to get there.
It was that last expression on his face, she thought.
It was the way he’d looked at her, as if she had shattered him as they stood out there in front of his cottage.
She couldn’t seem to get past it. She could feel it inside of her in the middle of another one of Pavlos’s long dinners, like a melody she couldn’t quite name playing endlessly around and around in her head.
By the time the dessert course came, she wanted to dig that haunting tune out of her head with her fingers.
She wanted to get back to the person she had been before Thanasis had turned up and claimed to know her.
Selwen wanted to be the woman who had been perfectly happy to sit at this table, lost in her own thoughts.
The woman who had deliberately not learned the names of Pavlos’s children, or these makeshift courtiers of his who laughed at the end of every sentence he uttered and were more than happy to debase themselves before him, if that would gain his favor.
But that woman had been concerned primarily with her own security, she realized as the days bled one into the next.
That woman had thought that she’d finally found the very things that Ffion had always told her she needed.
Safety. Her very own space. Art all around her, a soft place to land each night, and her heart’s desire in all things.
The woman she was now found her heart significantly more complicated than it had been when she’d met Pavlos, and she hated it.
The art studio that Pavlos had prepared for her was one of those cottages down toward the olive groves. In order to get to it, she had to pass the cottage where Thanasis had been staying—the one that the staff told her was his alone.
“It is kept ready for him always,” her favorite maid told her one day when Selwen asked, trying her best not to appear too interested.
“No one is allowed in it, no matter how many people come to one of Mr. Zacharias’s parties.
” She leaned closer, her dark eyes gleaming.
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone this, but only the housekeeper has a key.
So that no one can slip in without the young Mr. Zacharias’s knowledge. ”
Meaning, Selwen thought, Pavlos himself was barred from entry.
“Is that…normal?” she asked.
The maid made a face. “Before the young Mr. Zacharias insisted on this arrangement, his father would often…leave him all manner of presents in the cottage. Usually ones that were decidedly unwelcome, if you get my meaning.”
Selwen did not get her meaning. What present wouldn’t be welcome? But something in the way the woman said it kept her from asking. She had the strangest feeling that she didn’t want to know.
“What I want,” she muttered to herself after the maid took her leave, “is to stop thinking about that man.”
About the way that kiss had seemed to alter the cells inside her body. About the way his fingers, deep inside of her, had made her feel as if she was once again a complete stranger to herself, only this time it was somehow less scary.
She wanted it all to stop.
And yet every day when she walked down to the studio to sketch and paint, or, more often, to stare out the window toward the sea while thinking about sketching or painting, she found herself thinking about Thanasis instead.
About the way his face had changed when she had thrown all those things at him.
All her hot takes on a relationship she hadn’t taken part in.
Because even if she was his Saskia, even if that really was who she’d been once, she couldn’t remember it now.
So she might as well have been a stranger, dropping her opinions all over him with nothing to back them up but the worst possible interpretation of what he’d told her.
But he hadn’t seemed angry , she reminded herself. Was that what she’d expected? For him to shout or threaten her?
And if she really had worried about that, why had she gone at him the way she had? Systematically dismantling a memory that was clearly precious to him…
“But I’m right,” she told herself, every time she ended up in this particular circle of thought.
And as she was usually alone when that happened, she was the only one around to notice that she sounded weaker each time she said it.
Pavlos, on the other hand, was becoming more and more jovial. And perhaps more comfortable with Selwen, she supposed. There were no more respectful, careful walks amongst the olive trees. When she tried to tell him about her art, he would wave a hand. Dismissing her.
She told herself he was simply a very busy man, what with his work and his commitment to so much socializing.
“I have news for you, girl,” he said one night, jolting her back from wherever her thoughts had taken her…
off to a dark-eyed man who was far too beautiful and who only resembled his father a little.
“There has been enough lolling about. There is a gala in Athens this weekend. I will take great pleasure in showing you off. It’s about time. ”
Pavlos had gathered his faithful in one of his favorite solariums, and the music was loud. The laughter was piercing.
Selwen was certain she had misheard him. “I’m not going to any gala.”
And maybe it was because Thanasis had planted all those stories in her head. Maybe it was the way all of Pavlos’s minions always looked at her, always studying her, as if waiting for her to crack into pieces they could kick away with their well-shod feet.
Whatever it was, she saw it when it happened.
When this man who she had decided would keep her safe looked at her so coldly she felt as if she was suddenly back in the dark depths of a long Welsh winter.
“I beg your pardon?” His voice was mild enough. But it was the way he said it. It was the way he looked at her while he said it.
Like he hated her.
Selwen told herself she was being dramatic, even though she had never been anything of the sort before. She tried to make him understand.
“We agreed,” she reminded him. “I am not built for public things.” Though even as she said that, she wondered. Was that true? Or was that what she’d held onto from her life as a secret mistress? She swallowed and kept going. “A gala sounds very public, doesn’t it?”
They had been officially engaged for weeks now. It had been the better part of a month, in fact, though she was certainly not counting days from Thanasis’s departure because that would make no sense at all.
And yet something in her jumped—and not at all in the way it had on that dark beach that she absolutely did not spend any time thinking about—when Pavlos reached over and touched her face.
Everything in her seemed to screw itself tight, as if she wanted to armor herself against him.
You’re being ridiculous, she told herself. This man has never been anything but kind.
“You will change your mind, of course,” he told her, and there was something in the way his dark eyes moved over her that made her bite her tongue.
Made her certain not to laugh the way she wanted to, because she could tell that it would not be received well.
“I am Pavlos Zacharias. My wife will be on my arm when I wish it.”
Something she hardly recognized inside of her seemed to rise, them. Selwen found herself smiling. She wanted to bat his fingers away from her face, but, instead, she made herself reach out and touch his arm.
“That settles it then,” she said, channeling the light and air and sunshine of this place by day. Hoping it emanated from her. “I’m not your wife just yet, am I?”
For a moment, though she was aware that there was that music and all the usual laughter, it seemed very quiet, there between them. Intense, and not in the way it had been with Thanasis. That had seemed to come as much from inside her as from him. This was something completely different.
This was not an ache, but a weight.
Until, finally, Pavlos cracked a smile. Selwen felt something in her seem to release, too. “Not yet,” he said, and though he was smiling, his gaze was still cold. “Not yet, my girl.”
And when she slipped away from the party a little bit later, she stepped out into the cool night air, and felt how flushed her cheeks were. How hard her blood seemed to be pumping inside her body. How cold she felt, everywhere else, as if Pavlos had threatened her.
Why did it feel as if he had threatened her? Of course he hadn’t.
But though she knew exactly where the card was that Thanasis had left her, that she hadn’t thrown away, she didn’t go to it. She didn’t so much as pick it up.