Chapter Seven #2
Not because he had been terrible to her, because it wasn’t as simple as that. But because that much love had nowhere to go. That was why it had sat in her like grief for five whole years.
No wonder she’d imagined she was in mourning. She had been.
But not for the reasons she’d imagined.
“I will give you a tour,” Thanasis told her. He moved toward her stiffly, and really, this was the moment. It would be so easy. She would simply say, I remember you.
And then…
But that was trouble, wasn’t it? She already knew what would happen next.
So she said nothing when he walked over to her, and indicated with a tilt of his head that she could put her bag down.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to keep on clinging to it, and the remnants of her life in Wales were tucked inside of it, like they were some kind of talisman she could use against him.
But she reminded herself that Selwen didn’t know she needed to ward this man off.
Selwen might have had a physical reaction to him, and she thought he was a villain, but she clearly wasn’t afraid of him.
Selwen thought her reaction to him was an anomaly.
Selwen had no idea what happened when he really touched her. When he didn’t stop. When she wouldn’t let him.
Saskia placed her bag, perhaps a little too heavily, on the arm of the couch that she knew every last square inch of. She and Thanasis had christened every surface in this flat.
Repeatedly.
And if they were not christening it, they were living here. Laughing here, talking here. Fighting here and loving each other here.
He had taught her all the ways that she could take his cock and all the way she could use it to drive him out of his mind, right here on this same couch.
He had sprawled back, all of his clothes in disarray.
And she had knelt there happily between his outstretched legs, held that thrillingly dark gaze with hers, and sucked him in deep.
She looked away now, because she was afraid that he would be able to see it on her face. That longing. That hunger.
“You liked this flat because it had character,” he told her, and she thought he sounded a little stiff. Remote. Perhaps he had seen more on her face than she had intended. “I believe you said that living in a block of flats would only depress you.”
“I can’t imagine having opinions on blocks of flats,” Saskia said, because she thought Selwen would have. When the truth was, what she’d wanted—what she had always wanted—was a home.
And despite all the years and everything that had happened, this flat still felt like home.
It was something about the light. It was the way the rooms seemed to flow one into the next, and the way that they’d put this place to rights together.
It was not until later that she had realized that in making this place the home that she’d always wanted, she had played directly into his hands. Because how could she leave this place? How could she walk away from it when she’d put so much of herself into it?
This flat had been his ace in the hole, she’d decided toward the end.
“You have lovely taste,” she told him now.
Thanasis made a low noise. “I don’t know that I have any real taste at all,” he replied after a moment.
“I default to minimalism, as I’m sure you can understand, having spent time amid the Baroque theatrics that my father considers decor.
I’m not the one who found all the pieces that make this flat what it is. ”
Saskia remembered finding her way through Portobello Market, then letting Thanasis take her to far more exclusive shopping arenas, and that was why the flat reflected both of them. It was neither as Bohemian as she might have made it nor as minimalistic and corporate as he would have.
Every bit of it felt like theirs . It always had.
Until, that was, she had begun to obsess about the fact that he had a whole other house in London. A famous house that often turned up in magazines that he didn’t want to sully with the likes of her, his down-market mistress.
Those memories sat on her heavily. Saskia almost wished they hadn’t come back to her like all the rest.
Thanasis was unaware where her head had gone, and showed her the small study that she’d made into a proper little library.
“You liked to read here,” he told her. “You studied here. You preferred it when there was a fire in the grate because you could pretend you weren’t doing your coursework.
I believe you once told me that you preferred to imagine you were an eighteenth-century heroine instead. ”
“How fanciful,” Saskia murmured.
But the truth was, she adored this room.
It got light in the morning and in the evenings, when she’d had work to do and he was off on one of his trips, she would often find herself in here.
There was always reading to do and essays to work on, and she would pretend that she was something out of an Austen novel as she scribbled away, then curled up on the chaise with the fire crackling.
She had started her drawing and painting in earnest here, the artistic impulse inside of her no longer held hostage to the practicality that had governed her all her life.
It had been easier not to feel lonely that way, surrounded by art and study.
He led her down the hall to the guest bedroom that he’d used as an office sometimes, when he’d stayed here long enough that it required he check in with work.
It was still set up that way, and her objection to that was simply that the room looked like it could be anywhere.
There was nothing particularly noteworthy on the walls.
There were no identifying characteristics.
So no one could tell, she had understood at some point, whether he was in London or across the planet.
That was how committed he was to keeping this thing between them private.
There were closets along the hallway and when she looked back over her shoulder, she could see the door that led into a bright and happy eating kitchen on the other end.
She could remember cooking in there. He’d been absolute shit at it and she had taken great pleasure in teaching him some of the hallmarks of her university years.
A quick Bolognese. Packet ramen. Omelets made of anything they might have on hand.
Over time, they’d developed a few easy dishes they could both make to feed each other when they didn’t want the intrusion of the outside world, not even in the form of a food delivery.
She turned back around again, deliberately not thinking about how paranoid she’d originally become once she’d understood that he really did not intend to take her out, ever—unless costumes were involved—concentrating instead on that outrageously masculine back of his as he led her down to the final room. The bedroom.
God help her, but the things they had done in this bedroom.
The four-poster bed was made out of remarkably heavy wood, and she knew that because they had certainly done their best to send it skating this way and that across the floor. But it had always held firm.
It was a beautiful bedroom, and Saskia tried to focus on that. She supposed that what Selwen would notice was the seating area arranged around another fireplace. Not the bed. Not the expansive bathroom suite that took up more square footage than the whole of Ffion’s little house in Pembrokeshire.
She moved for the doors that led outside to the narrow terrace that wrapped along the side of the flat, accessible from the bedroom and kitchen.
She didn’t have to look out to know that there was a whole outdoor dining and lounging area set down on the kitchen side, tucked beneath a hard canopy top to keep the weather out.
There was a pergola a bit further along and she knew there was a hot tub tucked away beneath those vines.
What she could see right now, without memory to help her, was the private seating area off the bedroom.
It was enclosed in glass so that it was entirely possible to lie naked and tangled up with Thanasis, the rain coming down all around them, yet so warm and so loved that it was as if they’d become one.
With each other. With the weather.
“Lovely,” she said again.
“Not very much like a prison, is it?”
She turned, slowly, and studied Thanasis as he stood there. He was standing over by the bedroom door, giving the distinct impression that he did not wish to crowd her or to make her feel stuck back here with him in any way.
But he also didn’t look particularly happy about it.
“A beautifully appointed prison is still a prison, Thanasis. It doesn’t all have to be concrete cellblocks and metal doors.”
“Forgive me,” he said at once, though there was a fire in that dark gaze of his that she recognized.
His temper. That temper had always exploded when he was with her, and she’d loved that.
Because she’d been quite certain that she was the only creature on this earth who could make Thanasis Zacharias lose his shit.
But he wasn’t losing it now. And she had to remind herself that Selwen wouldn’t like it much if he did. Selwen would see that as evidence that she was right about him. “And what do you need to be forgiven for this time?” she asked.
“I did not bring you here to litigate a past you can’t remember,” Thanasis said after a moment, his voice calm.
His gaze anything but. “Not only would that be churlish, it wouldn’t get me anywhere.
And you don’t know this about me, Selwen, but I’m not a man who likes to tread water. I prefer a destination.”
Saskia wanted to laugh at that. Selwen wouldn’t know that she should. She settled on a sniff. “If that were true, I’m not sure why you bothered to answer your father’s summons to attend his engagement party. Much less obey.”