Chapter Eight
Thanasis truly did intend to leave Saskia alone.
To allow her to settle into that flat again—without him this time—and build whatever kind of life she wanted back here in London.
He thought that was the very least of the things she deserved after losing her memory and ending up engaged to a man she should never have met.
He waited for his father to call and announce that his fiancée had run off, but Pavlos never did anything of the sort.
Whether he was hiding it or simply hadn’t noticed yet, he didn’t bring it up in their unavoidable business meetings and Thanasis certainly felt no particular compunction to reach out to him.
The truth was, as much as he might have tolerated his father’s nonsense over the years, he didn’t really think that he had it in him to be civil to a man who had done something to make Saskia bolt.
And he had a hard enough time separating his business dealings from his father’s.
The last thing he needed to do was entertain the gutter press with a feud that would no doubt be reported widely, word for word.
He tended to his business. He haunted his office, jumping on things he normally left to his underlings, because he needed something to focus on that wasn’t the Saskia of it all.
Not that it worked.
Besides, Saskia was one of the few who had access to his private mobile and when she called, he made certain that he was available.
The first few times, she asked him questions about London. About the neighborhood. About what she should do and where she should go like she didn’t have access to the entire internet—
But then, the Saskia he knew had always been fiercely independent and capable. He had no idea what Selwen knew about London or how she felt about big, sprawling cities.
He answered her questions every time.
It was not until the third week of this that he began to wonder why it was she would call up a man she thought so little of for his thoughts on neighborhood eateries, shops, and nightspots.
“What sort of nightspots will you be frequenting?” he asked when she called the next time. He had walked out of a tedious meeting to take this call and he could look down the length of the office floor toward that meeting room, where he could see the tensions were rising.
But he didn’t care.
“As you know,” Saskia said into his ear, “I do like to dance.”
Thanasis had spent a lot of time thinking about the accusations that she had levied at him on the island. He could not dismiss them all out of hand, and that was what concerned him the most.
She could not remember what happened between them and, as a result, he could not trust his recollections.
In the meantime, he was fully aware that she had danced and danced and danced her way across the Greek Islands.
She had danced so much that she had somehow come to imagine that his father was an excellent dance partner, and he had found that he had no choice at all but to sit there and torture himself with images of this dancing—sometimes it was really dancing though, more often, it was a euphemism for other things he wanted to think about even less—until he was beside himself.
He would pace and pace into the small hours, wearing grooves into the hallways of his house on Hampstead Heath.
On the nights when he found himself in the flat, he would lie on the couch and drive himself insane with the memory of her. Right there with him. Lying on top of him. Fitting to him so perfectly that he had never felt quite right in his own body once she was gone.
He had wondered if he might truly go mad, for how could he possibly reconcile himself to this? Knowing that she lived, knowing where she was, and not having her?
How could he live with the knowledge that his father could, at any moment, have his debauched hands all over her?
Thanasis had begun to think that dying might have been easier than living without her, not that he intended to find out. In the meantime, he had resigned himself to the torture.
But now she wanted to go dancing some more.
“I have an idea,” he told her, as it came to him in a flash. The perfect solution, with only slightly more torture than usual. “I will take you dancing, Selwen.”
“Surely not,” she replied, in such a smooth, deliberate way that it gave him pause.
Because it made him think of Saskia. His Saskia.
It made him wonder how much of her had come back to London, bubbling up inside Selwen after all.
“What if we’re seen? What if someone thinks we’re together?
Worse still, what if they know that I was recently engaged to your father? ”
All valid concerns. Yet, “They won’t,” he said curtly.
And when they rang off, he sent his secretary a message, telling her to reach out to a client who had invited him to a masked ball in New York and tell them that although he had previously declined, he would now be coming. With a guest.
The next day he went by the flat for the first time since he’d foolishly greeted her here and ripped his own heart out with all he’d lost. Even though he had his own key, he buzzed up and waited for Saskia to let him in.
“Who is it?” she asked through the intercom.
“Who else knows you’re here?” he replied.
She didn’t reply. She only buzzed him in.
He took the stairs slowly, feeling the ghosts of all the other times he’d come here pressing in on him. Whispering him into states of nostalgia and need that could only cause trouble.
“She is not yours,” he reminded himself beneath his breath. “She barely knows who you are.”
But she opened the door at the top of the stairs before he made it there, and that felt the way it always had.
Like a homecoming.
Like he was finally where he was meant to be.
He got to the top and he watched her face closely as he drew nearer to her. He could have sworn that he saw that recognition again. He would have bet everything he had that it was there.
And everything in him sang out, but he didn’t reach for her.
Though he did see at once that she was no longer wearing the shapeless, flowing things she’d lived in on the island.
She was dressed in her own clothes now. Even five years old, Saskia’s wardrobe was timeless.
She had an eye for the classics and always chose items of clothing because they flattered her shape, not because she wanted her shape to fit into them.
A critical difference that she had lectured him on at some length, many times.
Fashion is tyranny, she had told him. Women are bludgeoned with messages about how they ought to look when half the time it’s biologically impossible. It would be better by far to teach women to love any shape they find themselves in, and dress for that.
I am fascinated, of course, he had told her, stretched out as he was beside her on their bed after a long and intense game of theirs that had involved experimenting with various bindings, and different ways to beg. She had done so, and so prettily, every time.
Not fascinated enough, she had retorted, grinning at him wickedly. Then she had started kissing her way down the length of his torso. She’d cupped him in her hands, and licked him, root to tip. Why don’t we experiment with fit, here and now?
Now I am even more fascinated, he had gritted out.
But that was a long time ago. Today Saskia looked at him both as if she didn’t recognize him and yet she did, and he had to order his cock to get control of itself as he followed her into the flat.
“Do you like coffee?” she asked, and slid him a look that he found…unreadable.
He was sure there were minefields here, but he couldn’t see them. “I do.”
“I thought you must. There’s a rather dramatic espresso machine in the kitchen, and I can’t imagine it would only be for me.” She wrinkled her nose. “Besides, I like tea.”
“You like tea all day and into the evening, yes,” he corrected her. “But in the mornings, you enjoy a decent coffee, like all civilized people do.”
“How very Greek of you.”
He shrugged, and didn’t quite smile, though it was the closest he’d come in some time. “I cannot deny it.”
When they smiled at each other, he actually forgot what year this was. The only difference between this moment and any of the other ones they passed in this kitchen was that they weren’t touching. And he almost forgot that too. He almost reached over, got his hands on her, and let himself—
But Saskia stopped him from doing it by simple virtue of turning away and applying herself to the espresso machine.
He did not tell her that he could remember when they’d installed it.
When he’d taught her how to use it. Or how they’d competed, in those early days, to see who could make the better freddo espresso or freddo cappuccino.
He remembered telling her that under no circumstances were any ellinikós kafés, traditional Greek coffees, to be made by anyone in the flat who was not Greek.
That almost feels a bit pointed, she had laughed.
It is a point, he’d agreed with intensity that was only partly feigned, of honor. Greek coffee not made by Greeks tastes like the Ottoman Empire. He’d shrugged when she’d laughed at that too. No one likes oppressive coffee, Saskia.
He could still hear her laughter. He could still see the smile she’d aimed at him, and the way she’d melted into him. What he didn’t understand was how he could feel all these memories around them, pressing in from all sides, and she couldn’t.
And when she slid him his coffee, perfectly made and precisely how he liked it, he wondered yet again just how much she really remembered.
“Tonight, we dance,” he told her. “There will be a car for you at noon and we will fly to New York.”
“New York,” she echoed.
“I was uncertain if you would know what to wear to such an event, so I came to help you choose the appropriate gown.”
“Gown,” she repeated, her eyes narrowing.