Chapter Eight #2
“You have an extensive wardrobe of formal attire, Selwen,” he told her, sipping at his coffee.
“I don’t know how you missed it.” He inclined his head toward the clothes she was wearing today.
It was nothing but a pair of jeans and one of those perfectly fitted T-shirts that look so simple and was thus exquisitely cut, in order to look so effortless.
“I see you have found the rest of the wardrobe.”
“Why would your Saskia have had a closet full of formalwear?” she asked, and though she’d made herself a coffee, she didn’t drink it. “I thought you didn’t take her anywhere.”
“I didn’t take her anywhere she could be photographed,” he corrected her, mildly enough.
“I didn’t take her anywhere there would be pictures taken, paparazzi articles written, or anything like that.
But there are other places in this world where a person can, if he’s willing to pay for it, have his privacy. ”
“If you say so,” she said, but something flickered in that dark tea gaze of hers.
He tossed his coffee back, watched her do the same, and he led her down the hallway to the bedroom again.
This time he didn’t spare a glance for that bed, or those stout posters that he had tested too many times to count.
This time he simply marched himself into the closet.
It was a large walk-in affair, with more than one room.
Thanasis didn’t point out that one of those rooms was his.
He simply moved toward the back and found the area that held all of her gowns, and then he flipped through them until he found the one he wanted.
He laid it out on the center block and watched her stare at it as if she thought it might bite her.
“Do you not like the dress?” he asked mildly.
So very mildly, because the last time she’d worn this dress it had been their anniversary.
Two years in. He had taken her to a private restaurant that could only be accessed through a series of tunnels and offered only private dining rooms. It had been a special night.
Everything had been magical. They had felt fated.
He had thought, this life is so beautiful .
It had been precious and he didn’t think that either one of them, that night, had known that there would only be a few months before they would end so abruptly. She might have been nursing hurt feelings. She might have been annoyed with him. But she was also in love with him.
He’d known that as well as he knew himself.
He’d thought about that night often in the years since he’d lost her, and more again now that she was back and thought ill of him, because how could she have turned against them the way that she had? Where had the magic gone? He had never understood.
But he hadn’t realized that today, he was testing her, until now. As he watched her face for clues as she stared at that dress.
“It’s lovely,” she said, which he was beginning to realize she always said. Because it was essentially meaningless. “If it fits as well as these jeans, it should look well enough on me too.”
“I have no doubt that it will,” Thanasis managed to say, remembering.
And when her gaze lifted to his, he was certain that she knew. That she remembered. That she knew exactly how he had helped her into this dress in the first place, and how he had left her shivering when he’d pulled her with him out to the car.
How they hadn’t made it to the restaurant, but had burst into flame on the way there. He’d pulled her over his lap and hiked this very same dress up to her hips, because he couldn’t bear not to thrust deep inside her. She couldn’t bear to not take those thrusts.
Two years in and they’d still been wild for each other.
They hadn’t made it out of that private dining room, either. That time, he’d leaned her over one of the chairs and hiked that dress up to her waist once more. Then he’d wrapped his hands around her hips and slammed his way into her again.
And when they’d made it home to the bed right there in the next room even now, he had her keep it on as he moved his way around her. Until he’d made her lie face down as he teased every bit of flesh that the crisscrossed back straps exposed.
With his mouth.
And only when she was writhing against him once more had he finally stripped her entirely, and then glutted himself.
Thanasis could have sworn that she was remembering all of those same things. He could feel it. He could taste it.
He was hard as hell, and he suspected she knew it.
There had never been a time in all the years he’d known her that he hadn’t been absolutely right about what she was feeling, especially when it came to sex.
“Thanasis…” she began, and he knew he wasn’t imagining the color on her cheeks. Or that understanding in her gaze.
“Twelve o’clock,” he told her, with a coolness that cost him dearly. “Bring the dress. And whatever else you need for a weekend in Manhattan.”
Then he made himself walk away. Before he didn’t.
Before he couldn’t.
And that night, he took her to a masked ball on a glittering Manhattan rooftop. They danced around and around, their identities hidden while flashbulbs went off all around them and far below, New York City gleamed and sparkled in all of its chaos and mystery.
Thanasis held her in his arms. He spun her around. And he thought even more that there was no possible way she could move with him like this—as if they were two parts of one whole—and still maintain that she did not know him.
He didn’t see how it could be possible.
Later, they walked down a Manhattan street together, hand in hand. This was New York City. No one paid the slightest bit of attention to two people in formal attire, masks firmly in place, out on the street. No one cared if he had his hands on her. If their fingers were intertwined.
And if he didn’t ask her why it was that Selwen from Wales would let a man she thought so little of touch her, well.
Maybe he didn’t want to know if she remembered him or not. Maybe he wanted to bask in the notion that she might.
And that was what their weekend was like. A carved-out bit of space in a country off across an ocean where they could have been anyone.
The last time Thanasis had felt like this it had been in that flat in London, where he could simply be himself.
He took her out for dinner on the night they were leaving, in a crowded New York restaurant where no one would have cared who they were even if they knew.
“Why do you seem so much happier in New York?” she asked him.
The way Saskia might have, because she’d known him so well.
He smiled, tucked away in the corner of the loud, bustling restaurant, for he was completely unconcerned about anyone seeing them or knowing who they were in the first place.
It was safe here. He did not have to worry about his half siblings or his father or even the European paparazzi who chased him—but never here.
“New York is anonymous,” he told her. “We could be anyone here. No one is paying attention either way.”
She was dressed like his Saskia. She was wearing the same effortlessly chic jeans she’d been wearing all day, in a dark gray shade. She’d changed from flats to heels and had dressed it all up with a black sweater and quietly elegant jewelry.
God help him, she was perfect. Still and ever, she was peerless and his.
His, something inside him insisted.
She studied him. “I don’t understand.”
Thanasis would have indulged her anything, particularly on a night like this. He reached across the small table and took her fingers in his again, and he felt her shiver, though she didn’t look at him while she did it. But she didn’t pull her hand away, either.
“What don’t you understand?” he asked her, aware that his voice was rougher now. That was what touching her did to him.
“This. You. Your father has never met a single bit of space that wasn’t a stage, because he is always only too happy to make it one.”
“My father is a narcissist.” He lifted a brow when she frowned at that. “I was raised by a narcissist, but that doesn’t mean I am also one.”
“Aren’t you?”
And he could have taken offense to that. But he didn’t think that was how it was meant. He toyed with her fingers, and chose not to let his temper lead the way.
Not in public. That was not how he preferred to vent it.
“I am not,” he told her instead. “Perhaps to my detriment. All I wanted, ever, was something that was mine. Something that was not tainted by my father.”
“Is that what I am?” she asked, those wise eyes of hers trained on him as if she was looking for clues the same way he was. “Am I tainted?”
“You will have to tell me.” Thanasis still didn’t like to think about his father anywhere near Saskia, but he pushed that aside, too.
“You must understand, it wasn’t simply that my father cheated.
He did, and on an epic scale. Yet part of the joy in cheating, for him, was making certain that it hurt my mother.
He went out of his way to make sure that it did.
But she was a Greek woman, you see. As stubborn as the day is long and she would not let him see that she was affected.
She would not react, and so he kept going, and they did this until she died. ”
“You say that as if you blame her,” Saskia said softly.
And he forgot that this wasn’t really his Saskia. That this was simply the woman who occupied her body now—and looked like her, and sounded like her, and hell, even smelled like her. Tasted like her. But she wasn’t Saskia.
Yet tonight, hidden away in plain sight in this loud restaurant, he didn’t care. He couldn’t.
She was close enough.
And she was still the only one he trusted.
“I do,” Thanasis confessed, though it hurt to say out loud when he’d avoided it all these years.
He waited for her to recoil, but when she didn’t, he took a breath.
“I think about my mother all the time. What did her stubbornness get her? She was miserable. She made sure that I was miserable, too. If she couldn’t leave him for herself, why couldn’t she leave for her own child? I will never understand.”
Saskia reached over and put her other hand on top of the place where their hands were already entwined.
“You were the child,” she said, her voice soothing and her gaze intent on his. “She should have protected you above all things.”
“I suppose it’s possible she didn’t know how,” he allowed. “She was very young when they were married. And from what I can tell, remarkably naive.”
“Then she should’ve figured it out,” Saskia said, her voice getting stern.
She gripped his hand tighter. “That’s what mothers are supposed to do.
It’s supposed to stop being about them, because what matters is the child they brought into the world.
The child who didn’t ask to be married to an overbearing man.
The child who didn’t ask to be brought up in misery.
That was her job. It’s fair to say that she didn’t do it well. ”
He wanted to ask her if she remembered her own tangled feelings about her young parents, who had adored her but had left her that night just the same, then had died on their way back to be there when she woke up. He wanted to ask her what mothers she recalled, as either version of her.
But instead he stared back at her for so long that he watched her flush, look down, then look away.
The food came then, which he thought probably saved her. She looked as if it was sent straight from heaven, and it made certain that she didn’t have to answer what would probably be his very next question.
After dinner, they once again walked the dark, crowded streets, where they were entirely anonymous. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her close, and maybe they were both pretending it was because it was cold.
But he knew better. Later, they would make their way out to his plane and head back to London. They would be there by morning.
They would be back in their usual reality.
Thanasis couldn’t say he was in any rush.
First, then, there was this. Walking down Park Avenue with Saskia cuddled up tight beside him as if nothing had changed.
As if they were still connected the way they always had been.
As if she had never left and never would.
Thanasis vowed, there and then, that he would do what he needed to do to make Saskia fall in love with him.
Every version of her.
No matter what it took.
Because he did not intend to lose her again. He could not bear it.