Chapter Thirteen
‘GO,’ HE SAID, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to see her reaction. Closing his eyes against the bitter, shredding feeling of regret and grief. Of knowing that, once again, he’d taken something beautiful and destroyed it. He doubted he would ever get over the sense of regret.
Cowardice was not his natural bent, however, so Nikos forced himself to open his eyes and look at her, to see the anguish in her face.
He looked at her in the way he’d never been brave or aware enough to do with Isabella.
Her complaints had fallen on deaf ears. But with Genevieve, her every word, tortured by the fact he would never return her feelings, though whispered, landed with a thud.
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding slowly, turning her back on him then moving to the wardrobe.
He stood his ground, even when his body was desperately trying to propel him forwards.
She returned a moment later, wearing the shorts and shirt she’d had on when she’d washed ashore on his island.
His gut rolled. ‘I don’t know how,’ she said, lifting one shoulder, looking every bit as vulnerable as she’d been that night.
‘I don’t have a phone. I can’t call a car. Would you—?’
‘I’ll arrange it, of course,’ he said, rocks in his gut rolling together to form a dusty sediment that flooded his whole body. ‘Where would you like to go to?’
‘I still have the room in Katanos. Can you send me there?’
Can you send me there?
Every single shred of good he’d done her was undermined by the vulnerability in that question. He moved then, crossing the room and putting his hands on her hips. ‘Genevieve,’ he said, but she shook her head and stepped away from him.
‘Just leave it,’ she asked breathily. ‘I don’t think we need to say anything more. We both know how we feel.’
But she didn’t know how he felt. She couldn’t. Not when those feelings were all so jumbled and tangled, a horrible knotty nightmare of what he wanted and needed, and needed to forbid himself from taking. The pledge he’d made himself on his wife’s death he considered to be unbreakable.
Nothing had changed that; nothing ever could.
‘Very well. I’ll take you back to Katanos.’
‘No,’ she said, quickly shaking her head again. ‘Not you. I think it’s better if we say goodbye here. I can take the train. I just need someone to drive me to the station.’
‘I’ll—’
‘No, not you,’ she stressed. ‘Please, Nikos. Just let me go, okay?’
What could he say to that? She’d given him two options. Love her, or let her go. He’d chosen the latter with barely a moment’s hesitation. And he would have a lifetime to live with the consequences.
The trip to the other side of Greece took almost six hours, and from there, she had to take a cab to her hotel, which was another twenty minutes.
By the time she arrived, she was exhausted, having not slept more than a few snatched hours on the train over, and even those had been tormented by dreams of Nikos, by her desire for him, her aching for him, her grief for him.
Because he deserved so much more, but he would probably never see that.
She would have spent a lifetime trying to make him see it, if he’d let her.
If he’d fought to keep her in his life, in any capacity, she would have stayed. But he was too good and decent for that, too traumatised by his belief that his marriage had, for his wife, been purely bad.
She stared out on Katanos as the taxi approached her hotel, but already, she was mentally pulling herself away from Greece, and the life she’d suddenly built here.
It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be, when the feelings were so one-sided.
Besides, she had a life in America she needed to return to.
The business of finding a job and finally putting her college education to good use, and, most importantly, the getting on with her own life.
In a way, she supposed she should have been grateful. She’d arrived in Greece feeling emotionally bruised and battered by James, but now she barely thought of the man she’d once been married to. All of her heartache, all of her heart, belonged to Nikos Konstantinou, and always would.
It was the sight of her engagement ring on the edge of the basin that finally got through to him.
She’d left, he’d watched her go, but it was seeing that ring—which, for him, had been so meaningfully chosen—discarded as a totem of their time together that really hammered it home to him that she was gone, and because of him.
That he’d hurt her.
Failed her.
That in some ways, he was no better than her husband.
Or wouldn’t be, if he didn’t at least send her away with more than a panic-driven insistence that she leave.
Not five minutes later, the rotors of the helicopter were turning and he was lifting up, over Athens, his mind already focused on Katanos, and the beautiful woman he knew he’d find there.
Genevieve had been sleeping most of the day.
Grief, exhaustion and depression had all caught up with her, and her brain had wrapped her in a protective mechanism, all but sedating her into a deep slumber, so she felt as though she were miles beneath the surface of the earth.
So at first, she didn’t hear the banging on the door.
But then, like a mallet or a ratchet, it burst through her dreams, meaning she woke up disorientated and alert, her pulse thrumming with alarm as her body wondered what was wrong.
‘Genevieve?’
Even through the door and across the carpeted floor, she knew instantly that it was Nikos.
From the sound of his voice, but also from the ache in her heart.
She moved quickly, pushing back the sheet and crossing the small hotel room, with absolutely no idea what time it was.
The sun was up, but, as far as she knew, it could have been anywhere from midday to sundown.
She wrenched open the door and stared at him, her insides twisting with love and familiarity, with the recognition that she was looking back at her other half.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, drawing her into his arms and holding her hard against him. Hope flared in her chest, soaring like an eagle, out of control and brilliant. ‘Don’t go like this,’ he said, taking that hope and strangling it into nothing.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked, pushing back to look up into his face. The expression there almost wrenched her apart.
‘I can’t let you go,’ he ground out. ‘I thought I could, but I need to know that, no matter where you are, you’re okay. I need to know you’re safe, protected. I need that like I need air.’
Her stomach dropped to her toes. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying I can’t be with you,’ he said, cupping her cheeks and staring down at her with every bit of intensity he possessed. ‘You know me better than I know myself; you know why I feel as I do.’
She swept her eyes closed against the assault of his desperation. ‘You love me,’ she whispered, knowing it was true.
‘I can’t be with you,’ he said, simply.
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Her eyes blinked open to face his and she saw the resolution there, the determination to stick to this viewpoint, no matter how painful it was to both.
‘But the thought of you losing your way again, of you ending up with someone like James, someone worse, it would kill me, Genevieve. No matter where you are, you are a part of me. I have to know you’re okay.’
‘I’ll be okay,’ she lied, because in that moment she felt as though she never would be again.
‘Let me take care of you,’ he said, and something tightened inside her, like screws against her ribs.
‘Take care of me how?’ To her own ears, the coldness was obvious in her tone, but he clearly didn’t hear it—or heed it.
‘Let me set you up in your own place, take away any financial worries. Let me care for you. And occasionally, God, Genevieve, God help me for my weakness, let me see you and remember that when I’m with you, I genuinely feel as though I am what you say.
Let me see myself as you do, from time to time. ’
‘From time to time,’ she murmured, imagining the world he described with a sense of overwhelming barrenness. The idea of living in that awful state of purgatory, just as he was on the island, one foot between both their worlds.
‘I cannot give you what you want, but I can give you so much, if you’ll let me.’
She took a step backwards, to put space between them, but he followed, and closed the door behind them, so she startled at the sound of it slamming.
‘Please,’ he said, and she knew it wasn’t a word he used often. It dug right into her heart. She blinked away, turning to look at the view, towards the island, imagining the future she really wanted. Side by side with him, no matter where, no matter how they lived.
‘I can’t accept that,’ she said, swallowing past a lump in her throat. ‘It’s not enough.’
‘It’s more than you have now.’
She turned back to him, her lips quivering in an attempt at a weak smile. ‘Is it? I have my independence, Nikos, and I fought so hard for it. I would never sacrifice that again, except for the deepest kind of mutual love. How have you so fundamentally misunderstood me?’
‘Genevieve—’
‘No.’ She shook her head, holding up a hand.
‘There are only two things I want in this world, and I had my whole marriage to recognise that. I deserve to be loved. Wholly, fully, without restraint. Messy, consuming, warts-and-all love.’ She tilted her chin, daring him with her defiant expression to contradict her.
‘And I deserve to be with someone who knows that I have what it takes to stand on my own two feet.’ The last one really hurt.
‘With James, I gave up my independence because he said he wanted to look after me, and I ended up with no agency, and no options. If you think I would ever make that mistake again, even with someone I love as much as I do you, then you really don’t get what I’ve been through. ’
He stared at her with obvious frustration and torment. ‘Genevieve, agape…’