Page 10 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
Being affectionate in public had taken acting skills on Lucie’s part too. In public, she’d played her part perfectly, all doe eyes and soft smiles even though having the paparazzi’s cameras aimed at her face was a form of torture for her. The moment they were alone, her black eyes would flash their loathing and her nose wrinkle its disdain. He’d lost count of the times she’d wiped her freed hand on her clothes as if wiping the feel of him off her skin, her back stiff and turned from him. Lost count of the times he’d done the same.
It had never worked, and that was what had made everything so much harder to endure. Every time their hands clasped, he felt the burn of her skin against his for hours after. Every time he slipped an arm around her waist as a show of affection for the cameras and she leaned into him for the same reason, he’d find himself breathing in the scent of her hair and find himself still inhaling it when alone in his bed. Still feeling the soft tickle of it against his neck. Still feeling the compression of her slight figure against his torso. Still feeling his heated blood coursing through his veins.
If they’d met under different circumstances, as genuine strangers with no entwined family histories and no bad blood, then things would be a whole lot different. He would bed her in a heartbeat and get this all-consuming ache for her out of his system.
It was the age-old conundrum of forbidden fruit, he acknowledged grimly as he stripped off his clothes. Being forbidden always made an object infinitely more tempting. As a child he’d been forbidden from using the swimming pool without adult supervision. The first time unsupervised opportunity had presented itself, he’d dive-bombed into the pool. If not for the racket his dive-bomb had made, the gardener would never have thought to look and would never have seen four-year-old Thanasis struggling to keep his head above water.
Lucie was more off limits than the swimming pool had been.
To Thanasis’s mind, marriage was the ultimate commitment two people could make, and sacred for it. When he made that commitment in the future, it would be for love and it would be for ever, and he would not allow any aspect of his temporary marriage to feel real enough to taint that future. When he made his real vows, he wanted to join his real wife in his real marital bed knowing it was the first time for him to make love as a husband.
His anger rising, he stepped under the shower.
Why the hell hadn’t he demanded a photo of Lucie before agreeing to marry her? Thanks to varying European privacy laws concerning minors, there were no pictures of her in the public domain, and the private life she’d lived in England since turning eighteen meant she’d escaped the paparazzi’s attention. If he’d known it was her, the woman who’d captivated him with that one look across a room all those years ago, he’d have played hard ball and demanded Athena or no deal. There would be no temptation of forbidden fruit there. Athena was beautiful too, but it was a beauty that left him cold.
And now he had to spend the next week walking a tightrope playing the devoted fiancé to a woman who made him feel anything but cold.
* * *
‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to spend a few days in Athens before we go to Sephone?’ Lucie said the next morning after the medical team left the room. Her latest scan results had been discussed, the doctor declaring her well enough to be discharged. This had resulted in her mother immediately diving into the carry-on case Thanasis had brought from the apartment for this eventuality and Thanasis getting straight onto the phone. It seemed her mother and fiancé were working in cahoots to get her out of this hospital room as soon as humanly possible.
‘Why would you think that, darling?’ her mother asked, shaking out a black summer dress with a wrinkle of her nose.
‘Maybe because the doctor just said one of the best ways to aid the recovery of my memories is by going to familiar places,’ Lucie pointed out drily. ‘I’ve never been to Sephone.’
‘The doctor also said you need to rest, and what better place than a peaceful island unless youwantthe paparazzi to stalk you?’
Lucie shuddered at the mere thought. If anything had tainted her childhood, it had been the paparazzi’s near constant presence during her time spent in Greece. Her mother’s love of the intrusive spotlight was but one of the many fundamental differences between them.
Her mother handed the dress to her. ‘Do you still not own clothes that aren’t black?’
Lucie looked at the tightly fitting, high-fashion, colourful attire her mother was wearing and chose not to answer. She was long past the rebellious teenage years when she’d adopted dressing from head to toe in black as a silent means of needling the woman who’d given birth to her, but old habits died hard. She’d added splashes of colour to her wardrobe in recent years but still felt most comfortable wearing black.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ Thanasis murmured, shifting from his position at the window where he’d been deep in conversation. ‘I need to make a call that might involve shouting.’
Startled at the glimpse of humour from a man she’d assumed didn’t possess one—in all their time in this hospital room, he’d been nothing but serious—Lucie grinned.
She’d woken with a clearer head than she’d had since coming round from the sedation and spent a blissful hour in peace and solitude with nothing but her thoughts to occupy her. But, instead of searching for her lost memories, she’d spent the time wondering what it was about Thanasis that had made her fall for him. Apart from his devastating dark good looks and perfect body that was. She’d had the odd date with good-looking men over the years but always something had put her off wanting a second date. Usually it was too much vanity or a lack of humour, often both—she found those two traits went hand in hand—and so she’d pondered what it was Thanasis had the others lacked and how she could fall for so serious a man, and now she knew. Hedidhave a tiny, latent sense of humour behind the Mr Serious persona.
‘Is my phone in the case?’ she asked her mother once they were alone. It was the first time she’d even thought of it. She dreaded to think how many messages she’d have to reply to.
Sighing at the inconvenience, her mother had a quick rummage in Lucie’s case. ‘Not that I can see. Do you need help dressing?’
‘I could do with a shower first.’ Since being admitted into hospital she’d had to put up with the nurses giving her bed baths, which would have been the indignity from hell if she hadn’t been so spaced out on the drugs, but now she was actuallycompos mentisshe’d rather pluck each individual leg hair out than put up with that again. She wanted a shower. A long, lovely shower.
‘There isn’t time,’ her mother dismissed. ‘Another patient will need this room.’
‘But the nurse said there was no rush.’
‘She was being polite. Come on, get that dreadful plastic gown off you.’
It took an incredible effort not to go into sulky teenager mode. ‘Underwear?’
Once everything had been placed on the armchair for Lucie to change into, she gave her mother a meaningful look. ‘Some privacy?’
Her mother rolled her eyes. ‘You always were a prudish little thing.’ Magicking a bulging makeup bag from nowhere, she disappeared into the adjoining bathroom with mutters of ‘touching up her face’.
Lucie glared at the closed bathroom door. She’d always hated it when her mother teased her for being a prude. Just because she’d made it to twenty-four with only one real boyfriend under her belt, and preferred wearing loose-fitting clothes that covered her breasts and backside rather than the tight miniskirts and low crop tops her mother favoured, did not mean she was prudish.
