Page 31 of Forgotten Greek Proposal
The air enveloping them thickened and suddenly the chapel was filled with a silence more complete than anything Lucie had ever known. For one long, breathless moment, anticipation that he was going to unfold himself from his prop against the pillar and haul her into his arms held her hostage.
She didn’t know if she wanted to cry or scream when she watched the shutters of his eyes come down with one forceful blink, and when he unfolded himself from his prop against the pillar, it was with his usual languidness.
‘We should probably meet the design team so you can have your dress fitting, so shall we?’ He indicated the door as if nothing had just passed between them.
Lucie summoned a smile. Or something she hoped resembled a smile. ‘Sure, let’s go and fight our way through the furnace just so I can be used as a human pin cushion.’
The lines around his eyes creased a touch. ‘I’m sure that if you keep still and let the team do their job, Francois will be careful not to let them stab you too many times.’
‘A cheering thought, and as a reward for the patience I’m going to have to display whilst being used as a pin cushion, you can take me up into the mountains later to watch the sunset.’
Not giving him the chance to argue with her, Lucie sauntered out of the chapel and into the oven that was the great outdoors. It actually felt quite cooling compared to the furnace inside her.
* * *
To Lucie’s disappointment, she spent so long being used as a human mannequin that by the time she was released from the purgatory of the dress-fitting room, the sun was already starting to set. That wasn’t to say it had been a nightmare—her dress was gorgeous and entirely in a style she adored, which was to be expected seeing as she’d had a say in its design even if she didn’t remember having that say, and Francois and his team had all treated her as if she were a princess. As an added bonus, she hadn’t been stabbed once—it was just that trying to hold a conversation for three hours when all she could see and think of was the expression in Thanasis’s eyes before he’d pulled the shutters back down had been close to impossible. He was driving her crazy!
He continued to drive her crazy with his body language that night over dinner, all pulsing looks when she caught him unguarded combined with utter physical control of himself. They exchanged not so much as a touch of a finger between them. It was a torture that continued the next day, from the moment she swam to his balcony for breakfast right until the time came for them to head into the mountains to watch the sunset.
Changing, at Thanasis’s insistence, out of the sparkly black flip flops he’d decreed unsuitable for trekking in, Lucie shoved her feet into her only vaguely suitable footwear, her chunky black calf-length boots, and met him at the front of the villa. He was in the driving seat of the golf buggy they would use to take them as far and as high as they could go before they had to walk. In the back seat, an enormous backpack filled with food for their adventure.
His gaze flicked to her as she stepped out of the door, then dropped to her feet. There was a long moment of stillness, as if someone had accidentally pressed pause on him, and Lucie had a sudden certainty that came from nowhere that he was going to comment with, ‘Nice boots,’ before he blinked himself back to life and welcomed her with a smile instead of words.
She walked over and showed him the tube of sunscreen in her hand. ‘Can you put some on my back for me please? I can’t reach.’
She watched his reaction, noted the tightening of his smile and the subtle flicker in his eyes, and knew applying sunscreen to her flesh was the very last thing he wanted to do.
She almost laughed.
It was the first time she’d needed to ask him. Daylight hours on Sephone had been spent avoiding the scorching heat of the sun but the climb they were going to embark on would leave her exposed.
Bad luck, Thanasis. Got you with this one, haven’t I?
With a sharp nod, he held his hand out for the tube.
She passed it to him. For the first time since their legs had brushed two nights ago, skin met skin as the pads of their fingers touched. But it was no lingering touch. Thanasis practically snatched his hand away before climbing out of the buggy.
Turning her back to him, she lifted her hair with one hand and held her breath.
Thanasis gritted his teeth, squeezed some of the lotion onto his hand, and told himself to grow a pair. It was human skin, nothing more. So what if it happened to be Lucie’s skin? There wasn’t all that much flesh that needed to be covered, mostly the shoulders and down to the base of her shoulder blades. Her black vest with its thin straps covered the rest of it…the thin straps she lifted her free hand to tug down her shoulders so he could apply the lotion unimpeded, confirming what he’d spent the day determined not to notice. That Lucie wasn’t wearing a bra.
He took a deep breath to clear his suddenly constricted throat and put his hands to the top of her back.
With brisk, wide strokes, he rubbed the lotion into the silken skin, fingers sliding over the nape of her neck, over the slender shoulders, and lower down until every centimetre of exposed flesh was protected.
He would never know what compelled his fingers to trace up her spine or why her shiver compelled his mouth to drop a kiss to her ear.
Breathing heavily, he stepped away from her and forced his thrumming body back into the buggy.
CHAPTER NINE
THE DRIVE TOthe mountain and to the point where the buggy could go no further took only twenty minutes. They were twenty of the longest minutes of Lucie’s life, and when Thanasis pulled the buggy to a stop in a natural clearing, her heart was still beating erratically.
Asking him to put the sunscreen on her had been necessary, but also a fun way to needle the man who’d developed a rigid determination to keep his hands to himself. She hadn’t anticipated that the dial of her longing for him, carried in every fibre of her being, would turn even higher. From the tension vibrating from the powerful frame sitting so closely beside her, and the clipped way he spoke when describing features of the mountain they were about to climb and talking about the natural fauna they were driving through, Thanasis for once being the one to drive the conversation, it was a suffering that was shared.
She could still feel his lips on her ear.
First removing two bottles of water, one of which he passed to her, he shrugged the huge backpack onto his back with the same ease Lucie slung a handbag over a shoulder. ‘Ready?’
