Page 12 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
Letting the salt and the tide do what it needed to do so he was ready to stop playing with ghosts, so he could figure out how to remind his Saskia who she really was.
He swam and swam, let the current play with him, and found himself deeply grateful that he’d learned how to swim off this very same shore. He was not afraid of the currents or the waves, and besides, there was always all the blazing light from his father’s villa there to beckon him back to dry land.
When he’d been a young boy, he’d swum out too far and there had been no one to watch him, much less save him. Hisfather had been with one of his mistresses. His mother had been performing her furious piety in the local church.
He had choked and flailed. But he had survived.
Some might have stayed away from the water after that.
Thanasis had always been made of sterner stuff. He’d made himself swim every day, refusing to fear the water that was everywhere on an island like this. Refusing to fear anything, except the one thing in his life that he couldn’t change.
The one person who could always be counted upon to do his worst, deliberately.
It occurred to Thanasis then that this was something his father would absolutely do, deliberately. Hunt down his own son’s mistress, secrete her away for the express purpose of causing pain, and then marry her. Simply because he could.
But that didn’t explain the memory issue.
He floated on his back with the moon up high, and glared at the stars as if they might give him some clarity. When the truth was, he knew better. They had never done a damned thing but shine.
Thanasis thought through every possibility, but it all came back to the same thing.
He was tempted to think that she was only pretending she didn’t know him, but he couldn’t really make himself believe that. Saskia was no actress. No liar. He’d seen genuine emotion on her face. He had to believe she truly didn’t know who he was, however impossible he found that.
Once she remembered him, he had no doubt, he would have no need to convince her to leave his father. She would do it herself. With bells on.
That was who she was.
So what he had to do was figure out how to introduce her to herself, before it was too late.
The next morning, Thanasis tended to business matters abroad and then, when afternoon threatened, he went and found his father.
On the rare occasions he came to the villa, Thanasis stayed in one of the cottages set apart from the main house. He enjoyed the walk, and the privacy, and there was something in him that no number of years in gray and rainy London could repress. That something that loved without reservation the brightness of a Greek day. The scent of sweet flowers on the breeze, and the silvery olive leaves as they took in the sun.
And, always, that gleaming sea that waited in the distance no matter where he looked. That wild Aegean blue, foreverjust there, justout of reach.
As he walked, he could pretend that there was nothing to worry about but this. The weight of a summer afternoon. The songs of the birds in the trees. The endless blue sky above and the whitewashed walls of all the buildings that seem to beckon the blue closer, then bring it deeper.
But soon enough, all he could see was the sprawl of his father’s pet project. The original villa that had stood on the site dated back to a time when the Zachariases were little more than goat herders. It was Thanasis’s great-grandfather who had started the business and had renovated the cottage that had always stood here to better reflect his new station in life.
It had been his grandfather who had made the villa a showpiece in its time, a restrained bit of Greek beauty.
And then had come Pavlos who had decided that he could command architecture the way he did his minions. He had thrown up a wing here and a bristling collection of roofs and structures there, connecting them all by breezeways and archways so that it all resembled balled-up pieces of discarded paper.
Though not in any sort of Frank Gehry sense.
The place was, truly, a vulgarity.
Though today Thanasis found that he felt more sanguine about the place than he normally did. He had detested living here, that was true. His childhood had not been a happy one, and while he knew it was not the house to blame for that, the house was where most of his childhood had occurred.
It was where he’d come to understand exactly who his father was.
But today all he could think about was the resurrection of his beautiful Saskia, and so he didn’t have it in him to condemn the massive display of more wealth than taste outright.
It was possible, he allowed as he drew closer, that there was a certain charm to it all. It was so over-the-top, so outrageous, that there was nothing to do but surrender to it. That was why he’d hated it all his life, perhaps.
He found he minded it less, today.
Inside, the staff was still sorting out the mess from last night. Thanasis picked his way through the front hall and made his way deep into the center of the sprawling building, where, if he knew his father, Pavlos would be nursing a tender head in his personal spa.
