Page 13 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
And sure enough, that was where the old man was. He was stretched out on a massage table next to his private pool, enjoying the ministrations of a masseuse who looked far prettier than she did physically capable, which only made Thanasis grit his teeth.
It had always been this way. His father did not consider women his weakness, but his right. This take of his had been the bane of his mother’s existence, Thanasis knew too well.
For this and a hundred other reasons, he could not allow the same fate to befall his Saskia.
His father looked up and smiled, smugly, when he saw Thanasis standing there. “I thought you ran off before dawn, asusual. Didn’t you once promise me that the sun would never fall upon your face on this island again?”
“I think you have me confused with one of your other children,” Thanasis said calmly. “One of the more theatrical ones, I would wager.”
Pavlos waved his lovely masseuse away and then sat up, sparing no apparent thought for the sheet that had barely covered him. He stood, stretched luxuriously, and then took his time settling his waiting robe back over his shoulders and belting it around his waist.
He had greeted company in precisely this way whenever possible, as Thanasis recalled. Especially if they had been there to see his mother and, preferably, knew her through the church.
The old man liked nothing more than making everyone around him uncomfortable.
Thanasis, obviously, refused to give his father the satisfaction of seeing any kind of reaction. What he did instead was wait there, one brow raised in vague distaste, until his father finished peacocking about and sat down in a chair beneath an overwhelmingly bright canopy of bougainvillea.
Pavlos lifted a hand and servants rushed from inside the house to present him with a tray of drinks and food, all calculated to settle his stomach and ease the pressure in his head.
Thanasis only took a seat when his father made a grand production of waving him into the one beside his, after acting as if he didn’t realize that Thanasis intended to stay.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this unusual, extended visit?” the old man asked as he settled back in his chair, then began to sample the food before him. With a certain laziness that would have befit a king.
“I decided to stay a while,” Thanasis said mildly. “It’s been too long.”
Pavlos gazed at him, challenge in his dark eyes. “You hate it here.”
Thanasis gazed back, impassively. “There are things I dislike about the place, certainly. I think you’ll find that most people have complicated feelings regarding their childhood home. I presume you must also, or you wouldn’t keep changing the shape of it.”
He knew that he’d struck a nerve when the old man sniffed, and took his time with hisdolmades.
“And what do you think of my bride-to-be?” Pavlos asked. He smiled. “Soon enough your new stepmother?”
Thanasis thought too many things to name. It was like a wretched kaleidoscope winching this way and that in his head, clogging his throat, and making everything in him tense up immediately.
But he made himself smile. “She’s not really your type, is she?”
“Do I have a type?” Pavlos sniffed again, though this time he frowned at his son, not his tray of food. “I am merely a slave to beauty, my boy. It is a curse.”
“Most of your paramours are already famous in their own right,” Thanasis said, almost offhandedly. As if he was reading an article about his father. He knew that it was important that he never seemtoointerested in anything. It only fueled the old man’s vindictiveness. “Marissa’s mother is still a model. Telemachus’s mother was an actress of some renown.”
Pavlos laughed, and not nicely. “That is one word for what she did, hopping from one yacht to another in the unforgiving glare of the Côte d’Azur.”
Thanasis ignored that. Even if it were true, which he was not certain it could be, that suggested only that his father was the sort of man who took part in the kind of squalid parties that Thanasis had assiduously avoided his whole life. Because theonly way to enjoy such events, or pastimes, was to forget that the women there werepeople.
That had never been a possibility for him.
“This choice of yours seems different, that’s all,” he said, with a careless shrug.
The old man looked at him for a dark, brooding sort of moment, then returned his attention to a bit of hair of the dog. He threw back a small measure ofouzo,then followed it with a few plump grapes.
“I am not the young man I once was,” Pavlos pronounced after a moment. And it was tempting to imagine that he could hear something like humanity in his father’s voice in that…but Thanasis had fallen for such tricks before. “Perhaps I would like a bit of sweetness and ease as my time here dwindles.”
“I’m surprised to hear that.” When Pavlos’s thick brows shot up, Thanasis shrugged. “I have never heard you entertain the faintest thought that you could be anything but immortal.”
Pavlos shook his head. “You don’t think much of me. Most of the time, I don’t care. You must dance to my tune no matter what you think, and that entertains me. But at the end of the day, Thanasis, every man must die alone.” He eyed his eldest son. “Even me.”
He stared at Thanasis as if he expected an argument. But when Thanasis only regarded him in the same deliberately impassive way, he grunted. “It is no secret to you, of all people, that marriage did not suit me. I did it because it was expected and, no matter what else I might have done, I always did what was necessary to honor the Zacharias name.”
