Page 20 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
But Saskia, no matter what name she called herself now, did not take back her words. She crossed her arms. Her eyes were glinting with temper and despite his reaction to what she’d said, he recognized that. He remembered it. And he preferred it, if he was honest. It was better than the fear he’d seen in her eyes on the beach.
Their relationship had been wildly passionate. Their rows had been the same.
There had never been anyfearbetween them. Seeing such a thing, then seeing her run, had made him feel as if he’d swallowed broken glass.
He couldn’t believe she didn’t remember these things. Or if she truly couldn’t remember, if she had suffered some injury—something else he could not bear to think about—then he could not understand how she couldn’tfeelthe truth inside her theway that he did. It was magnetic. It was impossible and bright and intoxicating, this string that he felt binding him to her.
It was the same inexorable pull that had been there between them since the start.
But the truth was, he also couldn’t believe that she could jump to such a conclusion no matter what she could or couldn’t feel. She wanted to marry a man like Pavlos and she thoughtThanasiswas the one to fear?
Was this how twisted she’d gotten over the past five years?
At least this helps explain why she disappeared,he told himself, but that failed to make him feel any better.
“Let’s look at the facts as you lay them out,” Saskia suggested. Her chin jutted out and she spoke, a telltale sign that she was not happy with him and only too pleased to fight about it.
He tried to take that as a good sign. Because at least this was a Saskia he knew.
“You claim you have no memory,” he reminded her, and it felt almost too familiar, to stand before her and defend himself.I have never hidden you,he had said to her years ago, and more than once.You are hardly locked away in a tower,fos mou.Is the dramatic language necessary?Looking back, it was possible he had deliberately said such things because he liked the way their passions came to the boil. He could admit it. Now. “I’m the one, then, who knows all the facts. And they are as I presented them to you.”
“You are a man,” Saskia told him in a withering sort of tone that was…new.
And not, to his mind, any kind of improvement. He stood straighter, something igniting deep inside him as he recalled the way he’d handled her in the past, when she’d been a little more careful with her mouth and the way she spoke to him. Maybe they’d both been a little more careful, then. Tempestuous, yes, but more careful with the things they said.
“Indeed I am,” Thanasis agreed, and he did not think that he was being quite as reckless as she was. Though the urge was there. It swelled in him like something much darker, much deeper. An incoming tide of too many memories of the ways they’d worked things out in the past.
The way he’d assumed they would have worked it out after that last night, too.
It had never crossed his mind that she might not come back.
“I don’t know what you think you told me,” Saskia was saying in the same too-hot tone. “Let me tell you what I heard. You, in all your Zacharias state—” she did something with her hand that he could only describe as lowering and dismissive “—came upon an orphan girl who was merely trying to look at art. Which is, by the way, generally free. So let us assume that she was poor as well. A poor, lonely, orphan girl, all alone in the world. And then you came in and seduced her by the following evening.”
Thanasis laughed before he could think better of it.“Idid not seduceyou.That is not how that happened at all.”
Quite the opposite, in fact. He had been captivated by her, as he’d said. He had never felt anything like it. If she had insisted on public coffees forever, he suspected he would have gone along with it. He had wanted to spend time with her. He had wanted to simply drink in her presence.
He had been turned inside out where she had been concerned, and he had spent years wondering how long he would have let that go on. How long he would have played that part.
But he hadn’t had to find out.
She’d been the one to hold his hand on a dark street. She had interlaced their fingers and sighed at the sensation that had flooded them both. Then she had been the one to lean in, standing up on her toes to kiss him first.
Saskia had been the one to set them both on fire.
Thanasis had been burned through ever since.
“You seduced her and then you hid her away from the world,” Saskia was saying, with great confidence. “I’m sure it’s a nice flat you chucked her in, but did she ever leave it? You said you wanted to keep your relationship private but what it sounds like is that you kept her in jail. Locked up tight.” In case he didn’t get the implication, she leaned forward, slightly, her steeped tea gaze on him.“Imprisoned.”
“I’m unaware of any jails that allow their inmates full and unfettered access to the entire city of London, a master’s program in a university, and free rein to go wherever they might wish at a moment’s notice—even an ill-fated train. That’s not my impression about how incarceration generally goes in the United Kingdom. But perhaps you, lately of Wales and with no memory older than five years, have a different view. By all means,Selwen,share it.”
He could see that she did not like the way he said that new name of hers. It was also possible she disliked his tone as much as he did hers, and he could not quite regret that.
“You imprisoned her.” Saskia said it again, like she wanted it to land, and hard. “Yet you seem to think that she should have somehow known what your intentions were despite this. Did you tell her those intentions?”
He had.
Thanasis was certain that he had.
