Page 27 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
It occurred to her now that she’d been unpardonably naïve for entirely too long.
Ffion would not have approved.
Selwen stared at that chair where Thanasis had sat, scowling at it as if she could make his apparition appear if she concentrated hard enough.
She thought about all the men she had danced with on various islands. How she had somehow convinced herself, one dance at a time, that all anyone wanted from her was the dancing. She’d convinced herself that this thing with Pavlos was the same. A bit of a dance, that was all. That was all he wanted from her, she’d been sure of it.
“What a fool you are,” she told herself, though the breeze stole her words away.
Because it had always been about sex. All of it.
Those men who had danced with her had wanted more. Pavlos had not showed her olive groves because he thought she had a particular interest in olives, but because part of the dancingheliked to do was showing off his wealth.
And here she was, heedlessly tripping face-first into situations she not only didn’t understand, but had actively tried not to when the truth was really very simple, there at the bottom of it all.
She liked dancing. But she had absolutely no interest in all that bouncing and flopping around that Pavlos and his massage therapist had been doing. Selwen couldn’t remember a single time she’d wanted anything like that, with any man, whether the men in the village back in Pembrokeshire or the men in the many islandtavernas.
It was like she couldn’t remember that part of herself either.
There was only one man who had ever seemed to affect her body at all. Only one who had made her feel that if she didn’t have some part of him inside her, she might die.
She had wanted todie,and she had, right there on his hand.
Selwen stared at Thanasis’s cottage, and felt something like a shiver move through her, except it felt a good deal more like an earthquake. As if she was crisscrossed with fault lines and they were all tearing themselves apart, here and now.
When she stayed in one piece, somehow, she wheeled herself around and marched herself through the labyrinth of the house to her bedchamber so that she could start packing her things.
And that was where Pavlos found her, quite a long while later. He had certainly notrushedto come to her. To explain himself, or apologize—
Which was what Selwen thought he was going to do when he stood there in the doorway and regarded her, with eyes she suddenly couldn’t fail to see were cold. And not at all kind, as she’d convinced herself they were.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, with what sounded like only the very mildest curiosity.
“Away,” she said, and was surprised that she didn’t sound particularly upset.
Surely she should have been crushed to a pulp.
But Pavlos laughed, and she found she felt even less upset. “I had no idea you were such a child,” he told her. “What did you think? That I would become a monk simply because you behave like a nun? What foolishness.”
If she cared about this man the way she should, surely she would have been more hurt than disgusted. Surely she ought to cry, throw things. Try to rip him apart, the way she had—
But she couldn’t think about that just yet. How fired up she’d been to rip Thanasis apart, and while she was at it, rip into his memories too, when all he’d done was kiss her on a beach. And when she’d melted all over him, like molten fire in his hands.
She felt absolutely no need to do that now.
It was another dose of clarity. She was beginning to wonder if it was possible to overdose on the stuff.
“It’s my fault,” she said, and perhaps her voice was too light, too easy. Because his eyes narrowed and, if possible, grew colder. “I should have made it clear from the beginning that I cannot tolerate disloyalty.”
“This is like a child trying to run away from home.” Pavlos laughed again, and she could admit, now, that she hated all the laughter in this villa. It came with sharp-edged knives. “You cannot have been confused about who I am, Selwen. I have made no secret of it. You have been present at too many of my parties to imagine that I was a man who abstained from the pleasures of the flesh, or, indeed, any pleasures at all.”
“It is one thing to drink too much. It is another to flagrantly sleep with another woman in the house where I’m staying. I think you know that, Pavlos.”
She thought he would get angry. But he only sighed. Then shrugged. It was a great, theatrical sort of gesture.
“I wish you good luck with this tantrum of yours,” he told her in that same patronizing tone. “You will not find it easy to get off this island, I am afraid. And when you are ready to have a conversation like adults, you can come and find me.” He laughed again, long and mean. “Though I would suggest that in the future, you knock.”
What she thought was,Everything Thanasis told me was true.
