Page 3 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
Saskia.Her name was a song inside of him. Saskia, whose lovely, perfect body had never been found. He had grudgingly come to accept that she had died in that train derailment, because surely no one could hide for five whole years. Not from a man like him with so many resources at his fingertips.
He had monitored her bank. Her credit cards. She’d never returned to the flat he’d set up for her in London and he knew she had nowhere else to go. She had been an orphan, in London for her studies and focusing on art history, of all pointless things. She had been quick and bright, intense and in love, and he had never wished to be parted from her. Then, after a night he wished he could do over again—oh, how he had wished it a thousand times—she had boarded that train in the morning and he’d never seen her again.
He’d been left with nothing.
And Thanasis had quickly discovered that without this woman he had hid away from the world, he was a stranger to himself.
It was possible that he had become used to that stranger. Or anyway, he’d learned to accept him, because it wasn’t as if he had another option.
But here, tonight, he was staring at her doppelgänger.
And he felt very much like the him he had lost that terrible day…
He cautioned himself against too much hope. He had acquainted himself with all the various stages of grief and then some, more than once, and nothing had changed the truth. There was no reason to suppose that would change now, either. Everyone had a twin, wasn’t that what they said? Everyone had a double.
Thanasis told himself that this woman here tonight resembled the woman he’d lost, that was all. She wasn’t—shecouldn’t behis Saskia. Just someone who looked so much like her that it was almost as if she had come back from the dead.
Obviously, that was impossible.
Obviously.
Still, he maneuvered himself closer. She wasn’t speaking to anyone, though she stood in a loose group of guests. She wore a pretty dress and a smile on her face and looked as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing from the people standing around her. Given that those people included Pavlos himself and Thanasis’s half brother, Johannes—who could best be described as two-faced and vengeful, and that on a good day—this was not a surprise.
She didn’t look like Saskia, Thanasis assured himself. Or rather, she looked different thanhisSaskia. Older, perhaps.
She wore her hair differently, longer now, tumbling down her back in glossy waves that made his fingers ache with the memory of running a shorter version of those thick waves between them.
He knew how she would smell, like bergamot and flowers, and he only realized he’d clenched his hands into fists when his knuckles began to ache.
This woman, who could not possibly be Saskia because Saskia was dead, had the same perfect oval of a face. The same clever, dancing eyes like steeped tea run through with the brightest sunshine. She had the same delicate nose and the same high cheekbones, both of which he had traced again and again with his fingers. His mouth.
And that washermouth, just as he remembered it. A sensual affair that made her look as if she was pouting when all she was doing was thinking. That mouth that he had felt all over his body, then lush and hot on his cock.
God help him, but he could feel himself stirring even here. In this squalid place where sex was merely one more commodity.
He stared at her so hard that it must have disturbed the air around her, because she looked up. And he braced himself, waiting for that clash of recognition when her gaze met his. That punch of understanding and electricity that had changed his life completely when he’d encountered her by chance in the Tate Modern in Central London.
But though she looked at him, and held his gaze, he saw nothing in the dark brown depths of hers save the mildest interest.
As if he really was nothing but a stranger.
This only proved that she wasn’t Saskia, he assured himself—but everything in him rejected it.
Emphatically.
Thanasis could feel it like a blow, a kind of terrible seizure rolling through him and churning him up, leaving nothing but destruction in its wake.
He gritted his teeth. And it took him a lot longer than it should have to make sure that no matter what devastating implosions were happening inside him—and there were too many to count tonight—his face betrayed nothing.
When there was movement beside him again, he found the sly and ever chemically impaired Telemachus beside him, another half brother. This one so dissolute that it was never clear if he knew who Thanasis was or if he thought that he was involved in some sort of extended drug-addled experience in his own otherwise empty head.
“Have to admit it,” Telemachus slurred at Thanasis as if picking up a conversation. “The old goat has always had good taste in women.”
“I’m aware of only one woman who fits that description,” Thanasis replied frigidly. “My sainted mother, may she rest in peace. The one and only wife he ever took.”
“My mother was a whore,” Telemachus said cheerfully, as if in agreement. “She’d have been the first to admit it if she was still alive. Not just admit it, but defend it. That doesn’t change the fact that she was beautiful.”
“I have asked you repeatedly not to speak to me in public,” Thanasis reminded Telemachus, who likely forgot that again the moment he said it. He moved away, growing more impatient with each step.
