Page 32 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
No wonder she’d imagined she was in mourning. She had been.
But not for the reasons she’d imagined.
“I will give you a tour,” Thanasis told her. He moved toward her stiffly, and really, this was the moment. It would be so easy. She would simply say,I remember you.
And then…
But that was trouble, wasn’t it? She already knew what would happen next.
So she said nothing when he walked over to her, and indicated with a tilt of his head that she could put her bag down.
She didn’t want to. She wanted to keep on clinging to it, and the remnants of her life in Wales were tucked inside of it, like they were some kind of talisman she could use against him. But she reminded herself that Selwen didn’t know she needed to ward this man off. Selwen might have had a physical reaction to him, and she thought he was a villain, but she clearly wasn’tafraidof him. Selwen thought her reaction to him was an anomaly.
Selwen had no idea what happened when he really touched her. When he didn’t stop. When she wouldn’t let him.
Saskia placed her bag, perhaps a little too heavily, on the arm of the couch that she knew every last square inch of. She and Thanasis had christened every surface in this flat.
Repeatedly.
And if they were not christening it, they were living here. Laughing here, talking here. Fighting here and loving each other here.
He had taught her all the ways that she could take his cock and all the way she could use it to drive him out of his mind, right here on this same couch. He had sprawled back, all of his clothes in disarray. And she had knelt there happily between hisoutstretched legs, held that thrillingly dark gaze with hers, and sucked him in deep.
She looked away now, because she was afraid that he would be able to see it on her face. That longing. That hunger.
“You liked this flat because it had character,” he told her, and she thought he sounded a little stiff. Remote. Perhaps he had seen more on her face than she had intended. “I believe you said that living in a block of flats would only depress you.”
“I can’t imagine having opinions on blocks of flats,” Saskia said, because she thought Selwen would have. When the truth was, what she’d wanted—what she had always wanted—was a home.
And despite all the years and everything that had happened, this flat still felt like home.
It was something about the light. It was the way the rooms seemed to flow one into the next, and the way that they’d put this place to rights together.
It was not until later that she had realized that in making this place the home that she’d always wanted, she had played directly into his hands. Because how could she leave this place? How could she walk away from it when she’d put so much of herself into it?
This flat had been his ace in the hole, she’d decided toward the end.
“You have lovely taste,” she told him now.
Thanasis made a low noise. “I don’t know that I have any real taste at all,” he replied after a moment. “I default to minimalism, as I’m sure you can understand, having spent time amid the Baroque theatrics that my father considers decor. I’m not the one who found all the pieces that make this flat what it is.”
Saskia remembered finding her way through Portobello Market, then letting Thanasis take her to far more exclusive shopping arenas, and that was why the flat reflected both ofthem. It was neither as Bohemian as she might have made it nor as minimalistic and corporate as he would have.
Every bit of it felt liketheirs. It always had.
Until, that was, she had begun to obsess about the fact that he had a whole other house in London. A famous house that often turned up in magazines that he didn’t want to sully with the likes of her, his down-market mistress.
Those memories sat on her heavily. Saskia almost wished they hadn’t come back to her like all the rest.
Thanasis was unaware where her head had gone, and showed her the small study that she’d made into a proper little library. “You liked to read here,” he told her. “You studied here. You preferred it when there was a fire in the grate because you could pretend you weren’t doing your coursework. I believe you once told me that you preferred to imagine you were an eighteenth-century heroine instead.”
“How fanciful,” Saskia murmured.
But the truth was, she adored this room. It got light in the morning and in the evenings, when she’d had work to do and he was off on one of his trips, she would often find herself in here. There was always reading to do and essays to work on, and she would pretend that she was something out of an Austen novel as she scribbled away, then curled up on the chaise with the fire crackling.
She had started her drawing and painting in earnest here, the artistic impulse inside of her no longer held hostage to the practicality that had governed her all her life.
It had been easier not to feel lonely that way, surrounded by art and study.
