Page 41 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
There was even the way he’d walked her to the door of the rooms that had been set aside for her in the town house he kept in lower Manhattan. He’d stood outside her door and smiled down at her, and then he’d bowed, just slightly as he’d left her there.
I hope this nightspot met with your approval,he’d said.
It has a lot of potential,she’d managed to reply, feeling hot and flushed straight through. From the dancing. From the way they’d walked back together. From simply being close to him again.
And she hadn’t moved from the door, so she’d seen it when he’d glanced back over his shoulder. She’d seen when his face was no longer the picture of courtesy, his eyes alight with a need that echoed in her, low and deep.
Then at dinner their last night, where he’d told her about his mother—something he’d never told her before. The way he’d played with her fingers, which wasn’t the heat that she was sure he could feel as easily as she could. It was intimate, the way he touched her at that table. The way she touched him back. There was that deep intimacy, in all of it.
She thought that they’d walked away from that restaurant changed, somehow.
They’d smiled at each other as they’d walked back downtown, weaving their way in and out of the crowds. A part of the bustle and roll of the New York streets.
But all she’d really been aware of was him.
Now, when they finally reached the right address in Chelsea in this gray city across the ocean from all that intimacy and light, she felt torn up inside from all these memories, all these sensations inside of her. She scowled at him when he made no move to get out.
“I think you’d better come up,” she told him.
He looked at her for a long moment, those dark eyes of his as unreadable as ever.
He nodded, slowly.
She thought that was ominous. It made her stomach hurt.
Maybe because of that, she made a point of gathering her own luggage and carrying it in with her, because she knew he usually had his driver do such things. It seemed necessary that she do it herself.
She didn’t want to ask herself why.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he told her as he followed her into the building, and took the garment bag and her small case from her.
For some reason, maybe because she was completely unable to handle herself the way she should have been able to, she found that ominous too.
Saskia climbed the stairs, entirely too aware of him at her back. Particularly because he didn’t seem to notice that he was heaving a case up the stairs with him. He was that fit. He always had been.
It set her teeth on edge, or maybe she just wished she could bite him a little—
She pushed that aside. It was unhelpful.
By the time they made it to the flat itself, Saskia was vibrating with a stress she couldn’t entirely name. She felt as if she might explode. Her skin felt strange, stretched too tight around her body, as if someone had come and switched it in the night.
She couldn’t help but think that if they’d stayed in New York, things would be different. Instead of walking back down to that town house and getting in a car to take them to the airport, would they have ended up in his bed?
Or hers?
Inside the flat, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest as if that could keep her heart in place, then she turned to face him.
“You were going to go back to your real house, weren’t you?” she asked.
“That seems like rather a loaded question.” One of his dark brows rose. “It is just a house. It is no more or less real than this one. The only difference I know of is that my house on the heath is—”
“Legitimate?” she interjected.
“Well-known,” he corrected her, with a certain pointed patience. “Particularly by my father. And all of my half siblings. They send the paparazzi there themselves. I have always wanted to keep you safe from these things.”
She felt strange again, this time as if something in her was ticking, like some bomb set to go off. “Your father promised me that I could stay private, but he was already talking about taking me to galas in Athens. Weddings in Paris cathedrals.”
Thanasis stood taller at that and she watched his jaw turn to granite. “That would make sense, of course. Everyone knows him to be an unapologetic womanizer. His trespasses against my mother were exhaustively covered in every paper there was. Of course he would wish to make a spectacle of his second wife, who everyone would assume is too naive to know better.”
