Page 45 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
They had spent long hours here, their legs tangled together and their gazes hot and sleepy. Sometimes the rain pattered against the window. Sometimes they would fog it up with the bath’s heat. Sometimes the light from outside filtered in, making them glow. They would sit here in the warmth with the scent of lavender and sugar in the air and all around, and tell each other things that would have felt incidental or even pointless if they’dshared them over a meal. Things that were so tiny that they hardly mattered, and yet he could remember each and every one of them now. All these years later.
Her feelings about bananas. Her least favorite pop song and, conversely, her secret, shameful favorite. Her deep suspicion of men in khaki trousers, particularly with American accents. Her aversion to the wordmoist.
Thanasis could remember all of it.
Sitting here with her felt so easy, so natural, that it was tempting to tell himself that they had erased that stretch of lost time. That they had simply glossed over it.
But he had lived through every ghastly moment of it. He remembered it entirely too well.
Now, finally, he had been with her again. And it had been glorious in every possible way, as always—save for the one, small detail of her lost memory.
Becauseheremembered everything, but she didn’t know who he was, no matter how many pictures of them were scattered about this flat. She didn’t know who they were. So this might have been fantastic sex for her—and he knew that it had been—but that wasn’t the same thing.
And he wasn’t sure how he could reconcile the fact thathefelt as if his soul had been turned inside out, thathehad felt that deep and intimate connection withhis Saskiaas if they werethemagain while she had simply…
Had sex.
It made him feel hollow.
Only darker.
“What’s the matter?” she asked him, tilting her head to one side as she regarded him.
Thanasis rose from the bath, because he couldn’t bear to lounge about in the relaxing hot water while this was happening,mimicking the relationship he’d once had with her and now likely never would again.
He got out and dried himself off, and she followed. Then they were out in the bedroom again and he couldn’t pretend that he wasn’t…
Whatever this was. He didn’t know how to name it.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” he told her. More sternly than necessary.
She frowned. “I wanted it to happen.”
“You don’t know who you are.” That came out louder than he’d meant it to, but he didn’t take it back. On the contrary, it was as if saying it loosened something in him. “You don’t know whoIam. This meant something to me and you don’t even know why.”
Saskia frowned at him. Then she looked away and he could have sworn that she looked something like guilty. But what could she have to feel guilty about?
“Thanasis…” she began, as if she was testing out his name in her mouth.
And he did not need to focus on that image.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying my very best to make certain that I am nothing like my father,” he told her, and now he did fight to keep his voice even—but it was a losing battle. “The lengths I have gone to, in every regard, beggar belief. I have separated myself in every possible way I can. I go to that island as little as I can. I minimize all possible conversations, because I do not wish to entertain him and I am tired of running interference for him. Yet I am forever apologizing for him, cleaning up his messes, and soothing the feathers he ruffles all over Europe and beyond.”
She made as if to speak, but he shook his head. “All this to discover, in the end, that I am the same. I might as well not have bothered to distance myself from him at all, for it turns out thatdespite all these efforts, I am no different from him at all. Where it counts, I am the same monster.”
Saskia was frowning at him as if he’d lapsed off into Greek. “What are you talking about?”
“I know what sex between us is like, Saskia,” he belted out. And he never lost his temper. He never lost his cool. Never, that was, unless it was Saskia. The only person on earth who had ever managed to get under his skin since he was a child. “I know exactly how it feels and what it does. And I know what it was like when we met, so I know exactly what you experienced tonight. But for me, it was so much more than that. And I knew it would be.I knew it,and I did it anyway.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
But she did. He could see that she did.
“I knew what would happen,” Thanasis said, again, to make certain he was facing this. That he was acknowledging what had happened here. “And how is that fair? You were so determined to think the worst of me and then, given the opportunity, I lived down to every expectation. At the end of the day, I’m as much a monster as my father ever was.”
And he didn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t that flash that seemed to go through her like an electric shock. “You are nothing like your father,” she told him, her voice serious and her gaze grave. “Nothing at all.”
“You don’t know him either,” Thanasis said.
