Page 47 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
She knelt up and then she put her hands on his chest, as if she couldn’t feel the glass shards where his flesh had been. As if she didn’t understand that he was no longer the man he’d been. That there was nothing left of him but dust and regret.
“No one has ever kissed me but you,” she told him. Simple and devastating. “No one has ever touched me but you, and I hated it.”
When he only stared down at her, somewhere between stricken and frozen andshattered, she hurried on. “I hated it, but it was a wonderful thing all the same, because it brought everything back. I knew everything about him was wrong and that was how I found me again. It all came flooding back while he was standing there, saying God knows what. I didn’t care. I rememberedyou,Thanasis.I rememberedus. I remembered everything.”
“How could you have decided to marry him if you had never even kissed?” Thanasis demanded, when that was really very low on his list of concerns just then.
“Because I didn’t care about him,” she shot back. “I’m not sure I cared about anything, Thanasis. You don’t understand, I don’t think, what it was actually like to be Selwen. To be me, but cut off from everything I care about and everything I am. To make the best of it with what I have, yet always feel off. Lost. Especially after Ffion died. She was the only thing that made me feelreal.”
“You told me.” Thanasis reached out to set her back on the bed, but he ended up holding her there instead, high against his chest. “You wore the equivalent of sackcloth and ash. You scuttled around the sodden streets of Wales. In a hood with downcast eyes, no less.”
“Because somewhere, deep inside of me, I knew that everything was wrong,” she said, very distinctly. Very clearly. “I didn’t want anyone else looking at me. You’re the only one I have ever wanted anywhere near me. You know that.”
“Yet you somehow thought you could have a sexless marriage with a man so debauched that he is a cautionary tale often told to children on the Greek mainland?” He shook his head. His griptightened on her arms, but only enough to remind him that she was real. That he wasn’t dreaming this. That this was happening—for good and ill alike. “You believed this was not only possible, but desirable?”
“When I tell you that he was nothing but kind to me, what I mean is that he truly was nothing but kind to me. Until he wasn’t.” Saskia shook her head. “I’m not a complete idiot, Thanasis, and neither was Selwen. We took walks together in the olive groves. He seemed overwhelmingly respectful of my wishes in all things.”
Thanasis snorted. “He’s always playing a game. Perhaps the game this season was innocence. Virtue. Either way, his games have a way of ending badly.”
“I saw who he was.” Her expression was set, her gaze clear. “And I didn’t like what I saw. That’s why I called you.”
That was not the only reason she’d called him, he thought. Not the only one, not if she was finally telling him the truth.
“But first there was a kiss.”
“And thank God there was,” Saskia said, with another blast of that temper of hers. He could see it light her up and something in him actually shook, because God help him, but he’d missed this. He’d missedher.
He’d missed the enduring joy of being in the presence of the one person in this life that he could be entirely himself with, no matter what was happening between them. Being shouted at by Saskia ranked better than all the obsequious boardroom interactions he’d ever had or ever will. Saskia furious with him was always better than any other alternative that didn’t involve her.
He’d known that five years ago. Then he’d lived it.
“If he hadn’t kissed me, I would still be there on that island,” she was ranting at him now. “I would still not remember who the hell I am. And that would be a crying shame, Thanasis, becauseI liked Selwen. She took care of me. When I had nothing at all in this world, I had her. And Ffion loved her, which is reason enough to think the best of her all on its own.” Her voice went ragged, then. “But I preferme.”
Thanasis reached over and slid his hand along the side of her face, so that his fingertips brushed her temples and he could run his thumb over her mouth.
She was back. She was his.
They still fit. They always would.
But that shattering inside him had stopped, now. And her return came with a terrible clarity that he couldn’t ignore. It was as if the scales had finally fallen from his eyes, and now that they had, he saw the truth of things.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been surprised that a clarity like that, cut-glass and dust, was painful.
“I must go,” he told her abruptly, because he didn’t want to leave.
He watched her mouth drop open.“Go?”she echoed.
But Thanasis couldn’t explain this to her. There were too many shards of glass stuck deep in his chest, and he knew himself to be the real villain in all of this after all. He could see it now.
And there was only one way to fix it.
Only one thing that would, if not make this right, at least make it better.
He had to hope it would.
“You can’t go,” she whispered. “I’ve only just come back.”
“Saskia,” he said, and her name was the song it had always been in his mouth. In his heart. “You will never know how much you mean to me. You will never comprehend it.”
