Page 48 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
And then he turned and walked away from her, because it was that or lose himself in her again. He couldn’t let that happen.
He couldn’t lose his momentum when he’d only just found it.
It was long past time for reckoning. And he knew he’d either do it now, or not at all.
Because he was already more monster than he liked to admit.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
It wasn’t untilshe heard the front door of the flat shut that Saskia finally accepted the fact that he was gone. He was really gone when she’d kept thinking he’d turn back. She’d kept thinking he’d reconsider.
She stayed where she was, kneeling on that bed and feeling winded.
And she stayed there a long, long while.
Thanasis didn’t come back that evening. He didn’t come back for days.
She started to wonder if he planned to come back at all.
One night, Saskia sat in her study with the fire blazing, wrapped up in a sweatshirt she knew was his. She would have known it was his even if she hadn’t found it in his part of the closet. She was sure she could smell that hint of vetiver in the fabric, that ghost of him that haunted her everywhere she turned in this flat.
Though there were worse ghosts. She stared around at the pictures of the two of them on every surface, laughing, smiling,gazingat each other. She remembered each and every one of the moments captured. It was like, having deserted her for so long, her memories were working overtime now.
That or her heart was in charge, making sure she knew exactly how broken she could feel.
Eventually, as the days passed her by with no sign of Thanasis, Saskia realized that she had never really considered the possibility thathemight leaveher.
Even that fateful night when she’d stormed out of the flat in high dudgeon but with no preparation, she’d expected him to be there when she got back. She had tucked a fistful of twenty-pound notes into her pocket and had taken off into the night. She’d bought her train ticket with cash just like she’d bought herself snacks off the trolley, too.
She’d sat there on the train as it left Paddington Station, telling herself bold stories about how she was going to break free ofthat manand start a whole new…something.
All the while secure in the knowledge that she would do nothing of the sort.
If she hadn’t thumped her head and wandered off from that train, she likely would have found her way back to him much sooner. The actual details of the derailment were blurry to her even now, but she rather thought that she’d ended up on that roadside because she’d been trying to walk her way home.
Because Thanasis hadn’t simply been her lover. She hadn’t simply been his mistress. Maybe, she’d thought then, it was a special sort of foolishness to imagine that there had ever been anything simple about those descriptions—or those relationships—at any point in history. Because it was all people, wasn’t it. And if those people were anything like her, they’d been doomed from the start.
Because that was the thing that there was no getting past, then or now.
Saskia had not only been in love with Thanasis since the moment she’d laid eyes on him in the Tate Modern, she had been equally in love with him—if significantly more horrified by it—from the moment she’d clapped eyes on him in his father’s villa.
She’d wanted desperately to pretend otherwise, and she’d tried. She truly had. But she had been more engaged with Thanasis as Selwen—even while telling him all the terrible things she’d imagined he might’ve done to a version of her she couldn’t remember—than she’d ever been about anything else in those five years.
She had kissed him on that beach. He had brought her alive, and she’d hated it. She’d pretended it wasn’t happening, because she’d wanted to stay locked up inside herself. That was what she’d understood. That waswho she was.
Or rather, that was who she’d become. That was why Ffion had given her that list, and some money, and had ordered Selwen to do what she’d asked. She might not have known who Selwen really was, but she’d understood the important bit.
That Selwen was hiding, whether she knew it or not.
She might have forgotten all the details, so little did the men she’d met impress her, but Selwen had danced her way across Greece. Just as Ffion had asked. She’d hit one island after the next, had flitted from onetavernato another, and the only man she’d looked twice at was the one who resembled Thanasis.
The one who sometimes looked a little bit like him around the eyes. And the mouth.
If she’d never run into a Zacharias, Selwen would likely still be dancing now, a mystery to herself and shut off from everyone else.
Instead, she’d come alive. She’d comehome.
And now she sat about in this flat that she could remember decorating all too well, because each item that had come into itmeant something. She had considered it nesting, and she knew he had, too.
