Page 11 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
He remembered that too well because she hadn’t been laughing two years later. She hadn’t been laughing at all that last night.
But he forgot about that, because her taste was flooding through him again. Tart and sweet, it was quintessentially Saskia, and it removed any lingering doubts he might have had about who she was.
This washer.This washis Saskia,at last.
The taste of her made that abundantly clear. It also made him so hard it actually hurt, but he ignored that.
This was the woman he had lost five years ago. This was the woman he had believed he would never see again. He could taste her. He could smell her. He could touch her, and he had.
“Saskia,” he said urgently, “you must tell me what this is all about. What happened to you? Where were you going on that train and why have you hidden yourself away all these years?”
Her eyes widened even further. The flush in her cheeks faded as she blinked, then she shook her head as if she was trying to clear it. He thought she looked a bit pale, suddenly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Saskia—”
“Stop calling me that.” Her voice sounded strangled, unwell and uneasy. She stepped back and looked around wildly, as if she expected to find attackers on all sides.
It took him too long to understand that her reaction meant that she felthewas an attacker, too.
He took a step back himself.
“My name is Selwen,” she told him, very carefully, as if the name itself was made of glass. “I don’t know who you are. I think you have me confused with someone else.”
He might have thought so earlier. He hadhoped soearlier, even.
But he had hoped for this more, and for much, much longer.
“I am Thanasis Zacharias,” he told her, the way he had once before, long ago. There in an echoing chamber of the Tate where modern art he could not pretend to understand cavorted about shapelessly on the walls all around them, somehow making her eyes seem brighter. He couldn’t recall what the exhibit had been or what he’d been meant to take from the viewing of it. Because she had been there and that had been that. “You know me, no matter what you call yourself these days.”
“Zacharias?” she echoed. “But that’s…?”
“Pavlos is my father,” Thanasis growled. “And you must know you cannot marry him.”
“I’m not who you think I am!” She threw that at him, her voice close to a scream, and then she ran.
And almost everything in him roared at him to chase her, to keep her with him, to never let her out of his sight again—
But there was another part. The part that had seen the confusion on her face and something like fear in her eyes.
And this was the woman he loved. This was the woman who he had thought for five years had died thinking he was ashamed of her. That he didn’t truly love her in return.
He could not also be the man who scared her. He could not live with that version of himself.
And so Thanasis made himself stand still in the moonlight. And he forbade himself from turning around to see what became of her.
Then again, he didn’t need to look. He knew.
It was as if he could see her through someone else’s eyes. As if she was once again a part of him the way she’d been back then.
Whatever it was, he knew that she ran up the stairs, scrabbled for the shoes he’d watched her kick off, and then stopped. He knew—and he was sure that he knew it, that it wasn’t merely another a wish—that she turned back and looked at him, still breathing too heavily. Still, he was certain, filled with the clamor inside her body thanks to his mouth and his fingers.
He could feel his spine prickle, and the urge to look was almost too much—
But he didn’t.
Instead, Thanasis waited on the beach as the moon took a leisurely turn across the heavens. He waited there, letting his mind do what it did best. He let it go running down pathways, making new connections, trying to figure out how his adored and cherished mistress had turned into a woman with a different name, here on an island he avoided, looking at him as if they’d never met before.
He didn’t know how long he stood there, but eventually he’d had enough of brooding at the sea. Thanasis stripped off his clothes and waded in, letting the Aegean perform its magic all over him. Letting the water make him new again.
