Page 18 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
“Because she was afraid of you?”
“Because she wasn’t. But she thought she had better play it safe, all the same.” He smiled again in that same way, and again, it was as if she could see his memory shimmering in the corners of her eyes. She didn’t dare look.
“I was captivated,” Thanasis said, though she thought he paused before that last word. As if he needed to be careful with it. “It took very little time for me to realize that I wanted her all to myself. And I’m a busy man.” He looked down, and something almost self-deprecating moved over his face. “I do not say that with any false confidence or as a bid to convince you of my importance. I run a major corporation. It is a multinationalconcern and a large bulk of my time is spent handling the fires my father sets, making certain to put them all out. I have to attend business meetings all over the world, all the time. I wanted to make certain that I could see her in whatever free time I had.”
Selwen couldn’t breathe. His eyes were much too dark for that, and oh, the way he was watching her as he told these things. As if they were intimate. As ifthiswas intimate, this conversation in the open air of a pretty morning.
“I asked her to be my mistress,” Thanasis said. He inclined his head slightly. “And she agreed.”
Her mouth was dry. Selwen licked her lips and then regretted it when his gaze tracked the movement. Or maybe, she amended, that was not quiteregretshe felt. “What does that mean? What an archaic word.”
“How funny,” Thanasis murmured, that gleam in his gaze seeming to move inside her, too. “That’s what she said.”
Selwen didn’t like that. It made something seem to yawn open in the pit of her stomach. “When I think aboutmistressesI think about smutty historical novels where dukes pranced about, keeping their mistresses in London houses and their proper wives in the countryside.”
“I am not a duke,” Thanasis replied, mildly enough, though there was nothing mild about the way he was studying her. “I moved her into a flat in London. Not a house. If the distinction matters.”
“Your flat?”
“Not my flat, no.” Something in his gaze shifted. “I wanted to keep her far apart from the rest of my life. And yes, before you ask, this eventually became a source of tension.”
Selwen was finding it difficult to breathe. It was like there was a band of something inflexible wound tight around her chest, and it kept cutting deeper into her. She thought it mightcut her in half. “I don’t understand any of this. Why couldn’t you simply date her like a normal person? Why not simply have a girlfriend? And what was her life, that she could simply…become a kept woman?”
“She was a student. She was doing an art history master’s program. She had graduated with distinction from her undergraduate program and spent the time that I wasn’t with her studying. And as far as I know, she found that not having to worry about bills or money was a relief. Not having to concern herself with paying rent allowed her to focus on her studies.”
“I suppose that is a benefit of being hidden away,” Selwen said, a little too hotly. “Like something to be ashamed of. Or you would have simply called her your girlfriend, taking her out to dinner and squiring her about, wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t,” Thanasis said, another dark undercurrent in his voice. “I don’t like public announcements, oblique or otherwise. I have a paparazzi problem, you see.” His lips curved and this time, there was no trace of any humor in it. Nothing the slightest bit wry. “Perhaps you’ve met my family by now, like my charming half siblings, each one of them filled with bile and spite. They enjoy nothing more than planting stories about me in the press. It is their dearest wish that the stories might prevent me from doing my job. Not because they want the job, or any job, but because they know I enjoy it. And they do not wish me to have anything in this life that I enjoy.”
“What that sounds like to me is a whole lot of main character syndrome,” Selwen said with a sniff. “Has it ever occurred to you that some people don’t think about you at all?”
“Many people do not think about me at all,” he agreed, in that low, outrageously compelling voice of his. “But none of them are related to me. And as for Saskia, I think you’re missing a key point in this.”
He leaned forward then, as if he wanted to impress this part upon her. So much so that she was actually shocked he didn’t reach out and put his hands on her body.
“She liked me,” he said, and there was something quietly devastating about it. “She wanted to spend time with me as much as I wanted to spend time with her. I did not force her into my life. It was as if we collided, and once we did, the only way forward was with each other.”
Her heart was slamming against her ribs. She kept thinking ofcolliding. Ofcollisions—two comets streaking across the sky and becoming one.
She kept thinking of that darkly beautiful face of his, and of his fingers thrusting deep inside of her, and the intense magic of his kiss—
Selwen wasn’t sure when she’d last taken a breath. “You’re saying that as if it should mean something to me, but I don’t—”
“We met on Tuesday,” he told her, his voice as intense as his gaze, as dark and as sure. “We had coffee on a Wednesday morning. By Wednesday night, I had already made her come apart some five times. Maybe more. By Saturday, we were like addicts, shambling about, sickened by the notion we might have to part. And so, we didn’t.” He didn’t shift that gaze from her. “I found the flat. I moved her in. It took a week in total to sort these things out. When we did, we were together for two years.”
“And then she ran away from you,” Selwen managed to get out, though her voice was little more than a whisper. Something hoarse and strange and yet she couldn’t seem to stop. “She ran away, or took a train, is that what you said? And you thought she was dead. Maybe, you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
“I knew her,” he shot back, and something blazed in his dark eyes. “I know that everybody thinks that it’s impossible for one person to know another. Everyone has a secret life, they say. Noone can truly know their lover, they claim. But I’m telling you, whatever you call yourself now, there is not one part of me that Saskia did not know. Not one part of her I did not know in return. I am as sure of her as I am of myself.”
“Then why did she leave?”
It was a stark question. It seemed to come from that pit inside of her that kept expanding with every word he said, and there was no small part of her that worried it would consume her whole.
Or maybe she was worried that she wanted it to do exactly that.
“I said I knew her, and she knew me. I didn’t say we didn’t have our troubles.” Thanasis looked away for the first time in this conversation and Selwen felt something move over her, some prickle of foreboding. Especially when he rubbed his hand over his face. “As time went on, Saskia found the secrecy and privacy that I insisted upon grueling. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy what we had, but she did not wish to hide it.” Selwen watched as his jaw tightened. “I didn’t understand it at first. But she became convinced that I was ashamed of her.” He shifted his gaze back to Selwen then, and once again she felt pinned into her seat. “Saskia was an orphan.”
And there was no reason at all that those words, spoken about a woman Selwen didn’t know or couldn’t remember, should pierce her the way they did.
