Page 39 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
“This. You. Your father has never met a single bit of space that wasn’t a stage, because he is always only too happy to make it one.”
“My father is a narcissist.” He lifted a brow when she frowned at that. “I was raised by a narcissist, but that doesn’t mean I am also one.”
“Aren’t you?”
And he could have taken offense to that. But he didn’t think that was how it was meant. He toyed with her fingers, and chose not to let his temper lead the way.
Not in public. That was not how he preferred to vent it.
“I am not,” he told her instead. “Perhaps to my detriment. All I wanted, ever, was something that was mine. Something that was not tainted by my father.”
“Is that what I am?” she asked, those wise eyes of hers trained on him as if she was looking for clues the same way he was. “Am I tainted?”
“You will have to tell me.” Thanasis still didn’t like to think about his father anywhere near Saskia, but he pushed that aside, too. “You must understand, it wasn’t simply that my father cheated. He did, and on an epic scale. Yet part of the joy in cheating, for him, was making certain that it hurt my mother. He went out of his way to make sure that it did. But she was a Greek woman, you see. As stubborn as the day is long and she would not let him see that she was affected. She would not react, and so he kept going, and they did this until she died.”
“You say that as if you blame her,” Saskia said softly.
And he forgot that this wasn’t really his Saskia. That this was simply the woman who occupied her body now—and looked likeher, and sounded like her, and hell, even smelled like her. Tasted like her. But she wasn’t Saskia.
Yet tonight, hidden away in plain sight in this loud restaurant, he didn’t care. He couldn’t.
She was close enough.
And she was still the only one he trusted.
“I do,” Thanasis confessed, though it hurt to say out loud when he’d avoided it all these years. He waited for her to recoil, but when she didn’t, he took a breath. “I think about my mother all the time. What did her stubbornness get her? She was miserable. She made sure that I was miserable, too. If she couldn’t leave him for herself, why couldn’t she leave for her own child? I will never understand.”
Saskia reached over and put her other hand on top of the place where their hands were already entwined.
“You were the child,” she said, her voice soothing and her gaze intent on his. “She should have protected you above all things.”
“I suppose it’s possible she didn’t know how,” he allowed. “She was very young when they were married. And from what I can tell, remarkably naive.”
“Then she should’ve figured it out,” Saskia said, her voice getting stern. She gripped his hand tighter. “That’s what mothers are supposed to do. It’s supposed to stop being about them, because what matters is the child they brought into the world. The child who didn’t ask to be married to an overbearing man. The child who didn’t ask to be brought up in misery. That was her job. It’s fair to say that she didn’t do it well.”
He wanted to ask her if she remembered her own tangled feelings about her young parents, who had adored her but had left her that night just the same, then had died on their way back to be there when she woke up. He wanted to ask her what mothers she recalled, as either version of her.
But instead he stared back at her for so long that he watched her flush, look down, then look away.
The food came then, which he thought probably saved her. She looked as if it was sent straight from heaven, and it made certain that she didn’t have to answer what would probably be his very next question.
After dinner, they once again walked the dark, crowded streets, where they were entirely anonymous. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and held her close, and maybe they were both pretending it was because it was cold.
But he knew better. Later, they would make their way out to his plane and head back to London. They would be there by morning.
They would be back in their usual reality.
Thanasis couldn’t say he was in any rush.
First, then, there was this. Walking down Park Avenue with Saskia cuddled up tight beside him as if nothing had changed.
As if they were still connected the way they always had been.
As if she had never left and never would.
Thanasis vowed, there and then, that he would do what he needed to do to make Saskia fall in love with him.
Every version of her.
