Page 6 of Forbidden Greek Mistress
They had laughed about that last one, but Ffion, who had been widowed after many years of marriage to her beloved Alun, held firm.
Love is meant to be extravagant,she had said.
These were all things the two of them had discussed over the years they’d spent together as companions, usually when Ffion would read about some exotic foreign location in the paper and start making noises that Selwen should hare off andfind herselfthere.
Once Ffion was gone, there was no more reason for Selwen to scoff, and no reason to stay in Wales anyway.
The hair had been easy enough. For as long as she could remember, Selwen had kept her hair short. It was the first thingshe’d done after Ffion had found her. She’d woken up that next morning and cut it all off, and couldn’t explain to her new friend why she’d done it. Then she’d kept it in a short cut, but as Ffion grew more and more ill, she hadn’t bothered with her hair at all.
So by the time that Ffion died, it had already been mostly grown out. And by the time she’d finished handling the funeral and getting rid of the property and all the rest of it, it was good and long.
You would have loved this,she’d told her friend in her head when she’d actually taken her hair down from the twist she’d kept it in for at least the last year and had a proper look at it.You always loved long hair.
The dressing part had been easy, too. Selwen had always dressed herself with an eye toward practicality, that was all. Ffion liked to make up stories about the things Selwen wore becauseshehad been quite stylish in her youth, but there was nothing mysterious about her choices. A life in blustery Wales, as quiet as it was damp, didn’t lend itself to slinking about in whatever was fashionable these days. She preferred jeans and hooded sweatshirts and waterproof shoes.
Still, she did her duty to Ffion. Once she left Wales she took the Eurostar to Paris, which she decided was enough training about through Europe. In Paris, she bought herself the sort of impractical things that she knew her friend would have approved of, heartily. Then she’d done the truly fun part and had gone off to the Greek islands. She’d toured about through the crowded, famous places, then she’d started poking around the lesser-known destinations too. And she was certain that somewhere in her travels she would stumble across someone to fall in love with, because wasn’t that what people did? They went off into Mediterranean climates, found themselves, and fell in love. Sunrises with said lovers were soon to follow.
But it hadn’t gone that way.
Because even with her hair long and wearing lovely, completely impractical garments that caught male attention wherever she went, Selwen found herself entirely indifferent to men.
Precisely the same way she’d felt plodding about in ugly boots and her raincoat back in Pembrokeshire.
She could read lovely, spicy books about falling in love with men. She could watch admittedly dreadful movies starring terrible men who saved the day and won the heart of the heroine. Both of these enterprises could make her feel dreamy and a bit short of breath, in all the nicest ways.
But real men? She didn’t really see the point.
Ffion had left Selwen a bit of money along with the rest. And while it certainly wouldn’t last a lifetime, it allowed Selwen to enjoy the Greek islands. She went wherever the wind took her. She wandered where she pleased across the islands, soaking in the culture, the colors, the astonishing views. She sketched and painted, because she could hardly keep her brushes and pencils out of her hands.
And every night, wherever she was, she would dutifully present herself at one taverna or another.
She danced with men. She laughed. She ate good food, and she drank good wine and betterouzo, and she always went home alone. She had fun, but none of the men ever made any kind of impression on her.
Until Pavlos.
Now, standing in his overwhelmingly over-the-top villa that could probably sleep the whole island and then some, she tried—not for the first time—to figure out what it was about this man that she found intriguing.
She had never had the slightest urge to kiss him, which Ffion had always assured her was the very base level of what a woman should feel in the presence of a potential lover. Ffion, by hertelling, had lived a wild and beautiful life with lovers in every port before she took one look at her Alun and settled down. She had known what she was talking about.
Passion is the entire purpose of life,she would pronounce grandly over tea.I have tasted passion in its many flavors and I want the same for you.
No matter how many times Selwen told her that she didn’t think she was a passionate sort of person, Ffion would scoff.
There’s no such thing as an un-passionate person,she would say. There’s only a person who hasn’t met their match.
Selwen had tried rather diligently to convince herself that Pavlos was her passion, but she knew better. He wasintriguing,was the thing.That was the word she kept coming back to when she tried to explain all this to the Ffion she carried about in her head.
There was something about him that made her…take notice. There was something about his features and how they worked together that almost made her feel as if she was haunted.
It had been that way from the start. She’d walked into thetavernahere and had felt drawn to him, though he was the sort of man she usually avoided. Too loud. Too sure of himself. Too cold through the eyes.
But she’d found herself searching his face, like she was trying to find someone else there.
She couldn’t make any sense of it. It was the strangest sensation, it only seemed to get worse the more time she spent with him, and she doubted very much that he was having a similar experience.
Really, it was hard to tell if Pavlos felt much about anything.
Selwen knew who he was. She hadn’t recognized him, but she’d known his name when he’d given it to her. The night they’d met, she’d gone back to her hotel and had looked him up. She’dseen headlines upon headlines, all of them about his wealth and his womanizing, and she hadn’t bothered to read further.
