Dani stopped eating, her gaze ping-ponging between the two of them.
“You can’t keep me here forever,” Theo continued. “I’ve already been searching under Knossos for months, and we haven’t found jack shit. It isn’t like we found a giant ruby gemstone and tossed it aside because we thought you were looking for a mummified Minotaur instead. Keeping me here longer isn’t going to change anything.”
With the way Pierre’s nostrils flared, she assumed the wordnowasn’t in his vocabulary. At least not when directed at him. Right then, at the worst possible time, Dani dropped the olive she’d been holding near her lips, the tiny fruit hitting the concrete coffee table with a dullthudbefore rolling down the patio and straight toward the pool.
Kerplunk.
Dani winced. But her embarrassment was washed away by the look Pierre gave her. A look that said he was only now remembering that she was even there.
“And who are you exactly?” he asked her.
Before she had a chance to respond, Theo cut in. “She’s no one. A tourist I saw at the museum.”
“Nice try,” Maurice chimed in, catching Pierre’s attention. “We already covered this. She’s his fiancée, and he tried passing her a note.”
Where was this fiancée idea coming from? The way Maurice had said it made it seem like he truly believed she and Theo were engaged.
Wait a minute. Theo’s words from earlier echoed through her head:She’s not her.
Oh my God. Theo…is engaged?
Dani looked at Theo, who, in turn, appeared to be trying desperately to avoid eye contact.
Engaged.
Theo.
Getting married.
To someone else.
The squeeze on Dani’s heart almost took her breath away.
Apparently a lot had happened since they’d last seen each other, after their night of drunken debauchery. She wished she could remember everything that had happened.
They hadn’t planned to spend the evening barhopping, but Dani was feeling like a night out after dumping her most recent pendejo of the month. “You can be my wingman,” she’d told him.
Not that any other guy could even get close to her that night. She and Theo were thick as thieves. Doing shots. Playing pool.Singing “I Got You Babe” at karaoke. Dancing. She remembered putting her hands on his hips, trying to teach him how to do a merengue even though the song playing was decidedlynota merengue.
Her recollection of them stumbling home was a bit fuzzy, though not as hazy as the whisper of a vision with his hand cradling her face and a vague memory of waking up in the middle of the night with the two of them sleeping beside each other on the couch. When she woke the next morning with the world’sworsthangover but no Theo, she knew something wasn’t right. Especially when he wouldn’t answer her calls or texts a few days after.
So when he followed up a few weeks later with a text—I have something I want to talk to you about. Fries and micheladas soon?—she’d figured it had to have been related to something that had happened that night.
Apparently she had been wrong. Theo was getting married, and he’d planned to tell her…over french fries? He had to be joking.
She glared at Theo and finally got his attention, questioning him with her eyes. He furrowed his brow and gave her a slight shake of his head.
What wasthatsupposed to mean?
The shake was likely imperceptible to someone like Pierre who didn’t know every one of Theo’s mannerisms, but Dani had studied his face enough times to know when something was off.
My God, what is going on?She wanted to scream. She wantedanswers. Theo couldn’t go and get engaged and then not tell her.
Even though an engagement didn’t make sense. His family had talked to his long-term girlfriend, Giorgina, after Theo haddisappeared, and she’d said they’d broken up a few weeks before he left for Greece.
Had he really already found someone else?
Oh God, that was it. He’d met someone else. While she was busy horsing around with Beau, Theo had met the love of his life and gotten engaged in a matter of weeks. That was what he wanted to tell her.
