He didn’t stop. But each step dragged something heavy behind it. And, even though he didn’t look back, he felt the precise moment his time dwindled to zero in the silence he left behind.
She stood there long after he left.
The terrace felt colder now, as if the sea breeze had turned on her too. A single tear slipped down her cheek—not dramatic, not even bitter, just inevitable.
She lowered herself back into the chair, arms wrapped around her ribs, as if she could hold the crack in her chest closed with sheer will.
He’d walked away from her.
After the past weeks, despite knowing that harsh reality was waiting to pounce, that hurt more than anything else ever could. It was time to accept that Nelios would keep guarding his pain as if it was the only thing that made him who he was. She’d seen the shadows in his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking. Felt the tension in his body when her fingers brushed too close to his heart. Too close to the fortress he’d spent decades building and lovingly tending.
But love—real love—couldn’t survive in the dark.
And definitely not the love she now accepted that she felt for him. The kind that wanted to dance in the sunlight all day, every day. The kind that came with rainbows shortly after cleansing rain.
If he insisted on keeping that door locked, then maybe it was time to stop knocking.
Unfortunately, putting thought into action wasn’t as easy.
For the next week she withstood the frosty silence and heavy censure, broken in the dead of night in bed when Nelios almost unconsciously dragged her into his arms and they fell on each other with almost desperate abandon.
Despite the hollowness of it, she attempted to convince herself that maybe sex was the stepping stone to this marriage of convenience, based on a piece of paper she didn’t want. Vayle suspected it was that abiding demonstration of care and affection for his son that made her own yearning so acute. That made her wish for more,damn it.
She wanted Nelios Petralis to throw off the pain from his past so he could decalcify his heart.So he could love her.Because, unless things changed, she was dooming herself to decades of one-sided longing and heartache. Or, she desperately feared, an even quicker exit.
Then a whole new facet to their journey struck.
Her heart swung like a pendulum, one side elation, the other desolation, as she stared down at the test stick in her hand. Despite the care they’d taken, and the fact that she hadn’t had her period since Angelos’s birth, it seemed somewhere along the line, probably after one of those frantic, middle of the night,half-asleep couplings, nature had taken its course. And lightning had struck twice.
She was pregnant with Nelios’s child.
Again.
And, with the bombshell she’d just discovered ticking away furiously beneath her skin, she went in search of Nelios.
To find him packing a bag. ‘Wh-where are you going?’
His face was set in forbidding lines she’d hoped never to see again after those hours on his jet that first time. ‘To Athens. I have an urgent issue that’s arisen there.’
‘Were you planning on telling me? Or just sending another of your minions to tell me?’
Was that a wince or was she deluding herself, as she had been about everything?
‘I guess we haven’t come as far as I thought if common courtesy can fall away so quickly,’ she muttered.
‘Did you want something, Vayle?’
‘Of course. I always want something.’ The smile that accompanied her flippant words missed by a mile. ‘But alas it seems I’m destined to just want and not get.’ She glanced at his case, her heart lurching. ‘And I thought you could work from anywhere on earth?’ she demanded, her fingers closing around the stick in her pocket.
He stiffened. ‘Some meetings are better had in person.’
She frowned, the sense that he wasn’t telling the full truth gripping her.
‘Nelios—’
‘Enough, Vayle. You say you’re not trying to fix me, but we both know that’s not true, don’t we? Because you keep eyeing that can of worms, itching to open it,ne? Even though I cannot give you what you want.’
‘And what is it that you think I want?’
