‘Heaven,’ he answered.
She licked a little and he saw the delight in her eyes as the flavours hit her tastebuds.
‘It’s not as good as the mint,’ she told him.
‘Lies,’ he said, nudging her arm. ‘Come on, Faye, you can’t lie to me.’
‘I will admit your flavour is good too.’
‘My flavour,’ he said teasingly. ‘Or the flavour of the ice cream.’
‘Do you like turning everything I say into an innuendo?’
‘Do you like me doing it to you?’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘Can you be serious?’ she asked, half-smiling.
He took a breath. ‘Actually, yes. Most of my life I am serious. For my career, for business… for the family challenges you have heard some things about.’ He sighed. ‘So, when I tease, when I joke, that is when I am just being me. Because that has not always come easy.’ He put his mouth back to his ice cream. This was the problem. Why was it that whenever he was in her company, he not only wanted to take all her clothes off and repeat everything they had done in his suite, but also his mind pressed him to gift her layers of himself he always kept tied up inside?
‘I’m listening,’ Faye said.
He shook his head. ‘You first.’
‘What?’
‘You were wound tight on the bike on the journey here,’ he said. ‘Something is happening with you. Or maybe with Saffron?’
‘If I tell you something,’ Faye began, ‘it has to stay between us, OK? Completely confidential. Completely.’
He held his free hand up, palm facing her. ‘I know all about confidential.’
‘I mean it, Kosta. I don’t want to…’ She had been about to finish the sentence with ‘lose my job’ but it didn’t feel like the right sentiment really. ‘…get into trouble.’
‘I will not turn that into an innuendo and I will be serious. I promise.’
She licked the edge of her ice cream to stop it dripping. ‘OK.’ She took a breath. ‘Someone has made an offer to buy the hotel.’
His chest contracted. What?
‘OK…’ he managed to say as his mind raced through all the potential scenarios. Was Stathis behind this? They had thought about a ballpark figure but that was as far as it had gone, wasn’t it? So was this offer from someone else? No, that was less likely than Stathis going ahead on his behalf.
‘Nothing has been formalised yet, but Alexandros is pushing hard to get Dimitria to accept and I just want to make sure that she makes the right decision, you know.’ She sighed again. ‘But also I’m worried about how it might change things for me, and I know that’s selfish but just when I feel I’m in a really good place with my work and my life in general this happens and?—’
‘Well, do you know anything else about the offer? Like how much it is?’
‘Why?’
‘As you said, Dimitria, she needs to get the most money for her property.’ At least as much as he was willing to give her to not ask too many questions…
‘Is that how you think too?’ She shook her head. ‘I know Dimitria wants to travel and she will need to finance another place to live, but I want to think that she will also care about the morals of the potential purchaser. You can’t give your whole life to something and not care about its future even if it ends up out of your hands, can you?’
She cared about this hotel. It wasn’t just a building or where she worked; to her it had a soul. He swallowed, the knowledge of what he was doing pinching at him a bit.
‘Faye,’ he began. ‘When we sell something we have owned or lived in or whatever, we have to understand that it won’t stay the same. People, they always want to make things personalised.’
‘But what if their personalisation is just greed and destruction?’
‘When a deal has been made then you have to accept it.’
