‘Did she listen to how you felt?’ Genevieve said, gently, aware that the last thing she wanted to do was criticise his poor, late wife. ‘Did your wants change from when you were dating, to married? Or were you always a workaholic?’
He glanced away, towards the windows.
‘Because it sounds to me like she knew what she was getting, and just wanted you to be different, once you were married. People don’t change.’
‘No,’ he agreed, gruffly. ‘They don’t.’ His hand moved to her hair, gently running over it. She shivered at the small, intimate gesture. ‘I wish I had, though.’
‘She loved you, Nikos. She stayed with you; she fought to be with you. There was enough in your marriage to make her want to stay. Take it from someone who spent almost every day of her marriage planning to leave. Hold onto that, not the arguments, not the blame. Focus on the good memories—I’m convinced that’s what she would have wanted.’
He stood then, abruptly, unsettling her as he strode across the room and placed his coffee cup down on a side table, and stared out of the glass windows that showed a view of the distant city. His back moved with each intake of breath. Then, slowly, he turned to face her, his whole body radiating tension.
‘I want to help you, Genevieve. I hate what your ex is doing to you. But for the duration of this fake engagement, let us agree that you will not try to make me feel better about my own failings. I do not need it; I do not want it.’
She ran the gamut of emotions. At first, it was easy to feel hurt. She’d been coldly rejected by James so many times that her first instinct was to see the same treatment in Nikos. Except there was nothing cold in Nikos, nor his words. For all he was holding onto his emotions with ruthless self-control, she could sense his feelings thrumming around the cabin. The desperation with which he clung to his guilt, almost as a protective mechanism to save him from fully feeling grief. He was using his wife’s death as an excuse, to stop him from moving on with his life, and to protect himself from ever loving—and losing—another person. She could see it so clearly, all of a sudden, and the fact he had his head in the sand about it infuriated her. So much so she stood, and weaved through the furniture, cutting across to him in a scant few seconds, and trying to rally her thoughts.
Trying to calm down, as well, to remember that, in her marriage, she had become expert at holding her temper and her tongue.
Those skills seemed to have deserted her now.
‘I don’t appreciate being told how I can act,’ she said, the words calm enough, though they vibrated slightly. ‘James spent our entire marriage sculpting my behaviour and personality, to be the perfect political wife. I will not endure the same from you.’
‘You are not my wife,’ he pointed out, and now she fully understood what he was doing. Picking a fight with her to push her away. Denying that there was anything real in this relationship because he couldn’t bear to face the alternative: that something was happening between them neither wanted nor had expected. Genevieve was terrified of that, too, but at least she was willing to face it head-on.
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But I’m a grown woman, intelligent and perceptive and I can say whatever I want,’ she said. ‘You are being so selfish, to wallow in guilt and consign your wife’s memory to that alone. Why not talk about how wonderful she was? How clever and loyal, talk about her goals and aspirations? Why dwell only on your guilt? On what you think you did wrong, and the arguments that led you to have?’
‘Don’t,’ he ground out, eyes boring into hers.
But she lifted a hand to his chest, her fingers splayed wide. ‘You can’t process her loss. You’re just treading water, keeping your head in the sand, because you’re afraid to move on.’
His nostrils flared. ‘What gives you any right to think you know so much about me? We’ve just met.’
‘Am I wrong?’ she demanded, lifting up onto her tiptoes and grabbing his face with both hands, holding him still, their eyes locked.
His lips parted on a rush of breath.
‘Am I wrong?’ she repeated fiercely.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, dropping his head, so their mouths were almost touching. ‘Whether you are right or wrong, it is my life, and how I choose to live it is my business. I would ask you again to keep your opinions on this matter to yourself.’
And before she could answer, he was kissing her with all the pent-up passion, frustration, grief, guilt and need that was flooding his system, kissing her as though it could somehow fix everything. And she was kissing him back in the same way, her mouth mashing to his, their tongues meshing, teeth clashing as they let passion control them completely. His hands, so big, broad and strong, curved around her bottom and pushed her against his erection, so she groaned into his mouth.
‘Please,’ she moaned, moving her hips as those same hands moved to her dress and ruched it in his palms before lifting it, pushing it over her head, leaving her naked except for a lace thong. He cursed against her skin as he moved his mouth to the curve of her neck and kissed her there, as his hands fumbled between them, unfastening his trousers and freeing his cock from the confines of fabric. A moment later, he was lifting her, wrapping her legs around his waist, and moving one step forward, so her back was bracing against the cold glass window as he drove into her in a single motion that had them both crying out on a wave of sheer, giddy relief.
‘Nikos,’ she cried, digging her fingernails into his shoulders, gripping him hard and tight, the pleasure of his possession unlike anything she’d ever known, even from this man. It was the heightened tension they’d felt in the lead-up, the argument that had been both hyper-emotional but also a form of foreplay. Or maybe that had been the time they’d spent apart, after having each other completely to themselves, on the island. But when he drove into her, it was like the bursting of a bank, and she was incapable of doing anything to stem the tide. She surrendered to it completely; let it catch her and take her out to sea.
‘It is bad enough,’ he said, dropping his mouth to her breast and flicking her nipple with his tongue, while his hand moved between her legs and brushed her clit, ‘that you make me feel like this when we have sex. That in this moment, I feel as though I am a god on earth, that all is right. It is so much more than I deserve, more than I told myself I would ever have.’ He moved his mouth to her other nipple and drew it into his mouth sharply, sucking hard enough that she cried out at the agonising form of pleasure. It was almost too much to bear.
‘You do deserve—’
‘I deserve nothing,’ he said, dragging his mouth back to hers and kissing her with the same fevered passion as the tide of pleasure burst around her again, so she cried out at the orgasm he delivered her so swiftly and easily. ‘Only the knowledge that this is temporary allows me to give into this. Just for now, not for ever. When you are gone, everything will once more be as it’s meant to be.’
He would have had no way of seeing the tears that sprang to her eyes, because she squeezed them shut and sought his mouth with hers, trying to kiss into him the peace she wished he could feel. How could she make him understand?
James was not rocking in a corner in their apartment in Washington, thinking of all the ways in which he’d failed her. He was not bemoaning the poor choices he’d made during their marriage. Because he was the worst kind of man. But Nikos? Nikos was all good. The evidence of that was in his guilt, his grief, and his inability to forgive himself. She wished she could make him understand.
But if there was one thing she’d learned through and through, in her marriage, it was that one person could not change another. Not unless they truly wished to be different. And she had no reason to suspect, let alone hope, that Nikos ever would. He’d chosen his path and, unless he chose to stray from it, she had to leave him to walk it. Alone, as he so clearly wanted.
It wasn’t until much later, in the early hours of the morning, when naked with limbs entwined, wrapped in the luxurious million-thread-count sheets of the master bedroom, with the yacht gently bobbing from side to side, and Nikos asleep beside her, that Genevieve realised she hadn’t so much as thought of whatshewanted. And a fear began to curl through her, wrapping around her organs, making it hard to breathe, as she faced the reality of their situation: she hadn’t protected herself. Not enough. She’d told herself she would never fall in love with another man, that she would never want what had the potential to hurt her, and yet, in a few short days, she’d fallen utterly and completely under the spell of someone who was determined to be miserable for the rest of his life.
