‘Do you doubt that I love you?’
‘I think you’re running from trauma, and you ran into my arms. I think I gave you pleasure for the first time in your life, and freedom from your husband. Those are two very seductive, powerful gifts. But gratitude is not tantamount to love. Great sex is not love.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’ She pushed out of the bed then, staring at him with a heart that was weeping. ‘You think I’m saying I love you because you can basically give me an orgasm just by looking at me?’
‘Perhaps.’
She swore softly, under her breath. She hadn’t expected him to return her declaration, but she’d at least expected him to accept it.
‘You’re wrong,’ she said.
‘Or maybe it’s because you spent three years trying to love a complete jackass that your heart just desperately wants to be put to use now.’
She shook her head. ‘Stop.’
His eyes flashed with wildness, and she recognised the cause of it. The panic he was feeling, because she was getting under his skin. Not just with her love, but with the things she kept saying about his marriage, showing him that his wife had loved him, regardless of his long hours and her frustrations there.
‘You don’t have to tell me you love me. You don’t have to give meanythingyou don’t want to. But at least let me speak what I feel. I spent my entire marriage squashing myself into a ball, metaphorically speaking, hiding how I felt and what I wanted, pretending to be something I never was. So let me always be honest with you. I love you. From the bottom of my heart, with every single part of me, I absolutely, unfailingly love and adore you. I would spend the rest of my life worshipping you, if you’d let me.’ A tear slid down her cheek. ‘But I also spent my marriage trying to make a man love me, who never had any intention of doing so. I will not make that mistake again. Either love me freely, or let me go.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘GO,’HE SAID, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to see her reaction. Closing his eyes against the bitter, shredding feeling of regret and grief. Of knowing that, once again, he’d taken something beautiful and destroyed it. He doubted he would ever get over the sense of regret.
Cowardice was not his natural bent, however, so Nikos forced himself to open his eyes and look at her, to see the anguish in her face. He looked at her in the way he’d never been brave or aware enough to do with Isabella. Her complaints had fallen on deaf ears. But with Genevieve, her every word, tortured by the fact he would never return her feelings, though whispered, landed with a thud.
‘Okay,’ she said, nodding slowly, turning her back on him then moving to the wardrobe. He stood his ground, even when his body was desperately trying to propel him forwards. She returned a moment later, wearing the shorts and shirt she’d had on when she’d washed ashore on his island. His gut rolled. ‘I don’t know how,’ she said, lifting one shoulder, looking every bit as vulnerable as she’d been that night. ‘I don’t have a phone. I can’t call a car. Would you—?’
‘I’ll arrange it, of course,’ he said, rocks in his gut rolling together to form a dusty sediment that flooded his whole body. ‘Where would you like to go to?’
‘I still have the room in Katanos. Can you send me there?’
Can you send me there?
Every single shred of good he’d done her was undermined by the vulnerability in that question. He moved then, crossing the room and putting his hands on her hips. ‘Genevieve,’ he said, but she shook her head and stepped away from him.
‘Just leave it,’ she asked breathily. ‘I don’t think we need to say anything more. We both know how we feel.’
But she didn’t know how he felt. She couldn’t. Not when those feelings were all so jumbled and tangled, a horrible knotty nightmare of what he wanted and needed, and needed to forbid himself from taking. The pledge he’d made himself on his wife’s death he considered to be unbreakable.
Nothing had changed that; nothing ever could.
‘Very well. I’ll take you back to Katanos.’
‘No,’ she said, quickly shaking her head again. ‘Not you. I think it’s better if we say goodbye here. I can take the train. I just need someone to drive me to the station.’
‘I’ll—’
‘No, not you,’ she stressed. ‘Please, Nikos. Just let me go, okay?’
What could he say to that? She’d given him two options. Love her, or let her go. He’d chosen the latter with barely a moment’s hesitation. And he would have a lifetime to live with the consequences.
* * *
The trip to the other side of Greece took almost six hours, and from there, she had to take a cab to her hotel, which was another twenty minutes. By the time she arrived, she was exhausted, having not slept more than a few snatched hours on the train over, and even those had been tormented by dreams of Nikos, by her desire for him, her aching for him, her grief for him. Because he deserved so much more, but he would probably never see that.
She would have spent a lifetime trying to make him see it, if he’d let her.
If he’d fought to keep her in his life, in any capacity, she would have stayed. But he was too good and decent for that, too traumatised by his belief that his marriage had, for his wife, been purely bad.
