‘You’re looking good, though,’ she added, nodding her head to add extra sincerity to her words.
What a shame that it was the truth.
Theo—or Theseus—or His Highness—wasn’t the most handsome man she’d ever met, but there was something about him that captured the eye and kept you looking. A magnetism. He had a nose too bumpy to be considered ideal, deep-set dark brown eyes, a wide mouth that smiled easily and a strong jawline. This combined with his olive colouring, his height—which had to be a good foot over her own five foot four inches—and the wiry athleticism of his physique, gave the immediate impression of an unreconstructed ‘man’s man’.
Her awareness of him had been instant, from the second he’d stepped into Marin’s Bar on Illya with a crowd of Scandinavian travellers hanging onto his every word. She’d taken one look at him and her heart had flipped over.
It had been a mad infatuation. Totally crazy. Irrational. All the things she’d reached the age of twenty-one without having once experienced had hit her with the force of a tsunami.
But now she was five years older, five years wiser, and she had a child to protect. Any infatuation had long gone.
Or so she’d thought.
But when he’d strode through the door of the stateroom the effect had been the same; as if the past five years had been erased.
‘Different to all those years ago,’ Theseus agreed, looking at his watch. ‘I appreciate you’ve had a long day, but time is against us to get the biography complete. Let’s take a walk to your apartment so you can freshen up and settle in. We can talk en route.’
He set off with Dimitris at his side.
Staring at his retreating back, it took Jo a few beats before she pulled herself together and scrambled after them.
Dull thuds pounded in her brain, bruising it, as the magnitude of her situation hit her.
For all these years she’d sworn to herself that she would find Toby’s father and tell Theo about their son. She’d had no expectations of what would happen afterwards, but had known that at the very least she owed it to Toby to find him. She’d also thought she owed it to Theo to tell him he had a child.
But Theo didn’t exist.
Whoever this man was, he was not the Theo Patakis she had once fallen in love with.
Theseus wasn’t the father of her son; he was a stranger dressed in his skin.
CHAPTER TWO
‘VISITORS TO THE palace often get lost, so I’ve arranged for a map to be left in your apartment,’ Theseus said as they climbed a narrow set of stairs.
‘A map? Seriously?’ She would remain civil if it killed her. Which it probably would.
So many emotions were running through her she didn’t know where one began and another ended.
He nodded, still steaming ahead. Her legs were working at a quick march to keep up with him as he turned into a dark corridor lit by tiny round ceiling lights.
‘The palace has five hundred and seventy-three rooms.’
‘Then I guess a map could come in handy,’ she conceded, for want of anything else to say.
‘There will not be time for you to explore the palace as you might like,’ he said. ‘However, we will do everything in our power to make your stay here as comfortable as it can be.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, trying not to choke on her words.
‘Are you up to speed with the project?’
‘I read a good chunk of it on the plane,’ she confirmed tightly.
As the deadline for the biography’s completion was so tight, Fiona had been emailing each chapter as she’d finished it so they could be immediately edited. The editor working on it had spent the past six weeks or so with a distinctly frazzled look about her.
‘Fiona has completed the bulk of the biography, but there is still another twenty-five years of my grandfather’s life to be written about. I appreciate this must sound daunting, but you will find when you read through the research papers that there is much less complexity there than in his early years. Are you confident you can do this within the time constraints?’
‘I wouldn’t have accepted the job if I wasn’t.’ Fiona’s editor, who Jo was now working with, had assured her that the last three decades of King Astraeus’s life had been comparatively quiet after his early years.
But Jo had accepted the job before discovering who she would be working for and exactly who he was.