CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘YOU’LLHAVETOclose your eyes,’ Galen said as he led her through the apartment. ‘Your gift is in the bedroom.’
‘What a surprise!’ Roula said in a droll voice, but he came up behind her and his hand covered her eyes.
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have time to wrap them.’
‘Them?’ she checked.
‘Just close your eyes.’
He led her into the bedroom and she stood there waiting—for what? A naked Galen? Gosh he made her thoughts depraved...
But she was not scared. It was odd, but even in the dark she wasn’t frightened.
‘Open them.’
‘Wow!’ Roula said, forcing a smile as she surveyed a new luggage set. Gosh, clearly Galen wasn’t the King of Romance! ‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Galen said. ‘They all come with a lifetime guarantee.’
She guessed in his own way he was giving her his blessing to leave. ‘Thank you,’ Roula said. ‘I mean that. I’m...’
Underwhelmed.
Except she shouldn’t be, Roula knew, for it was the best luggage set ever, and he was the sexiest man in the world, and he was trying to make this right.
‘I’m touched.’
Sort of.
Not.
She felt as if she’d got on a bus headed in the wrong direction, or on a ferry that was taking her to a port she didn’t want to go to but had insisted upon. Everything was chugging along in the wrong direction, and she didn’t know how to turn things around.
‘Come here,’ Galen said, and he took her hand and led her towards the terrace and the view she had missed the first time around.
She loved Athens, Roula thought as she stepped out onto the terrace. And, yes, Galen had the best view. For the Temple of Olympian Zeus was lit up in the foreground, so close, and high and proud behind it stood the Acropolis.
‘Worth it?’ he asked.
‘So worth it,’ Roula said, and even as she drank in the view her words were for him. ‘You can never move,’ she smiled. ‘I mean, how would you top that?’
‘I’m very lucky,’ Galen said. ‘I know that.’
‘So am I,’ Roula said, because tonight she felt so too. ‘I never thought I’d be...’Where to start?‘Dancing, making new friends, firing off texts requesting sex!’
‘It’s such an effective method of communication.’ He smiled. ‘I’m teasing.’
She smiled as he took her arms in his hands,
‘It’s been a brilliant six weeks,’ Galen said. ‘Well, perhaps not for you.’
‘It’s been the very best that it could have been. I honestly thought I’d be facing it alone.’
Yes, she was minus a family, but she had a cast of new friends and a new sense of herself now. She was no longer Guest Services Manager Roula, the woman he’d first met, or PA Roula as she’d tried to be, or ‘poor Roula’, as some of them back home called her.
But neither was she the New Roula she’d tried so hard to create. The one who stood in a sexy ball gown and knew what to do and how to say goodbye.