‘You can,’ he said firmly.
The dim lighting made it impossible to tell, but he thought she might have blushed when his fingers met hers. The women he encountered didn’t blush. Oh, he would leave them flushed. And panting. But...blushing spoke of innocence. An innocence he shouldn’t even be in the proximity of.
‘He knew you?’ she asked, as if finally processing the events that had happened. ‘Herecognisedyou,’ she said, a statement this time.
He shrugged off her apparent realisation of his notoriety, instead finding focus once again in her features. Her thoughts had furrowed her brow, drawing his attention to a nose that was distinctly ‘button-like’. From there it was impossibly easy to drop his gaze to her lips and he was forced to stifle the sound of his swift inhalation.
Her lips looked swollen, as if recently kissed and thoroughly so. It wasn’t a pout, and it wasn’t the exaggerated bee-stung puff that silly people paid ridiculous amounts for. It was a natural fullness that he wanted to bite down gently on. There wasn’t a slick of lipstick on them, yet their colour was as rich a red as his favourite Limniona. He could almost taste the wine on his tongue, the scent of the herbs and cinnamon spice in the air about them.
‘What are you doing here?’ His question surprised them both and for the first time in a long time he felt the white-hot sting of embarrassment. Never before had he shown such a shocking disregard for self-control as to give voice to what definitely should have been a passing thought.
‘I’m... I was supposed to be meeting someone.’
Her answer pierced the haze she had plunged his mind into. ‘Oh, my apologies,’ he said, frowning. He wasn’t used to misreading situations, given that his career depended on it. ‘I’ll—’
‘Oh, no, it’s not like that,’ she said, the words rushing out just like the hand she placed on his forearm. ‘I... Family. I was supposed to be meeting family, but he’s not here.’
Summer was quite aware that she was staring, but she couldn’t help herself. And it had absolutely nothing to do with whether Theron Thiakos had access to her father, and everything to do with the fact that she had never seen anyone like him before.
He was impossibly good-looking. Carelessly so. Although his body was angled away from her as if he was desperate to leave, he seemed as unable to break the strange connection between them as she was.
Which was why she noticed the minute tremor that rippled beneath the surface of him when she had mentioned family. To some he might have appeared relaxed, but there was a tension formed deep within him and she didn’t need a seismograph to know it. He reminded her of dolerite, the rock formed from pressurised molten lava.
‘You are on your own?’ He didn’t seem to like the idea.
‘In Greece? Yes,’ she confirmed.
He turned back to his friends, his gaze snagging on the exit to the bar and then back to her, and something in her curled as she realised he didn’t want to be there. With her. Shame. Embarrassment. Frustration?
She looked down as she saw him press a business card along the table with his index finger.
‘Just in case you get into trouble.’
‘I won’t need it,’ Summer said, no matter how desperate she was to accept the link to him, to her father.
He smiled, a painfully civil press of his lips that she felt around her heart. ‘Maybe, maybe not. But take it so I will be able to sleep tonight.’
And with that he disappeared.
For a moment she sat, stunned, watching him leave. And only then did she realise she hadn’t asked him when her father might return.
CHAPTER TWO
SUMMERHADBEENawake for a while without realising it. Staring up at the ceiling, her mind had continued to play out her dreams from sleeping into waking. And if it had just been a matter of images she might have been able to shake off the strange fantasies that had rolled out through the night hours. But it was the feel of them that had shaken her.
She could have sworn on the Bible that she knew the weight of his hand on her thigh, the press of his lips against her neck, the warmth of his body against hers, the safety she felt within his arms. A safety, a presence that made her unaccountably sad. The kind of deep sadness that felt familiar, that feltold.
Loneliness.
She realised it with a sense of confusion. She blinked at the ceiling and then approached it with a rationality that she was known for. Clearly it had more to do with missing Kyros Agyros than Theron and any such emotional reaction was surely understandable. Perhaps it was because she was in Athens alone that made it seem more...powerful.
She blinked back the threat of tears and threw herself into the shower, making plans as she washed the entirety of last night from her hair.
She didn’t know when Kyros might return from wherever he was, but she had to hope that it would be before she left in a week’s time. She decided to pass by the Agyros building later that afternoon and if there was a different receptionist she would try her luck again. If he hadn’t returned in three days, then she wouldhaveto call Theron and somehow force the conversation onto her father. Until then she wanted to see as much of her heritage as possible.
After breakfast she left the hotel and decided just to walk. The streets ranged from hidden cobbled passageways littered with coffee tables, fuchsia bougainvillea and old men playing backgammon, to wide city streets that stretched for blocks and shops with expensive fashion labels and jewellery.
She wondered what her father was doing now. Was he still here in Athens? Or had he left for some other part of the world just at the exact moment she’d arrived looking for him? She tried to imagine what it might have been like to grow up here and was pierced by a sharp prick of guilt. She would never exchange what she’d had growing up with Skye and Star and her mother. Whenever she thought of Mariam her mind skittered over itself. As if she wasn’t able or ready to think about how she had lied to her.