The woman came up to them, smiled with curiosity at Amelia then pressed a kiss to Santos’s lips. Bile rose in Amelia’s throat.
‘I don’t think we’ve met.’ The woman extended a manicured hand. Amelia stared at it.
‘No.’ Her voice sounded hollow. She couldn’t look at Santos but politeness had her shaking the other woman’s slim hand. ‘I’m just someone who used to work for Santos.’ She swallowed. Tears were engulfing her. She didn’t—couldn’t—say goodbye. She turned away, gripping the railing for support as she quickly moved down the steps, beyond grateful for her sensible ballet flats. She would never have been able to make a speedy getaway in heels like the other woman’s.
The other woman’s.
The way she’d leaned in and kissed him... They weren’t strangers and this wasn’t a first date. The idea of him being with someone else made her ache all over. The taxi was still there, the driver filling something out in his notebook. Amelia tapped on the window as she pulled the passenger door open. But Santos was right behind her, his hand on the door, his body framing hers as she moved to take a seat.
‘Wait.’ The word was drawn from deep within him, thick and dark. ‘Don’t go yet.’
A sob bubbled from her throat. ‘Why not?’ Her eyes lifted to his house. The front door was closed, his glamorous date no doubt ensconced inside.
‘You told me all of this. You said I wouldn’t matter. You said you’d never love me. You warned me. You haven’t done anything wrong.’
He was so close. She could feel his breath, each one ripped from his body. She had to get out of here. A full-blown breakdown was imminent and she wouldn’t subject him to that. She loved him enough not to want him to suffer unnecessary guilt. After all, what had he really done wrong? He’d warned her from the start.
I don’t believe in love—not romantic love, in any event. I don’t ask you not to love me because I’m arrogant, so much as because it’s utterly futile. I will never return it.
He stared at her and she waited for him to speak, but he didn’t, and the impossibility of all of this just made it worse. She sank into the taxi, her hand on the door. Still he stood there, his frame blocking the door from closing.
‘Please just let me go now.’
He continued to stare at her, his expression dark.
Tears filled her eyes; her heart was breaking. ‘I need to go.’
The plaintive cry did it. He seemed to rouse from something and step backward. A second later she pulled the taxi door closed and it drove away, taking her from his home, away from a scene that would be etched in the fibres of her being for ever.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EVERY MORNING FOR the next week, he woke with a feeling of weight bearing down on him, suffocating him. Every day for the next week, he struggled to so much as breathe.
When he slept, he saw Amelia. Her eyes, her smile, her frown, her pain. The moment Pia had arrived and Amelia had seen her, he’d wanted to throttle something, or to reach out and stop time, to undo what had just happened.
How could she fail to believe he was sleeping with Pia? And then Pia had kissed him and stood at his side, as though they were a duo and Amelia a stranger, and he’d been incapable of doing anything but standing there, so blindsided by what she’d said, by the heart she was offering him, that he’d been temporarily immobilised.
It hadn’t been good enough. Amelia had looked at Pia and believed that he was already seeing other women. Hell, hadn’t that been his plan? Hadn’t he thought that taking Pia to the fundraiser ball—an event for which he was on the board—might lead to him feeling something for her? And he would have been relieved if that had been the case. If finally he could have looked at another woman and felt even the slightest flare of interest.
Amelia couldn’t have known that he’d been celibate since Paris. Amelia couldn’t have known that the idea of so much as having dinner with another woman disgusted him. How could he sit across the table from someone else and make small talk when anyone else now bored him senseless?
His father’s announcement—that he was getting divorced again—only added to the weight pressing on Santos’s chest. All these people and their damned belief in ‘love’. It destroyed lives. Look at Amelia and how she was feeling! She’d let herself fall in love with him and now she was suffering.
He focussed on two aspects of his life to the exclusion of all else: Cameron and his work.
But, two weeks after Amelia had turned up on his doorstep, Cameron came home from school with a torn shirt pocket.
‘What happened?’ Santos reached out and ran his finger over it, something in the little boy’s demeanour instinctively leading him to understand the seriousness of this.
‘Nothing.’ Cameron crossed his arms over his chest. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Cameron?’ Santos’s voice was unintentionally sharp. He softened it with effort. ‘I cannot help you if I don’t know—’
‘Just leave me alone.’ Cameron burst into tears and stormed down the corridor, slamming his bedroom door shut.
Great.
He listened to the little boy’s sobbing and pressed his head against the wall. Everything was falling apart. A year ago his life had been ordered and neat. He’d been absorbed by his work, his commercial success a blinding light, and he’d enjoyed his social life too—sex, friendships; easy. He’d been happy.
He pushed up from the wall a little, his chest straining. No, he hadn’t been happy. He’d been existing. The only time he’d ever really been happy was on the island, over the summer. That beautiful, enormous mansion that was his connection to his heritage, a place where he was most at home, had suddenly felt like a real home. Returning each evening to Amelia and Cameron had become what he’d lived for. Knowing that within minutes of his helicopter touching down he would see Amelia, that he would be able to steal a kiss when Cameron wasn’t looking.
His stomach clenched. Her smile had become the most important thing in his life. But she wasn’t smiling now. She was miserable, and all because she’d fallen in love with him.
Just like the women who’d loved his father.
Pain was the inevitable cost of love. How could she fail to see that? Why hadn’t she protected herself better? Even her own parents had failed her, so why the hell had she put her faith in him? How could she have thought loving him was a smart idea?
Because she couldn’t help it; a voice in his head demanded to be heard. Love isn’t like that.
He listened to Cameron’s sobs subsiding a little, and then went into the kitchen, pulling out a box of ice-creams and opening one. Even that filled him with memories.
Maybe if he’d been stricter from the start, enforced tighter caps on what they were, rationed Amelia to being a ‘sometimes’ lover... Perhaps if he’d come home later, made sure that while they’d been sleeping together they weren’t also dining together, working side by side, doing all the things that might in different circumstances have characterised a real family...
He felt like he’d been punched in the chest. He didn’t want a real family. But he did want Amelia. He wanted her in his life, smiling, happy, pursuing her dreams but at his side.
But then what? another voice niggled at him. What if in a year’s time they wound up in this exact same position? What if he was even more like his father than he realised? What if he promised her the world and then changed his mind?
He knocked on Cameron’s door.
‘Go away.’
‘I have ice-cream.’
A pause. A sob. Then the door handle opened to reveal his son’s tear-stained face. Santos felt an anguish unlike anything he’d ever known. He wanted Amelia on a lot of levels but there was this, too. With her at his side, everything made sense, and he knew he was a better parent with her support. It was only a small part of why he needed her, but it was the straw that had brok
en the camel’s back.
He wanted her, but this time he’d be more careful. He’d protect her better. What he needed was a contract, a document that spelled everything out in black and white, a way of ensuring she wouldn’t get hurt this time around.
* * *
This had been a mistake. Amelia was a scientist first and a teacher next. She was, as it turned out, definitely not a cook. She stared at the front of her apron, covered in a pale yellow goo, and turned the tap on with her elbow. Water spurted out too hard, splashing her face. She ground her teeth together and eased the tap off, pushing her hands beneath the stream then adding some soap and lathering them up.
‘Make pasta, they said. It will be easy, they said.’ She cast an eye over the tragedy of her chopping board. Whatever the heck she’d assembled, it more closely resembled some kind of blobby sea creature than it did anything edible.
When her hands were clean, she moved back to the chopping board—the mess wasn’t contained to one patch of timber, though. It had spread over the kitchen bench. Flour, broken eggs, a rolling pin that would probably never look the same. The television chef with his cockney accent and roguish smile had made it look so easy.
He’d lied.
It wasn’t easy.
Grimacing, she lifted the chopping board, preparing to throw the evidence of her failure away, when the doorbell sounded. Casting a glance at the clock, she replaced the board and wiped her hands on the sides of the apron, making sure they were dry.
The supplies she’d ordered for her pupils were already two days later than expected. That had to be them. She moved through her home, not stopping to check her appearance in the mirror—she knew she must look a mess, with flour on her cheeks and in her hair, wearing a sloppy jumper and loose-fitting jeans, but what did she care?
She pulled the door inwards, preparing to sign the postal form and take the box of stationery, except it wasn’t Russell, the familiar Royal Mail delivery guy.
‘Santos?’ Everything inside her began to quiver. The cells of her body went into overdrive. With an enormous effort, she assumed a mask of cool civility, but it was almost impossible when she felt as if she were being electrocuted.
‘Amelia.’ His brow crinkled and his eyes swept over her, the corner of his lips pulling into a small smile. ‘What the hell have you been doing?’
Oh, God. She must look...terrible. But so what? She refused to care about that. Tilting her chin, she held his eyes. ‘I’m cooking.’
‘Really?’
It was a joke. She ignored it. Her body was buzzing and humming and her chest was compressing. ‘What are you doing here?’
He sobered, nodding, shoving his hands in his pocket. ‘I came to see you.’
She bit down on her lip. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘No. Yes.’ He stared at her, then expelled a breath. ‘Can I come in?’
She looked over her shoulder, then turned back to him. ‘I...okay. Just for a minute.’
‘Thank you.’ She stepped back, giving him plenty of space to move by without touching her, but it still wasn’t enough. His hand brushed hers and she almost jumped out of her skin. She covered her response by pushing the door shut with a resounding click. From there, she kept her distance, maintaining at least a metre of space between them when they reached the living room.
He looked around, his eyes taking in all the details, so she tried to see it as he must—the homeliness of it, the simplicity and cosiness. It was completely different from his perfectly designed living spaces.
She squared her shoulders, assuming a position of defiance and defensiveness rather than showing how affected she was by his presence.
‘Christos.’ He shook his head, then dragged a hand through his hair. ‘I have no idea what to say to you.’
How could he not hear her heart? It was slamming into her ribs over and over, so loud, so painfully persistent.
‘Then why are you here?’
‘Let me start with this.’ He nodded decisively, moving towards the window and looking out at the empty field that ran beyond her house, all the way to the stream. ‘When you came to Athens, I was going to a fundraising event. I’m on the board and obliged to attend. It wasn’t a date.’
And, despite the fact he wasn’t looking at her, she turned away from him, staring at a photograph on the wall.
‘I didn’t sleep with her. Or anyone else. I haven’t moved on from you, Amelia.’
She kept staring at the photo, his words wrapping around her, making her heart hurt, her breath burn, her body sag.
‘I wanted to, though. That night, I thought that if I could just do something I normally would that maybe I would start to feel normal again. Maybe if I went out with someone like Pia, laughed with her, flirted with her, you wouldn’t take up such a huge part of my mind any more. I needed to perform an exorcism, and I thought that would work.’
Amelia spun round to face him, hurt showing on her features, her eyes huge in her face. ‘I don’t know if that’s more offensive to her or to me. You thought that you could sleep with her and forget about me? You’d actually use another woman like that?’
He blanched. ‘I thought I’d feel something for her. Desire. Need. Anything. But I haven’t felt a damned thing since you left. Why is that?’ he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. ‘How come you’re all I can think about? How come you’re the only person I want, the only person I need?’
She clamped her mouth shut, her head issuing a stern warning to her heart. None of this meant anything. He was annoyed by her hold on him, but hadn’t that been the case all along? He’d been transfixed by her and waiting for that to wear off. He hadn’t wanted to feel that way; he didn’t welcome any of this.
He was moving closer to her and, while she braced for his nearness, there was a tiny part of her that wanted to welcome him. That wanted to run towards him and beg him to stay a just bit longer. She hated that part of herself. Speaking of exorcisms...
‘How come waking up without you makes me feel like I’m missing a part of myself? How come you’re the last person I want to see before I fall asleep at night?’ He moved closer, his body almost touching hers now. She made a small noise, a choking sound. Of fear? Or of want?
‘How come everything feels dull and pointless without you? How come I look for you all the time? How come I miss you so much I can barely breathe?’ Another step and his body pressed to hers, his hand lifting to cup her cheek.
‘How come I have told myself all my life that I would never be like my father, that I would never let a woman fall in love with me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t ever love a woman, and yet I love you?’
She drew in a deep gulp of air, shaking her head and stepping backwards. ‘Don’t.’ It took all her willpower and strength to separate from him. ‘Don’t come here now and say this. Don’t you dare.’
‘I fell in love with you, Amelia. It is the opposite of what I thought I wanted but here I am, a broken man, an incomplete man, without you in my life. Your love has become the sum total of what I want. What choice do I have but to come here and say this to you?’
‘You hurt me.’ He winced as though she’d hit him. ‘You did exactly what you’ve spent your whole life telling yourself you wouldn’t, and you hate yourself for that, so you’re trying to fix it. You can’t just say you love me! That’s not the answer to this.’
He shook his head, moving closer again, his body wrapping hers inwards, his arms linking behind her back. ‘I’m not just saying this to make myself feel better. Yes, I hurt you.’ He dropped his forehead to hers. ‘I hurt you and seeing that pain on your face is an image I will never forget. When you looked at Pia, when she kissed me, the look in your eyes...’ He shook his head, the sentence unfinished.
Pain was burning her insides anew. ‘Please don’t.’
‘But your hurt was matched by my own. I have been mis
erable without you, and all I can think about is the rest of my life, spending it like this, and there’s just this huge, dark void. Without you, nothing has meaning. You are my everything, Amelia.’
She sobbed, her eyes pleading when they met his. ‘Please don’t say these things.’
‘Do you love me?’
She swept her eyes shut, her lips parted. ‘Of course.’
‘Then why can’t I say this? Why can’t I say it back to you?’
She sobbed and shook her head. ‘Because I know what you want in life and it’s not this. You shouldn’t have to change who you are because of me.’
‘You changed who I am and what I want. Until I met you, of course I felt that love was a fantasy, a ridiculous construct. Until I met you, I’d never been in love before. You taught me to love—I love you, I love Cameron; you opened my heart. I’m still terrified of hurting you, or not being the father he needs, but you showed me that loving someone isn’t about not feeling afraid, it’s just about showing up and doing your best. Being there for the person you love. All I want in this life is you, Amelia.’
He brushed his lips to hers and she felt as though she were being breathed back to life. Her heart began to sing. ‘That artist in Paris saw something I was too stupid to recognise. Or maybe I recognised it and was just too stubborn to accept it. We are a family—you, me and Cam—and we should be together.’
Her heart was soaring inside her. ‘I can’t believe this.’
He compressed his lips and nodded, lifting a hand and padding his thumb over her lower lip, his eyes following the movement before he dropped his hand and stepped away. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought. I hurt you and I would be a fool to expect you to simply forgive and forget. I know I need to prove myself to you again, and I’m prepared to do that. Here’s what I want.’ And suddenly, he was the self-made billionaire tycoon success story all over again. Powerful, commanding, completely in his element.
‘The school year has just started—I know you won’t want to leave your students midway through. And Cameron has just started his new school and, while it’s not exactly working out as I’d hoped, I don’t believe in giving up, so I think it’s important he persevere a little longer.’
Hired by the Impossible Greek Page 17