by Fiona Harper
‘Kelly Bradford,’ she said, with a rise of her eyebrows.
* * *
Jason had no idea where Kelly would be, just that she’d be at the hospital. That was all he’d managed to get from her tight-lipped brother. He didn’t care. He’d flash a smile at anyone female with an ID card hanging round their neck and sweet-talk them into telling him where those tests were performed. Kelly should not have to be here on her own.
And, yes, he knew her sister-in-law was with her, but by ‘on her own’ he meant ‘without him’.
But in the end he didn’t need to smile at anyone, charm anyone. He stumbled across Kelly and the blonde he’d seen at the airport before he’d even walked inside a door. He spotted them, half-hidden by a small tree in a leafy little park labelled ‘The Peace Garden’ in the hospital grounds. The blonde was hugging Kelly tight and Kelly was sobbing uncontrollably.
The blonde looked startled when she spotted him striding towards her but, after the initial surprise had worn off, warmth crept into her eyes. She released Kelly and stepped away as Jason moved in and took her place. Kelly just kept sobbing, but the momentary hiccup the moment his arms slid around her told him she knew he was there. He pulled her close, almost crushing her, and whispered into her hair.
‘It doesn’t matter, Kelly. It doesn’t matter what the doctors say. We’ll fight it together.’
She nodded, even as her ribcage continued to heave, as the tears continued to fall. He was just still, held her until the gaps between oxygen-sucking breaths got longer. Then she wound both hands round his neck, pulled him to her and kissed him fiercely before pulling back and looking at him.
She was smiling at him through her tears. This woman was amazing. How had he even thought about letting her walk away from him? Such courage. Such strength. And he didn’t care how much time they had left as long as they spent it together.
She said something in a hoarse, tear-ravaged voice that he didn’t understand. His brain was having trouble making sense of the words.
‘Jason, did you hear that...?’
He frowned and shook his head.
She took a deep breath, steadied herself and looked him in the eye. ‘It’s just a cyst, that’s all. Just a cyst.’
What did that mean? He couldn’t have been looking any less confused because she grabbed him and kissed him again before saying, ‘It’s not cancer. I’m okay.’
And then they were back to kissing again and Jason didn’t care one bit.
There was a soft cough behind him. ‘I don’t think you two need me anymore, so I’ll just...be on my way.’ Jason would have nodded and waved the sister-in-law goodbye if all his attention hadn’t been tied up in showing Kelly just how wrong he’d been and just how right he was going to be in the future.
She came up for air eventually and rested her forehead against his. ‘I’m sorry I shut you out.’
‘I understand. But I want you to know you can count on me.’
She swallowed. ‘You mean if...if something happens in the future?’
He nodded. ‘I want to be with you, Kelly. Always. No matter what.’
She pulled back and he could see the joy at his words in her face. But he could also see the flicker of doubt in those cool grey-green eyes.
‘I knew you’d need convincing,’ he told her. ‘So I did something. Something to show you I mean business.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve spent too long skating on the top of life, pretending I was happy that way, pretending I wasn’t missing anything by going deeper...’
She got his attention by hitting his chest softly with her open palm. ‘Jason? What did you do...? You better not have done something to mess up that McGrath deal because I worked really hard on that and I will be most miffed!’
‘Miffed?’ He laughed. ‘You don’t have to be miffed.’ Which was just as well because he was guessing that would involve a whole lot of earache. ‘I went to see my father, made the first step in patching things up.’ He shook his head gently. ‘It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be...’
Her eyes widened. ‘You did! Oh, Jason, that’s brilliant.’ Then she hit him again. Harder. ‘And about time too!’
Well, he hadn’t expected anything but truth that packed a punch from Kelly but, before she could do anything else violent, he pulled her close and kissed her again.
‘I realised I’d checked out of my own life a long time ago, but you made me want to check back in,’ he told her, keeping his arms firmly around her. ‘Not for myself—although I know I need that—but for you. I want to do it for you, because you woke me up, Kelly. You gave me the kiss of life when I was half-dead and didn’t know I needed it. You made me want to live again.’
‘And you gave it right back to me,’ she said, grinning through her tears. ‘Let’s do it. If there’s one thing that this scare has taught me it’s that you have to grab every chance of happiness you get. And you make me happy, Jason. I want to be with you.’
He smiled back at her. ‘It’s a deal, then.’ And he pulled away, stepped back and offered her his hand. She stared at it for a moment.
Kelly looked between his hand and his face a few times, but she slid her fingers into his and his larger ones closed around hers. He stopped smiling. This wasn’t a joke or a cute gesture to make her laugh. He was serious about this.
He knew she understood when her eyes filled with tears. She nodded and the motion of her head propelled them over the edge of her lashes and down her cheeks. ‘My problem isn’t that I can’t commit,’ he told her. ‘I just chose not to for a very long time, but you know me well enough to know that when I make a deal I don’t go back on it. Ever. You know what I’m saying, Kelly?’
Julie would be pleased. He was going to be able to tell her she needed to buy a new hat.
She nodded and smiled through her tears. ‘It’s a deal,’ she whispered softly.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Greek for Beginners by Jackie Braun.
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ONE
If Darcie Hayes had any lingering doubts about her decision to call off her wedding a week before the “I dos” and end her engagement to her longtime beau, they were eradicated the moment she stepped off the plane in Athens and scanned the crowd.
A driver was supposed to meet her at the airport. That was part of the nonrefundable, all-inclusive Greek tour package that her spendthrift fiancé had booked for their honeymoon. The honeymoon she had decided to take alone.
Tad got their Buffalo, New York, condominium and their antisocial cat in the breakup. She’d figured a couple of weeks away from her well-meaning friends and family in sun-drenched Greece was a fair trade since she’d never liked the condo, and the cat had never liked her. Now, she had the sinking feeling that Tad had gotten the better end of the deal.
She saw no hand-printed sign bearing her name. Nor was anyone smiling in welcome and waving to gain her attention. For a brief moment, a handsome man on a cell phone stopped talking and their gazes met.
Her best friend Becky’s last text played through Darcie’s head.
Meet a man. Have a fling. Get ur sexy back.
Becky had wanted to come on the trip, but she hadn’t been able to get the time off work on such short notice. That wasn’t stopping her from giving Darcie all sorts of advice on how to spend her time, including having a fling. Well, if Darcie were going to cast caution to the wind, this would be exactly the sort of man she would pick to do it with. He was so gorgeous that her mouth threatened to fall open. It settled for watering, and she was forced to swallow or she would have drooled. The crowd of departing passengers surged around him then, obstructing her view. When the travelers cleared, he was gone.
After that, the only person who made eye contact with Darcie was a portly porter who approached with a trolley as she waited for her bags at the luggage carousel. It was just her luck that only one of the designer knock-offs showed up. It was the smaller of the two—the bag in which she’d packed her “second-string” outfits, the first string being the new clothes she’d bought especially for the trip. The bag sported wheels and a retractable handle, but the handle was out and dangling uselessly to the side. As for the wheels, one had been sheared off somehow.
The porter pointed to the missing wheel and busted handle, and then pointed to the trolley. Darcie nodded. Even though the bag was only one size up from a carry-on, when she’d hefted it onto the scale at the airport in Buffalo, she’d nearly given herself a hernia. She was more than happy to have someone else do the heavy lifting now.
The porter was old enough to be her father, but nothing about the smile he gave her was paternal. After loading her bag onto a cart, he winked. Then his gaze skimmed down and he said something in Greek that, even though she didn’t know what it meant, had her checking the buttons on her blouse to be sure they were fastened.
“I, um, can take it from here,” Darcie said, handing him a couple euros for a tip and then making a shooing motion with her hands.
Alone again, she heaved a frustrated sigh. So much for the part of her itinerary that read, “You will be met at the airport by a member of our friendly and efficient English-speaking staff and taken directly to one of Athens’s finest hotels.”
But then what her near-miss of a husband considered “sparing no expense” on the trip of a lifetime and how the majority of people would define the concept were two different things entirely. Tad had never earned a penny that he hadn’t pinched mercilessly afterward. Darcie was all for getting a good deal, but more often than not, you got what you paid for. She had a bad feeling this trip was going to be a case in point. The plane ride had been her first clue, wedged as she’d been for the long, transatlantic flight into a coach seat so narrow that even a runway model would have found the dimensions unforgiving.
Darcie wasn’t a runway model, nor would she ever be mistaken for one, even if at five foot eleven she had the height. She also had curves, the kind for which words such as big-boned and, her personal favorite, full-figured had been strung together. She’d long ago reconciled herself to that fact that no amount of dieting was going to result in her being considered dainty. Instead, through hard work and an amount of discipline she hadn’t known she’d possessed, she’d toned her body into its best shape ever for her wedding day. She’d planned to rock the church wearing a fitted white mermaid gown, but she’d never walked down the aisle.
That had been her choice, but still...
She headed for the nearest counter, putting her back into steering the trolley, which, she discovered, had an annoying tendency to veer to the right. All the way there, she prayed that one of the two uniformed men standing behind the counter would speak enough English to understand her.
“Excuse me,” she began, smiling at both. “Yia sas.” That meant “hello” and pretty much measured the extent of her Greek.
Luckily, one of the men replied in English, “Hello. How can I assist you?”
“Someone from my tour was supposed to meet me here and take me to my hotel, but I don’t see anyone. I was hoping you might know where I should wait for them.”
The man nodded. “What is the name of the company?”
“It’s Zeus Tours.” She rifled through her purse and produced a full-color brochure and a printout of her itinerary, which she handed to him.
The mouth under his thick moustache twitched with a smile and he nodded again. “Zeus Tours. Ne.”
“You know of them?”
“Ne,” he said again. It meant “yes,” but his amused expression didn’t leave her feeling relieved. Next to him, the other man had started to chuckle.
Oh, this didn’t bode well, but she forged ahead. “Um, so are they here?” She gestured to the busy terminal at large.
He glanced around. “I do not see Stavros.”
The other man said something in Greek that had them sharing a laugh.
“Stavros.” She repeated on a nod. “Am I supposed to meet this Stavros somewhere other than here?”
“Here. There.” The man shrugged. “I suggest you have a seat and make yourself comfortable.” He handed the papers back to her and pointed to a nearby bank of chairs. “It could be a while.”
“A while?” Her stomach dropped.
“Stavros keeps his own schedule. If he owns a watch, he never consults it.”
At this the man’s coworker hooted with laughter.
Darcie was tired and growing irritable. She wanted a shower, a nap and something to eat, not necessarily in that order. It wouldn’t hurt to throw in a drink somewhere, either. A nice glass of chilled white wine, perhaps. Or a shot of ouzo...straight from the bottle. What she didn’t want to do was spend any more of her first day in Athens in the airport as the punch line for a joke. But she worked up a smile and offered her thanks.
She was attempting to wheel the trolley away when someone tapped her on the shoulder. Darcie turned to find the gorgeous man she’d spied earlier. Her stomach took another dive, but this time for reasons that had nothing to do with disappointment.
Up close, she realized that he was taller than she was. Darcie actually had to look up. Even if she’d been wearing the highest pair of heels she owned, she only would have been on eye level. Six foot three, she figured, and every last inch of him was packaged in firm muscle beneath an untucked white linen shirt and a pair of designer jeans that fit snugly across the thigh.
His skin was tanned, his jaw subtly shadowed. His hair was nearly black and fell across brows of the exact shade. The eyes below those brows were a rich chocolate-brown and smiling even though his mouth held only the faintest curve.
“Hello,” he said.
Her tongue untied long enough for her to manage a basic greeting. “Hi.”
“
I could not help but overhear your conversation. Maybe I can be of help,” he said in gorgeously accented English.
“I hope so.” It came out on a sigh and Darcie came to her senses. “What I mean is, my fi— Um, friend booked an all-inclusive vacation package with Zeus Tours. I was promised that someone would meet me at the airport, but...” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug.
“Ah, Zeus Tours.” Like the pair at the counter, the man apparently was acquainted with the company, but he didn’t laugh. Rather, the corners of his mouth turned down in a frown. “May I ask why you decided to book your trip with that particular company?”
“My, um, friend found them on the internet and got a really good deal.”
It sounded like he said, “I am sure she did.” He glanced around then. “And where is your friend?”
Tad was probably with his mother, Darcie mused. It had taken her six years to accept the fact that an engagement ring was no match for the tight knots in Evelyn’s apron strings.
“Couldn’t make it,” she replied, leaving off the telltale pronoun.
A pair of dark brows rose. “So, you came to Greece by yourself?”
Even a man who looked like a Greek god could be a psychopathic killer. So, Darcie said carefully, “Yes, but you know, it’s a guided tour and they’re expecting me.”
The man glanced around and then back at her.
“Well, I’m sure someone will be here...any minute.” She pulled out the brochure again and tapped the front of it with the tip of one finger. “I’ve been assured a safe and supervised good time over the course of the next two weeks.”
This time the man’s mouth joined his eyes in smiling.
“I apologize. I am making you nervous when I am only trying to help. Here.” He pulled out the cell phone she’d seen him talking on earlier. “If you give me the number, I will call the company for you. I know the owner. He and I went to grade school together.”