by Olivia Gates
She turned. She had to, to breathe. She couldn’t, as long as she saw the end of her foolish hopes in his eyes. “Then do what you always do—act only when you have everything planned to the last detail. As for us, we were an experiment. Failing it was always the probable outcome.”
A shock wave of silence and stillness emanated from him, almost knocked her over.
At length, he rasped in a voice like a saw cutting steel, “What are you talking about?”
She pretended to busy herself with pouring the herbal tea she’d prepared for them. “If it’s not working, it isn’t. Best thing to do is to move on. Good thing we found this out early.”
He moved. She barely saw him in her peripheral vision, but he filled her senses. She bit down on a keen of screaming tension as he came to stand before her. She kept her eyes averted, felt nothing but the waves of his power buffeting her.
Then he grated, “You think I meant that we are not working?”
His vehemence forced her eyes up. “What else?”
“I meant this!” He flung his hand toward the phone that was ringing again. “It rings at all hours. And I can’t turn it off because if I do, they’ll do anything to find me, and I don’t want them following me here. Theos, Selene—you thought…”
He stopped, his eyes blazing, his Adam’s apple working.
Then he suddenly clamped her shoulders in convulsive hands. “How could you think that? I’m at my wit’s end only because this is interfering with my ability to be with you and Alex. This…intrusion is what isn’t working, what I have to end.”
As soon as the blow of relief almost buckled her legs, another of realization wiped it away, made them rigid again. “But that—” she nodded at the phone that was ringing again “—can’t end. It’s your life.”
“No,” he said. “This is my biggest war yet, and I can’t fight it properly because it involves your family, because I can’t bring us into it and because on account of it, I’m unable to be what I need to be for you and Alex.”
She shook her head again. “But there will always be bigger wars. This is your life, and if dealing with it stops you from being whatever you want to be for us, it always will.”
His eyes grew burning in their urgency. “No, it won’t. We don’t have an established relationship. I’m new to this, am just learning what it takes to have others in my life. We are testing me, and I can’t be fairly tested under these conditions. At this stage, it’s setting me up for failure, and I can’t afford to fail. That is why I need to be away from it all.”
She tried to step back, to escape the renewed confusion. He wouldn’t let her, clamped her flesh tighter. “I didn’t mean for a second that I want to be alone. Come with me, Selene. Just the three of us. For as long as it takes.”
Aris stared at Selene, afraid his heart was thundering so violently it was shaking him, so deafeningly she couldn’t hear him over its racket.
She looked as if she hadn’t heard him. Or as if she’d suddenly stopped understanding him.
Or was it only that she thought he’d lost his mind to propose what he had?
And he had. The harsh intellect and uncompromising logic that had governed his life were no more. He was driven by impulse, possessed by desire, tossed about by need without a hint of calculation or premeditation. Nothing was left inside him but one imperative necessity—to be with her and Alex.
He’d been going after them with more single-mindedness than the focus that had seen him to the top. And he’d come to realize both he and she had been wrong about him. He wasn’t unfeeling. Where it came to them, he was anything but.
He’d always thought it safer, more efficient, to keep his dealings with others on a practical, cerebral level. He’d never let his family close, never developed the ability to communicate with them, had served them in easily and unequivocally quantifiable ways. His brothers and sisters had their own lives, and he’d never felt they were missing anything by him keeping his distance.
But Selene and Alex were another matter.
Selene and Alex were his.
The possessiveness he felt toward both, the overriding emotions, were new, overpowering. All encompassing.
But he couldn’t just say these feelings existed. He was a man of action. Most important, he had to make sure he was capable of handling all that. Having a family of his own was such an enormous concept, it terrified him. At the same time, he couldn’t breathe with wanting it. Wanting it all with her. With both of them.
So he’d plunged into the deep end of the frightening, exhilarating unknown territories of being a suitor and one half of a parent duet. He couldn’t believe the sheer unbridled…joy just being around them brought, the emptiness he suffered when he had to leave. The anxiety that this might not be for real, for always.
That dread had been increasing by the moment as the world kept intruding when it was all still so new, so fragile and untested. He was terrified of messing up. He couldn’t risk letting the world tear them apart before they had something solid that would weather whatever it would throw at them.
Her reaction now compounded his fear. She’d misunderstood him too readily, had agreed to let it end too easily.
Did that mean she hadn’t been there with him since they’d started on this journey? Or was it that she simply had no faith in him at all, believed he’d fail her, and Alex, sooner or later, had even been waiting for him to do so? Was that why she’d found it so easy to believe he already had, and so soon, as to be so pragmatic about accepting his failure, so unaffected by it?
A red-hot lance of disappointment drove through his vitals. But he couldn’t even blame her. He wasn’t about to wipe away his lifelong track record on the strength of two perfect days and the odd stolen hour over two more weeks.
This made it more imperative that he get the chance to prove to her—and to himself—that he had staying power, that he could be what he longed to be, what they needed him to be.
That chance was all about where and when. Away from the world, now, and for as long as it took.
He repeated his request, urgency bursting in his heart. “Come to Crete with me, Selene. A few weeks in the sun, to forget the demands of the world and concentrate on us, on Alex. I haven’t had a vacation in over twenty-five years. I’m sure you haven’t had one in at least ten. We owe ourselves and each other time away from everything. Where better than on the golden shores of my homeland?”
Her midnight-sky eyes grew enormous, stormy with an amalgam of tempestuous emotions that buffeted him in turn.
He groaned his plea. “Please, kala mou. Say yes.”
Yes.
That seemed to be the only word Selene could say to Aris anymore.
She’d said it to his irresistible invitation less than twenty-four hours ago.
She’d set things up with Kassandra, told her brothers she was leaving with her for a much-needed vacation as Kassandra went on a fashion tour through Europe. She told them she’d contact them periodically to let them know that she and Alex were all right.
And here she was, already halfway across the world to where he’d whisked her aboard his private jet. Her and her entourage.
Though he’d assured her that his maternal aunt and her family lived on his estate and they’d have plenty of experienced babysitters to attend Alex when needed, she’d wanted to bring Eleni. He’d told her to invite Eleni’s family if she hesitated to leave them behind. It was Selene who’d been hesitant to bring more people, wanting their time together to be as private as possible. But he’d assured her his estate was arranged in such a way that they’d have total privacy even if a hundred people were around. So she’d ended up bringing Eleni and her husband, daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, the older generation seemingly beside themselves for a chance to go back to the “motherland,” and the rest excited to be treated to such an unexpected luxury vacation.
After they’d arrived in Heraklion’s airport, Crete’s capital, Aris himself had flown them to his estat
e by the sea in an even more impressive state-of-the-art helicopter. They’d landed half a mile from his mansion, and two limos had been waiting to drive them there.
True to his promise, the limo taking the others headed to buildings nestled among olive groves in a layout that made the estate look like a compound with the main building totally inaccessible from any of the satellite ones, leaving her and Alex to arrive at his house in total privacy.
They came to a stop before the three-story edifice built on the highest point of the land, which then rolled gently to the seashore. The house was ensconced within an explosion of dense thickets of palm trees, pines and cypresses. Beyond their lush cordon lay the most exquisite and seemingly endless landscaped, yet deceptively natural-looking, grounds. Within their vivid embrace the stone-and-plaster building sparkled with the same pristine pale gold as the beaches that spread from its verdant perimeters to the Sea of Crete’s waters, the most intense azures and emeralds she’d ever seen.
Selene trembled at the intensity of the stimuli that flooded her, the sensory pleasures cocooning her. From Aris’s nearness, to the breathtaking beauty that encompassed them, to the air that enveloped them in its balmy caress. After the nip of cold in NYC’s April, the Greek climate embodied spring with its warmth and dryness calibrated to perfect comfort, the air breathing a freshness and purity she could only believe had remained unchanged since the time of the ancient Greeks.
Aris led her up thirty-foot-wide stone steps to a Corinthian-columned portico out of the folds of time. She could now estimate that this place covered around seven thousand square feet and was nestled among at least fifty acres of land with a mile-long beachfront. But it wasn’t the size that impacted her, aroused her awe.
She’d lived most of her life in a stately Colonial mansion almost as large, had moved in the circles of those who lived in prodigious homes. But this place was something far more.
With its architecture drawing abundantly yet subtly on ancient Greek themes, Selene felt it siphoning away the strains of the hectic modern life they’d left behind just hours ago. She felt as if it were beckoning them to embrace the tranquility of ancient ways of life. It felt new yet reflected a centuries-old style, was faithful to a millennia-deep culture, catapulting her back to the time of her ancestors. It tugged at her on an elemental level, at the heritage mixed with her blood, but which she’d known only from secondhand accounts, understood only on an intellectual level.
Now, as she walked inside with Aris hugging both her and Alex into the warmth and protection of his body and solicitude, she felt for the first time what it meant to come home.
She sighed with pleasure as the same monumental design greeted her through an interior dominated by unobstructed spaces. There was no pretentiousness, no complex ornamentation or cluttered furniture that served only to flaunt the owner’s wealth and questionable taste. And she had no doubt the perfection was all an embodiment of Aris’s taste, his eye for the workable, the best.
The expansive entrance gave way to an invitingly simple and sprawling living area draped in utility, comfort and soothing sand tones, with a grand stone-clad fireplace connecting the interior and exterior in spatial and visual terms. The two-story ceiling made her feel she could fly if she wanted to, the flood of golden light pouring from the floor-to-ceiling window imbuing her with such serenity and a sense of freedom and providing an unrestrained view of a stunning internal garden and swimming pool.
A robust, sun-weathered and very good-looking couple in their early sixties entered the house behind them. Selene guessed they must be Aris’s aunt Olympia and her husband, Christos. They advanced toward her and Aris with what Selene judged to be more than a little confusion, which deepened when they saw her and Alex and noted Aris containing them within his embrace as if he was afraid they’d evaporate if he loosened his hold.
“Aristedes, you’re really here!” the woman exclaimed in Greek, sparing him a glance and pushing back a lock of still mostly dark hair before fastening her gaze on Alex and Selene with utmost curiosity—and in Selene’s opinion, not much hope that they might really be who they appeared to be to Aris.
“I bet you thought I wouldn’t come…as usual.” Aris spoke in Greek, too, making Selene’s eyes jerk up to him.
She constantly forgot he was Greek, fully, unlike her. He’d never acquired an American citizenship. But his perfect English, one of the many languages he spoke fluently, did bear the stamp of an accent that she’d found deepened when he was tired. And only served to make every word out of his mouth more unbearably sexy.
Aris guided her and Alex to meet the couple halfway, bent and kissed the woman’s cheek before doing the same with the man.
He turned to Selene with such indulgence. “Kala mou, please meet Thia Olympia and Thios Christos.” He turned his eyes to the others. “Please welcome Selene Louvardis and our son, Alexandros. I hope you’ll help me make their stay here unforgettable.”
Her heart quivered.
They were his aunt and uncle. Alex was his son.
She was just herself.
But what else was she? What would he call her? Fleeting ex-lover? Accidental mother-of-his-son? Test-in-progress?
At the mention of his full name, Alex had squeaked out an acknowledgment. Now he pulled at his father’s shirt, demanding his attention, to be included. Aris complied at once, bestowed one of those kisses that made Selene feel he was imbuing Alex with his very essence, before he whispered in his ear, and leaned forward, bringing him closer to his aunt.
The older woman’s mouth became a circle as her hands rose up, trembling, to receive Alex, who was now willing to be held by whomever at a murmur from his father.
He filled Olympia’s embrace with an excited squeal and her flabbergasted eyes surged with moisture. “Oh, Aristedes, oh, my dearest, at last. Your son!”
Alex looked up at Aris, demanding his praise for doing what he’d told him to do, and so successfully.
Aris delivered it, in that wordless code he’d developed with Alex as he caressed his cheek.
Selene almost whimpered at the intensity and purity of emotions that emanated from his eyes, from his every pore.
And that was before he raggedly said, “Yes, at last.”
Over the next few days, they settled in.
Aris gave her and Alex one of the mansion’s eight suites, which were almost as big as her condo, and took the one opposite them across a vast hall. She even had her own private staircase to the lower floor, via which Eleni came to babysit Alex.
With Aris there every second that Alex was awake, Eleni took over only when Alex napped. Which he did for longer than usual, expending so much extra energy with the excitement of being with his father all day in what he clearly recognized as a different and magical place.
And when he napped, it was Selene’s time alone with Aris.
It was another such time now, on a secluded part of the bay.
They strolled hand in hand in contented silence on the powdered gold sand, letting the surrounding beauty seep through them, and the tranquil rush of the bay’s jeweled waters set the tempo of their strides.
She kept stealing hungry glances at Aris. Each time she found him looking at her with an intensity that shuddered through her. Sometimes she shot him a tremulous smile. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she whooped, disentangled herself from his hold, sprinted to meet and chase the advance and lure of the gently foaming waves.
And who could blame her? She’d left an on-edge city and life to find herself catapulted here, to a place that put paradise to shame, served and catered to by a god of delights and temptation.
After frolicking like she hadn’t done since she was ten, she threw herself onto the warm, cushioning sand, spread her arms as if she’d embrace the cirrus-painted blue dome of the sky and sighed. “And to think I always thought you didn’t have a home.”
Aris came down beside her, leaned on his elbow and poured his inscrutable silver gaze over her boneless figure. �
�I don’t.”
That made her prop herself up on her elbows, look dazedly around, then cautiously back at him. “What about…all this?”
He shrugged a powerful shoulder, cast his steely gaze across the endlessness of the sea. “It’s not exactly a home. Not in the sense that I ever intended to live in it.”
“Then why did you buy it?”
His eyes moved to hers, translucent like sparkling diamonds yet unfathomable as sealed wells. “Actually I built it.”
“Why, if you never intended to live here?”
He shrugged again. “I thought I’d build something for my siblings, in case they ever wanted to come back to live in their homeland. So far they haven’t used the place for more than brief vacations.”
So he hadn’t built this place for himself. Or for a future family, something he’d thought he’d never have. Could someone like him change, embrace ties that he’d lived his life rejecting?
But there must be a reason that he’d built this place here.
She tried to find it. “Where you born close by?”
“Actually, I chose this spot because, when I was a boy, this was as far away as possible from where I was born.”
So that was his reason. An emotional one. It pained her that it was negative, but it meant he didn’t operate solely by cerebral coldness and practical responsibility, had impulses like other human beings.
He cast his gaze wide again, yet seemed to focus internally. “Crete, in this area, is only twelve miles wide. My home was on the other side of the island, overlooking the Libyan Sea. I used to cross the island on foot to go to Agios Nikolaos, a tourist town and port east of Heraklion, where I got my first job on the docks. I began to explore the uninhabited areas, until I came across this bay. I would come here to be alone, run up and down the hill the house is now built on for hours before sitting down to eat, if I had any food with me, looking out to sea as the sun set and the stars or moon dawned. From the time I was ten until I was fifteen, I slept under their canopy more than I did at home. When I made my first million, I bought the land. A few years back I finished building the estate.”