The darkness hid them, letting him pretend that now was then, that this was right. Touching her, kissing her, breathing her in, tasting her mouth and the salt from their tears became the only truth in him.
They rolled to the grass, stretching out. Her soft body was beneath him, fitting against him, perfection in the meld of its curves.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew he should stop this, but the broken part of him that needed her pushed forward, rucking up her shirt so he could get closer, touch more skin. He needed more skin.
“Ares...” She breathed his name against his mouth, then tugged on his hair where she’d tangled her fingers, urging him back. “I’m on call.”
He couldn’t see her, but he did become aware of an annoying jingle playing nearby and a bright light. They both looked to the side and she reached out with one flailing hand to grab her phone off the ground. The screen lit her features in a pale blue glow. Soft, swollen mouth to match swollen eyes.
Because she’d been crying too.
Ice ran down his spine and he levered himself off her so she could sit up. He didn’t stop moving until he was on his feet and fighting to breathe in something besides the headiness of her scent.
She spoke into the phone, talking to someone at the clinic—probably one of the interns from Athens he was still getting used to. “I haven’t seen her yet. Is she at full gestation?”
A baby. She was going to deliver a baby.
He didn’t even need to ask. He found his way to the door of the cottage, opened it and flipped on the courtyard light so she could move around safely.
“How far apart are the contractions? Any problems?” She went through a list of questions and then announced, “I’ll be right there. I just need to get down to the boat—probably ten to fifteen minutes.”
She had to go down the hill in the dark when she’d been crying and, worse, crying with him.
The first night at his house and he was already a mess. He was supposed to be keeping his distance, not making things harder for her. And that was exactly what things would be when he left. Unless she got sick of him before that.
He could only pray.
CHAPTER SEVEN
STILL YAWNING, ERIANTHE turned through the large wooden gate into the courtyard of Theo’s whitewashed stone cottage. It was situated on a small tree-lined street leading away from the village, and stepping through the gate was like stepping into a park. The stone walls bounced any noise away, and the verdant little garden filled the air with fresh, summery scents.
It should invigorate her, but the oxygen she sucked in through another massive yawn didn’t energize her in the slightest. She stopped outside his door and shook her arms and legs, trying to get her body going, out of that space where all it wanted was more sleep.
Last night’s birth had been long, going through the morning too, and she’d fallen asleep in the on-call room around one, so she was still wearing last night’s scrubs. Great dinner guest. No gift. Wrinkled scrubs. Perpetually yawning...
The door opened while she was caught in the middle of her usual wake-up round of bouncing calisthenics.
“Are you having some kind of seizure?” Theo asked, grinning at her, reeking of good mood.
She held up one finger, her eyes watering as she fought another urge to yawn, then gave in and performed the most important part of her wake-up routine: scratching her arms, neck, chest and belly.
“Oh, you’ve been bitten...or perhaps you have fleas. I saw a cat...”
“It wakes me up better than coffee.” She finally spoke, the light scratching having done its job better than coffee ever did for her.
“Scratching?”
She nodded, “Really. Scratching is something that arouses—”
He cut her off with a quick jerk of his hand and gestured her inside. “Let’s not talk about you doing stuff to yourself to make yourself aroused in my courtyard.”
Rolling her eyes, she moved past her big goofy brother and hugged Cailey. “Sorry I don’t have a gift for my first visit. It’s as gorgeous and warm as the pictures led me to believe. Yet I show up looking like a month-old loaf of bread.”
“You look just fine—but you know you could’ve come to rest here. You’re always welcome to take advantage of our closeness to the clinic, especially when a birth goes long.”
Her new sister-in-law led them to the veranda, where appetizers had already been laid and a bottle of wine was open to breathe.
“Are both mother and baby okay now?”
“They’re both great.” Erianthe skipped over the kind invitation with a smile and a nod of thanks, hoping to avoid talking about her new residence entirely. “Thought we might end up with a C-section at one point, so I was going to ring Ares to come assist me for once, but then she went from five centimeters to fully effaced in the space of about ten minutes. Pretty amazing.”
They sat at a cozy little table and, having missed eating anything substantial since yesterday, Erianthe didn’t need an invitation to help herself to the stuffed grape leaves.
Theo waited until she had a mouthful before asking, “So, are you and Ares sleeping together again?”
She choked and, just behind the squeeze of her throat and chest, felt herself go cold. All-over cold. Morgue cold.
Theo knew.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Cailey thump him in the chest. “Are you trying to kill her?”
It took a second for her to swallow the too-big, too-ravenous bite she’d taken, but even that wasn’t enough time to come up with an answer. Or for the prickling down the back of her neck to sort out what she even felt about that.
If she said no, that would be the truth, but would imply they’d used to sleep together. Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing to confirm. If she’d had half an inkling he might ask something like that, she might have had a prayer of lying her way through it without any suggestion that she was lying, but she wasn’t a good liar most days. She was an even worse liar when her body was shooting off warning alarms.
All she could think to do was ask numbly, “Why would you think that?”
Answering a question with a question? Yeah, liars did that. She was pretty sure that liars did that. But the question was out there now.
Theo and Cailey shared a look, and Theo poured her a glass of wine to wash down her dangerous grape leaf. “You two have been weird since coming home. Something was going on at the wedding, with him blocking you from seeing our parents—that isn’t the sort of thing you do when you dislike someone—and then you left together. Before the reception.”
“You didn’t warn me they were coming back early.” She pointed a finger but then took the wine—because wine could only help right now, either by slowing things down or just giving her something else to do. She hadn’t given a second thought to her and Ares leaving the wedding together. How had she overlooked how suspicious that had looked?
“You’re dodging the point.”
She took a sip of her wine and let herself focus on Theo’s face. His not-angry face.
He knew—at least about their past relationship—and he clearly wasn’t angry at being kept in the dark about it.
This whole business of keeping things secret—past things secret—suddenly seemed ridiculous and stupid. Theo wasn’t shaking with accusation, or even concern. He sounded...teasing. Like regular ole laid-back Theo.
The thousand tiny needle pricks on her neck calmed down and she breathed slowly out. “I am not sleeping with Ares.”
She had kissed him. A lot. And they probably would have ended up naked last night. But last night had been an emotional land mine and they’d both needed comfort—which had been an epiphany for her that had broken her ability to reason at the time. An unexpected birth really had been the only thing to save her. There would be no repeat performances tonight when she got home.
Got back to Ares’s home. That was what she meant.
“You’ve moved in with him.”
“Along with a patient whose house is falling in, who has no family and who has been abandoned by the father of her child. I couldn’t bring her, a veritable stranger, into Chris’s house with him having the baby there. That’d be wrong.”
“She has a point,” Cailey chimed in. “And Deakin and Lea are living in his guesthouse while the main house is renovated. That little room above the boathouse would never work for two people. Or even one for more than a day or two.”
“Especially when this patient is highly aware of every time her baby goes to sleep and stops moving and immediately worries that it’s something dangerous—that her baby is sick, in need of help, or...”
She couldn’t bring herself to say dead. That fear was the one that made this case particularly personal to Erianthe. All her patients were her concern, but she had an undeniable connection to Nyla.
“I saw her twice in my first few days because she regularly panics over the house and the water and all that. She’s in need. I thought you’d be proud of me helping someone in need.”
“Of course I am. But I know...” He paused and glanced at his wife, then back at Erianthe. “I thought you’d been sent straight to boarding school when you were young, but recently Father let it slip that before that you’d actually been in a convent for a few months. I told Cailey.”
The confession didn’t bring the usual prickle to the back of her neck. She even shrugged without effort. “I don’t care that you told Cailey—she’s your wife. I only didn’t tell her myself because how do you bring something like that up when you see someone again? Hi, how are you? Yes, Mother and Father sent me to a convent...”
“For getting caught having sex with a boy whom they would not name,” Theo finished with a glint in his eye, plucking up his own grape leaf. “Whom I’ve sleuthed out was Ares.”
“How did you work that out?”
Again, questions to cover secrets.
And Theo caught her at it, laughed and shook his head. “So you’re not denying it?”
She drained the wineglass. “Not denying it.”
Not that she couldn’t have tried, but pulling it off unrehearsed was something else entirely. Too many variables—not least of which being an inability to mask her own guilt.
“Told you.” He grinned at his wife. “So you and Ares were naked and got walked in on? That must have been mildly scarring.”
“Mildly...” she muttered, and shook her head.
The more this became something to tease and grin over, the more it began to bother her—as if she had a right to feel something else. It wasn’t Theo apparently knowing for a while but not asking until now. It was that he didn’t know how big it had been, how bad...and that she couldn’t tell him there was no joke to be found in that story.
“Listen, don’t tell anyone else, okay? It was something we kept secret back then because we didn’t want it interfering with the group dynamic. We didn’t want people feeling like they had to choose sides. Or blaming him for our father’s decision back then.”
She said the words, maybe even said them convincingly, but she didn’t know if she truly felt that way. Two days ago she had been certain Ares fully deserved that blame. Now? She wasn’t so sure.
“But you’re still weird around one another.”
“They’ve seen one another naked, Theo. Having any kind of normal relationship after that is hard.” Cailey championed her.
Erianthe nodded, as if that was the whole story, then said, “Please, it’s my secret. Don’t tell Deakin and Chris. Ares is pretty sensitive about it too. He felt guilty for a long time after they sent me away. If he knew you knew, he’d feel even more ashamed, and it’s in the past.”
In the past...
She almost believed it herself. Or she could consider believing it, even though nothing had felt as if it was safely back in the past ever since she’d gotten back...
“As long as you’re okay.” Theo looked at her closely, seriously enough to give his normal jovial manner some weight. “Otherwise I’d have to beat the beard off him.”
* * *
Ares sat at the docks, waiting for Erianthe to return with his boat from dinner with the Nikolaides newlyweds.
His gut said she was going to be irritated or angry when he told her he’d relocated to Shepherd’s Cottage. After last night he didn’t want to risk her coming there to find him. They couldn’t spend time together alone there—maybe shouldn’t spend time together anywhere. They were hardwired to get naked when they were alone. Especially there.
Headlights across the water, speeding toward the island, told him she was coming. The night sky was still so dark that he’d brought a lantern with him tonight. As she neared he climbed to his feet, readying himself to take the rope and help tie it off.
“What are you doing down here?”
Her words and tone seemed overly bright, forced.
“Were you afraid I’d sink your boat?”
“No.” He tied it off and offered her a hand to leave the boat. She took his hand, no hesitation—just took it.
No sooner had she stepped onto the wooden planks than she turned to him, her concerned face caught in the lantern’s shadows. “What’s wrong?”
He let go of her hand and gestured for her to walk with him down the dock. “This isn’t about Ariadne but what happened afterward...”
“Emotions were high.”
She kept up with his long stride, but he slowed himself down, not wanting them to get into the house and within earshot of anyone else before the conversation was done.
“What is this, specifically?” she asked. “Confirmation that we can’t have sex? I know that. I agree.”
“This is me telling you I’ve relocated myself to Shepherd’s Cottage.”
“You’re moving into your dad’s breakup hut?”
The incredulity in her voice stung, stopping him from walking.
“We went from fighting to almost getting naked in a heartbeat. It’s one extreme or the other with us, and it would be very easy to get confused.”
“I’m not confused.”
“Well, I am.” He held out one hand for the keys to his boat. “I’m working tomorrow, so I’ll give you a lift. Nothing at work is going to change. I just don’t think we should be alone together right now.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t, but Theo’s already figured out something is up.” She kept hold of his keys, despite his beckoning hand. “And I don’t like lying to him.”
It was a warm night, but he went cold. “What has he figured out?”
“He didn’t ask—he just stated it. My father has apparently told him that I was caught having sex with a boy they refused to name, and that was the reason I was sent to a convent for a while before I went on to boarding school. And he asked me specifically, ‘Are you having sex with Ares again?’”
An unnatural urgency twisted the back of his neck and spread over his shoulders. “What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell him about Ariadne. But I didn’t tell him he was wrong about us either. I said it was you. I’m not going to gaslight my own brother. He knows there was an us. And he seemed okay with it. He was laughing.”
“He always laughs things off until they get serious.” Ares shook his head. “It needs to stop here.”
“I know that. I didn’t tell him everything, and I don’t want to. I just wanted to tell you the truth. I know last night was shocking to you, and it was hard for me too, but it’s better between us now, isn’t it? Not good—nothing about having lost her is ever going to be good—but it was good to share the truth with someone after all this time.”
He didn’t feel that. All he felt right now was a certainty that all this was about to go wrong in the worst possibl
e way.
Because of him. His actions. Not hers.
If any man had done that to his sister—if he’d had a sister—Ares would never have been able to forgive him for it. Ares wasn’t even sure Theo would be all right if he found out. Nothing to do with worrying about the group dynamics.
Theo would mourn—it was that simple. The others would be sad too, but Erianthe was right about how much it would hurt Theo. Not just the loss of his niece, but knowing he hadn’t been able to take care of his sister through her darkest days. There was very little that riled him up, but family in need... That did it. And Erianthe—in a pre-Cailey world—was Theo’s closest family.
“I know I just said I don’t want to tell him,” she said slowly, as if she was working through some kind of thought process. “But... I don’t know. Maybe he deserves to know the truth. I’m not going to suddenly tell him—not without your permission—but... We deserve to have this burden of secrecy lifted from us too.”
“It’ll never be lifted. No matter how many people you share it with. The best thing we can do is keep looking forward and not make any more big, stupid mistakes.”
“So you consider it a mistake?”
“Of course I do.”
“Which part?”
He really wasn’t up for this conversation tonight.
“My brilliant plan to tell your parents was a mistake. I wanted to marry you, and the only way to make that happen with you being just sixteen was with the permission of your parents. The only way I could see to get that permission was to meet Dimitri on his own ground, to be what he understood, what he was...by taking charge and being a man.”
“You really thought that would work?”
Her brows pinched, and the dubious tone to her voice and the disbelieving way she considered him made him want to smash things. The lantern, maybe, then he wouldn’t have to see that look on her face.
“Why else would I go to him?”
“Because you knew how he’d react and then it would all be taken out of your hands. We’d be separated without you ever having to do any leaving.”
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