“Out slowly, until you have no more air to give...” he coaxed, his voice back to tender sweetness, wrapping them both in a bubble, alone, safe... Even if they were just bobbing in a boat at the dock.
Her parents could be following right now for all she knew—as stupid as that would be. Ares would definitely push Dimitri into the harbor.
Whatever he was doing, it worked. She drew in a slower, steadier breath and wrapped her hands around his wrists to make him keep touching her. He’d fought for her. He’d threatened Dimitri for her.
“He threatened...you...before?” Not exactly what she’d meant to say, but she panted the words anyway. “With what?”
“Same threat—different day,” he murmured, then leaned back to press his lips to her head, warm and soft, right between her brows, so that the whiskers he refused to shave off tickled her face. “But he won’t say anything to the others. Theo and Chris would never forgive him, and neither would you. He might have underestimated me, but he wouldn’t take that gamble with his children.”
“I don’t think I’m in danger of ever forgiving him for what he did.”
“But he holds out hope. He and Theo are getting along okay at the moment. Why would he risk that?”
She didn’t know whether Theo had told the guys he was adopted, and that his adoption had been a hushed family secret because “all men need a son.” But it wasn’t her secret to tell, so she didn’t.
At this pace, her back would be crooked with the weight of all these secrets by the time the summer was through.
“I really don’t know,” she answered finally, letting go of his wrists and sitting up a little straighter. “I didn’t think that I’d feel so overwhelmed when I finally had to speak to them. In my head, when I thought about how it would go, I always had the right words. I knew the exact thing to say to make him mourn for her too—his lost granddaughter. To make him understand his guilt. Back there I couldn’t think. I didn’t have any words, even though I’ve literally had years to rehearse what to say in my head.”
He stayed crouched before her, close enough to touch if she needed to.
“You can’t make people feel what you want them to feel. One day you might be able to give him enough information for him to generate his own feelings about what he did, but it’s not on you to make him a better man. He failed you, not the other way around.”
Gently, he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, one side and then the other. Sneaky tears. She wasn’t even with it enough to know when she was crying.
“I failed you too,” he murmured, but he didn’t linger there for her to start crying harder, just gestured to the lap belt on her bench, tucked her bag into a secure spot and went to the helm.
He’d failed her?
She’d failed Ariadne.
* * *
Erianthe widened the beam of her flashlight as she hiked up the big hill to Shepherd’s Cottage. She’d lied to Nyla about why she needed to interrupt their after-dinner chat to hike to the cottage, but if she was learning anything about the woman from her brief time of knowing her, it was that she picked up on lies quickly.
Luckily they were still at that super-polite stage of friendship where they didn’t call each other on their inept lying. Still, it didn’t sit right. She didn’t want to lie to any more people.
But she couldn’t think about that right now. She was too busy hiking to the place Ares had moved to in order to avoid bumping into her, back before the events of today had happened.
“I failed you too.”
Words she’d never expected anyone to say to her—least of all Ares. He’d definitely meant it. And he had also said yesterday, “I’d have given everything to be with you and raise our daughter.”
All those words, and action too, in fending off her parents. It meant something. She just wasn’t sure what, beyond knowing that she needed to talk to him. To know him.
She had to step carefully—it had been years since she’d navigated this hill in the dark on a regular basis, and rocks and land had a way of shifting and settling in new ways that her feet didn’t know from memory.
Everything he’d said framed who he was now, and how different the adult version of Ares had become from the boy. She couldn’t say if it was simply camouflage, a deep and desired change or just a manifestation of his regret. Not shaving or getting a haircut for a set length of time was a practice in some faiths. She wasn’t certain if he even knew what was going on with himself. But she wanted to know.
She skidded and had to right herself, pay better attention to the climb. Not exactly smart to come up in the dark, but it had been late when she’d sorted through what she’d witnessed enough to know she needed to go to him. He might not be as ready to talk as she was, but she could tell him how she felt.
If her short time on Mythelios had proved anything to her, it was that it wasn’t over between them. They had unfinished business of some kind.
Maybe it was just a need to lay the past to rest so they could move on with their separate lives. But maybe there could be a chance for them. She wouldn’t still be so drawn to him, so affected by simply hearing his name, if her feelings were completely over and done with, firmly in the past.
She wanted to trust him, but that trust wasn’t instinctive—it was a choice she had to make.
Reaching the cottage, she hurried up the short stone path to the door, flipped off her flashlight and knocked. Rushing forward when she probably should be tiptoeing.
When it came to Ares, she was still that brokenhearted sixteen-year-old girl. Waiting until morning would just mean she had a whole sleepless night to contend with beforehand. No, it was better that she do this tonight.
No answer to the knock. Her stomach tumbled—whether in fear or excitement, she couldn’t tell. So she knocked again.
“I failed you too.”
He’d be glad to see her. Maybe he was even regretting moving to the cottage so suddenly... He still cared for her in a tangible battle-your-dragons-and-carry-you-to-safety kind of way. If they could just get through the emotional minefield that lay between them...
Still no answer.
The surf and wind competed to make it impossible to hear any sounds of movement from within the cottage, where the lights were still on.
He didn’t sleep with the lights on—couldn’t if he was anything like he’d used to be.
Another knock. Nothing. Nothing.
Then she heard it—the faint ring of his cell phone carried on the breeze.
He was out back on the veranda.
Skirting the side of the cottage with the help of the light streaming through the decorative windows, she followed the inlaid stones and found him silhouetted against the night.
He stood closer to the edge than she liked—where it had always made her nervous and triggered her vertigo.
The casual clothes he’d changed into after work were built for comfort—she’d barely recognized him in a suit at the wedding—but he looked good to her in everything he wore. Tonight, the light, probably white T-shirt he wore fit well, and although he was thinner than she’d expected him to be, his shoulders were still broad. A warrior’s frame. One she found herself wishing she could bulk out.
He was still unaware of her. She stayed quiet to keep from interrupting his precariously located conversation—in English.
English.
Not someone from the clinic calling, then. Nor someone from the island. Or his father. Or mother...
“I’m not ready yet. Still have a couple of things to sort out.”
He stopped speaking to listen.
Ready for what? Was it wrong for her to stand there and listen? It wasn’t as if she’d come here to eavesdrop on him, but that was a particularly suspicious-sounding thing for him to say. Who could turn away from that?
“Maybe in a couple more weeks.”
Pause.
“I know you’re always rushing to fill spots, but I told you I needed at least three weeks before you could call to see if I was ready to leave. But it’s only been just over two, and I’m not done. I need a little more time. Get another doctor on temporary assignment for a couple more weeks until I can get there.”
He was leaving in a couple weeks? Three weeks was what he’d initially promised. And she’d been told he’d be staying for several months.
Somehow she managed to hold her questions in until he hung up the phone and stepped back, hands on his hips, head bowed forward.
Upset? Disgusted with himself?
“You’re leaving?” she asked numbly, and he turned to look at her, not answering for far too long for her liking.
“They need me,” he said, but from what she’d heard, he’d always intended on leaving early.
“We need you.”
I need you to stay.
She’d never had trouble saying what she meant in the past, but her courage abandoned her in that second. She’d overestimated how deep his current feelings were for her. His feelings were about her—or at least about how she made him feel about himself—and they were something he expected to be done with in a couple more weeks, apparently.
He stashed the phone in the pocket of the trousers he wore, his voice pitched loud enough to be heard without too much difficulty over the raging water. “You, of course, can still stay here with Nyla when I’m gone. I trust you. It’s not a problem.”
He trusted her? Right now all she trusted were her stinging cheeks and the strong desire to flee.
“Great. That’s generous of you. Letting us stay after you’re done sorting some things out. Am I one of the things you need to sort?”
She could see him well enough to track his movements, to make out his general body language, but not enough to see his face. The tilt of his head and shoulders said enough: he didn’t want to talk to her. Presumably about this in particular, but maybe about anything at all.
“It was a shorthand way to say I wasn’t ready to leave tomorrow.”
“It sounded a whole lot like I’ll be ready in two more weeks.”
“No!” he said roughly, his frustration finally cracking through the surface of his voice. Reaching a chair, he dropped into it and turned his gaze out to the black. “I need an escape hatch.”
“In case I get to be too much to deal with?”
“Because I’m not dealing with it well. Me.”
“We just started dealing with it together.” She gripped the flashlight tighter, to keep herself from throwing it at his head.
He knew this. He knew they were finally making some kind of real connection over her loss and now he needed an escape hatch? How could she even try to argue with that?
The futility of the conversation pressed down on her, so she threw up one hand to silence any rebuttal he was formulating.
“This is my fault. Once again I assumed you felt the same way I do. I had this idea that we would move forward together, but you just want to be gone. Might as well call them back and tell them you’ll take an assignment now. I can sort myself out. It might have been nice not to have to do it alone again, but you know what? You go. I’ve had years of practice coping by myself. I’ll. Be. Just. Fine.”
“Eri...”
She didn’t stick around to listen to his excuses. It was his life. If he needed to leave Mythelios—leave her—again, it was his decision.
She stomped heedlessly back the way she’d come, but once she was at the front of the house, another thought blasted through her mind and she turned to stomp right back.
“And this? This is what it looks like when someone doesn’t try to make choices for you.”
He more groaned her name than spoke it.
“Shut up!” she barked, then stormed once more for the front of the cottage.
She turned the flashlight on and went back to trail down the massive hill.
Ares Xenakis might be dead set on messing everything up, but she wouldn’t help him by falling down the hill in the dark and breaking her head. Her having sudden amnesia would be far too easy for him.
The ass.
CHAPTER NINE
FRIDAY NIGHT HAD ended with a fight. Saturday, Erianthe had split her time between visiting Theo and Cailey, catching up with Nyla with minimal explanation—though probably enough to give everything away—and wondering whether Ares had decided to make his great escape yet.
That was how, at eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, she once again found herself hiking up the insanely steep hill to Shepherd’s Cottage.
Check in, find out when he’s leaving, go back down again—that was the plan.
Don’t punch him in the junk.
Also part of the plan, but placed under the Optional heading.
Afterward, she’d go back down to the villa, laze in the sun and read something deliciously sexy about an alpha male who wasn’t hopeless and hairy, and whose issues could be solved with a bit of logic and adult decision-making.
As she cleared the top, Erianthe saw something—and stopped so abruptly she fell forward up the hill, her hands the only things saving her from a mouthful of grass and dirt.
What in the world had she just seen?
A little mental rewind as she shifted to her hip and she stayed on the ground—even if the grass scratched her bare legs. She’d seen Ares. Shirtless. Beardless. Planting flowers. In front of the little cottage.
She closed her eyes and imagined it again. Then she opened them.
Yep. Still there.
Maybe she was having a psychotic episode. Hallucinating.
How to tell...?
Throw rocks at him and see if he got mad?
Probably not the best idea she’d ever had.
She levered herself off the ground and really looked at him this time.
“I wondered when you’d stand up,” Ares said, not even looking over his shoulder.
“You saw that, huh?”
“Heard it.”
He finished digging a small hole, picked up a plant—a pretty flowering sea lavender—and gingerly placed it into the hole before tumbling dirt in around it.
“But no sliding or screaming.”
She’d displayed no signs of distress aside from falling, so he’d left her to it? Which was fine. She wasn’t looking for a white knight to take her freedom in the form of a forced rescue. She had come to find out when he was going to leave Mythelios, and had found him flower-planting instead.
And now her plan was effectively meaningless.
She stood and walked to stand beside him, viewing his work. “You like to garden?”
“Sometimes it’s nice to dig in the dirt.”
“When did you start that?”
“I used to help Sofia with her flower beds. Haven’t done much of it since then.”
He was referring to one of his father’s many ex-wives. A stepmother he’d truly grown attached to. Did that mean something?
“So you just woke up this morning and decided... I’d really like some lavender here?”
He paused, sweaty, with a smear of dirt across his chest and his nails caked with soil that would take an hour to scrub clean. It was the earthy, naked chest, the light whorls of hair there that he most decidedly hadn’t had at eighteen, that made it hard to think. It certainly wasn’t any long, lingering look from him that churned up the electrically charged butterflies in her belly—he didn’t look at her at all. Just planted his flowers.
When two more plants were in the ground, he finally spoke, his voice gentle—with the sweetness she always heard there for others but never for her. “They’re for Ariadne.”
Her eyes immediately began to sting, the sexy tingles evaporating in a single breath.
She could
n’t keep from asking. “Why sea lavender?”
His initial answer was to shrug, then after a long moment he had some words. “It’s what I thought of when I’d had two shots of ouzo. I know the logic might not make sense...”
She tilted her head, the better to see what he was up to without getting distracted by the definition in his broad shoulders. “Tell me anyway.”
“Because bees love sea lavender. Bees make honey. Honey makes me think of the story of Ariadne, because it’s the tribute to the goddess Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth. I know it’s kind of convoluted.”
She walked around him, watching what he was doing because she couldn’t seem to sift through the words bubbling in her heart to find the right thing to say—the safe thing to say, the considerate thing to say—or even to express the gratitude that welled there. As she rounded him, she came to the corner of the cottage and saw dozens of lavender plants in clumps of dirt sitting on top of the grass, waiting to be planted.
“You’ve been doing this all day?”
“Yes.”
And he was nowhere near done. She needed to see this done. That book by the pool and its uncomplicated hero...? Completely forgotten.
“I’ll help you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Yes, I do. But you’ll have to tell me how.”
Glad she’d worn shorts, she kicked her sandals off and carried them over to the door of the cottage so they wouldn’t be ruined, then returned to stand beside him.
“This line of flowers is pretty random out here. Did you have a design in mind?”
He looked up at her. The furrow stayed put, telling her he was considering sending her away. But he didn’t.
He stood up, got a tape measure and marked off another straight line abutting the one he was working on. “Spade there. Let me see your hand...”
She held her hand up to him, palm first, not asking his reasoning, just letting him go at his own pace.
“From here to here.” He touched the base of her palm with one finger and then the tip of her middle finger. “This far apart for the holes. And they should be deep by about this much, and big enough around to put your fist into.”
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