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“And you make me nervous when I imagine you isolating a child from the world. Promise me you’ll take him on trips and adventures...promise me you’ll expose him to a life outside Kamari.”
He searched her eyes. “I promise.”
She blinked back tears. “Good.”
“I will be a good father to him, too, Georgia. I will love him, and I will protect him—”
“Protect him from what, Nikos? From the world, or from you?”
He shifted, uneasy.
“You are only really, truly dangerous when you detach and disappear,” she said. “I don’t like your rough edges or your coldness when you’re angry, but the distance...that feels like rejection. Abandonment. No one wants that.”
“I pull away to keep from hurting you.”
“You only hurt me when you pull away.”
“I hurt you on the tarmac. I made you run away in tears.”
“Because you’d pulled away! You and I had this incredible moment in my room and then you disappeared completely for days. It hurt. So tell me now, why do you do that after we’re close? Why do you punish me?”
“I’m not punishing you. I’m punishing me.” There was an edge in his voice, and tension washed off him in waves. “I should have had more control. I should have not taken advantage of you.”
“You didn’t take advantage of me. I took advantage of you. I wanted everything you did, and more.”
Heat flared in his eyes, and she nodded. “I loved being close to you. You are so good at what you do...you’re wow. Seriously, wow. You make me feel so good, but then you leave and I feel ashamed because I think my pleasure disgusts you—”
“No.”
She lifted a brow. “Then why do you leave so quickly...and why did you avoid me after?”
“I wanted you. I wanted to carry you to the bed and strip your clothes off and—”
He broke off and dragged a hand over the bristles on his jaw.
She waited, but he wasn’t going to say more. “Forgive me for being bold, but, Nikos, that sounds really good to me.”
“What if I hurt you?”
“You mean, when you make love? Do you choke your partner...hit your partner...throw her around?”
“No!”
“Then what?”
“I am carnal.”
“Is that a bad thing?” She didn’t have that much experience. Sex was pretty much sex. She enjoyed it but hadn’t had unusual experiences or anything particularly erotic. “Is that supposed to shock me?”
“I want you, gynaika mou. I want to be with you. I want to take you to my bed and keep you there for hours, touching you, tasting you, making you shatter with pleasure. But if we do these things, it will complicate us, and we are already very complicated—don’t you think?”
Her pulse leaped in her veins. Her mouth had gone dry. “Yes.”
“And so I try to stay away from you so that I don’t kiss you again and put my hands under your clothes and touch you where I want to touch you, and feel you cry against my mouth as you come.”
Her eyes widened. She swallowed hard. Her heart raced now. She felt treacherously warm and wet between her thighs. “You like sex.”
“I do,” he said. “But I like you even more, and so I fight myself. I try to stay away, do the right thing.”
“So that’s why there is all this tension between us. You’re avoiding me because you want me. And I’m lonely because I want to be with you—”
“You are not lonely for me.”
“Oh, I am. I like you, Nikos. Even when you’re awful.”
“You can’t like me. You barely know me.”
She reached out, tugged on his sleeve. “Then let me get to know you.”
“And how will that help either of us? We know how this will end—”
“Exactly. We know how this will end. There can be no confusion about the end, either. I’m not staying here in Greece. My world and life is in Atlanta. Yours is here. Neither of us is looking for a relationship. We’re just trying to stay sane. Trying to make the best of an incredibly stressful situation.”
“It doesn’t have to be stressful, not if we stay on different sides of the villa.”
She laughed low, but there was little humor in the sound. “Am I the only realist here?”
He looked at her for a moment, his gaze fixed on her mouth. She could feel his desire. Her own body hummed with need. She slipped her hand from his sleeve to the back of his wrist. His skin was firm and warm. She stroked the back of his hand, to his fingers, lacing her fingers with his. “I can’t do this for three more months, Nikos,” she whispered.
His jaw flexed. “We have to.”
Her eyes burned, and her pulse raced. Everything in her felt stirred up. Her emotions were all over the place. She was physically attracted to him—dangerously attracted—and yet he was right. He was everything she couldn’t want. And perhaps he did know best. But at the same time she craved him, and his touch, and the pleasure he could give her. “I’m going crazy.”
He pulled away, stood up and walked across the room. “We’ll just try harder to stay out of each other’s way.”
The lump in her throat grew. “No! I’ll lose my mind, Nikos. I’m already lonely. I already feel trapped. I’m not used to being cooped up. We need a break... A little stress relief would go a long way. Can we please go somewhere tomorrow? And if not tomorrow, then later this week?”
“Have you swum today yet? You didn’t swim yesterday. Get in the pool. You’ll feel better.”
“I don’t want to swim.”
He shoved a hand through inky-black hair, pushing it back from his face. “Then go for a good walk—”
“Like I did today? Climb up the mountain to get a good hike in?” she interrupted fiercely. “Or perhaps I should try running. I only jogged today, but maybe tomorrow I could try a couple hundred wind sprints like you—”
“You don’t need to run.”
“Running won’t hurt the baby.”
“Walking is better, and you know it. Tomorrow it should be mild. Good weather—”
“No!” She jumped to her feet, hands clenched. “I’ve walked miles on your paths and they just go in circles. I’ve climbed this mountain. I’ve done everything I can do here on Kamari, and I need a change now. Please get me off this rock. Please let me see something new.”
“You will be free to explore after the delivery—”
“That’s three months away.”
“I thought you had to study.”
“I do study. For hours and hours every day, but I’m going stir-crazy. I need to get out...go see something, or go do something.”
“There is nothing good happening in the outside world. You are safe here, so I prefer you to be here.”
“If I am truly your guest, treat me like a guest and not a prisoner.” She drew a short, raw breath as the possibility hit her. “Or am I prisoner?”
“What a silly question.”
Her chest suddenly hurt, the air bottled in her lungs. He’d brought her to this island far from everything...
He said he didn’t leave Kamari... He said there was no reason to leave Kamari. Her eyes widened. Was it possible she was his hostage? “Are you
afraid I’ll try to escape? Run away?”
“That’s ridiculous. You’re getting yourself worked up over nothing.”
“Then why can’t we go out for part of the day? You said you had a boat. Let’s head to Amorgós, or even better, Santorini.”
“No.”
“Because I need to see people. I need to talk to someone. You’ve shut me out, and I understand why now. We have this—thing—between us and you’re trying to resist it, and I understand that now. But I am lonely. I’m overwhelmed.” Tears began to spill.
She struggled to wipe them away.
He swore in Greek and crossed to her side. “Don’t cry,” he said roughly. “Do not cry.” He wiped her cheeks dry with the pads of his thumbs. “Don’t cry,” he said more softly, his lips near her ear. “Because you make me want to comfort you, and kiss you, but when I kiss you, agapi mou, I want you, and I’m afraid if I claim you, I’ll never let you go.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEY TOOK A motorboat to Amorgós two days later.
On the way, Nikos told her that there was a devastating earthquake on July 9, 1956, just north of Amorgós, between Amorgós and Santorini. The earthquake registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, and a second 7.2 earthquake followed thirteen minutes later. Intense aftershocks occurred for weeks, lasting through the summer.
Fifty-three people died on Santorini alone, and villages were destroyed on many islands. Quite a few people left the islands.
“I would think the earthquakes would have created a tsunami,” she said.
He nodded. “Thirty-foot waves were reported all along the coast. And as difficult as this was, it’s always been part of our history. The volcanic arc stretches from Methana—” He broke off, seeing she didn’t know where that was. “Methana is a town on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, built on a volcanic peninsula. And that volcanic arc extends from Nisyros Island in the west, to the coast of Turkey in the east. The arc is filled with dormant and active volcanic islands.”
“There are some still active?”
“Absolutely. Milos, Santorini, Nisyros.”
She of course had heard of Santorini but wasn’t familiar with the other two. “Fascinating, as well as a little bit scary.”
