Page 43 of Nobody's Girl

Sofia grinned. “Cheesy.”

Ivo laughed. “I know but that was my honest reaction. I thought I’d blown it afterward, broke the spell, when I asked you if you would be there the next night.”

Sofia kissed him, pressing her body to his, feeling his cock grow even more harder, his arms tighten around her. “It was all I could do from not running into your arms. But I was a street girl, a homeless girl and you were…”

“Just a boy.”

“No, I knew you were special even then. My merman. I knew it could never be but the fact you would be back there the next night…I floated through the rest of the night. I keep thinking what if I never got sick? Would we be here now?”

Ivo held her gaze steadily. “I truly believe we would. We were meant to find each other, Sofia, il mia amore. Now…I’m going to take you into the pool outside and I’m going to make love to you the way I wanted to when we met.”

“We’ll recreate it, pretend we never met until now.”

“We will…”

Outside in the pool, under the blazing Crete sun, they swam together then came together to make love, reliving every moment of their meeting and realizing the other’s fantasies of that night. Sofia wrapped her legs around his waist as he pushed into her. They made love in the water, then on the hot tile of the patio, Sofia straddling Ivo and riding him hard. When the sun got too hot to bear, they retreated back into the cool of their bedroom and played their games again.

Afterward, wrapped in each other, exhausted they talked some more. Sofia told him about the first few years of her life, born in American to a white American father whom she never met, and an Indian mother who had been a Professor of Molecular Physics. Ivo was surprised. “Wow. So, you and she had wildly different passions?”

Sofia grinned. “We did, but to her credit, she always encouraged me to follow my heart, my instincts. I’m sure she would have loved me to go into the Sciences but that was never going to happen.”

“What about your stepfather?”

Sofia hesitated. “For years, right up to the minute my mom died, he was the best father figure you could imagine. That’s why it hurt – it still hurts – so much when he flipped. I guess if I was generous, I could say the grief drove him mad but…”

“It’s no excuse for what he did. What about this step-sister?”

Sofia’s eyes darkened. “She’s psychotic.” She looked at Ivo. “If I tell you something, will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

“You have my word.”

When she spoke, her voice trembled. “I’m almost one hundred percent certain…no, I know for a fact that Tamara caused the death of her mother.”

She saw Ivo’s shock. “You’re sure?”

“Tamara more or less told me. She hated my mother even more than she hated me. One day, I could only have been thirteen or fourteen, she said to me ‘You know, Mothers can be very clumsy.’ I had no idea what she was talking about, it seemed so random. But then she went on. ‘Sometimes they just…fall down.’ And she smiled at me and even at that age, I knew what she meant. I asked Jonas about his mother’s death, and he told me she had fallen down some stairs, hard concrete ones that led down to their wine cellar. Judy was still alive, had only just fallen when Tamara found her. The thing is…no-one had known Tamara was home from school that day. The doctors said had an ambulance been called earlier, Judy might have been saved but it took Tamara a half hour to call. She said it was due to shock.”

“Jesus.” Ivo looked sick.

Sofia nodded. “At her mom’s funeral, Jonas said Tamara didn’t cry, just stood there with a blank expression, holding her father’s hand.”

Ivo gathered her to him. “Thank Christ you got away from that family.”

Sofia sighed. “Apart from Jonas. I miss Jonas.”

Ivo stroked her face. “Then he’s always welcome.”

“You would like him. He’s very down to earth. He teaches – he loved my mom and she encouraged him to teach. He doesn’t give a damn about his father’s money.”

“When we get back, we’ll contact him, yes?”

Sofia smiled at him. “I would like that. We still have to tell my father his blackmail won’t work now.”

“I’m looking forward to that.”