Page 157 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

“And you promise you won’t…”

He smiled through pursed lips. “I promise. But only for you.”

“Thank you.”

She ran upstairs to change, not because she needed to, but because it gave her something to fill the minutes. Blane was standing at the kitchen window with a mug of coffee by the time she came back down. She hesitated in the doorway. He was watching the lane the way he watched most things, as though it might do something he needed to be ready for.

“You don’t need to glower at the road,” she told him. “Nikos isn’t due for another ten minutes.”

“I’m not glowering. This is just my face.” He didn’t turn around.

She came to stand beside him and bumped her shoulder against his arm, which was about as high as she could reach. “It’s a lovely face. It’s simply doing something very disapproving at the moment.”

He didn’t smile. “I still think this is a bad idea.”

“You’ve mentioned.”

“And I’ll no doubt mention it again.” He took a sip of coffee. “That man was in your courtyard in the middle of the night, Bea. Now you’re inviting him in for coffee.”

“I know, but… Katerina…”

“Katerina thinks he’s shy.” Blane let out one of those huffs of his. “Shy doesn’t put somebody outside your window in the middle of the night.”

“Technically, it wasn’t the middle of the night, Blane. It was late, but…”

His eyebrows drew together, and she let it go. He’d put forward his argument several different ways since he arrived, and in the strictest sense he was right. But being right about the facts and being right about the man were two different things.

“He’s coming to apologize,” she said, “and to explain. I’d like to hear what he has to say. You don’t have to like it.” She didn’t quite succeed in hiding her smile. “You don’t even have to be here for it.”

That earned her the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Damn right I do.”

The car came up the lane five minutes later. It was a dusty old hatchback that approached slowly and stopped a respectful distance from the gate, as though the driver wasn’t sure he was allowed any closer.

Bea’s stomach tightened despite everything she’d told herself. “That’ll be him.”

Blane set down his mug. He didn’t say anything—he didn’t need to. He’d gone all still, he was in super-security mode, and it might have been alarming if she hadn’t known it was all for her benefit. She went outside, and Blane came with her, settling into place half a step behind. And she loved him for it. He was close enough to reach her if she needed him, but far enough back that it was clear whose meeting this was. She didn’t need to wonder whether he’d done it deliberately. He absolutely had.

The man who got out of the car was smaller than she’d expected. In her imagination he’d grown into something enormous. In daylight he was perhaps sixty, wiry and weathered brown. He held a flat cap in both hands, turning it slowly around and around by the brim. He was clean-shaven. She noticed that, and for some reason found it incredibly touching. He’d shaved to come and say sorry. He came as far as the gate and stopped. It seemed fitting, somehow, that he stood there at the gate Blane had hung the morning he left.

She saw the exact moment Nikos registered that there was a second person in the courtyard. His gaze traveled up and up, and the flat cap went still in his hands. His mouth opened, but no words came out. Whatever apology he might have rehearsed apparently deserted him completely.

“Kaliméra,” she said as gently as she could. Her Greek still wasn’t wonderful, but she could manage a warm good morning.

Nikos didn’t answer. He was still staring at Blane the way a man might look at storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

She felt Blane shift his weight behind her and knew, just as she’d come to know so many things about him, that every instinct he had was telling him to step forward. To put himself between her and the man at the gate and make it known that whatever happened here would happen on his terms. That was who he was. And she could admit that it was a good deal of why she loved him. But… She reached back without looking and rested her hand in the middle of his chest. Not trying to restrain him—good grief, she couldn’t restrain the man if she tried. She just wanted to connect with him and somehow make him understand the words filling her head.

I’ve got this.

For a moment she could feel his heart beating fast and hard beneath her palm. Then he breathed out slowly. The tension didn’t exactly leave him, but it stood down. He stayed where he was. She didn’t dare look at him, because she knew that if she saw how much that restraint was costing him, she might cry.

“Nikos, thank you for coming. Would you like to come in? I’ve made coffee.”

Nikos looked from her to Blane and back again, then spoke slowly in careful, heavily accented English.

“You are not what Katerina says.”

Bea tilted her head. “What did Katerina say?”