Page 158 of The Best Thing He Never Wanted

“She says…” He paused, searching for the words. “A nice English lady on her own.” His gaze flicked toward Blane. “She did not say…”

“No,” Bea agreed. “I don’t imagine she did.”

Behind her, Blane made one of his huffing sounds, and this time she really hoped it was a strangled laugh and not the same sort of sound a bull made before it charged.

“This is Blane,” she told Nikos. “He’s… visiting.” It was such an absurd word for what Blane was that she nearly laughed. Nikos plainly didn’t believe her either, but he seemed to decide, sensibly, not to say so.

“I come to say sorry,” he said. “For the night. I did not want frighten you. I only…”

He gripped his cap tighter and looked past her, beyond the house toward the field and the little stone building at the far edge.

“I wanted to see.”

Bea followed his gaze to the shepherd’s hut, and something in the way he was looking at it made her heart hurt. “Come and sit down, Nikos. I think you’d better tell me.”

He sat at the table on the terrace, and Bea brought out the coffee pot. Nikos held his mug in both hands, as though he was grateful for something to hold on to.

Blane didn’t sit. He leaned against the wall a little way off. Close enough, but not too close, and Bea thought it was a fair bargain. He’d stand down for her, but he wasn’t going to sit and pretend this was a social call.

For a while, Nikos didn’t speak. He looked toward the hut, then at the house, then down into his coffee.

“My English is not good,” he said at last. “I am sorry.”

“It’s much better than my Greek,” Bea said. “Take your time.”

He nodded. Then, slowly at first, told her he’d been born in the little stone house at the edge of the field, not the big house.

Bea’s house had come later, when he was a boy, after his father had done well enough to build something better. The small house—the one she had been calling the shepherd’s hut—was where the family had started. Where his grandfather had lived, and his father after him. Where his mother had given birth to him the winter the snow had been too deep to get down to town.

“Over the door,” he said, lifting one hand to sketch a shape in the air. “There is a stone. My grandfather cut it. His letters and the year. It is still there. You can see if you go close.”

Bea had seen it. She’d been out to the hut a dozen times, but she’d never once wondered whose initials they were, or why anyone had bothered to carve a date into the lintel of a building she’d been calling nothing more than a shepherd’s hut.

She felt her cheeks warm. “Go on,” she said quietly.

Nikos told her that Stavros had never loved the place the way he did. Stavros had wanted to move away, to go to Athens, to live a life that didn’t smell of goats and wood smoke. He’d wanted a bigger life. When their parents died, they’d left Stavros the house and the good land around it.

Nikos stared toward the hut again. “I was given the rest.”

“What’s the rest?” Blane asked, pushing away from the wall.

Bea glanced at him. It was the first time he’d spoken. Nikos looked at him too and seemed to decide that the big American might be safe to talk to after all.

“The mountain,” he said, his face a little bitter. “High ground. Not good ground. There are rocks. The only thing it is good for is goats in the summer.” His chin dipped, and his grip on his cap tightened. “My brother got the house, the water, the flat land.” He shook his head sadly. “I got the sky.”

“And you never thought Stavros had the right to sell?” Bea asked.

“He had the right.” Nikos’s shoulders sagged. It seemed he’d made his peace with the law, even though he was still at war with the reality. “By the law, it was his. He can sell to who he wants.” He looked up, and for the first time Bea saw the emotion he’d been trying so hard to hold back. “But the stone with my grandfather’s name…” He swallowed. “He sells that to a stranger. He does not tell me. I hear from the village that my home is sold, and I am the last to know.”

Bea sat very still. She could feel Blane watching her now. No longer watching Nikos, but watching her, because he knew her. And he very probably knew what was coming.

“I’d like to say something,” she said. “And I’d be grateful if you both let me finish before either of you tells me I’m being ridiculous.”

Nikos looked baffled.

Blane came closer. “Bea.”

“You promised.”