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And then, before Sophy could stop her, Sasha was reaching across and pushing Sophy out of the car.
Sophy fell into space, her breath strangled in her throat, and then she landed on a hard surface, the breath knocked out of her body.
The only thing she heard before blackness consumed her was the faint sound of metal crashing far below her...
Sophy looked at Apollo.
Sasha was gone.
She tried to answer Apollo’s question but her voice sounded very far away.
‘She’s in the car... I couldn’t get her out. She’s dead.’
And then, like when she’d landed on that ledge, far above the bottom of the ravine, darkness came over her again like a comforting cloak.
The next few hours passed in a blur. Sophy was aware of coming round and a concerned doctor asking her some questions. Olympia had helped her to dress and then they’d been flying over the sea with Apollo’s voice in her ear.
‘Are you okay? We’re nearly there.’
When they reached the bright hospital in Athens where a team of doctors and nurses was waiting for them, Sophy knew that, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t hide from the painful reality waiting to be unearthed from the depths of her newly returned memory.
‘It would appear that the trauma of the crash, of seeing the car disappear with her sister in it, along with the bump to her head, caused a classic case of trauma-induced amnesia. And, because her sister was in the accident, she blocked out everything about her sister, which was her whole life. Effectively.’
Apollo was silent. Taking this in. He was standing outside the private suite at the hospital with the same doctor who had treated Sasha—Sophy—after the accident.
Theos. Even now it was hard to get his head around it. No wonder he’d always thought of her as so pale. She’d been a different woman. He realised now that all those little anomalies he’d noticed since the accident hadn’t been anomalies.
He didn’t think he’d ever be able to excise the image from his mind of Sophy crumpling before him like a ragdoll and the terror he’d felt as he’d waited for the island doctor to arrive.
She’d come round at the villa but she’d retreated to some numb place Apollo couldn’t reach. Even if the doctor hadn’t recommended it, Apollo would have returned to Athens as soon as possible to seek further treatment.
Through the window he could see a detective talking to Sophy now. She was still deathly pale. Any lingering doubt he might have had about whether or not she’d been lying about the amnesia was well and truly gone.
It was too huge to absorb and try and figure how he felt about this, and the fact that Sasha—his wife, however inconvenient she’d been—was now dead.
The detective stood up and came out. He stopped in front of Apollo. ‘I’ll have a team sent to look for the crashed car immediately. And your wife’s body. We should find Ms Jones’s documents in the car if they haven’t been destroyed. That will help clear things up.’
‘Thank you.’
When the detective had disappeared the doctor said, ‘We’ll keep Sophy in for the rest of the night as a precaution, but she should be okay to go home tomorrow. It’s going to take her some time to adjust to having her memory back. Be gentle with her.’
Apollo’s mind was instantly filled with vivid images of making love to her with a desperation that hadn’t exactly been gentle. His conscience smarted. Had sex precipitated her memory’s return?
The doctor was waiting for his response. He said, ‘Of course.’
She walked away and Apollo went into the suite.
Sophy knew when Apollo walked in. A volt of electricity went through her blood. Steeling herself, she turned her head to look at him. She quailed inwardly. His expression was stony. She had a sense of déjà vu from when she’d regained consciousness after the accident to find him with a similar expression.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘Okay, I think. My head fee
ls full again.’ She put a hand to it briefly.
Apollo looked at her for a long moment. ‘Can you tell me one thing?’
She nodded, tensing inwardly. There was so much she had to explain but she needed to make sense of it herself first.
