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CHAPTER SIX
ITWASEARLY.
Walking swiftly, Effie glanced sideways across the smooth water, lavender-coloured in the dawn light, to where the sun was inching up past the horizon. It was pale yellow and tinged on the underside with blue.
Calm, unshakeable, untroubled.
Turning away from the sea, she trembled. If only she could change places with the sun.
She had watched the sky lighten from her window and finally, when she’d been able to bear it no more, she got up and dressed and walked away from the silent villa.
She had no idea where she was going. No pre-set destination in mind. She just needed to move and keep moving.
Her sandalled feet slipped sideways and, reaching out, she rested her hand against an outcrop of lead-coloured rock.
She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all. She’d stared into the darkness, her body rigid like a block of wood, her eyes dry and scratchy. Of course, she had fallen asleep, but it had been a short respite from her tumultuous thoughts. Now she was awake, and if anything, she felt worse now than last night, when she’d fled from the terrace and Achileas’s single-word rejection.
Her pulse beat in time to the distant ebb and flow of the waves. In the darkness, her shock and shame had been her own, but now, with the sun rising, she was going to have to face him. It was nearly seven hours since she had made a complete and utter fool of herself by kissing Achileas beneath the setting sun, but it might as well have been seven seconds.
She could remember it exactly. Not just a frame-by-frame replay of what had happened but of how it had felt. The heaviness of her breasts and that flower of heat blossoming between her thighs. Soft, quivering, insistent...
Her fingers shook as they had when she had touched the hard muscles of his chest and arms, and she breathed out shakily. Leaning forward, she pressed her hot forehead against the coolness of the rock. But it couldn’t douse the heat beneath her skin.
She swallowed past the lump in her throat, unsure if the tears she was holding back were down to panic at what she had done or shame at her stupidity. Both, probably, although shame might have it in a photo finish.
Thinking back to the moment when Achileas had broken away from her, she rested her hand on the place in her stomach where she had felt that treacherous melting. Why had she done it? She had known that kiss they’d shared in her flat hadn’t been anything more than a means to prove a point, only for some reason she had forgotten that fact. She had forgotten everything. Not just where they were and why they were there, but who they were.
Who she was.
Until Achileas had reminded her.
At the unguarded memory her eyes began to sting.
He had been blunt at first, but not unkind. Only her head had still been spinning with the drugging intensity of his hard mouth on hers and so she had just stood there. And then he’d snapped at her. Like an impatient grown-up dispatching a child who had tried to stay up after her bedtime.
Her cheeks burned at the memory. As if a man of Achileas’s experience would be remotely interested in her. She had seen the women he dated—or one of them, anyway—and Tamara was sexy and sophisticated, not some clueless virgin.
And just because she was ready to be changed, it didn’t mean he felt the same way.
Her one and only consolation out of the whole horrific mess was that Achileas was unlikely to bring it up so she wouldn’t have to either. But she needed to keep replaying it inside her head until she could think about it calmly. And without her hands shaking.
It was getting sandier underfoot. Soaring dunes rose on either side of her and the path curved to the right.
She stopped short.
In front of her was a beach—a lagoon.
A perfect crescent of white ribbed sand curving in an arc around the clearest blue water she had ever seen.
It was empty, the air magically still, the sound of the waves gentle. Like a sigh, almost, or the soft intake of breath. She stared down at it, her mind emptied, all her disquiet and discomfort miraculously soothed. If she closed her eyes, it would be like when she was little, when she would climb into bed with her mum and listen to her sleep...
There was a splash and she breathed in sharply—only her eyes didn’t shut. In fact, they almost popped out of her head.
She had been wrong. The beach wasn’t empty.
A man was swimming, his muscular shoulders cutting through the waves with smooth, strong, rhythmic strokes like the prow of a ship.
She watched enviously, wishing she could swim with the same effortless grace. Abruptly he stopped moving beneath the water, juddering to a halt, and her breathing jerked as a head broke the surface and Achileas smoothed a hand over his face.
