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CHAPTER TEN
STARINGAFTERHIM, Effie felt short of breath as she remembered when she had seen that look on Achileas’s face before. It had been back in London, in his limousine, right after she’d accused him of hiding.
And now he was hiding again. Out there in the darkness.
Her head was full of panic. She needed to go after him, find him, but he could be anywhere.
No, not just anywhere.
She felt her heartbeat slow. She knew where he was. He had gone there before, and he would go back there for the same reason. To lift that anger and frustration, the pain he carried everywhere.
The pain of watching his mother being replaced in his father’s affections.
Eugenie must be Andreas’s mistress. And, knowing that, she felt everything else fall into place. Achileas’s frustration with the world, that near-constant simmering anger and the strange weave of tension between the two men when they’d met at the ball.
She was sure she was right, but for the moment it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding Achileas.
Even with the full moon it took her fifteen minutes to reach the lagoon. Things looked different at night, and of course it didn’t help that she was wearing heels, but finally she found the path down between the sand dunes.
Achileas was not swimming this time. He had taken off his jacket and was barefoot, sitting on the sand, his shoulders slumped like Atlas, his eyes fixed on the barely moving water.
‘You shouldn’t have come,’ he said as she sat down beside him.
He didn’t turn to look at her, but she didn’t need to see his face. She could read his shoulders, the set of his jaw.
‘That’s not up to you,’ she said quietly. ‘Only I expect you’ll have to prove that it is, and any moment now you’re going to storm off into the darkness again. I can’t stop you doing that, but I’m just warning you now that I’m going to follow you.’
‘And why would you do that?’
His hand flexed against the sand. But he stayed sitting beside her, and all the time he was throwing angry questions at her he was here and safe.
She stared at his rigid profile. ‘You’d do the same for me. You did the same for me.’
‘That was different. You were upset.’
And you’re not?she thought.
He looked up at her, as if hearing her unspoken accusation. ‘No amount of talking is going to change this.’
He meant fix this, she thought. But first he had to admit what was broken.
‘Maybe not,’ she admitted. ‘Some things can’t be changed. But sometimes they don’t need to be. You just need to find a way to accept them and adapt.’
‘Accept and adapt?’ He shook his head, his mouth twisting into a shape that scraped at her skin. ‘And you think I can do that?’
There was tension in his words, and with a jolt she realised that he didn’t need to go into the darkness to hide. He was hiding all the time, using his anger and impatience to deflect prying eyes from what lay beneath.
Slipping off her sandals, she nodded. ‘I think you can do pretty much anything if you set your mind to it.’
There was something flickering in his eyes that she couldn’t follow. ‘How did you know?’ he said finally. ‘That Eugenie wasn’t my mother?’
Remembering Eugenie’s cool, regal beauty, she said quietly, ‘She didn’t seem like the kind of person who likes old musicals.’
‘Probably not. Truthfully, though, what would I know?’ There was a tightness in his voice that made it sound flat, detached, as if it belonged to another man entirely. ‘I’ve never met her. But then up until six months ago I’d only met my father once.’
Effie stared at him in confusion. Was that a joke? Surely it must be. But one look at his face told her that he was being serious. Mute with shock, she groped in her mind for some kind of logic that would explain his words.
‘I don’t understand...how is that possible?’
