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18
Before saying good night by the hot tub last night, Angela had told Sienna she’d go for her morning walk and be back in plenty of time for the trip to the ancient Minoan village.
She jogged along the path to Fira, feeling frantic, until her heel slipped on a stone and she almost turned her ankle. Yet she kept to a fast clip. By the time she rushed through the café gate, she was out of breath and half afraid Xandros wouldn’t be there.
But he was gorgeous in the early morning sunlight. He’d already ordered her usual coffee and bougatsa. The coffee refreshed her, but the sugary pastry made her stomach lurch.
And so did his first words. “Sienna is mine, isn’t she, Angelika?” He said her daughter’s name as if he knew her, though Angela thought she’d only mentioned it a couple of times.
The cream in her coffee curdled in her stomach.
Xandros pulled out his wallet, opened it to a fan of pictures, and pointed to one of his youngest daughter. “They could be twins.”
Angela’s heart jumped to her throat, choking her. Different from the one in his home, this was professionally posed, a graduation picture. It could have been Sienna’s graduation photo.
There was no hiding from it, no lying, no half-truths. She shouldn’t even want to lie. She nodded. “I planned to tell her on this trip. I wanted to show her the beauty of Santorini and hope she’d see how easy it is to fall in love here.”
Xandros raised an eyebrow, saying softly, almost deadly, “Easy?”
Her skin flushed. She couldn’t meet his eyes, gazing around the terrace café instead. Like usual at this time of the morning, it wasn’t full, just two couples, each sharing a pastry, a family, three kids with their parents, getting ready for a day of sightseeing, an old man reading a book, the photographer. Eleni filled his cup as she rushed by.
Angela turned back to Xandros, his thick, wavy salt-and-pepper hair, the grooves of his face that hadn’t been there when they were young but which added to his depth of character. “It was so easy to fall in love with you. Because of who you are, because of who I am, because we were meant to be together even back then.”
He didn’t agree or disagree. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
She couldn’t meet the drill of his gaze, closing her eyes just to start the explanation. “It was the early nineties. We barely had email. The internet was still a mystery. There was no social media. And I didn’t have your phone number.” They were lame excuses.
He didn’t let her get away with it, his face stern, his features immovable. “You could have written me a letter. You could have flown back to Santorini and told me face to face.” All of it was true.
It was time to tell the whole story.
She concentrated her gaze on her coffee, hating herself for not being able to meet his eyes. “I told you about my mother. She could be so domineering, especially back then. I know I was twenty-two and I’d been to college and I was a grown-up, but it just seemed like when I got around my mother, I was a teenager again and unable to assert myself.”
The explanation sounded so weak, so pathetic, even fake, but she couldn’t deny him her gaze or her truth for long. It was up to him whether he felt sympathy or anger or disbelief. “I allowed my mother to undermine everything I felt for you. I take full responsibility for that. If I’d been older, more sure of myself, I never would’ve let that happen.” Then she confessed the worst. “I let my mother make me believe you were just a beach bum who went from woman to woman, finding someone on every tour. I allowed her to make me doubt you would even show up the next year. And that if you did, you certainly wouldn’t want the baby.”
In his pain, the color of his eyes faded from cerulean blue to a pale imitation. “You had so little faith in me?” Hurt turned his voice harsh.
She couldn’t let him think it was about him. “It was myself I had so little faith in.” She put her hand to her chest. “I didn’t think you could fall in love with me so easily, so quickly. I didn’t think that a mere three weeks would make you mine.” She reached out, letting her hand drop to the table inches from his. “Isn’t that why we said we’d meet after a year, so that we’d know our true feelings by then?”
She’d had so many insecurities. He was beautiful. Women looked at him with desire glittering in their eyes. And she was just… pretty on a good day, with a decent body. She could hide the flaws with shorts and a T-shirt, but not the slight bulges when she wore her bathing suit. He had kissed her stomach, not caring that it wasn’t flat. But maybe he’d done that with all women. Or maybe he’d liked that he could get her to try new things, and she’d willingly done just about anything he wanted. But those were things a man tired of when they eventually wanted someone new.
As if he’d been watching each separate emotion flicker across her face and shine from her eyes, he closed the short distance between their fingers. Taking her hand in his, he held her with his touch and his gaze. “I understand. You were afraid. You were alone. You didn’t know what to do. I married the woman my parents wanted me to because I had doubts and fears as well. You and I were young. It was such a fleeting time. Could we actually make it after having known each other for only three weeks? When you didn’t show up, I knew my fears were right, that I was just a vacation romance for you.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, blinking back tears.
He gripped her fingers for a moment. “You have no need to apologize. Neither of us does. It was simply what happened. Perhaps we should have said we would write to each other. Or call. But we cannot go back or live with regret or anger. We have to move on.”
She wondered exactly what moving on meant.
Xandros told her. “Yesterday on the beach, I said it wasn’t our time back then. But it is our time now. I will not let doubt ruin us. I will not let what others want or think get in our way. I will not let you go again.”
Her heart beat faster with each word. “I don’t have any doubts about you or me. But my daughter. She doesn’t know and…” She didn’t finish the thought.
He sat straight. “I should be there when you tell our daughter.”
Our daughter. A thrill rippled across her skin as he spoke. But she shook her head. “That’s a bad idea. She’s going to freak out as it is. I need to handle this. I won’t put you through that. And it’s not fair to her either. She doesn’t know you. She still thinks Donald is her father.”
After a brief silence and the slight tilt of his head as he looked at her, he asked, “Why do you need to tell her at all? Maybe it’s better that we let sleeping dogs lie.”
