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It hadn’t taken much research to discover that Kyros had been married to a woman called Althaia. She had died twelve months ago and Summer had felt a strange grief on behalf of a father she had never met for a woman she had never known. They had married before Summer was born, so clearly her father and mother must have had an affair. Summer didn’t know what to think about that, but wondered if it was why Mariam had never told her the name of her father.
She went to buy a bottle of water at a kiosk, pulled out her wallet and felt her eyes widen at the sight of the six hundred euros from the night before that she had completely forgotten.
Should she give it to the police? She took the change from the man at the kiosk and clamped her bag a little more tightly under her arm as she took a sip from the bottle of water. It wasn’t exactly stolen though. She bit her lip and frowned. The thought of spending it made her feel a little hot around her neck—as if it were wrong. Yes, she could use it to pay for her flights or the hotel, or even a little treat, but it made her stomach squirm.
She and her sisters had always been frugal with money. They’d had to be. Mariam had provided love and security but not always consistency and over the years all three sisters had been there to fill in the gaps. But in the last few years Skye had worked as a secretary for a local builder and Star as a teaching assistant at the local primary, sharing a flat so they could help pay for the expensive tuition fees for Summer’s geophysics degree. And she was determined that when she graduated and got her dream job she’d be able to give back to them.
Summer’s part-time job meant that she hadsomesavings so the lure of ill-gotten gains waned considerably. And only when she saw the animal shelter on the corner did her heart ease a little and she knew what she had to do. Five minutes later and six hundred euros lighter she feltgood. For the first time since leaving her father’s office she felt...happier.
She passed beneath a bright white and yellow awning, absentmindedly looking at the display in the window, and stopped, staring at the most beautiful yellow dress she’d ever seen. The long-sleeved ankle-length dress was deceptively simple and utterly elegant. A button-lined deep V-neck reached tantalisingly low and hugged the torso, flaring out at the legs and making it eminently cooler than what she was currently wearing. The design was pretty but it was the colour that really caught Summer, the kind of bright sunny yellow she’d always been told that blondes could never wear.Shouldnever wear.
Beyond her reflection, she saw a woman smiling at her and beckoning her into the shop. Summer was about to shake her head regretfully when she saw herself meeting her father in a dress like that. Looking beautiful and accomplished. And not like...heras she was now. Crumpled old clothes in muted colours.Invisiblecolours.
She did have her savings...
You can’t, she told herself.
Unbidden, Theron’s voice from the night before replied, insistent and final.
You can.
All morning Theron had stared at the Parthenon from his office window when he should have been answering emails, phone calls, running last month’s figures or doinganythingbut thinking of an English girl waiting for her family.
He could blame it on the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman for nearly eighteen months, but that would only be a half truth. Ever since he’d bought the apartment at Althaia’s insistence, he’d not been able to bring a woman back there. Before her death, Althaia had asked him to stop living in the short-term rentals that had made up most of his adult life thus far. Beneath that had been the silent censure about his short-term pastimes of the female variety, but she’d been too kind to call him on it.
Stability. Kyros and Althaia had always known how important it was to him. How it was more than a desire, but a need in a life that could very much have gone the wrong way, like so many others in the orphanage had. For just a moment, a memory of the first night in that place slipped through his defences and his entire body turned to stone. In a heartbeat he’d shut it down but that tension still held in his shoulders, in his jaw.
It will be good for you, she’d said.
All the while Althaia had been trying to give him stability, knowing that her death would rob him of it. She’d even tried to get him to reach out to Lykos, but that had been a step too far.
As he looked up the hill once again, he cursed. He needed coffee. Despite his assurance that he would only sleep well if she took his number, his dreams had been fevered images of Summer wrapped in his sheets, heated, flushed and utterly debauched. And as frustrating as those images were, he much preferred them to thoughts of the past.
Stalking from his office, he ignored the confused look of his assistant, blanked the question from his second-in-command and went for the stairs instead of the elevator, hoping to work off the nervous tension thrumming through his veins. Theron took them two at a time, his sense of urgency gaining rather than decreasing with the action.
He burst onto the pavement, sending a couple of pedestrians scattering, and made his way to the best coffee cart in the whole of Athens. He caught the eye of the mean old man who worked the cart every day of the year, rain, shine and even the occasional snow. He’d had the same coffee here every day for ten years and the old goat still growled, ‘What do you want?’ at him every time. It might have had something to do with how he and Lykos had once stolen a whole tray of muffins from his cart and, although he was fifteen years and several million euros away from the kid he’d once been, Theron had the sneaking suspicion that the vendor remembered it.
The rich smell of chocolatey coffee hit him and soothed this strange aimless fury unsettling him. He rolled out his shoulders and waited at one of the cheap metal tables that despite its apparent frailty—much like the coffee vendor—had somehow lasted the test of time.
His fingertips tapped out an impatient tattoo on the table top. The old man was mean, but he didn’t usually make Theron wait. He turned just as the most incredible flash of yellow caught his eye. He fought against it, he triedsohard not to look, but the impression of supple curves outlined in gold was seared immediately and indelibly into his mind. The woman had her back to him, affording him an exquisite—if illicit—view of the way the material caressed the sweep of her backside and swayed gently as she leaned towards the coffee vendor, who looked as if he’d just fallen in love.
Theron couldn’tnottrace the arch of her spine and wonder whether the space between her shoulder blades would fit his outstretched palm perfectly. Blonde tendrils had been swept up to reveal a neck pink from the sun, but no less tempting to his lips and tongue.
She looked around too quickly for him to turn away and his gaze crashed into a gold-flecked hazel stare that instantly widened with surprise. A surprise he felt himself, down to his very soul. Her name sounded in his mind as if he hadn’t already thought it a hundred times that day. But his name on her lips sent a surge of fire through his blood.
Her footsteps faltered and she came to a stop in the middle of the tables, staring at him while Theron sat there, hypnotised by the sight of her, so beautiful he felt changed by it.
Finally, he stood, pulling himself to his full height. ‘Summer.’
She looked back to the coffee vendor, who shooed her in Theron’s direction explaining in broken English that he’d bring her coffee over. Looking decidedly uncomfortable, she picked her way through the tables, the sway of the yellow material he wanted to feel beneath his fingertips gently billowing in her wake.
‘I didn’t know that you’d...’
‘My office is just round the corner.’
‘Of course.’ The moment she said it she blushed and he couldn’t quite fathom why she would think that his office wouldof coursebe round the corner.
She stood beside the chair he had offered her, looking at him in that way she did, until the vendor arrived with his coffee and her frappe. Theron ignored the side-eyed glare from the old man that warned him implicitly not to upset the nice English lady, and waited for Summer to sit.
