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Because no one had ever said that love meant happiness. Or that joy didn’t have a price. She had thought the price she must pay was Julian, but in many ways this was worse.
For it was sometime after midnight, she saw on the car’s dashboard. Technically Christmas, and that made a kind of sense, because this was a bittersweet sort of miracle. She had never thought she would see Crete again, and yet he had appeared like a dream. He had swept in like the mist, told her things about himself he never had before, and the way they’d come together could only and ever be love, as far as she was concerned.
Whether he would call it that or not.
She wanted to think that it was anxiety inside her, carrying on, ordering her to leap out of the car, demand that he turn around, do something to make it clear that she intended to marry in the morning.
But she knew better. She was trying to defend herself against the inevitability of the next time he would leave her. Shewantedto believe in this. Shewantedthis Christmas miracle.
All while she knew that he believed in Christmas and miracles about as much as he believed in love.
For some time they drove in silence. Timoney could feel some tension leaving her the farther they traveled from the house. From Julian and her unpleasant future. And yet the farther they traveled from her childhood home, the closer they got to London and the more a different sort of tension grew in her.
Mile by mile.
“You,” Crete said, almost softly, if that was a word that could be used for such a hard man, “are the only person I have ever met who has never treated me as if I was some kind of alien.”
Such a soft yet sharp spear, thrust straight through her heart. She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “I don’t think you’re an alien. That would be convenient, wouldn’t it?”
He let out a sound that she supposed was a laugh, though it seemed to curl around inside her like smoke and didn’t help any with the weight of misery that seemed to sit on her then.
But she should not have felt miserable on behalf of her kidnapper. What was the matter with her? She ought to have felt miserablebecauseshe was being kidnapped, not because he might have tender feelings about it.
Something is very wrong with you, she told herself sternly.
Crete handled the country lanes easily, as if the towering hedges and slippery roads were nothing to him. As if the way the lanes wound this way and that was nothing short of soothing.
How she wished she could find a way to soothe herself—but she hadn’t really managed that since she’d met him, had she? And she could hardly recall what had come before.
He made a low noise, as if he was coming to some kind of decision. She thought he sat a bit straighter behind the wheel. “You know my name is not actually Crete, do you not?”
“That is a wrinkle I did not see coming.” Timoney frowned down at her interlaced fingers. “Though it would explain a lot if you had an evil twin. Did the bad version of you knock you over the head and lock you up somewhere? Is this the good version? I have a lot of follow-up questions.”
He shot her a fulminating look, then returned his gaze to the winding lane.
“I was born with a proper Greek name,” he told her, his voice a rasp across the darkness between them. “Adrastos Demetrios. My mother had many issues, there’s no denying that. But she did not name her only son after an island.”
And despite all the many articles that Timoney had ever read about him, she’d never encountered this little nugget of information. It seemed almost fantastical that he might have a name out there that no one had ever discovered. A secret name he was sharing only with her. Only now.
Something in her seemed to hum around the syllables of that lost name. Adrastos Demetrios. Him but not him.
Another gift, that voice within whispered.
“Crete is traditionally a female name,” he told her. “It is also the only place in Greece my father’s wife had ever visited. So this is what she chose to call me.”
Timoney turned in her seat, forgetting her own concerns as she studied his proud profile beside her. “Do you think she knew that it was a girl’s name? Does she speak Greek?”
“She does not speak Greek, no.” His mouth curved into that shape that was not a smile. “But my father does. I myself did not learn Greek until I was in school and could choose my own elective courses. As you can imagine, Greek was not encouraged in the father’s house. And so it was my Greek teacher who first told me that my nickname was usually only used for girls. I think she expected me to be horrified.”
“But you preferred to defy expectations,” she whispered. “As ever.”
“I legally changed my name to Crete when I was eighteen,” he told her in that same dark rasp. As if it was painful to tell her this. “Because it was the only thing my father and his wife ever gave me. And though they meant it as a mockery, I’m certain, I chose to claim it as a prize.”
Of course he did. This proud, remote man. Timoney had never wanted to reach out to him more. It actually hurt to keep her hands to herself.
And Crete was still speaking. “But more than that, it was a challenge. Let them laugh at a man with a woman’s name. Let them amuse themselves at my expense. It would only make it all the sweeter when I crushed them.” He let out that laugh again. “And, indeed, it did.”
And any remaining doubts Timoney might have had that she was head over heels for this man, despite everything, faded away then. Because when he told her such harsh things, such sad reminders of the brutal place he’d come from, all she wanted to do was wrap herself around him and show him at least one moment of softness. At least one small bit of something better.
