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Somehow, her cheeks grew pinker. She gaped, searching for words, and he closed his eyes, the events of the past day weighing heavily on him.
“Have you eaten?”
She looked around. “What time is it?”
“Eight.”
“It’s late! I hadn’t realized.”
He also, therefore, could discount any notion that she’d been distractedly watching the clock, waiting for his return. “The day got away from me,” he explained, moving past her, into the kitchen and pulling out a platter of dips and breads. “Come, sit with me.”
Her eyes traced his face, and she hesitated. This morning, she’d really opened up to him, and though it didn’t mean anything to him, she felt strangely vulnerable now.
“I won’t bite,” he promised, and her heart did a funny flip flop as visions of him doing exactly that seared her, memories of his lips clamped around her nipples sending her into a tailspin. She cast about, looking for her shirt. It was discarded on the sofa, a casualty of the warm night. She walked towards it quickly, ripping it over her head then emerging, hair in disarray.
Anastasios was emptying his pockets, a gesture that struck her for how normal and domesticated it was, and for a fraction of a second she let her mind imagine that this was normal. That they were, in some way, a couple.
Longing was so strong, it almost felled her.
She blanked her face of emotion and pushed aside the childish, futile wishes, moving to meet him in the kitchen. While he gathered plates, she poured water glasses and removed a couple of cloth napkins from a draw.
“Do the staff usually feed you?”
“It depends what kind of mood I’m in. If I ask for food, I get it.”
She couldn’t help smiling. “Oh, how simple life must be for you, Anastasios Xenakis.”
“In some ways.”
Her eyes fell on a piece of paper he’d removed from his pocket and she gasped involuntarily.
“What is it?”
“This woman—,” she pointed to the brochure. “She’s fantastic.”
“You know of her?”
She shot him a furtive glance. “Don’t read anything into this,” she said warily.
He tilted his head, a gesture of encouragement.
“I went to see her perform last year.” The air between them crackled. “Your dad took me,” she rushed over that point, not looking at him, not seeing the way his features tightened. “She was so wonderful. I felt everything she felt. Her face is so expressive, so moving. Your father and I both wept like babies.”
Chapter 8
JUST THE THOUGHT OF his father crying convinced Anastasios. He had to go and see the performance. Curiosity was a beast within him as, the next morning, he pulled on a shirt, planning to work, when he thought better of it, switching to a pair of boardshorts instead.
Your dad took me.
Two distinct emotions had been writhing inside of him since learning about Phoebe.
Anger, with his father, and with Phoebe, for conducting an affair despite Konstantinos’s marriage and their age difference. There had also been jealousy, from that first night, and now, jealousy was in the clear ascendency. Somehow, he’d come to accept that whatever had happened between Konstantinos and Phoebe had been his father’s decision to make, his father’s mistake to regret. But the idea of them together offended him as a man—as a man who desired a woman with all of his soul.
He didn’t want his father to have taken her to see theatre performances. He wanted her all for himself.
The thought instantly sobered him.
That wasn’t his style. It wasn’t his way. He liked his life, he liked being single. He wasn’t talking about a long-term commitment though, he hastened to reassure himself. How could he? No one could ever know about Phoebe. Her relationship with Konstantinos made any kind of future untenable. But here, floating at sea, adrift from the usual obligations and requirements of his life, perhaps it was akin to being in international waters, where no rules applied?
