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“We don’t have to agree on anything.” Phoebe was shaking though, her knees quivering at the awful scene. Her glance roughly encompassed Anastasios as well. “Excuse me. I’ve had enough of this. Good night.” She turned and walked away, her back ramrod straight, her mind numb.
Outside, she looked around, as if just seeing the world for the first time. Earlier, with Anastasios, this piazza had seemed like the most beautiful, romantic place on earth but now it was dark and menacing. She had lost her bearings, but she knew one thing for sure. She couldn’t go back to the yacht with Anastasios.
She needed space and time to think.
“Phoebe.” His voice was stern, unemotional.
She turned slowly to face him, teeth pressing into her lower lip. “What?”
His eyes probed hers, but there was such darkness in his, such suppressed anger, that goosebumps lifted on her arms despite the balmy warmth of the night.
“Was that really necessary?” She whispered, then shook her head. “Couldn’t you have at least warned me?”
“You made your bed when you started sleeping with him,” Anastasios said quietly.
Phoebe gasped, lifting a hand to her chest. “How can you still believe that?” Tears weakened her voice. “How can you think that after everything—,”
“Why would I doubt it?”
“Because you know me, Anastasios.”
“Because you told me a few sob stories about your life? Who even knows if they’re true? Maybe that’s just how you get men to feel sorry for you, to give you gifts, like this,” he pointed to the necklace at her throat, a necklace which had, until that moment, meant so much to her.
Bile rose in her throat. “I told you, I don’t want it.” She reached up, trying to unclasp it, but her fingers were unsteady, and her clutch purse didn’t help. “I don’t want it,” she said again, the words tumbling out of her. “I don’t want it.” And now the necklace was choking her, so she started scratching at her throat, wanting it off, wishing she’d never agreed to wear it. “Please, please take it,” she turned around, but the second his fingers connected with her skin, every cell in her body began to reverberate and she made a wretched, sobbing sound, because she knew then how much she loved him, even when he had no love for her. He undid it, his fingers still hovering there, but she stepped away from him, quickly, urgently, needing to fight her body’s craving.
“I never asked for anything of your father. I never asked for anything from you.”
He stared down at the necklace then pushed it into his pocket as carelessly as if it were a stick of gum.
“I’m not interested in discussing it. Let’s go.”
“No way. I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“And what else do you propose to do?”
She hated him in that moment, the love in her heart lurching wildly to its counterpart, light to shadow. “Find a hotel,” she snapped.
“And waste money you don’t have? Then a flight back to London? That makes no sense.”
“Nor does going to the yacht and pretending none of this happened.”
“We won’t do that. We can’t.” His lips compressed and he angled his face away, his chest moving as though he too were grappling with dark emotions, trying not to let them win. And when he spoke, he was in command again, his voice measured. “In the morning, I’ll have you taken back to London.”
Have you taken, like an errant piece of luggage. She swallowed over a lump in her throat that might very well have been her pride. She hated how right he was. She couldn’t afford a hotel in Rome, nor a flight to London. She dug her fingernails into her palm and nodded stiffly. “Fine. Let’s consider my kidnap an economic one, this time.”
She turned away before she could see him flinch.
The silence was deafening. It had crackled the whole helicopter ride, where even the aerial view of Rome in the late night couldn’t distract her from the way he’d spoken to her—as though she were a piece of dirt on his shoe. Introducing her as their father’s ‘friend’, the word layered with so much cynicism and sneery contempt that even aliens would have inferred his meaning.
When the helicopter touched down, she unbuckled her seatbelt and removed the headpiece then fumbled with the door, but she had no idea how to open it. Anastasios reached across, his arm strong and capable, lifting the handle, then pulling back swiftly. He too was aware of the spark between them, even when neither wanted it.
She stepped out without a word of thanks, then thought better of it.
At the door to the main cabin, she looked back at him. “I suppose I should thank you,” she said caustically.
He walked towards her slowly, his face in shadows. She didn’t wait for an answer.
“Every year, I dread my birthday. I have this tradition, you see, of always having the very worst birthdays in the world. Like the year Dale saved up and bought me a CD I’d wanted for over a year and my father hit it with a hammer, or the year my father beat Dale until he had to go to hospital, or the year I was on the streets and cornered by three guys—god knows what they would have done to me if a routine patrol hadn’t driven past at that exact moment. Jail was a relief compared to that fear.”
