“Thanks,” she said as she reached for it.
“Allow me.” He held it wide, inviting her to step into its dry warmth. To refuse would have been to admit that she was still deeply affected by him. With a shrug of unconcern she stepped into his arms and waited with an expression of bemused impatience while he wrapped it around her and then patted it downwards as if to dry her. His hands rubbed her backside, her arms, and still she stood, thinking of the most unsexy images she could, waiting for him to give up.
She could get through this. She could. She just had to stay strong.
“Are you done?” She asked and he swore softly in his own language.
“What the hell’s happened to you?”
“What do you mean?” She loosened the towel and brought it to her head. She dried it enthusiastically, brushing away her desires and needs.
“I mean … nothing.” He spun on his heel. “You should get changed for lunch.”
She poked her tongue out at his retreating back and wrapped the towel around her shoulders.
But she did get changed for lunch. Given that Xanthe Rakanti undoubtedly already thought the worst of her, and Christos was practically tripping over himself to force her to acknowledge that she wanted him, Elle chose a dress that she might have, in a more prudent moment, have decided was far too inappropriate. The flimsy white cotton maxi covered her flesh but without a bra, it did little to hide her curves. She fluffed out her still-damp hair and put on the bare minimum of makeup, just enough to accentuate her big eyes and pouting lips.
And the second she stepped into the kitchen she wished she’d fought those instincts and chosen a conservative pair of jeans and t-shirt instead. Christos stared at her and then slowly began to shake his head in obvious disapproval, while Xanthe simply glared, her mouth parted in surprise.
“Oh, hey,” Filip, at least, was happy to see her. “Finally. I’m starving and Christos said we had to wait for you.”
“You shouldn’t have,” she said to her brother alone.
“Ellie, this is Christos’s mom, Xanthe Rakanti. Xanthe, my sister Elle Bradley.”
Elle swallowed as she walked across the room. The hatred emanating from Xanthe was a physical wall. Even Christos was surprised by the obvious force of enmity.
“Hello,” Elle went through the motions of civility, though she had little interest in knowing this woman. The sooner she left Athens the better, and then she’d never have to see either Xanthe or Christos again. Well, at least, not often.
“I …” Xanthe stood up and shook her head. “I thought …” She looked at Christos, completely shocked. “I thought I could do this.”
“Mother,” Christos’s word held a warning. “This isn’t Elle’s fault.”
Filip’s face was crumpling and for his sake alone, Elle spoke gently. “I know you’re upset,” she said to Xanthe. “I understand that. I’m very happy to leave now, and allow you to get to know Filip.”
“No.” Filip and Christos both spoke sharply and she looked from one to the other. It was Filip she addressed, though.
She crouched down in front of him and cupped his face. “Darling one, it’s too soon. And it doesn’t matter if I know these people or not. Christos is your half-brother. And I’m your half-sister. Xanthe wants to spend time with you.” Elle lifted her eyes to the other woman. “I’m going to go back to my room and read for a while.” At his look of sadness she kissed his forehead. “Truly, dearest, I’d rather read anyway.”
“I will not have you chased to your room,” Christos spoke darkly. “Mother, you said you were fine with Elle being here. So just … sit down.”
“She looks like her mother,” Xanthe spat, shaking, her eyes shimmering. “You didn’t tell me that.”
Elle looked from one to the other in confusion. Christos spun to face Xanthe. “It’s not relevant. She’s a different person.”
“Not that different,” Xanthe pointed out angrily, making it obvious she knew the details of Elle’s relationship with Christos. She focussed her gaze on Elle’s face. “Going to the press was the last straw. That’s something even your mother didn’t stoop to.”
Elle wanted to throw it all in Xanthe’s face – about the confidentiality agreement and the fact her precious husband had refused to help his wheelchair-bound son, but she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. She would never have hurt her brother in that way.
So when Filip began to speak, it was Elle that was left speechless. “The only reason my mother didn’t go to the press was because Filip made her sign a confidentiality agreement that was legally binding.” He enjoyed the silence that fell. Even Christos was momentarily mute. “And before you ask, Elle didn’t tell me about that. My sister has done nothing but look after me from the day I was born. I found the document when I was home one summer.” He turned to Elle, and his wistful smile almost tore her heart in two. “Paperwork and discretion: Her two biggest downfalls.”
It wasn’t funny, but Elle laughed. She squeezed his shoulder. “Don’t make a scene. Not over me. I’m happy to go.” She lifted her eyes to encompass Christos and Xanthe with the same ice-cold hatred. “No. Correction. I’m very, very happy to go.”
“Not without me.” He reached over and held her hand. “I don’t know why I was trying so hard to become a part of this family. I already have the best family in the world.” He squeezed her hand and Elle felt herself go from the depths of despair to euphoria in a moment. But it was wrong. She didn’t want him to close the gate on the Rakantis. She had seen into Christos’s heart and she knew there was goodness there. He might have been determined to hide it, but it was there.
“Filip,” Xanthe spoke now, her smile conciliatory. “We want you to be part of our family.”
“Perhaps. But if you don’t want Ellie too then that’s a deal-breaker for me.” He wheeled away from them, towards the lift, then spun. “And it wasn’t Elle who went to the press. It was me.”
Shit. Elle swore under her breath, watching his disappearing frame with consternation.
Christos and Xanthe were both staring at her.
“Is that true?” Christos, always so tan and vibrant, looked pale. When Elle didn’t answer he slammed his palm into the bench and both Xanthe and Elle jumped. “Damn it, is that true? Or is he covering for you?”
“Does it matter?” She began to walk backwards slowly. “Your father is the only one at fault in all of this.”
“And your mother,” Xanthe pointed out. And then, softly, slowly, “And me.”
“You?” Elle demanded. “How? Why? Don’t tell me you knew about his accident, because so help me God…”
“No,” Xanthe blanched as she sat down on a bar stool. “But I knew about the affair.” She shook her head. “I knew he’d slept with your mother.”
Christos was trying to fit all the pieces of his world back together but they wouldn’t slide into order anymore. “Since when? How?”
“Since it happened. He felt terrible. But then, I’d pushed him away.” She sobbed softly and Elle could have almost felt sorry for her. “We’d wanted so badly to have another child. We lost three pregnancies, Christos, and I just shut off from him.”
“I had no idea.”
“It was private. Personal. I felt like such a failure.” Tears were running down her face but Elle kept her heart locked and hardened. “He told me about Bella Bradley. But never about the child. It would have killed me, and I suspect he knew that. It explains why he went to such lengths to keep it quiet.”
“I beg your pardon, but nothing explains that,” Elle said with soft dignity. “Excuse me.” She walked with her head held high out of the kitchen towards the stairs. She took them two at a time but Christos caught her near the first landing.
“Elle? Just … please just wait. I have to deal with my mother. But I need to speak to you.”
“Oh?” She lifted her fingers and rubbed her temples. “To say what?”
“A thousand things,” he hissed. “Why did you let me blame you
for going to the press?”
“I didn’t let you blame me. You blamed me with scant regard for the truth.”
Chastened, he nodded. But his expression was one of confusion. “It just made sense that it was you.”
She squared her shoulders. “I would never, ever have done that to my brother. Or your mother. I told you that.”
“I know. But …”
“NO.” She shouted the word, not caring that perhaps her brother and Xanthe heard. “Enough. It’s over.”
“Why did he do it?”
She sighed, but began to walk up the stairs. He followed. “He saw a photo of us, taken that night we went to kómma.” The night she’d realised how much she loved him. “He presumed the worst.” Her laugh was brittle. “No, actually, probably he read the situation just right. He was worried that you would hurt me. Just like your father hurt my mother. He did it to protect me.”
He swore in Greek. “Please just let me handle Xanthe so we can talk.”
And now, because she knew she would be leaving imminently, she lifted her hand to his cheek. He breathed in her closeness as though his life depended on it.
“No amount of talk can fix this.” She pressed a chaste kiss to his lips and moved backwards but he didn’t let her. He chased her lips, kissing her fiercely and possessively, as he had the first night they’d met. And though a sob escaped her mouth, finally she lost control of her self-protective shield.
She kissed him back and she tangled her hands in his hair. She pressed her body to his and she groaned as she realised how impossible it would be for her to ever feel whole again.
She broke the kiss and moved her body away. Her breath was ragged and her limbs were tingling.
“I know you must hate me,” he said gently, slowly, like talking to a scared horse.
But Elle cut him off. “That’s the thing. I don’t. I don’t hate you. But I know I’ll never love you again either. I have seen betrayal all my life. I have seen my mother love and lose men just like you and it turned her into the most bitter, pathetic woman you can imagine. That won’t be me. Not for you. Not for anyone.”
In business, Christos had learned early on that timing was everything.
Opportunities made fortunes depending on when they were seized. The hottest building in town could be a wasteland if opportunities were squandered.
And he’d lost his opportunity with Elle.
“Listen,” he said, following her up the next flight of stairs and into the bedroom they’d shared. “I want Filip to stay. I will do everything you say. I’ll back off on organising things. And I’ll ask Xanthe to give us some space. But he won’t stay now if you don’t.” And he judged himself harshly for the manipulations he was employing. “Stay for him.”
“Screw you,” she said under her breath. But she turned to face him. And there was such weary dejection on her face that he knew he would spend the rest of his life trying to fix it. To fix everything.
“Stay here,” he implored. “Let me go and talk to them both.”
She nodded, numb and miserable.
He spoke to Xanthe first, gently, kindly, but insistently. “It might only take days, mother, but we need some space to work this out first.” And he’d hugged her gently as he’d led her to her car.
Filip was a harder sell.
For the first time since meeting him, Christos could see the angry, hormonal teenager Elle had warned him about. But Christos had been one of those himself, and he still remembered that the feelings were volatile, controlling and dominant. He was careful not to give Filip the impression that he didn’t have a say in matters, but with several reassurances that Elle had been cleared of any wrongdoing, and strenuously apologised to, Filip agreed that he’d speak to Elle later; that if she was okay with staying, then so was he.
Christos returned to Elle’s room, bracing for the most important conversation of his life, to find her gone.
10
The music reached him only seconds later and he exhaled a long, slow sigh of relief before running down the stairs two at a time.
She sat at the piano, one hand in her lap, the other working prodigiously along the keys. Even one-handed she played beautifully. He came to the stool and slid in beside her.
He reached down and wrapped his fingers over hers; they were warm and strong. She didn’t look at him but he stared hungrily at her.
“I’m sorry.”
Her smile was wistful. “I know. But I think it’s more that you’re sorry you got it wrong than that you broke my heart.”
“God, when I think of what I said to you. The way I reacted. I had no right …”
“No,” she cut him off. “You didn’t.”
“The whole time we were together I was telling myself I couldn’t feel for you what I did. That you were dishonest and manipulative; that you had no morals. But it didn’t make sense, because I fell so hard in love with you despite all that.” He reached over and gently guided her face towards his. “I fell in love with you despite everything I thought I knew about you. So when the story broke I was so quick to blame you. I was almost relieved when I had a reason not to love you. When I could go back to just thinking the worst of you.”
She sobbed and stood up, wrapping her arms around herself. “That’s not love.”
“I loved you.” He insisted, moving to stand in front of her. “I still love you.”
“You can’t say the things you said when you’re in love. It doesn’t work like that. You wanted to hurt me. It’s like you aimed a gun right at me. Jesus. You have laid insult after insult at my feet. About me. About my mother. You have insulted where I live. You have interrogated me as though because we slept together you had every right to know everything about me …”
“Not because we slept together,” he denied hotly. “Because I loved you. Because you loved me. Because you are a mystery and I want to understand you. Because you’re a book and I want to read every single page of you. Because I wanted to hear you speak and tell your stories, all of them.”
She shoved at his chest. “No. Stop saying you loved me.” She lowered her voice. “If your mother hadn’t taken it into her head to meet Filip, you wouldn’t even have come to me.”
“That is definitely not true,” he promised thickly. “And I wanted to meet Filip too.” He linked his fingers through hers and lifted them to his lips. His kiss carried his promises. “But I was rude to you. About you. About your mother. And yes, about your home. I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Then what do you want?” She cried, pulling at her hands to wipe her tears.
“I want a second chance.”
“Why? So you can make me feel something for you again and then drop me off the edge of a cliff?” She straightened her shoulders and lowered her voice, impersonating his rich, deep timbre. “You’re a stupid whore with nothing to offer beyond your body. I wish I’d never met you. At least I know you meant nothing to me. You were nice to sleep with when I was in the mood but otherwise you were boring, etcetera, etcetera.”
Hearing her repeat the foul, ugly epithet back at him made him groan. “I was an asshole. Unforgivable. I understand why you’re scared. I’ve shown myself to be untrustworthy and unkind.” He cupped her face. “It’s not a defence. There is no defence. But I have never been in love before. I was terrified of how vulnerable it made me feel.”
“Oh, that must have been horrifying,” she sympathised sarcastically.
“Let me show you how sorry I am.”
She shook her head. “I’m here for Filip. I don’t want to think about … I want you to …” she closed her eyes and tried to marshal her thoughts. “If you truly care about me, then leave me alone. If you want me to be happy, stay away.”
But Christos couldn’t do that. For two days, he watched her from afar, hoping she would relax just enough to let her guard down. But every time he so much as entered the same room she was in, she flinched and switched into an automaton, going through the motions until she
could escape to a different part of his house.
When she left for New York, Christos was ready to admit that he was at the lowest ebb of his life, with no way to claw out of it. Loving a woman who didn’t remotely return those feelings was bad enough, but the realisation that he’d had her: that for one perfect week he’d had her and had stuffed it up: it filled him with the kind of self-loathing he wasn’t sure he could ever remove.
The summer passed with Filip becoming more and more like a brother to him. By the time Christos accompanied him back to the States and drove him to his exclusive boarding school, there was genuine affection between the two men.
And Christos would miss Filip, but there was a small part of him that was relieved. With Filip back at school, he could finally turn his attention to Elle.
It was early in the afternoon and the sun was still warm. Though Autumn was around the corner, and Elle was looking forward to the cool break. The air-conditioner in her apartment was incredibly unreliable.
She peeled her work clothes off bit by bit, tossing them into her hamper. She pulled a big loose tshirt on and then lay on the bed, fanning her cheeks with a magazine. The paint on the ceiling was getting worse. What had begun as some peeling had turned into long strips that were revealing a rather dubious yellow wallpaper that someone must have decided was a good idea at one point or another. She’d fix it. Perhaps she’d go back to that yellow paper.
What did it matter, anyway? She was the only one who ever saw it. And just like that, her traitorous body clenched with remembered desires and rewards, heavenly touch and release.
She thumped her hand into the pillow and pressed her head into it.
That was over! She had to put Christos out of her mind once and for all.
God knew leaving Athens hadn’t achieved that. The photos Filip had sent each night could almost have been hand-picked to make her fail. Pictures of Christos cooking a barbecue, selfies of the two of them in the pool, watching television, in a helicopter flying over the ocean.
Christos’s smiling face in every single picture had converted into fodder for her dreams. That smile, those eyes, they’d haunted her and placated her, though ultimately the confusion had made the dreams unbearable. Waking to find that he wasn’t on the other side of the bed had just dipped her back into the vat of pain anew.