A sick feeling of dread and deep reluctance filled her.
Can I face it? Can I truly face it? Once my anger and my hurt and my outrage have worn off? Once I’m back in that dump of a bedsit, listening to the addicts and the drunks in the other bedsits? Hearing the endless traffic in the street, smelling the damp in the walls...spending my days slogging to clean up other people’s filth and my nights trying to stay awake to study, because study is the only hope I have of escaping from the life my father’s callousness has condemned me to...
The grim, bleak life she would be condemned to again.
Unless...
CHAPTER SIX
SHE FELT HER hands clench in her lap. Made herself look at the man who had just said what he had said. His eyes were resting on her, his expression veiled. He was waiting for her to answer him.
‘So,’ Alexandros Lakaris said, his voice level, eyes resting on her still, ‘what do you say?’
She couldn’t answer him. Not yet. Too much was in her head. He seemed to realise that, because his expression changed, became less intent. He was backing off. Giving her space.
She saw him sit back, pour himself more coffee.
‘It’s a lot to take in—for both of us.’
There was a smoothness in his voice now, and the slightest masking of the expression in his amazingly dark deep eyes. Eyes which she was all too aware she just wanted to go on gazing into, despite all the tumult in her beleaguered mind.
How easy it would be, she found herself thinking, just to go on looking into them...letting all the stormy emotions twisting inside her subside, letting herself just fall into that dark, gold-flecked gaze...
How tempting...
But he was continuing, easing his shoulders, reaching for his refilled coffee cup. ‘So what I suggest is this. Don’t rush back to London just yet. Stay tonight, at the very least, in Athens. I’ll book you into a hotel at my expense,’ he emphasised, ‘because it’s only fair that you have enough time to think about your answer.’
He drained his coffee and got to his feet, holding out his hand to her. ‘Come—let’s get some fresh air. A stroll by the sea will do us both good.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘It’s been a strenuous two days—and an emotional roller coaster for you.’
She let him draw her up, because it seemed easier to do so, let him fold her hand into the crook of his arm and pat it with brief reassurance. He led her out of the restaurant, pausing only to settle the bill with a flick of a gold-trimmed credit card. Then they were out on the pavement, and he was guiding her across the road to the seafront.
The warm sun was like a blessing on her, and she felt its benediction on her confused, exhausted emotions as they strolled along.
Alexandros Lakaris was pointing out a couple of islands visible out to sea, mentioning how the bay had once, in Athens’s Classical Golden Age, been the scene of the famous battle of Salamis against Persian invaders, telling her about Greece’s struggles so long ago.
Rosalie listened, glad of the diversion from her turbid thoughts and emotions, finding herself interested in what he was saying. She knew so little about Greece, ancient or modern...
But it’s my heritage—just as much as my English heritage! A heritage I’ve been denied. And even if my father is a man to deplore and be ashamed of, that doesn’t mean I have to reject everything about this side of me!
She felt her gaze flick from the seascape to the man at her side, as they strolled along the promenade in the afternoon warmth. Strolling along as if they were already a couple...
But it’s absurd what he’s suggested, isn’t it? Surely it is?
Her thoughts swirled within her, impossible to make sense of. All she knew right now was that somehow, and she did not know how, it seemed to be so very easy, so very relaxed, to be walking along like this, in a leisurely fashion, with his tall figure beside her matching his steps to hers.
He took them to the start of the marina.
‘Do you have a yacht?’ Rosalie heard herself asking, looking at all the boats bobbing on the water.
He shook his head. ‘A dinghy,’ he said. ‘I keep it moored at Kallistris.’
‘Kallistris?’
‘My island.’
Rosalie’s eyes widened. ‘Your island? You have an island? A whole island to yourself?’
He looked amused. ‘It’s a very small island,’ he said. ‘But it is my favourite place on earth.’
His expression changed and she lifted her eyes to his. There had been emotion in his voice—deep emotion.
‘Tell me about it,’ she heard herself say.
They resumed their stroll, walking along the edge of the quay on old cobbles, near the water lapping and slapping against the hulls of the moored yachts.
‘It’s reachable by helicopter and I go there whenever I can,’ Alexandros Lakaris was saying.
His voice warmed with fond affection—she could hear it. ‘There’s very little on it. Goats, mostly! And an old fisherman’s cottage by the beach, done up as a villa now. There’s a smallholding inland, where Panos and Maria live—they look after the place for me. It’s very peaceful.’
‘It sounds lovely,’ Rosalie said wistfully.
A whole island all to yourself, set in this azure sea, beneath this golden sun... A world, a universe away from the squalid back streets of the East End.
‘So, what would you like to do now?’ Alexandros Lakaris was asking her as they reached the far side of the quay. ‘Shall we go for a drive? And then back into Athens?’
She gave a nod. It was easier to let him make the decisions, easier to go with the flow.
Maybe it would be sensible to spend one more night here. To at least think over what he’s thrown at me.
Was it really as absurd as it sounded? When the alternative was so grim... When she’d had a brief, tantalising taste of the kind of luxurious life she could enjoy for months and months if she went with what he’d so extraordinarily suggested.
And at the end of those months she could go back to England with the divorce settlement he was promising her after he’d got the merger he wanted.
Into her head sprang visions of the kind of life she could lead if she did not have to go back to the bleak, exhausting slog she’d come from.
I could get out of London! Move to the country or a beautiful cathedral town! Or even the seaside. Make a completely new life for myself! A life of my own choosing.
The vision hovered in her head. So incredibly tempting...
They reached the car and he opened the passenger door for her. As he did so, he paused, frowning, as if something had just struck him.