Dazed, she glanced away and focused her attention on the boat, appearing fascinated by its sleek lines, gleaming fiberglass deck and oiled teak. “So this weekend is all about proving a point?”
“No. That’s the trouble. Now it’s about you and me, and feelings I never bargained for. I tried to tell you this the other night, but I lost my nerve.”
She wasn’t listening. Instead she was scrambling to her feet and swinging her head wildly from side to side, a wounded creature desperate to escape her tormentor.
Springing to her side, he trapped her in his arms. She lashed out at him, catching him a glancing blow on the jaw. “Let me go!” she spat. “Don’t ever touch me again!”
“You’re not hearing me, Emily,” he told her urgently. “Everything’s different now.”
“Sure it is.” She was sobbing. The sound drove splinters through his heart. “You’ve finally shown your true colors.”
“No, Emily. I made a stupid mistake.”
“So you decided to make it up to me by giving me a weekend to remember? How tedious you must have found it, pretending you wanted to have sex with me.”
“I wasn’t pretending! For God’s sake, Emily, you of all people know a man can’t pretend.”
“So how did you manage? By closing your eyes and imagining I was someone else?”
He crushed her to him, shocked. “Never. It was always you. Only you, right from the start. I just didn’t realize it at the time.”
“And here I thought we’d put to rest that whole ludicrous notion that I was some sort of fortune hunter out to fleece your poor father.” She wasn’t crying now. She was encased in ice.
“We have,” he protested. “You are what you’ve always been, as beautiful on the inside as you are on the surface.”
“I don’t feel beautiful,” she said tonelessly. “I feel stupid and pathetic, because I let myself fall in love with you.”
“Then I guess we’re both stupid and pathetic, because that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m falling in love with you, too, and the damnable thing is, I don’t know what the hell to do about it.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “You get over it. We both do.”
The look on his face told her it wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Why should we?” he whispered against her mouth.
But the damage was done and nothing he said or did could put things right again. “Because there’s no future in it for either of us.” She pulled away just far enough to look him in the eye, then added pointedly, “Is there?”
“If you’re asking me to predict what might happen tomorrow, I can’t, Emily. All any of us ever has is today. Can’t you let that be enough?”
Temporary bliss, in exchange for long-term misery? Not a chance! She was in enough pain already, and prolonging the inevitable would merely increase the agony. “No. I made up my mind long before I met you that relationships heading nowhere are a waste of time.”
“I could change your mind, if you’d let me.”
She was terribly afraid that he could, and knew she had to get away from him before he succeeded. He was kissing her eyes, her hair, her throat. Stroking his hands down her arms and up her bare back with killing tenderness. Sabotaging her with caresses when words failed to get him what he wanted, and already her resistance was dissolving under the attack.
“I don’t want to be here with you anymore,” she said, clinging to her vanishing resolve with the desperation of a drowning woman. “Take me back to the mainland.”
“I will,” he murmured. “Tomorrow.”
“Tonight.”
“Ohi…no.” He lifted her off her feet and set her down in the cockpit. Traced his lips over her cheek and brought his mouth to hers and kissed her softly.
He made her legs shake, her insides quiver. He made her heart yearn. “Please,” she whimpered helplessly.
“Give me one last night, my Emily.”
“I can’t.”
He touched her fleetingly between the legs. “Tell me why not, when I know you want me as much as I want you.”
She shuddered, caught in the clenching grip of rising passion. “Tell me why I’m inexplicably drawn to a man who isn’t at all my kind of man,” she countered.
“And what kind of man is that?”
“The kind who’s not afraid of love. Who’s happy with a nine-to-five job and a mortgage,” she said, grasping at a truth she’d refused to acknowledge until now. “The safe kind who doesn’t need to flirt with danger all the time in order to find fulfillment.”
“Then you’re right. I’m definitely not your kind of man.”
But he pulled her closer, and the way her body tilted to meet his, welcoming the questing nudge of his erection, proclaimed otherwise. As if she’d finally found what she’d always been looking for. As if he was exactly her kind of man.
She was lost, and she knew it. The irrepressible pulse of his flesh against hers enthralled her. Lured her into forgetting how he had deceived and used her. Nothing mattered except to know again the pleasure only he could give. If, the next day or the next week, he reneged on his protestations of love, at least she’d have this weekend to remember him by.
The hunger, rapacious, insatiable, spiraled to unbearable heights. Casting aside all pretense at dignity, she sprawled on the cockpit cushions. At once, he was on top of her. Thrusting inside her, hot, heavy, demanding.
Perfectly attuned, they rose and sank together, pausing at just the right moment to drown in each other’s gaze. There was no need for words to justify a decision that went against everything they’d just said to each other. They had come together because they could not stay apart. It was as simple as that.
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN they finally stirred and she mentioned that she’d like to freshen up, Niko ran a critical hand over his jaw, said he could use a shower and shave himself and told her not to rush. “We have all the time in the world,” he said. “We’ll have mezedes and wine and watch the moon rise, then eat dinner when the mood takes us.”
So she indulged herself in a leisurely bath, and shampooed the saltwater out of her hair. After toweling herself dry, she massaged lotion into her sun-kissed skin, spritzed a little cologne at her elbows and behind her knees and put on the silk caftan, glad she’d had the good sense to smuggle it aboard. He’d said he was in love with her, but she sensed he’d made the admission reluctantly, and pinned little hope on his feeling the same way in the morning. If so, and if this turned out to be their last night together, she intended it to be one neither of them would soon forget.
Nor did they, but not for the reasons she’d supposed. The very second she joined him in the main cabin, she knew their plans had changed. He’d showered—his damp hair attested to that—but he hadn’t shaved. There was no sign of the appetizers he’d mentioned, no tempting aromas drifting from the oven, no wine chilling. All that lay on the table was his cell phone, and one look at his face told her it had been the bearer of bad news. “Something’s happened,” she said, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Yes. I’m afraid we have to head back right away.”
“Is it Pavlos?”
He shook his head. “I just got word from my director of operations that we’ve lost contact with one of our pilots in north Africa. He was scheduled to pick up an injured Red Cross worker from a refugee camp. He never showed up.”
“What can you do about it?”
He stared at her as if she wasn’t in command of all her faculties. “Go find him. What did you think—that I’d sit back and leave him stranded in the desert?”
“No, of course not.” She swallowed, stung by his brusque tone. “Is there any way that I can help?”
“Change into something warmer, for a start. That thing you’ve got on won’t do. Quite a stiff onshore breeze has sprung up. It’ll be a chilly trip back to the mainland.”
She must have looked as forlorn as she felt because when he spoke again, his voice softened. “I know you’re disappointed, Emily. I am, too. This isn’t how I’d foreseen the evening playing out. But when situations like this come up, I’m afraid everything else has to go on hold. A man’s life could be at stake.”
“I understand,” she said. And she did. Completely. But what about his life? How safe would he be, rushing off to the rescue without knowing the danger he might be facing? “Will it be risky, your going looking for him?”
“It’s possible, but so what? Risks come with the job. You get used to it.”
You, maybe, but not me, she thought, the harsh reality of his vocation hitting home with a vengeance for the first time and filling her with apprehension. “How will you know where to start looking for him?”
“If he’s turned on his epurb—electronic positioning beacon, that is—it’ll lead me straight to him. If not, I’m familiar with the area, I know where he was headed and his coordinates before he lost contact.”
“What if you still don’t find him?”
“That’s not an option,” he said flatly. “He’s just a kid of twenty-three, the eldest of four children and the only son of a widow. It’s my job to locate him and bring him home to his family. They need him.”
“But what if—?”
He silenced her with a swift, hard kiss. “No ‘what ifs.’ It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this, and it won’t be the last. I’ll be back before you know it—by tomorrow night at the latest, but we really need to get going now if I’m to be ready to set out at first light in the morning.”
Set out to where? Some vast arid region miles from civilization? Some rebel stronghold where human life didn’t count for a thing? “Then I’d better get organized,” she said, and turned away before he saw the desolation in her eyes.
“At least my father will be glad to have you back earlier than expected.”
“I suppose.”
He came up behind her and wound his arms around her waist. “Did I mention how lovely you look, Emily?” he said softly against her hair.
On the outside, maybe. But inside, she was falling apart.
The nurse who’d replaced her was so happy to be relieved of her job, she practically flew out of the villa before Emily stepped in. “Is impossible!” she screeched, indignation fracturing her English almost past recognition. “He die, then me niazi! I do not care. One day more, I break his neck. Adio. Please not call me again. Apokliete!”
“Have a nice night,” Emily said wearily, as the front door slammed shut in her face.
Pavlos didn’t even pretend to hide his glee when she appeared at breakfast the next morning. “Didn’t take you long to come to your senses, did it, girl?” he crowed.
“Try to behave yourself for a change, Pavlos,” she snapped. “I’m in no mood for your shenanigans.”
He smirked into his coffee cup. “That bad, was it? Could have told you it would be.”
“For your information, I had a wonderful time. The only reason I came back early is that your son has gone searching for a young pilot lost somewhere over the Sahara.”
His derision faded into something approaching concern, but he covered it quickly. “Damned fool! Serve him right if he got himself killed.”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say that.”
“Why not?” he retorted. “Ignoring the facts isn’t going to change them. Wherever the latest hotbed of unrest shows up, you can bet he’ll be there, and one of these days he’ll push his luck too far.”
Ill-timed though it might be, the truth of his answer could not be denied, and how she got through the rest of the day she didn’t know. The minutes dragged, the hours lasted a small eternity. Morning became afternoon, then evening and, all too soon, night. Every time the phone rang, her heart plummeted. And sank lower still when the call brought no news of Niko.
“Better get used to this if you plan on sticking with him,” Pavlos advised her, as the dinner hour came and went without any word.
“The same way you have?” she shot back. “You talk a good line, Pavlos, but you’re as worried about him as I am.”
“Not me,” he huffed, but there was no real conviction in his tone and his gaze wandered to the clock on the wall every bit as often as hers did. “Where did you say he’d gone?”
“North Africa—the desert—I’m not sure exactly.”
“Hmm.” He drummed his arthritic old fingers on the edge of the table. “That’s a lot of ground for one man to cover.”
She closed her eyes. Fear beat a tattoo in her blood.
“Go to bed, Emily,” Pavlos said with uncommon gentleness. “I’ll wait up and let you know if we hear anything.”
As if she could sleep! “I’m not tired. You should rest, though.”
But neither made any move. Anxiety thick as molasses held them paralyzed.
Just after eleven o’clock, the phone shrieked into the silence one last time. Hands shaking, she grabbed it on the first ring. “Niko?”
She heard his smile. “Who else were you expecting at this hour?”
“No one…you…but it grew so late and you hadn’t called—”
“You’re going to have to learn to believe what I tell you, Emily,” he said. “I promised I’d be back today, and I am.”
“Yes.” Giddy with relief, she reached for Pavlos’s hand and squeezed it. “Where are you now?”
“At the office. I’ll be heading home as soon as I’ve filed my report.”
“And the man you went to find?”
“Had a fire in his control panel that knocked out his communications system. He made an emergency landing on a deserted Second World War airstrip. There are dozens of them, hundreds even, all over the Sahara. The one he chose lay nearly two hundred kilometers from where he was supposed to be, but his epurb was still working and led me straight to him.”
“And he’s okay?”
“He’s fine, though I wish I could say the same for the aircraft. But the good news is, we picked up the man he was supposed to bring back and got him to a hospital, albeit twenty-four hours later than expected.”
“You’ve put in a long day and must be exhausted.”
“Nothing an early night won’t fix. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“I can’t wait,” she said. “I missed you.”
“Same here, karthula.” His yawn echoed down the line. “I’d come over now, but—”
“Don’t even think about it. Go home and catch up on your sleep.”
“Will do. Kali nikhta, my sweet Emily.”
“Kali nikhta,” she replied. “Good night.”
In the days following, she should have been completely happy. Although he vetoed any suggestion that he should terminate her employment, Pavlos was on the road to recovery and didn’t need her as he once had. Accepting that she and his son were an item, he compromised by letting her take the weekends off.
She lived for the sheer heaven of those two days and nights. Niko’s spacious penthouse in Kolonaki was their retreat. The living and dining rooms and en suite guest room opened onto a terrace. A small library and starkly modern kitchen comprised the rest of the main floor, with a gorgeous master suite upstairs. The decor was as spare and elegant as he himself, lacking any of the usual personal touches like photographs, but the huge collection of books and CDs told her much about his tastes and hinted at a man content with his own company.
He did his best to please her during their time together; to make it seem they were like any other couple in love. Working around his erratic schedule, they explored the countryside, going by scooter if the weather allowed but, with the cooler temperatures of November, more often by car.
They hiked in the pine-covered hills behind the town, took a picnic hamper and sailed down the coast of the Attic peninsula. Sometimes, they drove to out-of-the-way villages where they sampled wonderful local dishes in quaint, unpretentious tavernas whose walls were lined with wine barrels. Other times, they went into Athens and dined in fine style on the best the city had to offer. They danced cheek to cheek in the Grande Bretagne Hotel; made passionate love in his king-size bed.
If he had to break a date—and he did, often—he sent her flowers, or texted messages to her in the night so that she found them on waking. In return, she tried to keep her anxiety under control when he was away, but never knew a moment’s real peace until he returned. She couldn’t sleep and walked the floor half the night. She couldn’t eat because anxiety robbed her of her appetite. Noticing, Pavlos never missed the chance to tell her she was making the biggest mistake of her life.
She learned to live with all of it because the alternative—to put an end to it—was unthinkable.
Once, when Niko discovered he’d left his cell phone on his desk at work and had to go back to get it, he took her with him and showed her around the private airfield that served as his base of operations. The flat-roofed office building had only four rooms but was equipped with the latest in electronic equipment. Probably the aircraft sitting on the tarmac were, too, but when Emily first saw them, what struck her most forcibly was how flimsy they seemed.
“Are they what you use to fly overseas?” she asked, trying to mask her dismay.
Discerning it anyway, Niko laughed and said, “Were you expecting hot air balloons, my darling?”
“No, but these things are so small and…old-fashioned.”
“Old-Fashioned?” He regarded her in mock horror over the top of his aviator sunglasses.
“Well, yes. They’ve each got two sets of those spider-leg propellor things stuck on the front.”
“I know,” he said dryly. “They’re what get them off the ground and keep them in the air.”
“But why wouldn’t you use jets? Surely they’re faster?”
“Faster, but not nearly as versatile or fuel-efficient. Twin-engine piston aircraft like these don’t require nearly as long a runway as a jet, can land just about anywhere and fly at a much lower altitude.” He eyed her mischievously. “Would you like me to take you up in one and show you what it can do?”
“No, thanks,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll take your word for it.”
As they were leaving, they ran into Dinos Melettis, Niko’s second-in-command. “Bring her to dinner,” he insisted, after the introductions were made. “Come today. We have nothing on the board until later in the week, which makes it a good night to relax with friends, and Toula would love to meet the lady in your life. Toula,” he added to Emily in an aside, “is my wife.”
They accepted the invitation and had a delightful evening. “Never before has Niko brought a ladyfriend to our home,” Toula confided to Emily in her careful English. “He is very enamored of you, I think.”
The way he pressed his knee against hers under cover of the table and muttered between courses that he couldn’t wait to get her alone again, Emily thought so, too. Yet for all that the passion between them burned brighter by the day, not once in all those weeks did they talk about the future. To do so would have shattered a present made forever uncertain by the demands of his job.
Although Emily did her best to live with that, what she couldn’t get over, what terrified her, was the nature of the work that took him away from her, and the fact he always assigned himself to the most dangerous missions.
When she dared to ask him why, he said, “Because I have the most experience and the least to lose.”
“But what about Vassili?” she pressed, referring to another colleague they’d bumped into one day at a kafenion in Athens. “You told me he’s one of the most skilled pilots you’ve ever come across.”
“He also has a wife and two-year-old son at home,” Niko replied.
His answer and all it implied chilled her to the bone.
One Sunday evening in mid November, they stood on the terrace outside his penthouse, sipping cognac and admiring the night view of Athens spread out below. But even though Niko appeared perfectly relaxed and content, a shimmering tension emanated from him, one Emily now recognized all too well, and she braced herself for what she knew was coming.
He didn’t leave her in suspense very long. “I’m off again tomorrow,” he said, as deceptively casual as if he were planning to play golf, but then added guardedly, “I might be gone a bit longer than usual.”
In other words, this undertaking was riskier than most. “How much longer?”
“Three days, possibly four, but you can count on my being home by the weekend.”
“Where to this time?”
“Africa again.”
A typically ambiguous reply. He never elaborated about his exact itinerary, was always deliberately vague about why he had to go. Delivering food and clothing to an orphanage…survival kits to a village cut off by a landslide…a medivac rescue…supplies to a field hospital, he’d say offhandedly when she questioned him, then quickly change the subject.
But she knew it was never as straightforward or simple as he made it sound. If it were, he wouldn’t come back looking so drawn. He wouldn’t wake up bathed in sweat from a nightmare he refused to talk about. He wouldn’t reach for her in the night as if she was all that stood between him and an abyss of utter despair.
“Where in Africa?” she persisted now.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes, it matters.”
He hesitated and she hung on tenterhooks, waiting for his answer. When he told her, it was so much worse than anything she’d let herself contemplate, was such a hellhole of violence, devastation and peril, that she felt sick to her stomach.
She knew how she was supposed to respond. Calmly. With acceptance. And she couldn’t do it. Not this time. Instead she started to cry.
“Ah, Emily,” he murmured and held her close. “Don’t do this. We still have tonight.”
But she’d broken the rules and commited the cardinal sin of wanting tomorrow, and tonight was no longer enough.
Her tears caught him off guard. Angry with himself for distressing her, and with her, too, because she’d known from the first the career he’d chosen for himself, he said, “This is why, until now, I’ve avoided serious involvement with a woman. When I take off on assignment, my attention has to focus on people whose lives, for one reason or another, are in jeopardy. Worrying about you is a distraction I neither need nor can afford.”
“I know.” She swiped at her tears and attempted a valiant smile. “I’m being selfish and unreasonable. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not usually so emotional.”
She hadn’t been during the early days of their affair, he had to admit. Lately, though, the smallest thing seemed to upset her. Just last week, he’d gone to pick her up at the villa and found her all teary-eyed over a bird that had flown into a window and broken its neck. He wasn’t very happy about the poor thing’s untimely end, either, but she knew every bit as well as he did that death was part of life and didn’t differentiate between old and young, guilty or innocent.
“If this is harder than you thought it would be and want out,” he said now, “just say so. I’ll understand.”
She closed her eyes against another bright gleam of tears and shook her head. “More than anything else, I want you.”
“Even with all the baggage I bring with me?”
“Even then.”
He wanted her, too. Enough that he’d willfully overstepped the limitations he’d imposed on his personal life prior to knowing her. And at that moment, with her body haloed in the nimbus of light from the city, and her beautiful face upturned to his in vulnerable despair, he had never wanted her more. “Then come with me now,” he whispered, drawing her inside and up the spiral staircase to the bedroom. “Let’s not waste the few hours remaining before I have to leave you.”
That night, unlike some when his desire for her overrode any attempt at finesse, he loved her at leisure. Caring only about pleasing her and driving the demons of fear from her mind, he kissed her all over. He seduced her with his hands, with his tongue. He hoarded the scent and texture of her skin. He watched the slow, hot flush of passion steal over her, tasted the honeyed warmth between her thighs. He commited to memory the tight rosy buds of her nipples and the little cry she made when she came.
