‘You get me to yourself for the whole week.’
‘Lucky me,’ she muttered under her breath.
‘No, agapi mou, lucky me. Time to stop what you’re doing—dinner’s ready.’
‘I’ve told Natassa I’ll eat in here.’
‘It’s eight o’clock.’
She raised a shoulder and tapped something on her keyboard with one hand while pushing her glasses up her nose with the other. ‘I’m in the middle of something.’
‘The middle of avoiding me?’
‘Don’t flatter yourself.’
‘Then look at me.’
He saw her eyes close briefly behind the large frames before she fixed her gaze on him, her beautiful face unreadable...except for the clenching of her jaw. Helena was in no way as nonchalant as she pretended to be. Since their kiss earlier, she had avoided looking him in the eye. She had spoken to him only when she had to. The carefully put-together appearance that had had an air of dishevelment earlier had deteriorated.
It was time to go for the kill.
‘Tomorrow morning, we are going to Agon.’
She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. ‘We? What for?’
‘To meet the magician creating the sculptures for my garden. We’ll sail after breakfast.’
‘I don’t need to meet the sculptor.’
‘I disagree and, as I am paying for your time and effort, I’m not going to take no for an answer. Enjoy your meal at your desk—if you decide to leave your office to smell the fresh air and share a drink with me, you’ll find me on the terrace.’
Her face pinched in on itself. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Do.’ Then, unable to resist a parting shot he knew would get a wonderful rise out of her, he added, ‘And if I’m not on the terrace then I will be in bed. You are more than welcome to join me there too.’
The rise he’d hoped for didn’t materialise verbally but he noted the tremor of her shoulders and the shaking of her hand as she tucked another lock of hair behind her pretty ear and pretended to ignore him.
Whistling jauntily, he left her to her own lonely company.
Helena dried herself off from her shower and slipped her nightshirt over her head. The spring she’d woken up with that morning had rusted and broken. She was exhausted. Her eyes hurt as much as her brain from concentrating so hard on her work and from trying to forget the kiss.
She might have succeeded in pushing the kiss from her mind but her body had not allowed her to forget. The beats of her heart had become totally erratic. Her lips tingled. Her skin felt as if electrodes had been placed under the surface. And, now that she had no computer screen to distract her, she could not stop reliving every glorious, hateful second of it.
Why had she responded that way? she wondered with clawing desperation as she turned her bedroom’s air-conditioning unit off and opened the window. Sitting herself on the windowsill, she inhaled sweet-scented fresh air into her lungs, praying it would help clear her mind.
It had always been like this, she thought miserably. Theo had been like a drug to her. One touch had always been enough to make her lose her mind. It destroyed her to know that nothing had changed. She was still a slave to his touch.
Distant laughter tinkled through the open window. She thought it sounded like Elli. Natassa took life very seriously but Elli had a lightness of spirit Helena envied. As a child she’d longed to be someone fun, a girl the other children would gravitate towards, but she’d found it impossible. She didn’t know how to be fun or tell the jokes that made others laugh. Laughter was not something often found in the Armstrong home, not with a stern, elderly English father who ruled the household with an iron fist and a mother forbidden to work or have anything that resembled independence.
In recent years, Helena had asked her mother many times why she stayed in such a marriage. The answer was always a stoical, ‘I made my vows.’
She tried to understand. Her mother had been nineteen and just finishing her first year at an English university when she’d been swept off her feet by one of the university’s dashing professors thirty years her senior. Six months later they were married and her mother’s university life was over as she was remodelled into the perfect wife. Her father entertained his colleagues and star students frequently and expected the house always to be immaculate and the food served to be perfect.
Helena remembered asking her mother once what she’d wanted to be as a child. Her mother had looked away before wistfully saying the life she had was the life she’d always wanted.
Her mother, she’d been certain, had been lying, not to Helena but to herself, a certainty that had crystallised through the years as she’d realised that the way her father ran their household was not normal and hadn’t been normal for at least a hundred years. On the rare occasions they’d travelled to Agon without him, her mother became a different woman, the woman Helena was sure her father had first fallen in love with. Why marry someone with such vivacity only to snuff all the life out of them?
The day before she’d been due to marry Theo, they’d had lunch with her parents. Helena had watched her mother sit silently while her father and Theo demolished a bottle of wine. The two men’s raucous laughter about a woman’s role in marriage alongside her mother’s downcast face had been the spurs for the fateful conversation that had broken them. Helena had been halfway into falling into the same trap. She’d let Theo make all the decisions and have his own way on everything, including his insistence that they marry as soon as possible. She’d been a little lamb following its master.
If she’d married Theo, everything she was and everything she could be would have been subsumed by him, just as her mother had allowed the essence of herself to be subsumed by her father... If
