she’d stopped chatting to Sofia and was sitting back, her hands in her lap, the wind blowing her hair into golden tangles about her face. Her incredibly pale face, and belatedly Angelos noticed how her fists were clenched, how she was starting to tremble.
He knew they shouldn’t have gone in the boat.
‘Talia.’ He slid off his seat and reached for her hands; they were ice cold. She didn’t even look at him. ‘Talia,’ he said again, his voice hard and insistent, and she blinked him back into focus.
‘Sorry...’ she whispered, and Angelos muttered a curse.
‘You have nothing to be sorry about.’
‘It’s just...we can’t see land any more...’ Her teeth chattered and Angelos slid next to her, putting an arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, closing her eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ he murmured. ‘It’s going to be okay. We’ll get to land, we’ll be safe. I’ll keep you safe.’ The words echoed through him, a promise he meant utterly and yet feared was hollow. After all, he’d broken it before.
Sofia turned to look at them, her face going nearly as pale as Talia’s as she took in her nanny’s sickly expression.
‘Talia...’
Talia gave her a weak, apologetic smile and silently Sofia slid her hand into hers. Angelos went back to the tiller, guiding them as quickly as he could towards the shore.
The boat sped swiftly over the water; he kept glancing at Talia, making sure she was okay. Her face was pale but she lifted her chin bravely and squeezed Sofia’s hand.
‘I’m okay, Sofia,’ she told the girl. ‘Don’t worry, please.’
The realisation that even in the midst of her suffering and fear, Talia was able to comfort his daughter, cared enough to comfort her, made something expand painfully in Angelos’s chest.
He turned away quickly, not trusting the expression on his face, and steered them on to Naxos.
AS SOON AS the sailboat reached the jetty, Angelos leapt out and tethered it before turning to Talia, his arms outstretched. She fell into his embrace clumsily, because her legs were so shaky, and heat scorched her once pale face as her panic started to recede, replaced by an almost as awful embarrassment.
‘You must think...’ she muttered as she stepped away from him.
‘I think you’re very brave, to go on this boat for my daughter’s sake,’ Angelos murmured. His hands still rested on her shoulders, his palms warm through the thin fabric of her sundress. ‘Thank you,’ he added, and then he released her to help Sofia out of the boat.
His words whirled through her mind as they set up camp on the stretch of beach by the harbour, the sand soft and warm beneath her bare feet.
‘I think you’re very brave.’ Did Angelos really mean that? She didn’t feel brave. She felt like the worst wimp, unable to hack so much as an hour in a sailboat. What kind of sad sack wasn’t able to manage that?
Talia had accepted her limitations for so long they had stopped bothering her. At least, she’d thought they had. But now that she was experiencing more of life, both with Sofia and Angelos, she was coming to realise how little she’d had these last seven years...and how much she still wanted.
They spent the morning on the beach and then walked into the town of Chora for lunch. As they approached the whitewashed buildings, colourful cafés with striped awnings and tables outside, Talia watched as Sofia seemed to shrink into herself. Her hair slid in front of her face, her shoulders hunched, her whole demeanour making Talia think the girl wanted to hide herself.
In the nearly two weeks since she’d been on Kallos, Talia had grown so used to Sofia’s face, to her bright smile and beautiful eyes as well as the puckered, reddened flesh that covered her entire cheek. She’d stopped noticing it at all, and Sofia had been much less self-conscious. But now she saw the shyness and insecurity come back, and she could tell Angelos noticed it too. As his daughter hid behind a curtain of curly dark hair, Angelos’s scowl deepened, a deep furrow carved between his straight eyebrows.
‘Where shall we go?’ Talia asked brightly. She was determined to rescue this day and keep it special and happy for Sofia’s sake. It wasn’t every day a girl turned nine, after all. In hesitant, clumsy Greek, she asked Sofia where she would like to eat.
‘There,’ Sofia said, pointing to a café at the end of the street, and they headed towards it.
‘You have learned some Greek,’ Angelos remarked as they took their seats at one of the tables outside.
‘Ava has been teaching me. I did ask Maria to ask you—’
‘Yes, I remember. I said yes. And I am pleased you have made the effort.’ He smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners, and Talia just about melted into a pool of slushy sentimentality.
She’d known she’d be a sucker for Angelos’s smile.
In fact, as they ordered their meals and enjoyed the sunshine, chatting in a mixture of English and Greek, she started daydreaming that they were actually a family. That Angelos actually loved her.
The realisation of what she was fantasising about had her jolting upright, nearly spilling her drink.
Angelos’s smile disappeared as he took in her pale face and slack jaw. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked in a low voice. ‘This isn’t too much for you?’
‘It’s fine,’ Talia assured him with a shaky smile. And actually it was fine. She, who avoided crowds and cities, was actually enjoying sitting in a restaurant like a normal person.
It was Sofia she had been concerned about, until her fantasies about Angelos had derailed her whole thought process. Did she really want him to love her?
Did she love him?
‘Talia?’ Angelos’s voice was tight with tension as he frowned at her, clearly concerned.
‘It’s okay.’ She rested her hand on his, and then snatched it back when just the slide of skin across skin sent sensation skittering through her nerve endings. ‘I’m fine. Really.’
Yet thoughts continued to zing through her mind as they ate lunch and then wandered through the town’s street market. Love was such a huge concept, and one she didn’t have a lot of experience with. Not romantic love anyway.
And you can’t be in love with Angelos. You barely know him. A week together, a single night of comfort...
Mindlessly she studied some fabric piled on a market stall, green silk shot through with gold thread. Angelos joined her, standing so close she could feel the heat of his body, inhaled the scent of his aftershave, and had to close her eyes against the wave of desire that crashed over her.
‘You would look lovely in that,’ he said, gesturing to the silk.
Talia’s heart lurched alarmingly. ‘Oh, I don’t know...’
