him I’ll take it and get the paperwork started.’ He heard his voice disobey his brain’s orders and then snapped off his phone.
Instinct won.
And then he looked up and saw her walk into the bar with her husband and their families. And she would be his lover, Nico decided. For her, he would break his rules—would be her regular refuge. He saw the strain on her features, saw her eyes almost pleading as they met his.
How she pleaded.
Connie felt like a hostage, her family her captor, and there, most unexpectedly, was Nico and she wanted his arms, wanted not to be made love to tonight but to be held, to be shielded, to be carried down the ladder from the wreckage her family had built for her.
She watched him stand.
Watched as he lifted his hotel key and rather pointedly pocketed it, and knew now that tonight she could go there—that Nico would be there for her, that maybe what she had wished for last night was being offered: liaisons in Athens; passion and phone calls; an occasional escape to a secret life.
How much easier it would be to play along with the charade, to laugh along with her parents and later say farewell to them, to turn into her hotel suite and then, a discreet while later, knock on Nico’s door.
So badly she wanted to take the easy option—especially when it meant the sweet reward of Nico’s arms tonight—but Nico had awoken something else within her, had made her a woman in more ways than he knew, for though scared she felt stronger.
It was for that reason she left Nico waiting alone through what would prove the longest night, in a bed that had been scented by them.
‘I STILL can’t believe you would do this to your father.’ She’d heard it a hundred, perhaps a thousand times, and it still stung as much as it had the first time, but Connie held her head high.
‘I still can’t believe that he would have done that to me.’ She put the last of her things in her case, knew that her time here in Xanos was over for now. She had brought shame to the family—annulled the most celebrated marriage on the island—and there was no choice but to leave. The word was about to get out, the presents ready to be returned, the families confronted, the accusations and threats hurled, and through it all Connie had stayed calm, even when her father had, this very morning, collapsed with chest pain in his office and was, having been examined by the doctor, lying in his bed guarded by a nurse. When even that did not dissuade her, her mother had finally told her to get out. But now, as she tossed in a honeymoon dress that was still unworn and wrapped in unopened tissue paper, she thought of the excitement when she had bought it and she had to swallow down tears as she pulled the zipper closed on her case. The brave facade was slowly slipping.
They had been cruel in the face of her mutiny. Of course, she could make her own decisions, choose a different life—but if she lived here there were rules, and if she didn’t …
Her bank accounts had been linked to the family business. All now were closed. Her car, which had been a present, had been taken back, all her jewellery, too. She was not to take the luggage, her mother said, that had been bought for her honeymoon. So she had fitted what she could into a very old case, appalled they would treat her this way, while deep down she had known all along this was how it would be.
‘Your father worked so hard to give you everything. We are the richest in Xanos, the most respected, and you would destroy it, this how you treat him. This will kill him, Connie.’
It might.
Her father had played his trump card, lying in bed with chest pain, and, her mother savagely relayed, it would kill him should she still go ahead with the annulment. She should just get back in her box and be Stavros’s wife.
‘Let me see my father, explain to him …’ Connie said as she had many times this morning.
‘You’ve destroyed him, Connie,’ her mother sneered. ‘The doctor says he must rest, that there must be no more upset. Be a good girl for him and maybe he will get better.’
It would be so much easier to do.
But hadn’t her father clutched at his chest throughout her teenage years—every time she’d questioned, every time she’d considered a different choice, every time she had dared to venture out? It had been the same thing and she couldn’t live like this, couldn’t be good for the rest of her life, just to avoid a funeral.
‘I want a real marriage, Mum.’ Surely she must understand it. ‘Like you have. Can’t you see that?’ But it fell on deaf ears.
‘How will it be for Dimitri, for poor Stavros? Did you ever stop to think about that?’
She couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Even if he would have made the worst husband, her heart ached for Stavros, for both islands were the same in that respect—appearances, however false, were all that mattered to the island’s elite. Far from hating Stavros, Connie felt sorry for him. He was as trapped as she would have been, forced to live a lie because that was what family dictated.
‘If that’s what he wants,’ Connie’s voice trembled, ‘then Stavros will get another wife, poor woman.’ She added, ‘I just hope he has the guts to tell her this time before the wedding night.’
‘Your father—’
Connie couldn’t bear to discuss it even a moment longer. ‘If you won’t let me see him then I’ll leave him a note.’
‘If he lives to read it.’ Her mother burst into tears again. She had dressed from head to toe in black since the day Connie had gone to their hotel room and told them she could not live this life. She had emerged from their row in this costume, as if someone had died, rather than that her daughter had stood up for herself. ‘I’m going to lie down. You be gone when I get up.’
‘You’re not going to see me off?’
‘Today you should be returning from your honeymoon.’ She sobbed. ‘Today should be my proudest day.’
It was the hardest note she had ever written.
Connie went to her father’s study, which was the furthest room from her mother’s wailing, and closed the heavy door. It was room that had both intimidated and intrigued her as child, all forbidden cupboards and locked drawers, and it intimidated her now, but quietly she roamed, trying to work out what to say in her letter.
The more they told her that she couldn’t leave, the more she realised why she should.
Why absolutely she must.
Her hand moved to her stomach, and her mind moved to the question that had been begging for answer for days now.
She was late—just a day or two, but getting a pregnancy test on the island was impossible without causing gossip.
There were so many reasons for being late, Connie assured herself—the stress of the wedding and the aftermath.
After all, she had started on the Pill in readiness for her wedding.
