stood, then reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and extracted a card from the marina where he was staying. She flinched as he tucked it into the front pocket of her jeans. “Don’t make this decision because you hate me, Stella. Make it for what you believe in. Make it for Akathinia. If the military isn’t handcuffed, they will seek to finish the job they started when they took that Akathinian ship last year. Lives will be lost.”
Her chin dropped, her lithe body tense, caught in the middle of a storm. “I know you,” he murmured. “You’ll do the right thing.”
“No, you don’t.” She shook her head slowly, a wealth of emotion throbbing in those blue eyes. “You don’t know anything about me.”
KOSTAS COULDN’T KNOW her because she clearly didn’t know herself at this moment in time. The fact that she was even entertaining his proposition was ludicrous.
Stella paced the terrace of Jessie’s oceanfront villa, smoke coming out of her ears. How dare he come here? How dare he throw that guilt trip at her? She had come to Barbados to get her head together, to figure out what she wanted to be. Instead, he had dumped the weight of two countries on her shoulders; issued that parting salvo that had her head spinning...
If the military isn’t handcuffed, they will seek to finish the job they started when they took that Akathinian ship last year.
Her stomach plummeted, icy tendrils of fear clutching her insides. Five crew members had died when a renegade Carnelian commander had taken an Akathinian ship during routine military exercises in the waters between Akathinia and Carnelia last year. If Kostas lost control of Carnelia and the military seized power, Akathinia was in danger.
But to marry him to protect her country? Commit herself to a union of duty, something she’d vowed never to do?
She halted her incessant pacing. Leaned her forearms on the railing of the terrace and looked out at the dark mass of the sea, a painful knot forming in the pit of her stomach. At least she knew the truth about Athamos now. It didn’t explain why Cassandra Liatos had been so special that he’d engaged in a death race with Kostas over her—why he’d been so foolish as to throw his life away over someone who didn’t know her own mind.
Unless he’d loved her...
Frustration curled her fingers tight. Had he? Was that the answer to the mystery that plagued her? She wanted to pound her fists against the big barrel of her brother’s chest and demand an answer, but Athamos wasn’t here. Wouldn’t ever be here again.
Bitter regret swept through her, hot tears burning her eyes, threatening to spill over into the sorrow she’d refused to allow herself to feel lest it disintegrate what was left of her. Somehow she had to let him go. She just didn’t know how.
She was pacing the deck again when Jessie came home, high heels clicking on the wood, a bottle of wine and two glasses in her hands.
“What is Kostas doing here? He nearly blew your cover. I had to convince a regular you were a friend from church.”
She could use a little higher guidance right about now. “He wants me to marry him.”
Jessie’s eyes bulged out of her head. “Marry him?”
“Open the wine.”
Her friend uncorked the bottle, poured two glasses and handed her one.
She took a sip. Rested her glass on the railing. “It would be a political match.”
“Why?”
“I am the symbolic key to peace and democracy in the Ionian Sea. A way for Akathinia and Carnelia to heal. A vision of the way forward.”
“Are you expected to walk on water, too?”
A smile curved her lips. “It would be a powerful statement if Kostas and I were to marry.”
Jessie fixed her with an incredulous look. “You can’t commit yourself to a marriage of duty. Look what it did to your mother. It almost destroyed her.”
All of them. Her parents’ marriage may have been a political union, but her mother had loved her father. Unfortunately, her father had not been capable of loving anyone, not his wife nor his children. The king’s chronic affairs had created a firestorm in the press and destroyed her family in the process.
“Kostas worries about the military junta that backed his father. He plans to hold elections to create a constitutional monarchy in the fall, but he’s afraid the military will seize control before then if he doesn’t send a powerful message of change.”
“And you being the poster child of global democracy will give him that.”
“Yes.”
Jessie eyed her. “You aren’t actually considering this?”
Silence.
Jessie took a sip of her wine. Leaned back against the railing as she contemplated her. “Can we talk about the elephant in the room? You were in love with him, Stella. Mad about him. If this isn’t you repeating history, I don’t know what is.”
“It was a childish crush. It meant nothing.”
Jessie’s mouth twisted. “You two spent an entire summer with eyes only for each other. It was predestined between you two... Then you finally act on it and he slams the door in your face.”
She shook her head. “It was never going to happen. It was too complicated.”
“Does that discount you measuring every other man by him? This is me, hon. I knew you back then. I know you now. You looked shell-shocked when he walked into that bar. You still do.”
“I can control it.”
“Can you? You once thought the sun rose and set over him. He was the newest superhero to join the party, sent to rescue all of us from the bad guys.”
What an apt description of her teenage infatuation with Kostas... Of the heroic status she’d afforded him for his determination to bring a better democratic way to his people. Her belief he was the only one who could recognize the bitter, alienating loneliness that had consumed her, because, she’d been sure, he’d carried it with him, too.
But that had simply been a manifestation of her youthful infatuation, she conceded, her chest searing. Her desperate need to be understood, loved, rather than seeing the real flesh-and-blood man he had been.
“I know his flaws now,” she said, lifting her gaze to Jessie’s. “His major fault lines...” She no longer harbored the airbrushed image of him that had once steered her so wrong.
“The thing is,” she mused, her subconscious ramblings bubbling over into conscious thought, “I haven’t been happy in a long time, Jess. I’ve been restless, caged in a box I can’t seem to get out of. Everything about my life is charmed, perfect, and yet I’m miserable.”
Jessie gave her a rueful look. “I was working my way around to that. But why? You do amazing work. Meaningful work. Doesn’t it give you
