Closer.
The men stopped dragging him.
Closer.
They let go.
With newfound strength he lunged forward, running to meet her, arms outstretched. If he could just hold her...
With all these people, even the hope he’d clung to couldn’t convince him now that there was any chance they could get away today.
If he could apologize, he’d have that to hold in his heart until he could find a way to get to her.
As he neared, ready to grab her, her face contorted. The tears he’d guessed would be there became rivers down her cheeks and she skidded to a stop, drawing her right arm back in a full swing.
A sharp blast of pain radiated from his left cheek and his head snapped to the side, sending him back a step to maintain his balance.
She’d hit him?
It took a few seconds for the situation to make sense through the expanding hollow filling his chest.
“Eri...” He said her name, the words he’d practiced in the car evaporating in the heat of her stare.
“I trusted you!” She half sobbed, half screamed, smacking away his hand as he instinctively reached for her. “I thought you were different, but you’re just like him.”
“No...” The word came out because it was the only one he could wrestle through his closing throat. He wasn’t like Dimitri Nikolaides, but he’d been tricked by him, his fears twisted, his weakness exposed. Made to doubt. “We can go—”
Her short, broken laugh stopped his words dead and ripped at his insides.
“I hate you.” The words, almost a whisper, hit him in the chest like a cannon blast.
She hated him.
Dimitri reached his daughter and began hauling her back toward the plane and onto the flight to a country Ares couldn’t name because they hadn’t told him. Somewhere far enough away that no one here would know about the baby—that was all he knew.
No hands grabbed him this time, but his feet still stayed glued to the ground.
“I will never forgive you for this!”
He wanted to say he loved her, but how could he say that now? Why would she believe him?
“I’m sorry.” He said the words, the only words he could find, and repeated them again and again.
I will come for you.
The words swam up—the words he meant to utter but couldn’t say to her. Not now, when the eyes that had always looked upon him with sweetness boiled over with such rage he could barely breathe.
The men who had been dragging him away now joined their boss in wrestling a struggling Erianthe back up the stairs.
The last words she screamed at him would still ring in his ears long after the plane departed. Because she was right.
This was all his fault.
THE LAST TIME Dr. Erianthe Nikolaides had set foot on the island of her birth she’d been barely sixteen, pregnant and betrayed by the boy she’d loved. Ten years on it had taken the earth actually moving and the request of her adoptive brother to pull her back.
Weeks before, Mythelios had been struck by a strong earthquake and Theo had sent up the beacon to call them home to staff the only medical facility on the island, which they were all tied to. But Theo had urged her to stay and finish her medical degree before she answered the call, so her arrival had been regrettably postponed.
The heat of the July sun baked her dark hair like coals on the back of her neck, sucking the strength from her so that every step toward the lovely three-story stucco building housing the Mythelios Free Clinic became a marathon. That was why her knees wobbled and she barely had her suitcases under control. Nothing else. Not the weight of her past and her secrets. Not the rock in her middle that came from knowing Theo Nikolaides wasn’t the only man she’d be seeing today.
Ares Xenakis had received the same call to come home that she had. Theo had summoned home the whole merry band of the pampered children of Mopaxeni Shipping, forgotten until they messed up—the men who funded and regularly staffed the clinic and Erianthe, who had nothing to offer but her skills. She’d cut all contact with her parents years ago, and that had included her trust fund.
Her training had been officially completed only last week, and she was late arriving to the disaster. She was that final piece of the family they’d forged when they’d still been counting their ages in single digits. The family that would be broken forever if the others ever found out how her seventeenth year had ended.
She clanged her way through the main entrance, her resolve to take her position at her brother’s side stronger than her ability to control the four-wheeled storage system erratically rolling behind her. One wheel caught at the door frame and her suitcase snagged just as the door swung closed on it. Perfection. It would be really great if one part of this journey could go smoothly.
She put some weight into a tug and the case snapped free, making her stagger backward into the clinic, an expletive bouncing off the teeth she’d clenched shut. By the time she turned around, every eye in the packed reception area had fixed on her with the kind of wariness that said they expected calamity to accompany such cacophony.
If the heat had left any extra air in her lungs, she would’ve laughed. The only harm she’d ever caused on Mythelios had been to herself, by trusting the wrong boy and not running away the first time her father had uttered the word convent.
The urge to laugh evaporated like water in the summer sun, but Erianthe tried to cover it with a smile, hoping to make a better impression on her future patients than that.
She’d had a week to prepare to see Ares again, to prepare for the first run-in with her treacherous parents, but she no longer had that wellspring of rage that had fueled her daydreams of vengeance in the first couple years. Now she had no idea what she should say to any of them, or even how she should feel. Ten years was a long time.
Focus on today.
The door swung shut, clamping off the blast furnace her years in England had made her weak to, and taking away the light her sun-blinded eyes needed to see.
She pinched the bridge of her nose and breathed slowly out.
No, today was too big. She had to focus on this minute, this second. Not one of her three betrayers was presently there. She didn’t have to know how to deal with them right at this second.
It wasn’t so much that she saw someone in front of her—her eyes were still closed and obstructed by her hand—but she felt a presence in her personal bubble and opened her eyes.
“Dr.
