Let Nikos go.
Let his father go.
Dressed in a pale blue wrap-around skirt and white summer top, Louisa sat on the stone seat set beside her son’s little grave with its marble headstone gleaming white in the sun. Today marked the fifth anniversary of his passing and she was glad she’d been able to convince Jamie to go with Pietros on a boat that was going out fishing for the day.
She needed to be on her own.
Moving to rest her forearms along the length of her sun-warmed thighs, she looked around her through blue eyes misted by the love she felt for this place. There was nowhere more beautiful on this earth than this tiny corner of Greece in her opinion. All around her the loving care and attention laboured on each square inch of the chapel and its garden was there to see in the carefully tended graves and the profusion of colour bursting from flowers that bloomed hot and bright in the fierce summer heat. Birds sang. The air was full of the scent of summer jasmine, and the tiny chapel with its handsome dome stood backed by a clear blue sky.
Nikos had been baptised here. She and Andreas had been married here, watched by curious islanders. She had been the quintessentially shy and uncertain blushing bride but because she had been carrying Andreas’s baby she had felt as if everyone looked on her as if—
Curtailing that memory, because it did not really matter any more what other people had once thought about her, she tried to concentrate on the here and now, and another painful decision she still had to make.
Did she leave here on the ferry in a few days’ time and never come back?
Lowering her face to her hands, she let her silk blonde hair flood forward to hide her face. It was all so muddled up, so painful and complicated. She wanted to think only about Nikos but all she could think about was herself! What was happening to her? What was going on inside her head?
A shadow suddenly fell across the sun to douse her in shadow. Pulling her face out of her hands, she had to squint to take in the tall, dark silhouette standing there. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was coming from directly behind him but she knew who it was.
‘When did you get back?’ she questioned flatly.
‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I had to leave quickly because of some business I could not neglect but …'
He shifted his stance, leaving the rest of his sentence unfinished as if he wished he had not said it at all. And the way he shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers told her that he wasn’t comfortable here.
Or he was uncomfortable about being here with her, Louisa amended and sent her gaze drifting towards something sitting on the white marble ledge of their son’s headstone that had not been there the day before, which told her Andreas had been here once already today.
Early.
So as to avoid bumping into her. Even after five long years, did he still find it this difficult to be here with her? ‘We need to talk.’
‘Not today, Andreas,’ she refused quietly.
‘My mother told me what she said to you. She—’
Damn interfering Isabella. ‘You’ve bought a new car,’ she cut in.
‘I don’t want you to listen to her. She—’ ‘Another Ferrari,’ she interrupted. ‘A black one instead of your favourite red.’
‘It is no one else’s business what you or I—’
‘Do you think you’re too old for flashy red now, is that it?’
Reaching forward, she plucked up the little black toy Ferrari from its narrow shelf with a dry little smile softening her unhappy face. Each time she’d come here over the years, the little car had been changed for a different model. It was one of those small things that always touched a tender spot inside her because she knew it was Andreas who brought them here and that it usually meant he had also changed one of his many super-cars he had scattered around the globe.
‘I just felt like a change, that’s all,’ he answered gruffly, then impatiently, ‘Will you listen to me, Louisa? We need—'
‘You big liar, Andreas Markonos,’ she said. ‘You decided that red Ferraris are for the flashy young-bloods and you’ve grown much too sophisticated to be one of them so you bought black this time. Nikos is going to be so—'
‘Will you not speak like that!’ he ground out.
Louisa’s whole body jolted in shock at his anger. ‘Like what?’ she quavered.
He swung his back to her, swivelling on the heels of his black leather shoes. ‘As if he is still alive.'
Trembling now, all hint of softness wiped clean, Louisa replaced the little car on its ledge. Tension sawed into the thickening silence. Pushing her hands flat together in front of her, she said nothing. In a tangled sort of way, she understood. She did speak of Nikos as if he were still right here with her. Sometimes the feeling was so strong she could actually believe he was …
Pulling in a thick breath, she stood up as that sudden restlessness grabbed hold of her again to send her walking across the soft green of the carefully watered lawn to end up standing against the low wall that enclosed the chapel grounds, feeling as if the letting-go stuff was beginning to crowd in on her from all sides.
After a few seconds Andreas followed, making the fine hairs at the back of her neck tingle when he came to a stop behind her. ‘My apologies,’ he said heavily. ‘I did not intend to shout at you like that.'
Louisa dismissed his need to apologise with a tense little shrug. Her restlessness had nothing to do with his emotional outburst. This was after all a very emotive place.
Feeling the corner of her mouth tug down on a sad little grimace, ‘Do you come here a lot?’ she asked him quietly.
‘Each time I visit the island,’ he responded.
Louisa nodded. ‘But you belong here.’
No reply came to that. He did belong here. Whereas she did not.
Staring out towards the expanse of glistening blue ocean until her eyes began to sting, ‘This is the last time I will be coming here,’ she told him, voicing the decision she had been struggling with for days.
‘Don’t be foolish!’ he snapped. ‘As I have been trying to say to you, you don’t have to heed my mother’s interference!'
‘She’s right though. It is time I let go.’
‘Time,’ he repeated as if it were a rude word. ‘What has time got to do with what we leave behind here each time we have to go away?'
‘You feel that too?’ Swinging round to face him, Louisa released a sharp gasp when she found herself looking at a completely different man from the one she had expected to see.
Until now she had only seen him wrapped in the softening cloak of darkness and he had been too dangerously potent for her to deal with then. Looking into his lean face without the sun blinding her eyes, she now felt the impact of this new view of him with a shattering shock. The younger man she had first fallen in love with had gone—forever. What she’d seen as mere maturity under cover of darkness had done him absolutely no justice at all. He was totally, devastatingly handsome. Totally, devastatingly lean—both physically and on the inside, where it only showed in the aura she was picking up from him. Andreas was a man to whom compromise had become very thinly spread indeed. The mouth that had kissed her so thoroughly a few nights ago now had a hardness about it that placed a chill across her bones. And the eyes, those deep-set dark brown eyes, looked as though the darker passions of the other night were as alien to him as—as standing here in this pretty