Irresistible Greeks Collection. Кэрол Мортимер
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The garden her mother had loved so much had become overgrown, and she was trying to clear away the weeds from the new shoots sprouting up all over the flowerbeds. Spring had finally arrived, and as she knelt she could feel the sun warm on her back. It seemed like a blessing.
She was in need of blessings. Working hard to count them. To keep them in the forefront of her mind. Keep buried in the depths of her mind all remembrances of Athan Teodarkis—buried deep, buried safe.
She was humming to herself intermittently—some tune she’d heard on the radio. She listened to the radio a lot these days. It was companionship. Comforting. The cottage was so isolated she could play the radio out here in the garden knowing no one would be disturbed by it.
A robin was hopping around at the back of the flowerbed, tilting its head sideways and eyeing her hopefully. A small worm coiled itself under a clod of earth and she kept it buried. Fond as she was of the robin, who was a cheery visitor to the garden, she didn’t feel up to deliberately feeding it a worm who was only trying to have a quiet life.
The way she was.
A quiet life. That was all she wanted right now. One that, like the tiny earthworm could be spent buried deeply and safely. Sheltered and out of the way.
Where she belonged.
It had been weeks since Athan had been and gone. Weeks and weeks. How many, precisely, she hadn’t counted. Hadn’t wanted to. The days drifted by, one after another, marked only by the burgeoning spring. That followed a calendar that had its own schedule. One day it was a clump of primroses, unfurling their pale blossoms, another day the catkins showering her with golden pollen. Another the first flush of green on the once bare branches of the trees.
It was all she wanted right now.
She kept herself almost entirely to herself. She had set up a grocery delivery service with a supermarket in a large market town, and it suited her not to have to go there in person. The weekly delivery was good enough. Sometimes the local farmer’s tractor rumbled past the cottage, but when she heard it coming she made sure she was not visible. She wasn’t being deliberately stand-offish. She just didn’t want to see anyone. Anyone at all. Whether local or stranger.
It was as if she was hibernating. Tucking herself away. Shutting down. Trying not to think. Trying not to feel. Trying to keep busy in the garden. While she worked she could feel her mother’s presence, approving of her for what she was doing. Glad her daughter was back here again, safe in the haven she had found for herself—her refuge from a world that had rejected her, a man who had not wanted her.
Marisa’s face twisted. Athan had wanted her.
That was the bitter, poisoned irony of it. After what he’d done to her, he wanted her.
Did he really think I would just totally ignore what he’d done? Why he’d done it? Just act like it had never happened?
But he had—obviously. That was what he’d assumed—that he could just pick her up again, carry on with her again. Take her back to his bed again …
No! She mustn’t think like that—they were dangerous thoughts. Bringing in their wake memories that were even more dangerous. Lethal.
She dug deeper with the trowel, wrestling with a long, tenacious dandelion tap root to extract the last fragment. It wasn’t the kind of root you could leave in the soil—a new weed would sprout even from the tiniest portion, seeking the air and the sun, thrusting up to grow and flourish.
Thoughts about Athan were like that. So were memories. She must get every last fragment of them out lest they seek to flourish once again.
She paused in her work, lifting her eyes to the hedge that bordered the garden, to the slope behind that led up onto open moorland. She would go for a walk later—blow away the cobwebs. Blow away the dangerous thoughts and memories that tried to get out.
Questions went through her mind and she wished she could have an answer to them, but knew she could not. Questions she had never asked but wished now she had. Questions of her mother.
How long did it take you to get over my father? To get him out of your head, your mind, your heart? To be free of him—free of what he’d done to you?
And the question that was most fearful of all: Did you ever get over him?
That was what she feared the most. That the wound was too deep, the scarring too brutal.
Because the problem was that despite all she was doing not to think about him, absorbing herself in this world, so familiar and so utterly different from the places she had been with Athan, it wasn’t working. That was what she was scared of.
How long will it take to get over him?
That was the question that fretted at her, tormented her. She wanted not to think about not thinking about him. She wanted not to have to make this continual effort to turn her mind to other things. To immerse herself in this place she knew so well, surrounded by nature, by the wild landscape of the moors, the quiet fields and hedgerows.
But it didn’t seem to be working—that was the problem. Surely by now she should at the very least be starting to forget him, to get over him. Not wanting to think about him, remember him. Surely she ought to be able to use her head to control her heart?
She froze. With one part of her brain she watched the robin hop closer to her. Bright-eyed. Red-breasted.
Predatory.
But the rest of her brain didn’t see him. Didn’t see the garden or the sunshine on the bushes, or the hedge behind the flowerbed.
The words that had sounded unconsciously in her mind came again.
Surely she ought to be able to use her head to control her heart?
No! She hadn’t meant that—she hadn’t. Panic filled her, choking in her throat.
It’s not my heart—it’s nothing to do with my heart.
Because if it was …
Before her eyes, the robin pounced. His sharp, deadly beak indented into the damp earth and in a flash, triumphantly, he tugged out the worm she’d tried to hide from him. With a flurry of wings he was gone, his prey consumed.
It’s not my heart. I don’t love him. I don’t love him!
‘Global economy … fiscal policy … employment levels … infra-structure investment … ‘
Athan let the words drone over his head. He wasn’t listening. He gave the appearance of it, though—anything else would have been rude. But the speaker at the conference—a top economist at a major bank—had been going on for what seemed like for ever. And Athan had heard it all before—
several times now. This was the third day of the conference, and he had been here right from the start.
It mopped up time, this conference, and that was the most important aspect of it.
Time that he would otherwise have spent brooding.
Obsessing.
Because that was what it was, he knew. He could look it in the face and know it for what it was. Know why it was what it was.
He’d lost her. Plain and simple.
Devastating.
How had it happened? How had he screwed it up so badly? But he knew why—just didn’t like accepting it. He’d high-tailed it down to the back of beyond where she’d holed up in that rundown hovel, seething with a raw, angry jealousy that he’d disguised to himself as outrage because Ian was daring to try and hook up with her again, and he’d hit a stone wall. Her point-blank refusal to have anything more to do with him.
Frustration warred with self-castigation. Frustration usually won—frustration that what he wanted so badly he wasn’t going to get—but every now and then