Jane Porter - Christos's Promise

Alysia inhaled as his lips touched hers, and he traced the soft outline of her lips with his tongue. He didn’t miss her gasp, or the sudden softness in her mouth.

His own body hardened, blood surging. From the distance he heard a cough. The nun! Wouldn’t do to get thrown out of here just yet.

Slowly he released her. “You taste beautiful.”

Alysia paled and dragged the back of her hand across her soft mouth, as if to rub away the imprint of his lips. “Try that again and I shall send for the abbess!”

He placed his foot on the bench, on the outside of her thigh. He felt the tremor in her body. “And say what, sweet Alysia? That your husband kissed you?”

“We are not married! We’re not even engaged.”

“But soon shall be.” He gazed at her exposed collarbone and the rise of fabric at her breasts. “Do you like wagers?”

She visibly shuddered. “No. I never gamble.”

“That’s admirable. But I like bets, and I like these odds. You see, Alysia, I know more about you than you think.”

He caught her incredulous expression, and felt a stab of satisfaction. “You won an academic scholarship at seventeen to an art school in Paris. You lived in a garret with a dozen other want-to-be artists, a rather bohemian lifestyle with small children running underfoot. When money ran out, you, like the others, did odd jobs. One summer you worked as a housekeeper. You did a stint in a bakery. Your longest job was as a nanny for a designer and his family.”

“They were respectable jobs,” she said faintly, blood draining from her face.

“Very respectable, but quite a change from life with a silver spoon in your mouth.”

“Is there a point to this?”

His smile faded and he leaned forward, trapping her between his knee and chest. “You’ve spent eight years of your life trying to escape your father.”

Her lips parted but no sound came out.

He watched her closely, reading every flicker in her eyes. “For a while, you were free. You painted, you traveled, you enjoyed an interesting circle of friends. But then you became ill, and your obliging father placed you in a hospital in Bern. Since then, he’s owned you, body and soul.”

“Body, maybe, but not my soul. Never my soul!”

Again the fire, the spirited defiance. He felt a kinship with her that he felt with few women. He softened his tone, appealing to her intellect. “Think about it, Alysia. In Greece you’re powerless. Your father is the head of the household, the absolute authority. He has the right to choose your husband. He has the right to leave you locked up here. He has the right to make your life miserable.”

“I’m no prisoner here.”

“Then why don’t you leave?

She held her breath, exquisitely attentive, her eyes enormous, her lips compressed.

“Now, if I were your husband,” he concluded after the briefest hesitation, “you could leave. Today. Right away. You’d finally be free.”

She didn’t speak for a moment, studying him with the same intentness with which she listened. After a moment she exhaled. “Greek wives are never free!”

“No, maybe not the way you think of it. But I’d permit you to travel, to pursue hobbies that interested you, to make friends of your own choosing.” He shrugged. “You could even paint again.”

“I don’t paint anymore.”

“But you could. I’ve heard you were quite good.”

She suddenly laughed, her voice pitched low, her body nearly trembling with tension. She wrapped her arms across her chest, a makeshift cape, a protective embrace. “You must want my father’s ships very much!”

Christos felt a wave of bittersweet emotion, unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He saw himself exactly as he was. Driven, calculating, proudly self-serving. And this woman, this lovely refined young woman, knew she mattered only in business terms. Her worth was her name. Her value lay in her dowry. For a split second he hated the system and he hated himself and then he ruthlessly pushed his objection aside.

He would have her.

Alysia slipped from beneath his arm, taking several steps away. She walked to the edge of the herb garden and knelt at the flowering lavender. “Ships,” she whispered, breaking off a purple stalk. “I hate them.”

She carried the tuft of lavender to her nose, smelling it.

“And I love them,” he answered, thinking she should have been a painting.

The bend of her neck, the creamy nape, the shimmering coil of hair the color of wild honey, the sun’s golden caress.

He wanted this woman. Deal or no.

She crumpled the lavender stalk in her fist. “Mr. Pateras, has it crossed your mind to ask why a man as wealthy as my father must give away his fortune in order to get his daughter off his hands?”

The sunlight shone warm and gold on her head. The breeze loosened yet another shimmering tendril.

“I’m damaged goods, Mr. Pateras. My father couldn’t give me away to a local Greek suitor, even if he tried.”

More damaged than he’d ever know, Alysia acknowledged bleakly, clutching the broken lavender stalk in her palm. Unwillingly memories of the Swiss sanatorium came to mind. She’d spent nearly fourteen months there, all of her twenty-first year, before her mother came, rescuing her and helping her find a small flat in Geneva.

Alysia had liked Geneva. No bad memories there.

And for nearly two years she’d lived quietly, happily, content with her job in a small clothing shop, finding safety in her simple flat. Weekly she rang up her mother in Oinoussai and they chatted about inconsequential matters, the kind of conversation that doesn’t challenge but soothes.

Her mother never discussed the sanatorium with her, nor Paris. Alysia never asked about her father. But they understood each other and knew the other’s pain.

Alysia would never have returned to Greece, or her father’s house, if it hadn’t been for her mother’s cancer.

The mournful toll of bells stirred Alysia, and she tensed, lashes lowering, mouth compressing, finding the bells an intolerable reminder of her mother’s death and funeral.

The bells continued to ring, their tolling like nails scratching down a blackboard, sharp, grating. Oh, how she hated it here! The sisters had done everything they could to comfort her, and befriend her, but Alysia couldn’t bear another day of bells and prayers and silence.

She didn’t want to be reminded of her losses. She wanted to just get on with the living.

Sister Elena, a dour-faced nun with a heart of gold, signaled it was time to return inside.

Alysia felt a swell of panic, desperation making her light-headed. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to leave the garden, or the promise of freedom.

As if sensing her reluctance, Christos extended a hand in her direction. “You don’t have to go in. You could leave with me instead.”

It was almost as if he could feel her weakening, sense her confusion. His tone gentled yet again. “Leave with me today and you’ll have a fresh start, lead a different life. Everything would be exciting and new.”

He was teasing her, toying with her, and she longed for the freedom even as she shrank from the bargain.

She could leave the convent if she went as his wife.

She could escape her father if she bound herself to this stranger.

“You’re not afraid of me?” she asked, turning from Sister Elena’s worried gaze to the darkly handsome American Greek standing just a foot away.

“Should I be?”

“I know my father must have mentioned my…health.” She gritted against the sting of the words, each like a drop of poison on her tongue. Unwilling tears burned at the back of her eyes.

“He mentioned you hadn’t been well a few years ago, but he assured me you’re well now. And you look well. Quite well, if rather too thin, as a matter of fact.”