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  He filled her to the point of stretching, and Erianthe could no longer tell herself that the two lovers she’d had since Ares should have been allowed to touch her. As he started to move, time and heartbreak didn’t evaporate, but they faded a little. The way he held her gaze connected them in a way her rational mind couldn’t label. As if they’d long ago bonded on a subatomic level.

  As her pleasure began to peak, those sharp, painful edges began to dull, and she could imagine him whittling off the carved edges of her memories with his touch, his presence. And simply knowing that her broken pieces were also his dulled their ability to cut into her just a little. But a little relief was enough when there had been absolutely none for so long.

  Later, after he’d carried her inside and run a bath, they sat wrapped up in one another in the old claw-foot tub, her legs around his waist and that once again hard shaft inside her. Erianthe locked her arms around his shoulders and let herself fall into his beautiful eyes.

  “Eri...? Eri?”

  He said her name and then said it again. It must have been a long time that she’d sat staring at him, because he gave her a little jostle.

  “Are you all right?”

  Was she all right?

  “I think so,” she answered.

  His hands stroked through her hair, then curled around the back of her neck to pull her against him. She rested her chin on his shoulder and held him so tight.

  She wasn’t all right. Not really. But how could she tell him that she wanted the chance they’d been denied? Only two days ago he’d been making plans to leave.

  She couldn’t say it. Couldn’t bare that vulnerable part of her yet.

  The truth of it was, she wasn’t ready to say it yet. But when she looked into his eyes, she felt what he felt...or seemed to. Maybe she was imagining it. Maybe she was just thinking about her own emotional experience of a situation, expecting he would feel the same.

  But maybe he would see it in her eyes...

  She leaned back again and caught his gaze.

  The evening’s last rays of sunshine painted the bathroom warm shades of sunset and set the threads of honey in his green eyes to shimmering gold.

  “I’ve always loved your eyes...ever since we were little. Before it could be explained by attraction,” she murmured. And then images of the first time she’d realized Ares was different from the other boys rose in her mind and she amended that. “Well, probably before.”

  “They’re just green.”

  “From far away, they are. Up close, they’re the color of a new leaf and, depending on the light, flecked with gold or amber. Mine are just black. Flat and black.”

  “They’re not flat. They shine like obsidian and reflect everything.”

  His gaze drifted lower, slowly enough that she could tell it wasn’t a conscious decision for him to look down and away. He went from being all hers to being at the wrong angle to connect with him.

  “Where did you just go?” Unwrapping one arm, she lifted his chin and, to make it easier, gave him a soft little kiss.

  “I don’t know.” His arms tightened, and soon she was pressed fully against him, his chin propped on her shoulder.

  He did that when he thought about the past. He did that when he thought about her, or about their daughter. When he didn’t want to say words. She did it too.

  But she could talk about her.

  “Her eyes weren’t blue. I’d expected blue, but they were dark. Hazel, maybe.”

  His breathing sped up—just a touch, but enough to indicate that he was listening. “They let you see her?”

  “I screamed until they let me hold her. Then I looked at everything. Her fingers were yours, so tiny and yet so long.” Once more the tears came, and she squeezed him a little tighter in return. “I thought I was over losing her. It’s so long ago. But since I’ve been home it seems like yesterday. I thought I’d already mourned her, but maybe I didn’t. Maybe I couldn’t do it fully on my own.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t even know whether I’m mourning her or you. Us. What we might have been.”

  What they still could be. She knew they could—she just didn’t know whether he wanted that too.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “HEY.” THEO APPEARED beside her at the nurses’ station, his usual cheerful manner holding a different tone. A tone that carried ominous inklings.

  “Why does it sound like you’re about to fire me?”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said, laughing in an entirely and obviously fake manner—a sound she was supposed to believe and yet made her feel uncomfortable.

  “You actually are firing me?”

  Sure, she didn’t have access to the kind of funds they all had for providing for the clinic—that lack of money had been a part of her life since the day she’d kicked her parents and their coffers out of her life and transformed herself into a poor medical student.

  The sober look that came into his eyes didn’t help. “Mom’s in Exam Room Two.”

  She turned to look around the area immediately, expecting to see her father lying in wait for her again. Dimitri was at the core of her parental problems, although her mother had certainly been an accomplice.

  “He’s not here.”

  “Oh.” Still that feeling scratched at the back of her neck—the one that warned the house of cards that had somehow become her life was about to collapse. “Why?”

  “She said she has a ‘lady issue’ and wouldn’t tell me what.” Theo never used his hands, but his tone made air quotes around lady issue.

  It sounded like their delicate flower of a mother couldn’t even reference an actual anatomical part of herself with her adult doctor son.

  “Who’s her doctor?”

  “Retired.”

  “Dammit, Theo. You cannot be asking me to treat her.”

  “I just want you to talk to her,” he said quickly, hands up in a defensive Whoa, there! position.

  “She’s probably faking it so that I have to talk to her.”

  That definitely sounded like her duplicitous parents. Ambushing her was a kind of trick to force her into something she didn’t want.

  “She’s not faking her distress, Eri.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “She was crying.”

  The tightness between her eyebrows began to feel like a cramp. Could foreheads charley horse? She pressed the butt of her palm there and gave it a hard enough rub to mash the thin muscle into compliance—and probably cause terrible wrinkles in the future.

  “I know it sucks. And I know she was complicit in sending you away.” Theo was arguing on Hera’s behalf. “But she’s never really stood up to Father about anything. That’s her character flaw. But are you going to carry a grudge forever? They’re not getting any younger.”

  Erianthe felt her mouth fall open in sheer incredulity, and it took several more seconds of Theo’s consternation at her response for her to remember: he didn’t know.

  That was the big flaw with managing her reaction to her parents around anyone but Ares. Theo was right—they probably all thought her reaction disproportionate and petty compared to what they thought she had gone through. Theo would always think that until he knew the truth. And she’d continue feeling guilty about it until she could be honest with him. But right now she had no counterargument to make.

  “I’ll talk to her to see what’s wrong,” she muttered, and immediately headed for Room Two, glad for once that her shoulders were growing increasingly stiff. Maybe that would make her feel steady physically, if not emotionally.

  Not that standing up to Hera Nikolaides required much backbone. She’d never stood up to anyone for any reason—including for the good of her own children.

  Not giving herself time to get more worked up, or even to think about what to say, she walke
d into the room and shut the door.

  Her mother, always perfectly put together, wore a flowing white blouse and trousers, gold jewelry on her arms, neck, fingers and ears, and had her perfectly smooth graying black hair swept into a chignon. Perfect and predictable.

  What Erianthe hadn’t prepared herself for—and what she’d failed to notice the last two times she’d been in the same space as her mother—was how much older she looked. Hera’s mascara had smudged and settled into the lines beneath her eyes. Because time kept going. She was older.

  Her mother was older. Ariadne was not.

  Before she could take it all in and speak, Hera rose from the plain plastic chair placed there for patients and hurried forward, arms outstretched.

  “No!” Erianthe said, probably too sharply. She couldn’t go from nothing to hugging, even if her mother had been crying. “This isn’t a reunion. Theo said you’re having some trouble, so we need to focus on that. Because if you’re not, I’ll walk right back out that door.”

  “I found a lump,” her mother all but whispered, still a little distance away from her, her arms falling back to her sides.

  Just like that all the air went out of the room.

  Hera’s mother had died from breast cancer, and Erianthe had studied enough about genetics to know she’d probably inherited one of the genes. Her mother might well have inherited both.

  Not wanting to help her own mother when she was so eager to help others...? She didn’t need the insistent pinging of her conscience or her stomach bottoming out to shame her. That was just a perk of being a Nikolaides.

  She couldn’t take her mother as a patient, but she could make an ethical exception for testing and help her understand what it meant.

  “When was your last screening and when did you notice the lump?”

  There were a number of other questions, and they went through them one by one, each settling into their own corner as they discussed symptoms and timelines.

  In the middle, Erianthe paused to go and fetch the ultrasound equipment and leave her mother some privacy to change into the usual hideous hospital gown.

  “This will say if I have cancer?” she asked, lying on the examination table and positioning herself as Erianthe directed the scan.

  Cancer. Her guts churned again.

  “No. This will let me see the shape and location of the lump, but simple machines can’t diagnose. I’m going to find it, then use a very thin fine-gauge needle to extract a sample of the tissue. We can send that for biopsy so we know what is going on.”

  Hera accepted this with a silent nod.

  “If it hurts... I won’t mean to hurt you.” How awful even to have to say that. “Tell me, and I’ll try to find a different position.”

  “I don’t mind a little pain. You get your strength from me.”

  Rule number one for being a compassionate doctor: never laugh in your patient’s face when they babble something outlandish under the fear and stress of a possible diagnosis.

  But inside her head... Really, if she had her mother’s “strength,” she’d be saddled to a feckless man in a barren, loveless marriage—because that was all she would’ve been good for after losing her child and falling into that hole inside herself.

  “I lost three babies before we adopted Theo.”

  And that was a bridge too far. Erianthe could be polite to an upset patient, but not if she was going to try to make her talk about things she had no right to.

  “Mother...”

  “It was earlier with them. But it’s never easy to lose a child.”

  She tried to ignore the subtext—the main text was bad enough. Her vision swam and she put the wand down, spinning on her stool to try to contain it.

  Don’t cry.

  “I can’t talk about this,” she croaked.

  “I just want you to know...”

  “See—I need to not be shaking or crying so I can perform the biopsy safely.” Her voice had gone squeaky, and that was just unprofessional. None of this was professional. Professional was not treating a family member—especially one you’d been estranged from for a decade of your life.

  “I’m sorry, koritsi mou.”

  “I’m sorry too,” she said, but she couldn’t say precisely what she was apologizing for—her mother’s sad miscarriages, or the fact that Erianthe blamed both her parents for the loss of her own child and all that had preceded it.

  Hera didn’t try to talk about anything again until after Erianthe had taken cells from the lump in the upper inner area of her mother’s right breast.

  “I’ll put this on the transport to Athens tonight. It should take a week or so for the results. Then we can figure out what the next step is.”

  “You mean chemotherapy?”

  “I mean most likely surgery,” she corrected softly. “I’m not saying mastectomy—I mean lumpectomy. That’s where they take out the mass and a little tissue around it to make sure that it comes out cleanly.”

  Hera absorbed this with a slow nod. “Will they send the results here to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you promise not to tell Theo until we know something? I don’t want him to worry.”

  She and Dimitri had recently become closer to Theo, who was going to give them a grandchild in six months’ time. Her mother was insulating him, which shouldn’t bother Erianthe. She didn’t want her mother to protect her.

  “He’s the one who told me you were ill.” Erianthe labeled the collection bag and sealed it up. “All these secrets... It’s like no one ever tells the truth about anything. Except Theo. And he’s the one being lied to over and over again.”

  “Theo has his own secrets.”

  Erianthe snorted.

  Hera stood and shed the gown in order to begin dressing herself. “He’s kept a secret for me.”

  “That he’s adopted?”

  “That Ares’s mother, Melisa, and I paid for your university and medical school fees in alternating months so that I could keep it hidden from your father.”

  Erianthe dropped her pen. “Theo said it was a collective effort by the guys.”

  That had always been part of why she’d intended from the beginning on coming back to practice at the clinic: she owed them a debt. Theo. Deakin. Chris. Possibly Ares. She’d never asked about his donation—hadn’t ever wanted to know.

  “It was the only way for me to help you when you persisted in being estranged from us,” Hera said, her tone dripping with the insinuation that she was the wronged party in all of this.

  “It wasn’t the only way, Mother. You could’ve stood up to Father for once in your life. You could’ve come to live in England with me, helped me through the pregnancy—which was hard enough even when nothing was actually wrong. You could’ve taken me to the hospital when I cried out to go, when there might have been time to save—” Erianthe stopped when she realized the volume of her voice was rising to dangerous levels.

  Hera didn’t argue any of it. But then, how could she?

  Back to the subject... “Ares’s mother paid too?”

  “Melisa loves her son, and her son loved you.”

  What should this secret make her feel? Angry that she’d been lied to? She wasn’t. Relieved that her mother had done something against the wishes of Dimitri, tyrant of Clan Nikolaides? Warmed to hear her mother speak of Ares’s love, which somehow legitimized it even while worsening the fact that Hera and Dimitri had been fighting it? With their questioning. Doubting. Their inability to speak of their feelings in the present tense.

  Always the past. That was a safe discussion.

  “What do you suggest I tell Theo?” Erianthe asked, getting on with it—which was really all she could do right now.

  “Tell him I’m in menopause.”

  She’d have laughed under any other circumstances. “Mother, you’
re sixty-three. He can work out that math on his own.”

  “Some women take a long time to stop having...” She sighed, giving up her own argument. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you told Father about the lump?”

  “No.”

  Well, Erianthe couldn’t really argue that one, but she would argue for Theo. “How about I tell Theo you had a test and will talk to him about it when you’re ready?”

  “That will only make him worry.”

  “You were crying. He’s already worried,” Erianthe said softly.

  She was worried too, and confused about every single word and gesture that had passed between them today. Where did this leave their relationship? Could she allow her mother to be a part of her life and still keep Dimitri at a distance? Would her mother agree to that? Did she even want to open that door again?

  “Fine, then—what you said, I suppose.” Hera presented her dressed self for inspection.

  Erianthe reached out to tuck a wisp of hair back into the ever-perfect twist at the nape of her mother’s neck and was grabbed in a fierce hug that left her on the verge of bawling.

  “When you’re ready to talk to me, you call me. I’ll come to the Xenakis island. I don’t care what your father thinks.”

  All Erianthe could muster was a brief hug for Hera in return, then she pulled back into her protective bubble, talking only about medicine, which was all she could understand right now.

  “I haven’t worked with the oncology lab in Athens yet, but I’ll try to put a rush on these results. I can probably get the wait time reduced to a few days.”

  She spent a couple of minutes discussing aftercare for the biopsy procedure, then excused herself.

  Too much information to process for one day. All she wanted to do was find Ares and then go home. To bed. Ignore the world. Ignore the problems still unresolved. Ignore Hera’s possible diagnosis. Hide out at Shepherd’s Cottage and pretend it was all settled.

  Pretend she knew Ares was going to stay.

  Pretend she wasn’t afraid to ask if he wasn’t.