CHAPTER SIX
815 Words
She showed up at the airfield with one bag.
Alexandros noticed it the same way he noticed most things about her—tucked it away, didn't dwell on it, pretended it didn't mean anything.
One bag.
No drama. No excess. Nothing about it suggested a woman preparing to spend a month being shown off.
He'd sent Stavros—his driver for more than a decade—to collect her an hour earlier with instructions to be helpful and otherwise invisible. Clearly, Stavros had succeeded because she stepped out of the car looking perfectly composed and faintly suspicious of the whole arrangement.
"Everything sorted at home?" he asked by way of greeting.
"Handled."
She didn't elaborate, and he didn't ask her to.
He recognised the word for what it was: the same clipped tone she'd used in his office, the answer she gave when something had cost her more than she intended to reveal.
Efficient.
He approved of efficient.
He didn't examine why he approved of it particularly in her.
* * *
The flight was long, and she slept through most of the second half of it.
Curled into her seat, she maintained the same composure even in sleep—no slack jaw, no awkward tilt of the head, just someone who slept the way people did when rest was scarce and never wasted.
He tried to work.
Or attempted to.
His attention kept drifting to the seat across from him, to the way the cabin light moved across her face.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, he found himself simply watching her sleep for no useful reason at all.
He closed his laptop.
He told himself it was fatigue.
* * *
The villa announced itself the way it always did—white walls catching the last of the afternoon sun, the caldera dropping away behind it into that impossible blue.
He had never brought anyone here before.
The realization came only now, watching Vera take it in for the first time. Not glancing. Not admiring it because she thought she should. Actually seeing it.
Only a handful of people knew this address. Maria, who kept the place running. Stavros, who stayed in the gatehouse whenever they travelled here.
No one else.
This was the one part of his life he had kept entirely to himself.
Yet somehow Vera was standing in it.
He had never consciously decided to bring her here. It had happened much the same way the arrangement itself had happened—quietly, somewhere beneath his awareness of making the decision.
Vera said nothing for a long moment.
Then softly, almost to herself:
"Oh."
That was all.
No performance. No attempt to impress.
She had encountered something beautiful and responded to it the way people did when they had forgotten—or never learned—that beauty was meant to be felt before it was discussed.
For some reason, he found that unsettling.
* * *
Maria met them in the courtyard.
Alexandros watched her take Vera in—the single bag, the travel-worn dress, the careful expression—and saw something flicker across her face.
Surprise, certainly.
Something else beneath it.
Whatever it was, Maria kept it to herself.
She took Vera's hands in both of hers, said something warm and rapid in Greek, and pressed a kiss to each cheek.
Vera laughed—not because she understood the words, but because warmth like that required no translation.
Before either of them could object, Maria lifted the bag from the ground.
"I will take this in," she said in English. "Go. Rest your feet. Dinner is at eight."
Then she was gone, disappearing into the house with the brisk efficiency of someone who ran it entirely on her own terms.
Alexandros let Maria's earlier expression join the growing collection of things he had chosen not to examine.
* * *
"Your room is in the east wing," he said. "I'll show you."
Something flickered across Vera's face.
Surprise.
Quickly hidden, though not quickly enough.
"You expected to share mine immediately?"
"I..." She stopped herself. "It seemed the more likely arrangement, given why I'm here."
"We are not in my office finalising a transaction."
His voice remained calm.
"We'll have dinner. We'll spend time together. The rest..." He held her gaze. "Will happen when it happens."
She studied him with those grey eyes, clearly searching for the strategy behind it.
Finding none.
Because there wasn't one she could see.
Only one he wasn't yet prepared to acknowledge himself.
"That's almost gentlemanly of you," she said.
"Don't mistake it for that."
They stopped outside her room.
"Mine is at the end of the corridor."
He left her there without looking back.
He had said what he intended to say, and he was not a man who lingered once a conversation had ended.
Whatever she chose to make of it was entirely her own business.
- Writer
