The Santorini Bride

She hadn’t been here since she’d come with her parents for a week in January. Then the weather had been almost cool. Now in midsummer it was blazing hot, and Martha was sweating and exhausted as she set her shoulders, then grabbed the handle of her duffel and began to haul it again up the narrow winding street.

The house would be empty. The refrigerator would be shut off and the cupboards bare. She would have to do the shopping and the cooking, but she didn’t care. It would be good to do everything herself. Keeping busy would be a good thing. Immersing herself in the life of the island would distract her and, she hoped, help her get her bearings, look to the future, make new plans.

She certainly had no intention of going on with the old ones—even if Julian had rung her cell phone while she was en route to the airport.

“It’s not as if Andrea means anything to me,” he’d said, sounding wounded, as if Martha was just supposed to accept him making love to another woman.

“Right. No big deal,” she’d said acidly. “I’m sure she’ll be pleased to hear that.”

“Well, what do you expect?” Julian had demanded, trading wholly inappropriate hurt for even less warranted indignation. “You never gave me any, did you?”

It didn’t seem the time to say she had come intending to do just that.

“Smart of me, I’d say,” she bit out.

“You’re a cold fish, Martha. If you’d ever shown a little passion—”

“You want passion? I’ll give you passion!” And Martha had flung the cell phone out the open taxicab window into the road where it had been instantly squashed by an eighteen-wheel semi. She only wished it had been Julian, not the phone, who’d been flattened.

Now she allowed herself a moment’s remembrance of the single satisfying sight she’d had yesterday afternoon. Then she made her way up the last few steps to the gate that led into the walled garden and the last flight up to the house. Sweat was streaming down her back and between her breasts, and her long curly black hair, which she had scraped back into a ponytail the minute she’d got off the plane, was coming loose. Tendrils straggled around her face.

She needed a cold drink, then a cold shower and a nap, in that order. Provided she could stay awake that long.

She opened the gate and let herself in. A trellis overhung with bougainvilleas in bright reds and purples gave her the first shade she’d had since she began the climb. Martha shut the gate, then leaned against the wall and just let the silence and the blessed coolness of the wall and the shade envelope her. For the first time since she’d opened the door to Julian’s bathroom, the desperate urgency to escape faded a bit. She breathed deeper. The stillness seemed to surround her.

Her breathing slowed and steadied. She ran her hand over the rough white stone wall. It felt solid, dependable, strong. And welcoming.

She remembered racing down these same steps as a little girl, running her fingers along the wall, thinking that her father had done that as a boy, and that his father had done the same. She smiled faintly and turned to press her cheek against the cool whitewashed wall, finding comfort in the notion that generations of Antonideses had done that, too.

Others had hurt. Others had survived. She would, too. Settled, comforted, determined, she squared her shoulders, grabbed her duffel and with renewed energy, hauled it up the winding stairs.

Thirty-two steps later she reached the top and fished out her house key. Her father had given each of them a key to the house when they reached the age of twenty-one.

Martha sent a brief silent thank-you to her father now as she turned the key in the lock and pushed open the heavy wooden door. The terrazzo-floored entryway was cool and breezy.

Breezy? Martha frowned, surprised to notice that the front windows were open, the light gauzy curtains rustling in the air. Had someone figured out she was coming?

Had Julian called her parents’ house looking for her? Oh, please no! She pressed a hand to her cheek in dismay.

But then she noticed the pair of sandals—men’s sandals—beside the door. Her heart leapt with joy. “Lukas?”

It had to be. Elias never left Brooklyn. “Someone has to work,” he would say dampeningly whenever the word vacation came up. And Peter, as far as Martha knew, had scarcely ever left Hawaii since he’d moved there to go to college. So that left Lukas—her twin.

If she could bear to see anyone right now, it would be Lukas.

He had always been her soul mate. He would understand and sympathize, and spending time with Lukas would keep her from believing that all men were as horrible as Julian Reeves.

“Luke?” Eagerly Martha kicked off her own shoes and started toward the kitchen when she heard the sound of footsteps coming down from the bedrooms upstairs. She turned expectantly.

A lean dark pirate of a man, with tousled jet-black hair and a sharp, narrow nose, was coming down the steps.

He had high, chiseled cheekbones and a hard, jutting chin. He was handsome, she supposed, in a rough-hewn way. If Julian was classically handsome the way a glossy highly polished marble statue was handsome, this man looked like rough-cut granite.

She supposed he must be one of Elias’s friends. He was, from the looks of him, in his thirties, about her oldest brother’s age. Had Elias given him the key and told him to make himself at home? It seemed more like the sort of thing her charming feckless father would have done than hard-nosed, hardworking Elias. She wasn’t sure he had any friends, anyway.

But this man didn’t look like the sort who would have had the patience to deal with her father. Aeolus Antonides loved golf courses and yachts and three-martini lunches—the finer side of civilization, he’d have said.

Civilized wasn’t a word that Martha would have used to describe the man who had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and was staring at her with what could only be described as profound dislike.

Well, she wasn’t exactly enthralled to see him, either.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, then startled her further by jerking his head toward the door. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Just leave.”

Leave? She was supposed to leave?

“Now wait just a minute, buddy,” she said, drawing herself up to her full height and glaring at him. At least he spoke English. In fact he sounded as American as she did. So he must be a friend of Elias’s. And therefore, irritating as he was, she would deal with him. “I’m not the one who’s going anywhere!”

He was the one who was intruding. This was her house, not his. He had no right to stand there, hands on hips, scowling at her as if she were the intruder. And she was damned if she was going to let him keep her from her home and her cool drink and her nap.

“Excuse me.” She started to step around him to go toward the kitchen.

He barred her way. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I want to get a drink,” she said. “I’m perishing. Now move.”

He didn’t.

“Look,” she said. “Who are you? Did Elias give you a key?”

His brows drew down. “Elias? Who’s that?”

So obviously he wasn’t Elias’s friend then. “My brother.”

The man shook his head, causing shaggy black hair to fall across his darkly tanned forehead. “Never heard of him. How’d you get in?” he asked suspiciously.

“How did I get in?” It was Martha’s turn to stare. She nudged the duffel bag with her toe. “With my key. I live here.”

“The hell you do!”

“Well, not always,” Martha admitted. “But I could if I wanted to. My name is Martha Antonides. My family owns this house.”

His expression cleared as if by magic. “Not anymore,” he said cheerfully. “I do.”

“What?” Surely she hadn’t heard him right. Did she have heat stroke? God knew it was hot enough, and she was exhausted enough, and what she’d just heard didn’t make a lick of sense. “What are you talking about? What do you mean, not anymore? Who the hell are you?”

“Theo Savas.”

As if that was supposed to mean something. She just looked at him blankly. “So?”