Saved By The Greek Doctor (Greek Gods #3) - Holly Rayner Page 0,21
a fact that I really did care. Way too much, actually—and way more than I should.
“I’m sorry,” the rep finally said. “All of our equivalent vessels are out at the moment, and we won’t have a replacement available for another week. We’ll come and collect the boat you were renting, of course, and we’ll work on the repairs as quickly as possible, but that is likely to take a while. Can you stay where you are for the moment, or do you need someone to come out and get you?”
The guy was just a rep for the boat rental service, so he certainly wasn’t the final answer on anything, but from what I could tell, they were going to very kindly accept that the whole thing had been an accident, and would therefore be covering it under their insurance. And for that, I would be eternally grateful.
The thing was, it was going to take a while for me to get a replacement boat. Which led to the question of whether I could stay where I was for the moment.
And the answer to that was pretty simple.
“Yes, I’ve got an open-ended invitation to stay here,” I said, trying to temper the grin on my face. “So I’ll be fine, I think, until you guys can manage to get a boat to me. No hurry,” I added at the last second.
“Thank you, despoinída, and can I say what a pleasure it is to have you using our service.”
I cringed a little at that. What a pleasure? I’d wrecked one of their boats! I mean, not on purpose, and certainly not with anything I’d done—but if they’d known that I was sailing along with my eyes closed right before the boat crashed, they might have thought differently about giving me another one. Or offering me niceties like a ride back to the mainland.
The thing was, I didn’t want a ride back to the mainland. At this point, I was starting to wonder whether I even wanted a replacement boat.
I mean yeah, that was presumptuous. It wasn’t like Nikos had asked me to stay permanently or anything like that; he’d basically just told me I could stay until the boat company delivered a replacement.
And he’d been insanely nice to even do that much. Insanely nicer to essentially take me under his wing, give me cooking lessons, do tours of the island, give me tips on how to make wine, teach me the three hundred ways you could eat olives—including cooked, which I had legitimately never thought about before—and then, on top of it all, act as my personal doctor on the side.
The thing was, though, the more cooking lessons we did and the more ways I learned how to eat olives and the more he checked my pulse, his fingers pressing down gentle on the sensitive skin of my wrist as he looked at his watch… the more I didn’t really want him to ever stop doing those things.
And that thought right there? That idea that I liked his fingers on my skin and liked hearing about how tired he got of olives, but how he would never stop growing them because they were a part of Greece’s tradition? That was as far as it ever got. It was as far as I ever let it go.
Because at the end of the day, no matter how gorgeous his eyes were or how much he smiled at me, no matter how much he set my blood to bubbling like champagne with his gorgeous looks and booming laughter, he was still just some guy I’d met while on vacation. He was a guy I’d probably never see again once I went back to the US, and a guy who had never said one single thing about wanting to keep in touch. So harboring fantasies about being anything more to him—even the one about coming back in the fall to help him stomp grapes—was basically just stupidity at its finest. Just me having dreams that I’d never be able to satisfy.
Me setting myself up to fail.
It was something I’d been good at, earlier in life, when I didn’t know how to stop myself. Giving myself over to pie-in-the-sky fantasies and feeling crushed when they didn’t come true. I was smarter than that now, though. Smart enough to know when I was setting myself up for a fall. And falling for this incredibly hot Greek doctor who happened to own his own island?