no time for staring into the distance, trying to make sense of how I felt about this entire adventure.
I hadn’t been wrong about Nikos getting up and springing immediately to action. We cooked a quick breakfast—and by quick, I mean a lavish egg, potato, and eggplant frittata—and then he hustled me into the shower with promises of a house tour with a library to be seen.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised when the rest of his house turned out to look like it belonged in an architecture magazine. Every room was done in a different color scheme, though all those schemes revolved around the same earthy, natural tones. Chocolate brown, the turquoise of the ocean, the sandy brown of the soil here, the white of the beach, the black of the rocks.
It was as if the house itself could have blended in with the island around it—and perhaps that had been the entire point, when they decorated it. It was done in what I would just call… money. Not quite modern but definitely not antique, plenty of glass but also plenty of wood, and everything sumptuous and clean and incredibly comfortable.
If I had dreamt up a house to spend a week in, on vacation in the Greek Isles, this would have been it.
I wondered again, as we passed through room after room, coffee mugs in our hands, how exactly he had the money to do all of this. He obviously didn’t work—or he might have once, but he didn’t anymore. And could being a doctor really have paid for all of this? Or was there more to the story?
It was none of my business, I knew. And yet there was a mystery surrounding Nikos that I wanted to unravel. I wanted to get to the soft center of him, to find out what was there. I wanted to touch the deepest, darkest parts of him in a way I’d never wanted to touch anyone else before.
And that thought frightened me, in a way. The last relationship I’d been in had ended rather spectacularly, and the thought of loaning my heart out to anyone else—or giving it away permanently—terrified me.
As I walked through the bright house, though, taking in the views on both sides—the vineyards and olive groves on one side and the ocean on the other—and fell into yet another natural flirtation with Nikos, the sparks jumping between us like they actually wanted to start a fire—I wondered how much I could control that. The thought of leaving this place—of leaving Nikos—was already so painful to me that I was leaving it entirely alone.
It wasn’t the kind of thing you generally felt for someone who didn’t mean anything to you. And though I wasn’t touching that thought, there was a very large, very rational part of my brain that was telling me that I had a problem. A very big, Nikos-shaped problem that was going to leave a big old hole in my heart if I wasn’t careful.
When we got to the library, of course, all of those maudlin thoughts flew right out of my head. Because if I’d thought the house’s beauty couldn’t be topped, it was only because I hadn’t seen the library yet.
It looked like a freaking museum. Done in a chocolatey wood so rich and dark that it looked like you could actually bite it, with reds and oranges splashed throughout, the place took up two stories and featured floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. There was a catwalk around the edge at what would have been ceiling level if this had been a smaller room, and the entire ceiling was made of glass in a dome, allowing the sunshine to come flooding in.
I stared up, my vision made foggy by the sunbeams dancing with the dust motes, and gasped.
“Oh. My. God,” I murmured. “How do you not spend literally all your time in this room?”
I heard a soft chuckle behind me, and felt fingertips brush down my spine—though they disappeared so quickly that I immediately wondered whether I’d actually been imagining it.
“I spend a fair amount of my time here,” he admitted. “It’s my favorite room in the house.”
“I can see why.”
I turned a small circle, my eyes still on the ceiling, and breathed deeply, taking in the smell of leather and old paper. Nikos’ smell, I realized suddenly.
“You smell like this room,” I said.
Laughter shot out of him at that, and I looked back down to see him shaking his head.
“Clearly I spend too