Saved By The Greek Doctor (Greek Gods #3) - Holly Rayner Page 0,41

he wasn’t sharing it. Surely, I deserved to know. I was, after all, the other person in this could-be relationship.

At the end of the day, though, I was guessing that it didn’t matter very much. He’d made his position clear, and I had to respect that. No matter how much it broke my heart.

I swung my legs around and climbed out of bed, knowing that I wasn’t going to get much more sleep right now. I might as well go to the kitchen, I thought, and get something to drink. Maybe stop by the library on the way back to my room and find something to read.

Find something. I allowed myself half a laugh at that, as it would probably take several lifetimes to ever actually get through all the books in that enormous library.

I opened the door as quietly as I could, knowing now that it had a squeak at a certain point, and knowing without a doubt that I didn’t want to wake Nikos up—if he was even sleeping. I took one step out of the room, and another, creeping along with my side pressed up against the wall as if I was somehow hiding the fact that I was out and about in the middle of the night.

As if I was somehow hiding the fact that I was still there, in that house that I’d started to consider home.

And then, as I was creeping along quickly toward the kitchen, I suddenly paused. Because I’d noticed something strange. The suite where I was staying was one of several doors in this hallway, and though they’d all been closed before, I now noticed that one of them—one that had definitely always been closed—was ajar.

So I did what any normal person would do. I stopped outside that door, frowned, and then pushed it open, wondering what exactly lay behind this door that was always closed. It certainly hadn’t been on my tour of the house. And that alone made it feel suspicious. Secretive.

Like something that I might need to know about before I went any further in my psychological breakdown of Nikos.

Okay, it wasn’t the most upstanding thing to have done, and it certainly wasn’t any of my business. But would you have really done anything differently? The man was a constant mystery, and I was in love with him. I wanted to know what the mystery was—and whether I could do anything about it.

The moment I walked through the door, though, I started feeling guilty. Because it wasn’t just some additional guest suite or a secret game room where he kept all the old pinball machines he collected that he was too embarrassed about to put in the main rooms. It wasn’t even a secret man cave, full of sports posters and memorabilia and video game consoles.

It was a little girl’s room.

There was a bed and a dresser, along with shoes lined up against the wall and a closet full of a girl’s clothes, which I could see through the half-open door there. On the bed, a teddy bear and a baby doll lay against the pillow, their eyes gazing up into the air around them.

Only… the entire thing was covered in a thin layer of dust. And once I started looking around, I realized that while this might once have been a little girl’s bedroom, it certainly wasn’t now. There were too many breakables about. Too many pictures, all in expensive-looking frames.

When I got closer to those pictures, I saw in the semi-darkness that they were all of the same little girl.

She was about eight or so, I thought, in the later ones, with enormous blue eyes and bright blond curly hair. And she was constantly smiling. Laughing at whoever was taking the picture, or grinning at someone who was off-screen. There were even a couple of studio shots. School pictures, maybe.

I came suddenly to another picture, and I recognized the frame. It was broken—as was the glass in it.

It was the picture I’d knocked off the table that first night here, when I’d been wandering around in a fevered daze.

And now I saw why Nikos had looked at it so sadly. There were three of them in that picture: him, the little girl, and a woman I didn’t recognize, with flaming red hair.

And in that moment right there, it all came crashing together.

He was divorced. He’d lost someone special to him. That was why he lived here alone. Because he’d wanted to leave the mainland and all