how professional I sounded, and then sent it off.
And that, I thought happily, finished off my day and my work week.
I was glad. It had been a long week, and I was beyond tired. The city was also starting to wear on me—the way it always did by Friday—and I was ready for a weekend on the island, with nothing but olives and wine and the miles of distant blue oceans to keep me company.
Oh, and Nikos, of course.
It had been a year since that day when he finally opened up to me about what had happened, and we’d settled into a routine now. We stayed in his penthouse in Athens during the week, then escaped to the island every weekend—sometimes for weeks at a time, when we could manage it.
I was working for GoGoDelish’s Greek headquarters—a startup branch that had been my brainchild—running the Greek version of the app, and it was going incredibly well.
The service was, in fact, more successful here than it was in the US. Partially, I thought, because this was a more intimate market. Partially because I was so freaking good at my job. And partially because Athens and its people had become the place where I belonged. I was incredibly attached to the city, and I loved every single person I’d met here. That sort of attachment… well, I liked to think it had made me work harder than I’d ever worked in Texas. I liked to think it had added some sort of special sauce to the work I’d been doing.
Whatever it was, this section of GoGoDelish’s corporate umbrella was head and shoulders above any other.
I knew because I checked the corporate rankings often. And I laughed like an evil queen every time I thought of Bryan seeing my little branch overtaking his and then beating it to a pulp.
Nikos, meanwhile, had gone back into the medical field. As gifted a surgeon as he was, he’d opted instead to open a general practice clinic in one of the more impoverished areas of the city, and was giving back to the community that raised him with free medical care.
I’d been nervous about it at first, but it turned out that he’d made a small fortune in his career as a surgeon and didn’t actually need any money. The income that we brought in on the olives and wine more than paid for our necessities. Everything else was extra.
We made sure to tell each other at least once a day how incredibly lucky we were. We lived in paradise. We had plenty to eat and plenty to drink, and were always laughing. And we had been lucky enough to come together in the most random possible way—which we agreed was the biggest stroke of luck ever. I couldn’t have picked a better island to get shipwrecked on. And Nikos couldn’t have picked a better day to be sanding his boat and become a hero.
And I needed to stop sitting here daydreaming if I wanted to have any hope of getting to the boat before Nikos left for the island. Not that he’d leave me here. But he had very strong opinions about sailing at night, and if I didn’t get to the docks before dusk…
At that moment, though, Nikos himself stepped through the door of my office.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised. “I was about to go down to the docks to meet you.”
He just gave me an enigmatic smile. “I have a surprise for you. Come on.”
He made me close my eyes when we were a few blocks from the water, and I could feel him putting a blindfold on me.
Confused, I started laughing. “You’re not going to pull some mean prank on me, are you?”
I felt his breath on my neck, his lips at my ear. “I said surprise, not prank. Don’t you trust me?”
“With my life,” I told him quickly, meaning it with every ounce of my being.
He walked me forward, guiding me carefully with one hand on my back and one on my shoulder, and I kept my eyes shut and went where he led, trying not to panic at the fact that I couldn’t see. Nikos often surprised me with small things—pieces of jewelry, days out on the water—but he’d never blindfolded me before.
What on earth was going on?
When Nikos whipped the blindfold off, I gasped.
It turned out that we were at my favorite of the marinas—a small section of the larger harbor in Athens.
And we were standing