CHAPTER 35

She hadn't told Nikos the complete truth last night. She had been loved once. She could remember the warm feel of her grandmother's arms around her when she was really little. The way her grandpa had smiled at her as if she was the sunshine in his sky, but it had been so long, sometimes she forgot what it was like to be loved.

She remembered that warmth when she was around Zoe, though. The older Greek woman made Ash wonder what it would be like to have a mother who cared. And part of her craved marriage to Nikos because she knew that if she married him, his mother would become her mother and someone in the world would actually love her. Nikos, who refused to acknowledge the emotion had no idea how very lucky he was to have had not one, but two people love him in his life.

And now she loved him, but she didn't know if she loved him enough to give the emotion freely without expectation of its return. If she couldn't, would their marriage work? Could it work? Was she strong enough to love unrequited and not grow bitter? And if she wasn't, how real was her love?

The answer to many of her questions lay in her response to her mom. She looked inside herself and felt a measure of peace steal over her. Because while she got frustrated with her mom and sometimes the pain of not being loved like she needed hurt more than she wanted to admit, she'd never, ever hated her. She didn't hate her now. She never would.

And for all their similarities, Nikos was not like her mom. He paid her more attention than her mom ever had. He also showed tolerance for family priorities with his own mom. That was something. Because Ash wasn't going to raise her children alone, a work-widow. She got the feeling that Nikos would think it was doubly important for him to be there as a dad for his children. Because his own father had not been there for him.

She couldn't help wondering how he was going to react to learning she'd guaranteed herself more than a weekend to make her decision. She'd taken the week off from work, managed to fool her security detail into thinking she was still in her apartment and flown to Barcelona. She hadn't had any real destination in mind when she arrived at the airport; she'd simply taken the first international flight available.

That had landed her in Barcelona, where again she'd made her travel plans based on availability and hopped the first outbound bus with an empty seat. That had brought her to this small coastal town. She'd never ridden a bus before and it had been kind of neat.

She'd checked into an older hotel, the kind that still used high ceiling fans instead of air-conditioning to control the heat. Her room was small, but clean and the decor was old world with a charm often missing in the upscale hotels she stayed at when traveling under her mother's aegis. She liked it, too.

Just as she enjoyed sitting on the beach for this short moment in time as if she was just anyone, not the daughter of a super wealthy businesswoman. But it couldn't last. She had to go back to her life eventually.

When she left Boston, she'd been running, she freely admitted. From Nikos. From her own feelings. From the decision she fatalistically realized was a foregone conclusion. Especially since allowing Nikos into her body. He'd been right. She'd been arguing semantics. Once she'd given herself to him, there had been no hope.

Not for a future without him if he wanted to share hers.

Remembering back to just before they first kissed, she'd had that moment of lucidity…the point at which she'd realized the outcome if she gave in. Stupidly…or courageously? Or simply unavoidably…she'd given in anyway.

She knew that sex didn't mean the same to women that it did to men. She didn't need her own painful past to learn that, the media screamed the message in every medium. But that sure knowledge had not saved her. Simply because sex meant something so different to her, she'd had no chance. If it was only her body she was holding back, she could have done it, but once her heart was involved, she was lost.

She was going to marry Nikos. The alternative…life without him and life without the mother's love she would be gifted with in Zoe, was an untenable choice.