Big Greek Baby Secret Read online

  “I have a bar,” I repeated more slowly. “Fully stocked. And I won’t even charge you,” I added with a jokey wink.

  The setting sun was reflecting off the windows of the villa the way it did every night in the summer. Maxine raised a hand to her brow and squinted up at me, her nose adorably crinkled.

  “Do you treat all trespassers this kindly?”

  “Only the pretty ones,” I replied.

  I turned away from her and shook my head. What on earth had come over me?

  Chapter 4

  Maxine

  I’m dreaming. Clearly, this is a fantasy, and I’ll wake up in my bed back home in Madison.

  I’d lived my entire life in Madison, Wisconsin, and the only time a man had ever offered me a drink was on my twenty-first birthday, when I’d accidentally stumbled into one of the town’s few gay bars and the bartender had felt bad for me. I’d thought I was flirting with a man named Kevin, but after twenty minutes of laying down the groundwork, I’d asked him for his number and he’d introduced me to his boyfriend, Michael. So, I’d drowned my sorrows in two free Long Island Iced Teas and had gone home alone.

  Now, only six hours after the plane had touched down, I was sitting in a private villa on the beach watching a tanned Greek god pour me a drink. I was so certain the whole experience must be a dream that I didn’t even bother to ask him what was in the glass he handed me. I just accepted it and tipped it back, wincing at the nice burn.

  “Not a fan of whiskey?” he asked.

  I thought about it, my lips pinched to one side, and then nodded. “No, that was all right. I think I liked it.”

  “Wait,” he said, holding up a hand. “Was that the first time you’ve ever had whiskey?”

  He looked so truly offended by my lack of alcohol experience that I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Sorry, I don’t drink very often.”

  His eyebrows raised almost to his hairline. “When I was in my twenties, I don’t think I did anything other than drink.”

  “When you were in your twenties?” I asked, not realizing I’d spoken my thoughts aloud.

  I hadn’t stopped to consider how old Dimitri was. He had just been a beautiful man. What if he was actually fifty, but had superhuman genes that made him look forever youthful?

  “I’m thirty-two,” he said, speaking as if the words were being forcefully dragged out of him. “It’s only two years away from my twenties, but it feels like a lot more than that.”

  Thirty-two wasn’t bad. I could work with thirty-two. That made him six years older than me. I’d seen a rom-com that had said something about age gaps…was it the seven-year limit? Not too much to have gaps in what we could relate over, pop-culture-wise?

  “You look very thoughtful. Is thirty-two an unlucky number or something?” Dimitri asked, pulling me from my thoughts.

  I could feel a blush creeping into my cheeks. He’d caught me, but I shook my head. “I was just thinking that you’re actually three years away from your twenties. You were thirty for an entire year.”

  He clutched at his chest like I’d stabbed him in the heart and then lifted the corner of his mouth up at me in a half-smile. “I suppose I deserved that after making you think you’d be arrested.”

  “I suppose you did,” I said with a wink.

  The bar sat at an angle between the villa and the beach, and from the deck chairs positioned in front of it, we had a full view of the horizon. The sun was dipping below the water, painting the sky in sherbet shades of orange, pink, and yellow. I wanted to reach up and take a scoop out of the clouds.

  I kept thinking the view was pretty enough to be a picture, and it was true. I wished I’d thought to bring my camera. This was a moment I wanted to remember forever. I wanted to put the ice cream sky in a frame and look back at this moment, remembering the gorgeous Greek man who’d poured me a drink and watched the sunset with me. It would be a story I’d tell my kids one day to encourage them to explore and live the world, not toil away in the same state the way I did.

  “How long will you be here on Barkas?” Dimitri asked.

  Something about the way he asked made my stomach flip. “Three days,” I said. “Unless the strike lasts longer than that.”

  “I’d hope not,” he said, and my face must have reflected my disappointment because he scrambled to explain. “I mean, for the sake of the airport and the jobs and travel plans people have. Of course, I’m not saying I want you to leave sooner.”

  I shrugged, trying to play it cool. “Give it a while longer. You may find yourself wishing you’d never invited the trespassing American woman for a drink.”

  “I highly doubt that,” he said, taking a sip of his drink and leaning back in the chair. The first few buttons of his shirt were open, revealing the smooth planes of his chest.

  I was unabashedly staring when he asked me a question, which I didn’t catch.

  “What?” I asked, looking up from his chest to his face. He was smiling at me, and I knew he’d caught me staring. I tried to pretend I didn’t care.

  “What do you plan to do while you’re here?” he asked.

  “I’m not really sure, honestly. I didn’t expect to have much free time, so I didn’t do any research about the area. I guess I’m going to be kind of winging it.”

  “Research? You make it sound like a homework assignment.”

  “Don’t people usually do research before they travel?” I asked. “You want to make sure to hit the best restaurants and see the best spots.”

  He shook his head. “If they do, they don’t know how to travel. You have to follow the flow of the place you’re visiting. Mingle with the locals, see where they go. You can’t let some internet rating site tell you which places to go into. If you do, you’ll end up surrounded by tourists.”

  “That all sounds nice until I walk into the wrong part of town and get shanked,” I countered.

  His eyes were squinty from the size of his smile, and his eyebrows drew together. “Shanked?”

  I mimed getting stabbed in the side and then had a ten-second elaborate fake death. By the end, my tongue was lolling out the side of my mouth, my eyes rolled back in my head.

  “There is no ‘wrong part’ of Barkas,” he said, laughing. “You need to forget everything you know about traveling and go with the flow.”

  “That will be easy. I don’t know anything about traveling,” I said honestly.

  Once again, his eyes narrowed at me, a question written in the lines of his forehead.

  “This is my first big trip.”

  “Out of the United States?” he asked.

  Suddenly, I felt self-conscious. What would my sheltered life look like to a sexy, wealthy Greek man? I’d already admitted I’d never tried whiskey. What would he say when I told him the flight to Barkas had been my first time in an airplane?

  “Umm…” I started, trying to find a way to describe my situation so it wouldn’t sound pitiful. After a few seconds, I decided that wasn’t possible and figured it would be best to just rip off the Band-Aid. “My first time out of Wisconsin.”

  I watched as the reality of what I’d said washed across his face. He leaned forward just as his mouth fell open in shock.

  “You’ve never left Wisconsin before this? As in, you’ve never been to any other state in your own country?”

  I looked down at my hands—which were wrapped around the nearly empty glass—and nodded, realizing for the first time how light my head felt. My arms felt tingly and warm and there was a buzz in the bottom of my stomach. I was definitely tipsy.

  “Well, that’s all right,” he said, clearly trying to reign back his reaction.

  I laughed. “No, it isn’t. You think I’m a freak.”

  “No, no, no,” he said, speaking quickly. “I’m just surprised.”

  I waved his apology away, silencing him.

  “Really, it’s okay. I’ve always known it was strange to have never left, and it’s why I begged to come on this work tri
p. My whole life, I wanted to travel, but it felt like a luxury I couldn’t afford. And my ex-boyfriend didn’t see the point in traveling. That difference alone would have broken us up sooner, had I felt like I had the time or the money to travel. But I didn’t, so it didn’t seem to matter, and we stayed together, never venturing outside Wisconsin. But then, for various reasons I won’t bore you with, we broke up. A few months later, the conference opportunity came up. So, I jumped at it, and now—by some miracle—the air traffic control people went on strike and I get to spend three days in paradise on the company’s dime.”

  When I finished, my mouth felt dry and my chest rose and fell quickly. “Sorry, that was a long, boring story,” I said, surprised at how much I’d opened up to this near-stranger.

  Dimitri shook his head. “It’s not boring. Not a bit. I find it impressive, actually.”

  A surprised giggle shot out of me. “I’ve never heard that before. Me? Impressive?”

  I’d said it as a joke, but even that felt vulnerable. I’d always felt like I wasn’t enough. Not for my father, who had left when I was three years old. Not for any of my past boyfriends, who I’d changed myself for, always trying to please. I had never felt like I was more than anyone expected. Always less.

  “Absolutely,” he said, sounding surprisingly genuine. “You are going after what you want in life and not allowing anything to hold you back. Not all people are like that. Most people let their hopes and dreams die along with them.”

  I’d never thought of myself in those terms before, and the threat of tears pricked behind my eyes. I swallowed them back.

  “What are your dreams?” I asked.

  Dimitri shifted and shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

  “I find that hard to believe. You seem too passionate about me following my dreams to not have any of your own.”

  “Do you want another drink?” he asked, grabbing my glass off the small table between our chairs and heading towards the bar.

  “I should probably switch to water if I’m going to walk back to my room tonight,” I said.

  Dimitri looked at me, wide-eyed, and I realized what I’d said.

  “When I walk back to my room,” I corrected immediately.

  I didn’t see Dimitri’s response to that. Even the accidental suggestion of me staying the night with him had my face aflame. I looked out towards the darkening water, the sun well below the waterline, now. Streaks of dying light danced across the waves, streamers of pink and purple and midnight blue.

  I wondered what it would be like to look out on that view every night. Maybe that was why Dimitri didn’t have a specific dream. He was living everyone’s dream. Who didn’t want to live on a beach with an ocean view?

  Dimitri returned with three drinks—two wine glasses and one tall glass of water. I wondered whether it wasn’t meant to be some kind of invitation. He had probably just been trying to be nice and give me the option of both. My answer hadn’t exactly been clear. I grabbed the water and drank half of it in one go.

  “You said you want to travel,” he said, picking up the conversation where we’d left off. “Does that mean a yearly vacation and you stay in Wisconsin, or do you want to live abroad at some point?”

  I’d given this exact question a lot of thought, but no one had ever asked me about it before. The few men I’d spoken to since breaking up with Tony had mostly wanted to talk about themselves. My life and interests were merely a footnote, the muck we had to tread through before they were free to talk about themselves. Dimitri, on the other hand, wanted to study me. He acted like there might be a test at the end of the conversation and he wanted to ace it.

  “I’d love to leave Wisconsin,” I said. “I’d love to live somewhere like this, actually.”

  “Being a telemarketer seems like it would allow you to work from anywhere in the world, right? So why can’t you live somewhere like this?” he asked.

  I decided not to mention that his villa on the beach was so far out of my price range it might as well have been on Mars.

  “By the time I’m living on the ocean somewhere, I sincerely hope I’m not a telemarketer anymore.”

  “It isn’t your dream job?”

  I almost choked on my water. “No. No, absolutely not.”

  The thought of still working for Diane in ten years, of showing up every day to sit inside my gray cubicle and eat my cold sandwich for lunch, made me feel nauseous.

  “This job is just paying the bills, for now. Eventually, I want to run my own bed and breakfast. My mom ran one in Madison while I was growing up. It’s what inspired me to travel. The people who came there were from cities all over the world and our bed and breakfast was just a stop on their way to somewhere else. I didn’t like the idea of being nothing more than a stop along the way for them. I wanted to be the destination.

  “So, the dream is to open a B&B somewhere like this, where people come and relax for a week or two at a time. I know there are resorts people can go to, but—no offense—I want to offer more than that. I want people to be immersed in the culture, not in five-star amenities that make it so they never have to leave the resort property. I want to broaden other people’s horizons just as mine will be broadened.”

  Dimitri held up his hands. “No offense taken. I know I’m living at the Sands of Barkas, but I feel the same as you do about resorts. They aren’t much for cultural authenticity.”

  “Why are you living in the resort?” I asked. “I mean, you have your own housekeeper and it seems like you’ve been here for a while. Why not buy your own place? Settle down?”

  “I’d never be able to find a house with this kind of view,” he said, spanning his hand across the dusky scene before us and laughing.

  “Surely there are other beachfront properties on this island,” I said, teasing him, but also wanting to learn something about him. Dimitri had evaded most of my questions throughout the conversation. He waved them away as unimportant or changed the subject or made a joke. If he hadn’t been so interested in hearing about my life, I would have assumed he was uninterested. Instead, it just seemed like he was reluctant to give away any personal information, which only made me want to know more.

  “Speaking of the island…” he said, leaning forward in his chair, elbows resting on his knees. “I’d love to show you around. I know this place better than anyone, and since you said you don’t have much of a plan, I thought I could offer my services as your tour guide.”

  “My tour guide?” I asked, a little suspicious. “Will you charge me fifty dollars at the end of the afternoon?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “No, I’ll charge you fifty euros. First lesson, we don’t use dollars in Greece.”

  “Good to know,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “Tell me you’ll come with me,” he said, becoming serious. He ran his fingers through his wavy hair and looked at me, his brown eyes reflecting the ocean. “I can show you around the town, we can hike through the hills, and I know where a secret beach cove is.”

  “A secret beach cove?” I asked, imagining a kind of superhero hidden fortress built into the rocks.

  He shrugged. “At least, it is usually empty. It will be fun. What do you say?”

  It was at that moment—sitting in front of the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen, staring at a beautiful Greek man who wanted to show me around his beautiful island—that I realized how much trouble I was in.

  Everyone said Paris was where you went when you wanted to fall in love, but I suspected one look at Dimitri would change their minds. The man was too handsome for words—not to mention that he was thoughtful and a good listener. He cared about what I had to say and wanted to show me a good time. All of those were good things, except I was leaving in three days. Could I really risk becoming attached to him? What if I never wanted to leave? What if he broke my heart into a thousand pieces and I decided to never travel again?

  A huge part of me wanted to say yes. I wanted to see the town t
hrough his eyes and walk behind him while we hiked through the hills. I wanted to see him swimming in the waters of a secret cove. At the same time, though, I didn’t know a thing about him. Not really.

  He had avoided revealing almost any personal details, which made me think he had something to hide. I’d already spent a good fifteen minutes of our conversation staring at his ring finger, searching for a tan line that would outline where a ring had been recently. But there was nothing. So, I at least felt mostly confident he wasn’t married.

  Surely he had a girlfriend, though. Did she usually share this house with him? If she was out of town for the weekend, she wouldn’t be able to get back to the island because of the airline strike. So, Dimitri didn’t have anything to lose by flirting with an American tourist just passing through.

  I didn’t really think any of this was true, but all I could think was that, one way or another, Dimitri would end up breaking my heart. Still—despite every reason I had to turn down his offer, walk back down the beach immediately, and spend the next three days by myself—I found myself nodding.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’d love for you to be my tour guide.”

  Dimitri smiled widely and clapped his hands together, leaning back in his chair. “Perfect. This is going to be fun.”

  I smiled back at him. Oh, it will be something, all right.

  Chapter 5

  Dimitri

  The weekend, like most weekends in my twenties, was almost completely lost to the haze of alcohol and the wind off the ocean.

  My sailboat saw more of the ocean than it ever did of the dock, and that was the way I liked it. Out at sea, I couldn’t see the disappointed face of my father, reminding me with every frown line that I was nothing like the heir he’d hoped for. I didn’t have to run from the cameras that followed me everywhere, wanting to snap endless photos of a member of the noble family eating a ham sandwich from the diner on the corner.

  I could sit back, relax, and forget about everything except the drink in my hand and the water around me.