Page 81 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
C LOUDS WERE GATHERING above Athens that early morning, the first break from the unremitting sunshine in over three months.
Lydia took her seat amongst the extremely early-bird tourists and the first of the commuters and tried to shake the clouds gathering in the unremittingly sunny mood she’d determinedly retained for the past week.
The train set off. Moments later it stopped.
Her heart clenched. A week ago, this was the stop she’d embarked at.
It had taken her the full week to pluck up the courage to take it again and prove to herself that she really was over him; that there had never actually been anything to get over, that the madness of lust she’d found with Alexis was gone.
Don’t think about him.
She’d been too busy to think about him other than in the abstract.
Lydia had found a new energy. She’d thrown herself into her work, pitching for more contracts in a few days than she’d done in a year.
No more picking and choosing the most exciting ones to catch her eye, now she was approaching her work like she always should have done, like a business and not like a hobby for a spoilt rich kid.
If she’d approached it like this from the start then she would never have had to go crawling to Alexis when bankruptcy had loomed.
She would already have been self-sufficient from her own endeavours.
Her parents had been too busy riding the wave of euphoria at the saving of the business to ask any questions about her time in London so she’d been spared from having to tell more lies. She never wanted to tell another lie. A few more days and she would tell them about the baby.
If anyone other than Helena realised she’d been the woman to leave the party with Alexis then they were being remarkably discreet.
It looked like she’d got away with that moment of madness.
She should be relieved but she was too numb to feel anything, and she still didn’t know what she would say to her parents.
Before, she’d planned to simply refuse to reveal the identity of the father until the baby was born and they’d fallen in love with their grandchild, yet whenever she tried to envisage the scene now, the sickness that had become a permanent part of her welled up and stopped her.
She couldn’t leave it much longer. If they weren’t so wrapped up in their euphoria they would notice her waistline had thickened. That morning, she’d caught sight of her naked figure and seen a small but detectable curve in her belly. Not quite a bump but definitely a precursor to one.
She’d come within a breath of calling Alexis to tell him.
There had been no contact between them. Not a call, not a message. Nothing. Radio silence.
She continued not thinking about him all the way to the Acropolis stop, all along her route on the Dionysiou Areopagitou walkway and past the church of St Demetrius, still not thinking about him when she disappeared through the trees onto the running route.
The thickening clouds meant she didn’t need to seek solace from the heat of the rising sun.
But this was her route, the safe, comforting, familiar path she always took, and she pounded along it to the old quarry, still not thinking about him as she passed the crag and took the landscaped path to the top of the hill.
When she reached the marble Philopappos Monument, she took a long drink of her water and, before she could stop herself, she turned her gaze in the direction of the district where Alexis lived, easily seeking out his apartment block.
She’d looked out at it from this very spot an average of five times a week since their weekend together.
This was the first time she’d looked at it with dark clouds looming over it.
Was he there or had he already left for work?
Don’t think about him.
Was he choosing which of his many, many, many snazzy suits to wear for the day?
Don’t think about him.
Still unable to wrench her gaze from the direction of his apartment, she absently rubbed at her belly and the weird bubbling sensation that had just started in it…
Like flutters. Bubbling flutters…
Her eyes widened and she pressed harder. That was her baby. She could feel her baby. She could feel her baby!
Still pressing into her fluttering belly, she excitedly unzipped her side pocket and pulled out her phone. She needed to call Alexis. He needed to know this momentous milestone…
A fat raindrop fell on her nose. Another landed with a splat on her chin. In moments, the heavens opened with a load roar and seconds later Lydia was soaked to her skin, still holding her belly, water pouring off her phone.
Cursing, she wiped the phone on her soaked T-shirt and tried to unlock it but her fingers were too wet for her fingerprint to work and the deluge too heavy for facial recognition to work either.
Excitement turned into panic. She couldn’t remember the pin code she hadn’t used since she’d first set the phone up.
Hardly able to see at all through the waterfall of water, she tried every pin code she’d ever had, her need to speak to Alexis and share the news and hear his voice, right now, growing stronger with each failed attempt…
Her screen locked itself at the exact same moment the fluttering bubbles stopped.
‘Please,’ she sobbed to her baby, rubbing vigorously with one hand as she manically shook her phone in a futile attempt to bring it magically back to life. ‘Please, do it again. Please. Please…’
Oh, God, she was crying, and no sooner had she realised her face wasn’t just wet with the rain but with her tears, a keening wrench sliced through her chest, the greatest pain of her life ripping her heart in two and bringing her to her knees with a howl.
Call him? Call him?
Lydia didn’t need to hear his voice. She needed him . Alexis.
She shouldn’t be calling him to share the news. She should be there with him, living the experience with him, in his apartment, in the bedroom he’d turned into a beautiful sanctuary for her because he loved her. Alexis loved her. He loved her and she’d closed her eyes and ears to it.
She couldn’t close her eyes and ears to it now.
Each and every heavy raindrop fell on her like a mark of condemnation: condemning her for walking—running—away from him like a frightened child instead of fighting for them, and all because she couldn’t handle what she felt for him and had never believed that she was enough for him; condemning her, too, for burying her head in the sand ever since, and all because the truth was too terrifying to contemplate, that to admit her real feelings for him meant admitting that she’d thrown away the best person in the whole wide world because she was a coward.
Another long, interminable day had bled into another long, interminable night, and now, with another long, interminable day to look forward to, Alexis stared out of his bedroom window at the torrent of rain lashing the streets.
Finally, the weather matched his mood. Good.
Why should he be the only one to suffer?
The darkness of the rainclouds was nothing on the cloud that had lived in his heart since he’d returned to an apartment empty of Lydia.
She’d taken everything of hers. His cleaning crew worked such magic that not even a strand of her hair remained. The only item of hers he still possessed was the lipstick that had fallen in the back of his car that first night. He’d taken to carrying it around with him.
Time, they said, was a healer. They were liars. All time did was rip the gaping wound in his heart wider. He’d never imagined missing someone could be a physical pain.
How the hell was he supposed to move on when Lydia’s ghost lived within the walls he slept in and in the very air he breathed? Somehow he had to find a way because this pain was beyond endurance.
The rain poured harder than ever but Lydia no longer cared. She lifted her face to it and accepted the drenching she deserved.
The safe, comforting, familiar path she’d taken on this run was the path she’d been taking all her life because she was too much of a coward to divert from it.
Too much of a coward to forge a life, a real life, for herself.
Too much of a coward to fight for the man she loved because she’d never had to fight for anything before, not even for herself.
Yes, everything Alexis had said had been the truth, all except for one thing.
She did believe in him. It was herself she’d never believed in.
The great Alexis Tsaliki, a force of nature who burned brighter than the sun and who could have any woman he so desired, loved her.
He wanted her . Just her. She was enough for him.
How could she have walked away after everything he’d done for her and everything he’d said? How could she have left him knowing that to leave him would be to destroy him? And destroy herself too.
She loved him.
The rain had stopped.
Lydia opened her eyes to the sun burning through the clouds. Its warmth bathed her skin.
She laughed and lifted her chin even higher. She loved Alexis. She loved him. She was his and he was hers, and she would do whatever it took, fight any fight needed, to make him understand and believe that she was his for ever.
Lydia let herself into her parents’ house. Her running clothes were still damp from the rain but she didn’t want to go back to her cottage and change, not until she’d done what needed to be done, now, before her father left for work.
They were both in the dining room finishing their breakfast, her father dressed in his suit, her mother still in her dressing gown.
‘I need to talk to you,’ she said without any preamble.
Her mother’s lined face…the last year had seen those lines turn into grooves…furrowed. ‘What’s wrong, baba ?’
‘Before I tell you, I want you to know that I love you.’
‘You’re scaring me. Are you ill? Come and sit down. Petros, pour her a coffee.’