Kostas's Convenient Bride

Codergirl: Andreas won’t like that.

OnBroadway: Even better.

Codergirl: You’re a troublemaker.

OnBroadway: I can be.

She let out a small laugh, only a little embarrassed when she realized someone might have heard. She looked around and realized Andreas was watching her, his expression brooding.

Her phone buzzed with another text and she looked at it.

OnBroadway: Just don’t make the same mistake I did.

Codergirl: What’s that?

OnBroadway: Being afraid to take a chance on a friend.

People said that emails and texts didn’t convey emotions, but there was a wealth of feeling behind Jacob’s last string of words.

Codergirl: What happened?

OnBroadway: I lost my friend and the chance at more.

“More texts from Jacob?” Andreas asked, his voice surprisingly mild, considering the tightness around his eyes and the tension filling his posture as he stood towering over her chair.

“Yes, give me a second.” She wasn’t leaving her new friend hanging after that kind of admission.

Codergirl: I’m sorry. You’re a good guy.

OnBroadway: I have my career.

It wasn’t enough, though, or Jacob wouldn’t have advised her to go for Andreas. Kayla understood loneliness.

“Tell Jacob hello, but it’s not safe to text and walk.”

Meaning they were going to be walking again very soon.

She looked up at Andreas. “Are you bored, boss?”

His jaw went rigid. “Not your boss. We have more sightseeing to do.”

“You are being rude.”

“In what way?” He leaned against the wall by her chair, and he might have looked relaxed but for the jaw hewn from granite, crossed arms and muscles bunched with tension.

She waved her phone at him. “I am in the middle of a conversation.”

“During our date,” Andreas bit out.

What? They were on a date? How had she not realized that?

He was talking again before she could get her whirling mind to formulate an answer. “Do you see me talking on my cell? Have I sent a single text?”

“No.”

“Because my attention is entirely on you.”

Wow. Okay. This day was so not what she thought it had been. Nothing had been unexpected. He’d planned it as a date and all the sensuality had been part of it.

“I thought you were busy looking at DIY.”

He shrugged. “I get that. I also get that you are not the one invested in repairing ties that you frayed.”

But Andreas was. He might not love her, but Andreas cared more about their relationship than any other one in his life.

That mattered to Kayla. A lot.

“We were having kind of an intense conversation. Let me just tell Jacob goodbye.”

Andreas nodded, his expression closed. He stepped away to give her privacy.

Codergirl: Off to see more sights. TTYL.

She felt a strange relief and a thrill of happiness when Andreas took her hand as they left the bookstore. He seemed to have a destination in mind, using his hold on her hand to guide her along.

For her part, she was just happy to take in all the color and texture. Tourists mixed with native New Yorkers, people moving quickly with a clear destination in mind, others stopping every couple of feet to take pictures. It was a magical mishmash of humanity.

“You are people watching again.”

“I like it.”

“Considering how much time you spend on computers, some might find your fascination with our species odd.”

Just because she was cautious about the friends she made and the time she spent with them in no way meant people were not endlessly fascinating to her. How they interacted with each other. The way their bodies often said things differently than what they said with their mouths.

Yes, she found computers a lot easier to decode, but that didn’t mean she was giving up on trying to decode her fellow human beings. “There’s plenty to find odd about me, Andreas. I spent years of my childhood mute and still managed to skip grades.”

He squeezed her hand, understanding wrapping around her, though no words were exchanged. Andreas was the only person she’d ever told about her past, and he’d never once made her feel like a freak because of it.

“You responded to the abandonment of your mother by shutting the world out. It was natural that refusing to speak was part of that for you. You trusted no one with your words.”

He’d gotten that, when none of her social workers had. Her first foster mom had, though, and she’d been the one to draw Kayla out of her silent isolation. Only to send her back into it with the woman’s death from breast cancer several years later.

“It’s not the normal way to react to trauma. To just stop talking.”

“You know how I feel about normal, Kayla.”

Kayla grinned. “According to you, normal is boring.”

“I refuse to allow anyone else to tell me what normal for my life is supposed to be. My father tried to tell me normal was a family with parents after my mother died, but what was normal about forcing me to live amid the very people who believed my mother was so beneath them, they never even spoke her name?”

“Weren’t any of them worth getting to know?” Kayla asked.

She’d never questioned him before on his wholesale rejection of the Georgas clan, but she could not imagine it. She had no family. Not a single distant cousin to call her own. He had so many and rejected them all.

“I do not know. I refused to let anyone close enough to find out.”

“And you don’t regret that? Not even a little bit?”

“Why would I?” he asked with negligent arrogance.

“Andreas, don’t you realize what I would give to have a single person I could call family?” She shook her head and then looked up at him. He was facing ahead, watching where they were walking. His expression hard to read in profile. “Someone I knew I could rely on to just be there?”

“You can’t always rely on family. You know that.”

“My mom, your mom’s family...they aren’t all there is. Families are there for each other. Just because we haven’t lived it, doesn’t mean we haven’t seen it. Just look at how Bradley’s family is. They are all so close. Look at Jacob’s sister, she’s mad at me because I ditched our date. Family.”

“You think I could have had that with a Georgas cousin?” Andreas’s voice was filled with mocking doubt.

But she wasn’t going to back down just because he got a little snippy. “You don’t know you couldn’t. You don’t know your dad wouldn’t have given you something more than you let him.”

She knew that right there might be pushing him too far, but she’d thought for a long time the biggest problem between Andreas and his father was that they were too much alike. Both as stubborn as each other. Both arrogant. Both sure they knew what was right.

And for a time in Andreas’s life, Barnabas Georgas had the power to impose his will on his son. Without a true father-son relationship to temper that imposition, all it did was make Andreas despise the man more than he already did for the way Barnabas had treated Melia Kostas.

No attempts to make things better were going to work because Barnabas Kostas had irreparably damaged his bond with his son from the very beginning.

Andreas stopped in front of a glass building they’d seen from the boat on their harbor tour.

He turned to face her, no problem seeing how he was feeling now.

An expression of stunned disbelief tinged with anger covered his face. “Are you kidding me? That asshole did nothing but what he wanted and only for the benefit of his own consequence.”

“He was spoiled. Used to getting his own way. I doubt he knew any other tactic but the one he took with you.”

“His loss.”

“One I bet he feels to this day.”

“You don’t really believe

that.”

She sighed. “I don’t know, okay? But it’s possible. Maybe there was more going on than you realized. He went about it all wrong, but maybe he didn’t know how to deal with a son who hated his guts before they ever met.”

“I had reason.”

“I know you did.” Barnabas Georgas had given Melia Kostas money for an abortion and to leave Greece.

She’d been ostracized by her family when she would only do one of those things, rejected by the man she’d loved, but she’d kept her son and raised him to the best of her abilities. And from all accounts, Melia had been an amazing mom.

“But circumstances change. People change. They learn to regret choices they made.”

She’d often wondered if her mom had ever regretted abandoning her. She’d always assumed the answer was no. After all, in order to contact Kayla, all she’d had to do was go through social services.