Читать книгу Modern Romance November 2019 Books 1-4 - Эбби Грин - Страница 19

THE PRESS WERE out in force next morning when the newly-weds left the Granchester Hotel in a flurry of flashbulbs. Drakon’s hand was pressed lightly against Lucy’s back as he guided her through the scrum of photographers and she looked up at him in gratitude just as the flash went off. And that was the photo which made the online edition of Britain’s biggest tabloid. Lucy Konstantinou, standing by the giant hotel Christmas tree with shining eyes and snowflakes on her nose, while Drakon looked down at her with something indeterminate written on his hard and handsome face.

On the way to the airfield Lucy insisted on stopping by the apartment to check on Xander, but the baby was fast asleep and Sofia was assembling a new interactive baby mat with bells and squeaky cushions, for when he awoke. The nanny had looked up when they’d walked in, a question creasing her eyes, as if surprised to see them. Almost as if this unscheduled stop was as unwelcome to her as it had been to Drakon.

‘Satisfied?’ her new husband had demanded as the limousine had pulled away from the kerb and Lucy had nodded before staring out of the window at the falling snow, feeling kind of extraneous. Not a real wife, nor a real mother either, it seemed.

There were photos of them boarding the plane at Northolt, where the fields surrounding the airstrip were soft and white and more clouds of snowflakes swirled from the sky. There was even a shot from inside the wedding reception—though it was a mystery who had taken it—in which she and Drakon had been feeding each other hunks of creamy wedding cake.

Nobody would have guessed from that laughing image that at that precise moment Lucy had been in an agony of self-doubt about Amy and her place in Drakon’s life. Yet now that fear had been banished and they were just about to begin their married life together and everything should be just fine and dandy, shouldn’t it?

Shouldn’t it?

Cosseted in the luxury of Drakon’s plane, Lucy scrolled down the newspaper website past all the pictures. English Nurse Marries Greek Billionaire! ran the headline, and she found herself wondering why newspapers seemed obsessed with stereotypes.

Her smile was wry. Or maybe they were simply more perceptive than she gave them credit for. Perhaps they had homed into her dreamlike state before, during and after the ceremony—and managed to work out for themselves that this all felt as if it were happening to someone else, not her.

The jet flew them straight to Prasinisos and once Drakon had dismissed the flight attendants, he pulled her into his arms and started to kiss her. And wasn’t it strange how sex could melt away your misgivings? Because the only thing she seemed able to rely on was her body’s reaction whenever Drakon touched her. It had only been a few hours since they’d last made love but already she was hungry to feel him inside her again. To feel him and taste him and shudder out her pleasure as he filled her with his thrusting hardness. Inside the plane’s master bedroom, he peeled off her clothes with care, as if he were slowly unwrapping a Christmas present, and he laughed when she tugged at his clothes with more eagerness than finesse.

‘Are you going to rip my shirt off, Lucy?’

‘If you could be bothered to help me with the buttons that wouldn’t be an option.’

‘Or maybe I’m enjoying being the passive object of your desire?’

‘You? Passive? I don’t think so.’

‘I don’t think so either,’ he growled, pushing her back on the bed to bury his dark head beneath her thighs, so that she had to bite at the knuckles of one hand to prevent herself from shouting out her pleasure. Eventually he moved back up her body and thrust deep inside her and she could feel the shimmering of another intense orgasm waiting in the wings. Afterwards she repaired her hair as best she could but her cheeks still had a fiery glow as the plane touched down on his private island.

It felt strange to be back. Last time Lucy had visited Prasinisos had been for an unexpected freebie weekend when it had been impossible not to be overawed by the beauty of Drakon’s exclusive home. But she’d also been aware of how broke she was in comparison to her wealthy host—a difference which had been brought home when his driver had been sent to meet her, widening his eyes before quickly composing himself.

That same driver was here today—Stavros, his name was—but there was no such look of bewilderment on his face. Maybe he didn’t even recognise her as the same woman. Why, when she’d looked into the mirror this morning Lucy had barely recognised herself! Her designer clothes were exquisitely cut and hugely flattering and she knew that the cost of her shoes and handbag had been eye-wateringly high. She looked expensive and felt expensive—as if she had every right to be married to one of the world’s wealthiest men. But inside she was the same Lucy, wasn’t she? The woman who was not really a complete woman, married to a man who seemed indifferent to love and emotion.

But unless she wanted to ruin this honeymoon, she was going to have to put a lid on her insecurities. To learn how to manage and adjust them. She had just married the most amazing man and was about to experience the holiday of a lifetime and she owed it to them both to make the very best of it.

Drakon was quiet as they drove up the rugged path towards his cliff-top villa past the dramatic outcrop of rock which some people said resembled a man’s face. He could feel the tension of the last few weeks leeching from his body, and not simply because of the post-sex endorphins which were lingering after that amazing mid-flight encounter with his new wife. No. It was a sense of achievement which now prevailed because it had all worked out exactly as he’d planned. He’d pulled it off. He had gained a suitable mother for his baby nephew and all he needed to do now was to play the part of contented newly-wed with conviction. Still, if the first twenty-four hours of married life were anything to go by, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Leaning back against the leather seat, he gave a small smile as Lucy’s excited voice broke into his reflection.

‘Look! Over there. What’s that, Drakon?’

He narrowed his eyes in the direction of her pointing finger. ‘It’s a peregrine falcon. Never seen one before?’

‘I’m not sure. And if I did I wouldn’t know what to call it.’

‘Call yourself a country girl?’ he teased.

‘As you know, I only live an hour outside London, which is hardly rural isolation,’ she protested as she leaned forward to get a better look at the falcon. ‘Wow. That’s amazing. So fast and so graceful.’

‘And so deadly,’ he commented, deadpan. ‘To small mammals, at any rate.’

‘I suppose so.’ She turned to look at him. ‘And the sea is very blue. Do you suppose there’s any chance of going swimming?’

Drakon thought how wistful her voice sounded and was reminded of the first time he’d seen her here—with her body ploughing through the azure waters of his pool. ‘It’s December, Lucy,’ he reminded her gently.

‘And people in the UK swim in all weathers,’ she informed him. ‘In the newspapers recently was a photo of a woman in Scotland who had to smash her way through the ice with a pickaxe before she could go for her daily swim.’

He laughed. ‘I’m not sure I’d trust you with a pickaxe. We’ll see. But not today. Today I have only one thing in mind and that’s to take my beautiful wife to bed as quickly as possible.’

Lucy wanted to object. To tell him not to say things like that because she wasn’t beautiful and they sounded dangerously romantic and she was afraid of getting sucked into a vortex of false promise, which would make her long for things which were never going to happen. Because flattering words didn’t really mean anything, did they? They were just words.

They reached the palatial villa where all the staff were lined up to greet them and it was only after she had shaken everyone’s hands that Lucy noticed the giant decorated tree which was glittering in one corner of the vast sitting room which led off the marbled foyer.

‘I didn’t know you had Christmas trees in Greece,’ she said wonderingly as she gazed at lush branches strewn with stars and fairy lights.

‘On the contrary, we love them. Sub-zero temperatures aren’t obligatory,’ answered Drakon with soft mockery in his voice. ‘On Christmas Eve the children sing carols and carry model boats painted gold and decorated with nuts. And we give presents, of course.’

Lucy thought about the modest gift she had tucked away for him in her suitcase and realised how humble it would appear in this lavish setting, as Drakon led her upstairs to the vast bedroom which overlooked the Mediterranean. The room was full of bright light and winter sunshine but she found herself glancing around nervously, and her voice was diffident when she spoke. ‘It looks…different in here.’

‘It is.’ The sweeping movement of his hand indicated the pristine linen adorning the king-size bed, as well as a soft new shade of grey on the walls. ‘I decided to have the room redecorated before you got here.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Oh? And why was that?’

‘Does it matter why?’

Lucy tried to stem the question but she couldn’t. Afterwards she would try to justify it by reasoning that she needed to know exactly where she stood, but perhaps it was more like worrying a healing cut on your finger and inadvertently making it bleed again. ‘I think so,’ she said lightly. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be honest with each other now we’re married?’

There was a pause. ‘I just thought it would be good to start afresh, with a completely clean slate.’

‘You mean, we’ll be using sheets which haven’t been slept in by any other woman?’

He winced. ‘If you like.’

She nodded, hating the completely unreasonable urge to cry which was making her eyes prickle. She knew the reality because he’d painstakingly spelt it out for her in London, just so there could be no mistake. He’d explained that he hadn’t been sexually indiscriminate but, even so, of course he’d had plenty of lovers before her. And why shouldn’t he? She was the freak, not Drakon. She was the woman approaching thirty who’d never been intimate with anyone until she’d melted into the arms of her Greek lover.

‘But won’t you miss it, Drakon?’ she forced herself to question huskily. ‘The variety of having all those different lovers? Though maybe I’m being presumptuous in assuming there won’t be any in the future. We’ve never discussed whether this is going to be an open marriage before now, have we?’

Drakon could hear the bravado in her voice and admired her outspokenness, knowing that few women would have been so matter-of-fact about such a tricky subject. Until he reminded himself that her candour was only possible because neither of them had any real emotion invested in the relationship. And that was why this marriage had a chance of succeeding—because there were no unrealistic expectations of love. And if she wanted honesty, didn’t he owe her that? His mouth hardened. Of course he did. Especially when he found lies so detestable.

‘I thought I’d made it clear that I would pledge to you my sexual loyalty,’ he said coolly. ‘Because I know how destructive infidelity can be. I’m not planning on having anyone other than you as my lover, Lucy, because sexually you thrill me in every way.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘But right now I’m having difficulty talking because the desire to pin you down on that bed and lose myself deep inside your body is pushing everything else from my mind.’

‘Then what are you waiting for?’ she questioned shakily.

He could hear the relief in her voice as he walked towards her, enjoying the instinctive darkening of her eyes as he unbuttoned her coat and hung it over the back of a chair. ‘You seem to be wearing rather a lot of clothes,’ he complained as he bent to unzip her knee-high boots.

‘It was s-snowing when we left the Granchester, if you remember,’ she breathed, perching on the edge of the bed as he slid the soft leather over each calf.

‘Well, it isn’t snowing here.’

She lifted her hips accommodatingly to allow him to slither her skirt over them. ‘Does it ever snow on the island?’ she queried conversationally.

‘I didn’t bring you here to discuss the damned weather,’ he growled. ‘We’re not in England now.’

He undressed her efficiently and though on some level he registered the fine fabric and cut of her new clothes, it was the naked Lucy which made his senses soar like the peregrine falcon which had swooped through the sky on the journey here. His fingers skated over her big, pale breasts and traced featherlight paths over her arching ribcage and although he was rock-hard and eager to thrust deep inside her, he made himself wait. As he slowly kissed her belly and licked a teasing line downwards, he lifted his head to look at her.

‘You’ve waxed,’ he observed, one demonstrative finger circling the satin-smooth skin of her inner thigh. ‘I noticed it last night but was a little too…preoccupied to mention it.’

‘Drakon!’

‘You want to be intimate in all ways?’ he mused. ‘Or do you want always to behave like a virgin and talk like a virgin?’

She shook her head. ‘The…the wedding dress designer advised I get it done.’ She gasped as his finger dipped lower. ‘She said she thought…less is more—’

‘Except concerning the application of sequins, of course,’ he commented drily as he moved over her.

He made it last as long as he could—which was precisely long enough to allow them both to choke out their almost simultaneous pleasure. The second time he took it more slowly, enjoying Lucy’s cries of wonder as her nails dug into his shoulder. When eventually they fell asleep, the setting sun was blazing through the huge windows so that the interior of the bedroom resembled a coral furnace. And when they woke, diamond-bright stars had been dusted over the clear, night sky. Drakon clicked on a lamp to see Lucy struggling to open her eyes, her nut-brown hair spread like satin over the pillow.

‘What time is it?’ she enquired sleepily.

‘Dinner time.’ He glanced over at his wristwatch. ‘At least, it will be soon. Spiro was in the process of preparing a wedding feast and if you want to shower—’

‘I do. I won’t take long.’

‘Take as long as you like. This room has two bathrooms.’

She nodded and rose from the bed but she didn’t lean over and kiss him and, for Drakon, it felt as if all the intimacies of the previous few hours hadn’t happened. As if she’d filed them all away under Sexy Lucy and gone back to being Sensible Lucy. He told himself he liked it that way. That it would be easier if they compartmentalised their lives like that all the time. But then she went and spoilt it all.

‘Drakon?’

Something in the way she said his name warned him, for it contained that curious note of emphasis which women made whenever they were about to start prying. Perhaps hoping to distract her with the sight of his ever-present desire, he pushed back the rumpled duvet and got out of bed. ‘What?’

But she deliberately kept her gaze fixed on his face, not his groin. ‘Earlier on, when you said…when you said you knew how destructive infidelity can be… Were you talking about your own experiences?’

He made no attempt to hide his displeasure. ‘Does it really matter?’

‘I think it does, yes. Did someone cheat on you?’

In a way, yes, though not in the way he suspected she meant. ‘Go and have your shower, Lucy.’

‘But—’

‘I said go.’

He went into the second bathroom and stood beneath the fierce jets of the shower before quickly shaving and dressing and hoping Lucy would have had the sense to forget it and move on. But when eventually she’d finished getting ready—standing in front of him in a velvet dress the colour of the night sky outside the window—he could see that look of stubborn determination still on her face.

‘Are we going to talk about it?’ she questioned.

‘About what?’ he said, deliberately misunderstanding.

‘About the infidelity you were referring to earlier.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Doesn’t sound like nothing to me. And weren’t you the one who suggested the necessity of intimacy in this relationship?’

It was a clever twisting of his own words and Drakon felt trapped—but he could hardly storm out of the room and tell her to go to hell, could he? Not on the second night of his honeymoon. ‘Is this what they taught you to do at nursing school, Lucy?’ he demanded. ‘To keep digging and digging until you got your answer?’

Biting back an exclamation of impatience, he walked over to the dressing table and extracted a pair of golden cufflinks from one of the drawers. But he was aware that he was playing for time and he suspected Lucy was aware of it, too. He could sense her watching him, and waiting—but the overriding feeling he was getting from her was one of compassion rather than prurience. And suddenly Drakon found himself wondering why he was so intent on keeping his memories locked away, because it wasn’t as if anything he told her was going to affect the practical nature of their relationship, was it?

Slowly, he slotted the second cufflink in place so that it lay flush and gleaming against the cream silk. Mightn’t it be a relief to confide in her something he’d only ever discussed with his mother? His mouth twisted. His lying mother. He felt the knot of pain in his gut tighten as he turned back to face his new wife.

‘Okay.’ He watched as she sat down on the end of the bed, her eyes fixed unwaveringly on his face, and it was only then that he began to speak. ‘You’re probably aware that I grew up in extreme luxury?’

She gave a short laugh. ‘There were no poor boys at Milton school, Drakon.’

He nodded. ‘No. I guess there weren’t,’ he agreed thoughtfully. ‘My father was the only child of an extremely wealthy man, but he didn’t follow my grandfather into the business. In fact, he’d never worked—he just lived off the profits of the company which my grandfather had painstakingly built up from scratch. Maybe the fact that everything had always been handed to him on a plate and the lack of purpose in his life were what lay behind what I was to later discover were his fundamental lack of self-worth and low self-esteem. But from the outside, at least, things looked perfect. He married my mother, who worshipped the ground he walked on, which only made his sense of entitlement all the greater. Everything she did was for my father. It was my first experience of unconditional female adoration, though it certainly wasn’t to be my last. She spent the majority of her time completely preoccupied with her appearance. Trying to stay young. Trying to fight nature’s natural progression with one surgical procedure after another. By the time she was in her forties, her face was so cosmetically altered that she could barely move her mouth to smile.’

‘And what was she like towards you—and Niko?’

‘We were superfluous to requirements. In short, we got in the way.’ His mouth twisted. ‘When Niko and I were seven they sent us away to school in England, and after that I felt as though I had two very different lives. My life in England and my life in Greece. But every time I went home on vacation, I could sense things weren’t right. I remember the atmosphere as being incredibly tense. I knew the marriage wasn’t happy, but since I had no idea what a happy marriage looked like, I just accepted it. But things seemed to be getting worse and every time I asked my mother if anything was wrong she would just fob me off and tell me everything was just fine. Tell me that my father was nothing less than a genius and it was none of my business.’

‘But it wasn’t fine?’ she interjected, into the silence which followed.

He gave a bitter laugh. ‘You could say that. Behind the scenes everything was breaking down at an unbelievable speed. She knew that and she must have known how the outcome of the decline would impact on all our lives but she lied to me.’ His voice grew silent for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t until my father’s death that it came out just how comprehensively she’d lied. One sordid fact came spilling out after another—and the bubble which had been the perceived perfection of Konstantinou family life burst in the most spectacular way.’

‘How?’

He didn’t answer straight away and when he did, he winced, as if he had just bitten into something sour. ‘I learned that for years my father had been entertaining a series of high-class hookers. Women who indulged him in whatever depravity was his current favourite and, from what I could gather, there were plenty of those. In turn he indulged them with whatever took their fancy—anything ranging from large diamonds to fancy apartments. He became a regular at the world’s biggest casinos and high-rollers like him always attract a following of low-lifers. As a result, the business was in tatters and there was barely anything left. It wasn’t what Niko had been led to believe would be his inheritance and that was the beginning of his descent into addiction. That was when he disappeared. I should have done something,’ he added bitterly. ‘I should have prevented it.’

‘But what could you have done, Drakon?’ she questioned urgently. ‘Because I’m getting the feeling that you’re shouldering most of the blame here.’

Drakon clenched his fists as familiar feelings of anger and frustration pulsed through him. ‘Because by then I had some idea how commerce worked and could have helped,’ he bit out. ‘I could have found some sort of rescue package to have halted the decline of the company, or implored my father to seek help. If my mother had told me the truth instead of pretending nothing was wrong, then I could have done everything in my power to turn it around.’

She shook her head. ‘But sometimes the best will in the world won’t make people do what you want them to do!’ she said, holding the palms of her hands towards him in silent appeal. ‘Even if you’d known about it, your father might have blocked all your attempts to save the company—he might still have chosen his life of depravity. Sometimes you’re powerless to do anything except sit back and watch while other people make their own mistakes, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.’

But Drakon shook his head, closing his heart and his ears to what she was saying. ‘I don’t do powerless, Lucy,’ he said. ‘Not any more. That’s something you need to know about me. Maybe the only thing.’

His words tailed away as the bells from the village church began ringing out and he could hear the sound of the children beginning to sing the traditional kalandra, but Drakon found himself unable to feel any sense of joyful celebration as he glanced down at his watch.

It was Christmas Day.