Читать книгу Greek Affairs - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 58

ANDREAS watched her go with his eyes narrowed and his chest feeling as if it was about to explode.

Blame her? He was still struggling to believe she had actually said that. How could she possibly think that he would blame her for anything when it had to be patently obvious that the only person he’d ever blamed for what had happened was himself?

Swinging away, he glared at the ocean. He should have been there. He should have been keeping his promise to his wife and his son instead of playing the big tycoon who found the alluring drug of power more important to him than them.

Well, he’d learnt that lesson in life the hardest way. She had accepted none of his calls to her parents’ house while she’d been in England. She’d switched off her mobile phone. When he’d flown to London to see her he’d been stonewalled by her cold-faced parents telling him that their daughter did not want to see him or speak to him. After that kick in the gut he’d flown back to Athens and spent the next few weeks stone-cold drunk.

Turning round, he saw she was in the process of squatting down and kissing her fingertips before gently pressing them to their son’s bright white marble headstone. His throat tightened, a whole gamut of aches raking through him as he watched her remain there like that with the hot sun beating down on her golden head and her fingers lingering where she had placed them.

So what next? he mused grimly. Where did the two of them go from here?

Not where that cold little look she’d sent him before she walked away said they were going anyway, he determined. This was not over yet by a long way and the sooner Louisa came to terms with that, the easier it was going to be for both of them.

By the time Louisa straightened up he was at her side again. ‘I will drive you back to the hotel.'

‘I can walk,’ she refused.

There was a short pause followed by one of those impatient shifts of his body, then his voice arrived so close to her ear it wove words around her like silk. ‘Perhaps I should tell you that Father Lukas is standing by the chapel entrance watching us,’ he murmured. ‘Do you want to give him fresh gossip to spread about us while we have yet another argument right here across our son’s grave?'

It was the ‘our son’s grave’ part that reached her, the sheer irreverence of arguing here at all. Taking a quick glance from beneath the shelter of her eyelashes to check that what he was saying about the priest was true, ‘OK,’ she conceded grudgingly. ‘I will accept the lift.'

‘Thank you,’ he drawled drily, then made her muscles stiffen as one of his hands slipped around her slender waist as he bent across her and reached out with his other hand to straighten the already perfectly straight little toy car on its ledge.

The warm, tangy scent of him swirled around her senses, the hot sun picked out the blackness of his hair and the rich golden colour of his skin. She tried to relax in his light grasp, tried not to notice the way his fingers lingered on the white marble ledge for a few more seconds before he slid them away and straightened up again. But the sudden sting gathering in her eyes and her throat was the sting of thick tears because she knew that his lingering touch on the toy car meant the same to a Greek male who did not show his emotions in public as the tender farewell kiss she’d just pressed to the marble stone.

‘Let’s go,’ he said gruffly and turned her towards the gap in the wall which led to the car park.

‘W-we should go and speak to Father Lukas,’ she managed to mumble across the threatening tears.

‘He will not want to intrude on our privacy today of all days,’ Andreas said quietly. ‘Unless, of course,’ he then added smoothly, ‘you want me to ask him how quickly he can arrange the renewal of our marriage vows.'

That totally unexpected, truly sardonic comment sent Louisa lurching from hot tears into a bristling fury she had to fight to keep down if she didn’t want Father Lukas to see her blow up.

‘I’m going to pretend that you never said that,’ she whispered hotly. ‘That way you won’t get blood on your fancy suit!'

‘I take it that renewing our vows is not to your liking, then?’ Andreas responded lightly.

‘Being near you at all is not to my liking!’ Louisa flung back.

‘Shame you did not think about that the other night.’

Louisa gave up trying to behave and went to wrench free of him. ‘I don’t know where you get the flat arrogance to believe you can joke about it!'

‘No joke.’ Long fingers pinned her right where she was.

‘Well, you’re mad, then, if you’re daring to think I actually want to stay married to you!'

‘Well, no child of mine will be born out of wedlock,’ he informed her. ‘So divorce is out, which leaves us with—what option left?'

Divorce …?

With that one casually uttered word he shattered her. It was like driving at full speed into a brick wall. For all the long hours she’d battled with letting go of their past, the crazily logical solution of divorce had not so much as entered her head!

Why hadn’t it?

She pulled to a shuddering stop in the dusty car park. Divorce, she repeated to herself. The final solution. It was sensible. It brought proper closure to everything—freed them both to get on with the rest of their lives.

So why was she feeling as if she was being turned inside out?

Andreas twisted to stand in front of her, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders, his voice a low, husky rasp. ‘Stop trembling,’ he muttered. ‘It isn’t as if we.’ He ground to a stop suddenly, the black bars of his eyebrows pulling together across the bridge of his nose as his fingers lightly tested the heat in her skin. ‘How long have you been sitting out here in the sun?’ he demanded.

Dusky eyelashes flickering away from turbulent blue eyes, she barely heard what he had said. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she whispered.

‘I thought you had more sense than to sit in the sun without shelter,’ he muttered. ‘Now your lovely skin is so hot it—'

‘Andreas—I am not pregnant!’ she choked out.

His fingers stilled on her burning shoulders, a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. He looked into her eyes, her wide, blue, anxious eyes. ‘But you are seriously concerned that you could be,’ he said, ‘or you would not have spent several minutes standing outside the pharmacy the other morning fighting with yourself before deciding that you could not do it.'

It was just one hard shock too many. The breath came and went from her body in appalled understanding of what that coolly delivered statement actually meant. ‘You’ve been having me watched!'

He didn’t even bother to deny it, just clasped her arm and led her across the last few metres to where his car was parked then leant past her to open the door.

‘Get in,’ was all he said.

When she turned to argue with him a cold chill went chasing through her because he looked so stern, so unrelentingly tough, and on a sudden bright flash of understanding it hit her that during his days away from the island Andreas had come to some serious decisions about them.

‘Why?’ she whispered shakily.

Irritation flicked across his hard-boned features. ‘Because I am not indulging in a stand-up fight with you here?'

His sarcasm hissed the air from her body. ‘Don’t be so—'

He pulled her against him then lowered his head and captured her mouth. It wasn’t an angry kiss or even a passionate kiss, it was a—frustrated, compulsive, shut-up kind of kiss that locked the two of them together in a dusty car park with the sun beating relentlessly down on their heads.

‘That,’ he husked out as he drew away again, ‘was for Father Lukas. Now get in the damn car before I take the next one for myself!'

Shaken—shocked some more because she’d forgotten all about the watchful priest standing in the church doorway, Louisa subsided into the low car seat. She pretended not to notice the way Andreas dropped his glinting gaze to her legs as the wrap-around skirt slithered open to reveal the length of a long and slender thigh, pale as porcelain and as smooth as silk—before her trembling fingers covered it up.

He closed the car door with a sharp flick from long fingers then strode around the bonnet with her wide blue eyes fixed on his tall, lean bulk as it moved with a smooth animal grace. His dark suit shifted expensively against him as he opened the other door then got in beside her, making her mouth go dry, because once again she was recognising that this Andreas was a completely different kind of beast from the one she had used to know.

‘Why have me watched?’ she demanded as he stretched out a hand to turn the key in the ignition.

The engine fired. He slipped it into gear. ‘I had to go back to Athens for a few days,’ he answered. ‘We had just enjoyed unprotected sex and I could not be sure what you would do about it once the shock had worn off, so I had one of my security team flown in to keep an eye on you.’

His security team? Her image of him was growing bigger and bigger. ‘For what purpose?’ she snapped out. ‘To stop me from throwing myself off the peninsula in despair—or to push me off it if I went near the edge?'

‘I protect my own,’ was all he said, as if that should mean something to her.

Well, it didn’t. ‘I do not belong to you.’

The square cut of his chin jutted as he turned them around in the car park. ‘As my wife you belong to me, as does the child in your womb.'

‘If there is one—if!’

Car tyres crunched as they drove over gravel. A few seconds later they were turning onto the road. ‘You had your chance to make it a definite no, Louisa, and decided not to take it.'

Heat flooded her cheeks. ‘I will not apologise for that decision.'

‘Did I ask you to?’ He sent her a cool glance as the car accelerated away, all slick, smooth man of the minute, she observed with a resentful sting. A sophisticated man in his sophisticated suit driving his sophisticated car, wearing a sophisticatedly implacable expression on his too, too handsome face.

‘Implied it,’ she said, seeing herself sitting beside him in her high-street skirt and little top and with about as much sophistication running in her blood to make a complete mockery of the fact that they had ever been drawn to each other in the first place!

‘Then I apologise. It was not intentional.’

‘How did your henchman know what I was thinking outside the pharmacy anyway?’ she flung out.

‘He didn’t. He merely relayed your movements to me and I drew my own conclusions.'

‘So you’re very clued up on tacky things like the morning-after pill?'

‘As, by all accounts, are you,’ he returned. ‘In truth,’ he added after a moment, ‘at first I thought you must be hovering over going in the shop to buy a pregnancy-testing kit. It only occurred to me later that you could only be so upset if you had been considering the—other thing.'

Louisa froze where she sat, she was so stunned that she had not thought of buying the test kit herself!

Twisting round in her seat, ‘Take me into town and I will buy a test right now,’ she said urgently.

‘And give the islanders something to really gossip about?’

He had an answer to everything. Sinking back in the seat she seethed in silence for a few seconds—then suddenly took notice of where they were.

‘You’ve gone the wrong way—the hotel is in the other direction.'

His answer was a quick, smooth change through the gears and an indifferent profile.

‘Andreas …’

‘I know where we are going,’ he drawled.

‘But,’ not liking this, not liking the tight, tingling feeling that was telling her she had lost control of everything that was happening here, ‘I need to go back to the hotel,’ she insisted. ‘I’m meeting Jamie there in less than five minutes and you—'

‘Liar,’ he said. ‘I met Jamie in town this morning. He has gone fishing for the day with Yannis’s son.'

Silence met that. Andreas turned his head to study the way she was sitting there with her silky blonde hair blowing back from the delicate formation of her face so she could not hide the guilty look at being caught out with the lie. She was not breathing as far as he could see and her teeth were pressing sharp crescents into her soft lower lip.

‘He did the protective-brother thing and warned me to stay away from you,’ he extended coolly.

‘Oh, he didn’t.’ She closed her eyes on a groan.

Turning his attention back to the road, ‘It was his right to do it,’ Andreas shrugged. ‘I respect him for it.'

‘What did you say to him?’

‘I told him nicely to stay out of it,’ he responded. ‘Then I loaned him some money because he was hovering around the bank, which was closed, and the wall machine was not working.'

‘Jamie accepted a loan—from you?’

Her disbelief made him grimace. ‘Not without a bit of manly posturing,’ he admitted. ‘Then, because he did not like to take anything from me without some pay-back, he told me about an enterprising guy called Max Landreau …'

The air inside the open-top car had been circulating quite pleasantly but at that precise moment it seemed to go perfectly still. Lifting up her chin and turning her face to the sun-kissed coastline speeding by her side of the car, Louisa pressed her lips together and refused to say a single word.

Tension inched into the sun-drenched vehicle.

‘Who is he?'Andreas asked when it became clear she was going to say nothing at all.

Building an image of Max’s tall dark shape in her head, she paused before answering, ‘That is none of your business.'

The hiss of his breath kept her chin up and her face averted. ‘He could become my business if you slept with him before you came here.'

That twisted her head around. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she prompted indignantly.

‘If you are pregnant,’ he enlightened, ‘we could have a paternity question to deal with. Very messy.'

‘And who have you slept with in the last month?’ she flicked back.

He frowned. ‘My recent sex life could not become a problem.'

‘If you were as careless with her as you were with me it could be! Now, there’s an interesting concept,’ Louisa laughed through her shimmering anger. ‘Two of your sexual partners pregnant at the same time … What will you do in your quest to have no child of yours born out of wedlock, Andreas? Dump the wife and marry the mistress?'

‘We were discussing your relationship with Landreau.’ He frowned. ‘Jamie said the guy wants to marry you.'

‘Well, lucky me,’ she mocked, thinking—you wretch, Jamie! ‘So which do I choose; the useless husband or the fabulous lover?'

Long fingers flexed on the steering wheel at her very measured insult aimed at his sexual prowess. ‘I am being serious.'

‘Well, I am seriously not going to be pregnant,’ Louisa flashed. ‘And if I am unlucky enough to find out that I have conceived a baby I will not play the role of your unworthy wife again!'

‘Tell our son that.’

The pained gasp she released hurt her throat and brought his face swinging round to flick a hard crushing look. Angry did not cover it, uncompromising ruthlessness did.

‘Tell Nikos that you are not prepared to sacrifice everything for his brother or sister in the same way that you did for him.'

‘Now who’s talking about him as if he’s still with us?’ Louisa pushed out chokily. ‘And you should be ashamed of yourself for saying any of that at all!'

Breathing gone thickly haywire now, she turned her face away again, vibrating inside with hurt. Another silence stung between them like killer bees on the rampage. They’d almost reached the far end of the island when he swung the car off the road to dip down a track through a thicket of trees.

They came to a stop in a dusty clearing. The engine died. The mood between them was thick. Louisa was fighting the lumps of tears lodged in her throat. Andreas climbed out of the car and came round to her side. When he opened the door for her she just remained sitting there refusing to look at him, refusing to move. The arm that lanced across her to unfasten her seat belt brushed against her cheek and sent her head jolting backwards. The air hissed from between his clenched teeth in response because it was so clear that her reaction had been one of revulsion.

‘I want to go back,’ she insisted.

‘Tough,’ he roughed out, hard fingers closing around her wrist like a manacle so he could use it as a lever to haul her out of the car.

The fact that a slender white leg appeared through the sliding gap in her skirt again did not improve his temper at all. She saw his face darken, saw the muscle-flexing clench of his gleaming white teeth. In its own way it was fascinating to watch him lose control of his temper like this. Like the old Andreas. Like the hotly jealous and possessive younger man who’d spent six weeks keeping her well away from his lusty Greek friends.

‘You’re hurting my wrist,’ she protested.

Squared chin jutting, he turned and began pulling her towards a wide, squat building she had not noticed as they’d driven up. He did not loosen his grip.

‘And bullies are not in the least bit attractive,’ she added tightly.

‘Shut up.’ He came to a stop in front of a blue-painted door.

The building looked new, Louisa saw, trying hard to curb her curiosity as he twisted a key in the lock. The land surrounding the house was still half a building site and there was a mini-digger resting idle over by the trees.

It was all she had time to notice before she was being pulled inside. Only after he’d slammed the door firmly shut behind her did he release her wrist, then he strode off through a wide archway and down some steps, leaving her standing there staring at the angry set of his wide shoulders that shouted Arrogant Greek Male so loudly she wanted to throw something at him!

But she didn’t have anything to throw and anyway she would not lower herself to his bullish level, she told herself as she rubbed at her wrist while glancing around. She discovered she was standing in a spacious hallway with rooms leading off from either side of the arch. The sense of newness was all around her in the smell of drying plaster and freshly applied paint on the walls and the clear fact that furniture of any description was scarce.

It struck her that she could just turn and open the door and walk away now that he’d left her standing here, and she even twisted in that direction, only to change her mind when she remembered it was at least a four-mile walk back to the hotel and it was hot out there and deliciously cool in here.

Anyway, curiosity was getting the better of her. What was this place?

With no intention of trailing in Andreas’s footsteps to ask him, Louisa struck out in another direction, opening doors along the lobby and peering inside. Most of them seemed to be bedrooms. Some of them were furnished and others were completely bare. After she’d checked all the doors she stepped up to the central archway and found herself looking down on a huge white space with wall-to-wall windows at one end framing what looked from here like a fabulous ocean view. A couple of big sofas still wrapped in plastic occupied the centre of the floor and what looked like a large flat-screen television covered in bubble-wrap was fixed to one wall.

The whole place had an unfinished, unlived-in echo about it, she thought as she walked down the three shallow steps which took her into the room itself, the main sounds she could hear coming from beyond another archway cut into a side-wall.

It was a kitchen, she discovered as she stepped into the opening, a huge, glossy white kitchen with a wooden table standing in the middle of its white-tiled floor. It was all very new, very modern, with another wall of glass Andreas was in the process of sliding open to let in the breeze coming off the ocean.

He had removed his jacket and tossed it onto the table. Unwanted butterflies attacked low in her stomach as she slid her eyes over the pale blue shirting covering his long torso, then his narrow hips and legs, which seemed to have gained in length and pure, potent power with the jacket gone.

‘What is this place?’ she finally gave in and asked him.

‘Mine.’ He said it with a low, rasping economy that told her his mood had not improved at all.

So much for curiosity, she thought with a grimace, spied a huge fridge opposite and was drawn to it by a sudden raging thirst. Tugging open the doors, she discovered it had been stocked full with just about everything to tempt anyone’s appetite. Ignoring the sudden hungry snap her stomach sent her, she selected a bottle of chilled water and unscrewed the cap as she elbowed the fridge doors shut.

Too thirsty to wait to hunt down a glass, she tipped back her head and drank greedily straight from the bottle. When she finally felt quenched enough to lower the bottle again, her blue eyes widened then stilled when she found that Andreas had turned and was staring through heavily hooded, glinting dark eyes at her extended throat.

Her heart gave a thump and a trickle of cool water lodged in her throat. She had to cough to clear it. The choky little sound brought his gaze up to lock onto the dews of water still clinging to her lips. Her very flesh began to tingle with that tight sting of overwhelming intimacy that came with the deeply bedded knowledge of everything about each other, which exposed what they were thinking or feeling even if neither wished to be so transparent. In this case Louisa would not have been in the least bit surprised if he’d leapt on her like a big hungry cat.

Because they’d always had this … gift for making the air between them pulse with sexual awareness. It had happened at the ferry terminal. It had happened on the hill. It had happened twice already today when he’d watched her wrap-around skirt slide apart. Andreas had looked at her exposed thigh and the heat of his desire to reach down and stroke her exposed flesh had struck right at the very centre of her sexual heart. Now here it was happening again as he stared at her water-dewed lips.

She licked the dew away with a flick of her tongue. The heavy black curves of his eyelashes flickered and the sizzling sting arrowed itself in a three-pronged attack on the tips of her breasts and between her thighs.

‘Thirsty,’ she said jerkily in the hope that speech would banish the unwanted sensation.

It didn’t.

‘How long had you been at the chapel before I arrived there?’ he demanded huskily.

The husky tone didn’t do much for her comfort either. ‘I can’t see that it matters.’ She shrugged the question away while wishing to hell that he didn’t look as good as he did.

‘It matters if you have been foolish enough to let yourself become dehydrated.'

He was right, she was forced to acknowledge with a frown. She had desperately needed the water but now that its deliciously cooling effect had reached her stomach she was beginning to feel ever so slightly queasy, and the skin on her arms and her shoulders felt tight and hot, which told her she had spent way too long in the sun.

‘Such husbandly concern,’ she mocked, lifting the bottle up so she could read the label, just in case she’d accidentally drunk something more lethal that water, ‘but it’s absolutely wasted on me, Andreas, when I don’t answer to you any more.'

‘If I gathered you up and stretched you out on that table you would answer to me,’ he growled out. ‘So stop trying to pretend you don’t give a damn about me when you know you still light up like a blowtorch whenever you look at me or I look at you.'

Stung by the horrible truth in that, ‘Maybe I light up the same for any man,’ Louisa retaliated. ‘I mean, think of all those years I’ve had to manage without you around to light my torch!'

Taking him on in the mood he was in was pretty stupid, Louisa recognised the moment he took his hands out of his pockets and she saw the darkening look hardening his face.

‘Well, that brings us neatly back to Max Landreau,’ he said and began moving towards her, coming in so close it was all she could do not to take a defensive step back. But that would give him an edge she refused to let him have, so she held her ground even though that ground felt oddly shaky beneath her feet.

‘I’m not going to talk to you about Max,’ she declared stubbornly, then frowned when she realised that a lot of things felt rather shaky right now, including her voice.

Twisting the cap back on the bottle, she turned to place it on the counter and almost staggered when the quick movement made her head start to swim.

‘Why not?’

Turning back to him, she frowned even more when his lean, dark bulk kept floating in and out of focus and nausea made a second grab at her stomach.

‘I need the loo,’ she said, fixing her muzzy gaze on the archway.

His hand closing around her arm stopped her from moving towards it. ‘We will finish this before you walk away.'

‘There is nothing to finish.’ Tugging free of his grip, she stepped around him and tried her best to walk in a straight line, only to find Andreas had moved to block her path.

Staring dizzily at the dark blue strip of his tie hanging down the front of his shirt, she laid a hand across her churning stomach. ‘Andreas, I don’t …'

‘You either tell me about Landreau or we do it the hard way,’ he warned her grimly. ‘And heed this, Louisa,’ he added, ‘you will not be leaving this house until I know everything about you and him—understand?'

Oh, she understood all right. Trying to ignore what was rumbling round inside her, she lifted her eyes to his angry face. ‘Where do you get off believing that you have that right?'

He sucked in his breath. ‘You are my wife. You belong to me.'

‘I do not belong to you!’ she cried out. ‘Will you stop saying that? I stopped belonging to you when you didn’t bother to come and get me five years ago! Now, please let me—’

‘What do you mean, I didn’t bother to come and get you? Where do you get off, telling a damn lie like that?'

This wasn’t the time for this. She was in real danger of losing the contents of her stomach on his shoes if she didn’t get to a loo quickly. But there was something in his harsh rasp that made her pause.

‘You couldn’t even manage a single telephone call to England to speak to me,’ she accused shakily. ‘I waited and waited for you to come and get me but you didn’t want to, did you, Andreas? As your brother Alex was so fond of telling m-me, I was the mistake you had to live with, but never, for one second, did I believe all of his mean rubbish until Nikos died and you took off to Athens to console yourself with another woman!'