Читать книгу Greek Affairs - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 62

DAYLIGHT came with glinting droplets of sunlight seeping in through the window and across the bed. Louisa lay there for a few minutes feeling much too lazy to want to bother to move—until it suddenly occurred to her that if the sun had reached such an angle in the sky that it could seep in through the bedroom window then it had to be getting very late.

She sat up in the bed, pushing her tumbled hair back from her face, then groaned as each movement brought on a series of aching complaints. Three days of playing Andreas’s sex slave was beginning to take its toll, she noticed drily. They made love, they ate, they made love, they lazed or played in the sun—they made love, she listed with a half-deriding smile. The only respite from this very specialised diet was when Andreas shot off to the family villa for a couple of hours each morning to use the business facilities set up there so he could keep in touch with the outside world.

Or the real world, she amended as she climbed off the bed, because this world wasn’t real by any stretch of the imagination. Even her brother was playing his part in the fantasy by making himself scarce as he enjoyed himself with Pietros while they—well they were behaving like a pair of young lovers pretending the past hadn’t taken place at all.

How had she allowed that to happen?

She hadn’t. Andreas had, in his arrogant, pushy, dominant role. He had orchestrated her every thought and feeling and action and she had just let him have his way because.

There it was again, she thought on a sigh as she stepped beneath the shower spray, the because was still playing games with her head. Only, three days on from the first time she’d stuck on the word, she now had the answer.

She loved him—still loved him, and if it had not gone away before now then it was never, ever going to go away, was it? He was so much in her blood he was like a virus, unshakeable and tenacious.

And today the ferry came back.

Stepping out of the shower, she wrapped a towel around her then just sank onto the edge of the bath.

Decision time.

Did she catch the ferry and leave here or did she stay? With him.

On the wild off-chance and flimsy excuse that she might be carrying his child again?

Heaving in a deep breath, she let it back out because that excuse no longer had anything to do with what the two of them had been doing here. They hadn’t even discussed the subject of babies again, and Andreas had been very careful to protect her since that first crazy loss of control. In fact they had not discussed anything. He had not asked about her life in London. He had dropped the subject of Max. And their parents were never mentioned. He went quiet sometimes, distant, usually when he returned from the other villa and seemed to struggle to slip out of his businessman role. He even looked different then, distant and cool, as if he’d pulled on a hard outer casing she was not able to penetrate.

The tough tycoon playing the tough tycoon, she likened with a smile.

Then right out of nowhere he would just crash through that outer casing, gather her up and take her to bed, or if he found her lazing on the beach he would strip off, catch hold of her and stride with her into the sea in playful mood—then take her to bed.

The two faces of Andreas Markonos, she mused. The tough and the playful—both were too deliciously charismatic for her peace of mind.

None of which helped her to look beyond the moment when the ferry sailed back in. Getting up, she walked into the bedroom, only to pull to another stop when she saw her bags standing there still lined up against the wall, saying more about the temporary nature of what she was doing here than anything else did.

What happened when she picked up those bags to leave here?

An image of Andreas striding off in one direction while she walked off in the other sent a cold little shiver chasing down her spine. She huddled into the towel. Her life was in England. Andreas’s was in Greece. She was no longer the young girl she had used to be, willing to play the placid little wife while he shot off to do the important bread-winning stuff. She had a life, a job she loved and a sense of her own value that had come to mean a lot.

Frowning, she chose fresh clothes out of her now depleted selection, dressed and dried her hair. She’d just stepped into the kitchen when the sound of a jet-ski had her glancing outside to witness the flourishing way her brother guided the craft up the shingle beach.

Looking tall and tanned and rakishly sea-sprayed, he strode up to the house. ‘Hi,’ he said as he stepped into the kitchen, then sent a quick look around. ‘Where’s Andreas?'

‘Using the office at the other house,’ she answered casually.

‘Good. That makes it easier because he turns to stone when I mention your boss.'

‘You had no right to bring Max up at all,’ Louisa said crossly.

‘I know, but at the time I enjoyed watching him suffer.’ Jamie grinned, unrepentant. ‘Anyway, Max is why I’m here. He rang the hotel this morning looking for you. He was not pleased when I said where you were.’ Digging his hand into the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a folded slip of paper and handed it to her. ‘He wants you to ring him pronto, something urgent.'

Looking down at the note, Louisa unfolded it. ‘Switch your damn mobile on!’ Jamie had scored with a flamboyant mimic of how Max must have relayed the message to him. ‘I have to speak to you—now!'

‘But he knows I switch off my phone when I come here.’ She frowned.

Jamie just shrugged. ‘He sounded very pushy.’

Still frowning, Louisa turned and walked back through the house to the bedroom, wondering what crisis could have erupted at work to put Max in such a bad mood? It wasn’t like him, Max thrived on crises. In the four years she’d worked for him he had never attempted to intrude on her vacations with hot little missives like this.

Jamie followed her, obviously too curious to know what the emergency was about to just shoot off again. He leant against the bedroom doorframe to watch as she fished her mobile phone out of her bag and switched it on. An instant flurry of text messages and voice mails tumbled into her inbox—all from Max.

Ignoring them, she hit quick-dial. The moment she made the connection, Max’s voice was burning her ear. ‘What the hell is going on, Louisa?’ he demanded furiously. ‘I thought it was over between you and your ex.'

‘Max, I don’t know what you—’

‘I am in the process of being stalked, my business interests picked over like chicken bones. My private life is being probed—by Andreas Markonos!'

Louisa closed her eyes and sank down onto the edge of the bed. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘You have to be mistaken, Max. Andreas wouldn’t—'

‘Old skeletons are suddenly falling out of my cupboards and threatening to talk to the tabloids if I don’t get rid of you, so don’t try to tell me that Markonos is not responsible. What I want to know is why!'

Holding her head in her hands, Louisa closed her eyes, struggling to make sense of it all. ‘I don’t know why,’ she whispered.

‘In all the years you’ve worked with me you haven’t so much as mentioned his name after your initial interview, and you have been making your annual pilgrimage to his island—clearly this time you decided to enjoy an intimate interlude with your estranged husband too, hm?’

Louisa shot to her feet. ‘That’s just not true, Max!’

By the door, Jamie straightened his stance.

‘So what happened?’ Max wasn’t listening. ‘Did you decide to taunt him with our relationship and the ruthless bastard decided to respond by trying to ruin me?'

‘Stop it,’ Louisa said. ‘You and I don’t have that kind of relationship and you know it. There isn’t a tabloid out there that would dare print any sleaze about you, Max—you own most of them! Look, give me a couple of hours and I’ll find out what’s going on and get back to you.'

She cut the connection, shaking all over.

‘What was all that about?’ Jamie demanded.

Flicking a paper-white look at him, she said, ‘Can you ask Pietros if he can give me a lift to the Markonos villa?'

‘Sure,’ her bother shrugged, fishing out his mobile, ‘but I wish you would tell me what’s going on.'

‘I’ll tell you when I know.’ As she turned away her mind was racing, trying to put the pieces of this jumbled jigsaw together. She recalled Andreas playing it quiet and remote each time he came back from the villa and a hot sting of suspicion shot down her spine.

But surely Andreas wouldn’t do anything like this. It was just too underhand. This had to be one of his family’s doing, she decided and was shocked how relieved she felt to come up with an alternative explanation that acquitted Andreas from blame.

By the time she’d climbed into Pietros’s old car, leaving Jamie to take the jet-ski back to the hotel, she’d totally convinced herself that she was on her way to the Markonos villa to break the news to Andreas that his family were playing dirty tricks again. Kostas came out onto the shady veranda as they drove up to the villa’s elegantly sprawling white frontage. Thanking Pietros, she climbed out of the car then stood for a few seconds, hovering as she looked at the house, and suffered a deep reluctance to move any closer to it.

She didn’t want to go in there, she admitted to herself as she made her feet take her up the wide marble steps towards a smiling Kostas. It was weird how this villa had become the monster of her past in her mind where all her saddest memories resided.

‘Is Andreas here?’ she asked the old family retainer.

‘He is in the study,’ Kostos nodded, stepping to one side of the open door so she could precede him inside. ‘It is good to see you here again, kyria,’ he said warmly.

Louisa just smiled and nodded and kept on going, walking on cool, polished sandstone across the spacious hallway that hadn’t changed in a single detail since she’d last been here. The door to the study stood firmly closed. Feeling oddly as if she was about to meet her own executioner, Louisa slid her hands down the sides of her short blue cotton sundress before she could bring herself to open the door.

At first glance everything looked exactly the same as it always had whenever she’d come in here. The stylishly designed functional room, which was really the central control room for the Markonos men to wield their power when they were here on Aristos, was lined by a multitude of hi-tech equipment with printers and fax machines and photocopiers cloaked by cedar cabinets. A long row of computer screens flickered away busily, each showing lists from different stock markets across the globe. Everything looked so comfortingly normal in a money-orientated, power-spinning kind of way and seeing that made some of her tension ease away.

Andreas was standing with his hips resting against the huge cedar desk loaded down with its usual stacks of files and paperwork. He was on the phone rolling out instructions in Greek. Her Greek had used to be pretty fluent but he was speaking so fast and intensely she didn’t have a hope of understanding what he was saying.

And anyway she wasn’t listening, she was looking. Even dressed casually in pale chinos and a plain white shirt, he exuded all the heady dynamics of a hard, polished tycoon. He was staring at his shoes, frowning, his cropped hair shining blue-black in the sunlight coming at him from the window behind him and casting deliciously brooding dark shadows across his face.

Alpha man relaxing at home, she drily observed. If you put him on the front page of Vogue looking like that the shops would sell out within minutes of the copies hitting the shelves. He was gorgeous—sexy; her tummy muscles flipped over and that hot, telling sting hit her abdomen to remind her that this was the only man ever to make her feel like this.

He glanced up and saw her then and surprise froze him, cutting off his voice as if someone had severed his tongue from his throat.

‘Hi,’ she smiled at him, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you here but—'

‘You are very welcome to disturb me,’ he declared as he shot bolt-upright. The phone rattled as it landed on its rest. As he strode quickly towards her everything about him was jerky and tense. The way he came to stop directly in front of her filled her with the strangest impression that he was deliberately blocking her off from the desk.

It spooked her enough to send her heart on a sinking dive to her stomach. When he reached out to take hold of her to kiss her, she took a wary step back. Something was wrong here.

‘No, don’t touch me yet,’ she jerked out. ‘I need to ask you something first …'

His dark eyes narrowed on her sudden tension. As he lowered his hands to his sides, Louisa watched them ball into two tense fists. When she looked up again it was as though a shutter had been slammed down across his face.

‘Ask me what?’ he prompted.

And then she knew. It was right there in his body language, in the clenched fists and his shuttered expression and his tense, blocking stance. It had nothing to do with his family—it was him.

She took another step back from him, feeling very cold suddenly, shivering, pins and needles chasing up her legs from the oddly unstable pads of her feet. Her heart began to thump. Eyelashes flickering as she looked away from him, she took a sideways step then just walked around him to go over to the desk.

A tense, dragging silence followed as she stood there moving her stark blue eyes from one stack of papers to the next stack, each one clearly labelled with the name of one of Max’s companies. Her name—her other name, Louisa Jonson—jumped out at her from a closed folder on the far side of the desk.

The phone started ringing—ringing and ringing, while Andreas held his stillness and the air slowly thickened with that insistent sound slicing through it as if it were trying to slice through her.

Then the phone stopped. Louisa drew in a breath. ‘I thought it was your father,’ she pushed out unevenly. ‘I refused to believe that you would …’ Pale as death, she spun around. ‘Why?’ she choked out.

His shrug was so insolent it almost hurt her more than all the rest put together. ‘Landreau is your lover.'

Louisa stared at him and couldn’t push out a single word in denial because he looked so calm, sounded so casual about the accusation that she actually found herself waiting for him to offer another one of those horrible shrugs.

‘Nothing to say?’ He offered a quick condemning smile instead. ‘Very wise,’ he added as he strode back to the desk, all lean, lithe, smooth-moving male in complete control of himself.

He reached across the desk to flip open the file with her name on it. ‘To give you your due, yineka mou,’ he continued, ‘at least you used your unmarried name while you spent the last four years travelling Europe, passing yourself off as Landreau’s assistant.’ The last word bit from between his teeth. ‘If, however, I can gather this much intimate information about your affair with him so quickly, then how much more could an experienced reporter dig up if he was curious enough?'

‘You’ve been coming here—each day—to investigate me?’ Despite all the evidence laid out in front of her, Louisa was still struggling to believe any of this. ‘For what purpose, for goodness’ sake?'

‘For the purpose of being prepared for the enterprising person who decides to drag my name through the mud if or when it comes to light that Max Landreau’s long-term live-in mistress is also my wife.’

As if he’d slapped her face, Louisa drew in a sharp breath. ‘I am not Max’s mistress.'

‘His long-term live-in—what, then?’

‘Assistant,’ she insisted. ‘His personal assistant. My duties deal with the personal and social side of his life but I don’t sleep with him.'

‘Intriguing,’ he drawled, turning to settle his lean hips against the desk again with that same long, relaxed sprawl of his legs. ‘You live in his house—'

‘I do not!’ she denied. ‘I rent the flat above his garages!’

‘You live in his house,’ he repeated. ‘It is your permanent address. You have a permanent stateroom on his yacht! Wherever he goes you go as if joined to him at the hip!'

His voice had hardened and thickened with each declaration he’d tossed at her. Reaching round, he snatched up the folder and in a shocking display of uncharacteristic carelessness sent a spill of papers sliding onto the desk as he flipped through them with long fingers to filter out several computer-generated photographs.

‘You,’ he said, ‘in a hot-pink bikini, leaning against him at a lunch party on his yacht.’ He showed her. ‘You,’ he continued, ‘wearing the slinkiest red dress I have ever seen, pinned to his side by the diamonds you wear around your beautiful throat at a charity ball at his house! Then we have the beach party in the south of France, where you use him as a pillow while he shades your face from the sun with his hat. You are laughing!’ he accused, as if laughing was a very big sin in his eyes. ‘You are wearing a white bikini! He wears nothing!'

‘Sh-shorts,’ Louisa stammered, face going pinker with each revealing photograph. ‘Max has sh-shorts on.'

‘He does not wear his shorts up as high as that muscle bronzed chest you are so comfortable with!'

She gasped as he flung the images at her. They fell in a slithering waft to the floor while he launched himself away from the desk. Shaken by his sudden burst of violence, Louisa just stared after him, not sure what to say in her own defence. She did travel wherever Max travelled. She did live-in, if that phrase could still be innocent after the rude interpretation Andreas had put on it. And the pictures did look pretty intimate, she allowed reluctantly.

‘I don’t sleep with him,’ she insisted.

‘Who mentioned sleep?’ he spun to rake back. He was vibrating with anger now, riding on a river of it. ‘The guy romantically proposed to you on top of the London Eye in front of a thousand guests—I watched the replay on the internet!'

The way his fingers shook as he scraped them through his hair almost made Louisa feel sorry for him—if he hadn’t roughed out a very rude word that stiffened her spine on an offended jolt.

‘It was six guests, and it was a publicity stunt,’ she corrected, refusing to admit how angry she’d been with Max for pulling the silly stunt at all. ‘He works in the media! He lives a very high-profile life!'

‘With my wife as his sexy little sidekick—am I supposed to be pleased to see you with him like that?'

‘How come you didn’t see the London Eye thing when it happened?’ she retaliated hotly. ‘It went worldwide at the time, so what were you doing in June last year while I was being proposed to, Andreas—hiding away in your island retreat with one of your floozies?’

‘Did you want me to see you?’

The challenge locked her eyes on his face, her mouth dropping open on a gasping quiver of shock.

‘Tall, dark, handsome media mogul, older than me but not by much, filthy rich,’ he listed, using each word like a punch. ‘Have you been using him as a substitute for me because you missed me, agape mou … have you spent the last four years waiting for me to notice you with him so I would come and claim you back?'