Читать книгу Greek Affairs - Кейт Хьюит - Страница 64

SHE didn’t see Andreas again until they landed at a private airstrip in Athens, which gave her more than long enough to list every nasty, sneaky thing he had done, so she was wound up like a spring-loaded clock by the time he reappeared to escort her into the waiting limousine.

A chauffeur-driven limousine with no central partition to give her the privacy she needed to say what she wanted to say—not that a partition would have made much difference because Andreas, she discovered, was quite capable of putting up his own partition.

So the air simmered between them as they drove into Athens and the closer they got to the luxury houses and apartment blocks of Kolaniki the more uptight she became.

‘I don’t want to visit your parents,’ she bit out when that horror scenario flicked into her head.

He said nothing, his closed profile making her fingers itch so badly to slap him into a reaction that she had to curl them into fists on her lap.

What was he up to—what was he thinking?

Andreas knew exactly what he was up to but the hell if he was going to let her know it—he wasn’t that brave. His throat tightened when he tried to swallow as they bypassed the road leading to the luxury houses that dotted Kolaniki Hill with its famous views over Athens and he felt her stiffen in the seat beside him. He was taking such a big risk here he wasn’t that certain he could carry it through.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered when they pulled into the forecourt of his apartment block. She was white as a sheet now, eyes too big and too dark in the pinched strain of her face. ‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to do this to me.'

The chauffeur climbed out of the car.

‘Try cutting me a bit of slack, agape mou,’ Andreas returned huskily. ‘I need to do this. We need to do it.'

Need to do what, though? Break her heart all over again?

The chauffeur opened her door for her, giving her little option but to step out of the car’s air-conditioned interior into the full humid weight of the afternoon heat.

It had taken barely an hour to get here, barely an hour to repeat a trip she had last made five years before. Now her heart was flailing around in her stomach. Any second now she knew she was going to be sick.

Andreas climbed out on the other side of the car and gave a nod at the chauffeur, who disappeared back inside the car and drove it away around the side of the building to where the garages were situated, leaving the two of them staring at each other across the empty gap.

He looked big, lean, tough—determined. Having got her this far with his grim bullying tactics, Louisa didn’t doubt she would find herself yanked over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift if she did not let him finish whatever it was he was so hell-bent on doing here.

So she made herself cross the gap separating them, chin up, blue eyes so cold they even felt like chips of ice. As she continued past him into the building’s elegant foyer the flat of his hand arrived, warm against the base of her spine.

Yet another statement of possession, she noted with a stinging tensing of her body as she flinched right away from him. She didn’t want him to touch her—she didn’t want to be here at all.

They stepped into the waiting lift like two separate entities and rode up to the top floor without saying a word. He did not take his darkly hooded eyes from her face, while she stared at the floor and hoped to God she could get through this without throwing up.

The lift opened directly into the apartment with its open-plan luxury that looked exactly the same as it had done five years ago, only without the evidence of partying to litter it up. It still bore the same classic modern furniture that had man stamped all over it because Andreas had owned this apartment long before she had come into his life.

The lift door swished shut, she couldn’t hold back a cold shiver, and her arms flung themselves around her body as if doing so would ward off what was throbbing away inside her trying to get out.

But still he hadn’t finished with this torture, coming to place that hand back on her spine, he ignored her stiffened rejection of it this time and made the hand a stubborn arm which propelled her across the living room to a door that, she recalled to her sinking horror, led through to the other rooms in this vast and elegantly sprawling place.

‘Don’t …’ she couldn’t stop herself from quivering out when he stopped outside the door to their old bedroom.

Still keeping her trapped by that controlling arm, he flung the door open and urged her inside. For the next thirty seconds she just stopped functioning, her knees went hollow, her throat closing up. Everything was the same in here—everything, right down to the huge bed with its snowy white linen she only had to take a fleeting glance at to need to push a hand up to cover her mouth. Once again the only things missing were the littered signs of occupation.

‘The last time you came here I would have willingly died rather than let you see what you did,’ his voice came deep and gruff from behind her, ‘but I was out of it, beyond the point of being any use to anyone, including a wife who deserved to find a man waiting here for her, not a stoned-out-of-his-head wimp.'

Well, he said it, Louisa thought starkly, pressing her fingers up to her lips, only to feel them tremble against her chattering teeth.

‘I want to beg your forgiveness.’

Right here at the scene of his crime? ‘Not a good venue for begging me for anything,’ she whispered.

‘An explanation, then,’ he persisted tautly. ‘Will you accept an explanation?'

Oh, God, did she have to? ‘Look,’ she spun round, aiming her hurt gaze at a point somewhere between his tense left shoulder and the door, ‘y-you don’t need to do this. I had already accepted wh-what I’d seen here or I would not have let you—'

‘Stop lying to me,’ he ground out.

She knew her face was white because it felt white! She knew her lips were trembling and her heart was pounding and—'I don’t need you to do this, Andreas! I don’t want you to do this! I just w-want to get out of here—'

‘Well, I need to do this!’ He reached out to catch hold of her shoulders, two tense hands gripping her as if they wanted to give her a damn good shake. ‘It cannot hurt you to listen,’ he said roughly.

No? ‘Confession might be good for your soul but it does absolutely nothing for mine!'

‘I love you!’ he raked out. ‘I have always loved you! I never stopped loving you. I don’t want to stop loving you! Does that make your soul feel good?'

With a rasping sigh he let go of her, pacing away across the room like a man who regretted saying all of that now it was out and it was too late.

Totally silenced, Louisa stared after him, watching as he lifted a clenched fist as if to send it grinding into the wall in front of him—then he changed his mind and turned.

‘Do you remember Lilia?’ he asked huskily.

Lilia? Louisa found she couldn’t remember anything. ‘You love me?’ It came out in a thick, breathless jerk.

‘Yes,’ he hissed. ‘Do you remember her?’

Lilia … Y-your cousin?’ She nodded, managing to pull up an image of a beautiful creature with gorgeous dark eyes and a fabulous figure. ‘Why didn’t you say sooner—a-about loving me?'

‘Because I was waiting for you to say it first,’ His mouth twisted into a grimace that he turned into a sigh. ‘It was Lilia you saw me with.'

‘You went to bed with your cousin Lilia?’ The shock and the horror of it almost knocked Louisa off her feet.

‘What do you take me for?’ He tensed up angrily.

‘A drunk?’ she suggested wildly. ‘Y-you went to bed with your cousin Lilia because you were drunk, and you think this kind of confession is good for your soul?'

‘I did not go to bed with her!’ He sighed. ‘Why don’t you just shut up and listen to what I have to say?'

It was all she could do to get her shaky legs to carry her the couple of steps needed to sink down on the nearest chair. Listening at this moment was very much beyond her while she was trying to recall what she had seen that day.

But all that would come to mind was Andreas lying there on that bed, naked from what she could tell by the way the sheet rode low on his hips, while his beautiful companion lay beside him apparently wrapped in what was left of the sheet. She’d had a naked arm curved around his shoulders, and her face had been pushed up close to his sleeping face with the long mane of her glossy black hair tumbling out behind her over the pillow.

‘Lilia rescued me from drowning in a sea of booze and self-pity,’ his deep voice impinged, making her blink into focus on him. He’d moved again and was leaning against the wall now, with his fists shoved out of sight in his trouser pockets, his expression oddly rueful even while it was tense.

‘I came back from trying to see you in England and locked myself away in here with a crate of whisky and no desire to see anyone,’ he went on. ‘I switched off my mobile and unplugged the phone. I hated myself. I hated you. I had sunk so low I was quite content to waste away right here in this apartment, and I would have done it if Lilia had not turned up and bullied the janitor to let her in. She was tough …’

A hard-crusted businesswoman who’d inherited her father’s stake in the Markonos empire and had been determined to hold on to her share of power, Louisa recalled.

‘She found me sprawled on the bed fully clothed and out cold with a bottle of whisky still clutched in my fingers. She shook me awake and generally shouted and bullied me until I agreed to get up and take a shower. I was a mess,’ he admitted. ‘I couldn’t even walk straight, never mind stand upright, so Lilia did it. She all but carried me into the shower then got in there with me—stripped my clothes off and somehow managed to keep me propped against the wall until the freezing cold water started to sober me up. Then she pulled me out of the shower and told me to dry myself and get a shave while she took one of the towels and went back into the bedroom to get out of her wet clothes. I cut myself,’ he recalled, lifting a hand out of his pocket to touch his jaw as if the cut were still there. ‘By the time I put in an appearance in the bedroom she was wearing the towel and had stripped the bed and was smoothing out the clean sheet …'

He stopped speaking for a moment, the hand lowering back into his pocket, then he gave a shake of his head.

‘I still don’t understand why it happened,’ he continued huskily. ‘I mean, you are so fair and Lilia is so dark, but—when she glanced up and smiled at me, that smile reminded me so much of you that I just … fell apart. I sobbed like a baby.’ He roughed out the confession. ‘I cried for you, I cried for myself, I cried for Nikos …’

Unable to just sit there when she could see he was struggling, Louisa got up and went to slide her arms around him. ‘You don’t have to say any more,’ she whispered painfully. ‘I know how you felt,’ because she’d been there, oh, she’d been there …

But Andreas didn’t want to stop. ‘Once I let the floodgates open I could do nothing to close them again. Lilia somehow managed to get me to the bed, though the hell knows how she managed it. Then she lay down beside me and held me. She just held me while the storm raged until eventually we both must have fallen into an exhausted sleep.'

‘I wish I’d had a Lilia,’ Louisa murmured. ‘Instead I got panicked parents who called the doctor and had me taken away.'

‘I wish I had been there to be your Lilia.’ His arms came around her, strong and tense. ‘We could have poured it all out together as it should have been, and the last five years of hell would not have happened.'

His tone had toughened. Louisa looked at him anxiously. ‘Don’t go down the revenge track again,’ she begged.

‘I’m not.’ He shook his head. ‘It might have taken me a few minutes longer than it should, but when you walked out on me at the villa it suddenly hit me that I had been fighting the wrong battles all along. Landreau did not matter, our two meddling families did not matter. Even the fabulous sex we’ve been indulging in did not matter, it was the fact that you could still let me love you like that, believing what you believed you saw here. That was my real victory, though I was in danger of letting it slip through my fingers.’

‘Hence the kidnap.’ Louisa was impressed by his recovery tactics.

He pushed his hand through her hair, his dark eyes remaining sombre as he released a sigh. ‘I don’t care about your other lovers, agape mou,’ he murmured. ‘I did not deserve that you could let me come near you again, so how can I resent them?'

‘Because you’re Greek, with unforgivable double standards?’ Louisa suggested.

He grimaced.

‘Because you’re arrogant and pushy and conceited,’ she added, ‘and can’t tell the difference between the truth and a lie when it’s stabbed at you with the intent to draw blood?'

He frowned.

It was Louisa’s turn to let her soft mouth twist out a grimace. ‘There haven’t been any other men, Andreas—and that includes Max,’ she took pains to impress.

Andreas pulled in a deep breath then let it out again. ‘I definitely did not deserve to hear you say that.'

‘So you’re going to believe me this time?’

He smiled ruefully. ‘Yes, please.’

‘I fell for you when I was seventeen and I haven’t wanted another man since,’ she confided. ‘You were right when you said I’d used my relationship with Max to hide behind. Perhaps I even used it to make—hope to make you come and claim me back, I’m still not quite ready to admit that one to myself.'

‘And I definitely did not deserve to hear you say that,’ Andreas impressed.

Louisa nodded in agreement, her gaze and her attention now fixed on his mouth because it had relaxed at last, looking more like the sexy mouth she so loved to—

‘Especially not when I haven’t finished my own confessions yet.’ that beautiful mouth wryly tagged on.

Louisa didn’t want to hear any more right now, she just wanted to—

‘About my other women.’

‘No.’ Her spine arched as she drew back from him. ‘Trust me when I say I don’t want to hear about them.'

‘No, trust me that you will want to hear it when I tell you that nothing happened with them.'

She was slow to lift her eyes to his because he had to be just saying that to make her feel better. ‘It’s the truth,’ he said softly. ‘They were not you. They made great arm candy but I didn’t want them for anything else. They were too proud to admit to anyone that I did not take them to bed, so my reputation as this fabulous lover grew from their face-saving lies.'

‘Andreas, I never expected you to remain faithful to me after we split up,’ and Louisa knew him. Five days was a long time for him to go without indulging his very healthy sex drive, never mind five years!

He laughed, a thick sound that seemed to mock himself. ‘Why do you think I fell on you like a sex-starved lunatic up on the hill?’ he asked. ‘Why do you think I acted like a great, hungry bear with no damn finesse? You,’ he said when she looked up at him. ‘I had you back in my arms and my libido went from nil to rampant …'

Oh, my, Louisa thought, her eyes darkening because she was starting to believe him—had to do when she saw the expression on his face. ‘You’re serious,’ she laughed.

‘A man does not lay out his failings to have them laughed at,’ he protested.

‘I’m not laughing.’ Louisa moved in closer. ‘I’m really very impressed.'

‘So you should be.’ He was regretting the confession now, she could tell by the frown grabbing at his eyebrows.

‘So what happens next?’ she murmured, wanting to kiss him, wanting to drag his clothes off him so badly she ought to be ashamed at how wanton she felt—but she wasn’t.

He read the look in her eyes and pushed out a heavy breath. ‘What the hell do you think happens next?’ He caught her up off her feet. ‘We are going to build new good memories over the top of your bad memories in this bed.'

Louisa sighed as he tumbled her down on the soft mattress. ‘I love it when you come over all masterful and primitive,’ she confided.