Читать книгу Eligible Greeks: Sizzling Affairs: The Good Greek Wife? / Powerful Greek, Housekeeper Wife / Greek Tycoon, Wayward Wife - Kate Walker, Robyn Donald - Страница 14

SHIVERINGLY cold in spite of the warmth of the September evening, Penny stumbled across the room to where Zarek still held out the blue silk robe and pushed her arms roughly into the sleeves. It was all she could do not to snatch the robe away from him as he pulled it up around her shoulders, but the ordeal didn’t take long. A moment later she was back over the other side of the room, dragging the sides of the robe together and belting it as tightly as possible around her waist. It was made of soft and thin material, so it was little use as protective armour against him, but at least she was covered and felt more secure that way.

‘You never needed to armour yourself against me.’ Zarek’s drawl stunned her with its hint of dark amusement. Even more so with its uncanny echoing of the word in her own thoughts. ‘And you never used to play games in bed—at least not those sort of games.’

‘I wasn’t playing any sort of game.’

‘No?’

With the blue robe wrapped round her, Penny felt a little more secure and able to face his cold-eyed derision.

‘I wasn’t playing at anything. I know I responded—there was always that spark—OK, more than a spark—of passion between us.’

‘As I recall, you couldn’t keep your hands off me. And vice versa. But then I’m not the one denying the blatantly obvious.’

‘I’m not denying it,’ Penny persisted. ‘I’d be a fool to even try. It’s there, obviously it is—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it.’

Whatever else Zarek had been expecting, it was not that. His dark head went back sharply, his eyes narrowing till they were just gleaming slits in his tanned face.

‘I’m not someone who just jumps into bed with any man in the first moment I see him, no matter how strong the provocation.’

He knew that. She saw the acknowledgement of it in his eyes even though he said nothing in response. She’d come to him a virgin and, in spite of an almost overwhelming longing to change that situation before then, she had been a virgin on their wedding night.

‘I’m not just any man.’

‘But I don’t know you.’

‘I’m your husband!’

It was a sound of fierce exasperation blended with total disbelief of what she was saying. Penny took several steps backwards, away from him, stopping short when she found that her back had come up against the wall. She could see from his face that he thought she had gone completely mad, right before his eyes, and even in her own mind her argument sounded weak and unsubstantial. But then he had got exactly what he wanted from their marriage. She wasn’t yet prepared to open up her heart to him and confess the truth—that he wasn’t the husband she needed.

She had more pride than to admit that until she knew more clearly exactly where she stood.

‘So you keep telling me.’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe I am who I claim to be? What do you want—a DNA test?’

Penny flinched at the malign humour in his dark tones but, pushing her hands into the pockets of the silk gown and curling them into tight, defiant fists, she managed to find the strength to continue in spite of feeling that she was suddenly desperately fighting for her life.

‘N-no—I don’t need that.’

‘Then start acting like you know me. I’m your husband—the man you married—and you damn well know it. And if you need any further confirmation—something we both know—then let me remind you that I am also the man who made sure that you—or at least an image of you—was added to the carving on our bed.’

One long tanned hand pointed back at the dishevelled bed they had just left.

‘Yes—as a mouse!’ Penny flung back at him.

She knew he was referring to the ornately carved wooden headboard that had been one of the wedding gifts at their marriage. Apparently these carvings were a tradition in the Michaelis family and were usually made up of symbols and images to represent the bride and groom, their families and elements from their lives. When the headboard had been given to Zarek and Penny it had all seemed to be about boats and the sea, with very little that related to her personally. When she had protested, Zarek had said that he would make sure she was added. She had come back from her wedding reception expecting at the very least to see a rose or two for her English nationality, or even a soaring oak tree as a play on her maiden name of Wood.

It had taken her a long time to find the tiny field mouse almost hidden in one corner of the ornate bed head.

‘Was that what you thought of me? As a mouse? A creeping, sneaking, terrified little mouse?’

‘Well, certainly not now,’ Zarek replied dryly, strolling over to a chair by the window and dropping down into it. ‘Right now you are—what is it that old film was called?—The Mouse that Roared.’

Was that actually a gleam of humour in the darkness of his eyes? Penny couldn’t be sure and because of that she didn’t dare risk rising to his teasing.

‘You have changed, Penny.’

If only he knew how much.

‘I’ve had to change—had to learn how to stand on my own two feet. One moment I was a new wife, embarking on a very different sort of life in an alien country—with in-laws who weren’t exactly pleased to see me arrive in their home, but with my husband by my side to help me through. The next I was…’

Breaking off, she could only shake her head, twisting the tie belt of her robe round and round her fingers, tying it in knots and then tugging them free again.

‘The next you were what?’ Zarek prompted when she couldn’t find the words to go on. ‘You didn’t seem to be struggling quite as much as you would have me believe. Certainly not with the in-laws.’

‘You think so?’

Outrage had Penny letting drop the narrow belt as she put her hands on her hips and faced him defiantly.

‘You want to try living with your stepmother complaining about every thing every minute of the day. With everything you do being wrong—and everything that dear Jason and Petros do is absolutely perfect.’

It was only when Zarek’s mouth quirked up into an unexpected and totally unguarded smile that she realised just how rigidly he had controlled his features from the time he had arrived until now. Even when he had been intent on seducing her, no trace of true emotion had shown through the tight muscles, only the burn in his eyes giving away any sort of feeling. It had been almost as if he had been determined not to show anything. So now she felt her insides twist, her heart lurch as she recognised the unexpected softening in his face.

‘I did,’ he acknowledged dryly. ‘I lived with that constant carping from the moment my father first brought Hermione home. And then when he married her and moved her and her sons into the house…’

He shook his head slowly, mouth twisting again at the memories.

‘I was glad to escape to boarding school in England.’

‘How old were you?’

Penny knew that her voice sounded slightly breathless because she was struggling with a tightness in her chest that came from the fact that Zarek had actually opened up about something in his past. When they had married he had always insisted that the past was irrelevant. That it was the here and now that mattered.

‘Seven.’

‘So young!’

At seven she had gone to the small village school just down the road. She couldn’t imagine how it would have felt not to be able to go back home at the end of each long, tiring day.

‘But I suppose you had Jason and Petros for company? No?’ she questioned when Zarek shook his head again.

‘They never went away to school. They had private tutors here on the island.’

Catching the sound of her swiftly indrawn breath, he switched on another smile, one that was totally different from before.

‘I much preferred it that way. And if I could have stayed at school through the holidays I would have preferred that too.’

The words were flat, emotionless, but all the same Penny felt that she saw something of the reasons why Zarek had always been so totally set against his stepfamily, his unyielding resolve that they would never get their hands on Odysseus Shipping.

And that perhaps was some part of the explanation why he had been so determined on having a family—an heir—as soon as possible. But it did nothing to ease the sense of being used, seen not as a wife but as a womb to carry that child, which was how she had ended up feeling in their marriage. And that was why she had resorted to taking the contraceptive pill, the discovery of which had sent Zarek incandescent with rage just before he had left for the Troy.

‘And your father?’ she asked and once more Zarek shook his head.

‘He gave Hermione whatever she wanted. He just wanted a quiet life and, to get that, he had to let her run things the way she wanted them.’

‘Then you’ll understand why I was ready to get out of here. You walk back in and assume that I’ve just been sitting here quietly, waiting for you to return. Perhaps doing a little embroidery to pass the time.’

The realisation that she had in fact been doing something like that made her heart skip a little uneven beat. She didn’t really expect an answer to her question and she didn’t get one. Instead Zarek continued to sit as motionless as a statue, even his eyes hooded and opaque.

‘How do you know that I hadn’t decided I’d had enough long ago and divorced you?’

‘On what grounds?’ Cool and swift, it had a bite as lethal as that of a striking snake.

‘Desertion?’ she parried sharply, refusing to let herself think of the way that he had never meant his marriage vows. Never intended to love and cherish. ‘You haven’t been in contact for two years.’

Something had changed. She couldn’t tell quite what it was, only that something in the atmosphere in the room was suddenly very different. Zarek hadn’t moved or spoken but everything about his long, still body communicated a new and very different form of tension.

‘I believe that we have already established that I was hardly in a position to phone you or to send many text messages.’

The dry, slightly mocking words only added to the already strung-out way she was feeling, knocking her over from irritation into full-blown exasperation.

‘When you were captured originally, perhaps! But you got away from them. That same week, if I have it right. And after that? There are two whole years with not a word, not a message. Nothing to let me know that you were still alive.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I didn’t know that I was.’

‘What…? What do you mean? That doesn’t make sense.’

But even as she asked the questions Zarek moved at last, getting to his feet and prowling restlessly across the room to stand by the window, staring out at the now moonlit waves. And as she saw his hand come up to rub at his head, at the ugly scar that marked his temple, she felt her heart thud just once, hard and cruel, at the reminder that he had been literally just inches away from death. How long it would have taken him to recover from that she had no idea.

‘I mean that for a long time even I did not know who I was,’ Zarek said, still not looking at her so that he didn’t see the way that her hands had gone to her mouth as if she could wish her foolish words back. ‘When I hit the sea I had already blacked out. I have no idea how long I drifted. I was just lucky that I was eventually picked up by a man in his yacht. He took me back to his home in Malta.’

‘Malta!’

Penny felt she might choke on the word. Was that where Zarek had been all this time? When she had been imagining all sorts of horrors, the thought of his lifeless body tossed into the ocean with a bullet in his head, he had been on that beautiful Mediterranean island.

So near and yet so far.

And what had he been doing all that time while she had been left stranded, neither a wife nor a widow? Not knowing whether to mourn him or to wait for him.

‘Don’t they have phones in Malta? Writing paper? Envelopes? A post office?’

That brought Zarek swinging round to face her, a faintly wry smile twisting his beautiful mouth in his shadowed face. That smile twisted a knife in her insides with its memory of how he had once looked, in the early days of their marriage, when he had been smiling at something she had said.

‘I wouldn’t have known who to contact. At the start, when I was unconscious and ill from exposure, I had no identification on me, no way of anyone knowing who I was. And when I did come round, I was no help.’

‘Oh, come on…’ Penny began, but then the full impact of just what he had said hit home to her and the words faded into nothing as her mind reeled in shock. ‘Do you mean…? Are you saying…?’

‘I’m saying I had amnesia—the wound on my head—the shock—exposure—any of it could all have caused it or added to the effect—but I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I knew I was alive—I was male and…’

He threw up his hands in a gesture expressing resigned acceptance of defeat.

‘That was it. So I couldn’t help anyone by telling them who I was or who might be looking for me. I didn’t know if I was married or single. If I had any family and where they were. I spoke English—that was what my rescuer spoke to me—but not Maltese. I also spoke French, Greek, Italian—so in which of those countries did I look for any clues?’

‘Amnesia…’

Penny could only echo the word in a sense of shock and bewilderment. It was so obvious now that she knew. It explained so many things, which was a relief.

And it also took away that feeling of outraged injustice at the thought that she had been left abandoned, suffering the torment of believing him dead when all the time he had been alive and well and living in Malta.

Suddenly it was as if that sense of outrage had been all that had been holding her upright. As if the removal of the indignation had been like tugging a rug from under her feet, throwing her totally off balance. Was it possible that her own lingering anger and hurt at all that she had found out about him just before he had left for the Troy had coloured her judgement, making her see hurts where none was intended, cruelty where he had never planned any?

But all the same he had come back to the island incognito, if not in disguise. He had come in secret, concealed behind the big beard, the long hair. And he had set himself to watch her, to observe what she was doing. For how long? Just how many days—weeks—had he been there?

‘Wh-when did you start to remember things?’

‘Only slowly. I’m not sure if I fully recall everything yet. For perhaps the first year I didn’t know anything. But occasionally I would have flashes of memory or dreams—’

He broke off abruptly as an unexpected sound interrupted his words. A sound that made Penny blush and made a rare, stunningly genuine smile of real amusement cross his face.

‘What was that?’

‘What?’ It was an attempt at distraction, one that didn’t work as her empty stomach growled again, more loudly this time.

‘Are you hungry?’

It was so long—too long—since she’d seen that teasing smile on his face. And having seen it resurface, she felt she would do anything to keep it there. There had once been a time when they were happy together, even if, underneath it all, Zarek had only been pretending.

‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘No—a lot…’

It was the first time she had sounded genuine, unconstrained, since she had leapt from the bed as if all the hounds of hell were after her, Zarek reflected. The first time she had sounded at all like the woman—little more than a girl—that he had married. And she pressed her hands to her belly as if somehow she could silence the growl of hunger that sounded once again.

‘Me too, now,’ he admitted, finding he could say it to this softer, younger-looking Penny. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’

‘Neither have I.’

She said it with a sort of astonishment that made him smile at her obvious sudden self-discovery.

‘I didn’t manage anything this morning because—the meeting was on my mind. And since then, well…’she shrugged, her expression becoming almost shame-faced ‘…things rather intervened.’

‘They did. For me too.’

It seemed ridiculous to be having this rather inane conversation about food in the darkness of the late evening in the silence of the big house. Especially in the heated atmosphere that had been boiling between them earlier. But privately Zarek found that he was admitting he was actually rather enjoying it. It was a relief to have a slight lull in the tension and abrasive aggression of the rest of the day. The constant need to keep his focus on what was being said and how it was being expressed. After his investigations of the past weeks, the sense of always looking over his shoulder had become so much a part of his life that he was glad to let it drop for a while.

And not just in the time since he had rediscovered who he was. The worst thing about getting his memory back had been recalling the way that had been a part of his life for so long. Knowing that Hermione and her poisonous sons were always waiting and watching, just hoping for a chance to stab him in the back. They had tried their damnedest when his father had been alive, putting any barrier they could between him and his parent, and in the two years since Darius had died had redoubled their campaigns in the hope of moving in on Odysseus Shipping.

And they had almost succeeded. If he had not walked in on the board meeting when he had…

But exactly what part had Penny played in that?

‘Let me get you something.’

‘There’s no need…’

‘Well, who else is going to do it, seeing as you’ve given the whole staff the night off?’

She made the comment sound light but he could still read the tension in her eyes, the faint quiver of her bottom lip. She obviously felt vulnerable and exposed alone in the house with him like this. Which was exactly how he wanted it. How he had planned it all the way along. Until he knew exactly what his lovely wife had wanted…

She had declared to his face that she and Jason were not lovers—had not been lovers. And he found that he believed her. How could she respond to him as she had just done if she had ever been intimate with his stepbrother? She had been as much at the mercy of frustrated hunger as he had felt after two long years away.

Which meant that the passion they had just shared still blazed between the two of them, though she seemed determined to deny it. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why. Unless she had something else to hide.

And she had been good at hiding things. A sudden flash of memory reminded him of the way, the last time he had been in this room, he had planned to leave a gift, some of her favourite perfume, in a drawer in her dressing table for her to find while he was away. Instead, the perfume had ended up in the waste-paper basket, thrown there in a dark fury when he had found the packs of contraceptive pills…

For a moment the memory of the bitter disillusionment that had savaged him then came back to slash at him. He had married Penny because she had driven him half mad with wanting but also because she had seemed different. Because she had appeared to offer something so unlike the poisonous atmosphere of lies and greed. Because she had seemed innocent and open. So when he had found that she had been deceiving him all along, he had vowed that never again would he let a beautiful face, an innocent air, mislead him.

But, oh, dear heaven, she was lovely.

The sensual thought sprang from nowhere into his mind, knocking him sideways mentally, and very nearly physically. It had such a force that he actually almost staggered under it, taking a single involuntary step to the side to steady himself as he did so. His body was still burning with the heated response that had seared through him such a short time before. He might have himself back under control but the hungry ache just would not go away and it left a throbbing bruised sensation along every nerve that still came close to making him want to groan aloud.

Now he knew why he had never been able to touch another woman in the time he had been away. Never had the inclination even though there had been plenty of opportunity, plenty of chances on offer to him. But even when he had still been struggling with his memory, when he hadn’t yet recalled just who he was, some inner instinct had created a restraint that had held him back from taking advantage of any of them.

And, looking back, he knew that the only women who had ever interested him had shared his wife’s sleek dark hair, her tall, willowy build and huge deep blue eyes. The brutal kick of sexual hunger that thought brought made him rush to force his mind onto other, less provocative matters.

‘A meal would be welcome. As would a shower.’

He even managed a smile. It wouldn’t hurt to be civilised for a while, even if the feelings he was burying behind the smile were very far from civilised and only just barely under control.

‘The plumbing at the cottage was very much on the primitive side.’

The rush of relief into her eyes was one that set his teeth on edge. Did she really think that she had got away with it after all? That everything was now sweetness and light between them? If she did then she had no real recollection of the man her husband was. She had lost out on a lot when he had come home, her plans to leave and start a new life ruined by the fact that she could not have her husband declared dead as she had planned. He had rushed into a relationship with her once before and lived to rue the day he had met her. He was not going to let himself get trapped that way again. But he could afford to take things rather more slowly for a while.

‘It must have been. Well, you can take this bathroom while I…’

Belatedly she realised how she sounded, the gracious lady-of-the-manor act she was putting on with a welcome guest. But he was no guest in his own home and whether he was actually welcome was something he had yet to finally prove one way or another. That burned in his gut so viciously that he knew it must show in his eyes, in the uncontrolled glare he turned on her suddenly smiling face.

It had her stumbling over her words, coming to an abrupt halt and snatching in a raw, ragged breath before she made herself go on in a very different tone altogether.

‘I’m sorry—I mean—I’ll use one of the other bathrooms. Of course.’

‘Of course,’ Zarek echoed dryly.

In the past they had shared many showers in the big luxurious wetroom that formed the en suite bathroom to the master suite in the villa. Long, indulgent showers that had often ended up with them back in bed at least once before they ever decided it was time to dry off and get dressed again. Now she looked as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the room and…

Or did she? OK, she looked edgy as hell, already moving a careful step and then another towards the door. But there was a darkness in her eyes that didn’t fit with the image of careful retreat. It was the sort of darkness that he suspected was still in his eyes too, making his pupils huge, swallowing up all the colour of his irises. It was the darkness of awareness, of arousal. And just to see it made his throat ache with the effort of holding back everything he wanted to say.

The way her arms were folded tight under the soft swell of her breasts, pushing them up and forward, sent his blood pulsing hot and heavy through his head. And her hands curved to cup their softness in a way that made the bite of sensual jealousy a torment he could barely keep under control. He wanted to stride forward, to tug her arms away from their defensive position, hold them prisoner high above her head, keep them there while he plundered her mouth with his, tasting her sweetness, taking her lips’ hungry response into his own.

The blue robe might be fastened tight around her slender frame in a way that spoke of determined defence, of protection from his touch, from his kisses, but it was no defence against his eyes or his thoughts. He could still see the outline of the rucked up dress, the pleats of cotton at her hips and waist. But below that the soft silk clung lovingly to the fine curves of her thighs, the shadowed place between them, reminding him, sharp as a cruel knife, of how close he had been to being able to bury himself in her and find the heaven of release he sought. The release of oblivion in ecstasy.

It was a cruel irony that he had only just come to remember his life and there was so much of it that he wished he had never recalled. An even crueller stab of fate was the fact that Penny had been the first memory to return. Thoughts of her had been there in flashes, haunting his dreams, just out of reach, even before he had known who she was. It had been the need to find her that had driven him to try harder and harder to remember.

And then, when he had recalled just who she was, he had felt that burn of disillusionment all over again.

‘If you need a change of clothes…’ Penny’s voice broke into his thoughts.

‘It’s all right…’

This was something he had already decided he would have to concede on. He had been away for two years. The reports had had him dead. Anyone—everyone—would have thought that it was a crazy thing to do to hang onto his clothes for that long. After his mother had died, even his own father had had to acknowledge that, adore her as he had, he couldn’t keep his first wife’s wardrobe when she had been gone six months.

‘I understand if there’s nothing here.’

‘No—’

She had crossed to the wardrobe that had always been his, was fumbling with the handle. Pulling it open, she stood back so that he could see. The sight of every item of his clothing still hanging neat and straight just as he had left them over two years before had an effect like a punch to his guts, driving all the breath from his body.

‘You kept them…’

But that had her lowering her face as if in embarrassment, brushing off his comment with an awkward little flick of her head.

‘You know where the towels are…’

She almost ran from the room, leaving him staring after her, his mind see-sawing sickeningly as he tried to adjust to what had just happened.

She had kept all his clothes. In spite of the fact that she had been told he was dead, she had kept all his clothes as carefully and as well cared for as she had done when he was there. She hadn’t cleared them out or packed them away, but had kept them here, in their bedroom. The room in which she still slept.

So what did that mean?

But he had seen her with Jason that first night. Seen the way she had run into his stepbrother’s arms. And heard her…

‘I want to get away from here, start living again. I’m tired of treading water…I can’t inherit unless we have Zarek’s death declared and legalised. So let’s do that. Let’s put it all behind us…’

And then, just as he reached the door this morning, that final, dismissive toast she had made, obviously with Jason in mind.

‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’

So how did that square with the same woman who had kept every item of clothing he possessed for the time he had been gone? Did this mean that Penny had actually been hoping that he would come back?

In which case, why the hell had she bolted from his bed as if his touch appalled her?

Shaking his head, Zarek headed for the bathroom, discarding his clothes as he went.

He had taken his time about coming back, had sent a private investigator to check out the situation here on Ithaca first, before he had even made the journey from Malta and then moved onto the island incognito because he had wanted to watch and see for himself. Because, face it, the return of his memory had brought with it bad memories as well as good. Memories of feelings that the intervening two years could only have added to, made worse, dug in deeper.

And the woman he had come back to—the wife he had found waiting for him—was not at all what he had expected. For a start, he had never expected her to be here at all.

Turning on the shower full force, Zarek stepped under the rush of water and let it beat down on his head.

In fact there was just one way in which she was just the same as when he had left. And that was that she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. The woman who only had to walk into a room to crank the heat up by one hundred degrees. Whose smile was an enticement to seduction. The woman who could make him burn with heat and hunger with one look, one word in her beautiful voice falling from her sexy soft lips.

She was a temptation strong enough to distract him from the way he really needed to be thinking, the things he had wanted to find out before he took up his old way of life again. His marriage was going to be so very different this time, or it was not going to exist at all.

But even as he told himself that the all-too-familiar heavy tightening in his groin warned him of what just thinking about Penny could do to him. The sort of reaction that stopped him thinking, drove the blood away from his brain and down to other, much more basic parts of his body. He’d already almost been caught that way once tonight. And thinking, not responding, was what he needed to do.

With a heavy sigh he reached up and turned the control on the shower to cold and forced himself to stand under it for far, far longer than he needed to get clean.