The Return Of Her Billionaire Husband

Juliette picked up her foundation bottle, took off the lid and released a sigh. Joe had done the same. He had travelled abroad for most of the time they were married, leaving her stranded at his villa in Positano. As far as she could see, he hadn’t made any adjustments to his life by marrying her. He had expected her to do all the adjusting. She had moved countries, left friends and family behind and lived in a large villa with no one for company other than a rotating agency-recruited team of household staff. None of whom stayed long enough for her to learn their names, much less their language.

Juliette picked up her foundation brush and ran her fingers over the soft bristles. Of course, she was always there waiting for Joe when he returned, and she couldn’t fault their physical relationship. It was as exciting and pleasurable as ever but it niggled at her that he seemed to spend more time away than he did at home. What did that say about her? Hadn’t her parents done the same? So many trips abroad, lecture tours, sabbaticals, leaving her languishing and lonely in boarding school.

Juliette applied some foundation to cover the dark shadows that seemed to be permanently under her eyes. There was nothing she could do about the shadows in her eyes—they were also permanent. She put on some eye shadow and then a coat of mascara but she left the lip-gloss for after she had her cup of tea. She unwound the towel from around her head and shook her shoulder-length hair loose. Looking at herself in the mirror, there was no sign she had ever carried a baby to seven months’ gestation. Her weight was back to normal...well, the new normal, because her appetite was hardly what anyone could call enthusiastic these days. Her hair had grown and thickened up again after a lot of it falling out due to hormones and deep emotional stress.

She looked like the same person...but she was not.

Juliette came out of the bathroom and walked into the lounge area and immediately saw the tea trolley next to the table by the window. She heaved a sigh of relief. A proper pot of tea with a silver tea strainer. No musty little tea bags and lukewarm water for this wedding party guest.

Big tick for you, Celeste.

Juliette could smell the bergamot notes of the high-quality Earl Grey in the air...and something else. Something that struck a chord in her memory and made a faint prickling sensation tiptoe across her scalp.

She swung around from the tea tray to see her estranged husband, Joe Allegranza, seated on the sofa behind her. A gasp rose but died in her blocked throat, her hand coming up to her chest to hold her leaping heart in place.

‘What the hell are you doing in my room?’ Her voice was a fishwife screech, her pulse a thud-stop-thud-stop hammering in her temples.

Joe rose from the sofa, his expression as unreadable as one of her father’s astrophysicist research papers. ‘It’s apparently our room.’ His deep baritone with its rich Italian accent made something in her stomach swoop.

Juliette frowned so hard a year’s supply of Botox would have given up in defeat. Two years’ supply. ‘Our room? What do you mean “our” room?’

‘There’s been a mistake with the booking.’

She narrowed her eyes to hairpin slits. ‘A mistake?’ She knew all about mistakes. Wasn’t he her biggest one? She wrapped her arms around her middle, wishing she wasn’t naked under the bathrobe. Wishing she had more armour against the tall, unknowable man in front of her. She needed heels the size of stilts to get anywhere near his six-foot-four height. She needed her head read for even noticing how gorgeous he looked, dressed in dark denim and a sky-blue open-necked shirt that highlighted his olive complexion.

She drank in his features, hating herself for being so weak. The determined jaw, the slash of aristocratic cheekbones, the ink-black eyebrows over hooded eyes the colour of centuries-old coal. The sensual mouth that had wreaked such havoc on her senses from the first time he had smiled at her, let alone kissed her.

But she was not going to think about his kisses. No. No. No.

Nor his earth-shattering, planet-dislodging love-making. No. No. No.

What she had to concentrate on was her anger. Yes. Yes. Yes.

‘Juliette...’ His voice had a note of authority that made her spine stiffen. ‘The way I see it, we have two options here. We either go downstairs and make a fuss and thereby draw a lot of attention to ourselves, or we suck it up and leave things as they are.’

Juliette unwound her arms from around her middle and widened her eyes to the size of the saucer under her bone china teacup. ‘Are you out of your mind? Why can’t we go downstairs and tell Reception they’ve made a monumental error? But wait—isn’t this the wedding planner’s mistake? Celeste Petrakis was the one who organised the accommodation. She’s being paid a ridiculous amount of money to make sure everything runs smoothly. This—’ she pointed her finger between him and herself ‘—is not what I’d call running smoothly.’

A frown drew his eyebrows closer together and he looked down at one of his rolled-up sleeves and flicked off an imaginary piece of lint. The gold glint of his wedding ring on his finger stopped her heart for a moment. He was still wearing his wedding ring? Why? She had left hers at his villa in Positano, but hardly a day went past when her thumb didn’t go in search of them on her finger like a child’s tongue checking the vacant space left by a missing tooth.

His gaze came back to hers—dark, deep, mysterious. ‘Celeste is Damon’s cousin. This is her first job after being sick with blood cancer. It would upset God knows how many relatives of his if we make a big deal about this. Greeks are all about family. Besides, this is Lucy and Damon’s wedding and I don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to our situation.’

Juliette chewed at her lip, knowing there was a lot of truth in what he said. Wedding party guests were meant to be the supportive team, not the main event. And it made sense not to make a fuss, given Celeste’s health issues. She admired the girl for getting back out there, and with such focus and dedication. Juliette hadn’t been able to illustrate another children’s book since she’d lost the baby. Her publisher and editors, and Lucy who co-wrote the books with her, had been incredibly patient but how long would that continue?

‘But what if one of us stayed in another room? Another hotel? There are plenty of hotels further down the—’

‘No.’ There was an intractable tone in his voice. ‘I’ve already spent the best part of an hour trying to find somewhere and drawn a blank. Lucy and Damon wanted the wedding party staying in one place. And there are no other rooms vacant here. So we will have to share.’

Juliette swung away and began pacing the floor, her arms wrapping around her body again. ‘This is ridiculous. I can’t believe this is happening. A weekend of sharing a suite with you? It’s...it’s unthinkable.’

‘You’ve shared much more than a suite with me in the past. Our first night together was spent in a room very much like this one, was it not?’ His coolly delivered statement triggered a firestorm in her body, sending waves of heat coursing through her flesh.

She didn’t want to think about that night and how her body so wantonly, greedily responded to him. How her senses had reeled under the ministrations of his touch. How many women since their breakup had enjoyed the pressure of his mouth, the smooth, hard thrust of his body, the sensual glide of his hands? A hot spear of jealousy drove through her belly, sending pain so deep into her body she only just managed to suppress a gasp.

Juliette sent him a glare hot enough to blister the paint off the walls. ‘How many women have you shared a hotel room with since we separated?’

Something moved across his features like a zephyr across a deep dark body of water. ‘None. We are still technically married, cara.’ His voice had a low and husky quality, his eyes holding hers in a lock that felt faintly disturbing. Disturbing because she found it almost impossible to look away.

She frowned, opening and closing her mouth in an effort to find something to say. None? No lovers since her? What did that mean?

She swallowed and finally found her voice. ‘You’ve been celibate the whole time? For fifteen months?’

His crooked smile made something kick against her heart like a tiny invisible hoof. ‘You find that surprising?’

‘Well, yes, because you’re...’ Her words trailed off and her cheeks grew warm and she shifted her gaze.

‘I’m what?’

Juliette rolled her lips together and glanced at him again. ‘You’re very good at sex and I thought you’d miss it and want to find someone else, many someone elses, after we broke up.’

‘Have you found someone else?’ A line of tension ran from the hinge of his jaw to his mouth.

Juliette gave a choked-off laugh. Her, sleep with someone else? The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. Which was kind of weird, come to think of it. Why hadn’t it? She was supposed to be over him. Wouldn’t being over him mean she would be interested in replacing him? But somehow the thought of it sickened her. ‘No, of course not.’

Joe’s eyes were unwavering on hers. ‘But why not? You’re very good at sex too. Don’t you miss it?’ His deep and husky tone was like dark rich treacle poured over gravel.

It wasn’t just her cheeks that were hot—her whole body was on fire. Flickering flames of reawakened lust smouldering in each of her erogenous zones. Erogenous zones that reacted to his presence as if finely tuned to his body’s radar. Her body recognised him in a thousand and one ways. Even his voice had the power to melt her bones. Her flesh remembered his touch as if it were imprinted in every pore of her skin. Hunger for his touch was a background beat in her blood but every time his gaze met hers it sent her pulse rate soaring.

And she had a feeling he damn well knew it.

Juliette smoothed her suddenly damp palms down the front of her bathrobe, turning away so her back was to him. ‘This is exactly why I don’t want to share a room with you this weekend.’

‘Because you still want me.’ He didn’t say it as a question but as a statement written in stone.

Juliette turned and faced him, anger rising in her like a pressure cooker about to explode. Her body trembled, her blood threatening to burst out of her veins. Should she mention the divorce papers burning a hole in her tote bag? The thought crossed her mind but then she dismissed it. She planned to hand them to him once Lucy and Damon left on Sunday morning for their yachting honeymoon. It would spoil the happy couple’s celebrations if the hideous D word was mentioned.

But Joe had mentioned the other dangerous D word. Desire.

‘You think I can’t resist you?’ Her voice shook with the effort of containing her temper.

His eyes went to her mouth as if he were recalling how she had shamelessly, brazenly pleasured him in the past. His gaze came back to hers and something deep and low in her belly rolled over. ‘I don’t want to fight with you, cara.’

‘What do you want to do then?’ Juliette should never have asked such a loaded question, for she saw the answer in the dark gleam of his chocolate-brown eyes.

Joe closed the distance between them in a number of slowly measured strides but she didn’t move away. She couldn’t seem to get her legs to work, couldn’t get her willpower back on duty, couldn’t think of a single reason why she shouldn’t just stand there and enjoy the exquisite anticipation of him being close enough for her to touch.

He lifted his hand to her face and skated his index finger down the curve of her cheek from just below her ear to the bottom of her chin. It was the lightest touch, barely there, but every cell in her body jolted awake like a dead heart under defibrillator paddles. Every drop of blood in her veins put on their running shoes. Every atom of her willpower dissolved like an aspirin in water. She could smell the lime notes of his aftershave cologne. She could see the sexy shadow of his regrowth peppered along his chiselled jaw and she had to curl her hands into fists to stop from touching it. She could see the lines and contours of his sculptured mouth, could remember how it felt crushed to her own.

Oh, dear God, his mouth was her kryptonite.

‘Take a wild guess what I want to do.’ His voice was rough, his eyes hooded, the air suddenly charged with erotic possibilities.

Juliette could feel her body swaying towards him as if someone was gently but inexorably pushing her from behind. Her hands were no longer balled into fists by her sides but planted on the hard wall of his chest, her lower body pulsing with lust-heated blood.

His hands settled on her hips, the warmth of his broad fingers seeping into her flesh with the potency of a powerful drug. His black-as-night gaze went to her mouth and she couldn’t stop from moistening her lips with the darting tip of her tongue.

He drew in a sharp breath as if her action had triggered something in him, something feral, something primal. He brought her even closer, flush against his pelvis, and her traitorously needy body met the hard jut of his.

His mouth came down to within millimetres of hers, his eyes sexily hooded. ‘This was never the problem between us, was it, cara?’ His warm hint of mint breath caressed her lips and her willpower threw its hands up in defeat and walked off the job.

Juliette’s heart was beating so fast she thought she was having some sort of medical event. ‘Don’t do this, Joe...’ Her voice didn’t come out with anywhere near the stridency she’d intended.

He nudged her nose with his—a gentle bump of flesh meeting flesh that sent a wave of longing through her body. ‘What am I doing, hmm?’ His lips touched the side of her mouth, not a kiss but so close to it her lips tingled all over. He brushed her cheek with his mouth and the graze of his stubble made something hot and liquid spill deep and low in her core.

Juliette’s lips parted, her lashes lowered, her mouth moved closer to his but then a stop sign came up in her head. What was she doing? Practically begging him to kiss her as if she was some love-struck teenager experiencing her first crush? She drew in a sharp breath and stepped back, glaring at him.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Nothing like a bit of projection to take the focus off her own weakness.

His cool composure was an added insult to the tumultuous emotions coursing through her body. ‘I would only have kissed you if you’d wanted it. And you did, didn’t you, tesoro?’

Juliette wanted to slap his face. She wanted to claw her fingernails down his cheeks. She wanted to kick him in the shins until his bones shattered. But instead her eyes filled with stinging tears, her chest feeling as if it were being squeezed in a studded vice. ‘I h-hate you.’ Her voice cracked over a lump clogging her throat. ‘Do you have any idea how much?’

‘Maybe that’s a good thing.’ His expression went back to his signature masklike state. Unreadable. Unreachable. Invincible.

Why wasn’t she shrugging off his hold? Why wasn’t she putting distance between their bodies? Why was she feeling as if this was where she belonged—in the warm protective shelter of his arms? Juliette slowly eased back to look up at his face, her emotions so ambushed she couldn’t find her anger. Where was her anger? She needed her anger. She couldn’t survive without it pounding through her blood. She blinked back the tears, determined not to cry in front of him.

‘I don’t know how to handle this...situation...’ She swallowed and aimed her gaze at his shirt collar. ‘I don’t want to ruin Lucy and Damon’s wedding but sharing this suite with you is...’ She bit her lip, unable to put her fears into words. Unwilling to voice them out loud, even to herself.

Joe inched up her chin with his finger, meshing his gaze with hers. ‘What if I promise not to kiss you. That will reassure you, sì?’

No! I want you to kiss me.

Juliette was shocked at herself. Shocked and shamed by her unruly desires. She stepped out of his hold and wrapped her arms around her body before she was tempted to betray herself any further.

‘Okay. That’s sounds like a sensible plan. Let’s decide on some ground rules.’ She was proud of the evenness of her tone. Proud she had got her willpower back into line. ‘No kissing. No touching.’

Joe gave a slow nod. ‘I’m fine with that.’ He walked over to the sofa and sat down, hooking one ankle over his muscular thigh.

He was fine with that?

Everything that was female in Juliette was perversely offended by his easy acceptance of her rules. Surely he could have put up a little bit of resistance? But maybe he had someone else he wanted to kiss and touch and make love to now. Maybe he was tired of being celibate and was ready to move on with his life. It had been fifteen months after all. It was a long time for a man in his sexual prime to be without a lover. A tight pain gripped her in her chest and travelled down to tie tight knots in her stomach. Cruel twisting knots that made it hard for her to breathe. If she didn’t pull herself into line, her grey-blue eyes would turn green. She had no right to be jealous. She had left their marriage. She had divorce papers in her bag, for pity’s sake.

‘Good.’ Juliette’s tone was so clipped it could have snipped through tin. ‘But of course, that leaves the tricky problem of what to say to Lucy and Damon when they realise we’re sharing a suite.’ She walked over to the bar fridge and took out a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap and pouring it into a glass. She picked up the glass and turned to face him. ‘Any brilliant suggestions?’

Joe’s expression was still inscrutable but she could sense an inner guardedness. His posture was almost too casual, too relaxed, too calm and collected. ‘We could say we’re trying for a reconciliation.’

Juliette took a sip of water before she gave in to the temptation to throw it in his face. She put the glass down on the counter with a clunk. ‘A reconciliation? For a marriage that shouldn’t have come about in the first place?’

A knot of tension appeared beside his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in an unblinking hold. ‘I wasn’t the one who left our marriage.’

Juliette stalked over to the windows overlooking the white crescent of the sand and the turquoise water of the beach below. She took a shuddering breath. ‘No, because you weren’t fully in it in the first place.’

The silence was so long it was as if time had come to a standstill.

She heard the rustle of his clothes as he rose from the sofa. Counted his footsteps as he approached her but she didn’t turn around. He came to stand beside her, his gaze focused like hers on the beach below.

After a long moment, he turned his head to look at her, the line of his mouth bitter. ‘If you were to be truthful, Juliette, you weren’t fully in it either. You were still getting over your ex. That’s why we hooked up in the first place, because you couldn’t bear to spend the night he got married to one of your so-called friends, on your own.’

Juliette wished she could deny it but every word he said was true. She had been shattered by Harvey’s betrayal. They had been dating since their teens. His affair with Clara had been going on for months and Juliette hadn’t had a clue. The night she’d thought Harvey was going to propose to her, he’d told her he was leaving her. Harvey Atkinson-Lloyd, her parents’ choice of the perfect son-in-law for their only daughter. The daughter who, unlike their high-achieving sons Mark and Jonathon, had failed to do anything much else to win their approval.

Juliette ground down on her molars, torn between anger at Joe for pointing out her stupidity and anger at herself for making a bad situation worse by falling into bed with him that night.

She turned to face him, chin high, eyes blazing. ‘So, what’s your excuse for hooking up with me that night? Or do you regularly sleep with perfect strangers when you’re working in London?’

An emotion flickered across his face like an interruption in a transmission. A pause. A regroup. A reset. ‘It was the anniversary of my mother’s death.’ His tone was flat, almost toneless, but there was a stray note of sadness under the surface.

Juliette looked at him blankly. ‘But I don’t understand... I thought you told me your mother had emigrated to Australia. Wasn’t that the reason she wasn’t able to come to our wedding?’

‘She’s my stepmother. Both of my parents are dead.’

Had she misheard him back when they were together? She tried to think back to the conversation but couldn’t recall it in any detail. She knew his father had died a few years back but he had barely mentioned his mother. She’d got the sense it was a no-go area for him, so she hadn’t delved any further.

They hadn’t done much talking about each other’s family backgrounds, mostly because he was away such a lot. Their brief passionate reunions when he came home between trips were physical catch-ups, not emotional ones. She had wanted more than physical intimacy but hadn’t known how to reach him. Every attempt to get closer to him had failed, with him leaving for yet another work commitment. It was as if he sensed her need for emotional connection and found it deeply threatening. But, to be fair, she too had been pretty sketchy with her own issues to do with her background, not wanting him to know how out of place she felt in her academically brilliant family.

‘I’m sorry...’ she said, frowning. ‘I mustn’t have heard you correctly when you told me that when we were living together.’

His lips moved in a grimace-like smile that didn’t involve his eyes. ‘My father remarried when I was a child. But when he died ten years ago, my stepmother and two half-siblings emigrated to Melbourne, where she has relatives.’

‘Do you have much contact with them? Phone? Email? Birthdays—that sort of thing?’

‘I do what is required.’

Juliette was starting to realise she didn’t know very much about the man she had married in such haste. Why hadn’t she tried a little harder to get him to open up? Her shock pregnancy had thrown her into a tailspin. And when she’d finally worked up the courage to call him and tell him, he had flown straight to her flat in London with a wedding proposal. A proposal she had felt compelled to accept in order to mitigate some of the shame she had caused her parents in getting herself ‘knocked up’ after a one-night stand.

She looked at him again, wondering how she could have been so physically close to someone without knowing anything about him. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’

Joe glanced at his watch and muttered a soft curse. ‘Isn’t there a drinks thing soon?’

‘Shoot.’ Juliette gave a much milder version of his curse. ‘I’m not dressed and I haven’t done my hair.’

He picked up a tendril of her mid-brown hair, trailing it gently through his fingers. ‘It looks beautiful the way it is.’ The pitch of his voice lowered and his eyes were a bottomless black.

Juliette swallowed and tried hard not to look at his mouth. ‘Ahem. You’re touching me. Remember the rules?’

He released her hair and stepped back from her with a mercurial smile. ‘How could I forget?’

CHAPTER THREE

JOE DROVE A hand through his own hair once Juliette had retreated to the bathroom. No touching. No kissing. Sure, he could abide by the rules. But he hadn’t realised it would be as difficult as this. It had been hard enough trying to erase the memory of her touch when he was living thousands of kilometres away. But sharing a suite with her this weekend was going to test his resolve in ways he wasn’t prepared for.

He hadn’t expected the chemistry to still be there. He hadn’t expected the hot, tight ache of desire to grip him so brutally. He hadn’t expected to feel anything other than guilt about how things had panned out between them. The guilt was still there, spreading cruel tentacles around his intestines like a poisonous strangling vine. Tentacles that crawled up into his chest and wrapped around his heart and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed like a savage fist.