A Passionate Marriage

‘Shall we begin?’ Takis opened a blue folder. Lester Miles had a black leather one, smooth, trendy and upwardly mobile. Isobel slid her hands to her lap.

Leandros continued to tap his pen against the desk.

‘In the midst of all of this tension, may I begin by assuring you, Isobel, that we have every desire to keep this civil and fair?’

Leandros watched her shift her gaze from his face to Takis. He felt the loss deep in his gut. ‘Hello, Uncle Takis,’ she said.

It was a riveting moment. Takis froze, so did Lester Miles, glancing up sharply from his trendy black leather dossier to sniff the new tension suddenly eddying in the air. The deeply respected international lawyer of repute, Takis Konstantindou, actually blushed.

He came back to his feet. ‘My sincere apologies, Isobel,’ he murmured uncomfortably. ‘How could I have been so crass as to forget my manners?’

‘That’s OK,’ she replied and, as Takis was about to stretch across the table to offer her his hand, she returned her eyes back to Leandros, leaving Takis suffering the indignity of lowering his hand and returning to his seat.

So she could still twist a room upon its head without effort, Leandros noted. You bitch, he told her silently.

The mocking movement of a slender eyebrow said—Maybe I am, but at least I won’t be your bitch for much longer.

The air began to crackle. ‘As I was about to say…’ clearing his throat, Takis tried again ‘…with due regard to the sensitivities of both parties, at my client’s instruction I have drawn up a draft copy of proposals to help ease us through this awkward part.’ Taking out a sheet of paper, he slid it across the table towards Isobel. She didn’t even glance at it, but left Lester Miles to pick it up and begin to read. ‘As I think you will agree, we have tried to be more than fair in our proposals. The financial settlement is most generous in the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances?’ her lawyer questioned.

Takis looked up. ‘Our clients have not lived together for three years,’ he explained.

Three years, one month and twenty-four days, Isobel amended silently, and wished Leandros would stop tapping that pen. He was looking at her as if she was his worst enemy. The tight mouth, the glinting teeth, the ice picks flicking out from stone-cold black eyes, all told her he could not get rid of her quick enough.

It hurt, though she knew it shouldn’t. It hurt to see the way he had been running those eyes over her as if he could not believe he’d ever desired someone like her. So much for dressing for the occasion, she mused bleakly. So much for wanting to blow him out of his handmade shoes.

Lester Miles nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said and returned his attention to the list in front of him, and Takis returned to reading out loud the list of so-called provisions. Isobel wanted to be sick. Did they think that material goods were all she was here for? Did Leandros truly believe she was so mercenary?

‘When,’ she tossed at him, ‘did I ever give you the impression that I was a greedy little gold-digger?’

Black lashes that were just too long for a man lifted away from his eyes. ‘You are here, are you not?’ he countered smoothly. ‘What other purpose could you have in mind?’

Isobel stiffened as if he’d shot her. He was implying that she was either here for the money or to try to win him back.

‘Both parties have stated that the breakdown in their marriage was due to—irreconcilable differences,’ Takis put in swiftly. ‘I see nothing to be gained from attempting to apportion blame now. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Lester Miles said.

But Isobel didn’t agree. She stared at the man she had married and thought about the twenty-three hours in any given day when he’d preferred to forget he had a wife. Then, during the twenty-fourth, he’d found it infuriating when she’d chosen to refuse to let him use it to assuage his flesh!

He’d met her, lusted after her, then married her in haste to keep her in his bed. The sex had been amazing, passionate and hot, but when he had discovered there was more to marriage than just sex, he had repented at his leisure during the year it had taken her to commit the ultimate sin in the eyes of everyone—by getting pregnant.

Leandros must be the only Greek man who could be horrified at this evidence of his prowess. How the hell did it happen? he’d raged. Don’t you think we have enough problems without adding a baby to them? Two and a half months later she’d miscarried and he could not have been more relieved. She was too young. He wasn’t ready. It was for the best.

She hated him. It was all coming back to her how much she did. She even felt tears threatening. Leandros saw them and the pen suddenly stopped its irritating tap.

‘Your client left my client of her own volition,’ Takis was continuing to explain to Lester Miles while the two of them became locked in an old agony. ‘And there has been no attempt at contact since.’

Yes, you bastard, Isobel silently told Leandros. You couldn’t even bother to come and find out if I was miserable. Not so much as a letter or a brief phone call to check that I was alive!

‘By either party?’ Lester Miles questioned.

The pen began to tap again, Leandros’s lips pressing together in a hardening line. He didn’t care, Isobel realised painfully. He did not want to remember those dark hours and days and weeks when she’d been inconsolable and he had been too busy with other things to deal with an overemotional wife.

‘Mr Petronades pays a respectable allowance into Mrs Petronades’ account each month but I do not recall Mrs Petronades acknowledging it,’ Takis said.

‘I don’t want your money,’ Isobel sliced across the table at Leandros. ‘I haven’t touched a single penny of it.’

‘Not my problem,’ he returned with an indifferent shrug.

‘Now we come to the house in Hampshire, England,’ Takis determinedly pushed on. ‘In the interests of goodwill this will be signed over to Mrs Petronades as part of the—’

‘I don’t want your house, either,’ she told Leandros.

‘But—Mrs Petronades. I don’t—’

‘You will take the house,’ Leandros stated without a single inflexion.

‘As a conscience soother for yourself?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he stated.

She sat back in her chair with a deriding scoff. He dropped the pen then snaked forward in his chair, his black eyes still fixed on her face. ‘But why don’t you tell me about your conscience?’ he invited.

‘Leandros, I don’t think this is getting us—’

‘Keep your house,’ Isobel repeated. ‘And keep whatever else you’ve put on that list.’

‘You want nothing from me?’

‘Nothing—’ Isobel took the greatest pleasure in confirming.

‘Nothing that is on this list!’ Lester Miles quickly jumped in as a fresh load of tension erupted around them. Leandros was looking dangerous, and Isobel was urging him on. Takis was running a fingertip around the edge of his shirt collar because he knew what could happen when these two people began taking bites out of each other.

‘Mrs Petronades did not sign a pre-nuptial agreement,’ Lester Miles continued hurriedly. ‘Which means that she is entitled to half of everything her husband owns. I see nothing like that amount listed here. I think we should…’

Leandros flashed Lester Miles a killing glance. If the young fool did not keep his mouth shut he would help him. ‘I was not speaking to you,’ he said and returned his gaze to Isobel. ‘What is it is that you do want?’ he prompted.

Like antagonists in a new cold war they faced each other across the boardroom table. Anger fizzed in Isobel’s brain, and bitterness—a blinding, stinging, biting hostility—had her trembling inside. He had taken her youth and optimism and crushed them. He had taken her love and shredded it before her eyes. He had taken her right to feel worthy as the mother of his child and laughed at it. Finally, he had taken what was left of her pride and been glad to see the back of her.

She’d believed there was nothing else he could do to hurt her. She’d actually come here to Athens ready to let go of the past and leave again hopefully feeling whole. But no. If just one name had the ability to crush her that bit more, then it would be that of Diantha Christophoros.

For that name alone, if she only could reach him she would scratch his eyes out; if she could wrestle him to the ground she would trample all over him in her spike heels.

But she had to make do with lancing him with words. ‘I don’t want your houses, and I don’t want your money,’ she informed him. ‘I don’t want your name or you, come to that. I don’t even want your wedding ring…’ Wrenching it off her finger, she slid it across the table towards him, then bent and with a snatch caught up her bag. ‘And I certainly don’t want your precious family heirlooms,’ she added, holding her three witnesses silent as she took a sealed envelope out of the bag and launched it to land beside the ring. ‘In there you will find the key to my safety deposit box, plus a letter authorising you to empty it for yourself,’ she informed Leandros. ‘Give them to your next wife,’ she suggested. ‘They might not be wasted on her.’

Leandros did not look anywhere but at her face while she spat her replies at him. ‘So I repeat,’ he persisted, ‘what is it that you do want?’

‘A divorce!’ she lanced back through tear-burned eyes. ‘See how much you are worth to me, Leandros? All I want is a nice quick divorce from you so that I can put you right out of my life!’

‘Insult me one more time, and you might not like the consequences,’ he warned very thinly.

‘What could you do to me that you haven’t already done?’ she laughed.

Black eyes turned into twin lasers. ‘Show you up for the tramp you are by bringing your muscle-building lover into this?’

For a moment Isobel did not know what he was talking about. Then she issued a stifled gasp. ‘You’ve been having me watched!’ she accused.

‘Guilty as charged,’ he admitted and sat back indolently, picked up the pen again and began weaving it between long brown fingers. ‘Adultery is an ugly word,’ he drawled icily. ‘I could drag you, your pride and your lover through the courts if you wish to turn this into something nasty.’

Nasty. It had always been nasty since the day she’d married him. ‘Do it, then,’ she invited. ‘I still won’t accept a single Euro from you.’

With that she stood up and, to both lawyers’ deepening bewilderment, snatched up her bag and turned to leave.

‘Isobel, please—’ It was Takis who tried to appeal to her.

‘Mrs Petronades, please think about this—?’ Lester Miles backed him up.

‘Get out of here, the pair of you,’ Leandros cut across the two other men. ‘Take one more step towards that door, Isobel, and you know I will drag you back and pin you down if necessary.’

Her footsteps slowed to a reluctant standstill. She was trembling so badly now she actually felt sick. In the few seconds of silence that followed she actually wondered if the two lawyers were about to caution him.

But no, they weren’t that brave. He was bigger than them in every way a man could be. Height, size—bloody ego. They both slunk past her with their heads down, like two rats deserting a sinking ship.

The door closed behind them. They were alone now. She spun on her slender heels, her eyes like glass. ‘You are such a bully,’ she said in disgust.

‘Bully.’ He pulled a face. ‘And you, my sweet, are such an angelic soul.’

The my sweet stiffened her backbone. He had only ever used the endearment to mock or taunt. He was still flicking that wretched pen around in his fingers. His posture relaxed like a big cat taking its ease. But she wasn’t fooled. His mouth was thin, his eyes glinting behind those carefully lowered eyelashes, his jaw rigid, teeth set. He was so angry he was literally pulsing with it beneath all of that idleness.

‘Tell me about Clive Sanders.’

There was the reason for it.

She laughed, it was that surreal. He dared to demand an explanation from her after three years of nothing? Walking back to the table, she leaned against it, placed the flat of her palms on its top then looked him hard in the face. ‘Sex,’ she lied. ‘I’m good at it, if you recall. Clive thinks so too. He…’

The table was no obstacle. He was around it before she could say another word. The cat-like analogy had not been conjured up out of nowhere; when he pounced he did it silently. In seconds she was lying flat on her back with him on top of her, and in no seconds at all she was experiencing a different kind of sensation.

This one involved his touch and his weight and his lean, dark features looming so close that her tongue actually moistened with an urge to taste. It was awful. Memories of never holding back whenever he was this close. Memories of passion and desire and need neither had bothered to hold in check.

‘Say that again, from this position,’ he gritted.

‘Get off me.’ In desperation she began pushing hard against his shoulders, but the only things that moved were her clenched fists slipping against the smooth cloth of his jacket. She could feel the heat of his body, its power and its promise.

‘Say it!’ he rasped.

Her eyes flashed like green lightning bolts filled with contempt for everything he stood for. His anger, his arrogance, his ability to make her feel like this. ‘I don’t have to do anything for you any more, ever,’ she lashed at him.

He released a hard laugh that poured scorn onto her face. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, angel, but you still do plenty for me,’ and he gave a thrust of his hips so she would know and understand.

Shock brought the air from her lungs on a shaken whisper. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she gasped.

But no more than she was, when the cradle of her own hips moved in response and that oh, so damning animal instinct to mate dragged a groan from her lungs.

He laughed again, huskily, then reached up to tug the comb from her hair. ‘There,’ he growled as red fire uncoiled across his fingers, ‘now you look more like the little wanton I married. All we need to do now is see how wanton,’ and his fingers moved down to deal with the jacket zip. The leather slid apart to reveal her neat cream blouse with its pearly buttons up to her throat. Whatever the blouse was supposed to say to him, she did not expect the flaming clash of her eyes with his, as if she’d committed some terrible sin.

‘Why the sexy leather?’ he demanded. ‘Why the prim hairstyle and a blouse my mother would refuse to wear? What are you trying to prove, Isobel?’ he lanced down at her. ‘That there are different kinds of sexual provocation? Or is this the way you’ve learned to dress for your new lover? Does he like to peel you, layer by exquisite layer, is that it?’

‘Yes,’ she hissed into his hard face. ‘The more layers I have on the more I excite him! Whereas you lacked the finesse to notice me at all unless I was already naked in bed and thoroughly convenient for a quick lay!’

The quick lay struck right at his ego. Both saw the blistering flashback of his last urgent groping before she’d left him for good. Sparks flew, heat, pain then an anguish that coiled a sound inside his throat.

‘You bitch.’ The sound arrived in a hoarse whisper.

He’d gone pale and tears were suddenly threatening her again. On a thick whimper she tried to dislodge him with the pushing thrust of her body, making leather squeak against polish wood and the heels of her shoes come close to scoring deep marks in the wood.

‘Let me go!’ she choked out helplessly. He caught the sound with his mouth and his tongue, and a full onslaught followed of someone who needed to assuage what she had just flung up into his face. Within seconds she had lost the will to fight this man who knew exactly how to kiss her senseless and make her cling with the hungry need for more.

One of his hands was in her hair while the other was sliding between their bodies, making her spine arch sensually as the backs of his knuckles skidded over her breasts. The blouse sprang free, he was that deft with buttons, long fingers slid beneath a final covering of flimsy brown lace and claimed her nipple. She groaned in dismay but was already threading her fingers into his hair as she did so, making sure that he didn’t break away.

It was all so primitively, physically basic! The harried sound of their laboured breathing, the squeak of leather on polished wood. The heat of his lips and the lick of his tongue and the slow, deep, sinuous thrust of his hips against the eager thrust of her own, that even with the thickness of her skirt was pulling her deeper into a morass of desire. If he reached down and touched the naked flesh at her thighs she would be his for the taking; the tingling already happening there was so tight she could barely stop herself from begging for it.

Suddenly she was free. It happened so quickly that she wasn’t expecting it. Dizzy, disorientated, she lay there gasping and blinking as he arrived lightly on his feet by the table and between two chairs. She’d forgotten the anger with which he’d started this. But now she remembered, felt tears of humiliation fill her eyes and didn’t even bother to fight him when he took hold of her by the waist, lifted her up and swung her to her trembling feet.

He saw the tears, and a sigh rasped from him. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered shakily. ‘You always were an animal.’

‘You should not have brought your lover to Athens!’ he ground out. ‘You insulted me by doing so!’

She responded by instinct. A hand went up, caught him a hard, stinging slap to the side of his face, then she was grabbing up her bag and turning to walk away. Unsteady legs carried her forward, as her trembling fingers hurriedly tried to zip up her jacket—while her hair flowed down her spine like a red-hot flag that proclaimed what they had been doing.

He didn’t stop her, which she took as a further insult. When she arrived in the next room the two lawyers stared at her tear-darkened eyes and dishevelled appearance in open dismay.

‘Whatever he wants,’ she instructed Lester Miles. ‘Have him draw up the papers and I’ll sign them.’

With that she just kept on walking.

Leandros had never been so angry with himself in a long time. He’d just treated her like a whore and for what reason?

He didn’t have one. Not now that sanity had returned, anyway.

Three years.

He couldn’t believe his own crassness! Three years apart and he had reacted to the sight of her with her lover as if he’d caught them red-handed in his own bed! She was young and normal and perfectly healthy. She was beautiful and desirable and she had a sex-drive like anyone else! If she had utilised her right to sleep with another man, then what did that have to do with him now?

It had a great deal to do with him, he grimly countered that question. On a dark and primitively sexual level she still belonged to him. Not once in the last three years had he thought about her taking other lovers. How stupid did that make him? Supremely, so he discovered, because from the moment she’d stepped into this room he’d tossed half a century out of the window to become the jealously possessive Greek male.

Then he remembered the expression in her eyes that had brought with it the memory of the last time they had been together. Something thick lurched in his gut and he reeled violently away from what it was trying to make him feel.

Guilty as charged. An animal lacking the finesse of which he was once so very proud. The boardroom door opened as he was splashing a shot of whisky into a glass.

It was Takis. ‘She slapped your face,’ the lawyer commented, noticing the finger marks standing out on his cheek. ‘I suspect that you deserved it.’

Oh, yes, he’d deserved it, Leandros thought grimly and picked up the glass of whisky then stood staring at it. ‘What did she say?’ he asked grimly.

‘Give him anything he wants,’ Takis replied. ‘I am to draw up the papers and she will sign them. So take my advice, Leandros, and do it now before she changes her mind. That woman is dangerous. Whatever you did to her here has made her dangerous.’

‘She admitted it—to my face—that she’s sleeping with that bastard,’ he said as if it should explain away everything.

To another Greek male maybe it did in some small part. ‘Did you tell her that you want this divorce because you already have her replacement picked out and waiting in the wings to become your wife?’

Shock spun him on his heel to stare at Takis. ‘Who told you that?’ he demanded furiously.

Takis suddenly looked wary. ‘I believe it is common knowledge.’

Common knowledge, Leandros repeated silently. Common knowledge put about by whom? His hopeful mother? His matchmaking sister? Or Diantha herself?

Then, no, not Diantha, he told himself firmly. She is not the kind of woman to spread gossip about. ‘Gossip is just that—gossip,’ he muttered, more to himself than to Takis. ‘Isobel will not be here long enough to hear it.’

Did that matter to him? he then had to ask himself, and sighed when he realised that yes, it mattered to him. What was wrong with him? Another sigh hissed from him. Why was he feeling like this about a woman he hadn’t wanted in years?

He detected a pause, one of those telling ones that grabbed your attention. He glanced at Takis; saw his expression. ‘What?’ he prompted sharply.

‘She knows,’ he told him. ‘Her lawyer mentioned the Christophoros name before he went after Isobel.’

Leandros felt his mind go blank for a split-second. She cannot know, he tried to convince himself.

‘The guy knew quite a lot as a matter of fact,’ Takis went on and there was surprise and reluctant respect in the tough lawyer’s voice. ‘He knew that Diantha spent time alone with you on your yacht in Spain, for instance. He also mentioned conservative attitudes in Greece to extramarital affairs, then suggested we review the kind of scandal it would cause if two big names such as Petronades and Christophoros were linked in this way in a court battle. He’s a clever young man,’ Takis concluded. ‘He needs watching. I might even use him myself one day.’

Leandros was barely listening. His mind had gone off somewhere else. It was seeing Isobel’s face when she’d walked in here, seeing the anger, the hate, the desire to tear him to shreds where he stood.

‘Dear God,’ he breathed. Where had his head been? Why had he not read the signs? When she hurt she came out fighting. Make her feel vulnerable and expendable and she unsheathed her claws. Let her know she wasn’t good enough and she spat fire and brimstone over you then ran for cover as quickly as she could. Let her think she was being replaced with one of Athens’ noblest, and you could not hurt her more deeply if you tried.

‘The lack of a pre-nuptial is beginning to worry me.’ Takis was still talking to a lost audience. ‘She could take you to the cleaners if she decided she wanted to roll your name in the mud.’

Turning, Leandros looked at the table where the imprint of her body had dulled the polished wood surface. His stomach turned over—not with distaste for what he had done there but for other far more basic reasons. He could still feel the imprint of her down his front, could still taste her in his mouth.

Not far away, resting where it had landed when she tossed them at him, lay her wedding ring and the envelope containing access to the so-called family heirlooms.

What family heirlooms? he thought frowningly. It was not something his family possessed.

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