The Greek's Secret Passion

‘Thank you,’ he murmured.

He hadn’t expected it to be so easy, though maybe he should have done if he had stopped to think about it. For hadn’t it always been too deliciously easy with her? Such a seamless seduction it had been with Molly, and hadn’t there been some perverse, chauvinistic streak in him which wished she had put up more of a fight?

He observed the polite, glacial smile—thinking that there was a coolness about her now, which might suggest something else. That she didn’t give a damn whether she spoke to him or not. Or that there was another man in her life—for surely someone as beautiful as Molly would not be alone? Another man whom she adored as once she had said she adored him.

He stepped inside, and the pert, high thrust of her buttocks hit some powerful button in his memory. He felt a pulse begin to throb deep and strong within his groin and his body felt as though it had betrayed him. She moved with a confident assurance, and something about this new, older Molly set his loins melting in a way which both frustrated and infuriated him.

He had known her one long, hot summer on Pondiki—a summer of thoughtless passion. She had driven him and every other hot-blooded man on the island insane with desire that summer. Those tiny little cotton dresses she had worn when she had been working. Or outrageous scraps of material only just covering her body on the beach. Or naked as could be, with just the darkened circles of her nipples and the faint fuzz of hair at her thighs—the only things breaking up the smoothness of that bare, pale flesh.

He had triumphed in the joy of knowing that only he had seen her undressed and uninhibited like that, but in that he had been wrong. And he had been a fool, he thought bitterly. Even now, the memory still had the power to anger him—but then it had been the first and the last time he had been betrayed by a woman.

She turned to face him, determined to present the image of the slick, urban professional, even if inside she felt like the impressionable teenager she had once been. Yesterday, she had reacted gauchely, but yesterday she had had a reason to do so. Yesterday his appearance had been like a bolt out of the blue. Today there was no excuse. ‘I was just having some coffee—would you like some?’

He smiled. How times had changed. She used to practically rip the clothes from his body when she saw him. Who would have thought that one day she would be offering him coffee in a chilly, distant way he would never have associated with Molly? ‘Why not?’

She felt like a stranger in her own home as he followed her into the kitchen and sat down on one of the high stools at the breakfast bar, but then Dimitri dominated his surroundings like some blazing star. He always had.

‘Do you still take it black?’

He gave a careless smile. ‘Ah. You remember?’

Molly’s hand was shaking slightly as she poured their coffee, automatically handing him a cup of the strong brew, unsugared and untouched by milk, and he took it from her, a mocking look in his black eyes.

Oh, yes, she remembered all right. Strange that you could learn your tables and French verbs by heart for years at school and some of them would stubbornly refuse to reappear and yet you could remember almost everything about a man with whom you had enjoyed a brief, passionate affair. So was the memory selective—or just cruel?

‘Don’t read too much into it, Dimitri! Everyone in Greece takes their coffee that way!’ she countered as she reached for a mug.

But he wondered what else she remembered. The feel of his flesh enfolding hers, the sheer power as he had driven into her, over and over again? Was she remembering that now? As he was. She had left him dazed—in a way that no woman before nor since had ever quite done—and where once he had revelled in that fact, it had afterwards come to haunt him.

She pushed the coffee towards him, hating herself for thinking that his silken skin was close enough to touch. For a long time she had yearned to have him this close again, and now that he was she felt…Briefly, Molly closed her eyes. She was scared, and she wasn’t quite sure why. ‘Here.’

‘Thanks.’ But he ignored the coffee and instead let his gaze drift over her.

She wore a short denim skirt and a white T-shirt which had flowers splashed across the breasts. Her feet were bare and her toenails painted a shiny cherry-pink, and he felt his mouth dry with automatic desire. Some women knew how to press a man’s buttons just by existing—and Molly Garcia was one of them.

‘You’re staring,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes. I imagine that most men do.’

‘Not in quite such a blatant way.’

‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘But I am Greek, and we are not ashamed to show our appreciation of beautiful things.’

She remembered that, too, and how much it had appealed to her at the time. And it wasn’t just where women were concerned—it was the same with good food, a cooing baby, or a spectacular sunset—Greek men were open about showing their pleasure in the good things in life.

With an effort, he tore his eyes away from the diversions of her body, forcing his attention on the high-ceilinged room instead. ‘And this is a beautiful house.’

‘Yes, it is.’ She forced herself to concentrate. ‘But you aren’t here to talk about my house.’ And neither was he here to stare at her in a way that reminded her all too vividly of how close they had once been.

‘No.’ He was scanning the room for signs of male habitation, but there was none. None that he could see. ‘You’re married?’

‘I was. Not any more. I’m divorced.’

‘Ah.’ A jerk of triumph knifed its way through him. ‘There is a lot of it about.’

The way he said it made her feel guilty—or had that been his intention? She knew his views on divorce. The break-up of families. He had condemned the easy-come, easy-go way of life which had been so alien to his own. She knew what his next question would be before he asked it.

‘Children?’

‘No.’ Molly stirred her coffee unnecessarily, then lifted her eyes to his. So far he had been the one asking all the questions, but she had a few of her own. ‘Do you have any more—apart from Zoe?’

He shook his head. ‘Just Zoe.’

‘And your wife? Won’t she think it a little strange that you’ve come here this morning? Are you planning to tell her about us?’

‘What “us” was that, Molly?’ he retorted softly. ‘What is there to tell? That we were lovers, until someone better came along?’

Someone better? As if anyone could be better than Dimitri!

‘Someone else to lose yourself in and to vent that remarkable, newly discovered sexual hunger on?’ he continued, quietly yet remorselessly. He remembered the sight of the man’s bare chest. Of Molly’s unbuttoned dress. Of the way that the man’s hand had rested with possession over the swell of her hip, and the image had the blinding power to take him right back. To recall how he had wanted to smash his fist into something. ‘Was he a good lover, Molly? As good as me?’

Even now, the sense of injustice was powerful enough to hurt her. To be wrongly judged struck at the very heart of her. And stung as she was by the need to defend herself, everything else dissolved into insignificance—for wasn’t he now giving her the opportunity to tell him what he had refused to hear at the time? The truth?

‘You don’t really, honestly think that I had sex with James that night?’

‘James,’ he mimicked cruelly. ‘Ah! I did not know his name. James.’ The black eyes glittered. ‘It was, of course, simply a little craziness on my part, was it not, agape mou—that when I find my girlfriend in bed with another man, to assume that they had been having sex? Whatever could have given me that idea? Don’t forget, Molly—I knew what you were like. I knew how much you loved it—I have never known a woman who fell so completely and utterly in love with sex the way you did.’

What use would it serve now to qualify his accusation with the plaintive little cry that it had been him she had loved? And that had been what had made it so mind-blowingly and uniquely special. Sex with Dimitri had seemed as easy and as necessary as breathing. She could no more have been intimate with another man at that time than she could have grown wings and flown

‘Had you tired of me?’ he demanded. ‘Was that why you took the American into your arms and into your bed? Had you taken your fill of me, Molly—eager to try out your newly acquired skills with someone different?’

But she was still filled with the burning need to separate truth from falsehood. ‘I never touched him, Dimitri,’ she whispered. ‘Nor he me—not in the way you are thinking.’

He remembered the abandoned posture of her sprawled, bare legs. It had been the first time in his life that he had experienced real jealousy, and its potency had unsettled him. ‘What way am I supposed to think? He was asleep on the bed next to you!’

‘It wasn’t like that!’

‘Ochi?’ He gave a slow, cruel smile. ‘Then how was it? I am so interested to hear.’

‘He was comforting me.’

‘Comforting you?’ He laughed. ‘Lucky man indeed—to offer comfort in such a way! I must begin to offer comfort to beautiful women—how very noble it will make me feel!’

And suddenly Molly had had enough. He was in her house and this was her territory and yet she was allowing him to dominate in the way that came so naturally to him. Throwing accusations at her and here she was, weakly trying to defend herself—when didn’t she have a few accusations of her own?

‘Actually, yes, he was comforting me,’ she said. She looked him straight in the face. ‘Because I had just found out about Malantha, you see.’

He stilled then, became so still that an outside observer might have wondered if he breathed at all. Only the ebony glitter from the narrowed eyes showed that he did.

‘What about Malantha?’ he questioned softly.

‘That she was the girl you were promised to! I discovered that I had been nothing but a light, summer diversion, one in just a long line of willing lovers! I saw you both together, you see, Dimitri. I discovered that night what everyone else on the island knew—that Malantha was always the girl you were intended to marry—and, yes, I was upset. Very upset,’ she finished, though the word sounded tame when she said it now.

Upset? At the time it had felt as though her heart had been torn from her body and ripped apart, with the edges left raw and jagged and gaping. First love and first heartbreak—and didn’t they say that the cut of first love was the deepest cut of all?

Everyone had told her that the pain would fade and eventually heal, and heal it had. It had just left a faint but indelible scar along the way.

She lifted her head and stared at him, her eyes bright and searching. ‘What happened to Malantha, by the way?’ she asked.

There was a pause, a pause that seemed to go on for ever and ever.

‘I married her.’

The world shifted out of focus, and when it shifted back in again it looked different. It was what she had half known and half expected and yet not what she wanted to hear. For hadn’t there been a foolish part of her that longed for him to tell her that she had been mistaken? That he had not been promised to Malantha at all. Or that he had, but had changed his mind along the way.

In a way it made things worse, and yet in a funny kind of way it made things better. So she had not been wrong. Those nights when she had lain awake wondering if she had ruined everything by jumping to a stupid conclusion had been wasted nights. Her instincts had been right all along.

She sucked in a dry, painful breath. ‘Then hadn’t you better be getting back to her?’ she questioned coldly. ‘In the circumstances, I doubt whether she would approve of you sitting in my kitchen, drinking my coffee—do you, Dimitri?’

‘My wife is dead,’ he said baldly.

There was a moment of terrible, stunned silence and Molly was rocked by emotions so basic and conflicting that for several long seconds she could not speak.

Dead? She looked at him blankly, seeking and finding the sombre affirmation in his eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘W…when?’ she asked ineffectually.

‘When Zoe was a baby.’

‘Oh, God, Dimitri—that’s awful.’

He shook his head. He didn’t want her sympathy. It was mistimed and irrelevant now. He wanted her, he realised. He always had and he still did. To lose himself in the soft white folds of her body. To feel that tumble of blonde hair swaying like silk against his chest. Desire could strike at any time, and this could not be a more inappropriate one, but that didn’t stop him feeling its slow, stealthy course through his veins, like some unstoppable drug.

‘It was a long time ago. It is past.’

For a moment, all that could be heard was the ticking of the clock.

‘How old is Zoe now?’ she asked suddenly.

The black eyes narrowed. ‘Fifteen.’

This time the sums were easier. ‘So you married Malantha soon after I had left?’ But she didn’t need an answer to that. ‘Of course you did.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Just tell me one thing, Dimitri—were you sleeping with her at the same time you were sleeping with me?’

His eyes iced over and his mouth curved with distaste. If anything could demonstrate their fundamental differences, then that one question had managed it with blinding simplicity. ‘Of course not. Malantha was brought up to be a virgin on her wedding night.’

It was meant to wound, and it did—but it was the truth, and who was she to argue with that?

She wanted to tell him to drink his coffee and go, and yet wasn’t there some irrational side of her that wanted the very opposite? To take him into her arms as if the intervening years simply hadn’t happened—and, in the process, to exorcise him and his sensual influence once and for all.

‘So now what?’ she questioned, amazed at how steady her voice sounded. ‘You haven’t even told me why you’re here, or how long you’re staying. Or even how you ended up living so close?’

Her eyes were questioning and he gave a soft laugh. ‘You think I tracked you down? Found where you were living and moved into the house next door?’

As he said it she realised how preposterous the idea was. ‘So it’s just a terrible coincidence?’

Terrible? Right at that moment, it didn’t seem so terrible. The woman who had always been able to take him straight to heaven and back was living in the house next door. Thoughtfully, Dimitri stroked the pad of his thumb against the warm circumference of the coffee-cup. If fate had provided such a breathtaking opportunity for a taste of former pleasures, then who was he to refuse such an opportunity?

He stared at her, wondering if there really was such a thing as coincidence? Now that he came to think about it, hadn’t she once described Hampstead to him, telling him how beautiful it was and painting a picture of the heath and all its glories? Had that description planted a seed in his subconscious mind, so that, when he had been choosing where to stay in London, he had instinctively plumped for the leafy green area which seemed so far from the centre of a city it was so close to? Had he subconsciously willed fate to step in—and had it not done just that?

‘I am here for a few weeks,’ he said slowly. ‘Zoe is going to an English summer school and I wanted to accompany her.’

Her mind ticked over; she was getting quite good at mental arithmetic. A few weeks. It wasn’t a lifetime. Surely it wouldn’t take too much planning for both of them to be able to keep out of the other’s way for that long. As long as they were agreed.

‘So what are we going to do?’

‘Do? What do you suggest?’ More as a diversionary tactic, he picked up his coffee and sipped it, black eyes challenging her through the thin cloud of steam which rose up like clouds. He wondered what she would say if he told her exactly what he would like to do at that precise moment, and how she would react. Would she open her mouth to his if he pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her? He saw the inky dilation of her pupils and once again he felt the powerful pull of desire. Because nothing was more seductive than mutual desire, particularly if one of the parties was doing their utmost to suppress it. ‘We are neighbours, Molly,’ he said softly. ‘And we must behave as neighbours do.’

‘You mean…’ she swallowed ‘…avoid each other wherever possible?’

‘Is that how English neighbours behave?’ he mocked. He shook his head and smiled. ‘On the contrary,’ he said, and the gravel-deep voice sounded as sweet as honey as he rose to his feet, managing to make the high-ceilinged kitchen look like a doll’s house with his tall, dominating figure. ‘We will say good morning and talk about the weather whenever we meet!’

‘Ha, ha, ha,’ she said automatically.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘But we are both grown up now, ne? I have been married and you have been married. What is it that you say—about a lot of water?’

‘Has flowed under the bridge,’ she filled in automatically, and remembering how she had helped him with his English was curiously more poignant than anything else. She slid her legs down off the stool and wished she hadn’t. She was a tall woman, but Dimitri managed to make her feel like a tiny little thing; and her skirt was suddenly feeling as though it had shrunk in the wash.

‘Gallons of the stuff!’ she joked, thinking that soon this would be over. It had to be. He would see sense and realise that they couldn’t possibly ever be friends, and they certainly couldn’t be anything else, either. Not now.

He smiled then, but it was an odd, grown-up smile that Molly didn’t recognise and it threatened her more than a smile ever should.

‘So I will come to your party,’ he stated softly.

She stared at him. ‘My p-party? What are you talking about?’

‘You are having a party, Molly.’

Had he turned into a mind-reader? Were there balloons and boxes of champagne glasses lying around the place, giving him clues? Feeling half mad and disorientated, Molly looked round the kitchen. No. ‘How the hell did you know that?’

She wasn’t thinking straight, or clearly—and there was usually only one reason why a woman acted in such a distracted way, he noted with a warm sense of triumph. ‘You sent me an invitation, remember? “To The New Residents!”’ he quoted drily.

Of course she had. She had posted them all the way down the road; she always did. Her heart had begun to thunder and she wasn’t such a self-deluding fool as to deny that part of the reason was excitement. But it would be madness if he came. Sheer and utter madness.

‘I sent an invitation to all my neighbours,’ she said wildly. ‘Because it’ll probably be noisy, and late.’

‘Well, then.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘You want to pacify your neighbours, of which I am one? Then pacify me, Molly.’

‘Dimitri,’ she appealed, steeling herself against the sensual undercurrent in his tone, wondering if that had been deliberate or just part of the whole irresistible package he presented. ‘You can’t seriously want to come?’

‘Oh, but I can,’ he demurred. ‘It will be good for me to mix a little while I’m here, don’t you think? And besides—’ he gave a slow, curving smile ‘—I like parties.’

She bet he liked them!

‘Well, of course I can’t uninvite you now,’ she observed slowly. She raised her face to his with a defiant tilt to her chin, in a gesture which told him quite clearly that she could cope with his presence. She certainly wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of being barred! ‘So if you insist on coming, then I guess I can’t stop you.’

When she lifted her face like that, she was almost begging to be kissed and the desire to do so almost took his breath away. What would she do if he kissed her? he wondered. ‘You could stop me if you wanted to,’ he taunted softly. ‘You just don’t want to. Do you, Molly?’

Not if she was going to show him that she didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘Oh, it’ll be interesting to see your predatory instincts at work with my friends,’ she said sweetly. She made a great pantomime of looking at her watch. ‘Now I really do have things to do—shall I show you out?’

Without waiting for an answer, she marched out of the kitchen towards the hall, and, reluctantly, Dimitri began to follow her. He was being dismissed! It was behaviour that he simply would not have tolerated from another woman and he felt the dull, hot ache of frustration as she opened the door. Then allowed himself to think of the tantalising inevitability of what was going to happen between them.

He glittered her a smile.

The kiss could wait.

CHAPTER THREE

BUT after Dimitri had gone, Molly did something she had not allowed herself to do for years. She ran upstairs, to the clutter of the junk room which lay at the very top of the house. Here there were books and documents and certificates: things you told yourself you might need one day, but rarely did—yet things you didn’t dare throw away, just in case.

The old leather box was dusty, packed with shells, an old charm-bracelet, a lucky four-leaf clover sel-lotaped to a piece of card. In here was a sentimental record of the years, and, right at the bottom, a photograph.

She pulled it out and looked at it. Her and Dimitri, frozen in time, their arms tight around each other, carefree smiles on their young faces. The only photo she had.

Visual images had the power to drag you right back, to take you to a place which you had kept firmly out of bounds, and as Molly stared in Dimitri’s heartbreakingly beautiful young face she stepped right back into the past.

A holiday job on the Greek island of Pondiki had seemed like heaven to an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl in the long vacation before she went to university. One minute she was hurling her blazer across the room, the next she was stepping out onto the blistering tarmac of Pondiki’s tiny runway on a high summer’s day. Grown up and free—with a suitcase full of cotton dresses and bikinis and not a care in the world.

There were just three hotels on the island and at that time it was off the beaten tourist-track. Most people opted for the bigger, livelier Greek destinations, and only discerning travellers and students had discovered the unspoilt beauty of the mouse-shaped paradise, with its lemon groves and pine trees and the towering Mount Urlin which dominated it.

Molly was a waitress in one of the tavernas and she worked lunchtimes and evenings. Afternoons, she was free. The work was undemanding—though she developed strong arms from carrying trays of beer and wine—and she was given her own small, shuttered room which overlooked the main square, which at night was lit by rainbow-coloured lights. When she lay in bed, after the busy shift had ended, she could hear the sound of the waves lapping on the soft white sands and sometimes she thought she had died and gone to heaven.

She made friends with the daughter of the owner—a Greek girl named Elena who was as keen to learn English as Molly was to learn Greek.

It wasn’t easy. Greek was a difficult language.

‘You should get one of the boys to teach you,’ ventured Elena shyly.

Molly wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not into boys,’ she said.

It was true; she wasn’t. She had no interest in the youths whose dark eyes followed her as she walked across the sunlit square in a cotton dress, with a straw sunhat to protect the blonde hair which seemed to fascinate them.

And then she met Dimitri and suddenly everything changed.

She and Elena had borrowed a scooter and ridden round to the opposite side of the island, where Pondiki’s most exclusive hotel lay sheltered in splendid isolation, and they had just sputtered to a halt when they heard an angry shout, and as Molly had turned around her heart had turned over.

She fell in love with him right there and then, it was as simple as that. She didn’t know why or how she knew it, she just did.

It wasn’t just because he seemed like a man, and not a boy—though he was only a few months older than her. Nor because his dark good looks made him look like some kind of diabolical angel. Nor the fact that his hard brown torso was bare and he wore just faded denims which clung to the narrow jut of his hips and his long, muscular legs.