Greek Affairs: To Take A Bride

‘It was not a request, yineka mou,’ he said coolly. ‘I am not your wife!’ she flicked out. ‘What are you, then?’

The heck if she knew, Louisa thought angrily. Not his wife, not free and single.

Pinning her lips together, she refused to answer and just took off down the slope, walking quickly—carelessly—because she needed to get as far away from him as she could before she did something really stupid and told him what was—

The hand closing around one of her wrists pulled her to an abrupt standstill. ‘Don’t be more foolish than you have been already,’ Andreas said harshly. ‘This path is treacherous.'

Panicked—spooked beyond any sight of reason because she knew what was going to happen next and that it was her own crazy weakness that was driving it—Louisa tried to wrench her captured wrist free. When he refused to let go of it she made the big mistake of swinging round to glare at him. Her troubled little world tilted as she took in his full six feet three inches of lean, sleek, muscular height. The eyes, the hair, the fabulous bone structure, the gorgeous, gorgeous sensual mouth. His hair was damp—spiked, like the eyelashes that framed his glinting dark eyes and the few curls of hair she could see clustered around the V-neck of his shirt. Trickles of sweat were still trailing down each taut cheek and the strong column of his neck and her tongue moistened with a desire to reacquaint herself with its clean, salty taste.

‘Please,’ she begged in a low, husky groan as the breath came and went from her body, the darkness surrounding her beginning to thicken with a new sultry heat.

‘Louisa …’ he breathed tensely. ‘Don’t do this.’

He knew what was happening to her. The glitter in his eyes and the taut set of his mouth told her so and she choked out a small whimper because she knew it was already too late. She should not have looked at him. She should not have let him see what was tormenting her! Knowledge brought intimacy and intimacy brought a complete collapse of all that was sensible and sane the way it had with that kiss they’d fallen into at the hotel.

‘I have to go …’ She tried to pull free again, desperation making her voice shake.

He muttered something in Greek then pulled her towards him. She felt the full burning heat of him as she made impact with his chest. She looked up, was instantly trapped by dark eyes swirling with an angry glint. She watched his damp brown throat move up and down as he swallowed before his tense lips parted so he could speak.

But she didn’t want him to speak. She didn’t want him to say anything. She just wanted to—

On another choking groan she gave in to what was driving her and reached up to hook a hand around his neck so she could bring his mouth down onto hers because that was what she wanted him to do with that sensual mouth!

Sensation flashed across her senses. It had been bad enough the first time when they’d kissed in the hotel car park; this time she just did not have a single ounce of control. She wanted him. She’d always wanted Andreas! He was a cross she had to bear because he was her first love, her only love—who really knew what made her this vulnerable to him?

Who knew what made her cling to and kiss him with a wild, hot, begging urgency that drove her tongue between his lips and sent her eager body arching into the hardness of his? All she did know was that it took only seconds for the whole thing to make the giant leap back through five years to a place in time when this explosive kind of passion had been normal to them.

The clean, damp smell of him permeated all around her. It was so exciting she just couldn’t keep still. When his hands made a compulsive slide down her body she dragged her mouth away so she could lick that warm, salty gloss from his throat and heard him hiss out something very rude.

Then he sent his hands thrusting up beneath her T-shirt, stroking her smooth naked back, and pressed her even closer. His heart was thundering, the bowl of his hips filling with that potent force that made her cling all the more desperately to him. She could not get close enough, could not taste enough of him.

With a fevered whisper of, ‘I want you,’ she went back to his mouth.

He took the kiss over and lost them both in the pleasure of it, the hungry stab of their tongues growing greedier and more demanding as the whole thing rushed on. Maybe the darkness helped, the feeling that they were alone in the world as they stood there on the side of the hill.

Then it was gone.

Andreas was the one to stop it. He was the one to push her away from him yet again. He was the one to spin his back to her while all Louisa could do was to stand there gasping and trembling with shock at the loss.

‘If you want sex that badly, then I am more than happy to provide it,’ he rasped out, twisting back to catch her pained flinch. ‘But not here on a dusty track, rutting like a pair of goats.'

‘Why not?’ Louisa challenged shrilly. ‘It was pretty close to how it happened the first time between us. You did not seem so picky then!'

Something flashed across his eyes. At first she thought it was a cruel type of cynical amusement, then she realised that it was pure, glinting rage. She’d touched a nerve she hadn’t even known he possessed and suddenly she’d been grabbed and pulled back against him again.

‘You want to re-enact our first time?’ he raked down at her. ‘You want me to roll you down on the ground and lose my head again, reintroduce you to what it is like to have sex with a man out of control?'

‘No,’ she whispered, horribly aware that this was all her fault. ‘I’m s-sorry … I don’t know what came over me. I—'

‘I came over you. Want came over you. Need—lust. A sudden desire for sex with your hot-blooded Greek!’ His contempt whipped her skin. ‘I must therefore assume that your last five years in the sexual company of Englishmen has not been enough to satisfy you.'

‘And what’s your excuse?’ she hit back at the cruel-tongued brute. ‘What drove you to respond as you did? A sudden desire to re-enact the deflowering of your teenage virgin?’ She was going to cry any second now. She was going to break down and weep! ‘Have the countless lovers who’ve passed through your bed not quite lived up to the excitement of having your very own personally trained sex object, one untouched by another male hand?'

‘Well, I am sure the last part no longer counts,’ he threw back in derision.

And how would you know? You haven’t even bothered to ask how I was doing in five years! Louisa wanted to shout. Instead she took off down the track again, hating him so much she just couldn’t understand how he could still get to her the way that he did!

Her knees still felt as if they didn’t want to support her. Her body was on fire. Her angry eyes flashed forked lightning out into the darkness in front of her and her pulsing mouth shook with tears.

She caught her toe on another stone jutting up in the pathway—the same toe she’d hit before! As she stumbled with the same sound issuing forth from her throat a curse rattled out from behind her as an arm looped around her in a flying hook that launched her off the ground. The next few seconds went by in a grappling blur as a pair of running shoes fought for friction on the loose gravel slope. She was winded yet sobbing and panting at the same time.

Setting her feet down on the path, Andreas spun her round to face the full fury her reckless dash had unleashed. ‘Are you crazy or something?’ he bit down at her. ‘How many fatal falls in this family will it take to make you—?'

He stopped like a man who’d been frozen. A white ring of tension circled the tense shape of his mouth. He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t looking at anything. And his fingers bit like talons into her arms while the night air screamed out what he had not said.

He’d meant Nikos. He’d been referring to the fatal fall their son had taken on a path just like this.

‘Oh, dear God,’ Louisa choked, how could she have been so stupidly thoughtless? ‘I just didn’t think,’ she whispered painfully.

He suddenly came alive with a hard, tight, rasping rip of the air from his body. Before she knew what was happening he’d heaved her upwards until their faces were level and caught her quivering mouth with the all-consuming delivery of his. Half a second later and true pandemonium broke out, the passion of before swung back into dominance with a hot and seething sexual urgency that grabbed hold tight.

Louisa didn’t even know which of them was first to fall victim. All she did recall was her head jerking back so she could look into his burning black eyes and any hint of common sense or self-control was tossed aside as their mouths met again in a wide, tight compulsion that she fell into mindlessly.

So much for not wanting sex on a dusty pathway, she thought hazily as he pushed her down onto one of the grassy embankments that ran along both sides of the path. The kiss didn’t even break as they made the manoeuvre, lips fused, tongues seducing, claiming—demanding. Louisa was the one to push up his T-shirt to expose his beautiful muscular body before her shirt followed suit.

He released a husky groan as her breasts arrived against his hot naked flesh. She went up in flames. Their hands were all over each other; nothing in the least bit sophisticated about this. It was sexual compulsion taken down to its most basic function. They devoured each other with touch and taste—aroused and tormented each other, the gasping tugs of their breathing twisting all around them, wanting, demanding and getting without question. When Andreas reared back to strip the white cotton trousers from her legs, Louisa stared at the hard contours of his face, strapped tight by a need that reverberated inside herself, then she dropped her gaze to the proud jut at his thighs she had already exposed and caressed with her hands to bring him to this virile state.

‘You always were a witch,’ he husked as he came back to her, and his thick curse was only part of what was attacking him as he entered her with a single sweet, driving thrust.

Her shuddering gasp of pleasure brought his mouth back to hers to devour the sound. He drove into her like a man trapped in a fever. If she didn’t know better she could have convinced herself that he had not done this for years. He was hot, he was trembling, his kiss so deep it was all she could do to clutch at his shoulders as he drove the whole wild experience on. As she began to reach that blinding white pinnacle he wrapped his strong arms right around her to lift her even closer and increased his pace. The tight sting of orgasm hit and just kept on coming, owning, controlling, flaying them both with its ripples of pleasure that dragged him groaning into the same frantic place.

Reality hit later when it was over. An awful silence filling with the terrible knowledge of the way they had behaved. It hit them both with a cold wash of dismay followed by a bone-tensing question as to what they were going to do next to extricate themselves from this.

Andreas muttered an earthy expletive as a final shudder shook him in the act of attempting to withdraw. Something tugged him right back again and Louisa’s thick little whimper confirmed what that something was. She had just come all round him in a wild multi-orgasmic flow yet she still wasn’t ready to let him go.

Or her inner body wasn’t, he amended that as he felt her clenched fists push at his chest. ‘Get off,’ she choked out.

He leapt backwards, ignoring the next protesting shudder to hit him as he shot to his feet and turned his back on her while he straightened his clothing and allowed her the privacy to do the same thing.

Turning his back had not been a good idea, he realised a few seconds later after watching the white trousers slide out of his line of vision and he listened to the urgent rustle of clothing as she got dressed.

Eventually everything went still. The new silence flicked like a whip all around him. How the hell did he turn and face her now? What was he supposed to say to the woman he had just tossed down on the ground and taken in an utterly primitive, no-finesse, raging lust?

His wife. The mother of his son.

He compromised by only half turning, his eyes carefully hidden beneath the heavy droop of his eyelids as he stretched out a hand in a silent offer to help her to her feet.

She ignored it and scrambled up under her own steam. Her hair and her clothes were speckled with dirt and bits of dry grass and thyme, and she was trembling so badly she almost stumbled again.

‘I—’

‘Don’t.’ Her voice shook as she silenced him.

Heaving in his breath, Andreas supposed that she was probably right and silence at this moment was the only way to deal with what they had just done. Yet right on the back of that grim thought a sudden thick laugh caught hold of him. ‘We never could control it, could we?'

It was like lifting the lid off a volcano, she launched the flat of her palm at his face.

‘No …’ He caught her wrist before the hand had a chance to make contact. ‘You don’t slap my face because you cannot control yourself around me, Louisa.'

‘I hate you,’ she whispered, wrenching her wrist free so she could spin her back to him, her slender arms wrapping around her body in soul-cutting self-defence. ‘How could we do that?’ she tremored. ‘How could we just fall on each other like that?'

‘It never took much.’ His voice was grim again.

She swung back. ‘Is that any kind of excuse?’

Andreas just shrugged. He’d wanted her from the moment he had watched her walk off the ferry. And, even standing here regretting the whole damn mad incident, he felt fresh need already pumping away inside him like some greedy monster he had never been able to feed anywhere else.

He cast a glance at the way she was standing there, upset, shaking with shock and horror and the close onset of tears. Beautiful, he thought bleakly, still so beautiful, even with her hair all over the place and her clothes covered with dirt.

‘Wh-what if I get pregnant again?’

It came out of nowhere, the one thing he had not been prepared to hear. It totally shook him. ‘You said that to punish me,’ he pushed out hoarsely.

The way those dark blue eyes looked at him gave him his answer long before the breathy little, ‘No,’ arrived in his ears.

He bit out a word that made her wince, her kiss-swollen mouth quivering before she shot back bitterly, ‘Well, that just about covers it.'

Then she left him standing there. Throat clogged by hot, shamed tears, Louisa started walking. When he came up behind her, her shoulders racked up with rejection because she thought he was going to grab her again.

But he didn’t grab. ‘Just walk,’ he rasped as he stepped in front of her then began to lead the way back down the path.

Louisa followed him in thick, bubbling silence, shame consuming her a little more with each step. She did not look at him but kept her eyes fixed on the ground as they trod the soft sand on the beach. When they arrived at the hotel he stopped at the entrance and she kept on going. Neither bothered to offer up a hypocritical ‘goodnight'.

When she finally crawled back into bed she hid her head beneath the pillow and tossed bitter recriminations at herself until she finally dropped into an exhausted sleep only to be woken up a few hours later by a knock on her bedroom door.

Struggling to drag herself awake, she rolled out of the bed without knowing she had done it. Then her eyes connected with the pile of clothes left to fall where she’d dropped them and instant recall had her falling like a stone back onto the mattress as the whole shocking episode robbed her of the ability to stand up.

She’d had sex with Andreas like a slut with no morals. She cringed inside her own flesh.

‘Louisa!’ Jamie knocked again. ‘Breakfast—I’m starving!'

‘Coming,’ she called weakly. ‘S-see you down there.’ Then she dived for the damning heap of clothes and stuffed them to the bottom of her bag with urgent, trembling fingers as if hiding the evidence would take the crime away.

It didn’t. As she headed for the bathroom she groaned at the subtle aches in places that made her quiver in shame and she hated herself. Catching sight of her face in the mirror froze her to the spot in dismay. She looked washed out through lack of sleep and all tumbled and tousled. A shocking inner glow burned like a sultry secret in the darkened blue of her eyes and in the soft pulse of her still swollen mouth.

I look like a lush, she thought in disgust and spun away from the mirror to step beneath the punishing heat of the shower spray.

Ten minutes later, showered, dressed and feeling about as composed as she was ever going to feel, she joined her brother on the shady terrace that overlooked the beach. The sun was already hot and glinting like crystal on the blue water. As they sat quietly planning their day while they ate breakfast, vivid flashbacks of what she and Andreas had done kept catching her out to send her senses spinning into hot, dipping dives.

Someone stepped around the corner of the hotel building from the direction of the car park. Glancing up, she felt her senses take a different kind of dive.

Well, this is a first in five years, she thought cynically as her mother-in-law walked towards their table.

‘Kalimera, Louisa,’ Isabella Markonos greeted pleasantly. ‘Jamie, pethi mou, how you have grown since I saw you last!'

Flushing, Jamie stood up to suffer the airbrush of lips to his cheeks then hurriedly excused himself. He’d managed to arrange a lift into town with Yannis’s son Pietros which gave him a great excuse to escape.

‘The years have flown by so fast,’ Isabella murmured wistfully as she watched him beat his hasty retreat.

Louisa said absolutely nothing and after a short hesitation her mother-in-law took possession of Jamie’s vacated seat then lifted dark eyes to her face.

‘Andreas has left the island,’ she informed her gently. ‘He visited Nikos very early this morning then boarded his helicopter and flew away …'

CHAPTER FIVE

ANDREAS had gone …?

Louisa had to fight to hang on to a calm expression.

‘He is very angry with me,’ Isabella confided. ‘And I can see from the look in your eyes that you are angry with me too.'

Was that what her look said? Better than looking devastated, she supposed. ‘You had no right to interfere,’ she said.

‘When have I not interfered between the two of you?’ the older woman hit back. ‘Who else was there to do it? You were two children playing at being adults for most of your marriage. You needed someone to interfere simply to keep you both practical.'

Practical. Louisa almost let loose a laugh. When had she and Andreas ever been practical about this attraction they suffered for each other? Certainly not up there last night on the hill. And if Isabella wanted to go back that far, then who wanted to be practical at the age of seventeen or twenty-two?

Isabella had been very practical when she’d gently suggested that Louisa should have her pregnancy terminated. Louisa recalled the way she’d wept to Andreas, and he’d turned on his mother and hit the roof. Later, when Nikos was born, Isabella then gently suggested that she should take care of her grandson while Louisa finished her education—in England. Again she had wept and again Andreas had angrily turned on his mother.

‘It was me who suggested you might prefer to visit Nikos when you could be sure that Andreas would not be here.’ Isabella picked on the only practical suggestion she’d ever made that Louisa had no argument with. ‘It was therefore down to me to make the decision that such a situation could not be allowed to go on.'

Sitting back in her seat, Louisa looked at this beautiful, dainty Greek woman who possessed a heart of steel behind all the visible signs of softer living, and wondered what her practical solution was going to be if her son had to break the news to her that he could have made his estranged wife pregnant again?

‘You both need to move on with your lives,’ Isabella continued, unaware of what was going on inside Louisa’s head. ‘It has become very clear to me that neither of you were going to do that until you had confronted your past.'

‘So you set Andreas and me up for a face-to-face confrontation?'

‘You needed to look at each other and see that you are no longer the same two people you used to be—see for yourselves how widely you have grown apart!'

A vibrant flashback in which she’d played a very intimate part in Andreas’s life recently hit Louisa’s vision.

‘We came to love you dearly, Louisa,’ Isabella persisted in her oh-so-deceptive gentle voice. ‘And we hurt deeply for both you and my son when fate dealt you such a cruel tragic blow. My dearest wish would be to see both of you happy again—in love and married to some other wonderful person who will give you more children to help heal the gap in your hearts dear Nikos left behind.’

In a sad, painfully aching way, Louisa agreed with those wishes. She too would like to be truly happy again. But how could she ever be happy with someone else when the man she had been in love with since she was seventeen still commanded so much power over her?

‘It is time for you both to let go …’

It was the way Isabella said it that grabbed Louisa’s full attention. ‘You want me to stop coming to the island,’ she said.

For a moment Isabella said nothing, allowing her answer to sound in the paining silence that hovered over them for a second or two. Then she stood up and came round the table. As she bent to kiss Louisa’s cheek she repeated gently, ‘It is time.'

Then she walked away, leaving Louisa on her own to absorb that cold little stab of cruel truth.

Andreas had already left the island, making his statement about letting go by putting distance between them as quickly as he could. His mother was now telling her that when she left here she would prefer it if she did not come back.

She got up, tense—shivery suddenly though the sun was hot. Andreas had gone. His mother did not want her here. Up on the hill above the harbour stood a tiny domed chapel with its neatly kept gardens where her son had been laid to rest. Did Nikos need her to come here? Did she have to come all this way to find him? He lived in her heart, would always live there, she knew that, but—

The but suddenly lost itself in the next thought to shoot into her head. She had done a very stupid thing last night and now retribution was looming large in the form of a pregnancy she could not allow to become real.

Truly pale now, the natural creamy tone of her skin wiped away, Louisa moved across the terrace like someone not of this life. An hour later and she was in town, standing outside the old-fashioned pharmacy with its distinctive green and white sign above the door. Tears were in her eyes and one of her hands was covering her trembling mouth because she knew now that she couldn’t do it. She just could not walk in there and calmly ask for the morning-after pill as if the tiny thing maybe struggling for life inside her did not have rights of its own.

It would be a part of her, a part of Andreas—a special part of their son. How she had even been able to convince herself she could just take a pill to ensure no child would come from what had taken place last night was appalling her now.

Let nature make the decision, she told herself as she turned and walked away again. Surely fate would not be so cruel as to make her pregnant again. Didn’t they say that lightning never struck in the same place twice?

She spent the next few days almost entirely with Jamie. She was quiet and withdrawn, though he was too busy enjoying himself to notice. Each morning they would eat breakfast together then he would walk her up to the chapel on the hill, stay with her for a little while before shooting off again, leaving her alone while he went back to the hotel.