Greek Affairs: To Take A Bride

Reclining on a sun bed in the shade of an umbrella, Louisa spent the rest of her day watching as Pietros, the hotel owner’s son, showed Jamie how to windsurf or how to ride his pride-and-joy jet ski, and they even talked someone into taking them out on his speedboat so that Jamie could try his hand at water-skiing too.

She tried not to think about Andreas. She tried not to beat herself up over what they had done. She tried not to agonise over the decision she had made outside the pharmacy. It won’t come to anything, she kept telling herself.

Then there were other times when Isabella’s blunt speaking would suddenly grab hold of her and she would take off on a tight-limbed, restless walk down the beach and battle with the tumbling morass of other feelings that swirled around her. It was a battle because, deep down, Lousia knew that Isabella was right. She had to let this island go.

Let Nikos go.

Let his father go.

Dressed in a pale blue wrap-around skirt and white summer top, Louisa sat on the stone seat set beside her son’s little grave with its marble headstone gleaming white in the sun. Today marked the fifth anniversary of his passing and she was glad she’d been able to convince Jamie to go with Pietros on a boat that was going out fishing for the day.

She needed to be on her own.

Moving to rest her forearms along the length of her sun-warmed thighs, she looked around her through blue eyes misted by the love she felt for this place. There was nowhere more beautiful on this earth than this tiny corner of Greece in her opinion. All around her the loving care and attention laboured on each square inch of the chapel and its garden was there to see in the carefully tended graves and the profusion of colour bursting from flowers that bloomed hot and bright in the fierce summer heat. Birds sang. The air was full of the scent of summer jasmine, and the tiny chapel with its handsome dome stood backed by a clear blue sky.

Nikos had been baptised here. She and Andreas had been married here, watched by curious islanders. She had been the quintessentially shy and uncertain blushing bride but because she had been carrying Andreas’s baby she had felt as if everyone looked on her as if—

Curtailing that memory, because it did not really matter any more what other people had once thought about her, she tried to concentrate on the here and now, and another painful decision she still had to make.

Did she leave here on the ferry in a few days’ time and never come back?

Lowering her face to her hands, she let her silk blonde hair flood forward to hide her face. It was all so muddled up, so painful and complicated. She wanted to think only about Nikos but all she could think about was herself! What was happening to her? What was going on inside her head?

A shadow suddenly fell across the sun to douse her in shadow. Pulling her face out of her hands, she had to squint to take in the tall, dark silhouette standing there. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was coming from directly behind him but she knew who it was.

‘When did you get back?’ she questioned flatly.

‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I had to leave quickly because of some business I could not neglect but …'

He shifted his stance, leaving the rest of his sentence unfinished as if he wished he had not said it at all. And the way he shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers told her that he wasn’t comfortable here.

Or he was uncomfortable about being here with her, Louisa amended and sent her gaze drifting towards something sitting on the white marble ledge of their son’s headstone that had not been there the day before, which told her Andreas had been here once already today.

Early.

So as to avoid bumping into her. Even after five long years, did he still find it this difficult to be here with her? ‘We need to talk.’

‘Not today, Andreas,’ she refused quietly.

‘My mother told me what she said to you. She—’

Damn interfering Isabella. ‘You’ve bought a new car,’ she cut in.

‘I don’t want you to listen to her. She—’ ‘Another Ferrari,’ she interrupted. ‘A black one instead of your favourite red.’

‘It is no one else’s business what you or I—’

‘Do you think you’re too old for flashy red now, is that it?’

Reaching forward, she plucked up the little black toy Ferrari from its narrow shelf with a dry little smile softening her unhappy face. Each time she’d come here over the years, the little car had been changed for a different model. It was one of those small things that always touched a tender spot inside her because she knew it was Andreas who brought them here and that it usually meant he had also changed one of his many super-cars he had scattered around the globe.

‘I just felt like a change, that’s all,’ he answered gruffly, then impatiently, ‘Will you listen to me, Louisa? We need—'

‘You big liar, Andreas Markonos,’ she said. ‘You decided that red Ferraris are for the flashy young-bloods and you’ve grown much too sophisticated to be one of them so you bought black this time. Nikos is going to be so—'

‘Will you not speak like that!’ he ground out.

Louisa’s whole body jolted in shock at his anger. ‘Like what?’ she quavered.

He swung his back to her, swivelling on the heels of his black leather shoes. ‘As if he is still alive.'

Trembling now, all hint of softness wiped clean, Louisa replaced the little car on its ledge. Tension sawed into the thickening silence. Pushing her hands flat together in front of her, she said nothing. In a tangled sort of way, she understood. She did speak of Nikos as if he were still right here with her. Sometimes the feeling was so strong she could actually believe he was …

Pulling in a thick breath, she stood up as that sudden restlessness grabbed hold of her again to send her walking across the soft green of the carefully watered lawn to end up standing against the low wall that enclosed the chapel grounds, feeling as if the letting-go stuff was beginning to crowd in on her from all sides.

After a few seconds Andreas followed, making the fine hairs at the back of her neck tingle when he came to a stop behind her. ‘My apologies,’ he said heavily. ‘I did not intend to shout at you like that.'

Louisa dismissed his need to apologise with a tense little shrug. Her restlessness had nothing to do with his emotional outburst. This was after all a very emotive place.

Feeling the corner of her mouth tug down on a sad little grimace, ‘Do you come here a lot?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Each time I visit the island,’ he responded.

Louisa nodded. ‘But you belong here.’

No reply came to that. He did belong here. Whereas she did not.

Staring out towards the expanse of glistening blue ocean until her eyes began to sting, ‘This is the last time I will be coming here,’ she told him, voicing the decision she had been struggling with for days.

‘Don’t be foolish!’ he snapped. ‘As I have been trying to say to you, you don’t have to heed my mother’s interference!'

‘She’s right though. It is time I let go.’

‘Time,’ he repeated as if it were a rude word. ‘What has time got to do with what we leave behind here each time we have to go away?'

‘You feel that too?’ Swinging round to face him, Louisa released a sharp gasp when she found herself looking at a completely different man from the one she had expected to see.

Until now she had only seen him wrapped in the softening cloak of darkness and he had been too dangerously potent for her to deal with then. Looking into his lean face without the sun blinding her eyes, she now felt the impact of this new view of him with a shattering shock. The younger man she had first fallen in love with had gone—forever. What she’d seen as mere maturity under cover of darkness had done him absolutely no justice at all. He was totally, devastatingly handsome. Totally, devastatingly lean—both physically and on the inside, where it only showed in the aura she was picking up from him. Andreas was a man to whom compromise had become very thinly spread indeed. The mouth that had kissed her so thoroughly a few nights ago now had a hardness about it that placed a chill across her bones. And the eyes, those deep-set dark brown eyes, looked as though the darker passions of the other night were as alien to him as—as standing here in this pretty place talking with her at all!

‘Of course I feel it,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you think I am made of stone?'

‘Yes!’ Louisa heard herself answer. But worse than that, she was finally—finally feeling the full blunt impact of what his mother had been talking about. She was finally seeing why Isabella wanted the two of them to come face to face. The ordinary English girl and this powerful Greek man were in such different leagues now that if they’d met for the first time this week Andreas would not have given her a second glance!

Her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. She dragged her eyes away from him—but not before they’d taken in the sharply tailored dark business suit in some expensive fabric that made such a big statement about his wealth and how comfortable he was with the stunning sophistication with which he wore it. Even the way his pale blue shirt collar sat so smoothly around his brown throat made its own statement about an exclusivity he had been gifted with from birth. Seeing it all set Louisa reeling because—how was it that she hadn’t noticed this staggeringly elegant man developing inside him while they’d still been together as man and wife?

‘How can you even be considering deserting our son?’ he rasped at her.

Having to force herself to concentrate on what he’d just said to her, Louisa tugged some air into her lungs. ‘Haven’t you just told me that he isn’t here?’ she reminded him. ‘And you’re right,’ she added when his dark eyes flicked like hard black diamonds and his tense mouth parted to say something. ‘Nikos left here a long time ago. Travelling all the way out here once a year to visit what is really only a shrine to him is a pretty meaningless exercise when I know exactly where I can find him when I need him.'

‘Look at me when you say that,’ Andreas responded tautly. ‘Look into my face and tell me again that this place, this island, that small grave over there no longer mean a thing to you!'

The force of his anger widened her eyes on him. ‘That was not what I said,’ she denied. ‘And why are you so angry with me?’ she demanded. ‘Until a few days ago you were not even aware that I came here at all!'

His body tensed inside all of that elegant dark suiting. ‘That has nothing to do with it.'

‘Well, thanks,’ Louisa murmured bitterly.

Something ripped across his hard features. ‘I mean that we are not discussing my failings here, we—'

‘So you do know you have them.’

He twisted away from her but even the way he did that was smoothly controlled and elegantly graceful instead of packed full with those old unfettered passions belonging to the younger man she had once known—the man she had met on a hill the other night!

‘As soon as you could after we buried Nikos you walked away from me,’ she reminded him bleakly.

The chiselled edge of his jaw flexed. ‘There were too many people around. I—needed to be alone.'

‘And I didn’t?’

‘I am a man. It’s OK for a woman to break down and weep in front of others but a man must remain strong and supportive.'

Louisa uttered a thick laugh. ‘Well, you certainly failed there, Andreas.'

His hands came out of his pockets and bunched into fists and she knew they did. She’d hit a nerve and the sadness of it all was that she just did not care. He’d hurt her badly when he’d walked away from her that day and even now, five years on, she still found it impossible to forgive him for doing that.

They’d had a fight via the telephone the day that Nikos had taken his fatal fall. Andreas had been telling her that he had to stay in Athens to attend an important board meeting. He’d insisted that he had no choice. She’d insisted that everyone had choices and that it was his choice to break his promise to spend the day on the beach with his son! Then she’d slammed down the phone and made her choice to take Nikos to the beach by herself.

As she lowered her head, her eyes turned dark like a bottomless ocean as she relived the moment that Nikos had broken free of her grasp and begun to run down the dusty track towards a herd of goats. She could still hear the way she had called out to him, ‘Nikos, take care!’ and still see the way one of the goats leapt from the embankment to land directly in his path.

‘You left because you blamed me for what happened,’ she whispered.

He spun around, a shaft of hard shock on his face. ‘I did not!'

Still, Louisa sent him a look of bleak disbelief. Why wouldn’t he blame her when she blamed herself?

‘I did not blame you.’ He grabbed her arm when she went to spin away from him. ‘It was an accident. Apportioning blame to such a tragedy is a weak fool’s way of dealing with it.'

Which was all very wise and grown-up, Louisa thought with a rueful twist of her mouth, but five years ago they had been neither wise nor grown-up, had they?

‘Where did you go when you left here?’ she questioned after yet another taut moment scrambled between them.

Letting go of her arm, he released a sigh. ‘I flew to the apartment in Athens and just stayed there. By the time I returned here to the island you had already left with your family.'

‘Two weeks later, Andreas,’ Louisa provided. ‘I waited two weeks for you to come back.'

His dark eyes were steady on her, not a hint of apology in them. ‘And you, agape mou, gave me only two weeks to come to my senses before deciding to go …'

It was the cool counter-challenge, Louisa recognised. It was the new tougher male with compromise spread very thin. She could have said more. She could have reminded him how he had not called her once while she’d been in England to ask how she was coping. She could even explain how she’d come back to the island six miserable weeks later, only to discover that he was not here. Or she could tell him how she’d flown to Athens and gone to their apartment, witnessed for herself what he had been doing to blot her out of his life.

But why bother when all of that was in the past and the consensus of opinion was that it was time to let the past go? It was over between them. It had been over for the last five years, which only made the lusty romp on the hill all the more shameful and what might come from it something she could repent at her leisure once she got back home.

Taking a blind glance at her watch, ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Jamie in ten minutes,’ she lied and walked away from him.

CHAPTER SIX

ANDREAS watched her go with his eyes narrowed and his chest feeling as if it was about to explode.

Blame her? He was still struggling to believe she had actually said that. How could she possibly think that he would blame her for anything when it had to be patently obvious that the only person he’d ever blamed for what had happened was himself?

Swinging away, he glared at the ocean. He should have been there. He should have been keeping his promise to his wife and his son instead of playing the big tycoon who found the alluring drug of power more important to him than them.

Well, he’d learnt that lesson in life the hardest way. She had accepted none of his calls to her parents’ house while she’d been in England. She’d switched off her mobile phone. When he’d flown to London to see her he’d been stonewalled by her cold-faced parents telling him that their daughter did not want to see him or speak to him. After that kick in the gut he’d flown back to Athens and spent the next few weeks stone-cold drunk.

Turning round, he saw she was in the process of squatting down and kissing her fingertips before gently pressing them to their son’s bright white marble headstone. His throat tightened, a whole gamut of aches raking through him as he watched her remain there like that with the hot sun beating down on her golden head and her fingers lingering where she had placed them.

So what next? he mused grimly. Where did the two of them go from here?

Not where that cold little look she’d sent him before she walked away said they were going anyway, he determined. This was not over yet by a long way and the sooner Louisa came to terms with that, the easier it was going to be for both of them.

By the time Louisa straightened up he was at her side again. ‘I will drive you back to the hotel.'

‘I can walk,’ she refused.

There was a short pause followed by one of those impatient shifts of his body, then his voice arrived so close to her ear it wove words around her like silk. ‘Perhaps I should tell you that Father Lukas is standing by the chapel entrance watching us,’ he murmured. ‘Do you want to give him fresh gossip to spread about us while we have yet another argument right here across our son’s grave?'

It was the ‘our son’s grave’ part that reached her, the sheer irreverence of arguing here at all. Taking a quick glance from beneath the shelter of her eyelashes to check that what he was saying about the priest was true, ‘OK,’ she conceded grudgingly. ‘I will accept the lift.'

‘Thank you,’ he drawled drily, then made her muscles stiffen as one of his hands slipped around her slender waist as he bent across her and reached out with his other hand to straighten the already perfectly straight little toy car on its ledge.

The warm, tangy scent of him swirled around her senses, the hot sun picked out the blackness of his hair and the rich golden colour of his skin. She tried to relax in his light grasp, tried not to notice the way his fingers lingered on the white marble ledge for a few more seconds before he slid them away and straightened up again. But the sudden sting gathering in her eyes and her throat was the sting of thick tears because she knew that his lingering touch on the toy car meant the same to a Greek male who did not show his emotions in public as the tender farewell kiss she’d just pressed to the marble stone.

‘Let’s go,’ he said gruffly and turned her towards the gap in the wall which led to the car park.

‘W-we should go and speak to Father Lukas,’ she managed to mumble across the threatening tears.

‘He will not want to intrude on our privacy today of all days,’ Andreas said quietly. ‘Unless, of course,’ he then added smoothly, ‘you want me to ask him how quickly he can arrange the renewal of our marriage vows.'

That totally unexpected, truly sardonic comment sent Louisa lurching from hot tears into a bristling fury she had to fight to keep down if she didn’t want Father Lukas to see her blow up.

‘I’m going to pretend that you never said that,’ she whispered hotly. ‘That way you won’t get blood on your fancy suit!'

‘I take it that renewing our vows is not to your liking, then?’ Andreas responded lightly.

‘Being near you at all is not to my liking!’ Louisa flung back.

‘Shame you did not think about that the other night.’

Louisa gave up trying to behave and went to wrench free of him. ‘I don’t know where you get the flat arrogance to believe you can joke about it!'

‘No joke.’ Long fingers pinned her right where she was.

‘Well, you’re mad, then, if you’re daring to think I actually want to stay married to you!'

‘Well, no child of mine will be born out of wedlock,’ he informed her. ‘So divorce is out, which leaves us with—what option left?'

Divorce …?

With that one casually uttered word he shattered her. It was like driving at full speed into a brick wall. For all the long hours she’d battled with letting go of their past, the crazily logical solution of divorce had not so much as entered her head!

Why hadn’t it?

She pulled to a shuddering stop in the dusty car park. Divorce, she repeated to herself. The final solution. It was sensible. It brought proper closure to everything—freed them both to get on with the rest of their lives.

So why was she feeling as if she was being turned inside out?

Andreas twisted to stand in front of her, his hands coming to rest on her shoulders, his voice a low, husky rasp. ‘Stop trembling,’ he muttered. ‘It isn’t as if we.’ He ground to a stop suddenly, the black bars of his eyebrows pulling together across the bridge of his nose as his fingers lightly tested the heat in her skin. ‘How long have you been sitting out here in the sun?’ he demanded.

Dusky eyelashes flickering away from turbulent blue eyes, she barely heard what he had said. ‘I’m not pregnant,’ she whispered.

‘I thought you had more sense than to sit in the sun without shelter,’ he muttered. ‘Now your lovely skin is so hot it—'

‘Andreas—I am not pregnant!’ she choked out.

His fingers stilled on her burning shoulders, a muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth. He looked into her eyes, her wide, blue, anxious eyes. ‘But you are seriously concerned that you could be,’ he said, ‘or you would not have spent several minutes standing outside the pharmacy the other morning fighting with yourself before deciding that you could not do it.'

It was just one hard shock too many. The breath came and went from her body in appalled understanding of what that coolly delivered statement actually meant. ‘You’ve been having me watched!'

He didn’t even bother to deny it, just clasped her arm and led her across the last few metres to where his car was parked then leant past her to open the door.

‘Get in,’ was all he said.

When she turned to argue with him a cold chill went chasing through her because he looked so stern, so unrelentingly tough, and on a sudden bright flash of understanding it hit her that during his days away from the island Andreas had come to some serious decisions about them.

‘Why?’ she whispered shakily.

Irritation flicked across his hard-boned features. ‘Because I am not indulging in a stand-up fight with you here?'

His sarcasm hissed the air from her body. ‘Don’t be so—'

He pulled her against him then lowered his head and captured her mouth. It wasn’t an angry kiss or even a passionate kiss, it was a—frustrated, compulsive, shut-up kind of kiss that locked the two of them together in a dusty car park with the sun beating relentlessly down on their heads.

‘That,’ he husked out as he drew away again, ‘was for Father Lukas. Now get in the damn car before I take the next one for myself!'

Shaken—shocked some more because she’d forgotten all about the watchful priest standing in the church doorway, Louisa subsided into the low car seat. She pretended not to notice the way Andreas dropped his glinting gaze to her legs as the wrap-around skirt slithered open to reveal the length of a long and slender thigh, pale as porcelain and as smooth as silk—before her trembling fingers covered it up.

He closed the car door with a sharp flick from long fingers then strode around the bonnet with her wide blue eyes fixed on his tall, lean bulk as it moved with a smooth animal grace. His dark suit shifted expensively against him as he opened the other door then got in beside her, making her mouth go dry, because once again she was recognising that this Andreas was a completely different kind of beast from the one she had used to know.

‘Why have me watched?’ she demanded as he stretched out a hand to turn the key in the ignition.

The engine fired. He slipped it into gear. ‘I had to go back to Athens for a few days,’ he answered. ‘We had just enjoyed unprotected sex and I could not be sure what you would do about it once the shock had worn off, so I had one of my security team flown in to keep an eye on you.’

His security team? Her image of him was growing bigger and bigger. ‘For what purpose?’ she snapped out. ‘To stop me from throwing myself off the peninsula in despair—or to push me off it if I went near the edge?'