Greek Affairs: To Take A Bride

Louisa felt her spine quiver as she drew in a breath. To her the why was obvious. ‘They didn’t like you.'

‘We were married!’ he raked back. ‘Whether they liked me or not should not have come into it! We were man and wife and we had just lost our son! We needed each other! It takes more than dislike to want to keep us apart like that!'

‘It w-wasn’t just them.’ Louisa put her hands up to her face and rubbed at it as if trying to rub away the pain of what she was going to say next. Then she dropped her hands and looked up at him standing there like a rumbling dark mountain threatening to erupt. ‘I wrote to you too,’ she told him thickly. ‘I phoned you here at the family villa and at your office in Athens, only to be told you were out of the country … Did your parents or your brother or your secretary pass on any of my messages to you?'

He did not need to answer because she knew that they hadn’t. Now she knew it but not back then when everyone had been so nice and gentle and careful with her.

Conspiracies. She shivered. Their marriage had been cunningly manipulated by two families who’d conspired to make it come to an end. Even her visits back to this island had been carefully coordinated to ensure that she and Andreas did not meet.

‘What you said about my brother.’ Andreas prompted darkly.

‘I used to tell you about Alex bating me and you used to just brush it off as sibling jealousy. And you know what?’ she said starkly. ‘I think you were right. At least Alex was open about what he thought about me, while.’ while the rest of them smiled nicely as they stabbed us in the back. ‘I knew you blamed me f-for what happened to Nikos—'

‘Will you stop staying that?’ Andreas sighed. ‘I did not blame you!'

‘Why not, when I blamed myself?’ she choked out. ‘And it was my own guilt that they worked on, wasn’t it? They used it to let me go on believing that you …'

She couldn’t say any more because the tears really were threatening now.

‘I have to go and deal with this.’ The way he suddenly burst out of his stillness left Louisa blinking as he strode through the archway like a man about to—

Leaping up from her chair, she ran after him. ‘Andreas—!'

He was halfway up the steps that led to the lobby when she called him. He stopped but he didn’t turn, the full length of his frame stiff with anger.

‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Don’t go off angry like you used to do when you didn’t like something!’ ‘You’re upset.’

‘Of course I’m upset. So are you! But think about it,’ she pleaded. ‘Charging off to slay them all isn’t going to change anything now!'

‘They stole five years from us,’ he roughed out hoarsely.

‘Yes.’ Her voice quivered. But it wasn’t only them who’d done that. She was thinking about the woman she’d seen him with—the one part of their conversation earlier he had oh, so carefully edited out!

His wide shoulders flexed inside the blue shirting. ‘They reduced us both to complete failures as a husband or wife in our own eyes …'

Louisa had to cover her unsteady mouth.

‘And to sitting alone at our son’s graveside when we should have been sitting there together …'

Oh, it was all so unforgivably cruel when put like that. ‘I suppose they believed it was the best thing for both of us at the time or—'

‘You believe that?’ He swung round to blister a burning look at her.

‘Yes—no!’ She gave a helpless shake of her head. ‘I don’t know what to think—I’m still reeling too much from the shock to think!'

‘Well, I am not reeling, so you can leave me to deal with it.’ He turned away again.

‘By climbing onto your jet plane and flying to England so you can have my parents lined up and shot?’ she cried out. ‘Well, don’t go fighting my battles for me, Andreas. I don’t need you to do anything for me any more!'

Wrong thing to say.

Louisa knew it the moment that his shoulders racked up and the air began to crackle. When he turned around, one glance at his face and she knew all the anger inside him and the monstrous feelings of hurt had made a switch to something else.

‘I think we have strayed away from the main plot a little,’ he murmured, coming back down the steps.

‘Meaning what?’ she asked warily.

‘Meaning that this started out as a discussion about you and me enjoying the exciting wonders of unprotected sex on a hill.'

‘Are we about to have another fight about whether I’m pregnant or not?’ she sighed out. ‘For goodness’ sake, one mistake does not automatically make a baby!'

Her half-shrieked words echoed off painted walls but he didn’t even blink. ‘It did with Nikos. One time without protection. One beautiful boy exquisitely conceived. One marriage hastily arranged.'

Louisa closed her eyes and tried to keep a grip on her temper because she knew where this was leading. ‘I am not taking up the role of your wife again on the wild off-chance that we’ve done the same thing again!'

‘Wild does not cover it.’

He sounded so close suddenly that she flicked her eyes open, her insides tumbling when she saw just how close he had come. Looking up into his face was like putting your fingers too close to a burning flame—dangerous, she likened as his sheer height and breadth and muscled strength snatched away her breath. Pure self-defence made her ease back from him, her breasts fluttering on an unsteady breath when she found her spine flattened up against the wall.

He followed—lazily, a wide shoulder coming to rest on the wall to one side of her, a long arm stretching across her to brace the flat of his palm on the wall on her other side, the whole manoeuvre aimed to trap her inside a circle of that oh-so-macho web of leashed power.

‘Let us deal with this issue once and for all,’ he murmured ever so softly, ‘and keep looking at me while we talk, agape mou,’ he instructed when she shut her eyes again to block it all out. ‘I want you to see in my face that I am not playing around here.'

Louisa knew that already. She knew it with every slowly shredding nerve in her body that this was no game. She tried for some air that would help keep her head clear, couldn’t help moistening her suddenly dry lips as she lifted her chin and slowly opened her eyes. This close up he was without doubt the most frighteningly gorgeous man she had ever encountered—or ever wanted to encounter, she extended helplessly. One Andreas had always been more than enough for her.

‘All right,’ wrapping her arms across her breasts, she tried for a careless shrug, ‘say what you want to say.'

‘You don’t want to see blood spilt and I do. So I will make a deal with you.'

‘What kind of deal?’

‘Be my wife again, in every sense, and I will attempt to control my desire to spill blood.'

‘This is silly,’ she shot out. ‘Why talk about this now when we will know one way or another in a couple of weeks if it even needs discussing at all? Once I’m back in England and can buy a testing kit without causing another Markonos scandal to erupt here, of course.’ She could not resist the sarcastic tag-on.

‘Because it isn’t just about the pregnancy now. I want more than that.’ He ignored her sarcasm. ‘I want my lost five years back.'

Her folded arms tightened. ‘You can’t have them back, Andreas.'

‘Then someone has to pay for their loss.’

‘Oh, stop being so disgustingly primitive,’ she snapped crossly. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—I thought it was the Greeks who pulled the rest of us out of the Dark Ages!'

He smiled at that. ‘Quick,’ he commended. ‘But you will not change my mind. You come back to me or our two families will pay the price.'

Her sensitive stomach turned queasy again. ‘I’ll give you an answer in a couple of weeks.'

‘I can do a lot of damage in a couple of weeks, agape mou.‘

Her chin shot up. ‘Stop calling me your darling when you’re standing here trying to intimidate and blackmail me!'

‘You would prefer me to use other incentives …?’

Eyes spiralling into a darker shade of blue, Louisa didn’t need to ask what those other incentives would be. ‘I should have known you would bring this right down to its most basic function,’ she muttered.

‘Sex,’ he dared to name it, ‘now, in one of the furnished bedrooms,’ he offered. ‘Think about it,’ he urged. ‘You and me coupling like we used to do, driving each other mad for hours and hours.’ Bringing up a hand he gently touched the telling burn in one of her cheeks. ‘We could enjoy a whole afternoon of glorious unprotected sex with no interruptions from—'

‘What do you mean—unprotected sex?’

‘I would have thought that was obvious.’ He smiled. ‘I want to make you pregnant.'

Robbed of breath, Louisa stared up at him. ‘You mean you actually want there to be a baby?'

‘I have thought of little else since our wild encounter on the hill,’ he admitted candidly. ‘Call me broody if you like,’ he mocked sardonically, touching the trembling fullness of her mouth. ‘I want to plant another seed inside your womb and be around this time to watch it grow.'

‘Stop it.’ She jerked her head back. ‘This is crazy.’

‘And it gets worse,’ he confessed. ‘You see, I began wanting this all the more once the name Max Landreau raised its threatening head. And do you know why?'

Louisa shook her head, not even trying to out-think a madman.

‘Because the idea of you conceiving another man’s child was just so unacceptable to me you were lucky you were with our son when I came looking for you, or I probably would have strangled you on the mere off-chance that you might be pregnant to another man!'

‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘You are unbelievable!’

‘Well, try thinking of it this way round. Ask yourself, my reluctant wife, how you would feel about me seeding my child in another woman …'

It was a blow Louisa had not anticipated. It flattened her back to the wall and whitened her face. ‘How did you get to be so brutal?’ she whispered.

His hands came up to frame her face, long fingers so incredibly tender as they slid her hair behind her ears. It was an old gesture and a familiar one he had used to make as a form of apology.

‘Primitive and brutal I might be but it hurts, hm?’ he persisted nonetheless. ‘It turns you inside out. My mother threw us together to make us see that we had nothing left between us but she could not have been more wrong if she had tried, because there is plenty left between us. You tremble,’ he husked. ‘I tremble because we still feel this much for each other.'

‘It’s just sex and the shock of what you said,’ Louisa dismissed all of that. ‘It will pass.'

‘But I don’t want it to pass.’ Lowering his head, he brushed his warm lips across hers.

And her lips clung—they clung!

‘Think about it,’ he urged. ‘Think about what we shared on the hill and what is still eating away inside us right here and now. Think of all the loving waiting for us the moment that you say yes to me. And think of the brother or sister we will make for Nikos and how happy he will be for us that we found each other again. We have a chance to make something good out of so much badness. All you have to do is agree to stay with me …'

She melted into thick, blinding tears.

Smothering a curse, Andreas wanted to take the words back. He despised himself for saying them at all! But he was not going to take them back because he meant them, every single aching one. They’d been cheated of the right to decide for themselves what happened to their marriage five years ago. They’d been manipulated by people who’d insisted on seeing them as children playing at marriage because they’d been foolish enough to conceive a son. In their twisted wisdom their families had decided that with Nikos gone their hasty young marriage should go too. It infuriated him. It burned like acid in his gut to know that people they believed loved them could do this to them.

Where would they be now without the interference? Who knew the answer? Certainly not him, he admitted as he stood looking down at this woman he had met at the wrong time in both their lives but had never—ever felt any differently about.

His mother wanted closure. Well, he wanted closure—only not in the way his mother had meant. To a Greek possession was everything. To a Greek you did not play around with something as deeply ingrained as that. Louisa belonged to him. He’d known it from the moment she walked off the ferry. What had taken place on the hill had only reinforced that belief. She was his, had always been his and would always be his. It was as simple and as clear as that.

‘If those tears spill over I will have to take drastic action,’ he warned her.

Pressing her trembling lips together, Louisa inhaled a controlling breath. ‘I will not be bulldozed into something I don’t want because you need to prove something to everyone.'

‘You have not been listening.’

‘Yes, I have.’ She looked up, eyes still awash with tears. ‘You are angry and you want revenge and you want me to be your accomplice.'

He didn’t like that. The way he stepped away from her told her that he didn’t like it. It was much too close to the truth. ‘I simply want back what they took from us.'

The moment he gave her some space to breathe Louisa felt a hot tingle spring out along her arms and shoulders. She rubbed at them absently. ‘We are two different people now. It would be like trying to relive a past that just doesn’t exist.’

‘Are you daring to tell me that our son did not exist?’ His sudden burning blast of fury shook Louisa to the core.

‘Of course I’m not!’ she cried out. ‘But you cannot recreate Nikos in another child, Andreas! That’s just—'

He went as white as a sheet and walked away from her.

Oh, dear God. Louisa closed her eyes. She should not have said that. Shaking badly inside and out now, she pushed herself away from the wall and tracked after him. He’d gone back into the kitchen and was standing in front of one of the units with his dark head dipped and his shoulders braced and he was holding on to the marble work-surface with a white-knuckled grip.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was a terrible thing for me to say.'

‘Some terrible things have been said all round,’ he uttered with an odd dry rasp. ‘It is what comes of waiting five years to say most of them.'

‘Yes,’ Louisa sighed out. ‘But two wrongs don’t make a right, Andreas. Surely you must see that?'

‘No, I do not see that.’

‘Stubborn,’ she mumbled, forced to switch her attention from their fight to herself because she’d put a hand up to her forehead and discovered it was burning hot, yet she was starting to shiver she felt so cold.

‘I am going to make coffee. Do you want some?’ he asked calmly, as if it was perfectly normal to drink coffee in the middle of a heated argument.

An odd-sounding laugh surged up from her throat. ‘Actually,’ she heard herself say almost curiously, ‘I don’t think I feel very well …'

CHAPTER EIGHT

AT LEAST it brought him round to face her, she noticed hazily as both he and the room began to fog in and out. There was a moment of complete stillness followed by a curse and a dizzying blur of movement before her hand was snatched away from her forehead so that Andreas could place his hand there instead.

‘You are burning up!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why didn’t you say something?'

‘We were too busy fighting.’

The next rash of curses rattled in his throat as he lifted her off her feet.

‘Put me down,’ she protested. ‘I’m not so ill I can’t walk!’

‘Shut up,’ he gritted, striding for the steps to the lobby.

‘I’ve got a terrible headache,’ she confessed on a groan. ‘And I’m all hot but I can’t stop sh-shivering.'

‘It is called sunstroke,’ he clipped out in disgust. ‘Do you feel nauseous?'

She nodded. ‘Been sick once already. Sorry,’ she added and let her head droop onto his shoulder and hated herself for feeling so good about being able to put it there. A few seconds later and the soft feel of a bed arrived beneath her with the cool touch of fine linen that made her shiver all the more.

‘Look at your shoulders and your arms,’ he said angrily.

‘They’re just a bit hot.’

‘You need a doctor—’

‘Oh, that’s right,’ Louisa sighed out, ‘bring in Dr Papandoulis and let’s start that great scandal you were so concerned about, when he discovers your estranged wife lying in the bed you usually reserve for your stupid mistresses!'

‘Parakaló?’ He straightened up with a violent jerk.

‘You might well beg my pardon!’ she shivered out, feeling so cold now she just wanted to crawl beneath the pale blue bed covers and curl up in a tight little ball. ‘The last magazine I saw with you splashed across it you had some lush little starlet hanging on to you like a limpet as you set off for your island retreat!’

‘I don’t bring women here.’ Blood surged into his taut face as he said it.

Not believing him, Louisa wanted to hit him. Then she suddenly shot upright and to her feet as another thought hit her full-on.

‘Did you sleep with her in this bed …?’

She was staring at the bed in horror.

‘No—You—’

‘Is that why you’ve had this villa built—so that you can bring your women here? Keep them separate from the family?’ She was becoming hysterical and she knew it but just didn’t care! ‘No wonder this place is barely furnished—you only needed a bed! Did you ever have cause to bring Dr Papandoulis out to one of them while they lay sick here?’ ‘Louisa, you—’

‘Don’t speak to me.’ Shaking as well as shivering now, she continued, ‘Y-you’ve already said enough. How dare you demand the last five years back when within weeks of deserting me you were shacked up with some woman while I hid and wept?'

He’d gone from red to white in as many seconds. ‘Agape mou, don’t—'

‘I can’t believe we did what we did on the hill the other night,’ she shook out. ‘I can’t believe I let you touch me at all after I’ve had to read every rotten detail of every rotten other woman you’ve been with in the last five years!'

‘It was not like that—’ He reached for her.

‘Don’t touch me!’ She pulled back. ‘I don’t feel well. I w-want to go h-home.'

‘You’re not well enough to go anywhere,’ he told her anxiously.

‘Well, I am not getting into that bed!’

‘Theos!’ he exploded. ‘The bed is new!’ Leaning past her, he tossed the pale blue covers back. ‘I had it flown in yesterday along with all the other furniture because I knew you would not want to stay with me at the family villa!—This house is not even ready for occupation!’ he added tautly as he straightened up again. ‘But I thought we could manage with the essentials. And I have never brought any woman to this island!’ he barked. ‘And you should know better than to believe everything you read in some sick glossy rag! Now, get into that bed before I murder you, Louisa!'

With that he turned and slammed out of the room, leaving her to sink weakly down on the bed in a mess of shaken limbs and emotions.

She had not even wanted to say any of that yet it had all just come pouring out! Fresh shivers overtook her, her burning skin quivering with prickly heat. On a low, angrily frustrated groan she just about managed to remove her skirt and top before she keeled over onto the cool linen then tugged the covers up to her chin. Her head was pounding, her stomach joining in, and hating Andreas for all she was worth only made her wriggle restlessly in the bed, which in turn made her wince when the movement irritated her burnt skin.

As soon as she was feeling fit enough she was getting out of here, she vowed fiercely. And he could take his lousy revenge-ridden proposition and his philandering self and offer them to some other woman—a woman who was probably as overused as him!

‘Here,’ a stiff voice prompted.

Peeling her heavy eyes open, Louisa discovered Andreas standing over her like some dark entity.

‘What?’ she mumbled aggressively.

Nothing flickered on his hard mask of a face as he held a glass out towards her. ‘To help the dehydration,’ he said.

Sending the liquid in the glass a dubious look, Louisa pulled herself up and took it from him.

‘And this …’ His open palm showed her a small pill. ‘Antihistamine to help cool your blood and take the sting out of your sunburn,’ he explained in the retracted tone of someone in no mood to take another argument.

‘I’m not sure if I should be taking …’

‘I checked with a doctor friend in Athens,’ he inserted. ‘The antihistamine might make you drowsy but it will not be harmful in any other way.’

He meant to a baby if there was one, though he was being very careful not to use the word now. Clearly, she’d shaken him up when she’d spat all of that out about his other women, so now he was playing it cold and stiff.

‘Thanks,’ she muttered and grudgingly took the pill from him then swallowed it down with the drink.

The drink tasted a bit odd but wasn’t too unpleasant. Handing the glass back to him, she sank down on the pillows, rolling carefully onto her side so she wasn’t facing him, then tugged the covers up over her burning shoulders and shut her eyes.

He did not move. Tension began to zip around them. Louisa had a feeling he was still standing there because he had something he wanted to say.

Well, she did not want to hear it.

‘Go away,’ she husked, desperately wanting to shiver and shake and put in a few miserable groans but refusing to let herself give in to the need while he stood there.

First she heard his heavy sigh, then the sound of his footsteps taking him back to the door, and absurdly she wanted to burst into tears.

What she did was drop like a stone into a deep slumber.

When next she awoke she was aware of something cool being smoothed into one of her arms. She opened her eyes to find Andreas sitting beside her on the bed, his dark eyes hooded and his mouth very grim.

‘Stay calm,’ he said as she made to stiffen. ‘I am not about to ravish you. I am merely applying a lotion to your burns.'

The effect was so wonderfully soothing that she didn’t want to do anything but lie there and let him continue. ‘You seem to be prepared for anything,’ she said drowsily.

‘Mm,’ was all he replied. But it was a very sexy mm, the kind of deep-bodied mm that vibrated up from his chest then across her senses and made her move restlessly between the sheets.

‘Be still.’

He was holding her arm out and was working the cooling lotion into her skin with all the gentleness of a masseuse. Eyes half-shut and still heavy with sleep, she watched him for a little while, unbelievably relaxed and unbelievably contented to just study him while he twisted her arm this way and that. She didn’t even mind when he reached the really hot spot on her shoulder though she was wearing no bra and was aware that the covers were slipping lower the higher up he worked.

A grateful sigh eased from her as the lotion began to neutralise the heat. ‘You’ll get it on the bedding,’ she thought she’d better point out when he finally allowed her arm to settle on the bed.

‘I would rather ruin the bedding than watch your skin peel off.’ He reached across her to pick up the other arm. ‘I thought you had learned to be more careful with your fair skin years ago.'

‘I used a sun-block before I left the hotel,’ she defended. ‘I just lost track of the time I’d been out, that’s all.'

He glanced up as she looked at him. Their eyes locked and her breathing stilled as a fine electric current began to pass between the two of them. It was sexual, they both knew that. Just as they both knew that if they did not break eye contact this was going to shift to a different all-consuming level.

He broke the eye contact first, his long lashes folding downwards as he twisted his body so he could begin work on her other arm. And because the antihistamine was making her feel like this, she told herself, she closed her eyes and just lay unmoving as he continued smoothing lotion into her until the sexual tug faded and without her knowing it she sank back into a relaxed sleep.