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www.millsandboon.co.uk
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER ONE
LEANDROS PETRONADES sat lazing on a sunbed on the deck of his yacht and looked out on the bay of San Estéban. Satisfaction toyed with his senses. The new Spanish resort had developed into something special and having enjoyed a very much hands-on experience during its development, he felt that sense of satisfaction was well deserved. Plus the fact that he had multiplied his original investment, he was business-orientated enough to add.
He had done a lot of that during the four years since he took over from his late father, he mused idly. Multiplying original investments had become an expectation for him.
Which was probably why he’d found this project just that bit different. It had always been more than just another investment. He had been in on it from the beginning when it had been only an idea in an old friend’s head. Between them, he and Felipe Vazquez had carefully nurtured that idea until it had grown into the fashionable new resort he was seeing today.
The problem for him now was, where did he go from here? The resort was finished. The luxury villas dotted about the hillside had their new owners, the five-star hotel, golf and leisure complex was functioning like a dream. And San Estéban itself was positively bustling, its harbour basin filled with luxury sail crafts owned by the rich and famous looking for new places to hide out while they played. By next week even this yacht, which had been his home while he had been based here, would have slipped her moorings. She would sail to the Caribbean to await the arrival of his brother Nikos, who planned to fly out with his new bride in three weeks.
It was time for him to move on, though he did not know what it was he wanted to move on to. Did he go back to Athens and lose himself in the old cut and thrust of the corporate jungle? His wide shoulders shifted against the sun bed’s padded white cushion as an old restlessness began to stir deep within his bones.
‘No, it is not possible to go over the top with this.’ A soft female voice filtered through the open doors behind him. ‘It is to be a celebration of San Estéban’s rebirth, and a thanks and farewell to all who worked so hard to make the project happen. Let it be one of fireworks and merriment. We will call it—the Baptism of San Estéban, and it will become its annual day of carnival.’
A smile eased itself across his mouth as Leandros listened, and his shoulders relaxed as the restlessness drained away. The Baptism of San Estéban, he mused. He liked it.
He liked Diantha. He liked having her around because she was so calm and quiet and so terribly efficient. When he asked her to do something for him she did it without bothering him with the irritating details. She was good for him. She tuned in so perfectly to the way of his thinking.
He was almost sure that he was going to marry her.
He did not love her—he did not believe in love any more. But Diantha was beautiful, intelligent, exceedingly pleasant company, and she promised to be a good lover—though he had not got around to trying her out. She was also Greek, independently wealthy and was not too demanding of his time.
A busy man like him had to take these things into consideration when choosing a wife, he pondered complacently. For he must be allowed the freedom to do what was necessary to keep himself and the Petronades Group of companies streets ahead of their nearest rivals. Coming from a similar background to his own, Diantha Christophoros understood and accepted this. She would not nag and complain and make him feel guilty for working long hours, nor would she expect him to be at her beck and call every minute of the day.
She was, in other words, the perfect choice of wife for a man like him.
There was only one small obstacle. He already had a wife. Before he could begin to approach Diantha with murmurings of romance and marriage he must, in all honour, cut legal ties to his current spouse. Though the fact that they had not so much as laid eyes on each other in three years meant he did not envisage a quick divorce from Isobel being a problem.
Isobel…
‘Damn,’ he cursed softly as the restlessness returned with enough itchy tension to launch him to his feet. He should not have allowed himself to think her name. It never failed to make him uptight. As time had gone by, he had thought less and less of her and become a better person for it. But sometimes her name could still catch him out and sink its barbed teeth into him.
Going over to the refrigerated drinks trolley, he selected a can of beer, snapped the tab and went to rest his lean hips against the yacht rail, his dark eyes frowning at the view that had only made him smile minutes before.
That witch, the hellion, he thought grimly. She had left her mark on him and it still had not faded three years on.
He took a gulp of his beer. Behind him he could still hear Diantha’s level tones as she planned San Estéban’s celebration day with her usual efficiency. If he turned his head he would see her standing in his main stateroom, looking as if she belonged there with her dark hair and eyes and olive-toned skin, her elegant clothes chosen to enhance her beauty, not place it on blatant display like…
He took another pull of the beer can. Up above his head the hot Spanish sun was burning into his naked shoulders. It felt good enough to have him flexing deep-bedded muscles wrapped in rich brown skin.
Recalling Isobel, he felt a different kind of bite tug at his senses. This one hit him low down in his gut where the sex thing lurked. He grimaced, wondering if or when he would ever want another woman the way he’d wanted Isobel? And hoped he never had to suffer those primitive urges again.
They had gone into marriage like two randy teenagers, loving each other with a passion that had them tearing each other to pieces by the time they’d separated. He had been too young—she had been too young. They’d made love like animals and fought in the same ferocious way until—inevitably probably—it had all turned so nasty and bitter and bad that it had been easier to lock it all away and forget he had a wife than to risk allowing it all to break out again.
But, like his sojourn in San Estéban, it was over now—time to move on with his life. He was thirty-one years old and ready to settle down with a proper wife, maybe even a family…
‘Why the frown?’
Diantha had come up beside him without him noticing. Turning his head, he looked down into warm brown eyes, saw the soft smile on her lips…and thought of a different smile. This mouth didn’t smile, it pouted—provokingly. And those intense green eyes were never warm but just damned defiant.
‘I am attempting to come to terms with the fact that it is time for me to leave here,’ he answered her question.
‘And you do not want to leave,’ Diantha murmured understandingly.
Leandros sighed. ‘I have come to love this place,’ he confessed, looking outwards towards San Estéban again.
There followed a few moments of silence between them, the kind that allowed his mind to drift without intrusion across the empty years during which he had hidden away here, learning to be whole again. San Estéban had been his sanctuary in a time of misery and disillusionment. Isobel had—
It took the gentle touch of Diantha’s fingers to his warm bicep to remind him that she was here. They rarely touched. It was not yet that kind of relationship. She was his sister Chloe’s closest friend and he was honour-bound to treat her as such while she was here. But his senses stirred in response to those cool fingers—only to settle down again the moment they were removed.
‘You know what I think, Leandros,’ she said gently. ‘I think you have been here for too long. Living the life of a lotus-eater has made you lazy—which makes it a good time for you to return to Athens and move on with your life, don’t you think?’
‘Ah, words of wisdom,’ he smiled. It was truly uncanny how Diantha could tap in to his thinking. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘After the San Estéban celebration I have every intention of returning to Athens and…move on, as you call it,’ he promised.
‘Good,’ she commended. ‘Your mama will be pleased to hear it.’
And with that simple blessing she moved away again, walking gracefully back into the stateroom in her neat blue dress that suited her figure and with her glossy black hair coiled with classical Greek conservatism to the slender curve of her nape.
But she did so with no idea that she had left behind her a man wearing another frown because he was seeing long, straight, in-your-face red hair flowing down a narrow spine in a blazing defiance to everything Greek. Isobel would have rather died than wear that neat blue dress, he mused grimly. She preferred short skirts that showed her amazing legs off and skinny little tops that tantalised the eyes with the thrust of her beautiful, button-tipped breasts.
Isobel would rather have cut out her tongue than show concern for his mother’s feelings, he mentally added as he turned away again and took another grim pull of his beer. Isobel and his family had not got on. They had rubbed each other up the wrong way from the very beginning, and both factions hadn’t attempted to hide that from him.
Diantha, on the other hand, adored his mother and his mother adored her. Being such a close friend to his sister, Chloe, she had always hovered on the periphery of his life, though he had only truly taken notice of her since she had arrived here a week ago to step into the breach to help organise next week’s celebration because Chloe, who should have been here helping him, had become deeply embroiled in Nikos’s wedding preparations.
It had been good of Diantha in the circumstances. He appreciated the time she had placed at his disposal, particularly since she had only just returned to Athens, having spent the last four years with her family living in Washington, D.C. She was well bred and well liked—her advantages were adding up, he noted. And, other than for a brief romance with his brother Nikos to blot her copybook, she was most definitely much more suitable than that witch of a redhead with sharp barbs for teeth.
With that final thought on the subject he took a final pull of his beer can, saw a man across the quay taking photographs of the yacht and frowned at him. He had a distinct dislike of photographers, not only because they intruded on his privacy but also because it was what his dear wife did for a living. When they had first met she had been aiming a damned camera at him—or was it the red Ferrari he had been leaning against? No, it had been him. She had got him to pose then flirted like mad with him while the camera clicked. By the end of the same day they’d gone to bed, and after that—
He did not want to think about what had happened after that. He did not want to think of Isobel at all. She no longer belonged in his thoughts, and it was about time that he made that official.
The man with the camera turned away. So did Leandros, decisively. He suddenly felt a lot better about leaving here and went inside to…move on with his life.
Isobel’s own thinking was moving very much along the same lines as she sat reading the letter that had just arrived from her estranged husband’s lawyer giving her notice of Leandros’s intention to begin divorce proceedings.
She was sitting alone at a small kitchen table. Her mother hadn’t yet risen from her bed. She was glad about that because the letter had come as a shock, even though she agreed with its content. It was time, if not well overdue that one of them should take the bull by the horns and call an official end to a marriage that should have never been.
But the printed words on the page blurred for a moment at the realisation that this was it, the final chapter of a four-year mistake. If she agreed to Leandros’s terms, then she knew she would be accepting that those years had been nothing but wasted in her life.
Did he feel the same? Was that why he had taken so long to get to this? It was hard to acknowledge that you could be so fallible, that you had once been stupid enough to let your heart rule your head.
Or was there more to it than a decision to put an end to their miserable marriage? Had he found someone with whom he felt he could spend the rest of his life?
The idea shouldn’t hurt but it did. She had loved Leandros so badly at the beginning that she suspected she’d gone a little mad. They’d been young—too young—but oh, it had been so wildly passionate.
Then—no, don’t think about the passion, she told herself firmly, and made herself read the letter again.
It was asking her if she would consider travelling to Athens to meet with her husband—in the presence of their respective lawyers, of course—so they could thrash out a settlement in an effort to make the divorce quick and trouble-free. A few days of her time should be enough, Takis Konstantindou was predicting. All expenses would be paid by Leandros for both herself and her lawyer as a goodwill gesture, because Mr Petronades couldn’t travel to England at this time.
She paused to wonder why Leandros couldn’t travel. For the man she remembered virtually lived out of a suitcase, so it was odd to think of him under some kind of restraint.
It was odd to think about him at all, she extended, and the letter lost its holding power as she sat back in the chair. They’d first met by accident right here in England at an annual car exhibition. She’d been there in her official capacity as photographer for a trendy new magazine—a bright and confident twenty-two-year-old who believed the whole world was at her feet. While he was dashing and twenty-seven years old, with the looks and the build of a genuine dark Apollo.
They’d flirted over the glossy bonnet of some prohibitively expensive sports car. With his looks and his charm and his immaculate clothing, she’d assumed he was one of the car’s sales representatives, since they all looked and dressed like a million dollars. It had never occurred to her that far from selling the car they were flirting across he owned several of them. Realisation about just who Leandros was had come a lot later—much too late to do anything about it.
By then he’d already bowled her over with his dark good looks and easy charm and the way he looked at her that left her in no doubt as to what was going on behind his handsome façade. They’d made a date to share dinner and ended up falling into bed at the first opportunity they were handed. His finding out that he was her first lover had only made the passion burn all the more. He’d adored playing the role of tutor. He’d taught her to understand the pleasures of her own body and made sure that she understood what pleasured his. When it came time for him to go back to Greece he’d refused to go without her. They’d married in a hasty civil ceremony then rushed to the airport to catch their flight.
It was as he’d led her onto a private jet with the Petronades logo shining in gold on its side that she started to ask questions. He’d thought it absolutely hilarious that she didn’t know she’d married the modern equivalent of Croesus, and had carried her off to the tiny private cabin, where he’d made love to her all the way to Athens. She had never been so happy in her entire life.
But that was it—the sum total of the happy side of their marriage was encapsulated in a single hop from England to Greece. By the time they’d arrived at his family home the whole, whirling wonder of their love was already turning stale. ‘You can’t wear that to meet my mother;’ his first criticism of her could still ring antagonistic bells in her head.
‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’
‘The skirt is too short; she will have a fit. And can you not tie your hair up or something, show a little respect for the people you are about to meet?’
She had not tied her hair up, nor had she changed her clothes. But she had soon learned the hard way that stubborn defiance was one thing when it was aimed at a man who virtually salivated with desire for you even as he criticised. But it was not the same as being boxed and tagged a cheap little floozy at first horrified glance.
Things had gone from bad to worse after that. And—yes, she reiterated as her gaze dipped back to the letter, it was time that one of them took the initiative and drew the final curtain across something that should never have been.
In fact, Isobel had only one problem with the details Takis Konstantindou had mapped out in the letter. She could not see how she could spend several days in Athens because she could not leave her mother on her own for that long.
‘What time does her flight come in?’
Leandros was sitting at his desk in his plush Athens office. In the two weeks he had been back here he had changed into a different person. Gone was the laid-back man of San Estéban and in his place sat a sharp-edged, hard-headed Greek tycoon.
Was he happy with that? No, he was not happy to become this person again, but needs must when the devil drives, so they said. In this case the devil was the amount of importance other people placed on his time and knowledge. His desk was virtually groaning beneath the weight of paperwork that apparently needed his attention as a matter of urgency. He moved from important meeting to meeting with hardly a breath in between. His social life had gone from a lazy meal eaten in a restaurant on the San Estéban boulevard, to a constant round of social engagements that literally set his teeth on edge. If he lifted his eyes someone jumped to speak to him. If he closed those same eyes someone else would ensure that he opened them again. The wheels of power ground on and on for twenty-four hours of every day and the whole merry-go-round was made all the more intense because his younger brother Nikos was off limits while he prepared for his wedding day.
On his father’s death Leandros had become the head of the Petronades family, therefore it was his duty to play host in his father’s stead. His mother was becoming more neurotic the closer it came to Nikos’s big day, and was likely to panic if she did not have an open line to her eldest son’s ear. If he complained she told him not to spoil this for her then reminded him that he had denied her the opportunity to stand proud and watch him make his own disastrous union. And because thoughts of marriage were already on his mind, he was hard put not to snap at her that maybe Nikos could take a leaf out of his own book and run away to marry secretly. At least the day would belong only to him and Carlotta. If there was anything about his own marriage he could still look back on with total pleasure, it was that moment when Isobel had smiled up at him as he placed the ring upon her finger and whispered, ‘I love you so much.’ He had not needed five hundred witnesses to help prove that vow to be true.
His heart gave him a punishing twinge of regret for what he had once had and lost.
‘This evening.’ Takis Konstantindou pulled him back from where he had been in danger of visiting. ‘But she insisted on making her own arrangements,’ Takis informed him. ‘She will be staying at the Apollo near Piraeus.’
Leandros frowned. ‘But that is a mediocre place with a low star rating. Why should she want to stay there when she could have had a suite at the Athenaeum?’
Takis just shrugged his lack of an answer. ‘All I know is that she refused our invitation to make arrangements for her and reserved three rooms, not two, at the Apollo, one of which must have wheelchair access.’
Wheelchair access? Leandros sat forward, his attention suddenly riveted. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her? Has she been hurt…is she ill?’
‘I don’t know if the special room is for her,’ Takis answered. ‘All I know is that she has reserved such a room.’
‘Then find out!’ he snapped. Suddenly the thought of his beautiful Isobel trapped in a wheelchair made him feel physically ill!
He must even have gone pale because Takis was looking at him oddly. ‘It could change everything, do you not see that?’ His tycoon persona jumped to his rescue. ‘The whole structure on which we have based our proposals for a settlement may need to be revised to take into account a physical disability.’
‘I think you have adequately covered for any such eventuality, Leandros.’ The lawyer smiled cynically.
‘Adequate is not good enough.’ He was suddenly furious. ‘Adequate is not what I was aiming towards! I am no skinflint! I have no wish to play games with this! Isobel is my wife.’ Hearing that ‘is’ leaving his lips forced him to stop and take a breath. ‘I will leave my marriage with no sense of triumph at its failure, Takis,’ he informed the other man. ‘But I will hopefully leave it with the knowledge that I treated her fairly in the end.’
Takis was looking surprised at his outburst. ‘I’m sorry, Leandros, I never meant to—’
‘I know what you meant,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘And I know what you think.’ Which was why that derisory comment about Isobel being adequately compensated had made him see red. He knew what his family thought about Isobel. He knew that they probably discussed her between themselves in that same derogatory way. He had even let them—if only by pretending it wasn’t happening. But they were wrong if they believed his failed marriage was down to Isobel, because it wasn’t. Not all of it anyway.
Takis was wrong about him if he believed that he was filing for divorce because he no longer cared about Isobel. He might not want her back to run riot through his life again, but…‘Whatever anyone else thinks about my marriage to Isobel, she deserves and will get my full honour and respect at all times. Do you understand that?’
‘Of course.’ For a man who was twice his own age and also his godfather, Takis Konstantindou suddenly looked very much the wary employer as he gave a nod of his silvered head. ‘It never crossed my—’
‘Find out what you can before we meet with her,’ Leandros interrupted, glanced at his watch and was relieved to see he was due at a meeting elsewhere so could end this conversation.
He stood up. Takis took his cue without further comment and went off to do his bidding. Leandros waited until the door closed behind him, then threw himself back down into his chair. He knew he was behaving irrationally. He understood why Takis no longer understood just where it was he was coming from. Only two weeks ago Leandros had called up his godfather and informed him he wanted to file for divorce. It had been a brief and unemotional conversation to which Takis had responded in the same brisk, lawyer-like way.
But a few weeks ago, in his head, Isobel had been a witch and a hellion with barbs for teeth. Now, on the back of one small comment she was the young and vulnerable creature he had dragged by the scruff of her beautiful neck out of sensual heaven into the hell of Athenian society.
On a thick oath he stood up again, paced around his desk. What was going on here? he asked himself. What was the matter with him? Did he have to come over all macho and feel suddenly protective because there was a chance that the Isobel he would meet tomorrow was going to be a shadow of the one he once knew?
A wheelchair.
Another oath escaped him. The phone on his desk began to ring. It was Diantha, gently reminding him that his mother would prefer him not to be late for dinner tonight. The tension eased out of his shoulders, her soft, slightly amused tone showing sympathy with his present plight where his mother was concerned. By the time the conversation ended he was feeling better—much more like his gritty, calm self.