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She drew back from the housekeeper’s embrace and took a moment to compose herself. ‘Oh, Phyllida,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.’
‘Kyrios Alexi.’ Clearly emotional herself, Phyllida touched Lexi’s hair. ‘You have changed.’
‘No longer the crazy redhead? I know. While you look exactly the same. You look fantastic.’
‘No. I am too fat.’ Phyllida laughed as she patted her ample stomach. ‘Not like you.’
Xenon glanced across at the main house. ‘Is my mother around?’ he asked.
‘She went to visit your sister. She said that you should settle in and she will see you at dinner.’
Xenon’s voice dropped. ‘And my grandmother?’
Phyllida shook her head, her face growing grave. ‘She is weak, but she is comfortable,’ she said. ‘The nurse is with her now and she is looking forward to seeing her grandson again. Now. Shall I make fresh lemonade for you and Kyrios Alexi after your long journey?’
‘Efharisto,’ said Xenon, his hand moving to brush the base of Lexi’s spine. ‘Come on, Lex. Let’s go and unpack.’
It was the briefest of touches but it started a whisper of reaction flaring over her skin and Lexi could feel her heart pounding as she followed him towards the furthest of the three villas, with its prime position overlooking the bay.
Their cases had been deposited inside the house and left on the ghostly surface of the marble floor—standing side by side as if in silent mockery. The white walls and dark wooden furniture were just as she remembered and Phyllida must have put that vase of white roses on one of the low tables.
The door of the villa closed behind them and Lexi was left with a feeling of panic. She thought of the bedroom next door and unwanted memories came crowding back. The smell of sex and the rumpled sheets. The closeness of Xenon’s hard body.
She licked her tongue over impossibly dry lips before she spoke.
‘Xenon, this is crazy. There’s no way we can stay here.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know very well why not. You’re not a stupid man, although at times you can be a very stubborn one.’ She steeled herself against the soft light of battle on his face. Don’t make me spell it out, her eyes pleaded silently. But his blue gaze remained obdurate and she glared at him. ‘There’s only one bed,’ she said.
‘And? Isn’t the whole point that we’re here as a married couple—and married couples share beds? What did you think would happen, Lex? That I would stay in the main house, knowing that you were closeted in here all on your own?’
‘You could do what any other man would do under the circumstances—and offer to sleep on the sofa!’
He shot a disparaging look at the piece of furniture she was indicating. ‘On that? Come on—that was never designed to be slept on. A Greek husband sleeps in the marital bed.’ His blue eyes gleamed with a mixture of mockery and promise. ‘With his wife.’
Lexi hated the way her body responded to the unashamedly sexual look which accompanied his macho boast. It was easy to tell herself she shouldn’t want him but much harder to ignore the way he was making her feel. When his gaze raked over her like that, she could feel the answering clamour of her body. The ache of her breasts and the insistent heat coiling low inside her. Because she still desired him as intensely as she had ever done—and she didn’t have a clue how to deal with it.
‘Why did you bring me here, Xenon?’ she demanded. ‘I mean, really? You say it was to bring comfort to your grandmother—’
‘That desire was genuine,’ he interrupted coolly.
‘And what else? Did you picture this scene when you made your suggestion? The inevitable showdown which would result when I found out that I’d be expected to share a bed with you?’
For a moment he didn’t answer and when he did, his words were accompanied by an odd kind of smile. ‘Yes, I pictured it,’ he answered slowly. ‘Though not at first.’
She stared at him, her heart beating very fast. ‘Tell me.’
He lifted his shoulders in a careless kind of shrug and once again she could see the bunching of muscle beneath his shirt. ‘I admit that when I came to your house that day I was little more than curious. I wanted to see the woman I had married and to see what life had done to her. I’d even promised myself that I would give you your divorce papers, if I were so inclined. And then you opened the door and...’
His voice tailed off in a way which made Lexi look at him suspiciously. Because Xenon didn’t do hesitation. And neither did he screw his eyes up as if he had been presented with a problem he couldn’t quite work out. Because wasn’t he the man with the answers to everything?
‘And what?’ she prompted.
‘I realised I still wanted you,’ he said simply. ‘I wanted you in a way I’ve never wanted any other woman, not before and not since. I wanted you in my arms. I still do. I look at you, Lex, and my body aches for you. I want you so badly that I can hardly think straight. Even now.’
She felt the dull crash of disappointment—for these were not new words. They were words he’d spoken many times when he’d been wooing her—when she’d bewitched and infuriated him by refusing to fall straight into his arms. They were expressions of high emotion he used when he was trying to get something which was just out of reach. He’d never said them when they would have meant something. He’d hadn’t spoken of wanting her when she’d been lying in that hospital bed with her womb raw and empty and the feeling that she had failed him as a wife.
‘We can’t,’ she said in a hollow voice.
‘Why not?’ he demanded, his eyes blazing like blue jewels in the dimness of the shuttered room. ‘Because you haven’t got the guts to face the fact that you want me, too? Why can’t you just come out and admit it? If not to me—then at least to yourself. That what we have isn’t over. And that it isn’t going to go away.’
She felt the quickening stab of fear and the even fiercer stab of desire. She felt the blurring of past and present. She thought about the secrets she had locked away.
‘You just like a challenge,’ she declared. ‘You’re a man who has everything. Who can get anything. You just want the one thing that’s eluding you.’
‘This has got nothing to do with challenge,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he met the spark of defiance in hers. He was aware of something primitive flooding through him. A tide of pure possession which he could not stop. ‘And everything to do with the realisation that you are my woman and you always have been. And nothing will ever change that.’
The raw declaration thrilled her almost more than it appalled her. She wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t. But Lexi knew that she couldn’t be swayed by words which were driven by nothing more than lust and a sense of ownership.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘We can share a bed and maintain this charade if that’s what it takes to get my brother off the hook, but that’s all.’ With an effort she tried to ignore the prickling of her breasts. The way that they had become heavy and sensitive—as if they wanted nothing more than for him to bend his lips to kiss them, shaping his lips around them and tormenting her with the feathery little lick of his tongue.
She shivered, trying to blot the erotic image from her mind and to focus on something other than the sudden hot, melting ache between her legs. ‘It’s over, Xenon,’ she croaked. ‘There’s no way back. And there’s no way I’m ever getting intimate with you again.’
CHAPTER SIX
‘SO, ALEXI. MY son tells me that you are something of a silversmith these days.’
Lexi put her wine glass down and produced another friendly smile, even though her face was beginning to ache. She felt like someone who had undergone a police interrogation, since Xenon’s mother had been firing questions at her for most of the overlong meal. And her arrogant son hadn’t done a thing to help her out.
Dressed impeccably in navy, with pearls gleaming at her throat, Marina Kanellis was an elegant woman whose once-beautiful face bore a vaguely startled look, as if life had disappointed her. Lexi knew she’d been made a widow when Xenon was barely eighteen and not for the first time she wondered why the bilingual socialite had never considered marrying again. Unless she was one of those women who loved only one man...
This line of thought was a little too uncomfortable to pursue. Instead Lexi concentrated on watching the candlelight flickering over the heavy crystal and silver, telling herself that the meal would soon be over and then she would be able to make her escape. She had tried to answer her mother-in-law’s queries as cheerfully as possible—even though she had been chewed up with nerves when she’d first sat down.
Yet she couldn’t deny that tonight Marina had seemed almost kind and much less terrifying than before. Maybe that was because these days she felt more mature and much less intimidated. And, of course, less worried that she was going to make some terrible social gaffe and make Xenon ashamed of her. She no longer had anything to lose, did she?
So she turned to Marina Kanellis and smiled.
‘“Silversmith” sounds a bit grand for what I do,’ she said.
‘But you are making jewellery?’
Lexi nodded, her fingertips brushing against the two elongated silver triangles dangling from her ears as if she were showcasing her handiwork. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you enjoy it?’ asked Marina.
‘I love it,’ Lexi answered. ‘I’ve got my own little workshop in the village and I enjoy being my own boss. It gives me the kind of freedom I’ve never had before.’
‘I can imagine.’ Marina Kanellis sipped from her glass of water. ‘I never worked, of course. Not before my marriage nor after it. It was not considered appropriate for a woman to work, particularly if she was a Kanellis woman, with all the responsibilities which went with that role.’
Lexi looked into Xenon’s piercing blue eyes. Help me out here, she beseeched him silently and to her astonishment she saw an answering glint of comprehension.
‘Modern women like to work, Mitera,’ he said, with the tone of somebody who had made the recent discovery that the world was round. ‘Some obviously need to work for economic reasons—but others do it because it gives them a purpose in life. It fulfils them in a way that nothing else can—something which men have known for centuries. And who are we to knock that?’
Lexi wondered if her own expression reflected the dazed bemusement of her mother-in-law’s. She looked across the table at her husband in disbelief. Xenon coming out with an opinion about women which didn’t sound as if it had been formed two centuries ago? This from the man who had been adamant that she should be a stay-at-home wife?
At the time, he had explained that they had far too much money for his conscience to allow her to work. Which in theory Lexi had tried to understand. She had told herself that she had married a Greek and that she had to accept there would be cultural differences.
But what did a woman do all day when she wasn’t working and there were servants to run her life for her? Especially if she was a woman who didn’t like to ‘do’ lunch, or spend hours shopping?
She waited to become a mother, that was what she did. And while she waited—in vain, in her case—she discovered that Xenon was governed less by his conscience than by his need to control her and his possessive desire to know where she was at any hour of the day.
So had he changed his views, or was he simply expressing something different because it was expedient for him to do so?
She met his eyes and saw the unexpected flash of humour glittering in their blue depths as if he knew perfectly well the thoughts which were running through her head. That lazy smile of comprehension flustered her and she turned to her mother-in-law, deliberately changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry to hear that your mother is so ill,’ she said quietly.
Marina Kanellis nodded and then sighed. ‘I know. She is old, of course, and she has lived a good life,’ she said. ‘But that makes it no less painful for those of us who love her. We must just make sure that she is kept comfortable, and happy. You will go and see her tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I will. I’d like that very much,’ said Lexi.
‘You know, she always enjoyed your songs,’ said Marina unexpectedly. ‘Especially the one about the man who got away.’
‘“Come Right Back”,’ said Lexi instantly, but this time she didn’t dare look across the table at Xenon. Didn’t they say that there was nothing as potent as cheap music—and hadn’t the words of that particular song seemed unbearably poignant for a long time after they’d split?
But her mood by the end of dinner was much more mellow than the one with which she’d begun it and the excellent food and rich Kanellis wine left her feeling warm and replete.
After the meal they sat outside and drank coffee on the terrace, overlooking the bay. The sky was as dark as a railway tunnel but it was punctured by the diamond dazzle of a thousand stars. She looked down at the lights of Lindos and the glitter of the Aegean and wished she could freeze that moment and never have it melt.
But after she’d said goodnight to Marina and walked with Xenon back to their villa, Lexi began to get butterfly feelings of nerves fluttering around inside her.
She avoided any kind of confrontation until after she’d brushed her teeth and tackled the time-consuming task of brushing her long hair. By the time she’d emerged from the bathroom, it was to find Xenon standing by the bedroom window, staring out at the glittering sea.
He turned round when she entered even though her bare feet must have made hardly any sound on the marble floor. He gave the glimmer of a smile when he saw she was covered from neck to ankle in a pair of pale silk pyjamas, but he made no comment about her buttoned-up nightwear.
‘You were sweet with my mother tonight,’ he said.
Lexi blinked. It wasn’t what she had been expecting to hear. What had she been expecting? ‘She’s much softer than she used to be.’
‘Yes, she is. So many things have happened and she’s a grandmother now. I think the fact that her own mother is dying has made her look at the world differently.’ He shrugged. ‘The cycle of life keeps turning. It’s made her aware of how precious time is.’
His undeniably emotional words hung on the air and Lexi felt the painful punch of her heart. ‘No. None of us should ever forget that,’ she said.
Xenon let his gaze drift over her. She had taken off her glasses and her face was scrubbed clean. He thought how unbelievably young she looked. And how innocent. Sometimes it was hard to believe the reality of her rough upbringing when right now she looked as if she’d spent her life growing up in a convent, nurtured on nothing stronger than milk and orange juice. Her fair hair tumbled down over her pyjamas and he wondered what she would say if he told her that the look she’d been aiming for had completely missed the mark. Because it didn’t matter how prim she tried to make herself—she still exuded a sensuality which oozed from her like honey from a slice of Baklava.
‘Ready for bed?’ he questioned sardonically.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t think you want to know what I think. So why don’t you run along and make yourself comfortable and I’ll give you long enough so that you can pretend to be asleep when I join you?’
Lexi’s face felt hot as she skulked off into the bedroom and climbed in between the Egyptian cotton sheets and for a moment she felt foolish. Had that been deliberate on his part? Was Xenon trying to make her doubt herself? Trying to make her believe that any woman would be insane not to take advantage of the opportunity which was now presenting itself?
Was she? Would it really be the end of the world if she gave in and let him make love to her again?
She knew the answer immediately. Of course it would. It would take her back to that dark place, the one with the unimaginable future and constant heartache. So forget it, she told herself fiercely.
Instead, she lay there doing a crash-course in sheep-counting and listening to the distant swish of the shower. And maybe she was wearier than she’d thought, because her eyelids began to grow heavy. Or maybe Xenon was just keeping to his word and stalling for as long as possible.
All she knew was that by the time he came to bed, she was in that comfortable half-world between waking and sleeping and the dip in the mattress as he got in beside her didn’t alarm her as much as it should have done.
But then he moved and she became aware of just how much space his body took up, even though the bed was vast. It had been a long time since she’d slept with him and her space suddenly seemed to have been invaded by a potent rush of testosterone. She could sense it pulsing in the air around her; she could feel her skin absorbing it, like a dark sensual heat.
She held her breath for what must have been a full minute while they lay there in the darkness, until his drawled voice broke the silence.
‘So are we just going to lie here, pretending to be asleep?’
She let out her breath in a slow rush. ‘I’m not going to ask what your alternative suggestion might be.’
‘You might be surprised by the answer. Come here.’ Snaking out his hand, he pulled her against him so that her bottom was pushed against his belly and his hand was resting lazily over the jut of her hip bone.
Half-heartedly, Lexi wriggled. ‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t make such a big deal out of it, Lex. Relax. I’m just holding you, that’s all.’
She wanted to tell him to roll over to the far side of the bed and leave her alone, but something stopped her. Because wasn’t it delicious to feel his warm breath fanning the back of her neck like that? And didn’t his arm feel so right when it was lying around her waist? She wanted to wriggle closer, to settle herself comfortably in a spoonlike position against him as she’d done so many times before, but in the midst of this forbidden pleasure came confusion. Because this was a first. Xenon lying next to her and just holding her? What was that all about?
She closed her eyes. Her Greek husband had been very definite in his views about what took place in the marital bed and what took place was sex. Lots of it. Consistently amazing sex it had been, too. In fact, lying here with him just a hair’s breadth away from her, it was very hard not to remember just how amazing it had been.
Until after the baby, of course. When Xenon had put himself out of ‘temptation’s way’ by absenting himself from the marital bed and going to sleep in the room next door. He’d told her she needed time to recover, but in her sorrow and her grief Lexi had felt neglected, and lonely. The longer they had been apart, the easier it had been to stay that way. And then she’d had time to think that maybe it was all for the best.
She had never slept with him again.
The taste of memory was bitter in her mouth and again she tried to wriggle away from him, but Xenon was having none of it. ‘Relax,’ he repeated.
‘Trying to lull me into a false state of security isn’t going to work.’
‘How very brutal of you, Lex—to suggest that I might have some kind of ulterior motive.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘Not right at this moment, no.’ Fractionally, his thumb moved over her satin-covered waist. ‘Tell me, did you enjoy dinner?’
‘Which part? The delicious bourekakia and tiropita—or your astonishing about-face on the subject of married women working?’
The thumb stopped moving. She thought she heard him sigh.
‘I should never have stopped you from following your career,’ he said.
Lexi stared into the nothingness. Now that her eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness, she could make out faint shapes of furniture. ‘Nobody can stop someone from doing something, not if they don’t want to.’
‘But I delivered an ultimatum,’ he said. ‘I told you in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t tolerate my wife working.’
‘And maybe you weren’t entirely wrong,’ she said slowly. ‘Our marriage would never have survived me trying to pursue a solo career which was always doomed. I recognised that eventually. It was just the way that you told me which hurt so much.’
‘How?’
His word seemed to fill the dark room and Lexi’s breathing grew shallow. It was a question he would never normally have asked, though this particular situation hardly qualified as ‘normal’, did it? Not by anyone’s definition of the word. And surely the concealing cloak of darkness meant that she could answer it honestly.
‘You spoke to me like I was just...something instead of someone,’ she said. ‘Like I was a person who was simply there to complement your life. As if I didn’t have any feelings of my own. As if my singing career could just be flushed away. It was all about you, Xenon—it was only ever about you.’
As the breath left his lungs in an even heavier sigh Xenon could feel the ripple of her hair. He scowled into the darkness as her body tensed and he felt the bitter pain of regret—the sense that he had been blind to what had been right beneath his nose. Was it too late to tell her that? To tell her that he hadn’t known how to behave any differently?
‘I had certain expectations of marriage,’ he said. ‘Which I expected you, as my wife, to meet.’
‘Yes, I know all that. You wanted a genteel woman. A yes-woman, yet you couldn’t have chosen someone more different if you’d tried. I was from a totally different background. I’d clawed my way up from the bottom. I’d looked after myself—and my brothers—all my life. I didn’t know how to be anything but independent and yet suddenly you expected me to relinquish all that.’
‘I wanted to look after you,’ he said.
‘No. You wanted to keep me in a cage. A highly embellished cage, it’s true—but a cage no less. At first I didn’t even notice. I was so enthralled by you—so happy just to be with you that if you’d suggested we live in a cave at the bottom of the garden I suspect I would have agreed.’
He flinched as he heard the way she said it. As if she couldn’t believe the person she’d been back then. The person who had adored him. Had. ‘I’d never been in love before,’ he said slowly. ‘I’d never been married before. All I knew was that wives were treated with a certain degree of reverence.’
In the darkness, Lexi gave a wry smile. ‘Suppressing someone’s spontaneity and talent isn’t being reverential, Xenon—it’s being controlling. Maybe you should face up to reality and accept that you’re just not the marrying kind—or maybe you should try marrying a more conventional type of woman. One who likes to be manipulated like that.’
He let his mouth sink into her hair and his words were muffled by its silken richness. ‘I’m sorry, Lex,’ he said. ‘Can you believe me when I say that to you?’
Lexi swallowed. The long silence seemed amplified by the darkness and the fact that she sensed he was holding his breath while he waited for an answer. It would be so much easier if she didn’t believe him. If she thought that he was simply saying something because it was convenient for him to do so. But she knew Xenon well enough to recognise his words as genuine—and these were very powerful words indeed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I believe you.’
‘And can you forgive me?’
Lexi closed her eyes. That was a harder question. Because forgiveness was complicated. When you forgave someone you left a vacuum where all the anger had been, and then what did you replace it with?
But she couldn’t carry on fighting him simply because she was scared of her own feelings, could she? ‘Yes,’ she whispered, but she pulled away from him—not wanting him to interpret her clemency as some kind of sexual green light.
Xenon felt her move away and his body stiffened with the hot stab of frustration. His hand was still at her waist but he sensed she had withdrawn from him in more than a physical sense. Where a few minutes ago she had been warm and—he thought—on the verge of compliance, all that had now gone.
It very nearly killed him but he forced himself to drop nothing more than a light kiss onto her silk-covered shoulder and then to turn over. He had never done this in his life—stopped himself from taking what he wanted to take. What deep down he still considered it his right to take.