Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  If there had been the slightest trace of a sexual intonation in what he’d said, anything that had made her think that he was deliberately putting a double edge onto the phrase, then Becca knew she would have totally lost control. But the note of genuine concern destroyed her composure in a totally different way.

  ‘Why don’t you put on a swimming costume and spend some time in the pool? You’re clearly not used to this sort of heat and the water would cool you down.’

  It wasn’t the heat of the sun that was disturbing her, Becca admitted to herself. It was the subtler, more sensual warmth of his body so close to hers that she could smell the intimate, intensely personal scent of his skin, topped with the tang of the water that still clung to it. That and the heat of her own response, the honeyed sense of need that flooded her body, pooling moistly at the junction of her thighs.

  A swim would be just what she needed. It would ease the burn of hunger, soothe the ache in her body. But there was one very practical problem.

  ‘I don’t have a swimming costume,’ she managed, casting a longing glance at the cool, fresh water as it lapped against the clean blue tiles of the pool. ‘I—never thought that I would need one when I came here. And to be honest, I never thought I’d stay this long.’

  She could have bitten out her tongue as soon as she’d spoken, realising too late how close she’d come to giving away the truth that she was not really the person he’d believed her to be. But Andreas hadn’t noticed the slip, too intent on his own train of thought.

  ‘That’s not a problem. I can soon provide you with a costume. There’s one in the pool house over there.’

  A wave of his hand indicated the small stone-formed building that provided a changing room and a shower for those who used the pool.

  ‘I saw it hanging up there when I went in this morning. It should fit you. Why don’t you go and try it on?’

  And come back here, wearing it?

  Becca’s mind quailed at the thought. Just the idea of sitting here beside him, lying in the sun or swimming in the pool close to him in some sleek, close-fitting Lycra costume made the tingling worse, bringing it close to the sensation of an electrical shock running over her skin. If someone had left it here then it was probably one of those mistresses he had spoken of. In which case, was it likely that the costume was anything more than a few skimpy pieces of material, precariously held up by a couple of shoestring straps?

  And yet the idea of getting away for a moment, going into the pool house to be by herself, as she had hardly been at any moment over the last three days, except when she had retired to bed, suddenly seemed such an appealing idea. She could hide away there for a while, regain her composure, gather her strength. And then maybe she’d be able to cope much better than she had been doing until now.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, fighting with herself to make sure that she got to her feet slowly, trying desperately not to make it look as if she was running away even though she knew deep in her heart that that was what she was doing.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  And the costume? she asked herself as she padded on bare feet across the stone-paved terrace, heading for the pool house. Well, if it fitted—and was in any way modest—then she might risk it.

  She’d make up her mind when she saw it.

  But when she saw the pale lavender swimming costume hanging on a peg in the small changing room the effect of it was like a sudden blow to her heart, stilling its beat and leaving her standing staring in blank and stunned disbelief, unable to think at all.

  It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be, was the phrase that repeated over and over inside her head, making the real world fade from her awareness into a buzzing, whirling haze in which the only real thing was the sleek, small item of clothing before her.

  ‘It can’t,’ she said, shaking her head in shock. ‘It can’t be.’

  Because the costume she now held in shaking hands was the one that she had worn herself on the single day she had spent in the villa as Andreas’ wife.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT STILL fitted her.

  That was a shock. She knew she had lost weight in the ten and a half months since her wedding and that she was no longer the relaxed, happy-go-lucky person she had been before she had met and married Andreas Petrakos.

  But the lavender swimming costume still fitted almost perfectly. There was so much Lycra in the material that it clung to her new, more slender shape, the low neck exposing softer curves, the high-cut legs revealing slender hips and thighs that had been so much more rounded when she had first worn it.

  Looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the wall of the changing room, Becca smoothed hands that were none too steady over the clinging material and tried to remember the Becca who had looked into the same mirror not quite a year before. Then her eyes had been sparkling with delight and the sensual satisfaction of having just made wild, abandoned, passionate love with her brand-new husband. And there had been a wide smile on her mouth that she had felt sure was going to be there for ever and that nothing would ever erase it.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Barely two hours later she had been on her way home, leaving her married life lying in pieces behind her.

  ‘Love!’ Andreas’ harsh voice, with its cruelly cynical emphasis on that vital word, echoed down from the past, sounding so loud and clear inside her thoughts that she almost believed for a moment that he had come into the room and thrown the word at her.

  ‘I don’t love anyone—least of all you! I doubt if I’m capable of the feeling …’

  They had arrived on the island late in the afternoon after the flight from England. Becca was still floating on a cloud of happiness after the delight of their wedding, the bliss of the thought of being Andreas’ wife. And she truly was his wife. He had wasted no time in making sure of that. They had been barely through the door before he had carried her upstairs to his bedroom, stripped her of the elegant trouser suit she had worn for travelling and made passionate love to her with all the ardour and the heat of which he was capable.

  Later, when Andreas had reluctantly been obliged to go to his office to deal with a fax that had come through unexpectedly, Becca had changed into the lavender-coloured one-piece swimming costume and headed for the pool.

  ‘I’ll join you there as soon as I can,’ he’d promised.

  He was much longer than she had anticipated. She was tired and bored, and thinking of getting dressed again before he came back onto the terrace where he stood, hands on hips, his face almost white with some fierce emotion that made his eyes glitter like polished jet.

  ‘Get dressed.’

  It was an order, an autocratic command delivered with such savagery that her blood ran cold, icy pins and needles prickling her skin in spite of the heat of the day.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  The words had barely left his lips before he turned on his heel and walked away, either not hearing or deliberately turning a deaf ear to her shaken question, her nervous request for an explanation as to his sudden change in mood.

  She hardly dared take the time to dry herself thoroughly, discarding the swimming costume and hauling on jeans and a T-shirt, pushing her feet into flip-flops, barely pausing for breath as she almost ran from the pool house and into the office, where Andreas was standing by the window, silhouetted against the setting sun, as he waited for her.

  ‘What’s happened? Is there something wrong?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  There was nothing of the ardent, caring husband in his tone; nothing of the passionate lover who had torn himself so reluctantly from her arms and from their bed just a short time before. What could have happened to have changed his mind and his mood so terribly?

  ‘Andreas? What’s happened? What’s this about?’

  ‘You tell me what it’s about. Tell me about Roy Stanton.’

  He flung the name at her like a weapon, watching through
narrowed eyes so that he caught the way she flinched, the sudden step she took backwards in uncontrolled shock.

  ‘So you do know the name, then?’

  It was too late to deny it. Her reaction had already given her away.

  ‘How—how did you…?’

  ‘How did I find out?’

  An arrogant flick of his wrist tossed away the question as so obvious that it didn’t need an answer.

  ‘An investigation into these things is easy to arrange.’

  ‘You—had me investigated!’ She sounded as appalled as she felt. And she felt even worse when Andreas shrugged off that question too, with even less concern than he had given the first.

  ‘I have every right to know what my prospective wife is doing with the small fortune I’ve given her. And I do not believe that you have the right to judge my actions when what you did was give that money to some other man. Or are you claiming that that’s not true?’

  ‘No …’

  Becca sank down onto one of the wooden benches in the changing room as the bitter memories of that day took all the strength from her legs. Andreas hadn’t given her a chance to explain. He had bombarded her with questions like some brutal counsel for the prosecution, demanding answers to a new one even while she was still stumbling over the answer to the last. And all the time she had been bound by the promise she had made to Macy. The promise to her newly discovered sister. The sister she had never known she had until just a few short weeks before.

  At first Macy had wanted nothing to do with her but then suddenly she had phoned, asking to meet, asking for help. But she had made Becca promise that she wouldn’t tell a soul.

  ‘No, I’m not claiming that.’

  ‘You gave this man money?’ Andreas had thundered. ‘All the money I gave you, by the look of it.’ ‘You said it was mine!’

  ‘You know damn well that I gave that to you to buy your wedding dress and anything else you wanted for—’

  ‘Are you saying that the dress I wore wasn’t good enough?’ Becca rushed in, jumping to the defensive in a panic as she struggled to think of some explanation she could give him.

  Her mind was reeling in shock at just the thought that Andreas had found out about Roy Stanton. There was no reason at all that he should even know the man’s name. And so she tried to stall him, using any argument she could to distract him while she tried to work out just what was happening and how she could possibly answer him at all.

  But going on the attack was the wrong move—the worst possible move of all. From being icily angry, Andreas’ temper went into meltdown, blazing fierce and furious as a forest fire, engulfing everything that stood in its way. And before she knew what was happening, it seemed that he was accusing her. But of what she was not quite sure.

  ‘The dress was fine—as far as it went. But it could have been more—should have been more…’

  ‘Should have! So now I have to wear what you order just to make sure that—that what? That I didn’t show you up by not wearing something suitable to match your status? Is that it, Andreas? Are you angry because I didn’t marry you in a couture gown—a designer original? One that would show my family—your friends—how wonderfully you can provide for me? That you can give me a fortune to spend on a single dress for a single day …’

  ‘A fortune that you gave to another man.’

  ‘I had my reasons!’

  ‘And what were they?’

  And that simple question brought the whole argument to a crashing halt. The words died on her lips, crushed back down her throat as if someone had put a gag right over her mouth and tied it so tightly that she had no chance of saying a word in her own defence.

  Because the truth was that she was gagged by her promise to Macy. She had sworn on everything she held sacred not to say a word. Not until Macy was safe. And when she had discovered that her already emotionally vulnerable half-sister was also very newly pregnant that vow had become even more important. So, even though it tore at her heart, she had to hold to that promise.

  ‘I—can’t say.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’ Andreas snarled and the savagery of his tone had her flinching back, terrified of his rage, the flames of fury that blazed in the darkness of his eyes.

  ‘Andreas—please …’

  How had this happened? How had the wonderful, blissful mood in which they’d reached the villa been turned into this terrible horror, this brutal tearing each other apart?

  ‘It was just money …’

  ‘My money—the money I gave you. And you gave it to him …’

  And then she thought she could see what was happening. In a sudden rush of understanding, she felt she knew just why he was so angry—what had got to him so badly. She had always known about the dark shadow over Andreas’ past. The fact that his mother had only married his father for the money he had, the lifestyle he could give her, and when Alexander Petrakos had lost much of his fortune through some rash and ill-advised stock-market gambling Alicia had taken off with his wealthier cousin, turning her back on her five-year-old son without a second thought.

  Then later, when Andreas himself had rebuilt the Petrakos fortune so that it had more than doubled the original amount, Alicia had turned yet again and tried to come back to the son she had abandoned over twenty years before. As a result, Andreas had always been wary of being used in the same way as his father. The slightest suspicion that any woman in his life might be a gold-digger meant that she was dropped so fast she never had time to even try to change his mind.

  So if Andreas thought—or even suspected—that she had married him for his money…

  ‘Andreas, don’t …’ she tried again. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’

  There had to be a way that she could reach him. A way that they could talk this out. If she could just calm him down, make him see that things could be put right. And then she’d talk to Macy, get her to see that she couldn’t keep her promise. She had to tell Andreas—he was her husband.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘No—not if you love me …’

  A sharp pain in her fingers jolted Becca back to the present, where, staring down at her hand, she realised that she had been twisting the stretchy material of the swimming costume round and round until it had tightened about her fingers, digging into the skin.

  But the tight physical pain was as nothing when compared to the one in her heart as she remembered Andreas’ reaction to her stumbling attempt to put things right, or at least bring about a truce between them.

  ‘Love!’ Andreas’ harsh bark of laughter had been cruel and totally without any humour in it. ‘Love? Who brought love into this?’

  ‘But you—I—you married me…’

  ‘Not for love!’ he flung the word in her face. ‘I don’t love anyone—least of all you! I doubt if I’m capable of the feeling. I married you for sex—for that and nothing else. No other woman has ever made me feel as hot as you do.’

  It was as if some freezing iceberg had suddenly enclosed her so that she could see and hear but she was incapable of moving and, for now at least, the terrible cold had deadened all feeling so that she was numb right through to the soul. Even her heart hardly seemed to be beating at all.

  ‘S-sex?’

  ‘Yes—sex. That thing we just enjoyed upstairs.’ ‘I didn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘Liar.’

  She wouldn’t have enjoyed it, couldn’t have enjoyed it if she’d known that he had been using her as cold-bloodedly and cruelly as it now seemed. If their whole marriage had been based on a lie and not the real love she believed it to be.

  ‘You had no right …’ she began but her frozen tongue wouldn’t form the words. Her lips were so stiff they felt as if they were carved from wood.

  ‘No right to what?’

  Andreas’ expression was carved from a similar block of ice as the one that seemed to enclose her. His jaw was taut and rigid, eyes freezing black pools.

  ‘To marry me if you felt that way. Y
ou have nothing to give me!’

  ‘Nothing!’

  His laughter was so hard that it seemed to splinter in the air around her, making her wince away from the shattered fragments that threatened her face.

  ‘Take a look around you, agape mou.‘

  One long fingered hand waved in a gesture that took in the luxurious room, the beautiful pool out beyond the patio doors and the view of the sapphire-blue ocean beyond that again. ‘You call this nothing?’

  Nothing without love.

  ‘Isn’t this enough?’

  ‘Quite frankly, no.’

  Bitterness made her say it. Agony pushed it from her lips in a cold, tight voice that didn’t sound at all like her own.

  ‘I expected more from you.’

  ‘You expected … Well, you can expect all you like but you’ll get nothing else from me—nothing.’

  ‘You think I’ll stay for that?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll stay for anything. In fact, let’s make this easy for you—let me help you on your way.’

  Marching into the hall, he flung open the big wooden door, letting in the warm evening air where the shadows were now gathering.

  ‘Andreas, you can’t do this! You married me today—we—we just consummated our marriage.’

  But what sort of marriage was it when the man she adored had just baldly announced that he didn’t love her?

  ‘If you divorce me then it will cost you even more …’

  It was meant to bring him to his senses. To get him to see that if she was only after him for his money, then he was going the right way about making sure that she got as much as she could possibly want. Surely the thought that she would get half of his vast fortune would make him stop and think and see where he was going wrong.

  Thinking looked like the last thing that Andreas was capable of. And stopping was obviously the last thing that was on his mind. She’d never seen him like this before in her life. She could almost see the red mist of fury behind his eyes, and his dark face was so contorted into a snarl that she barely recognised him as the man she had loved so deeply. The man she had vowed only that morning to love, honour and cherish.