Then he’d met Elizabeth and had known for certain he’d made the right choice. In his continued arrogance he’d married her without taking into account how utterly unsuited she was to a life as his wife.
His fresh beer was brought over. He took it straight from the waiter’s hand and took a large swig of it.
Talking about Ana, thinking about Ana, was hard, talking about her to Elizabeth, who he’d also hurt, doubly so. It brought it all back: all the rancid guilt that lived inside him. Ana would never marry. She would never have children.
He forced the rest of the story out. ‘Two weeks after I ended it she crashed her car into a tree. She wasn’t much of a drinker but she’d drunk heavily that night. I have no idea if she intended to kill herself or not.’
Elizabeth didn’t say anything, just stared at him with a stunned expression on her face. He searched for the condemnation he knew he deserved but couldn’t interpret what came from her eyes.
‘Her family...even though I told everyone that she was blameless, they blamed her for not doing enough to keep me. I didn’t know it at the time. Yanis filled me in when I got home. They put pressure on her. My parents got in on the act too. They all told her I would come to my senses and that she would have to change to keep me. But she knew I wouldn’t change my mind. She knew the situation was hopeless but I was oblivious to it all, thousands of miles away in a Caribbean paradise, all my problems forgotten about because I was with you.’
‘You don’t blame yourself, surely?’ she asked with sudden animation.
‘If I hadn’t abandoned her to deal with the fallout of the break-up alone, she would be alive today, of that I am certain.’ He shook his head, self-loathing filling him. Talking of Ana’s death made his guts feel they were being eaten without anaesthetic.
Elizabeth’s eyes held his for the longest time, the gold and red flecks shining. ‘If anyone’s to blame it’s her family and your parents for treating her like a commodity.’
He’d known that ever since Yanis told him of the pressure they’d all put her under, but that didn’t change his own responsibility.
He’d left Ana to deal with the fallout on her own, in his arrogance assuming that because he was all right then she would be too. It hadn’t occurred to him that their families would turn on her. He should have protected her.
At least he’d been able to protect Elizabeth from his family, however badly it had hurt her at the time.
‘And, Xander, you can’t know what was going through her head or what other influences might have been in play when she got behind the wheel.’
‘Whatever was going on in her head wasn’t good.’
‘The outcome might have been the same even if you hadn’t broken the engagement.’
What a tragic waste of a life, Elizabeth thought, her heart aching for the young Greek woman. A tiny part of her heart also ached for Xander bearing the weight of such guilt. She could see it in his eyes.
He held her gaze for an age before his eyes snapped back into focus and he said in a measured voice, ‘So there it is. You know it all. My world is a beautiful place to live in but a cruel place to be. Think yourself lucky that in a few months you’ll be able to leave it.’
She finished her wine and gazed back out at the foamy surf, a deep ache spreading out from her chest.
‘Do you want dessert?’ he asked.
‘No, thank you.’
He reached for his phone. ‘I’ll get my driver to collect us.’
She stared with more longing at the sandy shore. ‘If we walked along the beach, would it take us to your villa?’
‘Yes but it’s a couple of miles.’
‘I think I’ll do that. I need to walk.’ Walking was good. It always cleared her head and made sense of whatever madness she was living in. Right then, she had so many thoughts racing through her it would take a marathon to clear it.
She could sense his surprise. ‘Okay. Give me a minute to settle the bill and we’ll get going.’
* * *
To reach the beach from the restaurant involved descending a steep incline with only the moonlight to guide them. Inhaling the air that reminded her so heavily of St Francis it made her heart clench and twist. Biting the swirling emotions back, Elizabeth removed her heels and navigated her way carefully down the incline until she felt cool sand between her toes.
The night sea was making its familiar lapping noise. She remembered how soothing she’d found the sound on her first trip to St Francis, her first trip to any beach. Everything on St Francis had been soothing. Except it had all been an illusion. The serenity had created an ambiance that had lulled her into believing things that weren’t real. Here, on Diadonus, there were different scents, equally beautiful, but without the muscle memory reactions.
Would she one day inhale a scent and be taken back to this moment in time?
At least if that happened the memories wouldn’t lance her.
There was a gentle breeze coming from the sea and she wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and walked right to the water’s edge. She prodded a toe into it but the surf was too cold and she stepped back, right in time for a gentle wave to cover her foot.
Needing to move, she set off, treading footprints into the wet sand that were eradicated almost immediately by the waves. Just as their marriage had been eradicated almost immediately after exchanging their vows.
‘If divorce is too risky for your business, how can you risk divorcing me?’ she asked quietly.
‘You haven’t brought any assets into the marriage. There’s no contract between us. I can pay you off and that’s it. Over with.’
‘And when we finally are over with? Will you ever marry again?’
‘No.’ The word was blunt. ‘I know of no marriages that last without turning to hell. I would be left with the choice of living with someone I dislike or risk destroying my company with a bitter divorce.’
Elizabeth knew exactly how vicious divorces could be. And while he wasn’t saying anything she didn’t agree with, it still made her heart twinge.
‘What about children?’ she forced herself to ask, glad she didn’t have to see his expression when he gave his answer. He was walking beside her, his hands deep in his pockets, a foot apart but close enough that her senses danced with awareness.
It had always been like this. She’d only needed to catch a glimpse of him to feel every atom of her body vibrate.
‘Don’t you want to produce the next generation of Trakases?’
‘Loukas is the next generation.’
‘But don’t you want your own?’ she persisted. He had once. Or had that been a lie too?
‘Children need two parents. I’m never going to marry again so for me it’s not a consideration.’
‘What if Loukas doesn’t want to join the business?’
‘That’s for him to decide when he’s old enough. While I’m alive and kicking I shall run it the best way I can and put the structures in place for it to thrive when I’m gone.’
There was nothing she could say to that. And what did it matter to her in any case? They would go their separate ways soon enough and then she’d never have to see him again.
They were approaching a harbour. A row of yachts of varying sizes lay before them, pearlescent under the moonlight.
She remembered the day Xander had chartered a yacht for them. It was the first time she’d really considered that he must come from money, his familiarity with sailing and the unwritten protocols...
It should have been a warning sign. Instead it had delighted her. In her head she’d already moved to Diadonus to be with him. They wouldn’t starve while she completed her degree, learnt his language and found a job.
Her blood burned and her heart ached to remember her innocence. Voices called out in her head, happy memories that had turned into scars.
‘I seem to remember you never liked walking,’ he said, breaking the rolling silence that had formed between them.
She tried not to
flinch. It was hard to hold on to her loathing of him when he so casually dropped in things she’d expected him to have forgotten.
She was finding it hard to hold on to her loathing period.
‘I learned to like walking when I enrolled at New York State. After rent and tuition were paid I was stony broke. To save money I walked everywhere. I still do.’
‘Why did you quit Brown?’
After the confidences he’d shared over their meal it seemed petty not to answer him. ‘My mother withdrew her funding so I had no choice.’
‘Why did she do that?’
‘I told her I didn’t want to major in English any more.’
She could feel his eyes burning into her.
‘Why on earth would you do that? You’d only ever wanted to be a writer.’
‘I did,’ she agreed, wishing her heart didn’t twist to remember the person she’d been then. ‘I wanted to write scripts for films about modern-day love; stories with hints of the classics running through them, but when I returned home to New York the idea of writing anything about love was laughable. There was no way I could write about something I didn’t believe in any more, and script writing? Every girl in my class and her cat wanted to do that. I decided to go into business instead. I had no idea at the time what kind of business I wanted, but I knew I would be my own boss. My mother had other ideas, so I decided to go it alone.’
‘Why would she not want you to go into business?’
‘The only thing my mom has ever taken pride in about me were my achievements in English. I was winning literature prizes when I was eight and a career in writing was a foregone conclusion. When I told her I wanted to major in business...’ She took a deep breath, hating the memories. It felt like a different life. ‘The long and short of it was that if I refused to major in English, she would stop supporting me.’
‘So you moved out and transferred colleges off your own back?’
She wrapped her shawl tighter around her. The breeze had picked up, the chill now setting goosebumps off on her flesh. ‘I was legally an adult. She couldn’t force me to do anything. No one could. I still had some of the money granny had left me. It wasn’t enough to support me at Brown but was enough to pay for the first year’s tuition and rent at New York State, which was my home college. So I moved out of my mom’s and transferred there.’
‘Your father couldn’t help you?’
‘Nope. He’d just remarried a woman equally as manipulative as my mother. After a decade of war with my mom he was tired of arguing with women—that’s what he told me, anyway.’ She speared him with a look. ‘So you don’t have the monopoly on dysfunctional, emotionally abusive parents.’
‘I’m beginning to see that,’ he said after a long pause.
Somehow during their walk, their pace had slowed and the distance between them closed. Xander’s arm brushed lightly against hers.
The heat that rushed through her...
Her lungs seemed to close in on themselves.
‘No wonder you forgot to chase our annulment with all that going on,’ he murmured.
She forced herself to concentrate on the conversation at hand, not on the warm body brushing against her own, and moved out of his way so they were no longer touching.
The chill felt starker without his heat warming her.
‘The annulment was the last thing on my mind,’ she croaked. ‘I never even thought there might be a problem with it.’
Xander’s villa appeared shortly ahead of them. As they got closer, they drifted together again, close enough that if she flexed her fingers she’d be able to touch him.
In silence they passed the barrier onto his private section of beach, security lights bathing them the moment they stepped onto his land.
Her heart rate increasing so much she no longer felt the individual beats, Elizabeth hurried up the steps to enter the villa from the kitchen. She didn’t know the entry code.
She moved back down to allow him to get to it but the steps were narrow and it turned into an awkward kind of dance as they tried to step around each other.
And then, without knowing how, she found herself trapped between the railing and Xander.
Her breath caught in a throat that had filled with moisture. Unable to help herself, she tilted her head to gaze into eyes that trapped her more effectively than any chain could. The few senses not already on high alert sprang to life, lips tingling, every cell in her body straining towards him.
The look in his eyes...it was as if he wanted to eat her whole.
His mouth drifted slowly to hers, his eyes open and holding hers in their hypnotic gaze until the lids closed and she felt his warm breath brush against her skin in the moment before his mouth found hers.
For the longest time they didn’t move, their lips only whispering against the other’s.
He pulled back a little to stare at her again, and the hunger in his eyes darkened and he wrapped his arms around her to crush her to him.
Their lips fused together in a kiss full of such passion that her bones melted and then she melted, right into him, her hands grasping round to hold onto his back, crushing herself to him.
As their tongues danced together and the heat of his mouth consumed her, she clung even tighter, dizzy with the familiarity of his taste and the terrifying yet exhilarating familiarity of her own responses.
His hands burrowed into her hair and she wanted to cry as she remembered how he had done the exact same thing the first time he’d kissed her all those years ago.
If the kitchen door hadn’t burst open at that moment, there was every chance she would have lost herself completely.
‘So this is what you get up to when you’re supposed to be caring for my grandson.’
Elizabeth let go of Xander as sharply as if she’d had ice tipped over her.
Standing in the doorway, as tall and menacing as Morticia Adams with all her hair chopped off, stood a woman she could only presume was Xander’s mother.
CHAPTER EIGHT
XANDER REGAINED HIS composure before she did. He straightened and shook his head, and brushed past his mother.
‘How did you get in?’
‘I knocked and the door was answered. Your housekeeper told me you were out. I said I would wait.’
Listening to her, Elizabeth revised her opinion of Morticia Adams to one of Marlene Dietrich but with less of an accent. Her English was, like her son’s, impeccable. As was her timing.
Hastily straightening her dress, Elizabeth grabbed her shawl that had fallen to the ground and, her head reeling, her legs weakened, her body vibrating from the effect of his kiss, she followed them inside.
She didn’t know what she was most mortified about: that she’d fallen into Xander’s arms so easily or that his mother’s first impression of her would be her kissing her son so passionately.
She could get down on her knees in gratitude that she’d interrupted them before it had gone any further.
As skinny as a pencil, Mirela Trakas had cropped jet-black hair and the surprised face of someone on first-name terms with her plastic surgeon. Wearing a black pantsuit with full make-up and a dozen solid gold bangles hanging on her wrists, she strongly resembled a glamourous undertaker.
‘If you’d called first I would have told you not to bother,’ Xander said.
‘That’s why I didn’t call first. I’ll have a gin and tonic.’
A grim smile on his handsome face, he strode through the kitchen and dining room and into the infinity room, where he kept a wall-length bar. ‘I thought you were in Milan.’
‘We wrapped up early, so I thought I’d call in on my favourite son.’
The look Xander gave her perfectly conveyed his feelings. Nostrils flaring, he said, ‘Dad not with you?’
‘He’s gone to Monte Carlo for the evening to gamble your inheritance at the roulette table.’
Xander rolled his eyes. ‘I assume Elizabeth’s the reason you’re here?’
‘Elizabeth?
Is that her name?’
‘You know perfectly well it is. Elizabeth, meet my mother. Mirela, meet your new daughter-in-law.’
Mirela didn’t even glance in Elizabeth’s direction. ‘It would have been nice to learn my son had married from the son in question rather than hear about it third-hand. My phone has been ringing off the hook. All my friends know about it. The whole world knows about it. Even nuns in Outer Mongolia know about it but you couldn’t take the time to tell me.’
‘We’ve been busy.’
‘So I see.’ Her nostrils flared in an exact replica of her son’s. ‘You tell the judge you want guardianship of my grandson yet leave him with strangers to take your fake wife out. I’m sure the judge will be thrilled when I share it with him next week.’
He poured himself a large Scotch and downed it in one. Feeling as if she needed something strong too, Elizabeth stood beside him and poured herself one, downing it the same as he’d done.
Oh, wow. Her throat burned. And Mirela noticed, wicked pleasure alive in her cold eyes.
Thrusting a gin and tonic into his mother’s hand, Xander contemplated her coolly before saying, ‘Loukas is in bed asleep. He’s being watched by people he’s known his entire life, and who love him. Rather like you and Dad would leave Yanis and I alone while you two went out which, if I’m remembering correctly, was every night. You also left us alone for weeks at a time...’
‘That was always business, darling.’
‘That week in the Maldives was not business. Nor the frequent skiing trips to Canada. I could drink this whole bottle of single malt and I’d still be listing the times you and Dad took off without us that had nothing to do with business.’
Mirela waved her hand. ‘The Maldives would have bored you.’
‘Yes, you told us that when you got back after not bothering to tell us you were going in the first place. We had to find out from the staff.’
Married for the Greek's Convenience Page 8