Antonides' Forbidden Wife

by Anne McAllister

  She got a cup of coffee from the hospitality center. Having something in her hands would help. It would keep her from biting her fingernails, if nothing else. She sipped it and burned her tongue, muttered under her breath, paced some more.

  She should have said she would meet him in the Hamptons. There were jitneys that traveled back and forth between the city and the Hamptons. She needn’t have committed herself to a full afternoon in the car, just she and PJ.

  But it was too late now.

  She would have needed to make a reservation. And she would have had to tell him. And calling PJ was not on her list of things she wanted to do.

  She knew he’d say, “Chicken, Al?”

  And she wasn’t. Really. She wasn’t. Just…wary. Edgy. Nervous.

  She would go through with it. Of course she would. But it would help if he would get here so she could stop fretting about it and start resisting.

  “Ready?”

  The sound of his voice right behind her made her jerk. Coffee splattered on the floor, on her shoes, on her shirt, on her hand.

  “Oh!” She spun around and sloshed it on his shoes, too. “Stop sneaking up on me.”

  “I wasn’t sneaking. You were walking away. I couldn’t run around in front of you and say, ‘Here I am,’ could I? Are you okay?” He took the coffee out of her hand and set it down on a table while she tried ineffectually to mop herself up.

  “I’m fine. Terrific. Never been better.” She was muttering while she scrubbed at her shirt, then sighed and gave it up for a lost cause. “I need to change.” She gave her still-stinging hand a shake.

  “Let me see.” PJ caught her fingers in his and examined her hand. It was red where the coffee had burned. But somehow the stinging from the burn was less intense than her awareness of his touch.

  Abruptly Ally tried to pull her fingers away. But PJ held them fast and grimaced. “You should have some ice.” He lifted his gaze, meeting hers. “And a kiss to make it better?” He grinned lopsidedly.

  Ally snatched her hand out of his. “Ice, yes. A kiss, no.”

  “Don’t want a repeat of last night, Al?” His tone was teasing.

  But Ally had spent the night in far too deep a funk where kissing PJ was concerned. She compressed her lips. “I’ll just get some ice and change my shirt and we can go.”

  Before he could reply, she took a fresh coral-colored pullover top from her suitcase, then, leaving the case with PJ, hurried to the ladies’ room where she changed quickly, glared at her reflection in the mirror, exhorted herself to shape up, stay calm, cool and collected and, above all, resist PJ Antonides’s charm.

  Then she got a plastic bag of ice from the ice machine in the refreshment center, put it on her face before she put it on her hand. And then she made her way back to the lobby.

  PJ had put her suitcase in his car—a late-model midsize SUV with a surfboard on the roof.

  She stared at it. “I’ll bet you’re the only person in New York City with a surfboard on his car.”

  “I’m probably not,” he said. “You’d be amazed at what you see in the city. How’s your hand?” He opened the door for her and she climbed in, glad it was a good-size car and that she would be able to keep her distance.

  “It’ll be fine.” She fastened her seat belt. He fastened his, then slid the car out into the crush of midtown noontime traffic.

  Ally loved the city, but she never ever considered driving there. Honolulu was stress enough. But PJ maneuvered through the traffic as easily as he picked out and rode the waves he surfed.

  “I become the wave,” he’d told her once.

  “Do you become the traffic?” she asked him now.

  He slanted her a quick grin. “How’d you know?”

  She resisted the grin and silently congratulated herself. “You make it look easy.”

  “I manage.” He made a wry face. “It’s not the most relaxing way to spend a Friday afternoon.”

  “You should have let me take one of the jitneys. I could have met you out there.”

  “No. I don’t mind. Besides, it will give us a chance to spend some time together.”

  Precisely what Ally would have preferred not to have. But she said, “Yes. Are there going to be lots of people there?”

  “Enough,” PJ said grimly. “All the immediate family. The grandkids. My grandmother. A couple of my mother’s sisters. One of my dad’s crazy aunts. She’s a widow, but her husband was the cousin of Ari Cristopolous, which is why my dad decided he could justify inviting them that weekend.”

  “But he really invited them because of…you…and the daughter?”

  “Not that he’d ever admit it,” PJ said cheerfully.

  “Won’t he be upset?”

  PJ shrugged. “He knows now. Ma has to have told him. And he never stays upset long. He’s pretty easygoing.”

  “But what about the Cristopolouses? And their daughter? Won’t they be expecting…?”

  “An unattached son?” PJ did a rapid tattoo with his fingers on the steering wheel, grinning. “Yep. Poor ol’ Lukas.”

  Ally stared. “Lukas?”

  “My little brother.” PJ rolled his shoulders and sighed expansively. “Bless his heart.”

  Ally gave him a long skeptical look.

  He just laughed. “Lukas won’t mind. He never minds when people throw beautiful women at him.”

  “Do people often throw beautiful women at him?”

  “Mostly beautiful women throw themselves at him. It’s a little annoying.” PJ shrugged. “They think he’s good-looking. No accounting for taste. Tell me,” he went on, “what happened yesterday at the gallery? With Gabriela del Castillo?”

  Ally was curious about this brother whom women threw themselves at. It was hard to imagine anyone better looking than PJ. But then, maybe women threw themselves at him, too. She wanted to ask. But she didn’t want to know. So she focused on the question he’d asked her.

  “We had a really good meeting. I took half a dozen pieces—fabric art, quilted pieces, collages—and she accepted them all.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, a couple of Thai beaches—very stylized. A couple of New Zealand ones. A bit of Polynesian Maori influence. And some landscape collage type things—a New York skyline at night.”

  One she didn’t tell him about, was a much more personal piece—and one of the earliest she’d done. It had been her memories of the morning after the night they’d spent together, the view from his window toward the sea, the sand, the sunrise, the lone surfer on his board riding toward shore.

  All the longing she’d felt that morning had gone into that piece. It had accompanied her everywhere. She’d shown it in several galleries, had had offers to buy it, had never sold. Couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  But she’d offered it for sale at Gaby’s. She’d carried it with her too long. Like the marriage she was ending, it was time to part with it. So she’d told Gaby all the pieces she’d brought were for sale.

  “I’m sending her more when I get home, and she’s going to do a whole show—we’re calling it Fabric of Our Lives.”

  PJ whistled. “That’s fantastic.” He seemed genuinely pleased. “Where is the gallery? What’s it called?”

  “Sol y Sombra Downtown. To distinguish it from another called Uptown she has on Madison Ave. Downtown is in Tribeca. The original is in Santa Fe.”

  Once she got talking about it, she couldn’t seem to stop. And PJ encouraged her. He asked questions, listened to her replies, drew her out, seeming genuinely interested. And maybe because he was the only person to have shown any interest at all, she kept on going.

  She told him about the other artists whose work she’d seen there. Gabriela del Castillo represented artists in a variety of mediums.

  “I know what I like,” she’d told Ally, “so that’s what I represent.”

  She represented all sorts of oil and watercolor and acrylic artists as well as several photographers and a couple of sculptors.r />
  “And she’s just hung one room with work by a very talented muralist named Martha Antonides.” It was her turn to flash a grin at him now. “I recognized your sister’s work right away.”

  She had been as astonished to turn the corner in the gallery and find herself staring at an eight-foot-by-eight-foot painting that essentially took up a whole wall, a painting that captured summer in Central Park.

  It was as if the artist had distilled the essence of New York’s famous park—its zoo, its boats, its ball diamonds, fields, walkways and bike paths. The detail was incredible. Every person—and there were hundreds—was unique, special. Real.

  And studying it while Gabriela went on at length about its talented creator, Ally wished she’d gone back to look at the mural in PJ’s apartment to find herself in it.

  “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Gaby had asked eagerly.

  “I have, actually,” Ally had said. “I saw a couple of her murals earlier this week. She’s amazingly talented.”

  “You can tell her so,” PJ said when Ally repeated her comment to him. “She’ll be delighted to hear it. I’m glad she’s painting on something smaller than buildings these days. Easier for her, now that she’s staying home with a kid.”

  It was easy to talk to PJ about her work and about his. And since his family figured largely in the company, she found that it was easy to ask about them. He talked readily, telling stories about growing up in a large boisterous family that made her laugh at the same time that she felt twinges of envy for the childhood he had known. It was so different from her own.

  And while the thought of meeting a host of Antonideses was unnerving under the circumstances—she felt like a fraud—she found that the more she heard, the more eager she was to meet them.

  More than once she said, “You’re making that up,” when PJ related some particularly outrageous anecdote, many of them having to do with things he and his brothers did or pranks he played on his sisters.

  And every time he shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, ask them.”

  “I will,” she vowed.

  The stories he told surprised her because PJ had always seemed distant from his family in Hawaii, determinedly so. But now he seemed to actually relish the time he spent with them.

  “I thought you wanted to get away from your family,” she remarked as they headed east through one suburb after another until finally they got far enough beyond the city that there were actually cultivated fields and open spaces here and there.

  The sun was shining. A breeze lifted her hair. The summer heat that had been oppressive in the city was appealing out here.

  “I did,” PJ said. The wind was tousling his hair, too. “They’re great in small doses. Like this weekend. But I needed to be on my own. So I left. To find myself. Like you did,” he added, glancing her way.

  She hadn’t thought about that before. She’d been so consumed by her own life in those days that she hadn’t really thought about what motivated anyone else. PJ’s proposal had been a favor, but had always seemed more of a casual, “Oh well, I’m not marrying anyone else this week,” sort of thing.

  She hadn’t realized that he’d equated her situation with his own.

  “Did you realize that then?” she asked.

  “It occurred to me.” He kept his eyes on the road.

  Ally turned her eyes on him, understanding a bit better what had motivated him. Which should, she reminded herself, make it easier to resist the attraction she felt.

  She’d been a “cause” for him then. Nothing more, nothing less. And this weekend her chance to pay him back. On Sunday he would take her back to the city. Monday she would catch a plane back to her real life.

  And what PJ told his family afterward was not her problem. But the weekend could be a problem unless they discussed it ahead of time.

  She turned to PJ. “Before we arrive, we need to get a few things straight.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “WHAT sort of things?” PJ slanted her a wary glance.

  She had seen signs for various Hamptons—West Hampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton—so she knew they were getting near now. She didn’t know which PJ’s parents lived in, but the knowledge that she’d be meeting them soon banished her pleasure at the surprising ease of the journey and was replaced by jittery nerves and a definite edginess.

  “Rules,” she said.

  “Rules?” he repeated, sounding incredulous. “What sort of rules?”

  “No kissing.”

  His head jerked around. Disbelieving green eyes stared at her. “What?”

  “You heard me,” she said, feeling her cheeks begin to heat.

  “Not right, I didn’t,” PJ muttered under his breath. “I’m your husband,” he reminded her.

  “Only for the moment,” she said primly.

  “You can kiss me like you did and still want a divorce?”

  Now her face really was burning. “You caught me off guard. And I never said you weren’t appealing. It’s just…” she hesitated. There was no way she could discuss this with him. They weren’t speaking the same language. “I won’t say that I’m filing for divorce. I’ll leave that up to you.”

  “Big of you,” he muttered. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel. His knuckles were white.

  “I just—” she plucked at the hem of her skirt “—don’t think we should lead them to expect that we’re a couple.”

  “Ally, in their eyes we are a couple. We’re married.”

  “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Well, too bad. You’re here now,” PJ said as he flipped on the turn signal and, the next thing Ally knew, they were off the highway and heading south. She clenched her fists in her lap and tried to settle her nerves. She took a deep breath intended to calm her.

  “You’re not going underwater,” PJ said. “Relax. They don’t bite. I don’t either,” he added grimly.

  “You kiss,” Ally muttered.

  “And damn well, or so I’ve been told,” he retorted, then tipped his head to angle a look at her. “You didn’t seem to have any complaints.”

  “You kiss very well,” she said primly, staring straight ahead. “And you’ve proved that.”

  He made another right turn, then a left. They were getting closer and closer to the shore, running out of houses. And she was running out of time. She turned to entreat him. “I don’t want us to make this any more difficult than it is, PJ.”

  He slowed the car and looked straight at her. “I didn’t realize it was such a terrible imposition.”

  “It’s not! It’s—” she couldn’t explain. She couldn’t even make sense of her tangled feelings herself “—not difficult. But it is awkward. I feel like a fraud. That’s why I don’t want kissing.”

  He let the car roll to a stop now. They were sitting in the middle of the road. Fortunately there was no traffic. He let his hands lie loosely on the steering wheel for a long moment before he drew a long breath, then said quietly, “Is it when you kiss me that you feel like a fraud, Ally?”

  He didn’t wait for her to answer. He gunned the engine and they shot down the road another hundred yards and then he swung the car into a large paved parking area behind an immense stone and timber pseudo-English-style two-story house.

  “Home sweet home,” he said, and without glancing her way, he hopped out of the car.

  Challenged by PJ’s question, Ally sat right where she was, feeling as if she’d just taken a body blow to the gut. But before she could even face the question internally, let alone articulate a reply to PJ, he jerked open the door on her side of the car and said tersely, “Come and meet my parents.”

  Knees wobbling, and not just from being stuck in a car too long, Ally got out. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d expected—apart from being nervous—when he introduced her to his parents. Probably she hadn’t even let herself think that far.

  But whatever fleeting notions she had, they didn’t come close to what she got.


  “Good luck with your ‘no kissing’ rule,” PJ said just before he turned to face the horde of relatives descending upon them.

  And the next instant, they were surrounded.

  “Ma, Dad, this is Ally. Al, these are my parents, Aeolus and Helena,” PJ said and somehow he swept them together.

  And instead of politely shaking hands and saying, “How do you do?” as Ally had expected, she was instantly enveloped in Aeolus’s hearty embrace, her cheeks were kissed, her body was squeezed, her hands were pumped.

  “And so you are real!” he said jovially, dark eyes flashing with humor. “My boy is just full of surprises!”

  And somehow he managed to wrap PJ into the same fierce hug so that she might not have kissed him, but she certainly had plenty of body contact before Aeolus struck again, this time drawing his wife into their midst.

  PJ’s mother was not quite as effusive as her husband. But her expression, though clearly inquisitive, was warm and her smile was just as welcoming.

  “A new daughter,” she murmured, taking Ally’s cheeks between her palms and looking straight into her eyes. “How wonderful.”

  And just as she was smitten by guilt, Ally was kissed with gentle warmth. Then Helena stepped back, still smiling and slid an arm around Ally’s waist, drawing her away from PJ and his father. “Come,” she said, “and meet your family.”

  Her family.

  More guilt. More dismay. And yet, how could she not smile and allow herself to be passed from one to another. There were so many, all dark-haired, eager and smiling, as they shook her hand, kissed her cheeks, told her their names.

  Some names she recognized—PJ’s siblings, Elias and Martha, their spouses and a swarm of little boys who must be more of PJ’s nephews. There was another brother, some aunts, cousins, friends.

  She heard Mr. and Mrs. Cristopolous’s names, but they were just part of the blur. She did get a bead on Connie, though, the woman Aeolus hoped his son would marry.

  Connie Cristopolous was the most perfectly beautiful woman Ally had ever seen. She was blessed with naturally curling black hair. Ally’s own, stick straight, couldn’t compare. Not only did it curl, but it actually seemed to behave itself instead of flying around the way most of the women’s hair did. Her complexion was smooth and sun touched. Her features—a small neat nose, full smiling lips, deep brown eyes—were perfect. And she had just enough cheekbone to give her face memorable definition, but enough fullness in her cheeks to make her face warm and feminine.