Bought ForThe Greek's Bed

by Julia James

  But even just setting eyes on him again, shielded as she was by her dark glasses, was an ordeal. For one awful moment, as she saw his tall figure swing round towards her, it was all she could do to stop herself turning tail and running as far and as fast as she could.

  There was nothing in his eyes as they flicked over her. Neither satisfaction that she’d given in to his despicable terms nor disdain at her scruffy appearance. He simply said something briefly in Greek to the young man standing rather upright and nervously attentive at his side, who promptly came up to her.

  ‘I am Demetrious Xanthou— Theakis’s aide. Please let me know if there is anything you would like for the flight.’

  He was new to Vicky. She didn’t remember him from before. His manner was impeccably polite, but the expression on his face was studiedly incurious. The word ‘discretion’ all but shrieked from him.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she answered. She tried to make her voice offhand, as if it were nothing that Theo Theakis’s ex-wife was flying off to Greece with him two days after throwing her handbag at him in a fit of temper.

  It certainly seemed nothing to Demetrious Xanthou, and her face tightened, little more to his employer.

  Well, she thought grimly, if Theo wanted to treat her like the invisible woman she should be glad of it! She was only too happy to treat him as the invisible man.

  Except that it was very difficult to do that. As they boarded the plane, Theo letting her board first with a gesture that was light years away from true consideration but merely social habit, she was horribly conscious of him following her, too close behind. The interior of the jet, with its huge leather seats and mahogany tables—light years away from flying economy class—caught at her suddenly. Memory jabbed into her, sharp and intrusive.

  Private jets, squillion-pound yachts, supercars and designer wardrobes—a lifestyle that was the stuff of dreams for so many.

  But not for her. For her it had turned into a nightmare.

  Abruptly she dropped herself down in the seat she hoped would be furthest away from Theo, and dumped her backpack at her feet. She refused both offers of help to take it from her or to stow it, and busied herself pulling out a paperback from a side pocket, clipping her seat belt across her in a businesslike fashion, and settling down to read. Determinedly, she kept her nose in the book, pausing only to look out of the porthole window for takeoff, which never failed to bring a rush of adrenaline to her, until the jet had reached its cruising altitude. Across the wide aisle she could see that Theo had settled himself down and was talking incisively in Greek to Demetrious, who had a sheaf of papers laid out on the table between them.

  The mellifluous tones of the language of her father tugged at her. Since her marriage had ended she’d avoided anything Greek like the plague. Even though she had never managed to learn the language beyond anything other than hesitant reading and simple conversation, hearing Theo give instructions to his aide brought the words teasing back into her mind. And words that were more than business terms…

  She felt her stomach plunge, her skin contract over her flesh. All her Dutch courage of the night before had vanished completely. All her vain resolve to turn this outrageous situation to her own advantage was gone—completely gone! All that remained was panic—blind, blind, panic. She was sitting on Theo’s plane, being flown back to Greece.

  He’s going to have sex with me, and I’ve consented! My very presence on this plane is my consent!

  She must have been mad! She would have to run—run the moment the plane landed. Use her credit card to buy a return flight and get out the moment she could!

  But if she did she would never get her money.

  Jem would never get her money. Pycott Grange wouldn’t be able to open that summer. Children who needed it desperately would have to do without. And she—she would not achieve what last night had seemed finally within her grasp…

  Her ultimate freedom from the power that Theo Theakis wielded over her. The power she dreaded more than anything else in the world…

  You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to—it’s the only way.

  Just don’t think about it—don’t think about it till you have to.

  Hurriedly, she scrabbled about in the rucksack for her music and stuck headphones in her ears, flicking on the soothing counterpointed intricacies of Bach, instantly silencing the rest of the world around her. Doggedly she forced herself to keep reading. When, a little later, the smiling stewardess came to ask her what she would like by way of refreshments, she asked for coffee, refusing the champagne that was proffered. The very thought of alcohol now was stomach churning. So was food. Acid was running in her stomach, and she felt sick.

  But she mustn’t, mustn’t let it show! To let Theo see her nerves would be to pander to his vicious need for revenge, and she would not, would not give him that satisfaction.

  At least he was not in her line of sight, and nor could she hear his deep, dark voice any more, and for that she could be grateful. When her coffee arrived she lifted the cup, taking little sips, staring out of the window over the fleecy cloudscape, willing herself to be calm as the Brandenburg Concertos wove their compelling rhythm through her head. The morning had been such a rush she’d had no time to do anything other than surface, groggily, after a restless, tormented night of unpeaceful intermittent sleep and tearing emotion, then throw the essentials into her backpack.

  As for Jem—she’d changed her mind half a dozen times about whether to phone him and tell him she was on the trail of the money. Half of her wanted to reassure him, but half was terrified he’d start asking her questions about how she’d finally managed to change Theo’s mind…

  Jem must never know. Never. He would be outraged, and rightly so. No, she mustn’t think about Jem. She must keep him ignorant for his own sake, to protect him. Just as she’d kept him ignorant about how brutal Theo had been when he had ended their marriage so precipitately. She’d done so partly to protect Jem, but also because he’d have been bound to storm off and confront Theo on her behalf, and then Theo would know…

  No—she cut off her thoughts abruptly. Jem now, like then, had to be kept out of this. This was between her and Theo. That was all. She and Jem went back a long, long way, and he was vitally important to her—but she didn’t want him dragged back into the ungodly mess that had been the ending of her farcical marriage.

  I’ll do what I have to do—achieve what I aim to achieve. Then I’ll come home again, to Jem, hand him the money, and never say a word of what I had to do to get it.

  What I’m going to have to do…

  As she sat, tense as a board, sipping hot coffee, the full enormity of what she was doing hit her like slugs to her chin. Disbelief drenched through her, and a sense of dissociation from reality that she had been clinging to for dear life.

  I can do this—I can.

  I must.

  The mantra went round her head, carried by Bach, stopping her thinking of anything else. Anything at all.

  And especially, above all, what ‘this’ would actually mean…

  She could feel her eyes flickering and managed to replace the coffee cup on the table in front of her, her head starting to loll. Her restless, tormented night was catching up with her.

  The dream she slipped into was vivid. Instant.

  She was on the island. That magical, maquis-clad island, where the azure bowl of the sky cupped land lapped by a cobalt sea, enclosing it in a private, secret world, a world where the outside world ceased to exist, where everything—everyone—was reduced to the elements of which they were made. Sky and stone, sand and sea, air and water, light and dark. Flesh and blood.

  And heat. Heat beating up through the rocks, burning down from the blazing sun, heat running in her veins like a fire. A fire she could not quench, a heat she could not cool, heat in her skin, her veins, her nerves, her flesh…flushing through her, pulse, after pulse, after pulse…

  She woke—eyes wide, staring. Heart pounding. Terrified. />
  Words screamed through her.

  I can’t do this! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!

  Her hands clenched over the arms of her seat.

  The plane flew on.

  Theo listened as Demetrious brought him up to date on a dozen different items on his always crowded agenda. But his mind was elsewhere.

  So she had come. He had half wondered if she would. It could have gone either way, he knew—her self-righteous fury was quite capable of cutting off her own nose to spite her face. His face tightened. It was that, above all, that enraged him—her self-righteousness! Her self-righteous fury at being denied what she dared, dared to consider her entitlement to her uncle’s money! The uncle she had insulted and shamed, who even now still felt the burden of what she had done.

  As for himself—the lines around his mouth incised more deeply—did she really think she could do what she had done and then expect him to meekly hand over the money? His eyes flickered to where he could just see the edge of her body, almost invisible to him. He felt again that stab of raw black anger go through him. Then another emotion countered it.

  Should he have made her this offer, given her the chance to get the money she craved? Shouldn’t he just have continued to stonewall her, ignore her very existence, as he had done since he had thrown her out, raining down on her the censure she so richly deserved?

  With his head he knew that that was indeed what he should have done—every gram of sense in him told him so.

  But sense was not uppermost in his mind now. He knew that, deplored it, and yet even so knew he was going to pursue this—knew he was going to carry out what he had every intention of doing. What he had promised her last night when he’d felt again the touch of her flesh against his.

  He had unfinished business with her.

  And only when he had finished it—finished with her—would he finally throw her from his life permanently.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AS THE plane made its final descent, Vicky felt her stomach acid go into overdrive again. Not just because she was that much closer in time to the ordeal ahead of her. Nor just because of the nightmare memories that were ready to spring like banshees into her brain, with every familiar sight of Greece around her. But because something else had dawned on her—something that would make the ordeal ahead even worse. Where, exactly, was Theo planning on taking her—and did he intend her to be seen with him in public? On show at his side…?

  Dear God, surely he can’t be planning to do that?

  She swallowed. That had turned out to be the worst aspect of her brief, ill-fated marriage. It was ironic, really. It had been, after all, purely for show that she had gone along with the insane idea of marrying him in the first place! To show the world that Aristide Fournatos was not going cap in hand to Theo Theakis to save his company, but was merely doing something that every Greek family could approve of: forging a link for the mutual benefit of both commercial dynasties, between his niece and a suitable—oh, so highly suitable—husband. Saving his company was almost incidental.

  And so being on show had been an essential part and purpose of their marriage. Vicky had thought she could cope with it—after all, a marriage for external show only was all she had signed up for.

  But it had proved far, far more difficult than she had ever imagined.

  And then—impossible…

  Quite, quite impossible…

  She tensed in recollection as the memories started to march across her brain.

  As Aristides Fournatos’s niece she had been of interest to her uncle’s circle of friends and acquaintances, accepted by them despite her Englishness, because of Aristides. But as the wife of Theo Theakis she’d become an object not of interest, but of almost virulent curiosity.

  Especially from women, and in particular—the gleeful words of her uncle that every woman in Athens would envy her had not been an exaggeration—women to whom her husband was an object of their sexual interest.

  There were so many of them. Women like the one who had commandeered him the evening she had first been introduced to him at her uncle’s dinner party, women who had quite obviously either had an affair with him or wanted one. Or wanted another one. Athens, it seemed, was awash with women who found the man she had married magnetically attractive, and who all shared something in common—envy of her, or resentment, or both. Vicky had soon realised that she had committed a social solecism of the highest order—she had walked off with the prize matrimonial catch in Greek society.

  Without deserving it.

  Crime enough—except for something even worse.

  Without appreciating it…

  Her gaze hardened.

  Vicky knew, as the jet made its descent, that she had spectacularly failed to appreciate the enviable good fortune of having Theo Theakis for a husband. The needling and barbed comments she had received from other women had been proof enough of that. Comments openly directed at her by women congratulating her on her great good fortune in capturing such a prize, as well as more malicious observations from women who had, with sweetly smiling insincerity, expressed the hope that Theo Theakis would manage to be as interested in her as a bride as he evidently was in her uncle’s company. Her studiedly blank reaction in the face of all this antagonism had seemed to irritate them even more. The provocation had got worse, making her dread those social occasions when she’d had to be on show with Theo, until finally, to her relief, she had been castigated as a cold-blooded Englishwoman, dull and passionless, and dismissed from their further attention.

  But it hadn’t just been the scores of women for whom Theo Theakis was an object of desire who had regarded her marriage to Theo as a big mistake

  Her eyes darkened balefully and her hands clamped in her lap involuntarily.

  She knew to the exact moment when she had realised, with a terrifying hollowing of her stomach, just how big a mistake she had made when she had finally agreed to marry Theo.

  Talk about being lulled into a false sense of security…

  She had always, right from the start, been a reluctant bride. Quite apart from anything else, the terms of her marriage had meant deceiving her mother and stepfather. It had appalled her when she’d realised that Aristides had been planning to invite them to Athens for the wedding, and she’d had to urgently cite her parents’ inability to take leave in the middle of the school term to stop him doing so. She had also lied to him, saying that she had told them about her marriage. Of course she had not! If her mother had got the slightest whiff that her daughter was marrying a man she scarcely knew, for the reasons she was doing so, she would have been on the first flight to Athens to stop her!

  Telling Jem had been imperative, of course—if for no other reason than he’d wanted to know when she was going to take over at Freshstart again. It had been incredibly awkward telling him, and even though she had assured him fervently that it was of course a marriage in name only, she knew he’d been dismayed by her decision to go ahead with it. Even the knowledge that as soon as it was decent she would end the marriage and return to the UK with a handsome donation to her father’s charity had not made him warm to it. Nor had he relished having to run Freshstart in her absence, even though she’d promised him she would only be, after all, at the end of a phone if he needed her. But it had been yet another complication, and the more she’d got sucked into the whole business of marrying Theo Theakis, for however short a duration, the more reluctant she’d become—and the more inextricable her commitment had become, as well.

  Only the visible relief in her uncle’s eyes had kept her going. That, and one other thing. Since making the fateful decision she had spent minimal time with Theo, during which he had treated her with an impersonal formality that had managed to get her through the ordeal not just of the brief betrothal period but the wedding, as well. Despite the wedding being nothing more than a business arrangement it had been conducted with jaw-dropping extravagance. A lavish civil ceremony—to her uncle’s disappointment—had been fo
llowed by a huge reception, during which she’d stood at Theo’s side, stiff and disbelieving at what she had just done.

  It hadn’t been until they’d arrived at their honeymoon destination that the reality had hit her with the force of a sledgehammer. There had been something about being ushered into the honeymoon suite of a five-star hotel with the doors closing on her and Theo that had brought home to her the fact that in the eyes of the world he was her husband.

  There was, she had realised, staring in horror, only one bedroom—and only one bed.

  She had turned in the doorway. Theo had been behind her.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, seeing her aghast expression. His enquiry was brisk.

  ‘There’s only one bed,’ she said.

  His eyes glanced past her shoulder. Then they went to her face. For one brief moment something flickered in his eyes. Then it was gone. He gave a shrug.

  ‘It’s the honeymoon suite. What did you expect?’

  She took a step backwards. Already the bellhop had deposited their suitcases in the bedroom. One by each of the vast wardrobes. At the touch of a bell, the maid service would arrive to unpack them, lay out their nightclothes on the bed…

  Did he wear any?

  The thought formed in Vicky’s mind, and the moment it was there she could not undo it. Worse, an instant image accompanied it—Theo’s tall, lean frame, stripped of its five-thousand-euro suit…stripped right down to the hard, muscled flesh beneath…

  She gulped. No! Dear God, that was no way to begin this totally fake marriage! There was only one way to get through this to the other side—the way Theo had been behaving. As if they were nothing more than passing strangers, temporarily sharing accommodation.

  But that’s just what we are. Passing strangers…

  For the briefest moment emotion shafted through her. For an even briefer moment she recognised it for what it was—and was horror-struck. No—she could not possibly be feeling regret that they were nothing more than passing strangers.