by Penny Jordan
Lizzie had to gulp back the chagrin she felt at being reproved by Ilios for her lack of awareness of the needs of others—chagrin that was all the more intense because previously she had seen the one to point out that lack of awareness to him.
‘But I don’t want to share a…a bed,’ she protested. How ridiculous that she had to struggle to force herself to say the word bed. She, an interior designer, who in the course of her work was perfectly familiar with those three small letters. Familiar with the letters, but not familiar at all with the way the word bed made her feel when she was in the presence of Ilios Manos.
‘Do you think I do?’ Ilios challenged her, immediately making her feel humiliated. ‘We don’t have any choice. Fortunately it is a very large bed,’ he told her grimly.
She should, of course, be delighted and relieved that her presence in his bed was so unwelcome, Lizzie told herself. She wanted and needed him not to want her—if only to protect her from her own feelings after all. But instead she was filled with an explosive mix of emotions and sensations—heady excitement, tingling suspense, an irrational and rebellious aching longing that defied all her attempts to subdue it, and that was only the start of it. She could have written a list a metre long of all the effects Ilios was having on her as a woman.
She wasn’t immature or unread; she knew that it was perfectly possible for a human being to experience sexual desire without necessarily being in love with the person they desired. However, she had never somehow expected to be one of those human beings who did feel like that. She had assumed that only those women with a high sex drive were likely to have their hormones drooling with longing for a man to whom they had no intention of becoming emotionally attached. But now, of course, she knew better. Much, much better. And what she knew told her very definitely that she could not risk sharing a bed with Ilios. Not under any circumstances. Of course she could and would attempt to control her feelings, but what if she failed? What if she was tempted to—? But, no—she must not, under any circumstances, allow those tormenting images she had viewed before to slip into her head.
It was a large bed, Ilios had said. But far from tamping down the fire running riot inside her, his words had only fed it. A large bed meant more space in which to enjoy the sensuality of all the delights the human body could provide.
Lizzie could feel the prickle of the nervous sweat breaking out on her skin. This couldn’t go on. If it did she might well end up doing something she would not only regret but which would cause her humiliation and shame. She felt sick with anxiety. She could not share a bed with him. She simply didn’t trust herself to be able to do so without giving in to temptation. Even if by some miracle she could control herself whilst she was awake, who knew what might happen whilst she was asleep? It was horribly easy for her to imagine herself moving closer to him, seeking his body in her sleep, wanting him, and then waking to find herself touching him.
She drew in a shuddering breath of despair. ‘I really don’t think that we should share a bed,’ she told Ilios carefully.
She could see immediately that he didn’t like what she was saying.
‘Why not?’ Ilios demanded. Had she somehow guessed that she aroused him, despite his determination not to admit that even to himself? Did she think that she was so desirable, so irresistible, and he so weak that he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from turning that arousal into something more intimate?
‘I just don’t think that it would be a good idea,’ Lizzie responded, wishing desperately that he would stop pressing her.
‘Because you dare to imagine that I might desire you?’ Ilios accused her. ‘Despite what I have already said about there being no intimacy between us?’
‘No,’ Lizzie denied immediately. ‘It isn’t that.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t say.’
‘And I am afraid that you are going to have to—or take the consequences,’ Ilios warned her quietly.
Lizzie exhaled very slowly. What he meant was that she was going to have to share his bed unless she came up with a cast-iron reason why she should not do. Her reason might be solid, but her courage certainly wasn’t. Of all the unwanted situations she could have had to face, this had to be the worst of them. She was now in a position where she had to defend herself from her own desire for a man who didn’t want her by revealing that desire to him. It was her only means of protecting herself from it.
She had never felt more vulnerable or self-conscious, but the truth was that she needed Ilios’s help to stop her from making her situation even worse. Once he was aware how she felt, she knew he would take all the steps necessary to ensure temptation was removed out of her way. Desperate situations called for desperate measures, and there was surely no more desperate measure than the one she was going to have to take now. Rather like firefighters tackling a fire that threatened to destroy everything in its path, she was going to have to create a fire-break by deliberately destroying part of her own defences in the hope that doing so would ultimately protect her from herself.
‘It isn’t your desire that worries me,’ she told him truthfully, deliberately emphasising the word ‘your’.
Chapter Eight
LIZZIE’S admission was so unexpected, so breathtakingly straightforward and honest, that it took several seconds for Ilios to accept exactly what she had said.
He looked at her, watching the way the colour came and went in her face, seeing the bruised look of misery that shadowed her eyes, and something came to life inside him that he didn’t recognise.
Why didn’t he say something—anything? Lizzie thought anxiously, even if it was just to reject her.
However, when he did speak it was slowly, spacing out the words.
‘Are you trying to tell me that you don’t want to share my bed because you want me?’ he asked in disbelief.
Lizzie’s throat had gone so tight that it ached with her tension.
‘Yes. That is, I think I do. I’m not used to feeling…that is to wanting…I’ve never actually lusted after anyone before,’ she admitted, red-faced.
‘“Lusted after”?’
Now Lizzie could see that she had shocked him.
‘I’m sorry!’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t want it to happen, but now you can see, can’t you, how difficult it would be? I’ve really tried not to…to think about it, but sometimes it just sort of overwhelms me. I’m afraid that if we were to share a bed, then…Well, what I mean is I know that you don’t want anything to happen between us. I didn’t want to have to say anything.’
She gave a small twisted smile, whilst Ilios listened to her with a growing sense of incredulity and disbelief.
‘What woman would?’ Lizzie continued self-deprecatingly. ‘But at least now that you do know, I can rely on you to…to help me…to ensure that—well, that nothing happens.’
Ilios could hardly believe his own ears. Was she really standing there and telling him that she wouldn’t share his bed because she was afraid that the sexual temptation of his proximity would be too much for her self-control? Did she really think that he was the kind of man who would allow a woman to play the role of hunter in the chase between the sexes? Immediately Ilios wished he had not used such a metaphor, because it had somehow or other caused some very sensual images indeed to break loose inside his imagination—images that were having exactly the opposite effect on him he assumed Lizzie had expected her admission to have.
Her head bowed, Lizzie admitted, ‘I know you must be shocked. I was shocked too. That was part of the reason why I didn’t want to agree to marry you.’
‘You knew then?’ Ilios challenged her.
Lizzie swallowed against the painful lump of anguish lodged in her throat. I knew the minute I saw you, she could have said. But of course she mustn’t.
‘I knew that there was something…’ she told him carefully. ‘But I thought it would go away.’
‘And it didn’t?’
She shook her head.
‘I thought that I could fight against it, that it would be like fighting the hurdles I had to overcome when our parents died, and I will, only at the moment, after tonight and the champagne, I just don’t think…’
‘So it’s only tonight that you don’t want to spend in my bed?’
‘No, it’s not just tonight.’
‘So it isn’t just the champagne either?’
Lizzie couldn’t speak. She couldn’t look at him, and she couldn’t run from him either. All she could do was simply shake her head.
‘I’d be lying if I said that I’d never been propositioned by a woman before, and I’d be lying even more if I said that I’d either welcomed or enjoyed the experience,’ Ilios told her abruptly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m a man who does his own hunting, who selects the woman he wants and pursues her—not the other way around.’
Lizzie’s head came up. ‘I wasn’t propositioning you,’ she denied fiercely. ‘I was just trying to explain—to warn you.’ When he made no response she continued determinedly, ‘I could sleep in the guest room, and then in the morning…’
Ilios was shaking his head.
‘No. Now that I am aware of the situation you may rest assured that you can safely leave it to me to take the right steps to deal with it. That was what you wanted, after all, wasn’t it? For me to take responsibility for the situation?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie was forced to agree.
‘Right. I have some work to do—costings to check—and some e-mails to send. So why don’t you make yourself at home in what will now be our bedroom and stop worrying? It is a husband’s duty to protect his wife, is it not?’ Ilios’s whole manner was dismissive, and indicated that he no longer felt the issue worthy of discussion.
‘I’m not your wife—and anyway, a lot of women would take exception to the idea that they might need to be protected,’ Lizzie felt bound to point out.
‘This is Greece,’ Ilios told her firmly. ‘And you are both worrying needlessly and imagining problems where none need exist.’
If she did go to bed now, with any luck she would be asleep before Ilios came to join her. In all probability that was why he was staying up to do some work, Lizzie reflected, as she picked up her coat and nodded in acknowledgement of what he had said.
Ilios’s bedroom was twice the size of the guest suite, with both a bathroom and a wetroom attached to it. Not that Lizzie allowed herself to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary in the modern bathroom, with its limestone floor and walls, and its huge bowl-shaped bath.
The bed, as Ilios had told her, was very big—wide enough, surely, for two parents and at least four children; plenty wide enough for two adults to sleep in totally separate. Even so, Lizzie looked at the large sofa on the other side of the bedroom and then, still wrapped in her towel, went over to it. One by one she carried the cushions from it over to the bed, where she laid them meticulously down the middle of the immaculate pale grey silk and cotton cover.
There! That should stop her, should she attempt to do anything silly in her sleep.
Now all she had to do was find the cotton pyjamas she had brought with her from home.
Ten minutes later, wearing the tee shirt top and cut-off trousers, Lizzie pulled back the bedclothes and got into ‘her’ half of the bed.
Ilios rubbed his hands over his face to ease the tiredness from it and then looked at his watch. Almost two a.m. Lizzie should be asleep by now. Had he really needed to do this? an inner voice scoffed at him. After all, he was perfectly capable of ensuring that nothing happened that he did not want to happen. Wasn’t he? Or maybe, given the lengths he was going to to avoid joining her, he wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be.
He looked at the sofa. If that was how he felt, then he had better not take any risks, hadn’t he? Picking up the cashmere throw that was draped just so over one of the sofas, Ilios lay down with the throw over himself, flicking the remote to switch off the lights.
This was certainly not something he had envisaged when he’d decided that Lizzie would make him a perfect pretend wife, Ilios thought grimly. Sleeping on the sofa whilst she occupied his bed, in order to protect her from herself…
Chapter Nine
‘COFFEE.’
It was a statement, not a question, and the familiar darkly smoky male voice in which it was delivered brought Lizzie abruptly out of her sleep.
Ilios, dressed in a white towelling bathrobe and smelling discreetly of clean, warm male flesh, was standing beside the bed—her side of the bed—holding out to her a stylish white china mug, obviously wanting her to take it from him. Obediently Lizzie struggled out of her warm cocoon of bedclothes to sit up, reaching for the mug with one hand whilst keeping the bedclothes pressed to her with the other.
‘I’m still not safe, then?’ Ilios drawled, a gleam of something approaching amusement in the golden eagle eyes that held Lizzie spellbound.
He was actually smiling! Delight flooded through her, causing her to smile back at him before she could stop herself as she took the mug he was holding out to her. Until recollection of their conversation of the night before made Lizzie groan inwardly, and curse whatever had been responsible for her reckless folly.
Unable to come up with a suitably crushing and mature response, she looked away from him, almost sloshing coffee onto the bedding when she saw that the sofa cushions she had carefully put in place last night had gone.
Her eyes wide with disbelief and censure, she accused Ilios, ‘You took the cushions away.’
‘I had no other choice. I’m Greek! I have to think what it would do to my reputation as a man if Maria arrived and found that you had barricaded yourself on one side of the bed in isolation.’
‘You could have told her that we’d had a quarrel.’
‘I could have,’ Ilios agreed. ‘But there is a saying that you should never sleep with your anger or without your wife. Maria is of the old school, and she would believe that the more intense the quarrel, the more passionate the making up. In Maria’s eyes a quarrel between man and wife can result in only one thing—the arrival of a new baby nine months later.’
Lizzie shuddered inwardly and trembled outwardly. Why had he said that? He must know the effect it was likely to have on her after what she had told him. If this was his way of ensuring that she didn’t give way to her desire for him, then Lizzie didn’t think it was going to work very well.
‘There must be something you can say to Maria that would make her accept that we should sleep in separate rooms—after all, we aren’t even married yet.’
‘No, there is nothing,’ Ilios told her. ‘You must know that in Greece, especially this part of Greece, a man’s maleness is something he must prove to all those who know him in order to win and maintain their respect. That means being the master of his own house. No Greek male would ever publicly admit that his wife’s sexual advances were unwelcome.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that you that you told her that,’ Lizzie informed him indignantly.
Ilios looked down at the bed. Make-up free, with her hair down round her shoulders and the part of her body that wasn’t swathed in bedcovers shrouded by what looked like an oversized tee shirt, Lizzie looked nothing like a temptress of any kind. So why was his body telling him in no uncertain terms that she was, and that it was very tempted by her?
Absently glancing around the room, Lizzie noticed something she had not taken in before—the bedding on other side of the bed was pristinely neat. Untouched, in fact.
She turned accusingly to Ilios. ‘You didn’t sleep with me, did you?’
When his eyebrows rose she corrected herself hastily.
‘I mean you didn’t sleep in this bed last night.’
‘No. I didn’t.’
‘So where did you sleep, then?’
‘On the sofa. It was late when I finished working, and I didn’t want to disturb you. You see, you were sleeping on my side of the bed. I could have moved you in your sleep—without waking you, of c
ourse—but, given what you had told me, I didn’t think it wise to run the risk of you waking up in my arms and thinking…’
‘That I’d reached for you in my sleep?’ Lizzie guessed.
‘Something like that,’ Ilios agreed tersely. What he had been going to say was that he hadn’t wanted her waking up and thinking that he returned her desire and wanted her. Nor was he going to admit that the thought of holding her in his arms had tormented his body with such a savagely fierce sexual ache for her through the long, slow hours of the night that he hadn’t been able to sleep.
‘I’ve been thinking that perhaps we should just be engaged. Not actually get married. And then—well, you could tell Maria that I’m not the kind of woman who shares a bed with her husband before he is her husband,’ Lizzie told Ilios.
‘I need a wife, not a fiancée. You know that. And besides, it’s too late.’
‘Too late?’ Lizzie’s heart had started to thump uncomfortably heavily. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We’ve got an appointment at eleven-thirty this morning with the notary who has arranged all the paperwork for our wedding. He will accompany us to the town hall, so that the formalities can be finalized, and then we can be married.’
‘Today? So soon? But surely that isn’t possible? I mean, doesn’t it take longer than that to arrange things?’
‘Normally speaking, yes, but when I explained to my friends at the town hall how impatient I am to make you my wife, they very kindly speeded things up for us. Manos Construction is currently contracted to do some refurbishment work on certain parts of the city, and the local government is keen to get that work finished ahead of schedule.’
‘You mean you bribed them into making it possible for us to get married so quickly?’ Lizzie accused him.
‘No, I did not “bribe” them, as you put it.’Anger flashed in Ilios’s eyes. ‘I do not conduct my business by way of bribes—I thought I had already made that clear to you. All I did was agree to do what I could to ensure the contract is finished ahead of time and to the highest standard. Something I always insist on. We are subject to earthquakes here. It is always important that this is taken into account on construction projects, although some less than scrupulous contractors do try to cut corners. Now, I shall get dressed whilst you finish your coffee, and then leave you in peace to get dressed yourself.’