by Penny Jordan
Peace? How was it possible for her to have anything remotely approaching peace now that she had met Ilios? Lizzie asked herself grimly just over an hour later, when she stood in the dressing room she was now sharing with her soon-to-be husband, studying her own reflection.
She was wearing an off-white wool dress with a bubble skirt and a neat boxy matching jacket—the nearest thing she had been able to find amongst her new clothes that looked anything like ‘bridal’. Not that this was a proper wedding, or she a proper bride, of course. She must remember that. She was hardly likely to forget it, was she? It had been a shock to learn that they were getting married so quickly, but she suspected that she should have guessed Ilios wouldn’t want to waste any time putting his plans into practice.
She walked towards the door. It was a strange feeling to know that the next time she looked at her reflection in this mirror she would not be Lizzie Wareham any more. She would be Mrs Ilios Manos.
Chapter Ten
‘REMEMBER that you agreed to this,’ Ilios warned Lizzie as they stood together on the steps leading of the town hall.
Ilios’s notary, who had been with them the whole time whilst the simple ceremony making them man and wife had been taking place, stood back discreetly as Ilios took her arm.
Not trusting herself to speak, Lizzie nodded her head and forced a brief tight smile. It was all very well telling herself that it wasn’t a real marriage, nor a proper wedding, nor Ilios her real husband—there had still been that dreadful moment when they had stood together before the official marrying them and inside her head she had seen the small church in the village where she had grown up, and herself dressed in white, with her father standing proudly at her side, her mother fussing over her dress and her sisters laughing, Ilios watching them smiling, and she had felt a tearing, aching sense of loss strike her right to her heart.
‘Come,’ Ilios urged her.
The sun was shining, drying pavements still wet from the rain that had fallen whilst they were inside the building, and the breeze was cool. Summer, with its heat, was still many weeks away, and for the first time since she had agreed to marry Ilios Lizzie longed desperately for those weeks to fly past, so that she would be free to go home to her family. It had felt so wrong, so lonely getting married without them—even if it was a pretend marriage—and she ached with nostalgia for her childhood and homesickness for her sisters and the twins.
The sunlight shone brightly on the newness of her wedding ring. She must stop feeling sorry for herself and remember why she had agreed to marry Ilios, she told herself—why she had had to marry him. He was still cupping her elbow, very much the attentive bride-groom—no doubt for the benefit of the notary to whom he was now speaking in Greek. Both of them were looking at her, their conversation excluding her, reminding her that she was an outsider in a foreign land and very much alone.
The pressure of Ilios’s hold on her arm urged her closer to him, as though…as though he had somehow sensed what she was feeling and wanted to reassure her—just as a real husband would have done. That, of course, was ridiculous. Even if he had guessed how she was feeling he was hardly likely to care, was he? She could feel his thumb lightly rubbing her skin through her jacket. He was probably so used to caressing his lovers that he didn’t even realise what he was doing, Lizzie thought waspishly, as she tried to ignore the effect his absent-minded caress was having on her body. He was turning towards her, smiling warmly at her—a false smile, for his audience, of course.
‘Forgive us for speaking in Greek, agapi mou,’ he told her. ‘We were just discussing some business. But now, Nikos, I am impatient to take my beautiful wife for a celebratory lunch.’
The notary had soon gone, and Ilios was handing her back into his car.
Lizzie had assumed that Ilios would take her straight back to the apartment, and leave her to go on to his office, but instead he parked the car in a convenient space outside an elegant-looking restaurant.
‘I didn’t think you were serious about us celebrating,’ Lizzie told him.
‘I wasn’t—but we do have to eat,’ he pointed out dismissively, before getting out of the car and coming round to her door to open it for her.
They might not be publicly celebrating their marriage, but the keen-eyed restaurant owner who had greeted Ilios so warmly on their arrival must have noticed something—her new wedding ring, perhaps? Lizzie acknowledged. Her heart sank as he approached their table now, with a beaming smile and champagne. Of course she couldn’t possibly offend him by refusing to accept his kindness, but even so she couldn’t help glancing at Ilios as their glasses were filled with the sparkling liquid.
She wished that she hadn’t when he lifted his glass towards her own and said softly, and very meaningfully, ‘To us.’
‘To us,’ Lizzie echoed weakly, quickly sipping her own drink to disguise the fact that her hand was trembling. She mustn’t blame herself too much for her reaction, Lizzie tried to comfort herself. After all a marriage, even a pretend marriage, was bound to have some effect on a person’s emotions—just as a man like Ilios was bound to have an effect on a woman’s awareness of her own sexuality.
The toast didn’t have to be taken as a toast to them as a couple, and she was sure the deliberate emphasis Ilios had put on it was a private reminder to her that he was toasting them as separate individuals rather than a couple in their newly official union.
She found that even though she had been hungry her emotions were now too stirred up for her to have much appetite for the delicious food. Desperate for something to distract her from her unwanted and growing awareness that, no matter how illogical it might be, the fact that she and Ilios were married had produced within her an unexpected feeling of commitment to him—a sort of protective, deeply female need to reach out to him and heal the damage that had been done to his emotions and his life—Lizzie glanced round the restaurant.
Her attention focussed on a family group at another table. The parents, a pretty dark-haired young mother and a smiling paternalistic-looking father, were accompanied by three children: a little boy who looked slightly older than the twins, a girl who Lizzie guessed must be about four, and what was obviously a fairly new baby in a car seat buggy combo drawn up to the table. Although the children were not all the same sex, the relationship between them reminded her of her own childhood. The little boy, serious-looking and obviously proud of his seniority, was keeping an older-brotherly eye on the little girl and the baby, whilst the little girl was leaning over the buggy, cooing at the baby. Over their heads the parents exchanged amused and tender smiles.
Hastily Lizzie reached for her champagne, to try and swallow back the huge lump of aching emotion forming in her throat. Not for herself—she and her sisters had experienced the kind of love she could see emanating from this family. No, her sadness and pain was for those other children—Ilios’s sons.
Before she could change her mind she asked Ilios, ‘Are you sure there isn’t some way that you and your cousin could mend the broken fences between you and get your relationship on a happier footing?’
‘If that’s a roundabout way of trying to tell me that you’re anxious to bring our marriage to an end as soon as possible, then—’
‘No, it isn’t that.’ Lizzie stopped him. ‘It’s the children—your children,’ she emphasized, when she saw Ilios look frowningly towards the table she had been studying.
Leaning across the table, she asked him quietly, ‘Have you thought about what might happen to them if anything were to happen to you? They’d have no one—no father, no mother, obviously, no family Ilios. No one in their lives to give them a sense of continuity and security and…and…They would have no one to tell them their history, no one to tell them about you. I know that financially they would be protected, but that isn’t enough. They’d be dreadfully alone.’
Ilios was looking down at his plate. She had infuriated him, Lizzie expected, and no doubt he was going to tell her that the future of his sons was
none of her business.
When he did lift his head and look at her Lizzie found it impossible to gauge what he was thinking from his grim expression.
‘So you think that I should—what was the phrase you used?—“mend fences” with my cousin so that in the eventuality of my unexpected demise he will open his arms and his heart to my sons and become a second father to them?’
Put like that, what she had said did sound rather like something out of a sentimental film, Lizzie admitted.
‘Family is important.’ She insisted.
‘What if I were to do as you suggest and my sons ended up being humiliated and tormented by my cousin, just as I was myself? What if he abused the trust I placed in him for his own financial benefit?’
‘That’s what I meant about wondering if it was possible for you to mend fences with him,’ Lizzie defended herself. ‘Now, before it’s too late.’
‘I see. I become reconciled with my cousin, and you get a quick escape from a commitment and an agreement you’re obviously already wanting to renege on?’
‘No! I am prepared to stay married to you for as long as it takes.’
Ilios arched one eyebrow in a silent but unmistakably mocking query, and then asked her softly, ‘As long as what takes?’
Lizzie felt like stamping her foot. Ignoring her own feeling of self-consciousness, she told him fiercely, ‘You know perfectly well what I was trying to say. I am not attempting to renege on our agreement. If I did that you’d be within your moral rights to demand repayment of the money you gave me—money I need to ensure my family’s financial security. I know you’ve said that you don’t believe in love, but to deny your own sons the emotional protection they will need…’ She hesitated, and then decided to ignore her anxiety about angering him. If she was to be his children’s champion then she must do so without considering her own position. ‘Surely you can’t want them to suffer in their childhood as you did?’
Ilios looked at her in silence, whilst she held her breath—waiting for his response.
When it came, it was both unexpected and underhanded.
‘Obviously it isn’t only sexual lust for my body that champagne arouses in you, but a lust for plain speaking.’
‘What I said doesn’t have anything to do with me drinking champagne,’ she said vehemently.
‘No? Don’t the words in vino veritas mean anything to you?’
In wine there is truth. But it wasn’t the champagne that had loosened her inhibitions. It was seeing that small happy family. Only somehow Lizzie didn’t think that Ilios would believe her—no matter how much she tried to correct his interpretation of the situation.
Mend fences with his cousin? Ilios thought grimly of the way Tino had deliberately tormented him as a child—the way he had taunted him by pointing out that he had a mother, aunts and uncles and cousins, whilst Ilios’s own mother had hated him so much she had abandoned him. Of course Tino had had his own cross to bear. Their grandfather had never let him forget that his father had died a coward.
To their grandfather male descendants had simply been there to fulfil and continue the Manos destiny: to own Villa Manos, the land on which it stood, and continue their once proud history. Nothing and no one else mattered.
But Lizzie had had a point. No man was immortal, and if he should die before his sons were old enough to manage their own affairs there would be plenty of vultures waiting to pick at the vulnerable flesh of their inheritance.
He and Lizzie looked at life and humankind from opposite viewpoints. She believed passionately in the power of love, in parenthood and families. He did not. When called upon to do so she had put her siblings first, and every word she spoke about them showed that she would do anything and everything she could to safeguard and protect them. Just as she would her children, should she become a mother? Ilios frowned. That did not accord with his own beliefs about her sex. He could concede that Lizzie might be that one rare exception. But so what?
The trouble was there were beginning to be far too many so whats in his reactions to Lizzie Wareham, Ilios acknowledged, remembering that he had asked himself the same question when he had been forced to admit that he was sexually aware of her—sexually aware of her and aroused by her presence. He had no rational explanation for the way she made him think and feel, and trying to find one only served to increase his awareness of the effect she was having on him and his desire to crush it.
And yet, as much as he wanted to impose his will on his awareness of her, his body refused to accept it. Quite the opposite in fact. The ache that had been tormenting him flared from a dull presence to a sharp, predatory male clamour. Totally against what he had believed he knew about himself, her admission of desire for him had increased his own desire for her rather than destroy it. Increased it, enhanced it, and made him want her with a suddenly very driven intensity that he had never experienced before.
Ilios looked at Lizzie’s half-empty glass of champagne, and then at the bottle still in the ice bucket. Picking it up, he told her, ‘You’d better finish this, otherwise we’ll offend Spiros—and I don’t want to end up never being able to get a table here again.’
Lizzie shook her head.
‘I’ve already had one full glass,’ she reminded him.
‘And two might turn your thoughts to your uncontrollable lust for my body and a whole catalogue of things you’d like to do to it?’ he taunted her.
Before Lizzie could formulate a suitable crushing response he continued easily, as he filled her glass, ‘It seems to me that the best way to quench your sexual curiosity would be to satisfy it.’
What the hell had made him say that? Ilios challenged himself grimly. But of course he already knew the answer. Lizzie wasn’t the only one battling against a desire she didn’t want. Maybe what he’d suggested was the best way for them both to rid themselves of a need that neither of them wished to have.
What was happening? Was she hallucinating or was Ilios actually suggesting…? No, she must be imagining it.
‘Is…is that an offer?’ she managed to ask Ilios, in what she hoped was a voice that suggested she knew it wasn’t.
Only she was left thoroughly bemused at his response.
‘If you want it to be.’
Did she? What was happening here? Was Ilios really implying that he wanted her? Physically? Sexually? In bed?
Lizzie refused to answer him. She simply didn’t dare.
She didn’t like the way Ilios was looking at her. And she certainly didn’t like the way that look was making tiny rivulets of giddy excitement and longing rush through her body, like teenage fans rushing towards an idol, oblivious to reality or danger. Neither did she like the way she suddenly and overpoweringly wanted to look at Ilios’s mouth and imagine…She could hardly breathe, barely think—at least not of anything that didn’t involve her getting up close and personal with Ilios and discovering if that full bottom lip did mean what it was supposed to mean. What would happen were she to touch it with her fingertips, taste it with her tongue, explore it and…?
In desperation Lizzie took what she hoped would be a cooling gulp of her champagne. She certainly needed something to dampen down the sensual heat that had taken hold of her. Ilios was still looking at her—looking at her as though he knew every word she was thinking and every thing she was feeling. No, she did not like that look and all it suggested at all. Lizzie drew in a shaky breath of air as her conscience prodded her. Well, all right, she did like it—but she didn’t like the fact that she liked it.
The truth was, Lizzie realised ten minutes later, as Ilios held opened the car door for her, that much as she ached for the experience of having sex with Ilios, and eager as she was to explore and appreciate every bit of him, she was still female enough to want him to make the first move and show her that he wanted her as much as if not more than she wanted him. She needed to know his desire for her. She needed to feel that he wanted her so much that he could not deny that wanting. Only then would she truly
be able to indulge her own desire for him. And of course that was not going to happen—was it?
But what if it did? Ilios could be right, and the best way for her to get over the longing that was tormenting her was for her to go to bed with him. Hot excitement kicked through her body. She was a woman, she reminded herself—she was twenty-seven years old, after all—not a teenager. She knew perfectly well what the situation was and she couldn’t claim any different. Did she really want to go back home without experiencing what Ilios offered her just because she had panicked and wanted to be wooed? Wouldn’t she, years from now, look back in regret, or even worse in yearning, for what she had not had? It was perfectly safe, after all, and so was she. It wasn’t as though she was in love with Ilios and thought that somehow having sex with him—making love with him—was going to change him and cause him to fall head over heels in love with her.
No, this was purely about sexual desire. It was about answering, exploring, satisfying the need that had been aching, growing inside her from their first meeting. No one but the two of them need ever know that she had briefly stepped out of the role she had cast for herself after the death of her parents—a role that meant that she must always be the responsible eldest sister, monitoring her own behaviour in order that she could set their family standards and guide her younger siblings. Here, with Ilios, it was safe for her to experience being what in her real life she could never be—sensually eager, responsive to her own desires and those of her partner, without having to think about anything or anyone else.
What possible harm could there be in it? If it happened it would be a one-off, that was all—an exciting, tantalising sensual adventure. If Ilios should repeat his offer, was she going to be brave enough to do what she knew she wanted to do? Or was she going to be a coward who would spend the rest of her life regretting her hesitation?