by Penny Jordan
Lizzie’s heart sank.
When Ilios had warned her that his cousin was likely to be present she had been curious to meet him. Her private view was that Ilios, for perfectly good reasons rooted in their shared childhood, had turned him into a more unpleasant figure than he actually was.
It had taken less than a minute in Tino Manos’s company for her to recognise that she had been wrong. If anything, Ilios’s cousin was even more unpleasant than Ilios had said.
‘So,’ he announced now, with an unpleasant leer, ‘an opportunity to talk to the new bride, my cousin-in-law, without Ilios standing over us.’
As he spoke Tino’s gaze was fixed on her breasts, discreetly covered by the high neckline of the silk dress which wasn’t in the least bit provocative. Nevertheless, the way Ilios’s cousin was looking at her made Lizzie feel like crossing her arms over her chest, to protect her body from his unwanted visual inspection.
It was strange how you could sometimes know the minute you met a person whether or not you were going to like them, Lizzie reflected, and tried not to show how desperately she wanted to escape.
Short and thickset, with overly familiar sharp dark eyes, Tino Manos was the kind of man Lizzie knew she would have disliked no matter who he was related to. She could understand now all too easily why Ilios had spoken as he had when she had suggested that for the sake of his sons he should try to ‘mend fences’ with his cousin. No sane parent would ever want to entrust his vulnerable children’s emotional wellbeing and future to a man like this.
‘You are to be congratulated on having caught Ilios. You must have something very special indeed to have persuaded him to give up his freedom having always sworn that he would never marry.’
Lizzie fought hard not to show how offensive she found his unsubtle hints as to why Ilios might have married her and to remain detached. The way Tino was looking at her and the tone of his voice repelled her physically and emotionally, and it was with great relief that she heard Ilios answering his cousin in an even tone.
‘Yes, she does, Tino—and that something is my love.’
There was no need for Lizzie to act as she turned to her husband and gave him a speaking look of gratitude for his intervention.
‘Love? I thought that was something you’d foresworn.’
Tino was like a dog with its teeth into something it wasn’t going to release, Lizzie recognized.
‘So did I,’ Ilios agreed. ‘Until I met Lizzie.’
As he spoke he turned towards her, smiling tenderly down into her eyes, reaching out to take hold of her hand, rubbing his thumb gently over her skin in a gesture that both caressed and reassured.
‘And married her with such speed that you didn’t even have time to invite anyone to the wedding.’
Tino was suspicious, Lizzie felt sure. Her hand trembled against Ilios’s, and the look she gave him mirrored what she was feeling.
‘I didn’t want to risk losing her,’ Ilios responded, still smiling down at her. ‘I never want to lose her.’
As he spoke he bent his head and kissed her, his actions taking Lizzie by surprise. She knew that Ilios was putting on an act for his cousin, but still she had not expected this. Beneath his, her own lips softened and clung. Without intending to do so she placed her hand on his arm and moved closer to him, her whole body succumbing to her love for him, yearning toward him. Beneath the silk of her dress she could feel her nipples firming and aching, desire stirring and then quickening in the pit of her stomach. Unable to stop herself, she lifted her hand from his arm to his face, tracing the line of his jaw with achingly longing fingertips.
Ilios lifted his mouth from hers, causing Lizzie to open her eyes and look up at him. Her hand trembled against his skin, betraying her emotions, and her chest lifted with the demand from her lungs for extra oxygen. The words I want you so much and Let’s go home formed inside her head, but had to be denied speech.
‘So, how did the two of you meet?’
Tino’s voice was an unwanted intrusion, reminding Lizzie of her real role, as a paid-for pretend wife. She compared all the pain that that brought her with the impossible fantasy she longed for. A fantasy in which Ilios really did love, really had meant what he had just said, really had meant the way he had just kissed her…
‘Fate brought us together, Tino,’ Ilios answered his cousin, continuing, ‘Now, if you’ll excuse us…?’
Ilios was drawing her away, his hand resting against the hollow of her back as he guided her towards Ariadne Constantin—the woman who had smiled at her earlier.
Chapter Fourteen
LIZZIE had to wait until she and Ilios were in the car and on their way home, having arranged to have dinner with the Constantins later in the week, to tell him, ‘You were right about your cousin. It would be impossible to entrust the future of your sons to him. Do you think he believed what you said about us?’
‘I certainly hope so,’ Ilios answered.
Because he wanted to get rid of her, of course.
Ilios was annoyed with himself. Lizzie’s admission that she had been wrong about his cousin had reminded him of her earlier warnings about the vulnerability of his children should anything happen to him. Why should he be concerned about what she thought? Why should the dangerous thought that Lizzie would be a good mother find its way into his head? He knew he had made the right decision with regard to his own life, and Lizzie could have as many children as she wanted just so long as they weren’t his.
‘I’ll say goodnight,’ Lizzie told him at the apartment, as she went to put away her coat. ‘After all, I’m sure you have work you want to do.’
Why had she said that? Ilios wasn’t stupid—just the opposite, in fact. He was very perceptive, and he was bound to hear the acid note in her voice and guess that she was deliberately needling him. She held her breath, waiting for him to challenge her, but instead he turned away from her, leaving her feeling relieved that her reckless behaviour hadn’t provoked any comeback.
In the dressing room of the master bedroom she hung up her coat and warned herself that if he had demanded an explanation of her comment, he might easily have worked out that it had been provoked by her longing for him to take her to bed again, for his love.
It was all because of that kiss he had given her earlier in the evening—the way it had made her ache with the pain of her unrequited love for him.
In the living room Ilios opened his laptop. Lizzie was right, he did have work to do—and, as he had discovered many years ago, for him work wasn’t just the panacea that stopped all his pain, it was also his most constant and trusted companion, his closest ally in the fight to remain independent of all human emotional demands. It sustained and supported him, and he knew that within seconds of studying the screen in front of him all thoughts of Lizzie Wareham and the unwanted emotions she aroused within him would disappear.
Only they didn’t. No matter how hard he focussed on the screen, all he could see was Lizzie’s image inside his head.
What was going on? Whatever it was, he didn’t want it, Ilios thought savagely. There was no place in his life for it—or for her. But the harder he clung to that thought, to his denial of what he really wanted, the more his body ached for Lizzie. His body. That was all. That was all it was—a physical desire conjured up out of a lack of regular sex and the fact that he was sharing his living space with a woman. Any woman would have had the same effect on him. Any woman? Then why was it her image he could see inside his head, her body he ached to hold, her love for which he now hungered?
No. He categorically refused to accept the thought that had somehow slipped into his head. If he wanted anything from her then it was merely sex. Nothing more.
Prove it, an inner voice challenged him. Go to her now and take her in your arms, hold her and caress her and prove that when you do those things all you feel is a clinical sexual response, without anything emotional to pollute its physical purity.
Ilios looked towards the door. This was ridi
culous. He didn’t have anything to prove to anyone—least of all himself. But somehow he was on his feet and heading towards the master bedroom.
Lizzie was just getting into bed when the door opened and Ilios strode into the room.
‘I thought that tonight I’d have an early night myself,’ he told her, before disappearing into the dressing room.
Lying beneath the bedclothes, her stomach quivering with a mixture of uncertainty and excitement, Lizzie tried to breathe normally and relax, warning herself that Ilios probably hadn’t meant anything other than exactly what he had said.
There was no need for him to do this, Ilios assured himself, as he stood under the jets of the shower.
Was he afraid that he couldn’t prove what he had claimed? that inner voice goaded him.
No! Ilios denied. He stepped out of the shower and reached for a towel. If she hadn’t touched his face and looked at him the way she had earlier on this evening, when he’d been forced to put on that display of newly married bliss for Tino, then this wouldn’t be happening. He wouldn’t be aching the way he was for her now. No? If that was all that had made him ache for her, then what was his excuse for the fact that he had ached for her in the same way every night since that first time?
It was sex—that was all. Sex.
He flung down the towel. There was still time to stop this, still time to walk away and to use his will-power to silence the voice inside him.
There might still be time, but where was the desire? That, Ilios acknowledged as he opened the bedroom door, was all for Lizzie.
She was lying on Ilios’s side of the bed. How could she have forgotten?
‘I’m on your side of the bed,’ she told him as he came towards her. ‘I’ll move over.’
‘Why?’ Ilios asked her softly. ‘When we’re going to be sharing the same space?’
Lizzie felt her heart give a gigantic thump, and then her body filled with an anticipatory pleasure that poured through her like melted honey.
That was nothing compared with what she felt when Ilios got into the bed and drew her close to him. Like her, he was naked, and the feel of his skin against hers was a sensual caress almost beyond bearing.
This shouldn’t be happening. Not now, when she knew that she loved him. It had been different before, but now…Now she was deceiving him, taking from him something he would not want to give her. Ilios was touching her, stroking his fingertips down the sensitive flesh of her inner arm and making her shudder openly in responsive pleasure. Lizzie lifted her own hand to his shoulder, intending to tell him they must stop, but somehow the sensation of the warm, firm ball of male sinew and muscle beneath her touch overwhelmed her good intentions, seducing away her will-power to do anything other than give in to her own need.
Closing her eyes, Lizzie shaped the muscles of his back, her own nerve-endings recording the pleasure of each touch. Was male flesh really different from female flesh—thicker, sleeker, more warm, sensual satin than soft silk, somehow intrinsically male in its construction? Or was it merely her own response to knowing that the flesh she was touching belonged to Ilios that made her feel that?
As he kissed her and held her Ilios’s desire for her ran like ribbons of fire, until it filled his heart and his veins, spilling out into his touch so that it patterned his feelings for her on her flesh.
Cupped within his hand, the soft weight of her breast fitted as perfectly as though it had been created for his hold alone, and the erotic sensitivity of her nipple as it responded to his caress was responsive in that way only to his touch. The arch of her body inviting the possession of his was aroused only by and for him, as though they had been made for one another and only one another.
How could such a delicate touch have the power to drain from him the resistance of a lifetime? How could it seem to offer sanctuary and comfort? How could it possibly have the power to transform him from a man to whom emotions were the enemy to a man who craved…? A man who craved what?
Ilios moved restlessly against his own thoughts, against his own weakness in allowing himself this unfamiliar need to give the essence of himself into the safekeeping of another. He cupped Lizzie’s face so that he could kiss her. Kissing her and feeling her response to him re-established his role as the one in charge of what was happening. And his was the responsibility for them both, Ilios warned himself—a responsibility he had already neglected once.
Beneath Ilios’s kiss Lizzie breathed a sigh of delight. It was impossible not to let her hand follow its own inclinations and drift down the lean length of his body, past the flat male curve of his hip, and then come to rest at the base of his spine. The pressure of Ilios’s mouth on her own increased, his arms tightening around her as he half rolled her beneath him. Eagerly Lizzie parted her lips, her tongue caressing his, her fingertips stroking the shallow hollow where his spine ended.
Was it her love for Ilios that made the intimacy they were now sharing so heart-achingly intense? Lizzie wondered emotionally. It must be; there could be no other explanation, surely, for the sense of deep intimacy and connection she felt towards him.
She moaned softly with delight as Ilios moved over her, answering the pressure of her growing need. The pleasure from his hands spreading her thighs and his lips tasting her sex took from her both the ability and the will to do anything other than give herself over to him as he moved up her body, his flesh gleaming in the moonlight, erect and taut. Lizzie reached out towards it, encircling the swollen head of his sex, engrossed in the sensation of possessing him.
What had been pleasure had now become a fierce beating urgency—a primeval drive strong enough to crush all obstacles in its way.
How could the pleasure of another’s touch be so intense that it invaded every part of him, making his nerve-endings cry out within him under its onslaught? He wanted Lizzie to go on caressing him as she was for ever. He wanted her to stroke and know every bit of him. He wanted—As if a sheer drop had appeared out of nowhere in a misty landscape Ilios’s thoughts skidded to a halt as he recognised the danger he was facing. He could not, would not allow himself to feel like this. It went against everything he had worked for and planned for. It must not happen. It had to be destroyed.
Abruptly Ilios forced himself to release Lizzie, pulling back from her, leaving her without a backward look or a word of explanation.
Ilios had gone. She was alone in the bed that had so recently been such a wonderful place of intimacy and shared desire but which was now a place of harsh reality and emptiness.
Curled up against her pain, Lizzie tensed her jaw against the agonised cry of despair burning her throat. What had she expected? That the impossible would happen and Ilios would declare his love for her? She was twenty-seven, not seventeen, and surely what had happened to her young sister had shown her the damage that could be done when a woman was foolish enough to believe that her love for a man had the power to change him, somehow conjure from him a reciprocal love for her.
Ilios did not love her. He had made that plain in the way that he had recoiled from her, rejecting her with that look of furious disbelief that had told her more clearly than any words that he not only didn’t love her, but he actively wished she was not there.
Chapter Fifteen
LIZZIE suppressed a small guilty yawn, afraid she might actually fall asleep in her dinner if she wasn’t careful.
She was regretting now having agreed that it was a good idea, at the reception a week before, when Ariadne Constantin had suggested that the four or them go for dinner together, to a new restaurant that had recently opened to rave reviews. Especially in view of the distance that Ilios had deliberately created between them. He barely looked at her any more, never mind spoke to her or touched her. There had not been any further invitations to accompany him on site visits during the day, and nor was he discussing any aspect of his life or his plans with her any more. It was, Lizzie acknowledged bleakly, as though he hated her being there and bitterly resented the fact he had had to ma
rry her—even though it had been his own decision.
The food, a Greek take on Australian-Eastern fusion cooking, was delicious, and the light sauces accompanying the fish and meat courses mouthwateringly tempting, but Lizzie had no appetite for them. She was far too unhappy. Was her constant tiredness perhaps a symptom of the misery she was feeling? Was that why she yearned to close her eyes and blot out reality?
Just remembering the curtness in his voice and the way he had turned away from her now was enough to close up her throat and sting the back of her eyes with the embarrassing threat of unwanted tears. Her reaction was surely more that of a hormonal teenager than an adult woman, and certainly not one she could ever remember having before. But then she had never loved Ilios before.
Lizzie watched enviously as Ariadne and her husband got up to dance on the restaurant’s small dance floor. It must be heaven to be held so close in the arms of the man you loved in a small and discreet public demonstration of the love between you. Her body trembled in response to the intensity of her emotions.
The Constantins were returning to the table. Stavros Constantin was ordering more wine. Lizzie shook her head when the waiter moved to fill her glass. She hadn’t touched alcohol since the night she had drunk champagne and she and Ilios made love—had had sex, she corrected herself fiercely. That was all it had been—sex—lust—that was what she must remember. She certainly wasn’t going to risk having a drink now. In her current emotionally vulnerable frame of mind there was no saying what she might attempt to do, or how much she might try to humiliate herself once they were alone together.
The other three drank their wine, then Ariadne got up, asking if, like her, Lizzie wanted to visit the ladies’.
Nodding her head, Lizzie got up too. Anything would be better than having to sit next to Ilios, knowing how eager he was to get rid of her.