by Lynne Graham
Ella, Callie and Aristandros climbed into one of the cars waiting by the harbour while their luggage was stowed in another. Ella gazed out at the turquoise-blue sea washing the inviting white strand that circled more than half the island and, appreciating its emptiness, said, ‘Are you still trying to keep the tourists out?’
‘Why would I want to share paradise?’
‘It would be the easiest way of revitalising the economy and persuading the younger people to stay on. A small, exclusive development near the town wouldn’t interfere with your privacy.’
‘Remind me to keep you well away from the town council. They’d elect you immediately,’ Aristandros asserted. ‘In recent years, I’ve brought in several businesses to provide employment, and the population is currently thriving—without the tourist trade and its attendant problems.’
Ella gave him a sunny smile. ‘I’m sure you know what works best in your own personal little kingdom.’
‘I do not regard the island as my kingdom,’ Aristandros growled.
‘I didn’t mean to be controversial,’ Ella declared unconvincingly.
Aristandros skated a long, reproving forefinger along one slender thigh clad in coffee-coloured linen trousers. ‘Liar. You always liked getting under my skin, moli mou.’
‘Constant agreement and admiration is bad for you. Too many people behave as if your every decision is an act of sheer brilliance.’
‘It usually is,’ Aristandros fielded. ‘That’s how I make so much money.’
Involuntarily, Ella grinned, for his self-assurance was immense and always bold as brass. She studied the big house perched like a land-locked ship on the cypress-studded hillside. The villa, designed by his late mother, overlooked a secluded cove where the clear waters reflected the sky.
‘I have a project for you while you’re here,’ he said, greeting the staff assembled in the hall while Ella retrieved Callie from surging towards the stairs as fast as her little feet could carry her. ‘Revamp the house and drag it out of the eighties. It always reminds me of a film set.’
The big screen was undoubtedly what had inspired his mother’s opulent choice of décor, and the vast sunken living-area, marble floors and theatrical Greek columns. Ella was amazed that he had still not had the house renovated, and it made her wonder if he was more sentimental than he would ever be willing to admit. Doria’s portrait still adorned one wall, along with many photographs of her taken with famous people.
Aristandros bore not the slightest resemblance to his blonde, brown-eyed mother. He did, however, look very like his handsome father. In terms of attractiveness, though, he easily outshone both his parents, Ella decided, shooting him a keen appraisal. While he had Achilles’ looks, he had inherited his grandfather’s sharp intelligence and business acumen. Daily exposure to Aristandros had simply made her more aware than ever that he was an extravagantly beautiful, intriguingly clever and challenging man. On paper he ticked all her boxes.
Turning pink as he intercepted her lingering scrutiny, Ella walked out hurriedly on to the sweeping terrace and wondered if Lily was right: was it possible that she had never got over loving Aristandros? Had she never moved on properly after that first disillusionment? The suspicion appalled her, for she liked to see herself as being sensible. The sort of woman who could continue to harbour a strong, secret preference for a notorious womaniser struck Ella as being silly, weak in resolution and certifiably insane.
‘In three weeks’ time we’ll be attending a major charity performance at the opera in aid of the Xenakis Foundation. Dress formal,’ Aristandros announced.
Ella suppressed a sigh. ‘Where’s it being held?’
‘Athens.’
Ella saw Callie installed in the nursery, which the little girl clearly saw as home. Callie toddled over to a basket of toys and smiled as she dug out familiar favourites, her satisfaction at rediscovering them unhidden. Later, when Callie was in bed and Ella was dining out on the terrace with Aristandros, she breathed in deep. ‘You know, I’ve barely been with you two weeks and this will be the sixth different bed I’ve slept in.’
Aristandros shifted a broad shoulder with nonchalant cool. ‘Change is stimulating.’
‘I know you don’t want to hear this…’
Aristandros shifted a fluid brown hand in a silencing gesture. ‘Then don’t say it,’ he advised drily.
‘It’s not fair to Callie. She needs a more settled home.’
‘I don’t normally trail her round the world with me as I have done recently,’ Aristandros finally admitted. ‘She’s usually based here on the island.’
Guilt assailed Ella as she grasped the heart of the dilemma. ‘She’s travelling because I’m in the picture now and you know I want to be with her,’ she guessed ruefully.
‘While I want you to be with me. We’re the perfect threesome,’ he quipped. ‘Be practical.’
Ella toyed with her delicious, light seafood starter, her appetite ebbing. Be practical—remember the agreement you signed, remember who calls the shots around here, remember who says what goes as far as Callie’s concerned. But his lifestyle was unsustainable for a toddler, Ella reflected. More than anything Callie needed stability and routine to thrive, not to mention the same people around her.
Dark eyes reflective, Aristandros sipped his wine. ‘I have a business trip next week. I’ll leave you here.’
‘Great.’ Ella knew she was being thrown a consolation prize, but ironically she just as quickly found herself wondering whether his sudden willingness to leave her behind could relate to the fact that he was getting a little bored with her. Why not? she asked herself. Two weeks was a sizeable length of time for Aristandros to stay committed to one woman. And, if he was losing interest, how would she handle it?
Extinguishing that incendiary thought from her mind, for she saw no advantage in borrowing trouble in advance, she phoned her mother, who was still in hospital, after dinner. Jane was in reasonable spirits. Stavros and Dmitri were visiting her and had passed on the news that their father had been arrested and charged. Freed from the fear of her husband’s violence, Jane had decided to go for counselling.
‘Mum’s dealing with this better than I thought she would,’ Ella commented to Aristandros when he wandered out of the bathroom, only a towel linked round his lean hips and drops of water still sparkling on his hair-roughened chest. She would never have dreamt of adding that her mother thought she had misjudged him seven years earlier and had underestimated his potential for reliability. In her mother’s eyes, Aristandros had suddenly become a knight in shining armour worthy of the highest praise.
‘Hopefully it will give her a new lease of life. Sardelos had sucked all the energy out of her,’ he pronounced grimly.
A slender figure in a shimmering emerald-green nightdress edged with lace, Ella shivered. ‘I was only a child when they married, but I still remember how different she was before she met him—lively and outgoing. He turned her into a doormat.’
‘Not something anyone could accuse you of.’
Her blood sang in her veins as she studied him. He made her feel like a teenager—a hopelessly infatuated teenager, who got a thrill every time he looked at her. ‘Sometimes you make me very angry.’
A wicked grin slashed his handsome mouth, and her heart hammered as if he had pressed a switch. ‘You make me hot in a very different way, khriso mou.’
For the first time Ella took the initiative, crossing the room to slide up against his hard, masculine body, revelling in every point of physical connection with an earthy streak she hadn’t known she possessed until he’d brought it out in her. The very boldness of his arousal thrilled her. He parted her lips and let his tongue delve hungrily, deeply, and her bones seemed to melt beneath her skin while languorous heat and heaviness slowly uncoiled between her thighs. She detached the towel and looked up at him while she traced the impressive length of his erection.
‘There’s no hope for you in the wanton stakes,’ Aristandros husked
. ‘You’re still blushing.’
‘Of course I’m going to blush if you’re planning to offer a running commentary!’
‘So, take my breath away, moli mou.’
And she did, kneeling down gracefully at his feet to deploy her slim hands and her full, sensual mouth to the task she had set herself. She used her knowledge of the male physique and her infinitely more intimate awareness of what he liked to pleasure him. Ella was always a high achiever at anything she set out to do. Ripples of helpless response began shuddering through his powerful frame. He withstood her provocative attention for a very short time. His breathing audibly fractured, and then suddenly he was pulling her up and backing her down on the bed with scant ceremony.
‘You excite the hell out of me!’ he groaned, coming down on top of her and ravaging her luscious pink mouth until her senses swam.
He made love to her with mind-blowing power. Afterwards she lay shell-shocked with the intensity of the pleasure in his arms, her willowy body magically indolent and peaceful after her explosive release. He smoothed her hair gently back off her warm face. She kissed a smooth, muscular shoulder, catching the faint scent of cologne mingled with his own male scent, and drank in the smell of him like an addict. Right and wrong, she registered, no longer seemed so well-defined.
On some level she couldn’t hold back what she was feeling any longer, and wasn’t even sure that there was a point in such restraint while she lived with him and Callie. Sexually she found him irresistible, but his hold on her went much deeper than that. She was possessive of him and she cared about him as she had never yet cared for any other man. Yet he wasn’t the young man she had fallen in love with any more. Those seven years apart had altered him. He was harder, more cynical and self-contained, and willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted. Was it terribly wrong of her to feel special because he had gone to such extremes to get her back into his life again? And what was he doing to her once-firm moral compass?
In the early hours of the following morning she wakened and frowned at the familiar little cramping pains low in her stomach. A moment later she got out of bed and went into the bathroom to check out her suspicions. No, as she had thought, she wasn’t pregnant, and it was time to start her contraceptive pill. The necessities taken care of, she returned to bed.
Aristandros was still fast asleep in a careless sprawl which took up more than his fair share of the bed, outsized though it was. With his jet-dark lashes almost long enough to hit his hard cheekbones, blue-black stubble outlining his angular jaw and sculpted mouth, and with his classic, aquiline profile relaxed, he looked gorgeous. Her insides chilled at the thought of how he might have reacted to an inconvenient pregnancy. He liked to control everything, and she couldn’t have allowed him to exert control or influence in that field. She was grateful that the situation hadn’t arisen.
‘Hmm…’ He shifted position and found her, a hand splaying across her stomach and then rising to cup a small, firm breast with a drowsy sound of masculine contentment. ‘Ella…’
‘I’m not pregnant!’ Ella just blurted it out, keen to get the news out, mortified by the idea that he was secretly dreading the possibility that she might have conceived.
Spiky black lashes lifted on startled dark-golden eyes. He was as instantly awake as if she had doused him with a bucket of cold water. ‘Are you sure?’
‘One hundred percent,’ she declared.
His lean, strong face clenched. ‘I would have taken care of you. You needn’t have worried on that score.’
‘We have enough problems without that particular one.’
‘You still don’t want children?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Just not children with me?’ His expression sardonic, Aristandros released her and vaulted out of bed.
‘I need a shower.’
Ella was bewildered by his behaviour. ‘I assumed you would regard a pregnancy as a disaster and that you’d ask me to have a termination. You did tell me you didn’t want a child.’
A bronzed vision of pagan masculinity, he surveyed her with brooding force from the bathroom doorway, and shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘Then I thought about it and I reckoned I could live with it. Callie would probably enjoy having a playmate,’ he murmured lazily. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested a termination. The main reason my father divorced my mother was that she tried to have me aborted—he stopped her on the way to the clinic. That kind of knowledge gives you a different take on an accidental pregnancy.’
Shocked by the content of that entire speech, Ella nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it would.’
She tried to get her thoughts in order. Every time she thought she had Ari pigeon-holed, he confounded her expectations again. Think of him casually commenting that Callie would enjoy a playmate, admitting that, at the very least, he was uncomfortable with the idea of terminating a pregnancy that was merely inconvenient! I reckoned I could live with it—he could live with her having his baby. Well, she was still relieved that she wasn’t about to face that challenge. He would have needed to be a good deal more enthusiastic and they would have had to have discussed the idea in advance before she could have allowed herself to regret the fact that she hadn’t conceived.
Swallowing hard, she got back into bed. She had on several occasions in recent years gone through the experience of feeling broody, when the very sight of a baby or tiny clothes brought a lump to her throat and a powerful craving, but she would never have admitted anything so personal to him. Indeed her longing to see and hold her biological daughter had almost broken her heart for eighteen months. But, now fully aware of how incredibly lucky she was to have a loving healthy child like Callie in her life, she expected nothing more from Mother Nature.
Ella prowled round the modern building housing the doctor’s surgery and emergency facilities which Aristandros had funded on the outskirts of town. It was a rural doctor’s dream, but apparently two doctors had already come and gone, bored with the lack of a social life on a small island and the inconvenience of having to step on a ferry to visit friends and family. Currently the position was vacant. Having checked out the patient numbers, Ella reckoned there was really only enough work for a part-time doctor, and she very much would have liked to put her name forward.
‘We would be honoured to have you here,’ the town mayor, Yannis Mitropoulos, assured her, having intercepted her and offered her a tour after she had been seen peering wistfully through a window.
‘Unfortunately, I’m not looking for a job at present,’ Ella advanced uncomfortably.
Had she been, she was convinced she would have been in harness within five minutes of accepting the job. Aristandros had devoted two days to showing her round the island, and had introduced her to many of the locals. But he had not, offered her an inspection of the unoccupied state-of-the-art medical building he had built, or admitted that Lykos lacked a doctor’s services. Ella had only found out those facts for herself when she’d taken Callie into town. Whilst enjoying cold drinks at the taverna overlooking the picturesque harbour, she had found herself slowly and steadily being surrounded by hopeful people in search of off-the-cuff medical advice. Aristandros, however, appeared to have no conscience about keeping the only doctor on the island confined to home, hearth and bedroom.
In spite of that truth, over the past three weeks Ella had settled happily into life on Lykos. Aristandros had twice flown off on business trips without her, and she had been dismayed by the discovery that she missed him when he was out of reach. He was, however, surprisingly sexy and amazingly addictive during late-night phone conversations, she conceded with a covert smile.
She had come to terms with the fact that she loved him, and that she probably loved him a great deal more than she had seven years ago, which struck her as especially ironic when he had behaved so badly this time round. Back then she had expected perfection, a soulmate who shared her every thought and conviction and made no awkward demands of her. Now her expectations were rather m
ore human-sized and, in any case, she knew that she and Aristandros were diametrically opposed by the simple fact that she was a modern female and he was very old-style macho male. Although she felt that Aristandros was being totally selfish and unreasonable in refusing to allow her to pursue her medical vocation, she was beginning to suspect that his being the centre of her world, the only other person she really had to think about besides Callie, was something he prized above everything else in their relationship. He was as possessive as she was, and seemingly unwilling to share her.
Ella had managed to adopt two homeless dogs since her arrival on Lykos. One, Whistler, a fluffy mongrel of indeterminate breed, had been injured by a fish hook and brought to her for attention for there was no vet on the island either. Ella had dealt with the little animal’s lacerations and had offered to keep her while she healed. The second dog had arrived on the slender strength of the assurance that ‘everybody knows the English are mad about dogs’. Bunny, inappropriately named by Callie, was a boisterous Great Dane pup with paws the size of dinner plates, and he was accused of having sneaked off the ferry unattended. Both dogs were brilliant with Callie.
Aristandros had been taken aback by the sudden addition of two animals to the household, but had adapted wonderfully well after a lot of cool brow-raising over their antics, and had admitted that his mother had hated dogs and that he had never been allowed a pet. Ella thought his heart had been touched by Callie’s enthusiasm for the dogs: the sight of the trio gambolling on the beach was quite something.
Of course Aristandros was learning to love Callie which was very entertaining to watch. For instance, he tried to teach Callie to say ‘toes’ and she continually came up with ‘socks’ or ‘shoes’. She saw his pleasure when her daughter rushed to greet him and hug his knees. The child’s innocent affection and playfulness drew him out of his cynical shell and made him patient and much less driven. When his mobile phone had been found in a vase of flowers, he’d insisted he had somehow dropped it in there, when everyone in the house knew that Callie was always trying to get her hands on his phone because the colours it flashed attracted her like a magnet.