by Julia James
The owners had sold it with bookings already made, and Vanessa knew she would simply have to ensure the flat was clean and ready to receive visitors. The rent at high season was considerable, and because she had been able to buy the house outright she could use the rent as income, not for paying a mortgage. Although she would need to be prudent with her finances, she knew that, together with the modest but reassuring investments inherited from her grandparents, she could manage on her own.
For one fleeting moment a shadow darkened her eyes. Then, with a determined lift of her chin, she pushed aside the thought that had caused the shadow and started to tidy away the painting things.
By the time she’d cleared them away it was lunchtime, and she went into the kitchen to prepare a salad and a crusty French bread sandwich. It was simple fare, but nutritious and healthy, and all she needed. Fancy gourmet meals were a thing of the past now, and that was that. She poured some fresh orange juice and took her lunch through on a tray to the living room, where a small square dining table in the bow window caught the noonday sunshine. The house had no sea view, but all the houses in the street were painted in pale pastel colours, with tubs of flowers by the front doors and colourful window boxes. It was all very picture-postcard, for the tourist trade, but it made for a very pleasant environment to live in.
I’m lucky—so very lucky.
The words were a challenge, defiance, and a reminder. She was lucky—lucky to have had what she’d had, lucky in the wonderful memories of what, right up until the end, had been the most magical, miraculous time of her life.
I have to see the good things, only the good things.
If she became bitter about it it would only make the pain that tore at her, by day and by night, even worse. The heartbreak was unbearable—it could never be anything else, she knew that with piercing agony—but the raw pain would fade. It would have to fade. That part of her life was over now, completely over. It could never come back.
But though she could say that with her mind, and know it for the truth, her heart was not so accepting. Like the pole of a magnet separated from its opposite, her heart kept drawing back to the cause of its agony, its complete and absolute fracture.
Markos—the man she had loved, adored. But who had not loved her back.
You can’t force love—it wasn’t his fault he didn’t love me. Couldn’t love me.
Yet, even as the exonerating words formed in her mind, another part of her let other thoughts slip through. Harsher words. Without exoneration.
He should have told you he was getting married. He should have had the guts—the decency—to do that, at least…
And back again came yet further thoughts, neither exonerating nor condemning, but resigned. Unflinchingly facing up to truths she didn’t want to face up to, they marched their way into her consciousness, uninvited but unstoppable—just as Constantia Dimistris had marched into the apartment that fateful afternoon, at the most vulnerable moment of her life.
He didn’t tell you for the same reason. He didn’t love you.
Because men like Markos Makarios do not fall in love with the women they keep as mistresses. Nor do they consider it necessary to inform them of their forthcoming marriages.
Because a mistress is not someone to love, someone to respect, someone who deserves consideration. She is there for sex, for admiration, for ornament, for possession, for pleasure.
Nothing else.
She shut her eyes as if to shut out the words, which were not angry or bitter, but simply truthful—however unpalatable the truth.
A mistress is all I was. All I ever was. I kept trying not to face up to it—
But she’d had to in the end. Just as now she had to face up to never seeing Markos again. There could be no other possibility.
It was over. Quite, quite over.
I have to face it, accept it and move on. Move on into the rest of my life.
It was essential. Because from now on, for the rest of her life, she had more than herself to think about. She had someone who was far more important than the man who had kept her as his naively adoring, expensively pampered mistress.
And far, far more important than herself.
She got to her feet, rubbing her back again as she did so. Clearing away her lunch things took only moments. Going back into the other room, she closed the windows she’d opened to expedite the drying of the freshly painted walls, then went into her own bedroom to put on a pair of outdoor shoes. As she put her worn house-slippers away inside the wardrobe she thought with painful wryness how shabby they had always looked amidst the racks of shoes and boots she had worn before. She was glad now she had kept the house-slippers though—they were something she had been able to take away with her, as the shoes and clothes that Markos had bought her had not.
She felt herself smile again, not painfully, but a smile that brought a softening to her eyes. High heels were a thing of the past in any case, and so were the flattering, beautiful clothes she’d worn for Markos. Now her sartorial needs were very different.
Comfortable, serviceable, practical—that was what she required.
Picking up her shoulder bag, she headed for the front door. Time for her daily constitutional—a brisk mile and back along the seafront. In the evening she would go swimming at the local public pool, doing steady lengths to keep her muscles toned and trim. Staying healthy was essential.
For a fleeting moment she remembered the luxuriously appointed private gym and the vast pool in the basement of Markos’s apartment block. Then she put the memory aside.
It was, like the rest of her time with him, irrelevant now.
Walking along the seafront in the warm sunshine, Vanessa gazed out over the sparkling sea. Her spirits could not fail to lift. People were strolling up and down, and on the beach children were playing. Her heart gave a little squeeze. Yes, this had been the right place to come to, a good choice. She could start her new life here, and as the years passed the pain would fade.
She lifted her chin. The pain had to fade. There was no alternative. The future was all she had now.
The past had gone completely. It would not come back, and nor would the person she had once been.
The mistress of Markos Makarios.
Markos eased the car out into the road, turning left as his satellite navigation had instructed him. The top was down—he’d lowered it as he’d come off the motorway some twenty miles back—and the breeze was ruffling his hair. Both he and the car, a sleek, throaty, high-performance latest model, were attracting attention from passers-by, but he did not return it. His entire concentration was focused on his goal.
And it was nearly achieved. Two more roads to go, so the sat-nav told him, and then he would have found her.
The pupils of his eyes pinpointed, his mouth tightening.
His anger, leashed tightly, was absolute, shimmering beneath the surface like a black roiling tide. As he inched the car forward in the solid queue that seemed to be occupying the seafront road he stared ahead, unseeing.
Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw it. His head whipped to one side.
Her hair.
That amazing tumbling mane, lifting in the breeze as she walked along the seafront, her gait brisk but steady. Familiar—but with a completely different balance to it.
He stopped the car where it was, right in the middle of the traffic, and vaulted out, striding between the cars parked along the seafront concourse.
She stopped dead.
Her face whitened like chalk. She swayed, and for a moment he thought she was going to pass out.
‘Get in the car.’ His voice was low, and vicious.
He saw her swallow, tense completely, face rigid, eyes seeing—yet unseeing.
‘Get in,’ he said again.
Around the car, other drivers were tooting their horns with irritation, calling out to him. He ignored them. Ignored everything except the woman standing there as if she were turned to stone.
Jaw tighteni
ng, he seized her arm and propelled her the way he had come. She was nerveless, unresisting.
He took her around the front of the car, opened the passenger door and thrust her inside. She collapsed into the seat. Then, his face still as taut as a bow, he got back in the driver’s seat and rammed the car into gear, jerking forward.
He did not look at her. Did not allow himself to do so. But he could see, as he changed gear again, that her hands were clenched in her lap, her knuckles white.
He drove in silence, interrupted only by the sat-nav voice giving directions, which he followed. They took him to the end of the seafront and turned him left, heading inland again for a short distance, then turning him right, then left. The road it took him to was narrow, lined with miniature versions of the houses along the seafront, lacking the iron railings and basements and pillared entrances, but neat and elegant. Hers was painted white, with flower boxes and two steps up to the front door.
He drew up outside the house, pulling the car alongside the kerb, which had ‘Residents Only’ restrictions marked along it. He ignored them, and cut the engine.
‘Out,’ he said.
She fumbled with the catch and he leant across, releasing it. She seemed to shrink away from him. He felt the anger roil.
She climbed out, pausing to hold the top of the door for a moment, then undid the flap of her shoulder bag and extracted her house keys. She opened the door of the house and went in, leaving it open.
He slammed his door shut, immobilised the car, and followed her.
Vanessa unlocked the inner door to her flat, the lower half of the house, and walked inside. Her legs were like jelly. She wanted to sink down on the nearest chair, but she knew she could not. Must not. Shock was still reeling through her, and she could feel a sense of sickness in her guts. Her heart-rate was plunging wildly.
This isn’t good for me—this isn’t good for the—
The sound of Markos slamming the front door made her jump, and then he was striding inside her flat, slamming that door too, so the room reverberated with the force. He was right inside now, his height crowding the room, his presence dominating it. She took a step backwards, feeling the edge of the table behind her, glad of its support.
Her eyes went to him.
Markos.
Emotion scythed through her, each stroke cutting her from her knees.
Oh, God, Markos—Markos.
Her eyes hung on him, each feature searing on to her brain. For an endless, reeling moment she was helpless to do anything but stand there, her brain trying to make sense of what her eyes were seeing.
Then, like a blow to her stomach, his words felled her.
‘You little bitch! You two-timing, cheating bitch!’
For a moment she just went on staring, uncomprehending. His face was contorted, she could see, and fury was blazing in his eyes.
Her brow furrowed.
‘What?’
Of all the things Markos might have said to her, what he had just hurled at her made absolutely no sense.
Yet her response seemed merely to infuriate him more. Fury seared in his eyes again.
‘Don’t give me that!’ he snarled. ‘I want to know one thing only—and, Christos, you had better tell me! Who is he? Just damn well tell me that—who is he?’
Incomprehension paralysed her. She could only stand there, hands clutching around the edge of the table, shockwaves jolting through her.
His face contorted.
‘Don’t try and blank me. Just tell me who it is! And don’t even think of trying to protect him because I swear to God I’ll find out, and when I do—’
‘Who?’
She could see his jaw clench, his entire body taut as a bow.
‘What the hell do you mean, who?’ he hurled back, his eyes like stabbing knives. ‘The man you cheated on me with! The man who got you pregnant!’
CHAPTER NINE
THE WORLD SEEMED to stop. She could feel it grinding to a halt in the few fleeting seconds it took for his words to penetrate.
And, when they did, the shock she had felt up to then was as nothing, nothing at all. Disbelief, absolute and overwhelming, electrocuted her.
Blindly she felt for the back of the chair tucked under the table. Blindly she jerked it out, knowing with an overriding sense of protection for the child she carried that she must, must sit down before she fell down. She collapsed onto it, her heart hammering against her throat, hot and cold washing up and down through her body.
The world began to darken around the edges.
Instinctively she let her head sink down to her knees, forcing herself to try and take slow breaths. Equally instinctively her hand curved over her abdomen, sheltering the baby within.
‘What—? Vanessa? Vanessa!’
There was fear in his voice, sudden, raw, completely negating the fury of a moment ago. He took two urgent strides towards her and crouched down beside her.
‘Vanessa!’
She took a last, achingly slow breath, and lifted her head. The darkness receded, and there was just Markos instead. For one long, endless moment her eyes met his.
Then, swallowing deliberately, she said, ‘I’m all right. I’m—all right.’
She straightened up. Abruptly, as if such closeness were too disturbing, Markos took a step back. His expression was a mix of emotions.
‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’
His voice was short, as if he didn’t want to make the offer but knew he had to.
She shook her head briefly.
‘No, I’m all right,’ she repeated The shock was ebbing from her, leaving behind something quite different. Something very calm, very still.
It’s Markos, she told herself. Markos. Markos who has stormed down here and accused me of getting pregnant by another man.
She waited for the pain that the accusation, the assumption, must surely bring with it. Yet there was nothing. Only a great stillness inside her. As if something she had not realised still existed had just died.
But in its place came something else. A sure resolution that filled her, sustained her.
Slowly, she got to her feet. Markos started forward, but she held up a hand.
‘I just need to get a glass of water,’ she said, her voice quite calm. She glanced at him. ‘Would you like a drink? Coffee? Juice?’
He gave a curt shake of his head. His face was still taut, his dark grey eyes stormy, yet wary too, and with something else in them that she did not want to see and did not study.
She walked into the kitchen and took a bottle of chilled mineral water out of the fridge, filling up a glass for herself. She took a few careful sips, then came back into the living room. She resumed her seat by the table and took another sip of water, before placing it carefully on a cork mat to avoid any rings on the surface of the wood. Her other hand hovered over her abdomen, as if shielding her baby from the man before her.
Then she looked up and across to him where he stood, tension and simmering anger and whatever else was streaming through him in every muscle of his body.
‘What was the point of you coming here, Markos?’ she asked.
His brows snapped together, as if both her question and the way she’d asked it had taken him aback.
‘What was the point?’ he echoed, his voice low and savage. ‘You spend six months with me, then walk out on me without a word—a single damn word!—to another man, end up pregnant by him, and you ask me why I came here?’
She kept her eyes level on him. The same strange calmness was still inside her.
‘That’s what you think happened, is it?’ she asked.
Anger darkened across his face.
‘Don’t take that tone with me—not after what you did! And don’t even try and deny you’re pregnant!’ Accusation sliced from him.
Slowly, she shook her head. ‘No, I won’t try and deny it,’ she said. What would be the point? The evidence was visible.
Something flashed deep in his eyes as she spok
e. Then it was gone. She had no time to see what it was. But whatever it was didn’t matter. Not any more.
‘Then who was it? Answer me! Tell me who it was!’
There was a savagery in his voice that would have frightened her if she had not been so far beyond all feeling. She took in a breath, keeping it calm and even.
‘So, tell me, have you any contenders for the man who lured me away from you? Perhaps the charming Cosmo Dimistris, tempting me with his expensive emeralds? He was keen enough, after all—he seemed to find the situation piquant.’
A hardness had entered her voice, but it seemed not to register with him. Instead, his own face tightened and a burst of Greek issued from him, sounding harsh for such a mellifluous language. Then he swapped to English.
‘Do you think it funny to taunt me with your faithlessness?’ His grey eyes were like molten steel.
Something seared in her face. Her chin lifted.
‘Faithlessness? You are saying that to me? My God, you have a nerve!’ Then, just as suddenly, her chin sank, her eyes closing momentarily. ‘But of course you wouldn’t think so. To you it was an irrelevance. I know that.’
Her face shuttered, as if protecting her from an unbearable truth, but a second later her eyes opened again. She looked at Markos—who had once been everything to her, who could now be only nothing.
The aggression seemed to go out of her, and it was with a supernaturally calm, level gaze resting on him that she spoke.
‘Markos, I don’t know what this is about, but there is no point you being here. Go home. Just go.’