Fortunately the one key member of the group whom she didn’t want to see was not around. Theo had probably slept in as well or maybe he was working, getting back into the mindset to return to business now that the obligatory party was out of the way and his mission to free his brother from the claws of the gold-digger had been accomplished.
Without any transport to remove her from the villa, Abby made do with grabbing some breakfast and then retreating to the furthest part of the garden with her book and her thoughts.
The garden was vast enough to easily locate a hiding place. There were trees, plants and shrubs and benches scattered around, inviting people to sit and take a rest. Abby located one furthest from the house and went through the motions of opening her book, but her brain refused to assimilate the words on the page in front of her.
It had been years since she had touched a man, kissed him, had felt that drive surge through her, making her want to hold him naked against her.
That it had happened at all was frightening. That it had happened with Theo Toyas was terrifying.
The black print on the page in front of her blurred over and Abby blinked, clearing her eyes and telling herself that she wouldn’t cry. Instead, she gave up on the pretext of trying to read and lay back on the wooden lounging chair and closed her eyes. The breeze was soft and warm. Somewhere back at the villa guests were departing, but it was impossible to hear any voices from where she was, hiding in the depths of the carefully cultivated garden. If Michael’s grandfather had fashioned the villa to celebrate his young wife, then he had obviously done so with a youthful enthusiasm for privacy under the open sky.
Having had precious little sleep the night before, Abby could feel her eyelids getting heavier and she welcomed the peace of not having to think, not having to beat herself up with recriminations over her own stupidity.
She had no idea how long she had been sleeping and no idea how much longer she would have slept for had she not been awakened by the sound of something out of place, the sound of something that wasn’t the breeze rustling through the leaves. Her eyes fluttered open to find that she was in shade and not because the sun had dipped behind a cloud.
Theo was looming over her and she struggled to find some composure.
Her heart began to thud and creeping colour stole into her cheeks. He was vitally masculine in a pair of light cream trousers and a thin cotton shirt in faded blues and greys. His hair was damp and swept back from his face. Even with every sense leaping into immediate defence she was still aware of the primitive tug he exercised over her body. It was an instinctive reaction over which she seemed to have no control and it was even more terrifying now because somehow the light of day made it starkly real.
‘What do you want?’ she asked tersely, pushing herself up into a sitting position. ‘How did you find me here?’
‘I thought of the most obvious place you would go to hide away from the possibility of bumping into me.’
Abby didn’t bother to beat about the bush. ‘Can you blame me?’
Theo appreciated the blunt honesty. He gave her a slow smile that did weird, wonderful, scary things to her stomach even though her expression remained coldly hostile. ‘No, I can’t say that I do,’ he drawled.
‘So why have you come to find me? You’ve done what you wanted to do, haven’t you?’
‘Have I? Have you told Michael yet? That your love match is off?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s still sleeping! It would be hard to have a conversation with someone who isn’t awake!’
This time Theo’s smile was genuine. He had to hand it to her. The girl was gutsy and funny underneath that butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-your-mouth exterior.
‘Poor Michael. Sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Not to mention the frustrated. When do you intend to break the news?’
‘When we get back to England.’ She was shielding her eyes from the glare so that she could look up at him. It gave her a small advantage insofar as he couldn’t read her expression and, as though clocking on to that fact, he squatted down so that now he was on eye level with her, his face only inches away from hers.
‘Good,’ he said, silkily amenable, ‘because I wouldn’t want you to forget that I’ll be checking up to make sure that you have.’
‘Are you leaving now?’ Abby asked politely. ‘Because I wouldn’t want to keep you.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’ Theo murmured. ‘Yes, I am off now. Business is a beast that never sleeps.’
‘Leaving on your own?’ She had meant to leave him with the parting jibe that if he was leaving in the company of Alexis, then maybe he should spend a little time examining his own morality, but before she could launch into her invective he threw her another of those lazy smiles that made her toes curl and the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
‘Yes, I am. Why? Did you think that I might be leaving with the delectable Alexis?’ He shook his head with regret. ‘She wants too many things I’m not willing to provide at this point in time. Declarations of love, rings with large diamonds and the distant sound of wedding bells chiming over the horizon.’
‘You mean you just prefer to sleep around,’ Abby said scornfully.
‘You call it sleeping around,’ Theo said with a glint in his eye. ‘I call it dealing honestly with members of the opposite sex. I don’t make promises I have no intention of keeping.’ At this rate, he would miss the meeting he had scheduled for later in the afternoon. The private island hopper waiting for him would continue to wait, but his meeting involved several highly influential and very busy financiers for whom time was money and wasted time was close to a cardinal sin. ‘Why are you interested?’ he asked. ‘Are you jealous?’
‘Jealous?’ Abby spluttered, outraged. ‘You really are the most arrogant, egotistic human being I have ever met!’
‘You haven’t answered the question, though…’ Her softly parted mouth was an invitation he couldn’t resist and this time there was no guilt attached. She wasn’t sleeping with Michael. She was using him. That she hadn’t come right out and admitted it was simply a small matter of technicality.
He breached the short space between them and covered her mouth with his, felt it again, that confusion of anger and wanting that had been there in her before, when he had kissed her the previous night. The knowledge that she wanted him even though she hated herself for it was like adrenaline flooding his system. He felt his hard, aching erection bulging against his zipper and he continued to ravish her mouth with his. Acquiescence came when she wound her arms around his neck and when he reached to slide his hand under the small cropped top there was just a groan of submission. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She obviously had no idea that although her breasts were small they were perfectly formed and liable to drive any red-blooded male to distraction. How his brother could occupy the same space as her and keep his hands to himself was beyond him. He had to see. Hang the meeting. So he might be slightly late. They would be peeved but they would wait because he was too powerful for them to walk away.
He pushed up the top and was hotly turned on. Her nipples were large pink circles standing proudly, the tips stiffly erect, calling him to take one into his mouth just to suck, just to taste, and to hear her fevered response.
Abby squirmed as he suckled her nipple, caressing the other breast with his hand, making sure that there were no nerve-endings in her body that weren’t sizzling. He teased, pulling the aroused bud into his mouth, sending all her thoughts into free fall. Never, never had she felt like this before.
Her fingers tangled in his hair and she pushed him down, not wanting him to stop his fevered explorations.
It was only when his hand moved down to claim that one place which was now damp with desire that reality crashed through the barriers of her fevered mind and she wriggled frantically against him, trying to yank down her top with one hand and push him away with the other.
‘No!’ She dragged herself upr
ight and looked at him with shocked eyes. Her top was now back in place but her nipples were still throbbing from where he had assaulted them with his mouth and her whole body was trembling.
It took a few seconds for Theo to register the cooling distance between them and only a few more for him to realise just how out of control he had been. What the hell had just gone on? he wondered dazedly. He pushed himself up, aware of his erection, which was still clamouring for satisfaction. There she was, all pink-faced and appalled. Had he gone mad?
‘A little reminder,’ he said, grateful that his voice at least betrayed nothing of what he was feeling, ‘of why you need to break off your engagement.’
With that parting shot he turned on his heel and walked away and Abby watched his departing back and wondered how, having suffered all manner of mortification the night before, she had allowed herself to do the same again. The warning bells were ringing so loudly in her head that she felt faint. When she finally got to her feet, safe in the knowledge that he would have left for sure, it was to find that they were still shaking.
He was gone, she told herself over and over, gone for good and thank God for that.
CHAPTER SIX
‘HAVE you heard from your brother?’
Abby looked at Michael, who was lying prostrate on her sofa. Sundays were the only days he enjoyed away from work and, aside from the occasional lunchtimes when they would meet for something to eat during the week, they both tried to do something on Sundays. Today had been a day in the Pavilion Gardens, which Jamie had enjoyed. The weather had been beautiful and they had taken a picnic lunch, which Michael had done and, with his usual flair, had produced superb food for the three of them and the other six who had come along as well. Of course, it hadn’t been quite as carefree for Abby because Jamie demanded so much of her attention, but everyone had chipped in and, without a child between them in sight, had enjoyed the novelty of someone else’s.
And Jamie had enjoyed being the centre of attention. It was difficult for him and she knew that. He was getting to the age where he had begun asking questions about why he had no father, and she knew that those questions would probably become more pressing over time.
She had become lost in her thoughts when she was abruptly pulled back into the present by Michael saying that he had.
‘You have?’ Instantly she was on the alert. It had been three weeks, and she had already begun to think that maybe Theo would have forgotten his threat to be in touch, to make sure that the engagement had been broken off to his satisfaction. She had lulled herself into thinking that things that had seemed so real and so important in Santorini might have faded into the background under the frantic grind of his daily life. It wasn’t as though he had lots of free time on his hands to mull over his brother’s situation. ‘What did you tell him? He’s not coming down here, is he?’ She knew that her voice was laced with panic. Just as she had managed to bury her head in the sand about Theo’s threats, so too had she diminished his huge impact on her, telling herself that she had imagined her heated, mindless responses, that it had all been the effect of her nerves and the disorientation of being in another country, away from her son and her normal pace of life.
Now that hard, arrogant, ridiculously sexy face rose up from the mists of her memory like a punch in the gut.
‘He can’t come here, Michael. I don’t want to see him.’
‘You mean you’re scared to see him.’ Michael propped himself up on one elbow and grinned. ‘Oh, the tangled webs we weave!’
‘It’s not funny!’
‘It is when you sit back and look at it. There we were, blithely making our plans, and you end up falling for my brother. Who could have predicted that? No—’ he gave the matter a few seconds’ thought ‘—I could have predicted that. He’s had that effect on women roughly from the day he was born. He was a charmer then and he’s a charmer now. I warn you, though…you’re better off not getting entangled with him. He’s the proverbial heartbreaker.’
‘Tell me something I haven’t already figured out for myself,’ Abby scoffed. She stood up, utterly at ease in her dreadful slumming-it-at-home outfit of loose checked pyjama bottoms that never seemed to fit on her waist but a few inches below, and the sleeveless red vest that had seen more vibrant days.
It was a little after eight in the evening. Jamie was sound asleep upstairs, thoroughly worn out after a day of running about madly, and she had no plans to leave the house. Chances were that Michael might well end up staying on the sofa-bed. There was a movie on at nine-thirty which they both wanted to watch and often enough he simply stayed the night if he considered it too much effort to leave for his own penthouse apartment overlooking the coastline.
‘And I haven’t fallen for him. He’s arrogant and objectionable.’
‘But hugely irresistible to the opposite sex.’
‘I made a mistake. How many times have you done that?’
‘Too many to mention, my sweet, but then I’m not you.’
Abby decided to sidestep this line of conversation. Michael knew her just a little too well for her own good. ‘What did you tell him?’
‘Not a great deal, as it happens. He called last night when I was in the middle of trying to sort out some hideous fiasco with the shrimps and I couldn’t stop for a long chat.’
‘Did he ask whether we were still engaged?’
‘I presume he’s waiting for me to volunteer the information.’
Abby took a few seconds to digest this. As far as Theo was concerned, she was going to be responsible for letting Michael down gently, presumably with no mention of what had happened between them. It would therefore have seemed strange had he come right out and asked whether they were still together when he would have had no reason to ask the question in the first place.
‘And what are you going to tell him?’
‘No idea.’ He lay back down on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling.
Abby looked feverishly at his unruffled face.
‘I don’t like lying,’ he said eventually, ‘but I know Mum will be worried sick if she thinks that I’m no longer an engaged man. She’ll have images of me dying of a broken heart in my apartment with nothing for company but empty vodka bottles and the television. And my grandfather isn’t very well at the moment. We’re all hoping that it’s just a case of the party being a little too much for him, but…’ His expression was worried when he looked at her and Abby felt a swift tug of compassion. ‘Theo’s concerned about him and Theo is never concerned unless there’s a valid reason. I told him that I would meet him in London some time next week. Maybe I can just skirt around the engagement thing, deal with it later…’
Skirt around…? Deal with it later…? Those were words she didn’t associate with Theo Toyas, but she uneasily plucked the one comforting piece of information from Michael’s conversation. He would be going to London to see his brother. There would be no need for her to go with him and she had no intention of doing so.
‘So you haven’t actually set a date to meet…?’
Michael shook his head. ‘When Theo comes over here on business it’s next to impossible pinning him down to any specifics when it’s got nothing to do with work. Unless, of course, you happen to be his woman of the moment, in which case I expect he makes time…though I wouldn’t lay money on it…’ There was a certain reluctant admiration in Michael’s voice at the sheer ruthlessness of his brother’s habits. Abby refused to accommodate the emotion.
‘Charming man, your brother.’
‘Charming enough to…’
‘Don’t even think of saying it, Michael.’ She picked up the cushion which was lying on the ground by her chair and flung it at him.
It was funny, but even Michael, for all his intuition, didn’t know how deeply Theo had affected her. He knew her well enough to know that she would not have kissed him on a sudden whim, but he also thought that she was controlled enough to have put it behind her. She would never have dreamt of confessing to him
how much it still played on her mind. She would catch herself thinking about Theo, remembering the way he had kissed her, and in between laughing it off to herself would still feel disturbingly aware that she wasn’t putting it behind her the way she should have been able to.
‘Let me know when you go and how it goes,’ she said, blinking away the unwelcome thoughts. Talking about Theo like this, knowing that Michael would be seeing him some time in the next week, made her shiver. Knowing that he would be in the same country, looking up at the same sky, made her shiver.
‘Which is what I’ve got to do.’
‘What?’
‘Go.’ He heaved himself off the sofa with a deep sigh and in between her protests explained that he would be going to the club to make sure that everything was going all right. There was a new act performing, he told her, talking and putting on his shoes at the same time. A jazz band from Edinburgh, some new guys. He wanted to keep an eye on them, see whether they were good enough to hire again. He needed to keep the punters happy and Brighton had so many clubs that his had to excel to compete. Abby protested, but half-heartedly. It had been an exhausting day and she would be glad to get into bed.
She had seen him to the door and was switching off the lights in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. Abby flew out to the small hallway. The doorbell was particularly penetrating and it had a nasty habit of waking Jamie up. Once awake, Jamie could remain awake for hours, with his body telling him it was time to play even if his brain was informing him that it was time to sleep.
She pulled open the door and there he was.
So tall, so sexy and so unexpected that for a few seconds all she could do was blink, as if blinking would make the man there disappear or else turn him into Michael.
The Greek's Forbidden Bride Page 9