One-Click Buy: November Harlequin Presents

by Susan Stephens

  Shock at the sight of him lying there so still and silent made her gasp. Her vision that had cleared for just a brief moment blurred again as tears of horror filled her eyes.

  ‘He’s unconscious!’

  She didn’t care that her distress showed in her voice, that the edge of fear sharpened it.

  ‘Asleep,’ Leander reassured her. ‘He was unconscious for a time, but the doctors wouldn’t let him out of hospital until they were sure he was on the mend.’

  ‘Can I stay—with him?’

  She didn’t know what she might do if Leander refused permission. She didn’t think that her legs would support her if she tried to walk out of the room. She could still barely see, and the fight to force back the tears, refusing to let them spill out down her cheeks, was one that took all her concentration.

  ‘Kyrie Petrakos asked for me,’ she added hastily when she saw that the younger man was hesitating. ‘I promise I won’t wake him—or do anything to disturb him.’

  At last he nodded.

  ‘He did ask for you,’ he said, indicating a chair with a wave of his hand. ‘But I should warn you that the blow to the head has left him with some memory problems—the doctors believe they will be only temporary. So he may be a little confused when he wakes. Would you like a drink sent up?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Becca assured him hastily, squashing down the weak thought that a cup of tea might warm the sudden coldness of her blood, give her a strength she so much needed. What she needed more was to be left alone, to have time to catch her breath, mentally, since the telephone call had rocked the balance of her world so desperately.

  As Leander left the room she sank down thankfully into the chair he had indicated, her legs giving way beneath the weariness that was both mental and physical, her eyes fixed on the still form of the man in the bed.

  She had promised not to wake him, not to disturb him, but the truth was that he was disturbing her for all he lay so silent and unmoving. The sight of Andreas, whom she had last seen so tall, strong and proud, lying still and pale in the bed was almost more than she could take.

  But it was worse than that.

  She’d spent the last year telling herself that this man had been a mistake, one she deeply regretted, but she was over him. It had taken just one glance at the man in the bed, at the dark, stunning profile, the broad naked chest where the bronzed skin showed livid, disturbing bruises, ones that made her heart clench just to see them, to rock that belief in her head. If she had seen him standing, if her first awareness had been of the powerful, forceful man he was, the man who had used her and then thrown her out of his home, perhaps it would have been different. This man was too quiet, too vulnerable.

  Too deceptively vulnerable, a warning voice sounded inside her head. Because at any other time, vulnerable was not a word she would ever associate with Andreas Gregorie Petrakos.

  ‘I hate him.’

  In a low, desperate whisper, she tried the word hate out for size, feeling it strange and alien on her tongue. For almost a year now, she had used it every day in connection with Andreas’ name. Used it and meant it.

  ‘I hate Andreas Petrakos,’ had been the first words she had said on waking and often the last ones that had been on her tongue at night. They had replaced and reversed the ones that had been there before, in the brief time before her marriage, when she had whispered to herself how much she loved this man, afraid to voice the thoughts aloud for fear that she might be tempting fate and the happiness she dreamed of would evaporate just as a result of saying them.

  She shouldn’t have bothered, Becca told herself bitterly. She hadn’t tempted fate but the cruel blow had fallen after all. Andreas had never loved her as she had loved him; in fact, his marrying her had only been an act of revenge.

  The man in the bed sighed, stirred, muttered something, immediately drawing her eyes to his face once again. Had those heavy, closed eyelids flickered once or twice, or was she just deceiving herself?

  Just the thought of it made her heartbeat kick up several notches, making her blood pound in her ears.

  What would she do if—when he woke? When he spoke?

  And what about these ‘memory problems’? How much had they affected him? Knowing Andreas as she did, she could just imagine how difficult he would find any limitation to his awesome mental abilities. He would hate it and it would chafe at him like a net thrown over a wounded lion, holding him captive. He would rage against it, and Andreas in a rage was a terrifying sight.

  But perhaps more importantly, she should also consider what this news meant for her. Would Andreas even remember that he had asked for her? And what had been on his mind when he had?

  The long-fingered hand that lay on the bed had definitely twitched, flexing briefly as he sighed again. There was a long, angry-looking scratch running from the base of his ring finger right to his wrist and it pulled on something deep in her heart to see the raw tear in the beautiful, bronzed skin that seemed so very dark in contrast to the soft white cotton of the coverings.

  Becca bit down hard on her lower lip to hold back the faint gasp that almost escaped her and she fought to push away memories of how it had felt to know the touch of that hand, have it caress her skin, rouse her to heated longing…

  ‘No!’

  She wasn’t going to let herself go down that road. To do so would destroy her even before she’d spoken to Andreas, or found out just why he’d asked for her. And she was having enough trouble holding on to her self-control as it was, with the bitter memories that assailed her at just being in this house.

  The bittersweet memories—because some of them she could never deny had been so very sweet. She had been so idyllically happy when she had arrived at the villa. So happy that she had thought that her heart would burst from sheer joy.

  But that had been before Andreas had taken that loving heart and ripped it into tiny pieces.

  ‘O opoios…’

  There was no mistaking it this time. Andreas had murmured the words, rough and low, but he had spoken. His eyes remained closed but his head stirred restlessly against the pillows as he swallowed, ran his tongue over his dry lips.

  ‘O opoios…?’ he said again, his voice grating as if he hadn’t used it for a long time.

  ‘Andre…’

  Becca’s voice matched his for hoarseness and lack of strength. She felt as if all the blood had drained from her body at the sound of that once so dearly loved voice that she hadn’t heard for a year.

  ‘Mr Petrakos…’

  That brought his eyes open in a rush, huge and dark, turning her way, frowning as he tried to focus on her face.

  What could she see in them? It certainly wasn’t welcome—but was it anger or rejection, or…?

  ‘Who—?’

  He heaved himself up on the pillows, propped himself on one elbow as he stared into her face, and the cold glare from his deep-set black eyes warned her that she was in trouble.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said slowly and clearly in English, ‘just where the hell have you been?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘SO TELL me, just where the hell have you been?’

  He’d spoken in English, Andreas realised, but he had no idea why. Somehow when he’d opened his mouth, the words had just come out in that language, and he hadn’t even really thought about it.

  So what did that mean?

  Ever since he’d come round from the coma into which he’d fallen after the accident, nothing had been clear in his thoughts at all. He hadn’t even been able to remember his own name or where he lived, and it had taken a couple of long, hellish weeks for anything that he was told to stick inside his battered brain.

  He’d been thrown about the car quite violently, and he’d hit his head hard, they’d told him. He was lucky to be alive, so a few scrambled thoughts, some hazy memories were not unexpected. Hazy he could cope with, scrambled too. It was the blank, empty hole where most of his memory of the past year or so should be that was really dist
urbing him.

  But the doctors had had an answer for that, too. It would come back, they had assured him. In its own time. He just needed to relax and wait.

  The problem was that no one told him how long he had to wait. Or what the hell he did if it didn’t come back at all. The last thing he felt was relaxed.

  And they never told him how to handle situations like this. Like waking up in his own room with a beautiful woman sitting in a chair, watching him.

  A beautiful woman he remembered from before the gap in his mind.

  She was of medium height, as much as he could tell, and with a neat, slenderly curved figure in a blue and green print dress under a short white cotton jacket. Her hair was almost as dark as his own, shaped in a neat, short feathery cut that framed the heart-shaped face, emphasising the high cheekbones and the rich curve of her soft mouth. But where the eyes that he saw in the mirror every day were black too, hers were a soft, washed-looking pale blue, the colour of the sea out in the bay on a cool, shadowy day.

  ‘You are Rebecca, aren’t you?’ he demanded again when the woman didn’t speak but simply stared at him with wide, stunned-looking eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m—I’m Becca…Rebecca.’

  The words were English and on the soft, hesitant voice the accent seemed to fit as well. So somehow he’d been right when he had spoken to her in English.

  He didn’t even really know why English, only that it had felt so right.

  And something to do with this woman whose face had been the first thing that he had focused on when he opened his eyes. The woman who, he had to admit, had sparked off the first moment of real, sharp, intense interest he had felt since the day he had come round after the accident to a world turned upside down. At least he was still aware of the appeal of a beautiful female face, he thought bitterly, the sharp twist of desire reminding him that, no matter what was wrong with his mind, he was still functioning as a man for the first time since regaining consciousness.

  And the amazing thing was that he could remember her. So she belonged in his life from the time before his memory had been wiped away.

  Becca—Rebecca Ainsworth. The woman he had met at a party in London and who had knocked him for six from the moment he had first set eyes on her.

  And the woman he must still be having a passionate relationship with—Theos, but he hoped it was passionate!—or else why would she have turned up here like this?

  ‘So what took you so long?’

  The look of shock combined with blank astonishment on her fine features told him better than his own ears how aggressive and hostile he had sounded. That was the result of the sudden, violent tug of attraction throwing him off balance with its hint of how things had once been—in the life he could no longer remember.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he added automatically. ‘I don’t find it easy living with everyone knowing more about me than I do myself. It’s just a relief to see a familiar face.’

  But then something about the way she looked, some movement of her head, a flash of wariness in her eyes, hastily concealed, set his nerves on edge and had him clamping his jaw tight shut on the anger that almost escaped him.

  Had he got things wrong? Was Becca here because of what was still between them or had Leander decided to call her as a way of getting round the doctor’s unwelcome suggestion that he have a nurse? If that was the case, then the way that Andreas’ explicit instructions had been so blatantly ignored made anger well up inside him.

  ‘We are still together, aren’t we? Or are you just here as the damn nurse?’

  ‘Am—I…?’

  Becca’s thoughts spun as she saw the way that Andreas’ face had changed. It seemed as if in the few brief moments since he had opened his eyes and focused on her sitting there, watching him, he had swung from one extreme of mood to another with such devastating speed that she had difficulty interpreting his feelings or keeping up with each new change.

  Disbelief she had been prepared for, suspicion too. After all, they had parted on such terrible terms that she couldn’t imagine that he would truly be happy to see her, even though she had been told that he had asked for her. The last memory she had of him was of him standing in the doorway of his villa, this villa, watching her walk away, his face set into stony, unyielding lines, rejection stamped into every muscle in his tautly held body. She had known without even glancing back that his arms were folded tight across his broad chest, his powerful body filling the door space, blocking it, so that there was no hope of her getting back into the house if she had been foolish enough even to try.

  But she hadn’t tried. Even if she had wanted to, she knew she would be a fool to consider it. One glance into those cruel black eyes, seeing the hatred and the dark fury that had burned there, had been enough to keep her feet moving doggedly forward, even though tears blinded her eyes until she could hardly see the path in front of her. And even without that black fury, she had vowed that she was never going back. Never.

  ‘I married you for sex—for that and nothing else,’ he had said, and from somewhere deep in her soul she had dragged, up a fierce, savage hatred for Andreas. A hatred that burned away all the love she thought she had felt for him and left it shrivelled into ashes in what remained of her heart. She had clung on to that hatred, and fuelled it by reminding herself over and over and over just what he had said, the way he hadn’t believed her.

  And that hatred, that fury had been enough to get her out of there and into the taxi that he had called to take her away.

  It was only when the car had rounded the corner out of sight of the villa that she had let the bitter tears fall.

  But it seemed from his behaviour now that Andreas remembered nothing of that. It was the only explanation she could think of for the way he was behaving.

  Memory problems, Leander had said and, tense and jittery with nerves, she hadn’t thought to ask for details of what had happened. Now it seemed that she might have to face the fact that to Andreas she was the woman he had known—what? A year before? Fifteen months? It couldn’t be much more than that because they had married after only four months together.

  But it seemed that that wedding and the dreadful events that had followed it had been wiped from his mind. He obviously recalled nothing about their break up—or the reasons for it. So how was she to cope with that—and how was she to behave now?

  ‘Well?’

  The question was snapped out curtly. She’d hesitated too long. Patience had never been a virtue that Andreas Petrakos held in high esteem and it seemed that that at least hadn’t changed.

  ‘Has Leander brought you in to act as the nurse they threatened me with?’

  ‘Do you see having a nurse to look after you as a threat?’ Becca hedged, unable to control the way an instinctive smile curled up the corners of her mouth.

  Of course Andreas saw the idea of having a nurse to look after him as some sort of imposition—a threat. He’d hate the thought of needing to be looked after in any way at all. And his pride would make him fight against the prospect of that happening.

  The look her instinctive teasing brought her stabbed like a stiletto. Not because of any anger in it, but because there was a gleam in those deep black eyes that told her he’d caught the faint shake of laughter in her words, the twitch of her mouth.

  It was an expression that forced memories from the back of Becca’s mind where she had tried to hide them away for so very long. Memories of a time when she had thought that she couldn’t be happier; when she had believed that this stunning, devastating man had actually loved her as much as she had loved him. She had been very definitely and very bitterly disillusioned.

  ‘I told the doctor I didn’t need any nurse fussing over me.’

  ‘But you haven’t—been well.’

  To her despair, her voice caught on the words, something sharp and uncomfortable twisting in her heart at the thought of the powerful, muscled body before her being bruised and torn in the car accident she had been told about. Even
as she spoke, he shifted uncomfortably, and the movement revealed more bruising, this time along his ribs, and down to the lean waist.

  She would feel that way about anyone who was injured, she tried to assure herself. All that it was was a natural compassion for anyone who had been hurt. There was nothing left in her heart to make it any more.

  ‘The hospital believed I was well enough to be sent home, and I do not need any further attention!’

  ‘Not even from someone who doesn’t fuss?’

  What was she doing? Becca’s thoughts reeled as she heard what she’d actually said. She’d practically offered to take on the job of caring for him. And to her horror that was what Andreas obviously thought too.

  ‘You’re saying you’ll never fuss over me?’

  The beginnings of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, put a gleam in those deep, dark eyes. He couldn’t be flirting with her—could he? The contrast with the memory of the way that she had last seen those black eyes, burning with an icy flame of hatred, made her shift uncomfortably in her seat.

  ‘No…’

  Too unsettled now to sit still, Becca got to her feet, wanting to move restlessly about the room, then suddenly thinking better of her actions and returning to perch awkwardly on the arm of the chair.

  ‘I…I’m not saying that.’

  ‘Then what are you saying?’

  Andreas’ tone had sharpened as his eyes followed her uneasy movements.

  ‘I’m not…’

  The words shrivelled into nothing, drying her mouth so that she had to slick a nervous tongue over her parched lips as she tried to find some sort of answer to give him.

  She didn’t know this Andreas—or, rather, she had known him once but so briefly and so unbelievably that she had to struggle to remember it.

  He hadn’t flirted with her when they had first met. Then he had been focused, determined, his devastating personal power concentrated totally on her, so strongly that she had found it almost impossible to breathe.