by Julia James
She was very still for a moment. Then she spoke. ‘No.’
‘Do you claim you were “in love” with him?’ The jibe was still there.
‘No. But I cared for him, and I would have made him the best wife I could.’
‘Even though your marriage would have been based on a lie?’
She swallowed, looking away. She would not seek to placate him by saying she had accepted she had been wrong to deceive Giles. Why should she care what Angelos Petrakos thought of her? He was nothing to her—nothing! Except the man she hated …
From across the table Angelos’s gaze rested on her. This evening she had made no effort to dress as she had in London and Geneva. Yet the casual attire did nothing to play down her beauty. The leggings highlighted the length of her legs, the long soft top skimmed her breasts and slender hips, the undressed hair, cinched at her nape, flowed down her back like a pale waterfall. Her face needed no make-up, no deepening of the eyes or reddening of the mouth. Her beauty was her own, whatever name she gave herself. Once again he felt the emotion he would not name flow through him.
She was so still … unmoving. She sat there making no reply, as if he had not spoken. Another emotion pricked within him—a familiar one. She was closing him out as if he had no effect on her. It angered him, as it had before. His fingers tightened on his knife and fork as he cut into his meat. He did not want her closing him out. He did not want her sitting there so still, as if he had no effect on her.
He knew better. She had stood there, motionless, while he had touched her, caressed her—kissed her. And he had known with every instinct, every certainty, that though she had come to him with nothing more than a venal motive she had, for all that, dissolved at his touch …
For a timeless moment it was vivid in his mind, that indelible memory. She had stood in front of him and he had explored the fineness of her skin, the contours of her face, tasted the softness of her mouth, silenced from its provocative insolence at last.
Memory—vivid, real—fused over his vision as his eyes rested on her now. He felt that unnamed emotion flow within him again. Compelling, ineluctable.
He picked up his glass, breaking the flow of that unnamed emotion. As he drank, he saw her start to eat again.
‘So,’ he began, setting down his glass, deliberately putting aside the thoughts that swirled inside his head, ‘did you enjoy the walk this afternoon?’
Thea took a forkful of food. ‘Yes.’ She would be honest—why shouldn’t she be if he wanted, for whatever inexplicable reason, to make polite conversation with her? But why he was doing so, why she was here at all, was beyond her comprehension. And certainly beyond her caring. She had no choice but to be here.
‘You looked as though you did,’ he said slowly. In his mind’s eye he saw her again, sitting in the shelter of the rocks, gazing out over the vista, watching the eagles soaring. Quiet. Contemplative. Still.
As if she were at home there.
He put the thought aside, moved on from it.
‘Next time we’ll try a longer walk. But tomorrow you’d better take it easy. We’ll drive down to the village and take the cable car up to the restaurant at the top of the ski slopes. It stays open for the summer season. There’s a glacier nearby that makes summer skiing possible.
She looked up. ‘I’ve never seen a glacier.’
There was a note of interest in her voice. Spontaneous, unguarded.
‘They’re an extraordinary phenomenon of nature,’ said Angelos. ‘Rivers of ice moving so slowly, but so powerfully. Though in geological time they are rushing rapids compared with the growth and erosion of the mountains. Yet the Alps themselves are striplings—one of the youngest mountain ranges in the world.’
Thea listened, realising that Angelos seemed to have a real interest in what he was telling her. He went on, explaining about tectonic plates, volcanic activity and mountain-building, and at a pause found herself saying, ‘You know a great deal about it.’
His expression changed. ‘I once wanted to be a geologist,’ he said.
She stared. A geologist? Angelos Petrakos? Who could do anything he wanted?
‘So why didn’t you?’
‘It wasn’t possible,’ he said flatly. ‘Someone had to run the company my father had spent his life creating. It was my inheritance, and it was also my responsibility. I employ a lot of people whose livelihoods are in my hands. I can’t jaunt off to do what I want. Only sometimes—like now—I come here, to the mountains. On my own.’
He frowned, as if he’d just realised what he’d said. Because he wasn’t here on his own.
He didn’t bring women here. It was a place he kept solely for his own use. The place he came when he could let go—briefly—the multiple complex threads of Petrakos International to be here on his own, among the mountains.
And no woman that he knew would want to be here. Those he chose for his liaisons would never have been content to spend their time in this deserted place—spend their days walking the ridges and peaks and cols all day. Nor could he envisage a single one of them discussing tectonic plates with him.
His frown deepened.
‘Why have you an interest in geology?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Because I don’t know anything about it,’ she answered. ‘There’s still so much I don’t know—about so many things.’
He was looking at her, with that unreadable expression in his eyes that she often saw there.
‘“To be ignorant and uneducated is one thing,”’ she said. ‘“To want to remain so is another.”’
A glint showed in his eye. ‘A noble expression,’ he commented.
‘It’s what you said to me,’ she answered, ‘when I said I didn’t know anything about Monte Carlo except that it was full of rich people.’ She took a breath. ‘I resented it at the time, but afterwards I remembered it.’ She took a sip of her appelsaft. ‘It was true—resent it as I did. Only fools stay ignorant by choice. So I chose to learn, instead.’
‘You’ve learnt a great deal,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed almost beyond recognition. I don’t just mean your appearance, your accent. Its much more than that.’
She looked away. ‘You never knew me,’ she replied.
‘I knew enough.’ His voice was harsh suddenly.
Involuntarily her eyes went back to him. Clashed with his. Then, abruptly, his eyes were veiled, and when he spoke again his voice was milder.
‘And I still do.’
His voice was like silk across her skin.
Inside her ribs she could feel her heart give a sudden pulse. Danger pressed around her …
She felt it still, even after the meal had finished and they went into the lounge to have coffee served to them by Franz. As the manservant poured it out Angelos crossed to the well-stocked bookshelves behind the sofa in front of the hearth, and returned with a hefty atlas which he placed on the pine coffee table.
‘You wanted to understand tectonic plates, and the formation of the Alps and other mountain ranges?’ he said, settling himself down beside her and opening up the atlas.
Against her will, Thea found her interest outweighing her resistance to having Angelos Petrakos talk to her. Only as he used the illustrations and diagrams in the atlas to explain the complicated process she was disturbed by his physical proximity as he turned the pages. He was too close to her—far too close to her …
She felt her tension mount. Their bodies were almost within touching distance. As if he could feel it, he stopped talking, turning his head to hers. For an endless moment he looked at her.
Too close—too close! Far, far too close!
Her eyes flared in panic.
He straightened up, snapping the atlas shut. Without speaking he got to his feet and went across to an alcove. In a few moments music was flooding out into the room. It was Bach, or Vivaldi, or something like that, she vaguely recognised. Bright and fast and corruscatingly brilliant. She was glad of it, and sat back into a corner of the sofa, drawing up
her shoeless feet on to the seat, picking up her coffee cup, making a show of listening to the music.
She wondered whether Angelos was going to start talking again, but he stayed silent, one long leg casually crooked across the other, occupying the rest of the sofa, seeming content to do as she was doing—drinking coffee and listening to the music. In the hearth, the pine logs crackled and spat, making the room warm, the atmosphere somnolent. The music slowed, and after a while Thea felt her eyelids grow heavy.
‘You’re falling asleep,’ she heard Angelos say, and blinked. ‘It’s the fresh air and exertion. Go to bed, Kat.’
Slowly, sleepily, she uncoiled herself and set down the coffee cup, getting to her feet. For a moment she didn’t quite know what to say. His expression was unreadable. Then she simply said, ‘Goodnight,’ and went to bed.
That night she slept even better, though her dreams were vivid of high, windy places and brilliant sun, and she dreamt she was still walking. When she awoke Trudi was hovering. Breakfast, so it seemed, was waiting for her, and the morning was advanced.
It was another bizarre day. After breakfast Angelos drove them down to the village and up to the cable car station. Soon they were suspended high above the now green ski slopes, traveling up to the restaurant poised beside the piste. They lunched out in the open on the decked surround, and once again Angelos proved an informative companion. Once again, Thea simply went along with it. What else could she do? All she could do was accept the situation—accept that it served his purpose for her to be here. Accept too, that—bizarre as it seemed—Angelos was treating her, as he had the previous day, without any sign of his habitual anger.
He took her to see the glacier after lunch—a short walk across the col—and pointed out its features, the sun dazzling on its ravined, icy surface. They talked of how the glaciers were shrinking in the Alps, and everywhere, and of global warming, and he told her how he had started a new division of Petrakos International to develop green technologies. Again she found her mind stimulated, her interest engaged, curiosity aroused. It helped, she knew, that in the bright sunlight dazzling off the glacier his dark glasses veiled his eyes from her, veiled hers from him. It seemed—safer.
The sun was already starting to dip behind the peaks opposite as they descended in the cable car again, and by the time they reached the village it was dusky and shadowed in the deep valley. But the little village was attractive, with summer window boxes and traditional wooden-framed shops and houses. She did some toiletries shopping, and then Angelos paused outside a konditterei.
‘Tempted, Kat?’ he murmured.
Thea gazed at the trays of exquisite chocolates. Then she shook her head. It was madness to think of eating such horrendously calorific sweetmeats. It took her a moment to realise Angelos had gone into the shop. He exited a few minutes later with a huge box, done up with an even huger bow. He presented the box to her with a flourish.
‘For you,’ he said.
And suddenly, out of nowhere, Thea felt her throat tighten. ‘Th-thank you,’ she heard herself say, taking the box.
Dear God, what was the world coming to? Angelos Petrakos buying her chocolates …
As if he did not hate her …
Immediately she repudiated the thought. Impossible—impossible to believe he did not hate her! Yet as the day turned into an evening spent as the one before, quietly over dinner and then in the lounge listening to music, that same strange rapprochement seemed to hold.
In the days that followed they settled down into what gradually became a familiar routine—heading off on one long Alpine walk after another, trekking in the dazzling sunshine across the close-cropped turf, along the steep, precipitous ridges. She could not but start to accept that, for a reason she could not fathom, it really did seem that Angelos had, inexplicably, dropped his long-held hostility towards her. He made no more jibes or challenges to her. Instead, as the days passed, he seemed to be treating her as if she were truly a guest—someone he’d chosen to spend time with. Someone whose life he had never destroyed.
It was the strangest realisation. And, whilst that was strange, she found her own response even stranger, even more inexplicable. Little by little, day by day, she started, in return, to find satisfaction in the long, strenuous walks that ranged far and wide over the slopes and ridges, to find stimulation in their talking over dinner, the time she spent with him. And with every passing day she realised, with confused disbelief, that in spite of everything that had passed between them she was beginning to feel, of all things, quite extraordinarily and totally against all expectations, a kind of rapport with him … finding herself content both to trek in peaceful silence and to converse animatedly, incisively, on any and every subject.
Yet even as her guard against him lowered, so her physical awareness of him—which had always disturbed and dismayed her—grew. Fervently she tried to suppress it, tried to ignore it, but it was there running like a silent, powerful river deep inside her. She could not rid herself of it, could not make herself insensible to it. It was there all the time, growing. She knew her eyes were always going to him—they were now, as they crossed a col towards the next peak, on the taut planes of his face, the strong features, the wind-ruffled sable hair, the lean, powerful body. He was imprinting himself more and more on her consciousness.
It was troubling and disturbing. And very, very potent, bringing with it, slowly and inexorably, the most troubling realisation of all.
She stopped dead in her tracks. Her mind sheered away, like an eagle urgently beating its wings to gain uplift against the plunging wind.
No—that could not be—could not! It was impossible-impossible …
Stumbling, she forced herself to move again, missing her footing for a moment, so that she had to exert all her balance to recover. To recover more than her footing …
Her eyes went to the man ahead of her, striding onwards.
And she felt her lungs hollow as if all the air around her had been sucked away, leaving nothing in its place but a truth she had to face. A truth that drained the blood from her face.
She didn’t want to leave. Didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to go back to a world, a life, that seemed more and more unreal—more and more far away. Wanted only to go on being here, in this high, remote place.
With Angelos.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A CRESCENT moon was lying like a sliver of silver light, just above the dark mass of the mountains. Angelos stood on the balcony, hands curled over the balustrade, ignoring the chill of the night.
What was happening to him? For days now he’d taken Kat out across the mountains, walking for hours across the roof of the world, and with every passing day his thoughts about her had been changing. He knew it—could feel it. Could feel the emotions flowing through him like a watercourse finding a new path.
His brow furrowed frowningly. He had deliberately brought her here to these mountains, to this high, lonely place which exposed the truth about a person, giving them no place to hide, to disguise what they were. He knew that it was here that he became the person he most truly was—not the head of a huge multinational corporation, with thousands of employees and dozens to do his bidding at the nod of his head or his briefest word of instruction, but simply the man beneath that. The man he would have been had his father not worked his life away to build the company he’d bequeathed—too soon, far too soon—to his son. The burden along with the wealth and power. Here, in these mountains, he was himself.
And Kat—or Thea—or whatever name she called herself—was she the person she truly was here? Was that what he was seeing now? The truth exposed by the mountains that let no one hide their true selves here?
One thing he was certain of—his anger towards her had gone.
When it had happened he could not tell. But at some point the keening wind had whipped away the last shreds of it, like rags that had become tattered over the years and were now no more. It was strange not to feel angry with her any more. Stra
nge to feel that now he could simply lay that long-carried emotion aside and allow himself to focus only on the woman who had become in this place, sharing this strange, unexpected affinity, his companion …
His unblinking gaze rested on the crescent moon. He let the word resonate in his mind. Companion …
Had any woman ever been a companion to him? His experience of women was wide, but he could think of none who would have wanted to come here. None he would have wanted here.
But the woman he had brought here, to find out the truth about her—that woman, and that woman only, he did want here. Whoever she had once been, whatever she had once done, seemed very distant to him now. Now the only reality he saw was a woman whose company seemed to fit his in every way, whether it was in the companionship of the shared trail, the long silences of their treks, the mutual appreciation of the stark beauty of the alpine landscape, or in the easy, unstilted conversation of their evenings on any and every subject their discourse led them to, or the quiet enjoyment of music and the fireside.
His hands tightened over the wooden railing. There was one other reality that he knew about her. About himself.
His weight shifted restlessly.
With every day spent with her that reality became clearer, stronger. With every day her extraordinary beauty haunted him more powerfully, drew him more ineluctably. And now, as he stood here, beneath the heavens, high above the world below, he knew with absolute certainty what he wanted above all. It no longer mattered how she had offered him her body five years ago. If she was truly the woman she seemed now to be, whom he no longer had to be angry with, then surely there was no reason why he should not, finally, consummate his long desire for her?
And hers for him. Because, for all her vehement protestation that night in London, when she had shrilled at him that she could not bear him to touch her, he knew—oh, he knew!—that she was lying. With every day, with every evening spent with her, he could feel like an electric charge her shimmering awareness of him. She could deny it all she liked—but for how much longer?