by Lynne Graham
‘Look, I have something to tell you,’ Maxie cut in stiffly.
‘Let me speak…do you think this is easy for me?’ Angelos slung at her in a gritty undertone of accusation. ‘Baring my feelings like this?’
‘You don’t have any feelings for me,’ Maxie retorted flatly, her heart sinking inside her, her stomach lurching.
‘You seem very sure of that—’
‘Get real, Angelos. There are rocks on this beach with more tender emotions than you’ve got!’ Having made that cynical assurance, Maxie walked on doggedly ‘And why should you feel bad for trying to use me when I was planning to use you too? It’s not like I’m madly in love with you or anything like that!’ She paused to stress that point and vented a shrill laugh for good measure. ‘I only married you because it suited me to marry you. I needed a husband for six months…’
Against the soft, rushing backdrop of the tide, the silence behind her spread and spread until it seemed to echo in her straining ears.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Angelos finally shattered the seething tension with that harsh demand.
Maxie spun round, facial muscles tight with self-control. ‘My godmother’s will. She was a wealthy woman but I can’t inherit my share of her estate without a marriage licence. All I wanted was access to my own money, not yours.’
Angelos stood there as if he had been cast in granite, black eyes fixed to her with stunning intensity. ‘This is a joke…right?’
Maxie shook her golden head in urgent negative. She was so tense she couldn’t get breath enough to speak. Angelos was rigid with incredulity and in the stark, drenching sunlight reflecting off the water he seemed extraordinarily pale.
‘You do realise that if what you have just told me is true, I am going to want to kill you?’ Angelos confided, snatching in a jagged breath of restraint.
‘I don’t see why,’ Maxie returned with determined casualness. ‘This marriage wasn’t any more real to you than it was to me. It was the only way you could get me into bed.’ His hard dark features clenched as if she had struck him but she forced herself onward to the finish. ‘And you didn’t expect us to last five minutes beyond the onset of your own boredom. So that’s why I decided I might as well be frank.’
Turning on her heel, trembling from the effect of that confrontation, Maxie walked blindly off the path and up through the gardens of the house. He wasn’t going to be feeling all sorry and superior now, was he? The biter bit, she thought without any satisfaction as she crossed the hall. Now they would split up and she would never see him again…and she would spend the rest of her life being poor and wanting a man she couldn’t have and shouldn’t even want.
‘Maxie…?’
She turned, not having realised in her preoccupation that Angelos was so close behind her. The world tilted as he swept her off her startled feet up into his powerful arms. A look of aggressive resolution in his blazing golden eyes, Angelos murmured grittily, ‘It should’ve occurred to you that I might not be bored yet, pethi mou!’
‘But—’
The kiss that silenced her lasted all the way down to the bedroom. It was like plunging a finger into an electric socket. Excitement and shock waved through her. He brought her down on the bed. Surfacing, Maxie stammered in complete bewilderment, ‘B-but you don’t want me any more…you imagined me—’
Engaged in ripping off his clothes over her, Angelos glowered down at her. ‘I didn’t imagine that clever little brain or that stinging tongue of yours, did I?’
‘What are you doing?’ she gasped.
‘What I should have done when I woke up this morning to find you exploring me like a shy little kid…I didn’t want to embarrass you.’ Angelos focused on her, his sheer incredulity at that decision etched in every line of his savagely attractive features. ‘How could I possibly have dreamt that you could be embarrassed? Beneath that angelic, perfect face you’re as tough as Teflon!’
Maxie was flattered to be called that tough. She didn’t mind being told she was clever, or that she had a sharp tongue either. This was respect she was getting. It might not be couched in terms most women would’ve recognised but she knew Angelos well enough to see that she had risen considerably in his estimation since the previous night. Indeed, it crossed her mind that Angelos responded beautifully to a challenge, and that acknowledgement shone a blinding white light of clarity through her thoughts. She sat there transfixed.
‘Why are you so quiet?’ Angelos enquired suspiciously. ‘I don’t trust you quiet.’
Maxie cast him an unwittingly languorous smile over one shoulder. ‘I presume we’re not heading for a divorce right at this moment…?’
‘Theos, woman…we only got married yesterday!’
The heat of his hungry gaze sent wild colour flying into her cheeks. He still wanted her. He still seemed to want her every bit as much as he had ever wanted her, she registered in renewed shock. And then he brought his mouth to hers again and her own hunger betrayed her. Her hands flew up to smooth through his hair, curve over his hard jawline. The need to touch, to hold was so powerful it made her eyes sting and filled her with instinctive fear.
‘I won’t hurt you this time…I promise,’ Angelos groaned against her reddened mouth while he eased her out of her dress virtually without her noticing. He cupped her cheekbones to stare down into her sensually bemused eyes, his own gaze a tigerish, slumberous gold. ‘To be the first with you…that was an unexpected gift. And telling me crazy stories in an effort to level some imaginary score is pointless. You ache for me too…do you think I don’t see that in you with every look, every touch?’
Crazy stories? The will, her godmother’s will. Obviously, after a moment of reflection, he hadn’t believed her after all. But Maxie couldn’t keep that awareness in mind. She did part her lips, meaning to contradict him, but he kissed her again and she clutched at him in the blindness of a passion she could not deny.
‘Why should you still fight me?’ Angelos purred as he freed her breasts from the restraint of her bra and paused to run wondering dark eyes over her. He brushed appreciative fingers over the engorged tip of one pale breast and then lingered there in a caress that stole the very breath from her quiveringly responsive body. ‘Why should you even want to fight me?’
There was something Maxie remembered that she needed to tell him, but looking up into those stunning golden eyes she could barely recall what her own name was, never mind open a serious conversation. Angelos angled a blinding megawatt smile of approval down at her and it was as if she had been programmed from birth to seek that endorsement. She reached up and found his lips again, a connection she now instinctively craved more than she had ever craved anything in her life before.
His tongue played with hers as he lay half over her. He smoothed a hand down over her slim hips and eased off the scrap of lace that still shielded her from him. With skilled fingers he skimmed through the golden curls at the apex of her slender thighs and sought the hot, moist centre of her. A whimper of formless sound was torn from Maxie then. Suddenly she was burning all over and she couldn’t stay still.
And, as straying shards of sunlight played over the bed, Angelos utilised every ounce of his expertise to fire her to the heights of anguished desire. When she couldn’t bear it any more, he slid over her. He watched her with hungry intimacy as he entered her, the fierce restraint he exercised over his own urgency etched in every taut line of his dark, damp features.
The pleasure came to her then, in wave after drugging wave. In the grip of it, she was utterly lost. ‘Angelos…’ she cried out.
And he stilled, and Maxie gasped in stricken protest, and with an earthy sound of amusement he went on. She didn’t want him ever to stop. The slow, tormenting climb to fevered excitement had raised her to such a pitch, she ached for more with every thrust of his possession. And when finally sensation took her in a wild storm of rocketing pleasure, she uttered a startled moan of delight. As the last tiny quiver of glorious fulfilment
evaporated she looked up at him with new eyes.
‘Wow,’ she breathed.
Struggling to catch his breath, Angelos dealt her a very male smile of satisfaction. ‘That was the wedding night we should have had.’
Maxie was still pretty much lost in wonder. Wow, she thought again, luxuriating in the strong arms still wrapped around her, the closeness, the feeling of tenderness eating her up alive and threatening to make her eyes overflow. Oh, yes, wouldn’t tears really impress him? Blinking rapidly, she swallowed hard on the surge of powerful emotion she was struggling to control.
‘I think it’s time I made some sort of announcement about this marriage of ours,’ Angelos drawled lazily.
Maxie’s lashes shot up, eyes stunned at all that went unsaid in that almost careless declaration. Evidently Angelos no longer saw the slightest need to keep their true relationship a secret from the rest of the world.
‘Don’t you think?’ he prompted softly, and then with a slumberous sigh he released her from his weight and rolled off the bed in one powerfully energetic movement. ‘Shower and then breakfast…I don’t think I’ve ever been so hungry in my life!’
Only then did Maxie recall what he had said about ‘crazy stories’ before they’d made love. Her face tensed, her stomach twisting. ‘Angelos…?’
He turned his tousled dark head and he smiled at her again.
Her fingers knotted nervously into a section of sheet. ‘What I mentioned earlier…what I said about my godmother’s will…that wasn’t a story, it was the truth.’
Angelos stilled, his smile evaporating like Scotch mist, black eyes suddenly level and alert.
Maxie explained again about the will. She went into great detail on the subject of her godmother’s lifelong belief in the importance of marriage, the older woman’s angry disapproval when Maxie had moved in with Leland. But Maxie didn’t look at Angelos again after that first ten seconds when she had anxiously registered the grim tautening of his dark features.
‘You see, at the time…after the way you proposed…I mean, I was angry, and I didn’t see why I shouldn’t make use of the fact that you were actually offering me exactly what I required to meet that condition of inheritance…’ Maxie’s voice petered out to a weak, uncertain halt because what had once seemed so clear now seemed so confused inside her own head. And the decision which once had seemed so simple and so clever mysteriously took on another aspect altogether when she attempted to explain it out loud to Angelos.
The silence simmered like a boiling cauldron.
Slowly, hesitantly, Maxie lifted her head and focused on Angelos.
Strong face hard with derision, black eyes scorching slivers of burning gold, he stared back at her. ‘You are one devious, calculating little vixen,’ he breathed with raw anger. ‘When I asked you to marry me, I was honest. Anything less than complete honesty would’ve been beneath me because, unlike you, I have certain principles, certain standards!’
Maxie had turned paper-pale. ‘Angelos, I—’
‘Shut up…I don’t want to hear any more!’ he blazed back at her with sizzling contempt. ‘I’m thinking of the generous financial settlement you were promised should our marriage end. You had neither need nor any other excuse to plot and plan to collect on some trusting old lady’s will as well!’
A great rush of hot tears hit the back of Maxie’s aching eyes. Blinking rapidly, she looked away. He was looking at her as if she had just crawled out from under a stone and sudden intense shame engulfed her.
‘How could you be so disgustingly greedy?’ Angelos launched in fierce condemnation. ‘And how could you try to use me when I never once tried to use you?’
‘It wasn’t like that. You’ve got it all wrong,’ Maxie fumbled in desperation, deeply regretting her own foolish mode of confession on the beach when saving face had been uppermost in her mind. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment idea…I was hurt and furious and I—’
‘When a man gives you a wedding ring, he is honouring you, not using you!’ Angelos gritted between clenched teeth.
Maxie started to bristle then. ‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that…I only had the supreme honour of wearing that ring for about five minutes—’
‘You gave it back—’
Maxie lifted shimmering blue eyes and tilted her chin. ‘You took it!’ she reminded him wrathfully. ‘And I don’t want it back either…and I don’t want you making any announcement to anybody about our marriage…because I wouldn’t want anybody to know I was stupid enough to marry you!’
‘That cuts both ways,’ Angelos asserted with chilling bite, temper leashed back as he squared his big shoulders. ‘And I’ll be sure to ditch you before the six months is up!’
He strode into the bathroom.
Maxie flung herself back against the pillows, rolled over and pummelled them with sheer rage and frustration. Then she went suddenly still, and a great rolling breaker of sobs threatened because just for a little while she had felt close to Angelos and then, like a fairy-tale illusion, that closeness had vanished again…driven away by her own foolish, reckless tongue.
Yes, sooner or later she would naturally have had to tell Angelos about Nancy Leeward’s will. But on the beach she had blown it, once and for all. After all, who was it who had told him that she had planned to use him? And the whole thing had struck him as so far-fetched that within minutes of being told he had decided it wasn’t true. Indeed he had assumed that she was childishly trying to ‘level the score.’ Maxie shivered, belatedly appalled by the realisation that Angelos could understand her to that degree…
That was exactly what she had been doing. Believing that their relationship was over, she had been set on saving face and so she had told him about the will in the most offensive possible terms. Now that she had convinced him that she was telling him the truth, she was reaping the reward she had invited…anger, contempt, distaste.
And how could she say now, I wanted to marry you anyway and I needed a good excuse to allow myself to do that and still feel that I was control? There was no way that she could tell Angelos that she loved him. There was no way she could see herself ever telling Angelos that she loved him…
When he came out of the bathroom, a towel knotted round his lean brown hips, Maxie studied him miserably. ‘Angelos. I was going to tear up that prenuptial contract—’
‘You should be writing scripts for Disney!’ Angelos countered with cutting disbelief, and strode towards the dressing-room.
‘You said…you said you couldn’t pride yourself on your judgement where I was concerned,’ Maxie persisted tightly, wondering if what she was doing qualified as crawling, terrified that it might be.
‘I’m back on track now, believe me.’ Angelos sent her an icy look of brooding darkness. ‘I’m also off to London for a couple of days. I have some business to take care of.’
Business? What business? They had only arrived yesterday. Maxie wasn’t stupid. She got the message. He just didn’t want to be with her any more.
‘Are you always this unforgiving in personal relationships?’ Maxie breathed a little chokily when he had disappeared from view, but she knew he could still hear her.
‘I love that breathy little catch in your voice but it’s wasted on me. You wouldn’t cry if I roasted you over a bonfire!’
‘You’re right,’ Maxie said steadily, hastily wiping the tears dripping down her cheeks with the corner of the sheet.
Angelos reappeared, sheathed in a stupendous silver-grey suit. Lean, dark face impassive, he looked as remote as the Himalayas and even colder.
Maxie made one final desperate attempt to penetrate that armour of judgemental ice. ‘I really don’t and never did want your money, Angelos,’ she whispered with all the sincerity she could muster.
Angelos sent her a hard, gleaming scrutiny, his expressive mouth curling. ‘You may not be my conception of a wife but you will make the perfect mistress. In that role you can be every bit as mercenary as you like. You spend my money; I
enjoy your perfect body. Randy Greek billionaires understand that sort of realistic exchange best of all. And at least this way we both know where we stand.’
Maxie gazed back at him in total shock. Every scrap of colour drained from her cheeks. But in that moment the battle lines were drawn…if Angelos wanted a mistress rather than a wife, a mistress, Maxie decided fierily, was what he was jolly well going to get!
‘Angelos doesn’t know where you are? You mean he’s not aware that you’re back in London yet?’ Liz breathed in astonishment when the fact penetrated.
Maxie took a deep breath. ‘I came straight here from the airport. I’m planning to surprise him,’ she said, with more truth than the older woman could ever have guessed.
‘Oh…yes, of course.’ Liz relaxed again and smiled. ‘What a shame business concerns had to interrupt your honeymoon! It must’ve been something terribly important. When was it you said Angelos left the island?’
‘Just a few days ago…’ Maxie did not confide that she had left on the ferry exactly twenty-four hours later—the very morning, in fact, when her credit cards had been delivered. Credit cards tellingly made out in her maiden name. The die had been cast there and then. Angelos’s goose had been cooked to a cinder.
And, faced with that obvious invitation to spend, spend, spend, as any sensible mistress would at the slightest excuse, Maxie had instantly risen to the challenge. She had flown to Rome and then to Paris. She had had a whale of a time. She had repaired the deficiencies of her wardrobe with the most beautiful designer garments she could find. And if she had seen a pair of shoes or a handbag she liked, she had bought them in every possible colour…
Indeed, she could now have papered entire walls with credit card slips. If Angelos had been following that impressive paper trail of gross extravagance and shameless avarice across Rome and Paris, he would probably still think she was abroad, but he wouldn’t know where because she had deliberately used cash to pay for flights and hotel bills.