The hotel was only a short walk away but by the time she arrived there she had the beginnings of a headache, so the last thing she needed was to walk into the hotel foyer and straight into a bored and weary reception party. Her mother, Clive and Lester Miles were all sitting on the few comfortable chairs the dingy foyer possessed. On a low table in front of them lay the remains of an indifferent-looking afternoon tea.
‘Where have you been?’ her mother demanded the moment she saw her. ‘I’ve been worrying myself sick about you.’
‘But I left you a message at Reception,’ she said frowningly as she walked towards them.
‘I got your message, Isobel,’ her mother said impatiently. ‘“I’ve gone out for while,” does not really cover a three-hour disappearance, does it? Having dragged me all the way to Athens, I did think you would have spared a little time to be with me.’
‘But I thought…’ she began, then changed her mind. Her mother was right and attempting to shift responsibility on to the fact that Clive was supposed to be taking her out for the day wasn’t good enough. Especially when it only took a glance at Clive to know he was wishing he hadn’t invited himself along on this trip.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, and bent to press a contrite kiss on her mother’s cheek. It felt warm and she looked flushed. It occurred to her that they all looked flushed. Clive was sweating and Lester Miles had lost his suit jacket and tie and was fanning himself with an ancient-looking magazine.
It was then that she realised the air-conditioning wasn’t working, and that it was as warm inside as it was out.
‘It’s broken,’ Clive offered, noticing the way she’d glanced up at the air-conditioning vents set in the walls.
Broken, Isobel echoed wearily. No wonder her mother was cross. She had promised her faithfully that the hotel would be cool when she’d bullied her into coming here with her. With a deep breath she braced herself. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we go upstairs and all take a nice shower, then we can find somewhere to—?’
‘We can’t go upstairs, either.’ It was Lester Miles that spoke this time. ‘The lift has broken down as well.’
‘As well?’ she gasped. ‘You have to be joking.’
‘Nope.’ It was Clive again. ‘We are in the middle of a power cut, in case you haven’t noticed. No lights, no air-conditioning and no lift,’ he pointed out. ‘Apparently it happens all the time.’
‘So you tell me, Isobel,’ Silvia said crossly, ‘how a wheelchair-bound, feeble woman climbs four flights of stairs to get her much-needed cool shower?’
I don’t know, she thought, and wondered what they would do if she plonked herself down on the floor and had a good weep? Nothing had gone according to plan from the moment she’d left here this morning. She wished she hadn’t come to Athens. She wished she was still at home in rainy England, plodding away at her mundane photo-imaging job! She certainly wished she hadn’t had to set eyes on Leandros again. He cut her up, he always had done. She lost her calm and steady sense of proportion whenever she was around him.
‘You two men don’t have to stay down here if you prefer to go and cool off in your rooms,’ she murmured a trifle unsteadily. ‘I’ll see if Mum and I can find—’
‘Trust me, Isobel,’ Clive put in deridingly, ‘we are sitting in the coolest place right now.’
‘This place is a dump,’ her mother added.
‘I’m sorry,’ her daughter apologised once again, realizing she was going to cry. She placed a hand to her aching head and tried to think. ‘Just give me a few minutes—all of you—and I’ll see if I can find us another hotel to—’
‘Is there a problem here?’ another, deeper voice inserted.
If it was possible, Isobel’s spirits sank even lower as she turned with fatalistic slowness to face her nemesis. Leandros didn’t look hot, she noticed. He didn’t look anything but cool and smooth, suave and handsome and…
‘What are you doing here?’ It was her mother who asked the abrasive question.
‘And good day to you, too, Silvia.’ Leandros smiled, but his eyes remained fixed on Isobel’s pale face. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked her gently.
Gentle did it. Her mouth began to wobble. The tears bulged in her eyes. ‘I…’ She tried to think but found that she couldn’t. ‘I…’ She tried to speak again and couldn’t even do that. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t fair. He’d spun her round in circles until she didn’t know what she was doing any more.
Leandros’s hand came out in front of him. She saw he was holding her camera case out by its strap. She must have left it at Vassilou’s restaurant. Maybe she’d left her courage there too. She reached out to take the camera back, missed the strap and found herself clutching at a solid male wrist instead. He didn’t even hesitate, but just used her grip to propel her towards him and the next moment her face was pressed into his shoulder and she stayed there, not even caring who watched her sink so easily into the enemy.
One of his hands was gently cupping her nape; the other just as gently curved her waist. The camera was knocking against the back of her leg and her fingers were clutching at a piece of his shirt. He felt strong and reassuringly familiar and, though she did not want to feel it, there was not another place that she would rather be right now.
Someone was talking, someone was tutting. Someone else was also sobbing quietly and she knew it was her. He didn’t speak. He just stood there and held her and listened.
Then she heard her mother snap, ‘This it is all your fault, Leandros.’
‘Quite,’ he agreed, the single word vibrating in his deep chest and against Isobel’s hot forehead. ‘Mr Miles,’ he spoke to her lawyer, ‘would you do me a great favour and go over to that excuse for a hotel receptionist and tell him that Leandros Petronades wishes to speak to him?’
This blatant bit of name-dropping brought Isobel’s face out of his chest. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.
‘What you once told me I am good at,’ he replied. ‘Which is solving other people’s problems.’
It was an old gripe, and it stiffened her spine to be reminded of it. ‘I can do that for myself.’
‘Stay where you are.’ The hand at her waist slid up her back to keep her still. ‘This is turning out to be one of the best days of my life, and you are not going to spoil it by turning back into the tough-lady I know so well.’
Her worst day, his best day. That just about said it all for Isobel.
As you would have expected, when Leandros threw his weight around, the hotel manager came out of his hideaway at great speed to begin apologising profusely in Greek. Leandros answered him in equally profuse but incisive Greek. The conversation was so swift and tight that Isobel couldn’t follow it all. By the time the little man had hurried away again, Leandros was letting her ease away from him, and she then had to brace herself to face their audience.
Which made it the third time in one day she’d had to do it. Well, they said that bad things always come in threes, so maybe her luck was about to change, she thought hopefully as she glanced from hot face to hot face.
Her mother was staring at her as if she couldn’t quite believe that her daughter had just wept all over her estranged husband. Lester Miles had put his jacket back on and was looking invigorated because he had been given something to do. Clive had come to his feet and was weighing up the competition. If he had any sense, it was all he would do, Isobel thought, then took in a deep breath and decided it was time to introduce him to Leandros.
‘Clive, this is my husband Lean—’
‘Silvia, thoes! You do not look well.’ Cutting her off with a brusque exclamation, Leandros didn’t even glance at Clive as he went to lean over her mother. ‘This has been too much for you,’ he murmured concernedly and took possession of one of her hands. ‘You must accept my sincere apologies on behalf of Athens. You will give me five minutes only and I will make your life more comfortable, ee pethera, I promise you. If the manager is doing as I instructed then a car
is on its way here as I speak. It will carry you with air-conditioned swiftness away from this miserable place.’
As Isobel watched, her stubborn, tough, I-hate-this-man mother melted before her very eyes. ‘This hotel was all we could afford,’ she told him miserably. ‘Isobel wouldn’t listen to sense. She wouldn’t let you pay. And she wouldn’t let me stay in my own home where at least I could make myself a cup of tea if I pleased.’
‘Away to where?’ Isobel cut in on this very enlightning conversation.
‘To our home, of course,’ Leandros replied. ‘Isobel is a very stubborn woman, is she not?’ he conspired with her mother. ‘Which she gets from you, of course,’ he added with a grin.
‘I don’t cut my nose off to spite my face,’ Silvia pointed out.
‘What do you mean, to your home?’ Isobel gasped in outrage.
‘Our home,’ he corrected. ‘I am relieved to hear that, ee meetera. It is such a beautiful nose. Perhaps between us we could persuade Isobel to leave her nose where it is?’
‘You always were an inveterate charmer, Leandros,’ Silvia huffed, but her cheeks were now flushed with pleasure rather than heat.
‘Leandros. We are not going to stay at your house,’ Isobel protested. ‘The power cut will be over in a minute or so, then everything here will be back to normal!’
‘And if it happens again when your mother is in her room?’ he challenged. ‘Is it worth risking her being trapped up there?’
‘Just what I’d been about to say before you arrived.’ Her wretched mother nodded.
Isobel threw herself into one of the chairs and gave up the fight. ‘What about Clive and Mr Miles?’ she tossed into the melting pot of calamities that were befalling her today. ‘They will have to come too.’
There was a sudden and stunningly electric silence. Then Leandros rasped, ‘Your lover can sleep where the hell he likes, so long as it is not in my house.’
Her mother stared at him. Clive looked as if he had turned to stone. Lester Miles just watched it all avidly, like a man watching some gripping drama unfold.
Isobel’s heart stopped dead. Oh, dear God, she groaned silently and covered her eyes and wished the world would swallow her up. Too late, she remembered that she’d left Leandros with the impression that she and Clive were lovers.
She couldn’t take any more. She stood up. ‘I’m going to my room,’ she breathed shakily, and headed for the stairwell on legs that shook.
By the time she’d climbed up four flights and felt her way down a dingy inner corridor to her room, she was out of breath and so fed up that she headed straight for the telephone and got Reception to connect her with the airport. If she could get them home tonight then they were going, she decided grimly. Even if that meant travelling in the cargo hold!
No such luck. When a day like this began it didn’t give up on turning one’s life into a living hell. No seats were available on any flight out of Athens. She was stuck. Her mother was stuck.
‘I’m sorry,’ a voice said behind her. ‘My coming here seems to have made a lot of problems for you.’
‘Why did you come, Clive?’ She swung round on him. ‘I don’t understand what you aimed to gain!’
He was standing propping up the doorway. ‘I thought I might be of some use.’ His shrug was rueful. ‘Your mother agreed. It didn’t occur to me that your husband would view my presence here with such suspicion.’
He didn’t just suspect—he knew because she had told him! Oh, heck, she thought and sighed heavily. ‘He’s been having me watched,’ she explained. ‘When he heard that you were here he automatically assumed the worst.’
‘It’s nothing to do with him any more what I am to you,’ Clive responded curtly. ‘You came here to agree a divorce, not ask his permission to take a lover.’
Isobel released a thick laugh. ‘Leandros is a very powerful, very arrogant, and very territorial man. The moment he heard about you, the divorce thing was dropped. Now I’m stuck with a man who has decided to work on his marriage rather than give me up to someone else.’
‘That’s primitive!’
‘That’s Leandros,’ she replied, then sighed and sat down on the end of the bed.
‘You don’t have to go with him.’
No? I wish, she thought. ‘He’s already sweet-talked my mother with promises of air-conditioning and I can’t even begin to list the rest of the luxury she is now looking forward to.’
‘She doesn’t even like the man.’
‘Don’t you believe that front she puts up,’ she said heavily. ‘My mother used to think he was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ Until it all went wrong; then she’d wished him in hell.
Clive slouched further into the room. He was built like a cannon. All iron with a sunbed-bronzed sheen. The women adored him and flocked after him in droves. He worked at a fitness club. He spent hours patiently helping broken people to mend. He was nice!
‘You came to Athens hoping I would need putting back together again after meeting Leandros, didn’t you?’ she suddenly realized.
The painful part of it was that he didn’t deny it. ‘A man can hope.’
And a woman could dream. Her dream was downstairs right now, taking over her life. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured huskily.
He came to sit beside her on the bed. ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
Cry my eyes out? ‘Give it a chance.’ She shrugged.
On a sigh, Clive put a big arm around her and gave her a sympathetic hug. It was a nice arm, strong and secure and safe. But it was the wrong arm and the wrong man, though she wished it wasn’t.
‘Well, this is nice,’ a very sardonic voice drawled.
Isobel felt her heart sink to her toes. Clive gave her shoulder a final squeeze then stood up. As he walked towards Leandros she could feel the hostility bouncing between the two of them. It conjured up images of dangerous cats again, only these were two big male predators considering testing each other’s weight. They didn’t speak. It was all part of the test to keep silent. Clive didn’t stop walking and Leandros didn’t move so their shoulders brushed in one of those see-you-later confrontations you expected from a pair of strutting thugs.
The moment Clive had gone, the bedroom door closed with a violent thud. Isobel got up and went over to the small chest of drawers and pulled open the top drawer for some reason she couldn’t recall.
‘My car has arrived,’ Leandros informed her levelly. ‘Lester Miles and my driver are taking your mother on ahead.’
‘You should have gone with them.’ It was not meant nicely.
‘And leave you alone with the body-builder? You must think I am mad.’
‘Clive is a friend, not my lover.’ There, she’d told him. Now he could relax and return to the issue of divorce.
‘Too late for that, agape mou,’ he said deridingly. ‘Though ex-lover, he most definitely is.’
‘He is not my lover!’ she swung on him furiously.
His black eyes flared. He moved like lightning, making her heart pound as he pushed his angry face up to her. ‘Don’t lie to me!’ he barked at her. ‘I am not a fool! I can count as well as you can!’
‘Count?’ She frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
His breath left his lips through clenched white teeth. If he touched her she had a feeling he would end up strangling her, he was in such a rage. But he didn’t touch. He brought up his hand and placed four long fingers in front of her face. ‘Four people. Three rooms,’ he breathed severely. ‘You tell me how that adds up! You tell me where the extra person sleeps!’
‘Why, you…’ The words got lost in a strangled gasp as it sank in what he was getting at. ‘Clive did not share this room with me!’ she denied shrilly. ‘He didn’t come as one of my party. He came under his own steam. Booked in under his own name—and his room is not even on this floor!’
He didn’t believe her, she could see it as the savagery locked into his face. Without another word she slapped his hand
away then stalked across to the wardrobe, threw open the doors then stood back. ‘My room. My clothes!’ she said furiously. ‘My single bed!’
Her hand flicked out, sending his angry gaze lashing across the utilitarian plainness of a three-foot divan set in the shoebox this hotel called a single room.
‘You know what you are, Leandros? You’re the original chauvinist pig! You dare to come up here showing me your contempt for what you believe I’ve been doing with my sordid little life—while you shack up with Diantha Christophoros on your super-expensive bloody yacht!’
He spun to stare at her. ‘What I said before about Di—’
‘Talk about double standards,’ she sliced over him. ‘I really ought to go and confront her now, just to even things up a bit. Shall I do that, Leandros?’ She threw out the challenge. ‘Shall I strut the strut? Get all territorial and threaten to smack her in the face if she so much as looks at my man? Maybe I should.’ She sucked in a fiery breath, breasts heaving, eyes flashing on the crest of a furious wave. ‘Maybe I should just do that and let the whole upper echelons of this damn city know that Isobel, your scary slut, is back!’
She was gasping for breath by the time she had finished. He wasn’t breathing at all and his face had gone pale. But the eyes were alive with a dangerous glitter. ‘Slut,’ he hissed out. ‘You’re no scary slut but just an angry woman on the defensive!’
‘Defending what?’ she asked blankly.
‘Your blond Adonis.’
At which point she knew she was in trouble. He didn’t believe her about Clive, and was coming towards her with the slow tread of a man about to stake his claim on what he believed belonged to him.
‘Don’t you dare,’ she quavered, beginning to tremble as his arm came up. His hand purposefully outstretched and angled to take hold of her by the waist. If she backed up she would be inside the wardrobe; if she stayed where she was she was as good as dead meat for this predatory male.
Hot-Blooded Husbands Bundle Page 59