Greek's Last Redemption

by Caitlin Crews

  She believed that, too.

  “I could,” he said softly. “I will. I promise you, Holly. I always will.”

  Theo made good on his word, tipping her back in his arms and kissing her senseless, right there in the middle of the luxurious marble lobby of The Chatsfield, Barcelona.

  And neither one of them cared even the slightest bit if every last paparazzo alive was watching.

  * * *

  Five years later, Theo sprawled happily in the infinity pool of his private villa, set high on the Santorini cliffs, and permitted himself the simple joy of relaxing in the beautiful summer afternoon all around him.

  They’d earned each and every scrap of happiness, he thought.

  They’d spent the first year after their second honeymoon in Barcelona testing themselves. Could they trust each other? Could they grow together? Could they learn how to stay together, after all?

  The simple answer was yes to all, but life was rarely simple. It took commitment. It took openness. Vulnerability and trust were at the core of intimacy, and intimacy took time. It built slowly.

  And it was only sometimes about sex, which was too bad, as that still came as easy and as blistering as it always had.

  Holly had been faced with the unenviable task of earning the trust of those who had never trusted her to begin with. Theo had had the pleasure of watching the brittle version of her fade, though she would never quite be the dizzy, naive girl he’d swept away so easily.

  In the place of either of those, she was his Holly.

  Warm and often sweet, though never a pushover. Filled with hope and laughter, as he’d always imagined she’d deserved to be. Smart enough to run the social side of a tycoon’s life like its own ruthless corporation, wise enough to enlist the otherwise unapproachable Mrs. Papadopoulos to help her do it seamlessly and graciously.

  She was a force to be reckoned with, his beautiful wife—though, of course, he’d always thought so. Especially when he’d been the one doing the reckoning.

  Holly had even won over his brother and his disapproving father, though the latter had taken almost the whole of these five years to come around. It helped that the old man had nothing to do any longer but sit around, count his olive groves and permit his pretty daughter-in-law to flatter him, Theo thought, but he smiled as he thought it, his eyes on the shifting sea down below him and the Greek horizon in the distance.

  The mighty Demetrious Tsoukatos had retired, leaving Theo in his place, and it was perhaps only a surprise to Theo—and only in his more self-deprecating moments—that he was damned good at it. He’d made his hardworking brother, Brax, his right-hand man and he’d catapulted Tsoukatos Shipping straight into the glorious future they’d spent all these hard years earning.

  All that rose must fall—before rising again, stronger than before.

  This was who they were. This was what they did.

  This was true happiness, Theo realized then. Pure happiness, emanating out from the deepest core of him, and it only got brighter when he heard her light steps on the stones behind him. He felt the silken water of the pool shift as she entered it, heard her splash slightly as she dunked her head as she always did when she slipped into the pool, and then, moments later, she was pressing herself against his back, wrapping her arms around him and resting her chin on his shoulder.

  Theo waited until she let out a long, happy sigh, and knew her gaze, like his, was fixed on the horizon. On all that lay ahead of them.

  On the future growing within her even now, that her visit to the doctor today had been meant to confirm.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I have a confession to make,” she said, her voice ripe with laughter and with love, with that teasing note he found he adored beyond reason. “I’ve finally taken it all the way.”

  He didn’t know what she meant, not really, and so he simply held her hands as they gripped his chest, folding in together like their own Gordian knot. Unbreakable, he thought.

  “Should I be concerned?”

  “Only if you find it troubling to be tied to me forever in the time-honored fashion,” she said, and the echo of his own harsh words, uttered so long ago across a restaurant table in Barcelona, came back to him. “I’m afraid that you really will be forced to play these games with me forever.”

  He leaned his head against hers and felt her breathe. He felt it move in him, too, like a wish. Like a prayer. Both already granted.

  “Ah, agapi mou,” he whispered. “You have given me everything. I want to give you the whole world.”

  “Silly man,” she said, shifting to press her lips to his skin, a moment before he pulled her into his arms and demonstrated his joy in the starkest and most emphatic terms possible. “You already did.”

  * * * * *

  If you enjoyed this book, look out for the next installment of THE CHATSFIELD:

  RUSSIAN’S RUTHLESS DEMAND by Michelle Conder.

  Coming next month.

  Keep reading for an excerpt from THE SHEIKH’S SECRET BABIES by Lynne Graham.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  KING JAUL, WHO HAD recently acceded to the throne of Marwan on the death of his father, Lut, glanced across the date-palm-filled courtyard beyond his office. A beautiful brunette was playing ball there with her niece and nephew. Her name was Zaliha. Educated, elegant and as sweet-natured as she was well-born, she would make a wonderful queen, he knew. So why hadn’t he broac
hed the subject yet? he asked himself grimly.

  Marwan was a Gulf state, small but oil-rich and deeply conservative. A single king was not expected to remain single for long. Government officials had made no secret of their eagerness for him to take a bride. A royal dynasty was not seen as secure until there was another heir in the offing and Jaul was an only child, the son of a man who had been an only child.

  The newspapers were full of constant speculation. He could not be seen even talking to a young woman without rousing suspicions. His wide, sensual mouth compressed, uneasy memories surfacing of the wilder and more hot-headed young male he had once been. If he was honest with himself, he knew exactly why he was being indecisive about getting married. Moreover he was well aware that beautiful though Zaliha was, there was not the smallest spark of chemistry between them. But shouldn’t that be what he wanted now? A marriage shorn of the wild attraction and excitement that had once led to his downfall?

  A measured knock sounded on the door heralding the arrival of Bandar, who served as the royal family’s senior legal adviser.

  ‘My apologies if I’m a little early,’ the little man with the balding head said earnestly, bowing with solemn dignity.

  Jaul invited him to sit down and lounged back against his desk, restless at the prospect of an in-depth discussion of some obscure piece of constitutional law, which fascinated Bandar much more than it fascinated anyone else.

  ‘This is a very delicate matter,’ Bandar informed him uneasily. ‘But it is my duty as your adviser to broach it with you.’

  Wondering what on earth the older man could be referring to, Jaul studied him with unsullied assurance. ‘There is nothing we cannot discuss—’

  ‘Yet this is a matter which I first raised eighteen months ago with my predecessor, Yusuf, and he instructed me never to mention it again lest I caused offence,’ Bandar told him awkwardly. ‘If that is the case, please accept my apologies in advance.’

  Yusuf had been his father’s adviser and had retired after King Lut’s passing, allowing Bandar to step into his place. Jaul’s fine black brows were now drawing together while a mixture of curiosity and dismay assailed him as he wondered what murky, dark secret of his father’s was about to be unleashed on him. What else could this very delicate matter concern?

  ‘I am not easily offended and your role is to protect me from legal issues,’ Jaul responded. ‘Naturally I respect that responsibility.’

  ‘Then I will begin,’ Bandar murmured ruefully. ‘Two years ago, you married a young Englishwoman and, although that fact is known to very few people, it is surely past time that that situation is dealt with in the appropriate manner.’

  It took a lot to silence Jaul, whose stubborn, passionate and outspoken nature was well known within palace circles, but that little speech seriously shook him. ‘But there was no actual marriage,’ Jaul countered tautly. ‘I was informed that the ceremony was illegal because I did not obtain my father’s permission beforehand.’

  ‘I’m afraid that was a case of wishful thinking on your father’s part. He wished the marriage to be illegal and Yusuf did not have the courage to tell him that it was legal...’

  Jaul had lost colour beneath his healthy olive-tinted complexion, his very dark, long-lashed eyes telegraphing his astonishment at that revelation. ‘It was a legal marriage?’ he repeated in disbelief.

  ‘There is nothing in our constitutional law which prohibits a Marwani Crown Prince from marrying his own choice of bride. You were twenty-six years old, scarcely a teenager and that marriage still stands because you have done nothing since to sever that tie.’

  Wide, strong shoulders now rigid beneath the long cream linen thobe he wore, Jaul frowned, trying to calculate the sheer immensity of the wrecking ball that had suddenly crashed into his marital plans. He was already a married man. Indeed he was still a married man. As he had only lived with his bride for a few weeks before parting from her, what Bandar was now telling him naturally came as a severe shock. ‘I did nothing to sever the tie because I was informed that the marriage itself was illegal and, therefore, void. Like a bad contract,’ he admitted.

  ‘Unhappily that is not the case.’ Bandar sighed. ‘To be free of the marriage you require a divorce under UK law and Marwani law.’

  Jaul stalked over to the window beyond which Zaliha could still be seen entertaining her niece and nephew, but he was no longer remotely conscious of that view. ‘I had no suspicion of this. I should have been informed of this situation months ago—’

  ‘As I mentioned, Yusuf was my superior and he refused to allow me to raise the subject—’

  ‘It is three months since my father passed away,’ Jaul reminded him stiffly.

  ‘I had to ensure my facts were correct before I could raise this matter with you. I have now discovered that in spite of your separation your wife has not sought a divorce either—’

  Jaul froze, his lean, darkly handsome features clenching hard. ‘Please do not refer to her as my wife,’ he murmured flatly.

  ‘Should I refer to the lady concerned as your queen?’ Bandar pressed with even less tact. ‘Because that is what Chrissie Whitaker is, whether she knows it or not. The wife of the King of Marwan is always granted the status of Queen.’

  Jaul snatched in a ragged breath of restraint, lean brown hands closing slowly into fists of innate aggression. He had made one serious mistake in his life and it had come back to haunt him in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. He had married a gold-digger who had deserted him the first chance she got in return for cold, hard cash.

  ‘Naturally I respect the fact that your father did not approve of the young woman but perhaps now—’

  ‘No, my father was correct in his assessment of her character. She was unsuitable to be either my wife or my queen,’ Jaul acknowledged grittily, a faint flare of colour accentuating the line of his spectacular high cheekbones as he forced out the lowering admission that stung his pride. ‘I was a rebellious son, Bandar...but I learnt my lesson.’

  ‘The lessons of youth are often hard,’ Bandar commented quietly, relieved that the current king was unlike his late parent, who had raged and taken umbrage at anyone who told him anything he did not want to hear.

  Jaul was barely listening. In fact he was being bombarded by unwelcome memories that had escaped from the burial ground at the back of his mind where he kept such unsettling reminders firmly repressed. In his mind’s eye he was seeing Chrissie walk away from him, her glorious silver-blonde hair blowing back in the breeze, her long, shapely legs fluid and graceful as a gazelle’s.

  But she had always been walking away from him, he recalled with cool cynicism. Right from the start, Chrissie had played a cool, clever, long-term game of seduction. Hot-blooded as he was and never before refused by a woman as he had been, she had challenged his ego with her much-vaunted indifference. It had taken a two-year-plus campaign for him to win her and she had only truly become his when he had surrendered and given her a wedding ring. Unsurprisingly during that long period of celibacy and frustration, Chrissie Whitaker had become a sexual obsession whose allure Jaul had not been able to withstand.

  The payback for his weakness had not been long in coming. They had had a flaming row when he’d left Oxford to fly back to Marwan without her and, extraordinarily, he had never seen her again after that day. At that point and perhaps most fortunately for him, fate had intervened to cut him free of his fixation with her. Following a serious accident, Jaul had surfaced in a hospital bed to find his father seated like a sentry beside him, his aged features heavy with grief and apprehension.

  Before he had broken the bad news, King Lut had reached for his son’s hand in a clumsy gesture of comfort for the first time in his life. Chrissie, Lut had then confided heavily, would not be coming to visit Jaul during his recovery. His marriage, Lut had declared, was illegal and Chrissie had
accepted a financial pay-off as the price of forgetting that Jaul had ever figured in her life. King Lut had purchased her silence and discretion with a large sum of money that had evidently compensated her for her supposed loss of a husband while providing her with support for the future.

  For a split second, Jaul recalled one of the most insane fantasies that had gripped him while he lay helpless in that hospital bed. Aware of his diplomatic immunity within the UK, he had actually dreamt about kidnapping Chrissie. Now in the present he shook his proud dark head slowly, utterly astonished at the tricks his mind had played on him while he had struggled to come to terms with the daunting fact that, not only was his wife not his wife, but also that given generous enough financial compensation she had no longer wanted to be his wife. Chrissie had been quite happy to ditch her Arab prince once she’d had the means to be rich without him. Only angry, bitter and vengeful thoughts had driven Jaul while he’d fought his injuries to get back on his feet.

  ‘I need to know how you want this matter to be handled,’ Bandar told him, shooting Jaul back to the present. ‘With the assistance of our ambassador in London I have engaged the services of a highly placed legal firm to have divorce papers drawn up. After so long a separation they assure me that the divorce will be a mere formality. May I instruct the firm to make immediate contact with Chrissie Whitaker?’

  ‘No...’ Without warning, Jaul swung round, his lean bronzed features taut and forbidding. ‘If she is not yet aware that we remain man and wife a third party should not be dealing with it. Informing her of that fact should be my responsibility.’

  Bandar frowned, taken aback by that assurance. ‘But, sir—’

  ‘I owe her that much. After all, it was my father who misled her as to the legality of our marriage. Chrissie has a hot temper. I think a personal approach is more likely to lead to a speedy and successful conclusion. I will present her with the divorce papers.’

  ‘I understand.’ Bandar was nodding now, having followed his royal employer’s reasoning. ‘A diplomatic and discreet approach.’