by Lynne Graham
‘Theos...you will suffer for this!’
‘What am I supposed to have done?’
‘I was a fool to trust you even this far... My lawyers warned me... why the hell didn’t I listen?’ Constantine grated, glowering down at her with such loathing and disgust that Rosie turned pale as milk and began to shake, a sick feeling stirring in the pit of her stomach.
He released his hold on her crushed fingers, drew himself up to his full, thoroughly intimidating height and watched her collapse on trembling legs down into the nearest armchair. He lifted a lean brown hand and spread his fingers, the extraordinary force of that single physical gesture capturing her shocked stare.
‘You really want to find out what it is like being married to me?’ Constantine bit out with a flash of pure fire in his mesmeric, menacing gaze. ‘You will wish every minute of every day that you had stayed in your slum dwelling where you belonged and you will be on your knees begging for a divorce before I am finished with you!’
CHAPTER FIVE
WITH extreme difficulty, Rosie snatched in a ragged breath to steady her jumping nerves. ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about...’
‘Don’t you dare lie to me!’ Constantine thundered.
Rosie squinted with fearful curiosity at the newspaper he had flung on the coffee table. Constantine snatched it up again and displayed it like prosecution evidence. TYCOON’S SECRET WEDDING, ran the headline on the front page. Rosie gulped and then gaped at the familiar photograph of herself standing outside the cottage. The last time she had seen that photo, it had been inside a frame on the lounge mantelpiece. It had been taken the day she’d moved in, proud as punch of her first real home since childhood.
‘Maurice...’ she whispered with pained comprehension, for surely only Maurice could have given that picture to the Press.
‘Maurice,’ Constantine savoured with seething satisfaction. ‘I will break him in two!’
‘No, it wasn’t Maurice!’ Rosie gasped in horror, recognising that satisfaction for what it was and even more appalled by the sight of Constantine’s clenching fists and rampant aura of physical violence. She coiled her shaking hands together and her tongue stole out to moisten her dry lips. ‘It wasn’t Maurice.... it was me.’
‘Why try to protect him? He was your accomplice. You must have phoned him to tell him where we were staying because you didn’t know our destination until we arrived.’
‘Yes, I phoned him,’ Rosie muttered tightly, and bent her fiery head, the appalling tension in the room tensing her muscles so hard that they ached.
‘I presume that you realise what you have done.’ His accented drawl fell like a whip, the anger reined back to a chilling coldness which made the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck prickle. ‘Thespina will soon know that a wedding has taken place. She has friends in London and she will naturally demand an explanation of my strange failure to inform her of my marriage. Did you think of that...did you even care?’
Rosie flinched, tears of strain stinging her eyes.
‘No, of course you didn’t care. You couldn’t see beyond your own greed. Anton left you nothing in his will and you resented that, didn’t you?’ Constantine condemned with raw-edged distaste. ‘No doubt you dreamt of great riches. But two weeks before his death Anton took out a crippling loan to buy a mouldering ruin on the island of Majorca. Sentiment drove him to stake everything he possessed against that single, insane purchase and he was far too proud to approach me for either advice or assistance.’
‘Majorca?’ Rosie repeated unsteadily, her bright head slowly lifting.
‘Son Fontanal, the former Estrada home, complete with contents and a thousand stubbly, infertile acres fit only for a mountain goat,’ Constantine recited half under his breath, his lingering incredulity at such a move palpable. ‘The ruin even comes complete with an embargo on further development because it stands in an environ-mentally protected area. It was all but worthless to anyone but Anton. The heirs of the late owner saw him coming...’
‘Anton bought back Son Fontanal?’ Rosie whispered in breathless shock.
‘He was always a deeply sentimental man,’ Constantine conceded tautly but with the air of a male striving without success to comprehend such feelings.
But Rosie understood...Rosie understood as if her father had been in the room talking to her. This was what Anton had wanted his daughter to have. Son Fontanal, sold out of necessity by his widowed mother when Anton was only fifteen. Her father might have spent the rest of his life in Greece but his deep pain and regret at the loss of his ancestral home had never left him. As a powerless, frustrated teenager, Anton had sworn over his father’s grave that if he ever got the chance he would mortgage his soul to bring Son Fontanal back into the family again.
‘He loved that house,’ Rosie muttered softly. ‘No price would have been too high.’
‘It was an act of financial suicide. Had he lived ...’ Constantine’s hard mouth clenched, a muscle pulling at the corner of his lips as his deep voice roughened with suppressed emotion. ‘Had Anton lived, he would have had a choice between bankruptcy or coming to me. I like to think that he would have overcome his pride and approached me for help—’
‘Not his wife?’
Constantine shot her a look of naked disbelief. ‘Christos...what man would want to borrow money from his wife? Why am I discussing these private matters with you?’ he grated with sudden ferocity. ‘Go and put on that dress you wore last night. We are leaving this hotel.’
‘Forget the “we”...I’ll call a cab to take me home.’
Constantine loosed a derisive laugh. ‘You’re coming to Greece with me. That is the only option I have left... and believe me,’ he intoned with merciless black eyes, ‘if I have to drug you and tie you up to get you there I will do it.’
‘G-Greece...?’ Rosie stammered incredulously.
‘A short meeting with Thespina will be necessary now.’ Constantine dealt her a ferocious look of antipathy. ‘That is rather unfortunate when I have already told her that our fake engagement was broken and that we had parted.’
‘I don’t care how you choose to explain yourself but I am definitely not going to Greece,’ Rosie assured him flatly as she got up.
‘If necessary I will strip you and dress you myself.’
Rosie collided with black eyes of shamelessly steady threat. She went into the bedroom. Constantine strode in after her and detached the phone from its socket. ‘From now on you will not be communicating with the rest of the world. Now get dressed,’ he instructed.
Haunted eyes looked back at her from the bathroom mirror. How could Maurice have done such a dreadful thing? How could he have contacted the Press? He would know exactly how she would feel about that betrayal. He knew that she had been determined to protect Thespina from any further distress. She opened the bathroom door again and peered out.
Constantine was shrugging his broad shoulders into a superbly tailored jacket. Her mouth ran dry as she watched the sleek-toned muscles ripple beneath the fine silk of his shirt and noted the dark, tantalising shadow of the hair-roughened chest she had glimpsed during the night when he’d woken her up.
‘Why aren’t you changing?’ he demanded.
Her cheeks hot as hellfire, Rosie regained her wandering wits and muttered frantically, ‘Please let me phone Maurice ... I have to speak to him.’
Densely lashed dark eyes of outrage landed on her. ‘No.’
‘Please,’ Rosie persisted.
‘The first rule of a Greek wife is obedience,’ Constantine delivered, moving towards her with the predatory grace of a prowling leopard. ‘And if you don’t jump when I say jump, little rag-doll, I will take action to reeducate you and after a very little while in my undiluted company crawling across the floor of my bedroom like a submissive slave will come entirely naturally!’
Rosie slammed the door and locked it for good measure.
‘I can’t go to Greece,’ Rosie told him again in the lif
t.
‘I’ll content myself with beating Maurice to a pulp and putting him out of business, shall I?’ Constantine smiled down at her shaken face. ‘And don’t you doubt that it can be done. Discreet enquiries have revealed that much as Maurice’s old uncle likes his nephew Maurice got his profiteering instincts from the same source, and for the right price Uncle Dennis would regret the necessity but he would shove the pair of you out into the snow!’
Rosie was shattered that Constantine was already aware of the fact that their landlord was related to Maurice. ‘You knew—?’
‘I never make a threat I can’t carry through on. You step out of line, I take action in progressive degrees of unpleasantness. I will make Maurice Carter sorry he was ever born and even sorrier that he once shared a bed with you.’
‘You’re angry...you don’t know what you’re saying...’
‘Anger sharpens my wits but it would appear to scramble yours.’
‘Maurice is a completely innocent party in all this.’ If Maurice had alerted the Press, it could only have been because he genuinely believed that Constantine was trying to cheat her and that publicising their marriage would somehow strengthen her position. In other words, Maurice could only have done it for her benefit, so ultimately the responsibility was hers. ‘I can’t believe that you would want to injure him.’
‘Yet you say that Anton told you so much about me.’
Rosie’s troubled mind roamed over Anton’s frequent descriptive references to Constantine. A ruthless aggressor in business and temperamentally incapable of accepting defeat. A relentless enemy who never forgot a slight, fiercely loyal only to his family, and a male who didn’t know what relaxation was... except in the bedroom, women being his one leisure indulgence. Was that how he kept himself so fit?
Colouring, Rosie frowned at her inexcusable loss of concentration and then felt her stomach sinking at the reality of what she had recalled. Her father had loved and admired Constantine for all the qualities that he himself did not possess, she acknowledged wryly. So what did Constantine’s enemies have to say about his character?
‘This is an evening outfit...I look really stupid in this,’ she objected as the cooler temperature of the foyer assailed her bare arms and shoulders.
‘You look exactly as I want you to look...like a bimbo who hasn’t a clue how to dress in daylight. You don’t need to smile for the paparazzi either,’ Constantine added as mortified pink erupted over her cheekbones. ‘In fact the more miserable and out of place you appear to feel, the less surprised everyone will be when I ditch you again. You see, these rich older guys who bore the pants off their bimbos have a disastrously short attention span for those same bimbos!’
As he led her in the direction of the exit, Rosie was in an agony of teeth-clenching discomfiture. ‘Are you saying that there might be reporters outside?’
A split second later, she was confronted with a frightening sea of faces, snapping cameras and shouted questions. As she shivered violently, Constantine doffed his black cashmere overcoat and, draping it round her shoulders with exaggerated gallantry, banded a controlling arm round her spine. He strode silently through the parting crush to the limousine. Nobody got in their way. Rosie was grudgingly impressed by his cool, commanding presence and relieved to see Taki climbing into the front seat beside the chauffeur.
‘Are you still planning to sack Taki?’ she asked uncomfortably.
‘I am still considering the matter.’
‘It really wasn’t his fault, it was mine.’
Silence rewarded that assurance.
‘I can’t go to Greece without a passport or clothes,’ Rosie pointed out next. ‘I’ll have to go home first.’
‘Dmitri is taking care of that problem. He’ll meet us at the airport.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘We’ll eat on the plane.’
In frustration, Rosie subsided back into the warmth of his overcoat. The rich fabric harboured the faint, elusive male scent of him. Her nostrils flared and she found herself breathing in deeply. Stiffening, she stole a covert glance at him. He was on his mobile phone again but somehow he immediately sensed her surveillance, his long, spiky lashes lifting to reveal compelling dark golden eyes.
Her heart skipped a startled beat but she couldn’t break that involuntary connection. Those eyes were extraordinarily arresting in that lean, hard-boned face. His gaze roamed at an outrageously leisurely pace down over the exposed length of her shapely legs. Her skin burned as if he had touched her, her pulses racing wildly. A bitter-sweet ache stirred inside her. It was an effort to breathe as the tension thrummed ever higher between them.
Constantine smiled with sudden raw, earthy amusement, challenging her scrutiny with clear knowledge of the exact effect he was having on her. That awareness shook Rosie inside out. It gave her a shocking foretaste of the very sexual male animal she was dealing with and she was completely unnerved. With a jerk, she turned her head away and flipped his coat hurriedly over her legs.
Constantine threw back his head and laughed.
“Shut up!’ Rosie snapped without looking at him.
‘You have an astonishing air of innocence,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I am no longer surprised that Anton fell hook, line and sinker. He was at a dangerous age. It’s a shame that he never had the opportunity to see you in your true environment. Only then might he have sensed how false the image was.’
‘He had an equally false image of you. He told me that you had great charm, beautiful manners and fascinating conversational skills.’ At that point Rosie screened a yawn of boredom with her hand, and was secretly furious and thoroughly disconcerted when Constantine laughed with even greater amusement.
Less than an hour ago, he had been incandescent with rage. But now he exuded the indolent cool of a male in supreme control. But he is in control, an unwelcome inner voice reminded her. And all, seemingly, because of Maurice. Yet Rosie was still stunned by that apparent betrayal. She had to get her friend on the phone and find out what had really happened. Maybe the photo had been stolen. Maybe the Press had already been on Constantine’s trail...
Rosie was deriving precious little pleasure from her first trip abroad. As the car wove through the heavy Athens traffic, she sat rigid-backed and tense at the prospect of having to face Thespina again.
When Dmitri had joined them at the airport with her one suitcase and shabby backpack, she had tried to question him about Maurice but Constantine had prevented her. Since then, her temper had been further exacerbated. On board the private jet she had at least had the opportunity to change into more appropriate clothing but she had then slept through the whole of the flight, waking up only as they landed. By then, having gone without both breakfast and lunch, she had been so hungry that she had been forced to beg Constantine for the appropriate currency with which to buy a bar of chocolate as he’d dragged her through Athens airport, refusing to let her out of his sight for a second.
‘If you don’t put that blasted phone down, I will scream!’ Rosie’s hot temper erupted with startling suddenness.
‘What is wrong with you now?’ Constantine lowered the mobile with the long-suffering aspect of a male dealing with a very tiresome child.
Rosie’s teeth gritted. ‘I do not want to be involved in telling any more lies to Thespina.’
‘Would it give you a bigger kick to walk in and announce yourself as her late husband’s mistress?’
Frustration filled her. ‘I was not Anton’s mistress—’
‘The mistress who has now become the offensive equivalent of a daughter-in-law? Thespina deserves neither the pain nor the humiliation of that kind of truth,’ Constantine countered with fierce emphasis.
The limousine drew up in front of a large, elegant town house. Rosie climbed out into the heat of midafternoon, feeling hot, crumpled and sick with nerves. While Constantine spoke to the manservant who had hurried out to greet them, she hung cravenly back behind him.
He swung round and
expelled his breath in a stark hiss of pent-up tension.
‘Thespina is not here. She flew out to Brazil this morning to stay with friends. Apparently she tried to contact me to let me know her plans but she was unable to reach me.’
A simply huge tide of relief engulfed Rosie. She scooted back into the limousine at speed.
‘Now what?’ she asked almost brightly.
Constantine frowned. ‘It is unlikely that she will hear news of our marriage before her return. Her friends live on a coffee plantation in a remote area.’
‘You could phone her.’
‘I will wait until I see her. One does not make that sort of announcement on the telephone ...’ His strong face shuttered.
‘So what do we do now?’
Constantine ignored the question. He was in a filthy mood again, Rosie registered. It was not the time to share with him her belief that deception only dug deceivers into a deeper hole. She tried to be fair, tried to ask herself what she would have done in his position. Their secret wedding, designed only to meet the terms of Anton’s will, was now a matter of public record. And Constantine’s response to that hideous unforeseen development was simply to pretend that he had nothing to hide, indeed that their marriage was a genuine marriage ...
As that belated acknowledgement finally dawned on Rosie, she turned pale. Earlier in the day, Constantine’s fury, her distress over that wretched newspaper article and concern for Maurice and Thespina had blinded her to her own predicament. Now she focused on her companion in open shock. ‘You’re expecting me to pretend to be your wife?’ she whispered in shock.
‘You are my wife,’ Constantine reminded her with driven emphasis.
‘Legally speaking, I suppose,’ Rosie conceded weakly. ‘But—’
‘The fiction will have to be maintained for a couple of months at least.’
‘I’m a rotten actress. We don’t even like each other. People aren’t so stupid that they’re not going to see that!’ she protested.
Constantine ignored her again. She hated it when he did that. He closed her out as if she weren’t there. It made her feel like an irritating fly he couldn’t be bothered to swat.