by Lynne Graham
Constantine’s intent gaze flashed pure scorching gold. He murmured something rough in Greek and settled her down on the big carved bed that she hadn’t even noticed. She sat up again very slowly, her legs and arms oddly unresponsive to her bidding.
Constantine reached down a hand, flipped her gently back against the heaped-up white linen pillows and grated, ‘Stay there!’
Rosie stayed put. Wide-eyed, she watched him discard his tie, his jacket and rip at his silk shirt with scant concern for the buttons. Her tongue was welded to the roof of her mouth. A disturbing tremor ran through her tautening length. Her entire attention was nailed to Constantine’s bare chest, her spellbound gaze wandering from the gleaming brown skin of his shoulders to the black triangle of curling hair hazing his powerful pectoral muscles.
It was so hard to breathe, even harder to keep her fingers curling into her palms when this insane part of her craved the freedom to shift forward a mere foot to the edge of the bed and touch ... run exploring fingertips over that smooth golden skin, investigate the undeniable allure of that hard, flat stomach and that truly fascinating little silky furrow of dark hair which started just below his navel and travelled all the way down until it disappeared under the low-slung edge of a pair of black briefs. He was just in the act of hooking a finger into those briefs when Rosie realised in horror that she was gawping at him like a woman at a male strip show.
‘Take your clothes off,’ Constantine said.
Rosie had twisted her head away so fast, she was all but suffering from whiplash, face as hot as a furnace, gut feelings of shame and shock reverberating through her blitzed brain. So he had a really beautiful body. Was that any excuse to behave like a peeping Tom? But it was even worse to recognise the swollen heaviness of her breasts and the hot liquid sensation of unforgivable excitement burning somewhere she didn’t even want to think about. What had he said?
Constantine saved her the trouble of plundering her dazed mind for recollection. He said it again. Her bright head whipped back as fast as the head of a swivelling doll, huge green eyes agog at the command.
‘OK,’ Constantine gritted with savage impatience, and reached for her in one alarmingly fast motion.
‘What are you doing?’ Rosie screeched as her oversized T-shirt went flying over her startled head and he anchored a businesslike hand into the elasticised waistband of her leggings. Preoccupied by an instinctive need to cover her braless breasts with spread fingers, she was decidedly hampered in the undignified tussle which followed. Her leggings and her briefs were wrenched off together to the accompaniment of her aghast shrieks and breathless and impotent efforts to fight him off.
Clamping a hand like an iron vice to her forearm, Constantine held her fast and flipped the sheet over her frantically struggling body. Sliding into the bed with her, he rolled over and anchored an arm round her waist and yanked her back into electrifying contact with his hot, muscular masculinity. Rosie went rigid. He wasn’t wearing a stitch and neither was she and she just could not believe that he had forcibly stripped her naked!
‘I’ll go to the police and report you for this the minute I get out of this room!’ Rosie gasped the instant she got oxygen back into her straining lungs.
‘Be sure to tell them that I am your husband. I should think they’ll laugh themselves sick—’
‘You are not my husbandl’ Rosie spat with renewed vigour. ‘And if you dare to lay a finger on me—’
‘Shut up and go to sleep,’ Constantine growled, spreading his big, powerful body across the bed with a deep, luxuriating groan of contentment and forcing her to move with him.
‘G-go to sleep?’ Rosie queried shakily, every fibre of her trembling body centred in awareness on the bold thrust of his erection against her slender hip.
‘I have not slept more than a handful of hours in the past three days. So when I sleep you sleep too,’ Constantine told her, his deep, dark drawl winding audibly down in speed and volume.
Rosie twisted round in the manacle-like imprisonment of his arm. In a bewildered daze, she surveyed him. His drowsy eyes were darkly shadowed, the crescent lashes as long and luxuriant as a child’s already in the act of drifting down towards his cheekbones. Close up, she noticed how pale he was. As she recalled the travel schedule he had outlined, the strangest little pang of guilt nudged at her conscience and provoked a deep flush on her troubled face.
‘You don’t trust me not to disappear again,’ she gathered tautly. ‘But I’m prepared to promise that I’ll still be in this house when you wake up.’
In unconvinced response, Constantine shifted and snaked his other arm beneath her, forcing her even closer and into, if possible, an even more disturbing intimacy because this time she was facing him and lying half over the outrageously relaxed sprawl of his abrasively masculine frame.
‘Constantine ...!’ Rosie shrieked in anguish as he crushed her breasts into the solid wail of his hair-roughened chest and pushed her head down under his chin.
‘If you keep me awake I’ll get amorous,’ he warned her thickly. ‘I like to make love before I sleep. Sex is a wonderful antidote to stress and tension, pethi mou.’
There was only one tense person in the bed after that assertion and it wasn’t Constantine.
Rosie lay as still as a statue with the slow, steady beat of his heart thudding against her breast and the deep rise and fall of his breathing stirring her hair. He had both arms wrapped round her in an entirely asexual embrace. Indeed she might as well have been an inanimate toy. He had dragged her into bed with him only to ensure that she did not get the chance to make a break for freedom again. Now he was sleeping like a big, happy, contented log!
In dismaying contrast, Rosie was in a state of turmoil which was becoming horribly familiar to her in Constantine’s radius. Pure panic had provoked her flight from Greece. She winced at the awareness. Even asleep, Constantine reacted to that slight movement of hers, his arms tightening round her as he rolled over, pinning one long, powerful thigh between hers. Her taut nipples throbbed and her stomach clenched with horrendous excitement, her treacherous body responding with a brazen life and hunger all of its own. Rosie simply wanted to die of mortification.
He had ripped off her clothes and she had experienced not one decent pang of fear. She had been outraged but not scared and, worst of all, when he had told her to go to sleep she had been shattered and then ... and then ... disappointed? A sexual craving that horrified her still hungered like a wicked beast inside her. And she felt even more threatened by the discovery that one glimpse of Constantine looking exhausted could make her feel guilty and strangely sympathetic. How could she feel guilty about a male she loathed? Where had all her anger gone?
Shaken awake in an only vaguely familiar bedroom, Rosie slowly lifted her head off the pillow she was hugging, bemused eyes landing on Constantine. Fully dressed, he was standing by the bed, every vibrant battery blatantly recharged, energy sizzling from him in intimidating waves. He looked incredibly gorgeous.
‘What time is it?’ she mumbled, disorientated by the daylight still flooding through the windows and then deeply disturbed by the realisation that she had actually managed to fall asleep in his arms. True, she had not slept a great deal herself in recent days, but that was no excuse for relaxing to that extent.
‘Three in the afternoon. It’s time for you to get up. Lunch is being prepared.’
‘By whom...Carmina?’ she muttered round a still sleepy yawn as she stretched.
‘Since I was aware that the house had only an elderly caretaker in residence, I arranged for a number of my staff to follow me here,’ Constantine supplied drily. ‘But since habitable rooms are at a premium they’ll be using the holiday cottages on the edge of the estate.’
Sitting up, Rosie carefully hugged the sheet to her collarbone. Without shame, Constantine stared. A rosy red blush started at her breasts and crawled up her throat before she hurriedly broke back into speech. ‘How the heck did you find out where I wa
s?’
“The passenger manifest of your flight. Is this trip meant to be some sort of sentimental journey?’ Constantine dealt her a stonily unimpressed appraisal, openly suspicious as to why she should have chosen to take refuge in Anton’s family home.
‘I thought it would be the last place you would look for me.’ Rosie ducked her head, her eyes clouding. A sentimental journey...if only he knew. But then he didn’t know and he had shot her down in flames when she had tried to tell him who she was. His contemptuous dismissal of her claim had bitten deep.
‘Where is your wedding ring?’ Constantine demanded so abruptly that she jumped.
‘I took it off.’
‘Then put it back on again,’ Constantine told her grimly.
‘I can’t...’ Rosie shrugged. ‘I dropped it in a bin when I got off the plane at Palma.’
Constantine slowly breathed in and slowly breathed out again. Rosie recognised the exercise for what it was. It was the Voulos equivalent of counting to ten. What she did not understand was the flare of dark colour over his hard cheekbones and the momentarily seething look of a male striving not to react to a personal affront.
‘I didn’t think I was going to need to wear the wretched thing again!’ she protested in the hissing silence.
‘We’ll talk downstairs when you’re dressed.’ Constantine strode to the door and sent her a slashing glance. ‘You owe me an apology for the manner in which you chose to leave my home.’
‘I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.’ Rosie tilted her chin. ‘I’m not very good at apologising.’
‘But you will learn.’ Constantine spelt out grittily.
Why did he never learn? He was even more stubborn than she was. Grimacing, she slid out of bed. The sparsely furnished bedroom rejoiced in a very old-fashioned adjoining bathroom. The bath was big enough to accommodate an entire family. Still in possession of its Victorian shower attachment, it was the sort of bath which Maurice would have gone into raptures over, but unhappily there seemed to be no hot water available.
Her teeth were chattering by the time she had finished washing. Constantine had used both threadbare towels and discarded them in a sodden heap on the floor. Presumably he was also responsible for the lack of hot water. Even Maurice was better trained as a housemate. She would have to get dressed to fetch her backpack upstairs and only then would she be able to put on fresh clothes. However, on her return to the bedroom, Rosie discovered that she couldn’t find a single item of the clothing which Constantine had unceremoniously ripped off.
Wrapped in a thin and embarrassingly small wet towel, Rosie hauled open the bedroom door and shouted at full volume, ‘Constantine!’
Sixty seconds passed. Her toes began to tap on the dull, unpolished wooden floor. She yelled again. Steps sounded on the stairs. Rosie smiled and folded her arms. But it was not Constantine. Dmitri had been sent to deal with her. Furious, Rosie ducked back behind the door to conceal her undressed state.
‘Mr Voulos is not accustomed to being hailed by a shout,’ Dmitri said in an apologetic whisper voiced in fluent English from the landing. ‘In fact that form of address puts him in a very bad mood.’
‘He’s never in anything else,’ Rosie grumbled.
‘He still feels the loss of Mr Estrada very deeply.’
That quiet, sobering reminder drained Rosie’s face of colour. No, she hadn’t made any allowances for the effects of grief on Constantine’s temperament, had she?
‘How may I help you, kiria?’ Dmitri prompted in the ringing silence.
‘It’s not important.’ Rosie closed the door again and sank down on the edge of the bed.
Since her father’s death she had been pretty bad-tempered too, and how many nights had she lain sleepless? Something would happen and she would want to tell Anton about it and then, once more, she would have to come to terms with the fact that he was no longer there to eagerly receive her every confidence and never would be again. After twenty years how much greater that sense of loss must be for Constantine... and surely it was all wrong that they still could not behave like civilised human beings with each other?
A maid knocked on the door and entered, almost staggering under the weight of the garment bags she was carrying. Laying her burden down on a chair, she left the room again. A split second later Constantine strode in with two leather cases.
‘Right, obviously you’re moving in here...when do I get my clothes back so that I can move out?’ Rosie demanded, but after her recent unsettling thoughts her tone was less tart than usual.
‘These are your clothes,’ Constantine responded. ‘I bought them between flights on my travels.’
Her fiery head tipped back. ‘Why would you buy me clothes?’
‘You have nothing appropriate to wear. Consider the new wardrobe a gift.’
Her green eyes glittered. ‘That’s very generous of you, Constantine...but I would prefer to have my own clothes returned.’
‘No. Why do you think I removed them?’
‘Removed them ... removed them? You ripped them off me!’
Constantine dealt her a dark, brooding appraisal, his sensual mouth compressing. ‘I find it distasteful that you should wear garments bought by another man.’
‘Actually I bought what I was wearing in the cheapest shop I could find in Palma.’
Anger burnished his black eyes. ‘You know very well what I am telling you. That dress you wore at the hotel...Anton purchased that, did he not?’
Rosie nodded with a bemused frown.
‘So I have made a clean sweep. Theos...I can do without the reminder that you were his woman first!’ Constantine completed in a positive snarl, enraged at being forced to explain his peculiar behaviour.
‘Apart from the fact that I am not any man’s woman—’
‘You are mine now.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Rosie breathed.
‘Anton gave you to me.’
‘Say that again,’ Rosie invited tremulously, outraged by that particular choice of words.
‘And if I am to accept that you are my responsibility I expect you to conform to my expectations and respect my wishes from now on.’
‘I don’t conform, Constantine.’
‘You will with me.’
‘I want my clothes back!’ Rosie slammed back at him as she leapt upright, no longer able to stand him towering over her.
He reached for her.
‘I hate you...get your lousy hands off me!’
Those same hands framed her wildly flushed cheekbones. Glittering black eyes slashed down into hers in rampant challenge. ‘You were clinging to me like a limpet when I woke up, pethi mou. I had to give you the pillow to clutch instead.’
‘If you weren’t so much bigger, I’d knock your teeth down your conceited throat!’
‘You see ... you’re learning already. A week ago you would have physically attacked me,’ Constantine murmured with raw satisfaction.
Rosie shuddered with rage and turbulent confusion. Constantine let both of his hands slowly slide into her bright hair and at the caressing brush of those long brown fingers on her scalp she shivered convulsively, like a woman caught up in a violent storm. He released her with a wolfish smile, dark, measuring eyes scanning her with disturbing intensity. ‘You can bite all you like tonight, little rag-doll. I’m very adaptable to new experiences in bed.’
As the door closed, Rosie fell back against the bed for support. Of course he hadn’t meant tha t... he couldn’t possibly be telling her that he expected to make love to her tonight. All she had to do was to say no if he made any advances...all? Hurriedly, she repressed the suspicion that saying no to Constantine might not be that easy.
What on earth had happened to her barely formed desire to begin trying to civilise relations between them? Within thirty seconds he had had her at screaming pitch again. Why the new wardrobe? And why more clothes than even a rich, spoilt socialite could surely wear in the space of two short months? On their weddi
ng day, Constantine had complained because she wasn’t wearing one of the snazzy outfits which he had correctly assumed that Anton had bought her... and now?
Now it appeared to be a hanging offence for her to possess a single garment which Anton might have paid for! Her head was aching. It was tension ... pounding, throbbing tension and that awful sense of being horribly out of her depth again.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PERSPIRATION dewed Rosie’s short upper lip as she walked the length of the big, dark dining room with its massive carved furniture, tracked every step of the way by Constantine’s coolly appreciative appraisal. Was it madness to think that there was a gleam of ownership in that look? Was it even greater madness to consider lunging across the table at him to insist that he stop looking at her like that?
‘I knew that colour would look stunning against that wonderful hair.’
Rosie flushed, murderously self-conscious in her finery. Expensive or not, it was a plain little green summer dress and she had chosen it in preference to half a dozen more revealing outfits, only to discover that once the fabric was filled with living female flesh it outlined every slim curve with disturbing clarity.
‘Why did you bring staff here ... surely you’re not planning to stay long in a house you described as a ruin?’ Rosie prompted tautly as she took a seat opposite him.
‘The other wing of the house is uninhabitable but I believe we can manage to exist with the privations in this wing for a few weeks—’
‘A few weeks?’
‘Why not? What could be more conventional than a newly married couple seeking the seclusion of a mountain villa?’ Constantine watched her bridle with the indolent cool of a sunbathing big cat.
‘Why do you have to keep on reminding me about that stupid wedding ceremony?’ Rosie snapped.