by Lynne Graham
‘Aren’t you even curious about that newspaper article?’ Maurice prompted between grinding teeth of strain. ‘Or didn’t Constantine tell you that I took the blame for that? It’s true, it was my fault. I shot my mouth off to my sister—’
‘Lorna?’ Dredged from her introspection, Rosie’s head spun round.
‘She used to see this bloke, Mitch, in the pub. He was a reporter on the local paper. Apparently, she’d been trying to get off with him for ages,’ Maurice explained grimly. ‘So she spouted the story to try and impress him with the idea that she had interesting connections, invited him back to her flat for coffee and let him borrow that photo she took of you.’
Only then did Rosie recall that the day she and Maurice had moved into the cottage it had been his sister wielding the camera. Lorna had given her a souvenir copy of that photograph.
‘And that was the last she saw of him. Mitch swopped the scoop for a job on a London tabloid. It’s a lucky thing that I only told Lorna you were marrying Constantine and nothing else. She thinks you met him down in London,’ Maurice proffered heavily. ‘If she’d known about Anton or the will, that slimy reporter would’ve got the whole damned lot out of her!’
Rosie sighed. ‘You lied to protect her.’
‘Constantine is a very confrontational bloke. In fact, he comes out of nowhere like a rocket attack,’ Maurice groaned, staring fixedly into the driving mirror.
Rosie stiffened, dismayed to discover words in defence of Constantine brimming to her lips and hurriedly swallowing them back. ‘I’m probably just infatuated with him. I’ll get over it,’ she swore, striving to save face on the subject of a relationship that had no future whatsoever.
‘I hope so. Only a maniac with no respect for human life would sit on my bumper on a road as dangerous as this!’ Sweat was breaking out on Maurice’s brow.
‘You mean...?’ Rosie’s head whipped round at the exact same moment as a low-slung scarlet sports car flashed past them at speed on the brow of the bend and screeched to a tyre-squealing halt.
Panicked by the manoeuvre, Maurice hit the brakes of the four-wheel drive in an emergency stop. Constantine sprang fluidly out of the sports car and strode back towards them.
‘He raced cars for a while when he was a teenager,’ Rosie explained shakily. ‘Thespina persuaded him to give it up.’ He took up women instead, she completed inwardly.
‘He’s walking inches from the edge of a thousand-foot drop without looking where he’s going!’ Maurice gritted, his appalled gaze glued to the sight.
‘Can’t you drive on past or something?’
‘Are you as crazy as he is?’ Maurice demanded in a defensive burst of incredulity. ‘I’d need a death wish to try and outrun a Ferrari on this road!’
Constantine stilled three feet from the car and removed his sunglasses, sliding them into the pocket of his exquisitely tailored jacket. Ice-cold black eyes dug into Rosie and she shivered, intimidated more by that chilling, silent menace than she would have been by rage.
Maurice skimmed a rueful glance between the two of them and slowly shook his head. ‘Get out of the car, Rosie,’ he murmured flatly. ‘I’m only a hero on level ground... and, aside of that, Constantine is your husband.’
Shock made Rosie’s generous mouth fall inelegantly wide.
‘Unless, of course, you were about to tell me that he knocks you about...’ Maurice dealt her a doubtful but enquiring glance.
A terrible desire to lie assailed Rosie and then she clashed with the raw outrage in Constantine’s fulminating stare and shrank with shame. ‘But you can’t just—’
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not taking sides.’ With an air of decided finality, Maurice hit the release button on her seat belt.
‘How wise,’ Constantine purred like the predator he was as he strolled round the bonnet.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ Maurice sighed.
Disdaining the use of the door, Constantine lifted Rosie out of the passenger seat with two powerful hands. ‘I can walk,’ she snapped, her burning face a picture of temper and mortification. ‘Put me down, for heaven’s sake!’
In intimidating silence and paying no heed whatsoever to her fevered protests, Constantine strode back down the road and settled her into the Ferrari.
‘How dare you treat me like that?’ Rosie gasped as he swung in beside her.
‘What did you expect ... applause for making a fool of yourself?’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Conscience might have brought Maurice over here to check up on you but he wasn’t prepared to force the issue with me. Clearly you were telling the truth when you said that you weren’t lovers ... but the absence of the sexual element wasn’t for want of trying on your part, was it?’ Constantine slashed her a look of biting derision. ‘It is obvious to me that you settled for friendship only because he wasn’t interested in anything else.’
‘That’s nonsense ...’ Rosie began heatedly.
‘And then you threw yourself at Anton because you needed to prove to yourself that you were capable of attracting other men! Or was the affair with Anton and the move to London planned as a desperate last-ditch attempt to make Maurice jealous and sit up and take notice of you?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous ... I’m not in love with Maurice.’
‘You certainly weren’t in love with Anton. But then no doubt he was a father figure,’ Constantine responded with sardonic bite.
Rosie froze, her anger decimated by pain. ‘That’s exactly what he was,’ she mumbled.
‘And within minutes of that memorial service you weren’t lusting after any ghost!’
Rosie reddened fiercely at that earthy reminder of the way Constantine had affected her that day. ‘Don’t you have any decency?’
The powerful car shot to a halt in the courtyard. Constantine killed the engine and turned his head to look at her, black eyes as hard as jet in his vibrantly handsome face. ‘It took a hike when you took off in a tantrum with Maurice. He’s your security blanket and I think you’re old enough to do without him. Times have changed and don’t try to tell me differently, pethi mou. It’s me that you want now...’
Always and for ever, she thought fearfully, clenched by a bone-deep sense of her own vulnerability. She wanted much more than she had any hope of achieving.
Constantine lifted a lean hand and caught a colourful handful of corkscrew curls gently between his fingers. He tipped her troubled face up to the onslaught of his starkly assessing gaze. ‘And I want you,’ he completed with lethal brevity. ‘So what’s the problem? As I see it, it’s a simple and perfectly straightforward relationship.’
Rosie snatched in a sustaining breath, almost drowning in the evocative scent of him so close, a whole chain of little reactions making her head swim and her body quiver. ‘But then you only think with your hormones—’
‘Theos, I can’t think with anything else around you,’ Constantine admitted thickly, unconcerned by her censure.
Rosie struggled to suppress a shiver of excitement. Shame engulfed her and she swept up an unsteady hand to detach his fingers from her hair and pull back. ‘I know there are no guarantees in life but that’s not enough for me,’ she said tautly.
‘This is beginning to sound like a negotiation and negotiations invariably end with a price.’
‘Feelings don’t come with prices attached.’
He threw back his arrogant dark head, ebony brows raised in challenge above cool, watchful black eyes. ‘Are you sure of that? I’ve already given up my freedom and, strange as it might seem to you, that feels like a pretty hefty concession when I’ve never done it before.’
Refusing to be driven into retreat by the warning chill in the air, Rosie tilted her chin. ‘You haven’t given up anything for my benefit. You only married me because of the will and we’re only here together now because the Press found out. Do you have any idea how that makes me feel? Well, I’ll tell you how it makes me feel... like the flavour o
f the month for a casual sexual interlude,’ she asserted with steadily rising volume in the face of his dauntingly impassive appraisal. ‘And it might surprise you but I value myself a lot more highly than that!’
A silence punctuated by the audible hiss of her quickened breathing fell.
‘Then we would appear to have nothing more to discuss,’ Constantine concluded softly.
Rosie frowned in bemusement. ‘But...’
Constantine elevated a winged brow. ‘You don’t want a casual sexual interlude... and I don’t want anything else.’
The flush on Rosie’s cheeks slowly drained away, leaving her as white as his shirt-front. That cold-blooded assurance cut right into her like a knife. Nothing had ever hurt her so much. She clambered out of the Ferrari like a drunk trying to act sober, choosing each movement with infinitesimal care. Her stomach churned with nausea.
She could not believe that she had clumsily exposed herself to that level of rejection. Like a frantic teenager in love, she had slung her fear and insecurity at, him in the hope of drawing a reassuring response. But Constantine did not appreciate being put on the spot and he had had no inhibitions about brutally matching her foolish candour.
‘Of course,’ Constantine added softly, smoothly as he studied the rigidity of her slender back, ‘you could always try to change my mind, pethi mou.’
Rosie shuddered as the knife slid deeper still into her unprotected heart. In that selfsame moment, she also learnt that when provoked she could still hate almost as much as she loved.
‘And permit me to offer some advice,’ he murmured. ‘You are not going to do it by chasing off down a mountain with the throwback.’
Rosie lifted her fiery head high and turned round to face him again. ‘As far as I’m concerned, you don’t exist any more. You are beneath my notice,’ she stated with tremulous, driven dignity. ‘And I don’t want anything more to do with you.’
Anguished pain and flagellated pride weighted her as she walked indoors, shoulders square, chin high. Maybe it was just as well that she had been so painfully and naively frank, she told herself heavily. At last she now knew where she stood. And she knew how he saw her now too. She might not have enjoyed having her worst suspicions confirmed but knowledge was protection ... wasn’t it?
‘Oh, you shouldn’t have!’ Rosie scolded when she glanced up and found Carmina hovering over her with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade. ‘I could have come inside to get something.’
‘When you are inside?’ the old lady grumbled. ‘You come inside only when it is getting dark.’
Standing up, Rosie straightened, and her aching back protested. She rubbed her damp hands down over her grubby shorts and grasped the glass with a determined smile. ‘This garden... it’s beginning to look good again, don’t you think?’
Carmina settled down on the flight of stone steps rediscovered only the day before as a result of Rosie’s industrious labour and folded her plump arms. Her wrinkled face was troubled as she surveyed the pruned shrubs and the border of old climbing roses which now stood revealed where there had once been only a tangled thicket of undergrowth. She sighed. ‘The marriage ... it is not looking so good.’
Wincing, Rosie tilted her tense face up to the sun and then drank deep of the lemonade. It quenched her thirst but the effort of forcing liquid past her tightening throat muscles hurt. ‘Carmina—’
‘This is not what your father wanted,’ Carmina told her stubbornly. ‘You and Constantine... this marriage was his dream for the future.’
‘Dreams don’t always work out ...’ In fact, Anton’s dream had plunged her into a real nightmare, Rosie reflected wretchedly.
Over the past three days, living under the same roof as Constantine had become an agonising ordeal and no matter how hard she tried she had found it impossible to rise above that rejection and behave as if nothing had happened. She just couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. She just couldn’t bear to look at him or speak to him. She could only suppress her turbulent emotions in hard physical work, and at night she was so darned tired, she ought to have been sleeping like the dead...but she wasn’t.
She tossed, she turned and then she slid into an uneasy doze, only to wake up in hot-faced shock from dream after erotic dream about Constantine. What she did to him, what he did to her and the incredible number of unlikely places in which they carried out these shameless fantasies of hers ensured that her nights were far more exhausting than her days. And her inventive imagination made it even more impossible for her to meet Constantine’s eyes.
‘He does not know that you are Don Antonio’s daughter,’ Carmina complained in a tone of reproof. ‘That is a very big secret to keep from your husband.’
‘I know what I’m doing, Carmina.’
‘How can you say that? There is no peace in Son Fontanal. We all creep about the house ... no smiles, no laughter. That fancy cook ... he says if one more meal comes back to him uneaten he will leave!’
‘Constantine has a filthy temper.’
‘With a wife labouring in the garden all day, he has reason. You are neglecting your husband.’
Not in her dreams, she wasn’t. ‘He thrives on neglect.’
With a disapproving clicking of her teeth, Carmina shook her head and got up to go. ‘You are as stubborn as he is.’
Rosie settled back down to her weeding with renewed vigour. If her father was looking down on her and Constantine now, she knew he would be blaming her too. But from the moment that Constantine had asserted that had she been related to Anton he would have felt obligated to stay married to her Rosie had been determined not to try to attract and hold him on that basis.
Having smoothly seduced her into bed, Constantine had then freely admitted that his sole interest in her was sexual. Had he known she was Anton’s daughter, he would have tried to pretend that there was more to their relationship but all the time he would’ve been feeling trapped and resenting her like mad. And to try to tell him now when they were at daggers drawn and when she had no real proof to offer... what would be the point?
‘Why did you send away the gardeners I engaged?’
Startled, Rosie twisted round on her knees. A big black shadow had blocked out the sun. She focused on Constantine’s hand-stitched Italian loafers and looked no higher. ‘I prefer to do the work myself.’
“There are several acres of ground here.’
‘Well, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands, haven’t I?’ Her treacherous gaze started wandering up from the hem of his beautifully tailored grey trousers to the extensive length of his lean, hard thighs. Her stomach clenched and turned over.
Constantine released his breath in an explosive hiss. ‘You won’t go out to lunch, you won’t go out to dinner...you won’t even go out for a drive...’
They did nothing so safe in Rosie’s night-time fantasies. Her guilt-stricken appraisal strayed to the hard, muscular flare of his hip and the taut flatness of his stomach then lower again and she closed her eyes in absolute anguish as she realised that she was eating him up with her eyes. ‘I’d be wasting my time and yours.’
‘You nourish a grievance like a child revelling in a monumental sulk!’
‘I’m not sulking. I just don’t think we have anything left to say to each other. You said it all.’
‘Christos ... at least stand up and look at me when you’re speaking to me!’ Constantine grated rawly, bending down without warning to close one strong hand over hers and tug her upright.
Rosie pulled herself free and backed away several steps. Involuntarily her evasive gaze clashed with diamond-hard dark eyes. It was even worse than she had feared. That collision cost her dear. It was like being run over by a truck, thrown into the air with heart fearfully hammering and the breath wrenched from her body, all control wrested from her.
She shivered, every muscle taut as the hunger hit her in a stormy, greedy wave, a desperate, obsessive wanting that paid no heed to pride or intelligence. She wanted to touch him s
o badly, her fingernails bit sharp crescents into her hands. The simmering tension in the atmosphere heightened, until she could hear the accelerated thump of her heart in her ears.
‘What I said to you...’ Brilliant dark golden eyes challenged her levelly, his sensual mouth twisting. ‘Has it occurred to you that perhaps I wasn’t ready to answer questions about us?’
She wanted to believe him—she wanted to believe him so badly, she could almost taste her own desperation. But it had taken him too long to come up with that justification and suddenly Rosie despised herself for even listening. She started walking away. ‘I need a bath—’
A lean hand whipped out and closed round her forearm to stay her. ‘Is that all you have to say to me?’ he gritted.
Angry green eyes flashed into his. ‘You miscalculated, Constantine. You’re so used to saying and doing whatever you like with women that you thought you could do the same with me.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ he growled.
A bitter little laugh was dredged from her tight throat. ‘You assumed that you could be honest and get away with it. In fact, not only did you think that, you actually thought that putting me down would make me try harder to please...’ Her strained voice shook and she compressed her lips to silence herself.
For a split second, Constantine stared down at her, inky black lashes low on his stabbing gaze. ‘That is not true—’
‘I don’t believe you. You’re arrogant and selfish and inconsiderate of other people’s feelings,’ Rosie asserted unsteadily. ‘And I don’t care how rich or how powerful you are... I wouldn’t give daylight to any man who talked to me like that!’
‘Is that a fact?’ Reaching out for her with two determined hands, Constantine urged her up against him and sent every skin cell in her taut body leaping. ‘You will give me a lot more than daylight before I am finished, pethi mou!’
His vengeful mouth was hot, hungry and hard and her knees gave way. His tongue delved between her lips with an erotic thrust that tore a whimper of delight from her. Raw excitement electrified her, releasing the uncontrollable flood of her own hunger. She shuddered convulsively and her heart raced so hard and fast that she clung and clutched at him to stay upright.