by Kim Lawrence
‘I should have done a lot of things when we were together, including walking out before you so charmingly threw me out!’
The colour that began low on his throat travelled upwards until his entire face was suffused. ‘I could have done that better,’ he admitted huskily.
‘Is that your version of grovelling?’ She gave her head an impatient shake. ‘Even if you crawled on your hands and knees I’d never forgive you for what you did.’
His face had that closed, unreadable expression as he said tautly, ‘I think I should tell you why I asked you to—’
He’s going to say it. Divorce…once he said it, it would be real. She suddenly went icy cold. Maybe I’m not ready to hear this after all…?
How long do you need…?
‘I know why you’re here,’ she cut in quickly.
His dark brows drew together in a straight line above his masterful nose. ‘You do…?’
‘For goodness’ sake, don’t drag it out. I need to get back.’ She raised her wrist and evinced astonishment at the hour, even though she couldn’t see her watch through the warm mist of unshed tears.
‘You kept it.’
Her shimmering gaze lifted. ‘Kept what?’
Angolos tapped the diamond-encrusted face of the watch he had bought her on their honeymoon. His hand dropped away, but not before the tips of his long brown fingers had trailed lightly along the inner aspect of her slender wrist.
It was barely a touch yet her body reacted like that of an addict given the scent of her drug of choice, only to have it snatched away. Inside the loose cotton bodice her breasts ached and craved the touch of hands and lips. Buried memories resurfaced and the ache low in her pelvis became a physical pain.
‘I’m sentimental that way.’ Let him never know how true that was.
The week in Paris, their honeymoon, had been utter bliss; she treasured the memory of every single moment of it. She had been a nervous bride the first night, but the moment he had touched her she had quickly lost her inhibitions. Her introduction into a sensual world she hadn’t known existed had left her in a daze. Every morning when she’d woken up tangled up with the warm, lithe body of her incredible lover she’d felt as if she had died and gone to heaven.
For a week everything had been magical. Georgie had tried, but had never been able to recapture that magic.
The first cracks had appeared when they’d arrived in Greece. It had been here that the scale of Angolos’s wealth had hit Georgie for the first time. They had landed on his private heli-pad, for goodness’ sake! In her world people who had two cars were well off; Angolos had casually revealed that he had a yacht, which was presently being refitted.
From the air she had been able to see that the estate, located on a peninsula, covered acres and acres. The main house itself and the gorgeously landscaped grounds with their tennis courts and pools were palatial, and the setting beside the sea was totally stunning.
‘Not disappointed, are you?’ Angolos had teased.
‘It’s all incredible.’ So was a museum.
Georgie, who had been brought up in a standard 1930s semi-detached house, was actually daunted by the sheer scale of everything. She had thought there might be a housekeeper or some help in the garden, but to discover there was an army of live-in domestic help to run the place came as a nasty shock.
This wasn’t the sort of house where you nipped down to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich in the middle of the night. She seriously doubted that Angolos knew where the kitchens were!
Within ten seconds she knew that she wasn’t going to acclimatise to her new life overnight. It was going to be a steep learning curve, but she reasoned if she had Angolos there to help her she would be all right. She didn’t know at the time that he wouldn’t be…that his work would occupy most of his waking moments.
She walked around the place making the right admiring noises, but she couldn’t imagine ever thinking of this place as home. And on top of that there was his family, who had been there in force when she’d arrived.
‘Sorry about tonight,’ Angolos said when they lay in bed later that night. ‘They wanted to inspect my new bride, and who,’ he suggested throatily, ‘can blame them?’
‘I don’t think they were very impressed.’
‘Don’t be silly. They’ll love you…why wouldn’t they?’ Angolos impatiently dismissed her concerns. ‘You just need to relax a little.’
‘You don’t think I was relaxed… Did I come over as—?’
He laid a finger against her lips. ‘Forget about my family; it doesn’t matter what they think. They’ll be gone tomorrow.’
She breathed a sigh of relief. Angolos seemed different in this environment, but she was sure that once they were alone everything would be all right. She couldn’t wait.
‘Good…that is, I’m sure they’re very nice, but there was an awful lot of them.’ There was no way she was going to remember the names of all those aunts and uncles and cousins. As Angolos was kissing his way up her neck she was hard-pressed to remember her own name.
‘I really don’t want to talk about relatives,’ he said, pausing halfway up.
‘Me neither,’ she admitted huskily as he peeled off her transparent nightgown to reveal glowing skin.
‘Theos, but you are beautiful.’
His words drove everything else from Georgie’s mind. She melted.
The sex was spectacular, but the problem was still there the next day in the shape of his mother and sister. They were still there at lunch-time.
Short of packing their bags for them, what could she do?
As she walked out to the helicopter pad with Angolos, who had explained he had to go into the office, she took the opportunity to casually enquire, ‘When are your mother and sister going home?’
Angolos threw some instruction to his assistant, a polite, nice-looking young man who was distantly related. As the younger man hurried ahead Angolos directed a puzzled frown at Georgie’s face.
‘Home…?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t follow.’
‘I was wondering when your mother and Sacha were going back home.’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘They are home, yineka mou, didn’t I say? They live here.’
Somehow the strained smile stayed glued to her face. ‘No, you didn’t say.’ The realisation that they would be sharing a home with his family made her spirits plummet. It had taken about five minutes for her to realise that she and her mother-in-law were never going to be pals, and that her sister-in-law, whom Georgie considered horribly indulged, looked down her aristocratic little nose at her.
‘Mother will be a big help while you’re settling in, and Sacha is your age—you’re bound to have a lot in common.’
Georgie, who seriously doubted either of these claims, responded to the kiss he planted on her lips with less enthusiasm than previously.
‘Are you all right?’
Georgie, a big fan of telling it as it was, heard herself lie. ‘Terrific…just a bit tired.’
That was the first time she concealed her feelings from him, but not the last time. She even got quite good at it though her acting talents were stretched to the limit when he dropped one particular bombshell on her.
Angolos went to Paris, this time on business and without her. ‘I’d love for you to come with me, of course I would, but this is business. You do understand…?’
On his return he casually mentioned, in a ‘you’ll never guess who I bumped into’ sort of way, that he had had dinner with his ex-wife while there.
Georgie, who had already been force-fed a daily dose of Sonia-worship by her in-laws, wanted to scream, but instead she smiled and said quietly, ‘How nice.’
The following month he announced he had invited Sonia up for the weekend. That his ex arrived late seemed to be taken for granted. Georgie could have accommodated her tardiness, but she could never forgive their guest for being poised, self-assured and, it went without saying, drop-dead gorgeo
us. In fact she had all the qualities necessary to be Angolos’s wife—heck, she even still had her ring; she’d just swapped fingers!
In other words she was everything Georgie longed to be and wasn’t.
She was also very tactile, always touching and stroking. Georgie was forced to watch as she stroked Angolos’s arm or ran her fingers over his lean cheek. It seemed to Georgie that every time she walked into a room they were there, laughing in a corner, sharing their jokes and their secrets. Feeling totally alienated, she retreated into her shell.
‘You never struck me as sentimental.’
She turned her head towards Angolos and smiled. Unexpectedly recalling the traumatic events made her realise just how much she had changed in the intervening years. It was quite an empowering experience to realise that if she found herself in that situation today she would not creep away to feel slighted and sorry for herself in the corner.
No, she would tell the other woman to lay off. She would confront Angolos—at best his behaviour was insensitive, at worst he still had feelings for his ex. She would demand he decided whom he wanted, because she wasn’t playing second fiddle to anyone!
‘I was being ironic. The watch—’ she glanced at her wrist ‘—is a good investment, much more likely to rise in value than money in the bank, or so I was told.’ By her dad when he’d returned the watch, having taken it to be valued without her knowledge.
‘You had it valued?’
She nodded; her father had been shocked that she’d been walking around wearing something that was, as he’d put it, ‘worth as much as a two-bedroomed house’, without any insurance.
‘My finances were tight.’
‘You seem to have a more practical attitude to money than you once did.’
‘Practical?’ She thought about the wild flowers, carefully pressed and preserved alongside other treasures in the velvet-lined box. Angolos had picked them for her the first time they’d walked through the sand dunes. ‘I’m working on it. But I don’t think I’ll ever care about money for its own sake and I don’t put a price on things the way you do.’
‘Not even your virginity?’
Heat flooded her face as her furious flashing eyes flew to his face. ‘Don’t you dare make out I held out to make you marry me!’ she snapped. ‘You always put a higher value on that than I did,’ she reminded him. ‘You could have had it for nothing, Angolos—you didn’t have to marry me.’
In the long simmering silence their eyes locked. His chest lifted as he expelled a long sibilant sigh.
‘I know.’ She would never know what it had cost him not to accept what she had been so anxious to give him.
‘Then why…?’
He pressed his fingers to the groove above his masterful nose and scanned the stretch of beach. It was empty but for a few people walking dogs.
‘Why did you marry me, Angolos?’
‘Do you want to walk?’
She released a hiss of frustration through clenched teeth. ‘You’ve no intention of telling me, have you?’
The disturbing smile that played around the corners of his sensual lips neither confirmed nor denied her husky accusation. ‘Walk…?’
‘Walk?’ In contrast to the restive energy that Angolos was projecting, she felt utterly drained.
‘You know—put one foot in front of the other.’
It really ought to be that simple, but her shaking knees didn’t have the strength or co-ordination to move her from the spot. ‘You’re impossible,’ she accused.
‘But cute?’ he suggested.
She only just stopped herself responding to his smile. ‘I never thought I’d hear you say “cute”.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘No.’
One winged dark brow arched. ‘No to cute or a walk?’
‘Both.’ She sat down rather hurriedly.
‘As you wish.’
Angolos followed suit but with less haste and considerably more grace. As she tucked her knees under herself and arranged her skirt around her legs Georgie was aware of his dark eyes watching her. She was aware of just about everything about him, including the warm male scent that made her oversensitive nostrils twitch.
‘Don’t try and charm me, Angolos. I’ve got immunity. Anyway, you’ve no need to butter me up. Like I said, I already know what this is about.’
Her head lifted, their eyes connected. Angolos’s expression was wary; it cost her a supreme effort to smile. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a fuss, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
Angolos looked at the envelope she handed him but made no effort to take it.
‘I think I’ve signed all the places I need to.’
He still didn’t react, just carried on looking at it with a total lack of recognition in his eyes.
‘For heaven’s sake.’ She leant across and deposited it in his lap. ‘I found it, it must have fallen out of your pocket. Did you think you’d lost it?’
He took the envelope and turned it over in his hand cautiously as though he expected it to burst into flames. Georgie found his manner bewildering.
‘Dios, I had totally forgotten about this.’ After his meeting with Paul he had contacted his lawyer. The papers were already prepared; they had been for two years.
‘How long will it take to be…final? The d…divorce.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
ANGOLOS’S glance lifted to Georgie’s face. There was a strange look in his deep-set eyes that she couldn’t interpret. ‘Never!’
The forcefulness of his explosive retort made her stare at him in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Then understand this.’ Georgie gave a grunt of shock as he began to tear the envelope into pieces with slow, deliberate thoroughness before tossing them up into the air.
She watched in open-mouthed astonishment as the fragments went flying down the beach in several directions, drifting like confetti on the air currents.
‘Have you gone mad?’ She turned her astounded eyes on him. ‘Why make the effort to bring that here personally and then do that?’
‘I never intended…’
‘Never intended what?’ she prompted.
His jaw tightened. ‘We’re not getting divorced.’
She pressed her hands to her head, the dull throb in her temples had turned into a blinding headache. ‘But you came here to…and I want to get divorced!’ she added on a note of escalating misery.
‘Too bad.’
‘You want to get divorced.’ The squally sea breeze suddenly caught her skirt and lifted it. It took her several moments to smooth it back down, and when she looked up she saw something in his eyes that made her sensitive stomach flip.
‘You saw Paul at his surgery.’
Georgie didn’t want to talk about Paul. ‘So that’s how you knew we were here.’
Angolos inclined his dark head.
‘I know some people think strong and silent is attractive, but ask them how they feel about it after they’ve lived with strong and silent for a few weeks. I think you’d find they’d have changed their tune,’ she predicted grimly. ‘For goodness’ sake, don’t just look all brooding and beautiful—say something!’
His only response to her emotional outburst was a raised eyebrow—one of these days she would swing for this man.
‘What would you like me to say?’
‘I give up!’ she declared. She slid an exasperated sideways glance at his lean, saturnine profile. ‘What were you doing discussing me with Paul anyway?’ she demanded crossly. ‘He has no right to discuss me; there’s such a thing as patient confidentiality.’
Angolos dismissed her complaint with an impatient motion of his hand. ‘I’m your husband.’
‘On paper.’ Paper that was even now blowing across the ocean…her divorce would probably end up in Normandy. ‘And even if we were together, that doesn’t give you a right to know my medical details.’
‘He didn’t divulge any private details, medical or o
therwise,’ Angolos cut in impatiently. ‘He told me I have a son.’
She dug her toe into the sand and vented an ironic laugh. ‘That was news…?’
‘To me it was.’
‘How can you say that?’
He ignored her exasperated exclamation. ‘Now I know that Nicky is mine, obviously things must change.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘Two words I’m not liking there…“must” and “change”.’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Georgette. You know where I’m going with this.’
She shook her head. ‘Not a clue.’
‘Then I’ll spell it out: we will be a family.’
The bad feeling in her stomach coalesced into straightforward panic. ‘I have all the family I need.’ He wasn’t…he just couldn’t be suggesting what she thought he was!
‘A family requires both parents. You and Nicky will come back to Greece with me and we will be a family.’
A hoarse laugh was drawn from Georgie’s aching throat. ‘And to think I used to be intimidated by your vast intellect. You know, mostly I was scared stiff of giving an opinion in case you laughed at me.’
Angolos looked so appalled by this confidence that under less fraught circumstances she might have laughed.
‘But now I know that you may be clever, but you’re also stark staring crazy. Me live with you again…? The only way you’ll get me back to Greece is in a strait-jacket.’
‘You’re speaking emotionally without considering—’
‘I don’t need to consider anything. I recognise insanity when I hear it.’
Until he captured her wrists in his she wasn’t aware that she had been tugging at her own hair. ‘Calm down. You’re overreacting.’
He acknowledged her snarling, ‘shut up!’ with an infuriatingly tolerant smile.
‘Once you’ve thought about it—’ he continued talking across her demand to be let go! ‘—I think you’ll come to appreciate that this is the right thing to do. Sometimes being a parent involves sacrifice.’
He really was incredible. ‘You’re telling me that? Know a lot about being a parent, do you? Gosh, share your wisdom, I’m all ears,’ she begged.