by Lynne Graham
‘But you’re stuck here now,’ Eros pointed out softly, even while his dark deep drawl vibrated in the smouldering silence. ‘And you will not leave this island or take Teddy from it until I am satisfied that I can trust you.’
So shocked was Winnie by that provocative threat that she spun round to face him again, brown eyes huge with disbelief in her expressive face, her chest heaving.
For an instant, Eros found his concentration slipping. Even in a rage, he was still a man and the heave of Winnie’s luscious lace-covered breasts was as eye-catching as it was arousing. It also brought to mind the lowering awareness that this was not how he had expected to spend his wedding night. But then how would he know what was normal on a wedding night? he asked himself sardonically. He had never had a normal marriage and now it looked as if history was set on cruel repeat, a possibility he absolutely refused to accept a second time around.
Either he was married or he wasn’t. There would be no halfway deal, no unreasonable conditions set between him and Winnie. Yet at the same time he refused to contemplate another divorce. They had to put Teddy first and, as far as he was concerned, putting Teddy first entailed giving their son both parents beneath the same roof.
‘You can’t be serious!’ Winnie exclaimed, challenging that outrageous announcement that he would not allow her to leave the island.
‘You haven’t given me a choice,’ Eros parried with harsh conviction. ‘Do you think I don’t appreciate that your grandfather will be standing by waiting for the opportunity to steal you and Teddy back from me?’
Her lashes flickered up on startled eyes and she turned her head away again, the muscles in her slight shoulders rigid with strain. Something else she hadn’t thought about, she scolded herself in exasperation: Stam Fotakis would not take defeat lying down. Her grandfather would remain determined to get his own way and he would not be fussy about his methods. But it galled her to see herself and her child at the centre of a tug of war between two powerful men.
‘If you somehow contrive to escape and return to Stam, that will be your choice,’ Eros delineated in a driven undertone. ‘But you will not sacrifice my son to his care.’
‘Oh, drop the drama!’ Winnie scoffed. ‘My grandfather would not harm a hair on Teddy’s head and nothing you can say would convince me otherwise!’
‘I only have to look at your family’s history to know that Stam has very poor parenting skills and I won’t subject my son to that experience.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Winnie argued in frustration. ‘Grandad cares about Teddy.’
‘I assume he cared for his own sons at one time, as well,’ Eros countered very drily. ‘But he still flung your father out to sink or swim for defying him when he was only a teenager. As for your uncle, Nicos, he made the mistake of marrying a woman your grandfather disapproved of. She was a divorcee and Stam refused to even meet her. When your uncle died, your grandfather and he were estranged.’
Winnie dropped her head, her eyes troubled, because she hadn’t known that salient fact. Stam had told her only that his elder son had died in an accident, not that father and son had been at daggers drawn at the time of his passing. And rightly or wrongly, it did make her question her innate faith in the older man because evidently her grandfather had made an almighty mess of keeping his own family together.
‘And don’t kid yourself that Stam would give Teddy any easier a ride if he failed his expectations,’ Eros completed grimly.
‘Point taken,’ Winnie conceded stiffly, wanting the subject dropped because it was patently obvious that Eros knew more about her grandfather than she did.
‘And Stam will never accept me. He’s too much of a snob,’ Eros added grimly. ‘In his eyes, I’m nouveau riche...and there’re no princess grandmothers in my family tree!’
‘That sort of thing isn’t important to me,’ Winnie muttered uncomfortably.
‘Pedigree is very important to your grandfather. Don’t ever forget that. He wanted a ring on your finger to gloss over the reality that you were an unmarried mother and that’s where my role was supposed to end. I was good enough for you to marry but not good enough to be accepted into the Fotakis family.’
‘Scarcely matters now,’ she mumbled helplessly.
But Eros wasn’t listening. He stalked indoors, his long lithe legs powering him towards the bar in the corner of the ballroom. Momentarily released from tension, Winnie allowed herself to breathe again. She congratulated herself on not losing her temper and leant back against the iron balustrade, letting the strain slowly trickle out of her muscles.
Eros strode back, his entire focus locked to Winnie’s slight figure. With her luxuriant mane of dark hair shifting in the light breeze below the sparkling diamond tiara and her caramel eyes bright in her heart-shaped face, she looked tiny and gorgeous and that reluctant acknowledgement only unleashed a stronger tide of aggression within him. She had betrayed his trust and she wasn’t a fitting mother for a vulnerable child. How could she be? In marrying him and as quickly walking out on him again she had demonstrated that she had very few principles, least of all when it came to reliability and honesty.
Winnie didn’t really want a drink but she accepted the glass of wine Eros extended because she was thirsty and if he was offering a polite olive branch, she was more than willing to grasp it. Taut as a bowstring, she sipped nervously at the wine.
‘When I asked you to marry me, it was the real deal,’ Eros intoned with level diction, his lean, darkly handsome features sombre. ‘There was no deception involved and no lies. I intended to be a husband to you and a father to my son and I planned to fulfil both roles to the very best of my ability.’
Winnie breathed in so deep she felt dizzy when the cool salty air flooded her lungs. She flung her slim shoulders back, brown eyes bright with anger. ‘Don’t you dare try to talk down to me when you threatened to harm my sisters by exposing their secrets!’
‘That doesn’t excuse you for entering that church and speaking vows you had no intention of following through on!’ Eros ground out wrathfully. ‘That was wrong!’
‘Your threats were equally wrong.’ Winnie fought back with a flush rising in her cheeks. ‘I couldn’t risk allowing you to humiliate my sisters any more than I could risk losing my son, so don’t you dare tell me that you were offering me “the real deal” because you didn’t give me any options!’
‘I chose to do what was best for all three of us and I put Teddy first. You’ve never put him first,’ Eros condemned grimly. ‘If you had, you wouldn’t have kept us apart.’
‘Wouldn’t I have?’ Winnie gasped, so furious that she could hardly breathe for the tightness of the corseting built into her grown and squeezing her ribs. ‘You were such a great role model for an innocent little boy, weren’t you? A married man having an affair with an employee behind his wife’s back? Do you really think you were the kind of father I wanted or needed for my son?’
‘Perhaps not but I was his father and I had rights,’ Eros reminded her without remorse. ‘Rights and responsibilities you were happy to ignore and deny.’
Clutching her wine glass, Winnie gave way to her impatience and moved forward to push past him and return indoors. ‘We’ve already been through this argument. There’s no point going there again!’ she proclaimed.
‘I married you in good faith. I didn’t even demand a signature on a prenup. Why? I was fool enough to trust you.’
Breathless and troubled with her cheeks on fire with mortification, Winnie snatched up the bottle of wine on the bar and refilled her glass. ‘More fool you, then!’ she shot back at him defiantly, reasoning that as he had already won the most important battle she had little more to lose from aggravating him.
Eros was outraged. Quiet, trusting, naive little Winnie, it seemed, had only ever existed in his own imagination, a romantic fiction more than a reality. ‘A fo
ol no more,’ he reminded her with dark satisfaction. ‘I have my wife and my child in my home where I wanted them to be.’
‘And much good may it do you!’ Winnie hurled back as she moistened her dry mouth with more wine. ‘I am not your wife in any way that counts.’
Eros dealt her a sizzling all-male smile of one-upmanship, recalling how his bride had melted in his arms a bare hour before she’d walked out on him. Some things Winnie could fake but not that burning chemistry and in retrospect he recalled the signs of disquiet he had noticed in her and misinterpreted as shyness. To a certain degree she had changed. She had toughened up, learned to challenge him and she refused to hang her head and admit regret. But at heart and in the only field that really mattered, he told himself, she was still his Winnie, as red hot for him as he was for her.
That flashing smile made Winnie feel dizzy where she stood and she blinked, her throat convulsing as she acknowledged the strain of trying to defend herself when her own heart and logic also screamed that she had done wrong. Two wrongs would never make a right. Her grandfather’s machinations and desire for revenge had tied her up in knots. But she had put Teddy first when she’d readily agreed to her son having a proper relationship with his father.
Marriage, however, had been a step too far for her, a much too personal and humiliating step that had cost her the independence and pride she had worked so hard to re-establish since Teddy’s birth. Between them, her grandfather and Eros had torn her life apart. Even worse, Eros had hurt her badly once and she wasn’t prepared to risk that happening again. Naturally she could be civil to her son’s father, but she couldn’t treat him as a husband or trust him, not when she was degradingly conscious that he had only married her for Teddy’s benefit.
‘You married me intending to cheat me of both a marriage and a son,’ Eros grated in a tone of raw frustration. ‘What is your answer to that?’
Winnie drained her wine and set the empty glass down with a sharp little snap on the bar before turning on her heel and simply walking away from him.
‘Winnie!’ Eros ground out wrathfully.
Winnie paused. ‘You know, I always hated my name. My parents shortened it from Winifred to Winnie and now I don’t like Winnie either,’ she muttered almost conversationally. ‘It makes me think of a horse—’
‘Thee mou...’ Eros bit out, his strong jaw clenched hard as she turned in a reluctant half circle to look at him again. ‘What nonsense are you speaking?’
‘I’ve got nothing more to say to you.’ With extreme unwillingness, Winnie focused on him again. Eros Nevrakis, her husband, and he was as gorgeous as a lustrous jungle cat, full of energy and predatory drive. He was judging her as she had once judged him because she had lied by omission in agreeing to marry him when she’d had no intention of staying married to him or even of living with him. He had found her out when he’d caught her in the act of leaving him and there was no coming back from a sin that barefaced.
‘I have plenty to say to you.’
Halfway up the sweeping staircase, Winnie stilled and turned back. ‘Really? That must feel very much out of character. A little more than two years ago when it mattered, you had nothing to say to me.’
His stunning bone structure snapped taut, stormy green eyes narrowing with wariness. ‘You vanished. You didn’t give me the chance to say anything.’
‘Be honest for once,’ Winnie challenged. ‘You had nothing of any value to say to me back then. I was just a fling for you.’
Eros gritted his even white teeth. ‘We’ve got enough trouble in the present without digging back into the past!’ he derided without hesitation.
‘But that past formed the present and my opinion of you and, no matter how hard I try to be civilised and gracious and consider Teddy, I can’t get over the fact that I hate you more than any man alive!’ Winnie flung truthfully.
As Winnie raced on up the stairs, Eros froze where he stood, colour ebbing from below his bronzed complexion. She didn’t hate him, she told herself fiercely; she refused to accept that. Why the hell had she brought up the past? That past was better left buried and untouched. He couldn’t go back and change anything about it. He had been married...fact. He had let her down when she had most needed him...fact.
As Winnie pushed through door after door in vain search of her luggage, she finally arrived in front of the double doors at the end of the corridor and thrust the doors wide. Her single suitcase filled with old garments she had been content to leave behind sat still packed by the wall.
Eros leant back against the doors to send them slamming shut. He watched her twist to try to reach the buttons at the back of the gown, the same buttons he had planned to undo one by one as he stripped her bare. His mouth ran dry, the throb at his groin a provocative reminder of his susceptibility to a woman he could not trust. The reaction infuriated him.
‘You lied to me,’ he condemned.
Winnie spun round, her face aflame. ‘I didn’t lie. I went through with the wedding.’
‘You think that’s enough to excuse you?’ he derided.
‘No, but it’s the best you’re going to hear.’
‘You don’t hate me,’ he told her, stalking with fluid, boneless grace across the wooden floor that separated them. ‘A woman doesn’t kiss a man the way you kiss me when she hates him.’
Winnie tossed her head, lustrous strands of mahogany hair tumbling round her hot face. ‘That’s just sex,’ she told him dismissively. ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with emotions. I believe you taught me that.’
Taut with arousal, Eros surveyed her in frustration and reached for her. ‘Let me undo those buttons for you.’
‘They’re hooks underneath, not buttons,’ she muttered breathlessly, as if she was making a very important point. Eros turned her round, long, lean fingers gentle but firm on her slight shoulders. With just that single touch her treacherous body ran from zero to fifty in awareness and she stiffened, disturbingly conscious of the hooks giving way at her spine and the smooth brush of his fingers across sensitive skin.
‘I can’t be that way again with you... I just can’t!’ she exclaimed in sheer desperation, all too conscious of the melting heat blossoming low in her pelvis, the licking temptation ready and willing to drag her down into sensual oblivion. She supposed that was natural. Eros had taught her to crave him and she had suppressed that side of her nature ever since, refusing to acknowledge it, afraid of falling victim to that weakness again.
Lean hands heavy on her shoulders, Eros nudged her hair out of his path and pressed his mouth passionately to the soft skin at her nape, sending a darting tingle of shivering lust down her taut spinal cord. ‘I haven’t been with any woman since I was last with you,’ he admitted in a charged undertone.
Still quivering from the wickedly provocative assault of his hungry mouth on her skin, Winnie went rigid at those words and then suddenly tore herself free to spin round and look up at him in frank disbelief. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she told him boldly.
Stormy green eyes pierced hers in unashamed challenge. ‘Whether you accept it or not, it happens to be the truth.’
Oxygen bubbled in the back of her throat, scrambling her breathing as she gazed up at him in bewilderment. ‘But why? I mean, you were divorced... Why wouldn’t you have found someone else?’
His proud bone structure pulled taut, his exotic cheekbones prominent, the shadowy hollows beneath adding stark definition. ‘I’ve never been into casual encounters and I didn’t want to rush into anything either. I won’t let sex control me or push me in the wrong direction again.’
Her lashes fluttered, bemusement claiming her. She was barely breathing as she listened because he had never told her that much before and, ironically, he both gave to her and then took away again with those words. First, he implied that what he had shared with her had not been casual and then he suggested that sexual desire ha
d once got him involved with the wrong woman. Did he mean her or his ex-wife? Or some other woman from his past?
What did strike her almost dumb was that Eros, for all his gorgeous vital masculinity and electrifying sexuality, had almost as many quirks, inhibitions and fears as she had. Nothing had ever shaken her as much as that revelation because it simply transformed her view of him, turning him from the ruthless, dishonest sexual predator she had believed him to be into a much more human male with his own secrets and vulnerabilities.
Winnie stared up at him, her heart-shaped face solemn. ‘You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?’
An ebony brow quirked. ‘Why would I lie about something like that? What man boasts about celibacy in this day and age?’
Winnie closed her eyes because of the scratchy sting prickling at the backs of them, fighting off the threat of tears. Her feathery lashes drifted down onto her cheeks to conceal her expression. With a husky groan, he hauled her into his arms. Passionate urgency sprang from every line and angle of the lean, fit body pressed hard against hers. His hungry mouth crushed hers, his tongue sliding between her lips to delve deep until a shudder racked her slight frame.
‘I don’t want to rip the dress,’ Eros muttered roughly, spinning her round in front of him and addressing his attention to the many buttons still to be undone.
‘Why not? I’ll never wear it again,’ Winnie murmured, already wondering what lay ahead for them now because they were racing fast into unknown territory and, although she knew she ought to step back and demand her own space and resist the intimacy he wanted, she was as still as a statue, her pupils dilated, her body all of a quiver in anticipation of what he would do to her and how that would make her feel.
Eros ran through hook after hook, impatience gripping him in waves, and he too was fighting off second thoughts. He was picturing her as she’d walked down the aisle towards him, reminding himself that that had all been showmanship designed to fool him and lull him into a false sense of security. She had never intended to be his wife, never intended to share his bed and his fury at that reality that was still dug down deep inside him. What was he playing at? Getting entangled with Winnie again was like playing with fire and it would be all the more dangerous because of her connection to Stam Fotakis, who would destroy him if he could.