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‘So you keep telling me.’
‘Are you saying you don’t believe I am who I claim to be? What do you want—a DNA test?’
Penny flinched at the malign humour in his dark tones but, pushing her hands into the pockets of the silk gown and curling them into tight, defiant fists, she managed to find the strength to continue in spite of feeling that she was suddenly desperately fighting for her life.
‘N-no—I don’t need that.’
‘Then start acting like you know me. I’m your husband—the man you married—and you damn well know it. And if you need any further confirmation—something we both know—then let me remind you that I am also the man who made sure that you—or at least an image of you—was added to the carving on our bed.’
One long tanned hand pointed back at the dishevelled bed they had just left.
‘Yes—as a mouse!’ Penny flung back at him.
She knew he was referring to the ornately carved wooden headboard that had been one of the wedding gifts at their marriage. Apparently these carvings were a tradition in the Michaelis family and were usually made up of symbols and images to represent the bride and groom, their families and elements from their lives. When the headboard had been given to Zarek and Penny it had all seemed to be about boats and the sea, with very little that related to her personally. When she had protested, Zarek had said that he would make sure she was added. She had come back from her wedding reception expecting at the very least to see a rose or two for her English nationality, or even a soaring oak tree as a play on her maiden name of Wood.
It had taken her a long time to find the tiny field mouse almost hidden in one corner of the ornate bed head.
‘Was that what you thought of me? As a mouse? A creeping, sneaking, terrified little mouse?’
‘Well, certainly not now,’ Zarek replied dryly, strolling over to a chair by the window and dropping down into it. ‘Right now you are—what is it that old film was called?—The Mouse that Roared.’
Was that actually a gleam of humour in the darkness of his eyes? Penny couldn’t be sure and because of that she didn’t dare risk rising to his teasing.
‘You have changed, Penny.’
If only he knew how much.
‘I’ve had to change—had to learn how to stand on my own two feet. One moment I was a new wife, embarking on a very different sort of life in an alien country—with in-laws who weren’t exactly pleased to see me arrive in their home, but with my husband by my side to help me through. The next I was…’
Breaking off, she could only shake her head, twisting the tie belt of her robe round and round her fingers, tying it in knots and then tugging them free again.
‘The next you were what?’ Zarek prompted when she couldn’t find the words to go on. ‘You didn’t seem to be struggling quite as much as you would have me believe. Certainly not with the in-laws.’
‘You think so?’
Outrage had Penny letting drop the narrow belt as she put her hands on her hips and faced him defiantly.
‘You want to try living with your stepmother complaining about every thing every minute of the day. With everything you do being wrong—and everything that dear Jason and Petros do is absolutely perfect.’
It was only when Zarek’s mouth quirked up into an unexpected and totally unguarded smile that she realised just how rigidly he had controlled his features from the time he had arrived until now. Even when he had been intent on seducing her, no trace of true emotion had shown through the tight muscles, only the burn in his eyes giving away any sort of feeling. It had been almost as if he had been determined not to show anything. So now she felt her insides twist, her heart lurch as she recognised the unexpected softening in his face.
‘I did,’ he acknowledged dryly. ‘I lived with that constant carping from the moment my father first brought Hermione home. And then when he married her and moved her and her sons into the house…’
He shook his head slowly, mouth twisting again at the memories.
‘I was glad to escape to boarding school in England.’
‘How old were you?’
Penny knew that her voice sounded slightly breathless because she was struggling with a tightness in her chest that came from the fact that Zarek had actually opened up about something in his past. When they had married he had always insisted that the past was irrelevant. That it was the here and now that mattered.
‘Seven.’
‘So young!’
At seven she had gone to the small village school just down the road. She couldn’t imagine how it would have felt not to be able to go back home at the end of each long, tiring day.
‘But I suppose you had Jason and Petros for company? No?’ she questioned when Zarek shook his head again.
‘They never went away to school. They had private tutors here on the island.’
Catching the sound of her swiftly indrawn breath, he switched on another smile, one that was totally different from before.
‘I much preferred it that way. And if I could have stayed at school through the holidays I would have preferred that too.’
The words were flat, emotionless, but all the same Penny felt that she saw something of the reasons why Zarek had always been so totally set against his stepfamily, his unyielding resolve that they would never get their hands on Odysseus Shipping.
And that perhaps was some part of the explanation why he had been so determined on having a family—an heir—as soon as possible. But it did nothing to ease the sense of being used, seen not as a wife but as a womb to carry that child, which was how she had ended up feeling in their marriage. And that was why she had resorted to taking the contraceptive pill, the discovery of which had sent Zarek incandescent with rage just before he had left for the Troy.
‘And your father?’ she asked and once more Zarek shook his head.
‘He gave Hermione whatever she wanted. He just wanted a quiet life and, to get that, he had to let her run things the way she wanted them.’
‘Then you’ll understand why I was ready to get out of here. You walk back in and assume that I’ve just been sitting here quietly, waiting for you to return. Perhaps doing a little embroidery to pass the time.’
The realisation that she had in fact been doing something like that made her heart skip a little uneven beat. She didn’t really expect an answer to her question and she didn’t get one. Instead Zarek continued to sit as motionless as a statue, even his eyes hooded and opaque.
‘How do you know that I hadn’t decided I’d had enough long ago and divorced you?’
‘On what grounds?’ Cool and swift, it had a bite as lethal as that of a striking snake.
‘Desertion?’ she parried sharply, refusing to let herself think of the way that he had never meant his marriage vows. Never intended to love and cherish. ‘You haven’t been in contact for two years.’
Something had changed. She couldn’t tell quite what it was, only that something in the atmosphere in the room was suddenly very different. Zarek hadn’t moved or spoken but everything about his long, still body communicated a new and very different form of tension.
‘I believe that we have already established that I was hardly in a position to phone you or to send many text messages.’
The dry, slightly mocking words only added to the already strung-out way she was feeling, knocking her over from irritation into full-blown exasperation.
‘When you were captured originally, perhaps! But you got away from them. That same week, if I have it right. And after that? There are two whole years with not a word, not a message. Nothing to let me know that you were still alive.’
‘Perhaps that’s because I didn’t know that I was.’
‘What…? What do you mean? That doesn’t make sense.’
But even as she asked the questions Zarek moved at last, getting to his feet and prowling restlessly across the room to stand by the window, staring out at the now moonlit waves. And as she saw his hand come up to rub at his head, at the ugly scar that marked his temple, she felt her heart thud just once, hard and cruel, at the reminder that he had been literally just inches away from death. How long it would have taken him to recover from that she had no idea.
‘I mean that for a long time even I did not know who I was,’ Zarek said, still not looking at her so that he didn’t see the way that her hands had gone to her mouth as if she could wish her foolish words back. ‘When I hit the sea I had already blacked out. I have no idea how long I drifted. I was just lucky that I was eventually picked up by a man in his yacht. He took me back to his home in Malta.’
‘Malta!’
Penny felt she might choke on the word. Was that where Zarek had been all this time? When she had been imagining all sorts of horrors, the thought of his lifeless body tossed into the ocean with a bullet in his head, he had been on that beautiful Mediterranean island.
So near and yet so far.
And what had he been doing all that time while she had been left stranded, neither a wife nor a widow? Not knowing whether to mourn him or to wait for him.
‘Don’t they have phones in Malta? Writing paper? Envelopes? A post office?’
That brought Zarek swinging round to face her, a faintly wry smile twisting his beautiful mouth in his shadowed face. That smile twisted a knife in her insides with its memory of how he had once looked, in the early days of their marriage, when he had been smiling at something she had said.
‘I wouldn’t have known who to contact. At the start, when I was unconscious and ill from exposure, I had no identification on me, no way of anyone knowing who I was. And when I did come round, I was no help.’
‘Oh, come on…’ Penny began, but then the full impact of just what he had said hit home to her and the words faded into nothing as her mind reeled in shock. ‘Do you mean…? Are you saying…?’
‘I’m saying I had amnesia—the wound on my head—the shock—exposure—any of it could all have caused it or added to the effect—but I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I knew I was alive—I was male and…’
He threw up his hands in a gesture expressing resigned acceptance of defeat.
‘That was it. So I couldn’t help anyone by telling them who I was or who might be looking for me. I didn’t know if I was married or single. If I had any family and where they were. I spoke English—that was what my rescuer spoke to me—but not Maltese. I also spoke French, Greek, Italian—so in which of those countries did I look for any clues?’
‘Amnesia…’
Penny could only echo the word in a sense of shock and bewilderment. It was so obvious now that she knew. It explained so many things, which was a relief.
And it also took away that feeling of outraged injustice at the thought that she had been left abandoned, suffering the torment of believing him dead when all the time he had been alive and well and living in Malta.
Suddenly it was as if that sense of outrage had been all that had been holding her upright. As if the removal of the indignation had been like tugging a rug from under her feet, throwing her totally off balance. Was it possible that her own lingering anger and hurt at all that she had found out about him just before he had left for the Troy had coloured her judgement, making her see hurts where none was intended, cruelty where he had never planned any?
But all the same he had come back to the island incognito, if not in disguise. He had come in secret, concealed behind the big beard, the long hair. And he had set himself to watch her, to observe what she was doing. For how long? Just how many days—weeks—had he been there?
‘Wh-when did you start to remember things?’
‘Only slowly. I’m not sure if I fully recall everything yet. For perhaps the first year I didn’t know anything. But occasionally I would have flashes of memory or dreams—’
He broke off abruptly as an unexpected sound interrupted his words. A sound that made Penny blush and made a rare, stunningly genuine smile of real amusement cross his face.
‘What was that?’
‘What?’ It was an attempt at distraction, one that didn’t work as her empty stomach growled again, more loudly this time.
‘Are you hungry?’
It was so long—too long—since she’d seen that teasing smile on his face. And having seen it resurface, she felt she would do anything to keep it there. There had once been a time when they were happy together, even if, underneath it all, Zarek had only been pretending.
‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘No—a lot…’
It was the first time she had sounded genuine, unconstrained, since she had leapt from the bed as if all the hounds of hell were after her, Zarek reflected. The first time she had sounded at all like the woman—little more than a girl—that he had married. And she pressed her hands to her belly as if somehow she could silence the growl of hunger that sounded once again.
‘Me too, now,’ he admitted, finding he could say it to this softer, younger-looking Penny. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’
‘Neither have I.’
She said it with a sort of astonishment that made him smile at her obvious sudden self-discovery.
‘I didn’t manage anything this morning because—the meeting was on my mind. And since then, well…’she shrugged, her expression becoming almost shame-faced ‘…things rather intervened.’
‘They did. For me too.’
It seemed ridiculous to be having this rather inane conversation about food in the darkness of the late evening in the silence of the big house. Especially in the heated atmosphere that had been boiling between them earlier. But privately Zarek found that he was admitting he was actually rather enjoying it. It was a relief to have a slight lull in the tension and abrasive aggression of the rest of the day. The constant need to keep his focus on what was being said and how it was being expressed. After his investigations of the past weeks, the sense of always looking over his shoulder had become so much a part of his life that he was glad to let it drop for a while.
And not just in the time since he had rediscovered who he was. The worst thing about getting his memory back had been recalling the way that had been a part of his life for so long. Knowing that Hermione and her poisonous sons were always waiting and watching, just hoping for a chance to stab him in the back. They had tried their damnedest when his father had been alive, putting any barrier they could between him and his parent, and in the two years since Darius had died had redoubled their campaigns in the hope of moving in on Odysseus Shipping.
And they had almost succeeded. If he had not walked in on the board meeting when he had…
But exactly what part had Penny played in that?
‘Let me get you something.’
‘There’s no need…’
‘Well, who else is going to do it, seeing as you’ve given the whole staff the night off?’
She made the comment sound light but he could still read the tension in her eyes, the faint quiver of her bottom lip. She obviously felt vulnerable and exposed alone in the house with him like this. Which was exactly how he wanted it. How he had planned it all the way along. Until he knew exactly what his lovely wife had wanted…
She had declared to his face that she and Jason were not lovers—had not been lovers. And he found that he believed her. How could she respond to him as she had just done if she had ever been intimate with his stepbrother? She had been as much at the mercy of frustrated hunger as he had felt after two long years away.
Which meant that the passion they had just shared still blazed between the two of them, though she seemed determined to deny it. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why. Unless she had something else to hide.
And she had been good at hiding things. A sudden flash of memory reminded him of the way, the last time he had been in this room, he had planned to leave a gift, some of her favourite perfume, in a drawer in her dressing table for her to find while he was away. Instead, the perfume had ended up in the waste-paper basket, thrown there in a dark fury when he had found the packs of contraceptive pills…
For a moment the memory of the bitter disillusionment that had savaged him then came back to slash at him. He had married Penny because she had driven him half mad with wanting but also because she had seemed different. Because she had appeared to offer something so unlike the poisonous atmosphere of lies and greed. Because she had seemed innocent and open. So when he had found that she had been deceiving him all along, he had vowed that never again would he let a beautiful face, an innocent air, mislead him.
But, oh, dear heaven, she was lovely.
The sensual thought sprang from nowhere into his mind, knocking him sideways mentally, and very nearly physically. It had such a force that he actually almost staggered under it, taking a single involuntary step to the side to steady himself as he did so. His body was still burning with the heated response that had seared through him such a short time before. He might have himself back under control but the hungry ache just would not go away and it left a throbbing bruised sensation along every nerve that still came close to making him want to groan aloud.
Now he knew why he had never been able to touch another woman in the time he had been away. Never had the inclination even though there had been plenty of opportunity, plenty of chances on offer to him. But even when he had still been struggling with his memory, when he hadn’t yet recalled just who he was, some inner instinct had created a restraint that had held him back from taking advantage of any of them.
And, looking back, he knew that the only women who had ever interested him had shared his wife’s sleek dark hair, her tall, willowy build and huge deep blue eyes. The brutal kick of sexual hunger that thought brought made him rush to force his mind onto other, less provocative matters.
‘A meal would be welcome. As would a shower.’
He even managed a smile. It wouldn’t hurt to be civilised for a while, even if the feelings he was burying behind the smile were very far from civilised and only just barely under control.
‘The plumbing at the cottage was very much on the primitive side.’
The rush of relief into her eyes was one that set his teeth on edge. Did she really think that she had got away with it after all? That everything was now sweetness and light between them? If she did then she had no real recollection of the man her husband was. She had lost out on a lot when he had come home, her plans to leave and start a new life ruined by the fact that she could not have her husband declared dead as she had planned. He had rushed into a relationship with her once before and lived to rue the day he had met her. He was not going to let himself get trapped that way again. But he could afford to take things rather more slowly for a while.
