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The Secret Wife
LYNNE GRAHAM
His inherited brideBoth Constantine Voulos and Rosie Waring are horrified that the terms of Anton Voulos’s will decree they must marry. Convinced that all he has to do is arrange for a quiet marriage and a quick divorce to the woman he thinks is a gold-digger, the only hitch in Constantine’s plans is the inconvenient, incredible attraction between them.Unable to resist the delectable Rosie, Constantine gives into nights full with an insatiable passion, despite days filled with mistrust and misunderstandings. But when the truth about his beautiful and innocent wife is revealed, Constantine is left wondering if Rosie will consent to become his wife for real…
is one of Mills & Boon’s most popular and bestselling novelists. Her writing was an instant success with readers worldwide. Since her first book, Bittersweet Passion, was published in 1987, she has gone from strength to strength and now has over ninety titles, which have sold more than thirty-five million copies, to her name.
In this special collection, we offer readers a chance to revisit favourite books or enjoy that rare treasure—a book by a favourite writer—they may have missed. In every case, seduction and passion with a gorgeous, irresistible man are guaranteed!
LYNNE GRAHAM was born in Northern Ireland and has been a keen Mills & Boon
reader since her teens. She is very happily married, with an understanding husband who has learned to cook since she started to write! Her five children keep her on her toes. She has a very large dog, which knocks everything over, a very small terrier, which barks a lot, and two cats. When time allows, Lynne is a keen gardener.
The Secret Wife
Lynne Graham
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
HER heart beating like a drum, Rosie crept into the church when the rush was over, sliding into a pew near the back to listen to the memorial service from a safe distance. Anton Estrada had been well-known in the city of London. The dim interior was crammed to capacity with those who wished to pay their last respects.
A black gold-embroidered scarf covering her bowed head, Rosie shivered, lost in the dark well of her grief. As far back as she could remember she had been alone, but for a few agonisingly brief months she had had Anton. And now he was gone, that warm, laughing man, who had called her the joy he had waited for all his life and the greatest love of his existence. Tears shimmering in her shadowed green eyes, she stared down at the huge ornate emerald on her finger until it blurred out of focus. Well, who would love her now? she thought painfully. Who indeed would ever love her like that again?
The silence and the soft murmur of voices finally penetrated. In a daze, she glanced up and realised that the service was over and the church was almost empty again. Disconcerted by her loss of concentration, she flew upright and headed for the exit. A corner of her scarf caught on the end of a pew, jerking her head back, making her stumble.
She would have fallen but for the strong, masculine hand that came out of nowhere to close round her slender forearm and steady her. ‘Are you all right?’ a dark, honey-rich drawl enquired and her lush dark lashes fluttered in momentary bemusement as the fleeting familiarity of accented English washed over her and filled her with unbelievable pain. ‘Perhaps you should sit down again—’
‘No...’ Riven with tension, Rosie straightened and broke free of that male grasp. Forgetting that her scarf was caught, she barely felt the pull as it trailed off and freed the wild, tumbling mass of her Titian hair from confinement. Involuntarily, she glanced up and froze in stark horror, her breath snarled up in her throat, her beautiful face stiffening like pale, tear-streaked marble into stricken stillness. Sheer shock slowed her heartbeat to a numbing thud that echoed sickly in her eardrums.
Constantine Voulos stared down at her, apparently entrapped by the same immobility that paralysed her. He was gorgeous, even more gorgeous than he had looked in Anton’s photographs, Rosie registered helplessly. Luxuriant black hair, stunning bone structure and a wide, wickedly sensual mouth. A wave of dizziness engulfed her as she collided with mesmeric dark deep-set eyes. Her bemused gaze locked with compulsive intensity to his. It was as terrifying as walking off a cliffedge and falling...and falling...and falling. She couldn’t breathe and she couldn’t speak. It panicked her.
‘Who are you?’ he murmured thickly, in one fluid movement drawing closer again as he tugged her scarf free and extended it to her.
Rosie turned white as death and backed off on legs that were ready to buckle, a dark, ferocious wave of violent and confused emotion consuming her. Constantine Voulos, the child whom Anton and his Greek wife, Thespina, had raised as their own.
‘Your scarf...’
Jerkily, reluctantly, she reached out to the child who had become a man. It was a mistake. He caught her thin, trembling fingers in his.
‘Please...’ Rosie gasped, attempting to break the connection, her slim body already twisting on the brink of flight, panic currenting through her.
‘Christos!’ Constantine vented in raw disbelief as he recognised the antique emerald adorning her hand. ‘Where did you get that ring?’
Astonished recognition had made him temporarily loosen his grip. Rosie snatched her fingers back and raced down the steps. The wintry breeze caught her curling torrent of hair and the long, loose black coat, making them flow out behind her like wings as she broke through the lingering groups of people outside and flew across the busy road, indifferent to the screeching brakes and honking horns that accompanied her dangerous passage.
Rosie wandered one last time round the silent rooms. Without Anton’s larger-than-life presence the pretty little house was an empty shell. Having eradicated every scrap of evidence that she had ever lived within these walls, she would slam the door behind her and walk back into her own world. It couldn’t have lasted much longer anyway, she told herself.
She cherished her freedom, yet she had allowed Anton to clip her wings. He had stubbornly persuaded and pressurised and finally pleaded until she’d surrendered and moved in, willing to compromise, wanting to be what he wanted her to be if that pleased him...but always knowing that sooner or later she would be forced to rebel.
‘I am an independent spirit,’ she had said to him gently once.
‘Your independence was forced on you and it was a most unnatural responsibility for a young girl to carry,’ Anton had countered with staunch disapproval. ‘You no longer need to bear that responsibility now that I am here.’
And she had laughed and argued but not very hard, wryly aware that he could not begin to understand the life she had led or the background she came from any more than she could really comprehend his and that it would upset him if she were too honest. So they had built a bridge across the great divide of wealth and culture by making careful allowances on both sides, and ironically it had been remarkably easy for right from the beginning there had been this amazing sense of mutual recognition.
She had been lucky to have that much, she reflected painfully. Four months of perfect happiness was more than some people achieved in a lifetime. Four months of being loved passionately, unconditionally, selflessly. Good memories had taken the edge off the bad ones. She swallowed the thickness of tears in her throat and smiled with sudden brilliance. Nobody could take those memories away. Or the ring that had been in the Estrada family for two centuries, the single surviving heirloom which Anton had slid onto her finger with unashamed tears in his dark eyes.
‘Now it will be worn again for only now is it where it truly belongs.’
Rosie recalled Constantine’s outraged incredulity when he had recognised that ring and a humourless laugh escaped her. So I accepted one little memento; think yourself lucky, Constantine Voulos, for had I been greedy I could have taken far more! Because Anton had wanted to lay the world at her feet. His joy and pride in her had dangerously overwhelmed every other loyalty. That was the only thing they had ever argued about.
And Rosie was guiltily conscious that it had been a struggle to keep her conscience in control. It hadn’t been his wealth that had made her feel like that; she simply couldn’t imagine having that kind of money. No, it had been the squirming attacks of resentment which she had fought to conceal, knowing just how much those feelings would have distressed him. But she was human, fallible, as capable as anyone else of thinking self-pitying thoughts and experiencing envy.
At the age of nine, Constantine Voulos had lost his parents in a car accident. Anton and Thespina had taken Constantine into their home and brought him up as if he were their own child. It had never occurred to Anton that Rosie might resent his constant references to his substitute son’s innumerable virtues and talents, only to despise herself for the unreasoning injustice of such childish promptings.
The silence began to get to Rosie. She shivered at the echo of her own footsteps. She should have cleared out the day Anton had died but she had been in such shock she had simply stopped functioning. Only six weeks earlier, a mild heart attack had put him into hospital. She had been first at his bedside, reluctantly torn from him only when she’d realised that Thespina and Constantine were already on their way from the airport.
‘Stay ... to bell with them all!’ Anton had grated recklessly, already inflamed by the nurse who had attempted to prevent her visit to his private room.
‘You know you don’t mean that. You can’t do that to your wife,’ Rosie had muttered tightly, her better self talking, her worse self bitter that she, who had more right than anyone, should have to fight her way in and then sneak her way out.
‘You never use her name,’ Anton had sighed heavily.
And she had flushed hotly, avoiding his gaze, too many complex emotions swirling about inside her, too much guilt, too much pain. Thespina had been his wife for over thirty years. A wonderfully loyal and loving wife, who had nonetheless been cruelly betrayed. And the simple fact that Thespina was unaware of that betrayal and indeed must be carefully protected from that knowledge did not make the brick-wall barrier of her very existence any more easy for Rosie to accept.
Rosie had slunk in and out of that hospital for an entire week, her natural buoyance soon reasserting itself to soothe her initially frantic fears about Anton’s health. He was only fifty-five. He had been working too hard. Oh, they had talked endlessly about all the sensible things he would have to do in the future! It had occurred to neither of them that that future might be measured only in weeks.
He had taken a convalescent cruise round the Greek islands but on the same day that he’d flown back to London again Anton had had a massive heart attack. ‘Gone within minutes!’ his secretary had sobbed down the phone, still in shock. ‘Who am I speaking to?’ she had asked then for Rosie had never rung his office before, but when Anton had failed to meet her for lunch she had been worried sick.
Rosie had replaced the receiver in silence. Naturally she could not attend his funeral in Greece. Sick to the heart at her cruel exclusion, she had gone to the memorial service instead, only to run slap-bang into Constantine Voulos through her own clumsy lack of attention. That encounter yesterday had appalled Rosie. She should have packed her bags long ago and gone home! But she had wanted privacy in which to come to terms with the loss of the father she had known for so painfully short a time.
‘Rosalie... ?’
Her heart lurched sickly against her breastbone, the oxygen locking at the foot of her convulsed throat. She jerked round in horror.
Constantine Voulos was standing on the landing outside her bedroom. He was breathing fast, his hard, strikingly handsome features set in a dark mask of fury as he moved towards her. ‘That is your name, is it not?’
‘What are you doing here?’ Rosie gasped, her entire body turning cold and damp with instinctive fear. ‘How did you get in?’
‘You evil little vixen,’ Constantine grated, his six-foot-three-inch all-male bulk blocking the doorway that was her only avenue of escape. He couldn’t take his shimmering dark eyes off her. It was like being pinned to a wall by knives.
With enormous effort, Rosie straightened her slim shoulders and stood her ground but she was deathly pale. ‘I don’t know who you are or what you want—’
‘You know exactly who I am!’ Constantine slung at her, unimpressed, taking a frightening step closer.
‘Stay away from me!’ Rigid with tension, Rosie wondered frantically how he had found out about her and how much he knew.
‘I wish I could ... I really do wish that I could,’ Constantine bit out with clenched fists, the explosive anger that emanated from him screaming along her nerve-endings like a violent storm warning.
Rosie retreated until the backs of her knees hit the divan bed. ‘What do you w-want?’
‘I want to wipe you off the face of this earth but I cannot ... that is what inflames me! How did you persuade Anton to do something so insane?’
‘Do... what?’ she whispered blankly, too scared to be capable of rational thought.
‘How did you persuade one of the most decent men I ever knew to sacrifice all honour and family loyalty?’ Constantine seethed back at her.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about—’
‘Don’t you know what Anton did only days before his death?’ Constantine demanded rawly, scanning the suitcase on the bed with a contemptuously curled lip. ‘Have you any idea what his final words were before he died in my arms?’
Numbly, sickly, Rosie shook her head, a dense cloud of spiralling curls the colour of flames rippling round her rigid shoulders. She hadn’t known that Constantine had been with her father when he died. Ironically that new knowledge brought a lump to her throat and warmed that cold place inside her as she thought of that dreadful day. Anton had not been alone but for his secretary. Constantine had been there, Constantine had been with him, and whether she liked it or not she knew just how much that would have meant to her father.
Constantine gave a great shout of raucous laughter that chilled her. Eyes black as night dug into her with unhidden repulsion. ‘Every word which he struggled to speak related to you!’
‘Oh...’ Her stifled response barely broke the smouldering silence. And she heard his pain and didn’t want to recognise it for what it was because she did not wish to admit that she could share anything with Constantine Voulos.
‘He made me swear on my honour that I would protect you and respect his last wishes. But I didn’t even know of your existence! I didn’t understand who or even what he was referring to...nor did I know until last night what those last wishes were!’ Constantine vented on another surge of barely contained rage that visibly tremored through his long, muscular length. ‘He wrote a new will, and were it not for the fact that the publicity would destroy Thespina I would trail you through every court in Europe and crucify you for the greedy, calculating little vixen that you are before I would allow you to profit by a single drachma!’
‘A new will?’ Her teeth gritted as she withstood the lash of his insults. Hot, angry colour drove away her previous pallor. But at least she now understood what Constantine Voulos was doing here and why he was forcing such a confrontation. Evidently Anton had been foolish enough to leave her something in his will in spite of her fierce assurances that she wanted and needed nothing.
His nostrils flared as he surveyed her with dark fury. ‘Months ago, Thespina suspected that there was another woman in his life. Christos... I actually laughed when she shared her fears with me! I convinced her that it was only the excitement of a new business venture which was making Anton spend so much time in London. I was naive indeed. I underestimated the lure of youth and beauty on even the most honourable of men. Anton was obsessed with you... he died with your name on his lips!’
‘He loved me,’ Rosie mumbled helplessly, the acid sting of tears burning behind her stricken eyes as she turned defensively away.
‘And I would lay my life on the line before I would allow Thespina to endure that knowledge!’ Constantine growled rawly.
She understood then. Evidently Constantine Voulos did not know who she was. He assumed that she was the other woman, Anton’s mistress cosily set up in the proverbial love-nest. It was laughable but she couldn’t laugh. Her tremulous mouth compressed into a bloodless line. Anton had kept their secret to protect his wife. A twenty-one-year-old betrayal had gone to the grave with him. She owed it to her father to keep faith with him. The truth would only cause greater pain and distress and for what gain?
She didn’t need whatever Anton had left her. She had her own life to lead and she had no desire to take possession of anything which more rightfully belonged to her father’s widow. That would be wrong, morally wrong, she felt. The ring was different. It was her only tangible link to a heritage and a background she had lived all her life without.
‘As you can see... I’m leaving.’ Rosie lifted her bright head high and surveyed the intimidatingly tall, dark Greek with bitter antipathy ‘You have nothing to worry about. I wasn’t planning to hang around and embarrass anyone—’
‘If it were that simple, we would not be having this distasteful meeting,’ Constantine incised fiercely. ‘I would be forcibly ejecting you from this house!’
Rosie vented a scornful laugh, her own hot temper steadily rising. ‘Really?’ she challenged.
He glanced at the open suitcase, his hard mouth twisting. ‘You weren’t leaving. Possibly you were planning a brief trip somewhere but nothing will convince me that you were about to make a final departure.’
Rosie dealt him a withering glance. ‘My, aren’t we self-important? What gives you the idea that I would waste my breath trying to convince you of anything?’
A dark surge of blood accentuated the savage slant of his dramatic cheekbones. Naked derision fired his dark eyes. ‘I will not lower myself to the level of trading insults with a whore.’
Rosie had a sharp tongue which few attempted to match. She hadn’t expected a provocative response. Thwarted fury stormed through her. ‘Get out!’ she launched at him abruptly. ‘Just get out and leave me alone, you ignorant swine!’
‘Not before you answer one question,’ Constantine asserted in a sudden hiss as he stared broodingly back at her. ‘Are you pregnant?’
Rosie stilled in shock, glancing down at the flowing swing blouse she was wearing and then intercepting his narrowed glance travelling in exactly the same direction. Her cheeks crimsoned.
‘If you are pregnant...then and only then could I understand Anton’s motivation,’ Constantine conceded grudgingly, and yet he was perceptibly devastated by what his own imagination had suggested.
And only now had that possibility even occurred to him, Rosie registered, and boy, did the idea make him sick! That naturally golden skin had assumed an unhealthy pallor as presumably the implications of such a development sank in. This was how Constantine Voulos would have looked had she revealed her true relationship to Anton, Rosie realised with a sudden stab of satisfaction.
Few would deny that Anton’s child, illegitimate or otherwise, might have some sort of claim on his estate. Had she chosen to tell the truth, Constantine would not have dared to insult her. She was Anton’s daughter, his only child, the very last of the Estrada bloodline... and certainly not some calculating little gold-digger!
‘You don’t answer me.’ Abruptly Constantine swung away and then he spun just as swiftly back, his strong features clenched and taut. ‘If I have stumbled on the truth, my opinion of you is unchanged, but I should apologise for having approached you in such anger.’
Morbid amusement touched Rosie. He was backtracking fast on his offensive. Was he afraid of her now, afraid of the power she might have to disturb the smoothly planned future he no doubt envisaged for himself as sole controller of Anton’s various business enterprises? The idea that she might be carrying Anton’s child was a threat that shattered Constantine Voulos.
‘But be assured,’ he drawled flatly. ‘Should there be a child, every possible test would be required to prove your claim.’
Rosie was helplessly entertained by the knots he was tying round himself. Having come up with his own worst-case scenario, he was forgetting the boundary lines he had mentioned earlier. ‘But wouldn’t that be terribly upsetting for Thespina?’
His breath escaped in a startled hiss, his eyes flashing ferocious gold. ‘Your malice is indefensible...’
The instant Rosie had voiced the words she had wished to retrieve them, had realised too late how she would sound. For a moment she had longed to strike back at Thespina and Constantine and now she was bitterly ashamed of that spiteful prompting. She dropped her head, closed the case and tugged it down off the bed. ‘I’m not pregnant. Go in peace, Constantine. I am not a threat to either you or Thespina,’ she muttered heavily.
Downstairs the doorbell shrilled, breaking the pulsing tension within the bedroom.
‘That’ll be my cab.’ Rosie moved past him with relief. Her knees felt wobbly but she was bolstered by a feeling of innate superiority. Her father had been wrong about Constantine, his ward and son in all but name. Constantine was not, after all, Mr Perfect—well, that was hardly a surprise, was it?
Anton had been naive to imagine that Constantine would generously open his arms to his own natural child. Rosie had never paid much heed to her father’s oftrepeated assurances that if Constantine was ever given the chance he would fall over himself to be welcoming to the sudden advent of a little sister... not that Anton had ever referred to her and Constantine in such gruesome terms as brother and sister!
No, instead Anton had talked with immense warmth and approval about ‘family obligations...family support...family honour’, blithely ignoring the fact that Rosie would sooner have put an end to her existence than become anyone’s obligation! Furthermore she had been born a dyed-in-the-wool cynic.
Constantine had reacted exactly as she had expected to the idea that Anton might have fathered a child—with shock, horror and dismay as he foresaw what an expensive dent such a child might conceivably make in his own financial expectations. Feeling that she was a better person than Constantine Voulos because monetary greed had no hold on her, Rosie held her head high.
‘Don’t open that door!’ Constantine suddenly bit out from behind her.
Rosie’s head spun. He was halfway down the stairs, his diamond-bright gaze centred on her with ferocious intensity. ‘What the—?’
‘Quiet!’ he whispered rawly, slashing an overpoweringly arrogant brown hand through the air in emphatic command.
With an exasperation she did not even seek to conceal, Rosie simply ignored his demand and yanked open the front door. Disorientatingly, however, it was not a cab driver who stood on the doorstep. Rosie blinked, gulped and froze.
A small, slim woman in a black suit stared at her in wide-eyed distress, every scrap of colour slowly fading from her olive skin. She took a hesitant step back and then stilled, a look of complete bewilderment drawing her brows together as Constantine’s large dark frame appeared behind Rosie.
Faced with her late father’s wife in the flesh, Rosie had stopped breathing. Not a muscle moved on her paralysed face as she struggled not to let her horror show. A heavy hand came down on her shoulder like an imprisoning chain of restraint. Constantine said something soft in Greek but Rosie could feel the savage tension holding his big, powerful body in tautly unnatural proximity to hers.
Without warning the older woman lifted her hand and gently caught Rosie’s fingers, raising them to study the emerald which trapped the sunlight in its opulent green depths. ‘The Estrada betrothal ring,’ she whispered unevenly, and then she slowly shook her head in comprehension. ‘Of course... Anton gave you the ring for her! Constantine, how foolish I have been; I should have guessed ... but why didn’t you tell me?’
In receipt of that bemused appeal, Constantine inhaled sharply and Rosie felt his rigidity. ‘It did not seem an appropriate time to make an announcement—’
‘Only a man could believe that...as if the news that you are to marry would not bring me joy at any time!’ Her face wreathed in a delighted smile, all her uncertainty and anxiety vanished, Thespina beamed appreciatively at Rosie. ‘Exactly how long have you been engaged to my son?’
‘Engaged?’ Rosie echoed in a daze of disbelief, the pink tip of her tongue snaking out to moisten her dry lower lip.
‘It is very recent,’ Constantine drawled flatly.
