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Something about his demeanour was unsettling and Lexi felt a flicker of foreboding. ‘Is there any point?’
‘You’re not even a bit curious to discover why I’m here?’ He gaze moved over her shoulder, to glance into the cosy interior of her cottage. ‘Why I’ve driven all the way down from London to this godforsaken little place you’ve chosen to live in?’
‘I imagine it must be for your benefit and yours alone,’ she answered. ‘And if that’s the case, then I’m not interested. I’ve got nothing to say to you that hasn’t already been said.’
‘I wouldn’t speak too soon if I were you, Lex.’
‘Veiled threats won’t work, Xenon.’ She gave him a tight smile. ‘Time after time you’ve refused to give me a divorce and we seem to have reached a stalemate. So unless you’ve got the papers with you, it’s going to have to be hello and goodbye. I’m sorry if you’ve had a wasted journey but...’
She began to close the door on him but was stopped by his frankly outrageous action of inserting one soft Italian shoe into the narrowing space. For a moment she actually thought about pushing all her weight against it but Lexi knew there was no point in trying. She was strong for a woman, but he was built like an ox. She remembered the first time he’d picked her up and carried her effortlessly to bed. How she had purred her pleasure out loud. Lexi shuddered at the memory. How could she even have been that woman?
‘I don’t need your strong-arm tactics,’ she said.
‘Tough.’
His eyes met hers and Lexi knew this was one battle she wasn’t going to win. ‘Then I suppose you’d better come in,’ she said ungraciously. ‘Perhaps you’d like to beat your chest like an ape while you’re at it?’
‘I might,’ he agreed. ‘I know how much that macho stuff turns you on.’
Don’t rise to it, she told herself even though she could tell from the cool smile on his face that he seemed to be enjoying this. But then Xenon thrived on battle, didn’t he? He liked the frisson and the taste of triumph. That was one of the reasons for his global success and his boardroom victories.
Over his shoulder, she could see his gleaming limousine parked awkwardly at the bottom of the tiny lane. It couldn’t have been more in-your-face if it had tried and she hoped none of her neighbours were home. She had tired of the fame which had once been hers and had done her best to leave it all behind. She worked hard at being normal. She’d spent time blending into her local community, trying to prove that she was just like everyone else. The last thing she wanted was for Xenon Kanellis to come along and blow all her efforts with one ostentatious display of wealth. ‘You’re taking up a lot of space with that gas-guzzling piece of machinery.’
‘You want me to ask my driver to move it?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘I could send her away for a couple of hours, if you like.’
Stupidly, one word registered above all the others. A word which echoed annoyingly in her head. ‘You have a female driver?’ she questioned, unprepared for the flash of primitive jealousy which shot through her.
‘Why not?’ He shrugged. ‘Weren’t you always telling me that I should practise a little more equality?’
‘Your idea of equality ended when women got the vote, Xenon. I thought you didn’t like female drivers? You went on about my driving often enough.’
‘That was different,’ he said, shutting the door behind him and giving her a patronising smile. ‘You are temperamentally unsuited to being behind the wheel of a car, Lex. Probably because of your artistic nature.’
She’d only been in his company for five minutes but already Lexi wanted to tip her head back and scream. But anger was good, she told herself. It kept the adrenalin flowing. It stopped her thinking about the pain of the past. It stopped her from wanting him. And that was the crazy and scary thing. That she still wanted him.
‘So why are you here?’ she asked. ‘To remind me how lucky I am not to have to put up with your sexist attitude any more—or is there something else on the agenda?’
For a moment Xenon didn’t answer. Instead, he let his eyes travel over her, slowly acquainting himself with someone he’d once known better than any other woman. But the truth was that he was taken aback by her appearance.
The Lexi he’d met and fallen in love with had been a glossy pop-star. A woman with fame at her fingertips and a world who couldn’t get enough of her. Sexy Lexi the press used to call her and they hadn’t been wrong. Everyone had told him she was the last woman he should have married. That a woman like her was ill suited to a man with such fiercely traditional Greek values. Even when she had abandoned her singing career and tried to play the good wife with varying degrees of success, people had still regarded her with suspicion and subsequent events seemed to have proved them right.
Yet the Lexi who stood before him now was a low-key version of the woman who had turned heads whenever she’d walked down the street. The shiny red hair—her trademark look—had gone. She still wore it long, but now it was back to its natural colour; it hung over one shoulder in a thick plait of strawberry-blonde. Gone were the contact lenses she was always losing and, instead, her silvery-green eyes were accentuated by a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her wearing glasses before and they made her look oddly serious and surprisingly sexy. The only jewellery she wore was a pair of silver earrings—heavy twists of metal which caught the light as she moved.
In faded jeans and a plain cotton shirt, her transformation couldn’t have been more dramatic and it was hard to reconcile this new sober image with the glittering woman he’d married. But with Lexi, what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got. Of every woman he’d ever known—and there had been quite a few—she had depths like no other. Hidden, mercurial depths which had captivated him from the start.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said slowly.
She answered his scrutiny with a shrug, even though she could feel the inevitable sting of wounded pride. Because she had seen that look in his eyes and had known exactly what it meant. She had been judged and found wanting and even if it shouldn’t hurt, it did.
If she’d known he was coming she would have put on some make-up and changed out of her old jeans. She might have disagreed with such a plan on principle, but what woman wouldn’t have made an effort if she’d known she was about to come face-to-face with one of the most desirable men in the world?
‘Most people change, Xenon,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the few certainties in life.’ But she thought that, as usual, he had managed to buck the trend, because everything about him seemed exactly the same. The same thick black hair, which could never quite be tamed, no matter how expensive his barber. The same effortless elegance—easy when you had a body of muscular perfection which radiated easy power. He always wore a suit when he was in England and today was no different. His only concession to the warm summer day had been to ditch his tie and loosen the top two buttons of his shirt, but that made him look disturbingly accessible. And he wasn’t, she reminded herself. He definitely wasn’t.
She fixed him with an inquisitive look, knowing that she needed to get rid of him and as quickly as possible. ‘So are you going to tell me why you’re here?’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s my lucky day and you have got those divorce papers. Or are you still stalling?’
Xenon tensed, her flippant tone reminding him of the essential differences between them. Keep reminding yourself of those, he thought grimly. ‘I prefer to think of it as giving time for the dust to settle rather than stalling. You know my views on divorce, Lex,’ he said. ‘Half the problems in this world can be laid at the door of broken marriages.’
‘But when two people can’t live together—what’s the alternative?’ she questioned. ‘A life of misery with two people trapped in a relationship which has become a nightmare? Surely the world has moved on from that?’
He ignored that. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?’ His gaze flickered around the cluttered room. ‘To offer me some coffee and show me a little hospitality? Black mark for you, Lex. Have you forgotten all the things you learnt as my wife? Was all my tuition wasted?’
It was a dig at her background. She knew that. He was attacking her where she was at her most vulnerable—a position from which she could never fight back. But today she wasn’t going to take the bait because nobody could help where they came from. The only thing which mattered was the person they had become. And she had become a person who was no longer dazzled by the Greek billionaire’s arrogance or impeccable background.
‘I certainly haven’t forgotten your high-handedness and sense of privilege,’ she said coolly. ‘But since you’re clearly not going anywhere, we might as well do this with a degree of civility. Even if we both know it’s only a veneer.’
‘Oh, Lex,’ he murmured. ‘What a cynic you have become.’
‘I learnt from the very best,’ she retorted, leaving him standing in the middle of her sitting room as she went out into the kitchen to make coffee.
Her fingers were trembling as she boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into a pot. Why had he turned up now, when she’d just about got her life back on track? When she’d seen—if not exactly a light at the end of the tunnel—at least some hint that the world didn’t have to stay black and miserable for ever.
It hadn’t been easy, going from being a famous pop-star to wife of a global magnate—and then back to relative obscurity again. Sometimes her life seemed to have had more transitions than a quick-change artist. The failure of her marriage had been almost unbearably painful at times, but she had come through it. She had survived.
But now it all came rushing back. The pain and the fear. The look on Xenon’s face when he’d finally arrived at the hospital with eyes like stone, when she’d lost her baby. The second pregnancy she had failed to carry. When she’d discovered just how unbearably painful a late miscarriage could be. The memory was so overwhelming that for a moment Lexi had to lean over the sink, sucking in several deep breaths of air until she’d composed herself enough to go back into the sitting room.
She set the tray down. He was sitting in a chair which seemed too small for him and his brooding figure seemed to dominate the room.
‘So,’ she said, handing him a cup. But she didn’t sit down and join him. She didn’t want to do anything remotely intimate because that was fraught with danger. She perched her bottom on the window sill, thinking that looking down on him from a height might give her something of a psychological advantage.
‘So,’ he echoed. Pushing aside a pile of brochures which were piled up on the coffee table, he put his cup down and looked around. ‘This is a bit of a fall from grace, isn’t it?’
She knew it was stupid to react but, even so, Lexi couldn’t stop herself from bristling with indignation. ‘This is my home and I love it,’ she said. ‘At least I can close the door at the end of the day and know that I’ll find peace inside.’
‘But it is small. Surprisingly small.’ He fixed his gaze on two goldfish which were swimming round and round in a bowl. Goldfish? Since when did his wife start keeping fish? He frowned. ‘I realise that no alimony has been finalised—’
‘And I’ve told you that I don’t need your money!’
‘Which is clearly not true if you’re having to live like this.’
‘I like living like this!’
‘Do you? Yet you walked away from a life where you had homes all over the world—beautiful homes?’
‘They were your homes, Xenon, not mine.’
‘And now they tell me you are working as a jewellery designer?’
‘They?’ Lexi raised her eyebrows. ‘No need to ask how you found that out. I suppose you hired some private investigator to spy on me.’
‘I don’t consider finding out a few basic facts about my wife to be “spying”,’ he answered. ‘I’m just intrigued by the life you’ve chosen. You earned a fortune when you were with the band. What’s happened to all the money?’
She sucked in a breath, tempted to tell him to mind his own business. Because it wasn’t his business and he had no right delving into it. But Lexi knew how persistent he could be. How he liked the facts to be laid out in front of him. If he wanted to know something he was only going to find out anyway—because when you were a man like Xenon Kanellis, you could find out pretty much anything you pleased.
‘A lot of it went on my...family.’
‘Ah, yes. Your family.’ He picked up his coffee and sipped it, wincing slightly at the weakness of the brew. Her background had added to her general unsuitability as a Kanellis wife. She came from the kind of dysfunctional family which had been completely outside his experience. Her mother had never been married and her three children had been fathered by unknown and absent men. The ramshackle, gypsy-like quality of Lexi’s home life had appalled him—but even that had not been strong enough to take the edge off his hunger for her. He had brushed aside suggestions that two people from such differing backgrounds might never find any mutual areas of compatibility and had married her anyway. ‘How are they?’
Lexi’s eyes narrowed with suspicion because there was an odd note in his voice and it was alarming her. Xenon didn’t usually enquire solicitously about her family and he certainly didn’t drive nearly two hundred miles in order to do so. In the past she might have asked him why he wanted to know—when she was still in that honeymoon phase of believing that things like that mattered. When all their dreams had been intact and lying ahead of them. But she had moved beyond that phase a long time ago and his opinions were no longer relevant.
‘They’re okay,’ she said.
‘Really?’
She met his eyes and gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Look, you’ve obviously got something on your mind—so why not just come out and say it?’
There was a pause. ‘I’ve seen your brother.’
‘My brother?’ she echoed in alarm, because this could only mean trouble. Hiding her sudden sense of fear, she composed her features into an expression of mild interest. ‘Which one?’
‘I think you know very well which one. Jason.’
Lexi’s heart was now going, thud, thud, thud. Jason. Of course. Jason who had been trouble from the moment he was born. Still she kept the tremble from her voice, trying to make her question sound as indulgent as the question of any caring sister. ‘What did he want?’
Xenon put his cup down with a small sound of exasperation, watching as her heavy-lidded eyes suddenly became hooded. ‘Let’s dispense with the air of innocence, shall we? You’re not stupid, Lexi. What do you think he wanted?’
The invisible hand which was clenched around her heart grew even tighter and Lexi knew that the time for pretence had passed. ‘Money, I’m guessing,’ she said numbly.
‘Money!’ he agreed. ‘That thing he can’t do without. The one thing he’s never bothered to earn himself throughout his useless, idle life.’
‘Please don’t insult him.’
‘Oh, come on—isn’t that taking sisterly loyalty a little too far? Since when did the truth become an insult—or have you spent so long avoiding it that you just don’t see it any more? And maybe here’s a truth you really should take on board.’ His body stilled and his eyes grew watchful. ‘Don’t you see that giving him everything he wants has helped make him the man he is today?’
Furiously, she shook her head and glared at him. Because how would someone like Xenon ever understand? Xenon who had been born into a world of lavish wealth. He hadn’t known what it was like to come home from school to an empty fridge. To have to cut a hole at the top of your shoes because you’d outgrown them.
In Xenon’s world there had been relatives—far too many of them in her opinion—and servants, who had all doted on him. He’d never had to go to the police station to bail out his drunken mother and then to lie about it to social services, terrified that the family would be split up if the truth ever emerged. He’d never had to hold a terrified and sobbing child who had woken up from yet another nightmare to discover that the real world could be infinitely worse.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Oh, I think I do,’ he said coldly. ‘Jason has found that the well of easy money you’ve always provided has run dry—so who better to turn to than his wealthy brother-in-law?’
The thudding of her heart increased. ‘What does he want money for?’
‘Why do you think? To mop up the mess he’s made of his life with his gambling addiction.’
Lexi closed her eyes as a terrible sense of inevitability crept over her. She’d tried everything to help Jason with his gambling habit. In the early days she had sat down and talked to him and he had lied through his teeth and told her he’d quit. She’d believed every word he’d said as she’d signed over yet another cheque supposed to help put him back on the straight and narrow. Or maybe she had just wanted to believe it. Later, she had paid for the first of many visits to the rehab clinic—until he was kicked out of the last one for starting up a poker school with his fellow patients.
She opened her eyes to find Xenon studying her. ‘I expect that you told him no and sent him away,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m rather hoping you did. The last counsellor I spoke to told me that I should “withdraw with love”.’ She saw the perplexed look on Xenon’s face as he heard the term and she remembered how disparaging he’d been about people who had sought professional help for their problems. ‘It means you have to stop giving him money and bailing him out. It’s supposed to make him take control of his own life.’
‘Actually, I didn’t send him away.’
‘You didn’t give him money?’ Her voice rose in alarm. ‘That’s what’s known in the business as “enabling”.’
‘I don’t give a damn what it’s known as!’ he bit out. ‘I’m more concerned with the consequences of his actions.’
Her fear growing by the second, Lexi blinked at him from behind her glasses. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m talking about the fact that Jason has borrowed money. Lots of it. Against your name—and against mine as it happens, since we are still legally married and the Kanellis connection is like liquid gold.’ Resolutely, he ignored the horrified widening of her eyes. ‘He has built up the kind of debts which made even my eyes water—and I’m no stranger to large sums of money—’
‘How much?’ she butted in.
He told her and Lexi blanched because she didn’t have that kind of money. Not any more.
‘And the kind of people he’s borrowed it from tend to get rather...angry if they don’t get their loans back,’ he continued.
Lexi’s hand flew to her mouth. She could feel the hot rush of breath against her fingers as Xenon’s blue gaze iced into her. ‘What are we going to do?’
Xenon nodded as a grim feeling of satisfaction washed over him, because that was the first sensible thing she’d said. We. ‘It looks like I’m going to have to pay off his debt for him—’
‘But—’
‘There’s no alternative, unless you happen to have the money sitting stashed away. That is, unless you want his pretty face altered out of all recognition?’ His eyelashes suddenly narrowed, so that his eyes looked like shards of blue ice. ‘These people can be dangerous, you know.’
Lexi knew about danger. She’d grown up surrounded by it. And hadn’t that been one of the best things about her sudden fame—that she’d been able to escape from the dark and seedy side of life? The last thing she wanted was for Jason to be catapulted back to that place, where nothing seemed safe. She looked at Xenon’s hard features, realising that he was offering to help. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me until you’ve heard what it entails,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay off his debt for him—but this time, he doesn’t go back to his old life and repeat the same old pattern. And neither does he go into some fancy clinic where he uses that abundance of Gibson charm to manipulate his counsellors.’
‘So what are you proposing he does?’ she questioned. ‘Apply for a personality transplant?’
‘Nothing quite so drastic. My solution is simple. He needs to change. To work his body like a man. To see the sun come up in the morning and put his head on the pillow at night, instead of spending it in the casino, like a zombie.’ His eyes bored into her. ‘And maybe he wants to change because he has agreed to go to work for one my cousins in Greece.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘On one of the family’s vineyards,’ he continued. ‘Your darling brother has agreed to do some hard, physical labour for the first time in his life.’
She stared at him in disbelief. ‘He’s agreed?’
‘I didn’t give him very much choice in the matter,’ he snapped. ‘It was my condition for bailing him out.’
Lexi felt a worrying see-saw of emotions as she took in what he’d just told her. He could be so hard and indomitable that it was all too easy to forget his streak of kindness.
But he hadn’t been kind when she’d most needed him to be, had he? He hadn’t been there for her at all when she’d reached out for him. He had pushed her away until there had been nothing but distance left between them any more.
‘So...why come here and tell me all this?’ she questioned.
He gave a cold, hard smile. ‘No ideas, Lex? You think I should bail out your brother just out of the goodness of my heart?’
She met the obdurate look in his eyes and a whisper of fear began to creep over her skin as she realised what lay behind his words. ‘You mean...there’s a price?’
