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‘How? Not by foot, you won’t—and you’ll never catch him in this enormous car!’ But she was shaking. Shaking like a leaf. She hadn’t been ambushed like that in a long time and she had forgotten how exposed it could make you feel. She could see several tourists stopping now and, inevitably, some of them were getting their phones out. ‘Now look what’s happening,’ she moaned.
‘Get in the car,’ said Xenon, pushing her into the back seat before sliding in beside her.
Once they’d pulled away he took out his mobile phone, punched out a number and began speaking in a flurry of Greek for several furious minutes. The call finished, he turned to her. ‘Perhaps I should have anticipated that might happen. I’m sorry.’
‘Well, it’s a bit late to be sorry,’ she said crossly, trying not to melt beneath the genuine contrition in his blue eyes. ‘That was a gift of a photo. Why, I could even write the headlines for them: Greek Billionaire And Ex-Wife Ring The Changes.’
‘That’s very good, Lex. Did you ever think about a career in copywriting?’
‘Don’t you dare try and make a joke about it. Didn’t you stop to think that someone might have seen us going into a jewellery shop and rung the press?’
‘Oddly enough, the press aren’t my first priority. I don’t spend my damned life tiptoeing around them.’
‘Well, maybe you should. Now they’ll think there’s a story when there isn’t. A divorcing couple buying a brand-new wedding ring! Why don’t we find somewhere where I can buy a white dress and a bunch of flowers and we can maybe pose for some more photos?’
‘Stop worrying.’ His voice was soothing. ‘I’ve sorted it.’
‘How?’
‘Just leave it to me.’
To Lexi’s surprise, the journey passed quickly and suddenly the magnificent Kanellis estate was coming into view—a glorious citadel overlooking the medieval town of Lindos. But despite the beauty which surrounded her, Lexi felt her body tense as the car drove through the electronic gates before coming to a halt in the main courtyard.
Because she still had to face Marina, didn’t she? And hadn’t that always been a stumbling block?
Xenon’s mother hadn’t been her biggest fan. She clearly disapproved of a flashy English pop-star with a troubled background. It didn’t matter what Lexi did—or what she tried to do—she was never able to do it right. Toning down her image and trying to blend into an aristocratic Greek background was never going to work. She’d never broken through that initial barrier of hostility and it seemed that her mother-in-law could never get past the fact that she thought her beloved son had married beneath him.
But that was no longer relevant, Lexi told herself. I’m doing this for Jason. And I am no longer that woman who is so easily intimidated.
‘Here we are,’ said Xenon. He caught her gaze and held it. ‘Ready?’
She drew in a breath. ‘Ready as I’ll ever be.’
The driver opened the door for her and she stepped out into the sunny central courtyard where she was immediately enveloped in warm, fragrant air.
Looking down she could see the crystal waters of St Nicolas Bay and the hills which framed it like a picture. She could smell pine and lemons and hear the magnified hum of the cicadas. It was so typically and beautifully Greek that for a moment Lexi just stood there, drinking in the moment.
The land had been owned by the family for centuries and the tiered estate was vast and sprawling. All three of its bougainvillea-covered properties were entirely separate—each with their own private gardens. Pots of tumbling flowers provided splashes of colour—and the infinity pool seemed to connect with the sea and sky in layers of different, dazzling blues. Lexi had often wondered what it must have been like to have grown up in a place as beautiful as this. A place which was as different from the scruffy social housing where she’d spent her formative years as night was to day.
Suddenly she saw a familiar figure emerging from the main house, the sun illuminating the new threads of grey which were streaking her dark hair.
Her workaday dress was covered with an apron and Lexi’s heart clenched in her chest as the woman grew closer. ‘Phyllida!’ she croaked—and then all the breath was knocked out of her lungs as she was caught in a fierce embrace by Xenon’s London housekeeper.
For a few moments the women hugged but didn’t speak and Lexi was glad because the lump in her throat would have made speech impossible. Because it had been Phyllida who had been with her in London the night Lexi had started to bleed. Phyllida who had rung for the doctor and accompanied Lexi to hospital when the pain had got so bad and nobody could get hold of Xenon.
Lexi felt the memories come flooding back. There had been no one else she had trusted enough to ask at the time. Her first miscarriage had been so early—at eight weeks it had been more like a very heavy though heartbreaking period. But the second time had been different.
All her hopes and dreams had been focused on the life growing inside her and when that first low cramping pain had caught her by surprise, she had been so scared. She hadn’t been able to believe it was happening all over again—especially because she’d passed the ‘danger’ period of twelve weeks. But it had been happening and there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it. It had been the Greek housekeeper who had kept a silent vigil throughout the day and into the next day, until at long last Xenon had arrived back from his trip to the Far East. He had walked into her private room at the hospital and Lexi had seen the empty look in his eyes when she told him that the baby had died. And she had known that nothing was ever going to be the same again.
She drew back from the housekeeper’s embrace and took a moment to compose herself. ‘Oh, Phyllida,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again.’
‘Kyrios Alexi.’ Clearly emotional herself, Phyllida touched Lexi’s hair. ‘You have changed.’
‘No longer the crazy redhead? I know. While you look exactly the same. You look fantastic.’
‘No. I am too fat.’ Phyllida laughed as she patted her ample stomach. ‘Not like you.’
Xenon glanced across at the main house. ‘Is my mother around?’ he asked.
‘She went to visit your sister. She said that you should settle in and she will see you at dinner.’
Xenon’s voice dropped. ‘And my grandmother?’
Phyllida shook her head, her face growing grave. ‘She is weak, but she is comfortable,’ she said. ‘The nurse is with her now and she is looking forward to seeing her grandson again. Now. Shall I make fresh lemonade for you and Kyrios Alexi after your long journey?’
‘Efharisto,’ said Xenon, his hand moving to brush the base of Lexi’s spine. ‘Come on, Lex. Let’s go and unpack.’
It was the briefest of touches but it started a whisper of reaction flaring over her skin and Lexi could feel her heart pounding as she followed him towards the furthest of the three villas, with its prime position overlooking the bay.
Their cases had been deposited inside the house and left on the ghostly surface of the marble floor—standing side by side as if in silent mockery. The white walls and dark wooden furniture were just as she remembered and Phyllida must have put that vase of white roses on one of the low tables.
The door of the villa closed behind them and Lexi was left with a feeling of panic. She thought of the bedroom next door and unwanted memories came crowding back. The smell of sex and the rumpled sheets. The closeness of Xenon’s hard body.
She licked her tongue over impossibly dry lips before she spoke.
‘Xenon, this is crazy. There’s no way we can stay here.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know very well why not. You’re not a stupid man, although at times you can be a very stubborn one.’ She steeled herself against the soft light of battle on his face. Don’t make me spell it out, her eyes pleaded silently. But his blue gaze remained obdurate and she glared at him. ‘There’s only one bed,’ she said.
‘And? Isn’t the whole point that we’re here as a married couple—and married couples share beds? What did you think would happen, Lex? That I would stay in the main house, knowing that you were closeted in here all on your own?’
‘You could do what any other man would do under the circumstances—and offer to sleep on the sofa!’
He shot a disparaging look at the piece of furniture she was indicating. ‘On that? Come on—that was never designed to be slept on. A Greek husband sleeps in the marital bed.’ His blue eyes gleamed with a mixture of mockery and promise. ‘With his wife.’
Lexi hated the way her body responded to the unashamedly sexual look which accompanied his macho boast. It was easy to tell herself she shouldn’t want him but much harder to ignore the way he was making her feel. When his gaze raked over her like that, she could feel the answering clamour of her body. The ache of her breasts and the insistent heat coiling low inside her. Because she still desired him as intensely as she had ever done—and she didn’t have a clue how to deal with it.
‘Why did you bring me here, Xenon?’ she demanded. ‘I mean, really? You say it was to bring comfort to your grandmother—’
‘That desire was genuine,’ he interrupted coolly.
‘And what else? Did you picture this scene when you made your suggestion? The inevitable showdown which would result when I found out that I’d be expected to share a bed with you?’
For a moment he didn’t answer and when he did, his words were accompanied by an odd kind of smile. ‘Yes, I pictured it,’ he answered slowly. ‘Though not at first.’
She stared at him, her heart beating very fast. ‘Tell me.’
He lifted his shoulders in a careless kind of shrug and once again she could see the bunching of muscle beneath his shirt. ‘I admit that when I came to your house that day I was little more than curious. I wanted to see the woman I had married and to see what life had done to her. I’d even promised myself that I would give you your divorce papers, if I were so inclined. And then you opened the door and...’
His voice tailed off in a way which made Lexi look at him suspiciously. Because Xenon didn’t do hesitation. And neither did he screw his eyes up as if he had been presented with a problem he couldn’t quite work out. Because wasn’t he the man with the answers to everything?
‘And what?’ she prompted.
‘I realised I still wanted you,’ he said simply. ‘I wanted you in a way I’ve never wanted any other woman, not before and not since. I wanted you in my arms. I still do. I look at you, Lex, and my body aches for you. I want you so badly that I can hardly think straight. Even now.’
She felt the dull crash of disappointment—for these were not new words. They were words he’d spoken many times when he’d been wooing her—when she’d bewitched and infuriated him by refusing to fall straight into his arms. They were expressions of high emotion he used when he was trying to get something which was just out of reach. He’d never said them when they would have meant something. He’d hadn’t spoken of wanting her when she’d been lying in that hospital bed with her womb raw and empty and the feeling that she had failed him as a wife.
‘We can’t,’ she said in a hollow voice.
‘Why not?’ he demanded, his eyes blazing like blue jewels in the dimness of the shuttered room. ‘Because you haven’t got the guts to face the fact that you want me, too? Why can’t you just come out and admit it? If not to me—then at least to yourself. That what we have isn’t over. And that it isn’t going to go away.’
She felt the quickening stab of fear and the even fiercer stab of desire. She felt the blurring of past and present. She thought about the secrets she had locked away.
‘You just like a challenge,’ she declared. ‘You’re a man who has everything. Who can get anything. You just want the one thing that’s eluding you.’
‘This has got nothing to do with challenge,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he met the spark of defiance in hers. He was aware of something primitive flooding through him. A tide of pure possession which he could not stop. ‘And everything to do with the realisation that you are my woman and you always have been. And nothing will ever change that.’
The raw declaration thrilled her almost more than it appalled her. She wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t. But Lexi knew that she couldn’t be swayed by words which were driven by nothing more than lust and a sense of ownership.
‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘We can share a bed and maintain this charade if that’s what it takes to get my brother off the hook, but that’s all.’ With an effort she tried to ignore the prickling of her breasts. The way that they had become heavy and sensitive—as if they wanted nothing more than for him to bend his lips to kiss them, shaping his lips around them and tormenting her with the feathery little lick of his tongue.
She shivered, trying to blot the erotic image from her mind and to focus on something other than the sudden hot, melting ache between her legs. ‘It’s over, Xenon,’ she croaked. ‘There’s no way back. And there’s no way I’m ever getting intimate with you again.’
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_89807f2e-6baf-5438-8c3b-4d54c6eedad5)
‘SO, ALEXI. MY son tells me that you are something of a silversmith these days.’
Lexi put her wine glass down and produced another friendly smile, even though her face was beginning to ache. She felt like someone who had undergone a police interrogation, since Xenon’s mother had been firing questions at her for most of the overlong meal. And her arrogant son hadn’t done a thing to help her out.
Dressed impeccably in navy, with pearls gleaming at her throat, Marina Kanellis was an elegant woman whose once-beautiful face bore a vaguely startled look, as if life had disappointed her. Lexi knew she’d been made a widow when Xenon was barely eighteen and not for the first time she wondered why the bilingual socialite had never considered marrying again. Unless she was one of those women who loved only one man...
This line of thought was a little too uncomfortable to pursue. Instead Lexi concentrated on watching the candlelight flickering over the heavy crystal and silver, telling herself that the meal would soon be over and then she would be able to make her escape. She had tried to answer her mother-in-law’s queries as cheerfully as possible—even though she had been chewed up with nerves when she’d first sat down.
Yet she couldn’t deny that tonight Marina had seemed almost kind and much less terrifying than before. Maybe that was because these days she felt more mature and much less intimidated. And, of course, less worried that she was going to make some terrible social gaffe and make Xenon ashamed of her. She no longer had anything to lose, did she?
So she turned to Marina Kanellis and smiled.
‘“Silversmith” sounds a bit grand for what I do,’ she said.
‘But you are making jewellery?’
Lexi nodded, her fingertips brushing against the two elongated silver triangles dangling from her ears as if she were showcasing her handiwork. ‘Yes, I am.’
‘And you enjoy it?’ asked Marina.
‘I love it,’ Lexi answered. ‘I’ve got my own little workshop in the village and I enjoy being my own boss. It gives me the kind of freedom I’ve never had before.’
‘I can imagine.’ Marina Kanellis sipped from her glass of water. ‘I never worked, of course. Not before my marriage nor after it. It was not considered appropriate for a woman to work, particularly if she was a Kanellis woman, with all the responsibilities which went with that role.’
Lexi looked into Xenon’s piercing blue eyes. Help me out here, she beseeched him silently and to her astonishment she saw an answering glint of comprehension.
‘Modern women like to work, Mitera,’ he said, with the tone of somebody who had made the recent discovery that the world was round. ‘Some obviously need to work for economic reasons—but others do it because it gives them a purpose in life. It fulfils them in a way that nothing else can—something which men have known for centuries. And who are we to knock that?’
Lexi wondered if her own expression reflected the dazed bemusement of her mother-in-law’s. She looked across the table at her husband in disbelief. Xenon coming out with an opinion about women which didn’t sound as if it had been formed two centuries ago? This from the man who had been adamant that she should be a stay-at-home wife?
At the time, he had explained that they had far too much money for his conscience to allow her to work. Which in theory Lexi had tried to understand. She had told herself that she had married a Greek and that she had to accept there would be cultural differences.
But what did a woman do all day when she wasn’t working and there were servants to run her life for her? Especially if she was a woman who didn’t like to ‘do’ lunch, or spend hours shopping?
She waited to become a mother, that was what she did. And while she waited—in vain, in her case—she discovered that Xenon was governed less by his conscience than by his need to control her and his possessive desire to know where she was at any hour of the day.
So had he changed his views, or was he simply expressing something different because it was expedient for him to do so?
She met his eyes and saw the unexpected flash of humour glittering in their blue depths as if he knew perfectly well the thoughts which were running through her head. That lazy smile of comprehension flustered her and she turned to her mother-in-law, deliberately changing the subject. ‘I’m sorry to hear that your mother is so ill,’ she said quietly.
Marina Kanellis nodded and then sighed. ‘I know. She is old, of course, and she has lived a good life,’ she said. ‘But that makes it no less painful for those of us who love her. We must just make sure that she is kept comfortable, and happy. You will go and see her tomorrow?’
‘Yes, I will. I’d like that very much,’ said Lexi.
‘You know, she always enjoyed your songs,’ said Marina unexpectedly. ‘Especially the one about the man who got away.’
‘“Come Right Back”,’ said Lexi instantly, but this time she didn’t dare look across the table at Xenon. Didn’t they say that there was nothing as potent as cheap music—and hadn’t the words of that particular song seemed unbearably poignant for a long time after they’d split?
But her mood by the end of dinner was much more mellow than the one with which she’d begun it and the excellent food and rich Kanellis wine left her feeling warm and replete.
After the meal they sat outside and drank coffee on the terrace, overlooking the bay. The sky was as dark as a railway tunnel but it was punctured by the diamond dazzle of a thousand stars. She looked down at the lights of Lindos and the glitter of the Aegean and wished she could freeze that moment and never have it melt.
But after she’d said goodnight to Marina and walked with Xenon back to their villa, Lexi began to get butterfly feelings of nerves fluttering around inside her.
She avoided any kind of confrontation until after she’d brushed her teeth and tackled the time-consuming task of brushing her long hair. By the time she’d emerged from the bathroom, it was to find Xenon standing by the bedroom window, staring out at the glittering sea.
He turned round when she entered even though her bare feet must have made hardly any sound on the marble floor. He gave the glimmer of a smile when he saw she was covered from neck to ankle in a pair of pale silk pyjamas, but he made no comment about her buttoned-up nightwear.
‘You were sweet with my mother tonight,’ he said.
Lexi blinked. It wasn’t what she had been expecting to hear. What had she been expecting? ‘She’s much softer than she used to be.’
‘Yes, she is. So many things have happened and she’s a grandmother now. I think the fact that her own mother is dying has made her look at the world differently.’ He shrugged. ‘The cycle of life keeps turning. It’s made her aware of how precious time is.’
His undeniably emotional words hung on the air and Lexi felt the painful punch of her heart. ‘No. None of us should ever forget that,’ she said.
Xenon let his gaze drift over her. She had taken off her glasses and her face was scrubbed clean. He thought how unbelievably young she looked. And how innocent. Sometimes it was hard to believe the reality of her rough upbringing when right now she looked as if she’d spent her life growing up in a convent, nurtured on nothing stronger than milk and orange juice. Her fair hair tumbled down over her pyjamas and he wondered what she would say if he told her that the look she’d been aiming for had completely missed the mark. Because it didn’t matter how prim she tried to make herself—she still exuded a sensuality which oozed from her like honey from a slice of Baklava.
‘Ready for bed?’ he questioned sardonically.
‘What do you think?’
