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‘Careful,’ Theo said. ‘You don’t want to spoil things.’
He smiled as he spoke, but the icy glitter of his eyes, and the soft but deadly menace of his tone, left Skye in no doubt at all that the warning was meant in a way that was very different from a concern about her dress.
As a result she had been desperately on edge all evening, waiting for the axe to fall, for Theo to speak out and reveal the dark secret that would ruin everything.
But for now he was clearly biding his time, and hiding his cruel intent behind a smiling mask.
‘So how did you two meet?’ he asked now, pushing aside his plate and leaning back in his chair, a glass of rich red wine in one hand.
It was an innocent enough question—on the surface at least. But underneath the lazily drawled words lurked so many dangerous rocks that could sink her totally if she wasn’t careful.
Instinctively Skye turned to Cyril, conceding to him automatically. When he had come up with his proposal, he had insisted on absolute secrecy. Their marriage was to look genuine, with no hint of the deal behind it, and of course both Skye and her father had been only too glad to agree.
‘Business,’ was what he said, helping himself to another portion of the rich baklava that had formed their dessert. ‘Skye’s father runs a couple of my hotels in England.’
‘In London?’ Both Theo’s tone and his eyes had sharpened and Skye shivered faintly, knowing where his thoughts were heading.
‘No—Suffolk. Country house hotels—part of the group but out of the capital.’
‘But Suffolk isn’t far from London, is it?’
Theo raised his glass to his lips, sipped slowly, black eyes moving to lock with grey over the top of it. His fierce, unwavering gaze held hers mesmerically.
‘Do you go into London very often, Kyria Marston?’
‘Skye, please.’
She forced it from between lips that felt as if they were carved from wood.
‘And, no—I don’t go into London.’
‘Not at all?’
Careful! Skye warned herself. One false step and he would swoop like that hunting eagle. But she didn’t want him to think he had her on the run. It might feel like that, of course—she was very definitely trapped with her back against a wall, but she was damned if she was going to run away in panic and leave the field to him. She might just as well surrender right here and now and tell Cyril the truth about their meeting herself.
She could at least give Theo Antonakos a run for his money.
Deliberately she picked up her own glass, swirled the wine around in the bottom of it, then looked him straight in the eye again.
‘Well, obviously, I do go to London every now and then—but not often. And to tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I was there.’
Her defiance caught his attention. One black brow lifted sharply in sardonic response and he inclined his dark head in a small acknowledgement of the way she had parried his attack.
Oh, but she was good, Theo admitted to himself. This Skye Marston was a superb actress—so good that, if he didn’t now know exactly what was going on, he would have been totally convinced by her performance.
He had met her precisely twice—for less than a day at a time—and on those occasions she had been perhaps half a dozen different women, changing her personality and her behaviour as quickly and easily as he changed his clothes.
Looking at her now, no one would ever guess that she had been that nervous, distressed creature in the London bar, let alone the wild, passionate woman who had been in his bed that night.
Now here she was the picture of cool elegance in that sleek turquoise silk dress, sleeveless and with a deep vee neckline. Silver glittered at her ears and around the long graceful neck, exposed by the way she had piled that glorious rich coloured hair up at the back of her neck, and she looked calm, relaxed and totally in control.
But she couldn’t really be in control, any more than he could. She had to know that their shared secret was there, between them, like a dark shadow.
He lifted his glass again to drink, then reconsidered and only pretended to sip from it. His head was clouded enough. His thoughts had been reeling since the instant in which his father’s announcement had hit him like a punch to his jaw, and he still hadn’t decided what to do about it.
‘You don’t want to go out—to clubs—or bars?’
He wasn’t quite sure who was watching whom—only that it seemed to him as if there were no one in the room but the two of them. His father might have disappeared completely, and the quiet, decorous presence of a couple of maids barely impinged on his consciousness.
‘Skye doesn’t frequent clubs and such.’
It was Cyril who answered, reminding Theo sharply of the fact that he was there, at the head of the table. That this was his house—his father’s home—and the woman opposite was his father’s future bride.
‘That’s one of the things that attracted me to her. Her innocence. She’s not like so many modern young women.’
This time Theo really did have to gulp down a large mouthful of his wine, if only to stop himself from laughing out loud, or making some cynical comment, revealing just precisely how he felt about that statement.
So she had his father totally conned. The old man had no idea at all what she was really like.
So why didn’t he just tell him? Why didn’t he just open his mouth and say the words?
Your fiancée is not at all the woman you think she is.
The words sounded so clearly inside his head that for one heart-stopping moment he almost thought he’d said them aloud and froze, waiting for the explosion that would follow.
But nothing happened. The declaration had just been in his imagination and the conversation continued just as be-fore—his father blithely ignorant of the emotional grenade that had almost exploded right in his face.
Because that was the effect it would have had. In one split second, Cyril Antonakos would have gone from being the proudly possessive fiancé of a beautiful, stylish, sexy…
Oh, Theos, so devastatingly sexy…
A gorgeous, glamorous, much younger woman.
One moment, Cyril would have been the envy of all men with such a woman on his arm—the next he would have known the sordid truth.
‘Her mother has been unwell. So Skye spends most of her time at home, caring for her.’
Except when she’s out trawling bars, picking up strange men…
Once more Theo had to bite down hard on his lower lip to stop the words from escaping.
Skye’s stunning eyes had dropped, staring down at her hands on the table, and it was all he could do not to laugh out loud in cynical admiration. As a pose of innocent modesty, it was damn near perfect—except that he knew it was a lie and so did she.
So why didn’t he just admit it? Why didn’t he announce to his father that the woman Cyril thought was a sweet, unworldly, family type wasn’t anything of the sort?
Because if he did then, as well as damning her, he would destroy himself in his father’s eyes. In fact, he would probably end up painted as the villain of the piece and Cyril would turn his back on him once and for all—for good this time. His father would cut him out of his life without a second thought.
And he had vowed that if his father ever held out an olive branch of peace he would grab it with both hands. That he would do everything in his power to repair the breach that had come between them; end the estrangement if he possibly could.
That was why he was here now. Why he had come to be the best man at the wedding—unaware of just who the bride his father had chosen was. He knew what interpretation his father would probably put on it. That he had come crawling back because he thought that doing so would change Cyril’s mind about cutting him out of his will.
Well, if that was the case, then he would take a great delight in letting the old man know that he had no need at all of anyone else’s money. He had more than enough of his own.
But this island was a very different matter. Helikos had come to Cyril through his first wife—Theo’s mother. It had been in her family for centuries. Calista Antonakos had been buried here, as had both her father and mother before her. It was Theo’s rightful inheritance, and one he would fight for with the last strength in his body. He certainly didn’t intend to lose it because of some little gold-digger who had caught his father’s attention. This year’s wife who, if she followed the example of every other Kyria Antonakos, would be here and gone again in the space of a couple of years.
‘That is unusual,’ he managed, knowing from the tiny flicker of a glance in his direction that Skye was unable to control that the acid tone of the words hadn’t been lost on her. ‘I have to admit that in anyone else I might find it hard to accept about any modern young woman. But, having met your lovely fiancée, I can believe anything of her. Why, when I first encountered her this afternoon, she was embarrassed at being caught in just her swimming costume—in spite of the fact that it was a far more modest design than so many I have seen.’
She was listening hard again. All her attention was focused on his face, and the way those slender, elegant hands were nervously folding her napkin over and over on itself betrayed the inner tension that she had managed to smooth from her expression. She was not at all sure just in what direction he was going to take this and that thought gave him an intense, dark satisfaction.
He waited a nicely calculated moment before continuing with deliberate casualness.
‘In fact, there was one woman I met last weekend…She was exactly Skye’s age—and build—but the skirt she wore was barely there. She was probably showing far more flesh than you were this afternoon, Stepmama.’
Oh, she didn’t like that! She had definitely winced at that ‘Stepmama’, flinching back in her chair at his tone.
‘So it was hardly surprising that she got herself into trouble with some roughs in a bar—’
But Skye had clearly had enough. Dropping the napkin down on the table, she suddenly met his mocking gaze head on, a new flame of bravado in her soft grey eyes.
‘That’s precisely why I never go into bars or clubs if I can help it!’ she declared defiantly. ‘You can never tell what sort of thug you might meet there.’
Thug! It was meant to sting and it did.
Whatever else he had been that night, thug didn’t describe it. He had treated her as well as she had any right to expect, when she had come on to him as she had. But of course she would want to make out that she had been the innocent in all this, to win the sympathy vote, just in case Cyril ever found out the truth.
A black tide of rage swamped his mind, drowning all rational thought, and his hand clenched so tightly on the stem of the wineglass that he was within an inch of snapping it sharply in two.
He couldn’t stand to be in the room with the lying, conniving little bitch any longer. He had to get out of here or explode. And if he did lose his temper, then he would take Skye Marston and her calculated play-acting with him. He would tell the truth about their meeting—give his father every single gory detail, and then walk out while the shock waves were reverberating round the house.
But those shock waves would damage his world too. They would take the fragile peace he had made with his father and shatter it irrevocably into tiny, irreparable pieces. If he took Skye Marston down, then she would take his last chance of inheriting Helikos with her. And he wasn’t prepared to let that go.
Not for a cheap little tramp who was clearly well practised in lying through her teeth.
‘Well, you don’t need to worry about getting rid of me,’ he said, tossing down his own napkin and getting to his feet. He directed what he hoped was obviously a fake smile of understanding, his gaze going to where his father’s hand still rested on her arm.
‘I can see that you two would obviously like to be alone—and I’d hate to intrude. Besides, I’m expecting a call from a young lady.’
It was only his secretary with news of a contract he was working on, but hell would freeze over before he would admit to that.
‘So I’ll say goodnight, Father—Stepmama. And I’ll see you in the morning.’
He was proud of the way that he managed to stroll from the room. Pleased with the fact that he didn’t pause or look back, or even show that he gave a damn about what he was leaving behind him. He knew he appeared relaxed, casual and totally at ease.
The truth couldn’t be more different.
Because, no matter how much he might tell himself that he had kept quiet only because of Helikos, he knew that the real truth was much more complicated than that. Ever since that night they had spent together in London he hadn’t been able to get the searingly erotic images of Skye Marston out of his thoughts—and he still couldn’t. Just sitting opposite her had set off a string of heated images that circled over and over in his thoughts until he felt he would go mad.
He didn’t want to think of them—didn’t want to think of her.
But the truth was that he could think of nothing else.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HE MIGHT as well face facts; he was never going to sleep.
Theo finally admitted to himself that he had no chance at all of drifting into the welcome unconsciousness of slumber, no matter how hard he tried.
He had been tossing and turning in his bed for an hour or more now, and even working on the intensely boring business documents he had tried to use to numb his mind into sleeping had not had the desired effect. He was as wide awake as he had been when he’d left the dining table—wider, in fact, as his struggle not to think of Skye Marston had left him feeling more and more restless with each second that passed.
Eventually he gave up completely, tossed the file down onto the floor, flung himself out of bed and dragged on the pair of swimming shorts that he had discarded earlier.
He had wanted to swim earlier and had been frustrated. Finding Skye in the pool had driven every other thought from his head.
But now he felt so restless and edgy, with a tension building up inside him like the growing oppression before a storm. He had to act or explode. He had to do something! And exercise was the sanest, the safest thing he could think of.
Swimming in the still of the night, with only the moon for light, was a calming, relaxing experience. There was no one around, only the sound of an owl hooting once or twice to disturb the silence. Theo swam the length of the pool over and over and over again, backwards and forwards. Long, powerful strokes swept through the water, his muscular legs kicked again and again, until at last he felt a degree of peace descend on him.
Slowly, he began to tire, but still he pushed himself harder and further until his muscles ached and his breathing had a raw edge to it.
‘Enough,’ he muttered at one last turn. ‘Enough.’
Now, at last, he felt he might sleep.
If he could just keep Skye Marston from his mind then he might actually get some rest. It was after one in the morning, time to go to bed.
The single-storeyed pool house was in darkness. Only a small lamp by the door glowed to break up the pitch-black that came from being so far out in the country without a single street lamp for miles. But Theo knew his way around from growing up here as a boy. Shaking the water drops from his soaked hair, he padded into the hall, confident and sure on bare feet. Pausing only to snatch up a towel from a hook in the shower room, he made his way to the kitchen, rubbing himself dry as he went.
The light switch was to his left. Not even needing to look, he reached out a hand and clicked it on.
And froze in shock at the sight of the silent female figure sitting at the kitchen table, her face pale, her back stiffly upright, and her hands folded on the surface in front of her.
She was dressed in just a simple white tee shirt and jeans, her feet bare. The long red hair was loose and fell unstyled over her shoulders and down her back; there was no trace of make-up at all that he could see on her pale, soft face, and she looked stunning.
So stunning that he cursed the kick his heart gave just at the sight of her. The next moment he instinctively moved the towel he was holding so that it fell down in front of him, hiding the instant hardness that strained against the front of his shorts. How could he still respond to just the sight of this woman like this when he now knew just what she was?
An hour’s swim in the cool water of the swimming pool and he still felt like this! Hot and hungry in the space of a heartbeat. He was frankly surprised that the remains of the water on his body weren’t evaporating from the heat of his skin in a cloud of steam. What he needed was to go and plunge back into the water.
That or a very long, very cold shower.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you,’ Skye said quietly. ‘We have to talk.’
‘No, we don’t. I don’t have to do anything I don’t want and I don’t want to talk to you.’
Skye drew in a deep breath and carefully tried to adjust her thoughts, find the new approach that would fit better with this obviously truculent mood he was in.
‘I need to talk to you.’
