The Greek's Forbidden Bride

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Michael had always had the ability to get around her and she knew why. She trusted him. There was no dark, hidden agenda.

Still, standing here now and looking at Theo’s broad back and lazy pose, she couldn’t contain a certain amount of apprehension.

She had apologised profusely to Lina, in the hope that the older woman might see fit to consign her to party preparation duties, but no such luck. Instead she had smiled charmingly, promised longer conversations just as soon as all this hectic stuff was over and expressed delight that she was getting along so famously with Theo, who could be a handful.

He swung round to face her as soon as she began walking towards the car, snapping his cellphone shut and shoving it into his pocket.

He was wearing a pair of khaki coloured Bermuda-style shorts and a short-sleeved shirt which hung loosely over the waistband of the shorts. He looked cool, casual and very, very sophisticated, especially with the dark shades which shielded his eyes from her and made it virtually impossible for her to know what he was thinking.

‘You really don’t need to do this,’ Abby announced flatly when she was within speaking distance of him. ‘You have work to do and I’m more than happy to occupy myself by the pool or out in the garden with a book.’

Theo accepted her remark with a slight inclination of his head and, instead of answering, pulled open the passenger door of the car for her to get in.

‘Not much of an adventure when you’ve been promised a sightseeing tour of the island, though, is it? Reading a book in a garden?’ he murmured once inside the car. Behind the dark shades, she could only imagine the triumph in his eyes as he contemplated a morning of vicious cross-questioning.

‘I didn’t come here for adventures,’ Abby said. ‘I really didn’t even expect that I would get much of a chance to explore the island. Michael said that once the party was out of the way, we would return at a later date and catch up on all the sightseeing we wouldn’t be able to do this time round.’ Faced with a day out in the hot sun, trailing along behind Theo and trying to deflect his arrows, Abby had changed out of her cropped jeans into something cooler—a short lime-green drawstring skirt that fitted on her hips and a small sleeveless white vest. Now she felt hideously exposed even though she knew that Theo wasn’t interested in looking at her legs.

‘So what did Michael tell you about the island?’

‘It’s small and has some very good boutiques.’

Theo felt his mouth twitch. ‘Remind me to tell him never to consider a job in the tourist industry. Okay, here are some facts. This island is one of the most violent volcanoes on the planet. Some think that three thousand years ago it wiped out the entire Minoan civilisation. And, believe it or not, there was no tourism to speak of until fairly recently, when people realised that add one famous crater to amazing black sand beaches and you get a must see resort.’

‘And you don’t approve?’ Abby felt herself grudgingly drawn into the conversation. If her mission was to be super-friendly and allay any suspicions, then this was as good a place to start as any because she was genuinely interested in the history of the place.

‘What small island really approves of tourism?’ He glanced briefly at her and she wished again that he would remove the sunglasses.

‘The ones that make a packet of money out of it?’ Abby ventured.

‘Doesn’t mean that the natives like it,’ Theo pointed out. He interrupted himself to point out various sights, drawing her attention to the colour of the rocks and the nature of the landscape, comparing it to other Greek islands. ‘Of course,’ he said, resuming his original topic, ‘they all work towards promoting tourism because it involves promoting their own standard of living, but do you not agree that it deadens the authenticity of a place?’

‘If I had the choice of a roof over my head and food in my stomach, and the price was to be polite to a few tourists for a few months of the year, then I know what I’d choose.’

‘Ah, a practical woman.’ Or something else. ‘And here I was thinking that all women were romantics at heart.’

‘Because someone is sensible doesn’t mean that they’re not romantic as well,’ Abby said.

He wanted to dwell on the significance of what she had said, but decided to go down the tantalising route of finding out just a little bit more about her.

‘I suppose wandering the land with your parents may have resulted in you not getting a large enough dose of reality to extinguish the notion of romance.’

Abby tore her eyes away from the impressive scenery to stare at him. Remember you’re being nice and friendly and open, she thought. ‘Maybe, although I must say I had a large dose of reality in the form of temporary housing and dodgy neighbourhoods. No, I tell a lie, we never really stayed anywhere dodgy. Wolf and River preferred villages to cities.’

‘Wolf and River?’

Abby hadn’t meant to say that. Not even Michael knew about those stupid names her parents had called themselves. Just uttering it out loud made her cringe with embarrassment. She stared resolutely ahead, chin tilted, and didn’t say anything.

‘Your parents were called Wolf and River?’ Theo stole a glance at the stubborn profile. So she was a slightly more complex gold-digger. Probably why she had succeeded with Michael, who had never been one to fall for the obvious.

‘They explained that they needed names to suit the people that they were. Course, I carried on calling them Mum and Dad.’

‘Bet they loved that.’

‘They accepted that I…wasn’t like them. Anyway, that’s all very boring. Tell me some more about the island. You said it’s volcanic. Isn’t that dangerous?’

Theo’s eyes strayed fleetingly to her slender thighs, abundantly exposed thanks to the short skirt which had ridden up, and he tried to focus on the mission at hand.