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‘I haven’t asked you about any of your former lovers, have I?’
‘No, that’s right. You haven’t.’
He wondered what he was trying to do—whether he was trying to sabotage things before they’d even got started. Why the hell hadn’t he just told her that in her silvery gown she eclipsed every other woman he’d ever known? That she was beautiful and soft and completely desirable? With a small growl of anger directed mainly at himself, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her again and he heard the gasping little sound she made as she caught hold of his shoulders. He kissed her for a long time, until she started to relax—until she began to press herself against his body and the barrier of their clothes suddenly seemed like something he couldn’t endure for a second longer. He led her over to the bed and sat her down on the edge, before getting down on his knees in front of her.
‘What are you doing?’ she joked weakly as he began to unstrap one of her shoes. ‘You’ve already made the proposal.’
He lifted his gaze; his expression mocking. ‘I thought it was you who did the proposing?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She tipped her head back and expelled a breath as he started rubbing the pad of his thumb over her instep. ‘So I did.’
He removed both shoes and peeled off her silvery wedding dress before laying her back on the bed and kicking off his shoes and socks. He lay down next to her, pushing the hair from her face and brushing his lips over hers, taking his time. ‘You are very beautiful,’ he said.
‘I’m—’
He silenced her with the press of his forefinger over her mouth. ‘The correct response is, thank you, Alek.’
She swallowed. ‘Thank you, Alek.’
‘But I’m afraid of hurting you.’
She reached her hand up to brush a strand of hair off his forehead and suddenly her face looked very tender. He felt his heart clench.
‘Because of the baby?’ she asked softly.
He nodded, still wary around that shining tenderness which instinctively put him on his guard. ‘Because of the baby,’ he repeated.
‘The doctor said it was okay.’ She leant forward and kissed him. ‘But that maybe we should avoid swinging from the chandeliers.’
‘I don’t have any...chandeliers,’ he said indistinctly, but suddenly the flirting word games of foreplay became swamped by a far more primitive need to possess. Refocusing his attention, he began to explore her properly—touching the coolness of her flesh above her stocking tops as she began to make soft little sounds of pleasure. Did she feel his uncharacteristic hesitation as his fingers tiptoed upwards? Could she hear the loud pounding of his heart? Did she know that suddenly—ridiculously—this felt completely new?
‘It’s no different from how it was before,’ she whispered. ‘I’m still me.’
He kissed her again. But it was different. She was like a ship carrying a precious cargo. His baby. He swallowed as his finger trailed over her navel and he could tell she was holding her breath, expelling it only when he eased his hand beneath the elastic of her panties and cupped her where she was warm and wet.
‘Oh,’ she said.
His mouth hovered over hers. ‘Oh,’ he echoed indistinctly as, blindly, he reached for his belt and suddenly she was unbuttoning his shirt, making a low sound of pleasure as she slipped it away from his shoulders. And he stopped thinking. He just gave himself up to every erotic second. There was a snap as he released her bra and her breasts tumbled into his eager hands. He felt the slide of her bare thigh against his as she used her foot to push his trousers down his legs. He could smell the musky aroma of her sex as he peeled off her panties and threw them aside.
Their eyes met in a long moment and he felt shaken by the sudden unexpected intimacy of that.
He slid the flat of his hand over her hip. ‘I don’t want to hurt you—’
She bit her lip, as if she was about to say something controversial but had thought better of it at the last moment. ‘Just make love to me, Alek,’ she said with a simple sincerity which tore through him like a flame.
Slowly he eased himself inside her, uttering something guttural in Greek, which wasn’t like him. But none of this was like him. He’d never felt this close to a woman before, nor so aware of her as a person rather than as just a body. It rocked him to the core and, yes, it intimidated him, too—and he didn’t like that. He wasn’t used to being out of control. To feeling as if he were putty in a woman’s hands. He groaned. Maybe not putty. Because putty was soft, wasn’t it? And he was hard. Ah, neh. He was very hard. Harder than he could ever remember. And if he wasn’t careful, he was going to come too soon.
This is sex, he told himself fiercely. Sex which you both want. So treat it like sex. Breaking eye contact, he buried his face in her neck as he began to take command, each slow and deliberate thrust demonstrating his power and control. He smiled against her skin when she moaned his name and smiled some more when she began to gasp in a rising crescendo. ‘Oh, yes...yes!’
He raised his head and watched as she came. Saw her tip her head back and her eyes close. He saw her body shudder and heard the disbelieving little cry which followed. And then he saw the first big fat tear which rolled down her cheek to be quickly followed by another, and he frowned. Because hadn’t she cried last time—and wasn’t the deal supposed to be that this time there were no tears? No regrets. His mouth twisted. No nothing—only pleasure.
‘Alek,’ she whispered and he could no longer hold back—letting go in a great burst of seed which pumped from his body as if it was never going to stop.
He must have fallen asleep, and when eventually he opened his eyes again he found her sleeping, too. Rolling away, he stared up at the ceiling, but although his heart was still pounding with post-orgasmic euphoria he felt confusion slide a cold and bewildering trail across his skin.
He glanced around the room. Her wedding dress lay on the floor along with his own discarded trousers and shirt. His usually pristine bedroom looked as if someone had ransacked it and he found himself remembering the ornament breaking in the hall—a priceless piece of porcelain shattered into a hundred pieces which had crunched beneath his feet.
What was it about her which made him lose control like that? He turned his head to look at her again—a pale Venus rising from the crumpled white waves of the sheets. His gaze shifted to her belly—still flat—and his heart clenched as he thought about the reality of being a father.
The fears he’d been trying to silence now crowded darkly in his mind. What if certain traits were inherited rather than learnt? Wasn’t that one of the reasons why he’d always ruled out fatherhood as a life choice, not daring to take the risk of failing as miserably at the task as his own father had done?
She began to stir and opened her eyes and he thought how bright and clear they looked, with no hint of tears now.
‘Why do you cry?’ he asked suddenly. ‘When I make love to you?’
Ellie brushed her fringe out of her eyes, more as a stalling mechanism than anything else. His question suggested a layer of intimacy she hadn’t been expecting and that surprised her. This was supposed to be about sex, wasn’t it? That was what she thought his agenda was. The only agenda there could possibly be—no matter what her feelings for him were. If she suddenly came out and told him the reason she’d cried was because he made her feel complete, then wouldn’t he laugh, or run screaming in the opposite direction? If she told him that when he was deep inside her, it felt as if she’d been waiting her whole life for that moment, wouldn’t it come over as fanciful, or—worse—needy? If she told him she was crying for all the things she would never have from him—like his love—wouldn’t that make her seem like just another woman greedily trying to take from him something she knew he would never give?
She told him part of the truth. ‘Because you are an amazing lover.’
‘And that makes you cry?’
‘Blame my hormones.’
‘I suppose I should be flattered,’ he drawled. ‘Though, of course, that would depend on how experienced you are.’
She pushed her hair out of her eyes and narrowed her eyes. ‘Are you fishing to find out how many lovers I’ve had before you?’
‘Is it unreasonable of me to want to know?’
She sat up and looked down at his dark body outlined against the tumbled bedding. ‘I’ve had one long-term relationship before this and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject, because I think it’s distasteful to discuss it, especially at a time like this. Is that acceptable?’
‘Completely acceptable would be for there to have been no one before me.’ He smiled, but it was a smile tinged with intent rather than humour. ‘And since I intend to drive the memory of anyone else from your mind for ever, you’d better come back over here and kiss me right now.’
His hand starfished over her breast and, even though his questioning was unfair and his attitude outrageously macho, Ellie couldn’t seem to stop herself from reacting to him. She wondered what he’d say if she told him he’d banished every other man from her mind the first time he’d kissed her. Would he be surprised? Probably not. Women probably told him that kind of thing all the time.
It hadn’t been her plan to have him parting her legs again quite so soon, and certainly not to cry his name out like a kind of prayer as he entered her a second time. But she did. And afterwards she was left feeling exposed and naked in all kinds of ways, while he remained as much of an enigma as he’d always done.
She lay there wrapped in his arms and although his lips pressing against her shoulder were making his words muffled, they were still clear enough to hear.
‘I’m thinking that we ought to start sleeping together from now on—what about you?’ he said. ‘Because it would be crazy not to.’
It was a strangely emotionless conclusion to their lovemaking and Ellie didn’t know why she was so disappointed, because he was only behaving true to form. But she made sure her smile didn’t slip and show her disappointment. She kept her expression as neutral as his. He wanted to treat sex as simply another appetite to be fed, did he?
Well, then, so would she.
She lay back against the pillow and coiled her arms around his neck. ‘Absolutely crazy,’ she agreed huskily.
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_0b124257-a0b9-5248-a9c2-9642cc57e2d8)
HER WEDDING RING no longer mocked her and neither did the closed door of Alek’s room. Because Ellie now shared that room, just as she shared the bed within and the man who slept in it.
Pulling on a tea dress, Ellie began to brush her hair. To all intents and purposes, she and Alek now had a ‘full’ marriage. Ever since the night of their wedding—when they’d broken the sexual drought—they had been enjoying the pleasures of the marital bed in a way which had surpassed her every expectation.
He could turn her on with a single smile. He could have her naked in his arms in seconds. Even when she told herself she ought to resist him—in a futile attempt to regain some control over her shattered equilibrium—she would fail time and time again.
‘But you can’t resist me, poulaki mou,’ he would murmur, as if he guessed exactly what she was trying to do. ‘You know you really want me.’
And that was the trouble. She did. She couldn’t seem to stop wanting him, no matter how much she tried to tell herself that she was getting in too deep. And if sometimes she lay looking wistfully at the ceiling after he’d made love to her, she made sure it was while Alek was asleep. She tried to stop herself from caring for him too much—and certainly to hide her feelings for him. Because that wasn’t what he wanted. This was as close to a business arrangement as a personal relationship could be.
But her life had changed in other ways, too. They started going out more as a couple, so that at times the marriage felt almost authentic. He took her to the theatre, which she loved. They watched films and ate in fancy restaurants and explored all the tiny backstreets of the city. They drove down to the south coast, to visit Luis and Carly in their amazing house which overlooked a beautiful river.
And yet, despite the increased richness of their day-to-day existence, it was difficult to get to know the real man behind the steely image, despite the external thaw between them. He could do that thoughtful stuff of massaging her feet when she was tired, but if his fingers hadn’t been made of flesh and blood she might have thought she was being administered to by some sort of robot. Sometimes it felt as if she didn’t know him any better than when that list of his likes and dislikes had been circulated to staff at The Hog before his arrival. She still wasn’t sure what motivated him, or what made him sometimes wake her in the night when he’d had a dream which had clearly been a bad one. She would turn to find his eyes open but not really seeing, his body tense—suspended between the two worlds of sleeping and waking. But when she gently shook him awake, his face would become guarded and he would deflect her concerns with something sensual enough to send any questions scuttling from her mind.
He was a master at concealing the real man who lay beneath; adept at avoiding questions. His cool blue eyes would narrow if she tried to probe more deeply; his gaze becoming one of sapphire ice. Don’t push me, those eyes seemed to say. But that didn’t stop Ellie from trying, even though he would deflect her questions by sliding his hand beneath her skirt and starting to make love to her. He’d leave her breathless and panting as all her questions dissolved and nothing was left but the pleasure he gave her, time after time. And she didn’t give up. She just lowered her sights a little. She stopped expecting big revelations and just concentrated on the little ones.
And every time she discovered something about him, it felt like a major victory—like another little missing bit of the jigsaw. In those sleepy moments after making love, he told her about how he’d worked his way up from being a kitchen boy in Athens, to owning an entire chain of restaurants. He told her about working on a fancy vineyard in California, so that he knew all about the wine trade. He made a wistful face when he described his friend Murat’s beautiful country of Qurhah and told her how big the stars looked when you were out in the middle of the desert. He explained how life was just one great big learning experience and everything he knew, he had taught himself.
And one thing she was learning faster than any other was that it wasn’t so easy to put the brakes on her own emotions. She wasn’t sure if it was her fluctuating hormones which were changing her feelings towards her Greek husband, or just that sex had removed the protective shield from her heart. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to stop herself from caring for him in a way that went bone-deep. Her heart was stubbornly refusing to listen to all the logic her head tried to throw at it.
Yet she knew what happened to women who were stupid enough to love men who didn’t love them back. She’d watched her mother’s life become diminished because she had wanted something she was never going to have. She’d wasted years on bitterness and resentment, because she’d refused to accept that you couldn’t make another person do what you wanted them to.
And that was not going to happen to her.
She wouldn’t let it.
Smoothing down the folds of her tea dress, she walked into the kitchen to find Alek seated at the table, a half-full coffee pot beside him as he worked his way through a stack of financial newspapers. He glanced up as she walked in, his eyes following her every step, like a snake bewitched by a charmer. She had become used to his very macho appraisal of her appearance and, with a certain amount of guilt, had grown to enjoy it.
He put the newspaper down as she sat down opposite him and his eyes glinted as she reached for the honeypot.
‘I enjoyed licking my favourite honey last night,’ he murmured.
Her eyes widened. ‘Alek!’
‘Are you blushing, Ellie?’
‘Certainly not. It’s just the steam from the coffee making me hot.’
‘Would you like to come to Italy?’ he questioned.
Ellie dropped the little wooden spatula back in the pot. ‘You mean, with you?’ she said.
‘Of course with me. Unless you had someone else in mind?’ He smiled and gave a lazy shrug. ‘We can treat it as a kind of honeymoon, if you like. I thought we could go to Lucca. I have business in Pisa and I can go there afterwards while you fly home. And Lucca is an extraordinarily pretty city. They call it the hidden gem of Tuscany. It has an oval piazza instead of a square one and a tower with trees growing out of the top. Lots of dark and winding streets and iconic churches. You’ve never been there?’
She shook her head. ‘I’ve never been anywhere apart from a day trip to Calais with my mother.’
‘Well, then.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Didn’t you once tell me how much you longed to travel?’
Yes, she’d told him that, but that had been when she’d still had ambition burning big in her heart. When travelling had been part of her work plan and independence had been a believable dream which seemed to have fallen by the wayside since she’d discovered she was pregnant. She thought of Italy—with its green hills and terracotta roofs. All those famous churches and marble statues she’d only ever seen in pictures.
Wouldn’t it be good to go on an unexpected honeymoon for some sunshine and culture—even if it was the most unconventional honeymoon in the history of the world? And yet, just the fact that Alek had suggested it brightened her mood. Wasn’t this a bit of a breakthrough from her enigmatic husband? Could she possibly make it a real honeymoon—as if they were people who genuinely cared about one another, rather than two people who were just trying to make the best of a bad situation?
She began to spread the thick, golden honey on her toast and smiled at him. ‘I’d like that,’ she said. ‘I’d like that very much.’
‘Thavmassios. We will fly the day after tomorrow.’
* * *
Two days later their flight touched down in Pisa where Alek had arranged for a car to take them to Lucca. The drive took less than an hour and they arrived in the late afternoon, when all the shops were closed and the place had a drowsy feel about it. Ellie looked up at the high city walls and thought she’d never seen anywhere more beautiful. Alek had rented an old-fashioned apartment overlooking a sheltered courtyard, where geraniums tumbled brightly from terracotta pots. The wooden frame of their bed was dark and worn and the sheets were crisp and scented with lavender.
She knew that they weren’t like other traditional honeymooners, and yet as he closed the apartment door behind them Ellie was filled with something which felt awfully like hope. She thought: We’re in a city where nobody knows us. Two strangers blending with all the other strangers. Mightn’t there be a chance that here the man she had married would let his mask slip for once, when there was only her to see?
They made love, unpacked and showered and then Alek took her out to dinner in a garden shimmering with candlelight where they ate the local delicacy of tortelli lucchese—a bright yellow stuffed pasta, topped with a rich ragu sauce. Afterwards, they sat beneath the star-spangled sky and drank their coffee—their fingers linking together on the table, and for once it felt real. As if they really were genuine honeymooners and not just a pair of actors acting out the parts. When he took her home, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately and he picked her up and carried her to the bedroom with a look on his face which made her tremble.
The following morning Ellie awoke alone. For a minute she lay there as sensual memories of the previous night filtered into her mind, then she pulled on a robe, splashed cold water over her sleepy face and went off to find Alek. He was sitting on their balcony with breakfast laid out on the small table and the aroma of coffee vying with the powerful scent of jasmine.
‘Where did all this come from?’ she questioned as she looked at the crisp bread, the buttery pastries and the rich red jam.
‘I got up early and you looked much too peaceful to wake. I went for a walk around the city walls and called in at the panificio on the way back.’ He poured out two cups of coffee and pushed one across the table and smiled. ‘So what would you like to do today?’
And suddenly—she had no idea what caused it—the perfect scene before her began to disintegrate. It was like tugging at a tiny nick on a delicate piece of fabric which suddenly ripped open. It all seemed so false
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