Antonides' Forbidden Wife

“Mrs.…Antonides?”

For an instant Ally didn’t react to the name, just sat staring blindly at the magazine in her hand and tried to think of what she was going to say.

“Mrs. Antonides?” The voice was firmer, louder and made her jump.

She jerked up straight in the chair as she realized the secretary was speaking to her. “Sorry. I was just—” praying this would go well “—woolgathering,” she said, raising her brows hopefully.

The secretary was impassive. “Mr. Antonides will see you now.” But Ally thought she detected a hint of challenge in the woman’s voice.

Ally wet her lips. “Thank you.” She set down the magazine she hadn’t read a word of, gave the other woman her best hard-won cool professional smile and headed toward the open door.

Six feet of hard lean whipcord male stood behind a broad teak desk waiting for her. And not just male—a man.

The man she’d married, all grown up.

Ally took a surreptitious, careful, steadying breath. Then she swallowed, shut the door and pasted on her most cheerful smile. “Hello, PJ.”

Even though he was looking straight at her, his name on her lips seemed to startle him. He took a single step toward her, then stopped abruptly, instead shoving his hands into the pockets of navy dress-suit trousers. He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Al.” The nickname he’d always called her by. His voice was gruff.

“Alice,” she corrected firmly. “Or Ally, I guess, if you prefer.”

He didn’t respond, left the ball in her court.

Right. So be it. “Bet you’re surprised to see me,” she added with all the brightness she could muster.

One brow lifted. “Well, let’s just say, you didn’t make the short list of any Mrs. Antonideses I might have been expecting.” His tone was cool, edged with irony.

And while a part of Ally wanted to throw her arms around him, she knew better. And any hope she’d entertained that they might be able to go back to being pals was well on its way to a quick and permanent death.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” she apologized quickly. “Shouldn’t have used your name, I mean. I don’t ordinarily use your name.”

“I didn’t imagine you did.” The edge again.

She let out a nervous breath. “I just…well, I didn’t know how busy you were. President. CEO.” She glanced back toward the main door where she’d seen a plaque with his name and title on it. “I thought you might not see me otherwise.”

His brows lifted. “I’m not the pope. You don’t need to request an audience.”

“Well, I didn’t know, did I?” she said with asperity, disliking being put on the defensive. “This—” she waved her hand around his elegant office with its solid teak furnishings and vast view across the East River toward Manhattan’s famous skyline “—is not exactly the ‘you’ I remember.”

It might not have been the Vatican, but it wasn’t a tiny studio apartment above Mrs. Chang’s garage, either.

PJ shrugged. “It’s been years, Al. Things change. You’ve changed. Grown up. Made a name for yourself, haven’t you?”

There was challenge in his words, and they set Ally’s teeth on edge, but she had to acknowledge the truth of them. “Yes.”

And she made herself stand still under the long, assessing gaze that took a leisurely lingering stroll up from her toes to her head, even as it made her tingle with unwanted awareness.

“Very nice.” A corner of his mouth quirked in a cool deliberate smile. “I’ve changed, too,” he added, as if she needed it pointed out.

“You own a tie.”

“Two of them.”

“And a suit.”

“For my sins.”

“You’ve done well.”

“I always did well, Al,” he said easily, coming around the desk now, letting her feel the force of his presence at even closer hand, “even when I was a beach bum.”

It was hard to imagine this man as a “beach bum,” but she knew what he meant. When she had known Peter Antonides, he had never been about the fast track, never cared about wealth and ambition. He’d only cared about living life the way he wanted—a life on the beach, doing what interested him.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I thought…I mean, I’m surprised you left it. It was what you liked. What you wanted.”

But PJ shook his head and shoved a lock of hair off his forehead as he propped a hip against the corner of his desk. “What I wanted was the freedom to be me. To get away from everyone else’s expectations but my own. I did on the beach. And I’m still free now. This is my choice. No one pushed me. I’m here because I want to be. And it doesn’t define me.” He paused, then fixed his gaze intently on her. “But I’m not the point. What about you? No, wait.” He shoved away from the desk. “Sit down.” He nodded to the armchairs by the window overlooking the East River. “I’ll get Rosie to bring us some coffee. Or would you rather have iced tea?”

She hadn’t come to sit down and be social. “I don’t need anything,” she said quickly. “I can’t stay.”

“After ten years? Well, five since I last saw you. But don’t tell me you just ‘dropped in’?” He arched a skeptical brow. “No, you didn’t, Al. You came specifically to see me. You said so. Sit down.” It wasn’t an invitation this time. It was an order. He punched the intercom. “Rosie. Can we have some iced tea, please? Thanks.”

Ally took a deep breath. He even sounded like a CEO. Brisk, no nonsense. In command. Of course he had always had those qualities, Ally realized. But he’d never been in charge of anyone but himself when she’d known him.

Reluctantly she sat. He was right, of course, she had come to see him. But she’d expected the visit to be perfunctory. And the fact that he was making it into something else—something social, something extended even by a few minutes—was undermining her plans.

It wasn’t personal, she assured herself. At least not very. And PJ didn’t care. She was sure about that. This was simply a hurdle to be jumped. One she should have jumped a long time ago.

She needed to do this, make her peace with PJ, put the past behind her. Move on.

And if doing so meant sitting down and conversing with him for a few minutes first, fine. She could do that.

It would be good for her, actually. It would prove to her that she was doing the right thing.

So she sat down, perched on the edge of one of the armchairs overlooking the East River and downtown Manhattan and tried to muster the easy casual charm she was known for.

But it was hard to be casual and polite and basically indifferent when all she really wanted to do was just feast her eyes on him.

PJ Antonides had always been drop-dead handsome in a rugged, windblown, seaswept sort of way. Not a man she’d ever imagined in a suit.

He hadn’t even worn one to their wedding. Not that it had been a formal occasion. It had been five minutes in a courthouse office, paid fees, repeated vows, scrawled signatures, after which they’d come blinking out into the sunlight—married.

Now she looked at him and tried to find the carefree young man he’d been inside this older, harder, sharper version.

His lean face wasn’t as tanned as she remembered, and the lines around his eyes were deeper. But those eyes were still the deep intense green of the jade dragon that had been her grandmother’s favorite piece. His formerly tangled dark hair was now cut reasonably short and definitely neat with very little length to tangle, though it was ruffled a bit, as if he’d recently run his fingers through it. His shoulders were broader. And though jacketless at the moment, apparently PJ really did own a suit. She could see its navy jacket tossed over the back of his chair.

He obviously owned a dress shirt, too—a narrow-striped, pale-gray-and-white one. He had its long sleeves shoved halfway up his forearms, as if, even in running a corporation, he was still willing to get down and dirty with whatever had to be done. Beneath his unbuttoned collar dangled a loosened subdued burgundy-and-gray-patterned silk tie.

Ally wondered idly if his other tie was equally conservative.