One Kiss in... London: A Shameful Consequence / Ruthless Tycoon, Innocent Wife / Falling for her Convenient Husband

But best of all in the evenings was the sound of the seaplane.

Because it brought him home.

She loved watching it touch down and then Nico step out. Sometimes the tide was in and the jetty submerged, but the plane would take him as close as possible and he would roll up his trousers and walk barefoot. She would have to keep looking away, to pretend not to be waiting, not to be watching, when he came in.

‘How was your day?’ she asked this evening.

‘Impossible,’ Nico told her, and then pulled out the phone and gave Charlotte the next day’s orders. He’d spent the day in several town halls on the mainland, poring through records, and then, to cap things off, the extremely generous offer he had put in on the stretch of land beside his house had again been refused by the developer.

‘I’ll start dinner,’ she offered.

‘I’ll get myself something later,’ Nico said, because Despina always left him a feast of meals, but she ignored him and as she brushed past him Nico caught her fragrance. He saw how far she had come in these last days, and he wanted her on the couch weary and half-asleep, as she had been in London, because this version of Constantine was a one he was struggling to ignore. He went to place his laptop on the table, but the space was taken up by the outline of a huge jigsaw.

‘Despina found it,’ Connie apologised, ‘though it doesn’t have a picture to work from. It’s handmade …’

He did not want to talk about jigsaws; he did not want to be standing here, wondering how Leo’s day had been; he did not want to want the scent of home. He did not want her laying two plates on the bench. He selected a bottle of wine and opened it to breathe as she brought over the meal—a simple meal, of crisp salad with local olives and flakes of feta cheese warmed a little by slices of lamb tossed in oregano. There was a pita bread she had grilled, and though he did not want this, somehow they moved from the bench to the table. He sat there, doing the impossible jigsaw with one hand, idly eating from a fork with the other and it felt, for Nico, far too good to last.

‘What time are the fireworks tonight?’ She looked up from the jigsaw and he saw how much more readily she smiled these days.

‘Fireworks?’ Nico frowned.

‘Well, it’s morning in Australia,’ she pointed out, because just as night fell here, Nico would head out to the garden with his phone. Just as Australia’s working morning struck, so, too, did Nico, placing angry calls to the developer, furious at the lack of response to his questions and offers, clearly not used to being ignored or not getting his way. ‘I want the jetty to be mine,’ Nico said. ‘It belongs to the next block of land. But I’ll just have to go on wanting. He’s knocked back my offer. I refuse to call again.’

‘Till next time.’ Connie grinned, and then it faded. ‘I’ve got a difficult phone call to make, too. Not tonight,’ she added, as they naturally moved from the table to the lounge. How much more comfortable she felt to sit beside him now. She looked out at the sea and thought for a quiet moment before speaking. ‘But I have been putting it off.’

‘To your parents?’ Nico asked, but Connie shook her head.

Until she had sorted things with Nico, she could not stand to talk with them. She was injured, too, on behalf of Leo, the grandson they had made no effort to contact. ‘I want to know how Stavros is.’

‘Why?’ Nico asked.

‘Because,’ Connie answered, ‘I worry about him—I want to know how things are going …’

‘After the way he treated you?’ Nico shook his head. ‘Why would you care for someone who hurt you?’

‘It wasn’t all his fault.’

‘His part in it was, though,’ Nico pointed out. ‘He chose not to tell you the truth, he chose to deceive you.’ He made a slicing gesture to his throat. ‘Gone!’

‘Just like that?’ Connie challenged, and she wasn’t defending Stavros, more she was defending herself. ‘Sometimes things are more complicated—’

‘Not really,’ Nico interrupted. ‘He lied to you, and in my book that means you don’t have to worry about him any more.’ He flicked his hand and said it again. ‘Gone.’

She didn’t like this conversation, didn’t like learning the rules of relationships according to Nico, painfully aware that very soon it might be she who was gone, dismissed with a flick of his hand, for not telling what she knew.

‘Anyway, let’s not talk about it now,’ Nico said, because tonight he could not accept just wanting. ‘Let’s just enjoy tonight.’ And it wasn’t what he said, more the way he said it that brought something back, that had her remember there was so much more to this man. He turned to face her on the sofa and smiled a smile she had seen before. With just one look he could melt her worries, with the merest lilt to his voice it was only them in the world. He leant over to pour her some wine, but she put her hand over the glass.

‘Not for me, thanks.’

She couldn’t quite work out what had happened, how the sofa had suddenly become the most dangerous place in the house.

‘I’m going to bed. I’ll just clear the bench.’ She stood because Nico was stretching out on the sofa.

‘Leave it,’ Nico said. ‘Despina will do it in the morning.’

She laughed, for the first time in … she honestly could not remember how long, possibly a year, but for the first time in ages Connie threw her head back and laughed. ‘You were almost perfect there,’ Connie explained. ‘I thought you were going to clear it yourself.’

‘Why would I?’ The thought had never entered his head and she watched as he stretched out fully, and somehow she wanted to join him, to look out toward the darkened sea, to talk and, yes, perhaps laugh again, and maybe something more. ‘Goodnight, Constantine.’

‘Connie,’ she corrected him, as she did so often, but Nico shook his head.

‘Not to me.’ She turned to walk toward the bedroom and his voice followed her. ‘And by the way, I am.’

‘Am what?’ It came back to her then—a something that made her dare not turn around, and she stood holding her breath in the hallway, closing her eyes as she heard his response.

‘Perfect.’

She walked to her bedroom, checked Leo and then climbed into bed, trying not to think about the something that had happened, but it was rippling through her body like a tide with no return. A mother, yes, she would always be a mother, but the wave was growing stronger, dousing her, as the woman she also was returned.

Nico Eliades was, to Connie, perfect.

It was she who was flawed.

CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_9ec98a6a-8693-5f37-b7f9-2a0ef0250b6e)

SHE looked much the same to Nico when he poured real coffee from the pot and offered her one, but Connie, sitting on the sofa holding Leo, shook her head. She seemed unable to meet his eyes.

‘Did you sleep well?’ Nico asked.

‘Wonderfully,’ Connie said, taking great interest in her middle toenail, embarrassed by her own Nicodriven dreams. ‘You?’

‘Not so good.’

Nico was more concerned with the change in himself to notice any in Constantine, how he’d almost lost last night, at least where women were concerned, a very level head.

Last night, watching her eat, hearing her laugh, well, as she’d headed to bed, in an unguarded moment Nico knew he had flirted. It came as second nature to him, he consoled himself, with any beautiful woman … but there must be none of that, Nico firmly decided as the strained conversation went on. They hadn’t sorted out the consequences of their first night together yet. It was not time think about moving on to their next.

‘Did Leo’s crying wake you?’

‘A bit.’

It had.

It had been hell getting to sleep, sensing her in the next room and, like a punishment for the depravity of his own thoughts, every time he finally drifted off to sleep, the baby would wake him, and he would hear the murmur of her voice. He tried not to picture what she was wearing, if anything, tried not to go in there as he heard her settle the babe, tried to ignore the creak of her bed as she climbed back in it.

He had not considered at first that it might be a problem—his mind had been focussed on other things, the news he might have a son, the appalling conditions she was living in, but now they were away from all that, now that she was here in his house, in the next bedroom, suddenly he was remembering all too often, the bliss of their one night.

‘I’m going to work.’