The Good Greek Wife?

And Penny had run straight into Jason’s arms. She had been planning having him declared dead with his detested stepbrother. And the wild fire of fury that had flared inside him at the sight had been a struggle to bring under control. It was fierce, it was unthinking, it was irrational, but the sight of the woman—the wife—he had come back to find enfolded in the arms of the man he knew had been scheming his downfall for all of his adult life had had him fighting with himself not to react in anger. Unable to stay and watch, he had turned on his heel and marched away before the urge to declare himself there and then had got the better of him.

Shaking his head, he fixed his eyes on the now moonlit sea as it lapped against the edge of the beach below the cottage, the slow, dark swirl of the waves suiting his mood completely.

Jason had already taken the first steps towards acquiring what he and his mother had always wanted. His elder stepbrother had barely waited for Zarek’s disappearance to be confirmed before he had been trying to apply for power of attorney to run Odysseus Shipping. He hadn’t hesitated to make his move as soon as the opportunity had presented itself. But of course the legal control rested with Zarek’s wife.

With Penny, who had had a far greater return on her investment of time in their marriage than she could ever have hoped to achieve.

Or thought she had.

He rubbed at the ugly scar that marked his temple, grimacing as the wound throbbed with the ache of memory.

That was one of the reasons he had come back to Ithaca in total anonymity, his true appearance obscured behind the wild growth of beard and hair. And it seemed that it had worked. Tonight he had come face to face with his wife for the first time in years and she had shown no sign of recognising him.

But just hearing her voice again had brought it all back.

‘Go, then!’

The memory was so clear that he actually glanced up and in the mirror over the fireplace almost as if he expected to see that the door had opened while he had been absorbed in his thoughts and Penny had walked into the room.

‘If you’re going, then go! I don’t know why you’re even telling me this. It’s not as if you’re asking my permission!’

Shaking his head to try and drive the sound of his wife’s voice, still shrill even after all these years, from his mind, he paced across the room to the window to stare out at the now moonlit sea where it lapped against the pebbles of Dexa beach. The wind was getting up, making the olive trees sway wildly in the breeze.

He was damn sure he hadn’t been asking for permission or anything like it. The truth was that after the way their marriage had all but disintegrated in the short time they’d been together he’d firmly believed she would be as grateful for a break as he was. She’d even backed away from him sexually, and sex had been one of the things that had been right between them at the start. The glue that had kept them together.

‘Just go—’ she had flung at him, her sexy mouth distorting in the force of her rejection of him. ‘But be warned, if you go, then don’t expect me to be here waiting for you when you return.’

So had she waited? He’d thought she had when he had discovered that she was still here on Ithaca. He’d even allowed himself to wonder just for a moment whether she might hold out some hope that he would come back. From what she’d just said it seemed that it was the legalities resulting from his disappearance that had kept her here, not any lingering loyalty to her marriage.

But then she’d made it only too plain exactly why she’d married him in the first place. He’d been fool enough to believe her declaration that she wanted children—longed for them, she’d said—when in fact she’d been lying through her teeth. She’d even been taking the pill and when he’d confronted her with the evidence she’d thrown it back in his face.

‘Bring children into this marriage—you have to be joking. Where did I sign up for that? Where was that written into the pre-nup you got me to sign?’

He’d never thought he’d need to do that. He’d signed and sealed the financial details, but never made them dependent on the one reason he’d determined on marriage in the first place.

And Penny had proved herself nothing but a scheming little gold-digger. She’d married him for those financial details and never intended to carry out her part of the agreement. Never intended to give him the heir he so longed for. Even if he had come back safe and sound from the Troy, she would still have come out of their brief marriage a millionaire in her own right. He had been happy to agree to very generous terms, never thinking he would have to fulfil them before he had even celebrated his first wedding anniversary. For ten short months of commitment, Penny would walk away with a huge profit.

But not as much as she would profit from his supposed death. From the will that he’d changed in her favour when they had married. One thing was clear. She wanted to realise her assets, get her hands on the company.

It must have felt like the answer to her prayers—as if all her birthdays had come at once—when he had done exactly what she’d wanted. He hadn’t come back, leaving the field wide open to her. She hadn’t even had to go to the trouble of divorcing him and so risking losing half the money she had married him for.

Pushing his hands through the long mane of hair, he faced his reflection in the mirror and saw the darkness in the eyes that stared back at him, the tautness of the jaw line under the thick growth of beard. Remembered anger tightened his lips until they almost disappeared. There was a way to deal with this that would have much more impact, and it seemed that Penny herself had just given him the perfect opportunity he had been looking for.

He’d been away too long—an absence he had not been able to do anything about—but the last week or two he had spent waiting and watching, just to see what he would be walking into when he made his return. That was all over now. The time for waiting and watching was past.

Heading into the tiny, primitive bathroom, he opened a cupboard and reached for scissors, a razor. It was time he came out from behind his concealing disguise and made his presence known.

Zarek Michaelis was back. And very soon the whole world would know it.

And so too would his errant, untrustworthy wife.

He was looking forward to seeing the look on her face when she realised that she was not going to get her greedy fingers on the fortune that she had hoped—believed—was hers. Or that the new life she had declared that she wanted would not be on the cards any time soon.

When she discovered that the husband she had believed was dead and out of her life for good was in fact very much alive and ready to take back the reins of his previous existence.

‘Penelope, it really is time to make a decision.’

Hermione leaned forward as she spoke, dark eyes boring into the face of the woman opposite her, long fingernails tapping on the polished wood of the boardroom table to emphasise the point she was making.

‘We can’t let things go on any longer as they are.’

‘We?’ Penny questioned, determined not to let Zarek’s stepmother run this meeting, have things all her own way.

There was no escaping the decision that she had known she had to face some time. The decision everyone had been demanding she make for a year or more now. And deep down she knew she’d already made it. But it didn’t mean that she was happy about it.

‘We are all shareholders,’ her mother-in-law pointed out, the bite of acid on the words making Penny flinch inwardly.

‘Minority shareholders,’ she flashed back, determined not to show how her stomach was tying itself in knots; the fight she was having to keep at least some degree of composure in the face of the bitterness of the inevitable.

‘But nevertheless Odysseus Shipping is a family concern.’

It was Petros, Hermione’s second son and Jason’s younger brother who spoke, shifting his bulky form on his chair in a movement that echoed the impatience in his voice.

‘And you are blocking us from playing a part in running the company,’ he tossed over the table at her. ‘We all need to put our expertise to work to keep it running—and growing. Without Zarek it has become a rudderless ship.’

His stiff tone and totally focused expression gave no sign at all of even noticing the pun.

‘It needs someone in charge.’

‘I am in charge,’ Penny declared, stiffening in her seat.

This was how it had been from the moment that Zarek had first been declared missing. The rest of the family had barely given her time to register the loss of her husband, let alone grieve for him, before they had been putting pressure on her to find a new head of the family firm, and at least once every month they had dragged the subject of his successor up again. She’d tried to hold it together, she really had. But she’d had enough.

‘It’s a shipping empire,’ Petros dismissed her protest with a contemptuous wave of his hand. ‘A man should be in charge because we all know Zarek isn’t coming home. And until things are made official then the company will always be in a shaky state. A prey for rumour and scandal in the papers. An insecure bet for investors.’

‘You know what has to be done.’ Jason leaned forward now to distract her attention. Obviously he had seen the way her jaw had tightened, her breath hissing in between clenched teeth, and he was clearly worried that she was going to go back on what she’d told him last night. ‘Penny, it’s over two years since Zarek went missing. There has been no sign of him, no word in all that time. It’s time we accepted what we all know as the truth and had him officially declared dead.’

There. It was out. The words seemed to land on the table with a deafening thud, lying there in front of her in an almost solid form. Too real to reject or deny. But now when it came to it she didn’t know if she could go through with this.

‘It takes seven years to have someone who’s missing officially declared dead.’

‘Not in a case like this,’ Jason reminded her. ‘Not when there is so much evidence as to what really happened and that you can file a petition to have him legally declared dead. You know that everything points to the assumption that Zarek died that day on the boat. Even the pirate chief himself said…’

‘I know what he said!’ Penny’s tone was sharp as much from the knowledge that she really didn’t have a leg to stand on as from the fear of hearing those words spoken aloud again.

‘That’s him,’ the leader of the pirates who had boarded the Troy, the boat that Zarek had been on on the very last day he had been seen, had said when they had shown him a photograph of Zarek during the investigation into what had happened. ‘That’s the one. And, yes, he’s dead. I put a bullet in his head myself.’

He had been so openly defiant, so proud at the thought that he had killed one of the hated Westerners, the rich who had so much more than he and his band had ever had, that he hadn’t even cared that he had convicted himself of murder with his own words.