The Good Greek Wife?

‘In good time,’ Zarek repeated, reaching out a hand to the edge of the door and pulling it open wide, the meaning of his message clear. He wanted everyone out of here and Jason would be a fool to ignore the signs. They were dismissed and that was it.

But still he lingered, looking across at Penny, a question in his eyes.

‘Penny?’ he queried, appearing to check how she felt.

How did she feel? She supposed to some it would seem wonderful that her husband, this man who had been away missing for so long—who had once been believed to be dead—would lay claim to her like this. To them it might appear that he was still so ardently in love that he couldn’t wait to be alone with his wife, to restore the links of their marriage, renew their relationship.

But recalling what had happened between them before he had left, the rifts that had opened up between them, dividing them from each other, she knew she couldn’t see it that way at all. Oh, yes, Zarek wanted to be alone with her but for his own personal, darker reasons rather than any loving reunion. And she could only begin to guess at just what those reasons might actually be.

But, ‘It’s fine, Jason,’ she said, exerting every ounce of control she could manage to keep her voice firm and even when inside her nerves were quailing at the thought of how far from fine everything was. ‘Absolutely fine.’

Was there some light of approval in the flash of the dark eyes he turned in her direction? The niggling worry that there was also something else had her shifting in her seat, finding herself able to move at last. Her brain seemed to have started working again too, sending the message Zarek is back—Zarek is back!—into her thoughts in a mixture of wild delight and shuddering apprehension. What was she to think? Yes, Zarek was back—but just who was this man who had been missing for two years? And what had happened to him while he had been away?

Exactly who had come home to her?

Chapter Four

PENNY pushed herself to her feet as Jason, Hermione and Petros made their way out of the door, tight knots forming in her stomach at the thought of being alone with her husband for the first time in so long.

She had never felt like this before, not even in the very beginning when she had first known him and had become his bride so very soon after that. Then she had been fizzing with excitement, just waiting for everyone else to go and leave them alone so that she and Zarek could become truly man and wife.

She had been so sure then. Sure that he wanted her—that he loved her. After all, he’d married her, hadn’t he? At barely twenty-two she had been so very young, so naïve in matters of the heart, and even more innocent of the force of physical desire. It was only later that bitter disillusionment had set in and she had come to realise that Zarek was more than capable of wanting without any sort of love.

The door was shut, everyone else was gone. Shifting from one foot to another, Penny nerved herself for whatever was to come. At least standing upright she felt better equipped to face him. She had always been considered too tall by most men, but never for Zarek Michaelis. Somewhere in his past family history there had been an ancestor—probably his Irish great-great-great-grandfather who was always referred to as The Giant—who had brought a gene for height into the family and Zarek had inherited that in maturity. Even at five feet ten, Penny had to tilt her head back slightly to meet his eyes.

‘So now…’ she said as he closed the door a little too firmly for her mental comfort. ‘What…?’

But the words caught in her throat as if a knot had tied tight around them, preventing her from getting them out. She could only stand and stare as Zarek lifted a hand to the right side of his face, just by his temple, and rubbed at the skin as if something there was troubling him.

‘Are you all right?’ she questioned sharply. ‘Is something wrong?’

When he didn’t respond but simply stood, back stiff, shoulders tight, head turned away from her, she felt the rush of memory like a sort of stinging mental pins and needles flood into her mind.

Someone else had done just that. And not too long ago. The memory seemed to dance at the corners of her thoughts, slipping away whenever she tried to get a grip on it. But right now she had other, more important concerns on her mind.

‘What is it? Zarek? Do you have a headache?’

Still he didn’t answer but stood motionless as a statue so that she launched herself towards him, covering the short space between them in a matter of seconds and whirling round in front of him.

‘Tell me what’s wrong?’

Without pausing to think, she reacted instinctively, lifting her hand to cover his where it still lay against his face, pressing her fingers over his as she looked up into his dark, shuttered face, seeing the way his heavy lids had come down over the darkness of his eyes. Hiding them from her.

‘Tell me!’

For the space of a couple of jerky heartbeats he didn’t move a muscle, but then at last he shifted slightly, moving the weight of his body from one foot to another, and drew in his breath on a slow, deep sigh. The warmth of his flesh reached her through the fine cotton of his shirt and the movement brought a waft of a deeply sensual scent, the ozone from the sea, sunshine on skin, and underneath it all the warm, musky scent that was personal to Zarek alone.

And in a split second the mood of the moment had changed. Where there had been nerve-twisting apprehension there was suddenly a heart-stilling tension. In Penny’s veins the blood seemed to pulse infinitely slowly, shockingly heavy. Her breath too seemed frozen, leaving her with her mouth slightly open, unable to inhale, unable to think.

All she was aware of was the feel of Zarek’s skin under her fingers, the heat and the softness of it, with the power of muscle and bone beneath the supple flesh. It was as if sparks had flown from his skin to hers, holding her melded to him, unable to move.

And the burn along her nerves reminded her only too painfully of how it had once been between them. The way that she had never been able to resist his touch, his kiss. The way that her body was yearning for it, reaching towards him even now.

‘Zarek…’

His name was just a whisper across lips that were suddenly parched and dry, her tongue seeming to tangle on the sound so that she had to swallow hard to ease the discomfort in her throat. ‘Zarek…’

‘No…’ Zarek said, his eyes still closed against her, his voice rough and seeming slightly ragged at the edges. ‘Don’t…’

‘Don’t what?’

But then he opened his eyes and looked down into her face and she knew exactly what he meant. What exactly he did not want her to do.

He didn’t want her to touch him. He was rejecting without words the feel of her hand on his, the connection of skin on skin. He didn’t have to say a word; it was there in his face, in his eyes.

And that was when she realised just what a terrible mistake she had made. Impulse and concern had made her break through the barriers that she had felt between them. The barriers that she had erected in her mind in self-defence because of the need to protect herself from the shock of his sudden arrival, the memory of all that had been between them before he had left.