Greek Affairs: To Take a Bride: The Markonos Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride / Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride

Twisting the cap back on the bottle, she turned to place it on the counter and almost staggered when the quick movement made her head start to swim.

‘Why not?’

Turning back to him, she frowned even more when his lean, dark bulk kept floating in and out of focus and nausea made a second grab at her stomach.

‘I need the loo,’ she said, fixing her muzzy gaze on the archway.

His hand closing around her arm stopped her from moving towards it. ‘We will finish this before you walk away.'

‘There is nothing to finish.’ Tugging free of his grip, she stepped around him and tried her best to walk in a straight line, only to find Andreas had moved to block her path.

Staring dizzily at the dark blue strip of his tie hanging down the front of his shirt, she laid a hand across her churning stomach. ‘Andreas, I don’t …'

‘You either tell me about Landreau or we do it the hard way,’ he warned her grimly. ‘And heed this, Louisa,’ he added, ‘you will not be leaving this house until I know everything about you and him—understand?'

Oh, she understood all right. Trying to ignore what was rumbling round inside her, she lifted her eyes to his angry face. ‘Where do you get off believing that you have that right?'

He sucked in his breath. ‘You are my wife. You belong to me.'

‘I do not belong to you!’ she cried out. ‘Will you stop saying that? I stopped belonging to you when you didn’t bother to come and get me five years ago! Now, please let me—’

‘What do you mean, I didn’t bother to come and get you? Where do you get off, telling a damn lie like that?'

This wasn’t the time for this. She was in real danger of losing the contents of her stomach on his shoes if she didn’t get to a loo quickly. But there was something in his harsh rasp that made her pause.

‘You couldn’t even manage a single telephone call to England to speak to me,’ she accused shakily. ‘I waited and waited for you to come and get me but you didn’t want to, did you, Andreas? As your brother Alex was so fond of telling m-me, I was the mistake you had to live with, but never, for one second, did I believe all of his mean rubbish until Nikos died and you took off to Athens to console yourself with another woman!'

CHAPTER SEVEN

THERE, it was out. The one secret she had been hugging inside herself for so long it actually ripped at the tissues of her ravaged senses to tear it free! If she had been less distressed she might have noticed the way his whole stance had frozen.

‘I h-hate you for that,’ she whispered. ‘I will never forgive you for doing that!'

His voice when it came was thick and hoarse. ‘Alex—my brother told you I …'

She nodded then wished she hadn’t when it set off the whole sick, dizzying feeling again. ‘And I might have been stupid enough to fall into your sexual trap again,’ she said bitterly, ‘but I will never, ever belong to you again! Now, just let me pass …'

Pushing him to one side, she fled with a hand pressed to her mouth, glad she’d already checked out the other rooms because it meant she could make directly for a finished bedroom with a bathroom attached.

When it was over and the room eventually stopped spinning she dared to move to the washbasin to freshen her mouth and splash cool water on her face. Everything was so new in the bathroom that even the bar of soap was still sealed in its wrapper. As she turned off the tap she caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror and was shocked to see how dreadfully pale she looked because she felt so tingly and hot. Her shoulders and arms had turned pink, she noticed. If she were back at the hotel she would be loading on the after-sun lotion by now but this bathroom contained only the bare essentials.

A sigh turned her round to stare at the closed bathroom door. She knew she couldn’t put it off. She had to go back out there and face him—finish it.

He was standing in front of the open wall of glass again with the rigid set of his back facing the room.

‘Max Landreau is my employer and a very good friend but he is not my lover,’ she stated, ‘and the only reason I am telling you that is if I have been unfortunate enough to conceive a baby I don’t want any doubt cast upon who the father is.'

He didn’t bother to answer. He didn’t even bother to turn. All he did was continue to stand there staring at the view as if it was more interesting than what she’d just said. Anger began to sizzle. It was enough that she deeply resented feeling forced into saying what she had, but to be ignored after saying it was the final straw.

As far as she was concerned she’d said more than enough to earn her freedom. ‘I’ll wait for you in the car—'

‘I did come to get you.’

About to spin away, she stilled to watch as he turned to look at her, his lean strong face hewn from rock against a backcloth of uninterrupted blue.

‘Say that again,’ she shook out.

‘I followed you to England but you refused to see me.’ He gave a flick of a long-fingered hand. ‘I was not going to bring this up but you did, so we might as well deal with it. It was a difficult period for both of us five years ago and I knew you needed time to come to terms with … what happened, but how much time, Louisa?’ A sigh wrenched from him. ‘You were grieving, I understood that. I behaved badly after the funeral. I knew I deserved everything that you dished out. But to refuse to see or even speak to me? To keep me hanging around in England like a dog to be whipped and even after weeks of it to still send me packing as if our years together meant nothing to you at all?'

Lost in confusion, Louisa gave a shake of her head. ‘But I didn’t refuse to see you.'

‘I phoned, I wrote; you refused to answer my calls or my letters.'

‘No,’ she denied, not wanting to believe this.

The flat line of his mouth offered up a derisive twist. ‘Lie to yourself if you feel you must do, but I know it happened, agape mou, and there is only so much banging of my head against the brick wall of your unforgiving nature I could take before I finally let it sink in that it really was over for us.'

The growing horror that he could be telling her the truth here really shook her. ‘I never knew you had come to England,’ she whispered.

Grim scepticism spun him away again. A different kind of churning took charge of her stomach as she walked towards him. ‘Andreas,’ she said. ‘I truly did not know! You came—to England? No one told me. Who did you speak to? Why didn’t they tell you where I …?'

Enlightenment suddenly began to dawn, dragging her feet to a shuddering halt a couple of steps from his hard, lean, unrelenting stance.

‘My parents,’ she breathed unsteadily.

Her parents had been so eager to get her away from this island, always resentful of the Markonos wealth and power and the way they believed Andreas had used her that summer. When Andreas had walked away after the funeral he had confirmed every bad thought they’d ever had about him.

And his family had not tried to hide their relief when she had eventually agreed to go back to England. For the best, everyone had said. You both need time to recover from your loss. So she’d given in to pressure and left the island, wanting, needing to get away from everything, not least from what she’d read as his desertion of her when she’d needed him the most.

Suddenly the strength drained from her legs and she pulled out one of the chairs then sank down onto it. By then Andreas had turned again and was studying her face with a hard, cold, unforgiving glitter while she sat there numbly recalling all the heartache and pain she had carried away with her along with the heavy drag of her numbing grief.

‘After arriving in England I became … very upset,’ she improvised because the truth was so impossible to admit. ‘H-hysterical,’ only just touched the edge of it. ‘The doctor decided it was best that I went away to—to convalesce.'

‘You were in hospital.?’ The stunned catch in his voice made her flinch.

‘More like a private retreat,’ she said, unable to look at him because even after five years she still found it difficult to accept how quickly she’d sunk into that dark place inside herself. ‘If—when you came for me my parents were supposed to tell you where I’d gone! They promised me, they promised …’

Then they’d lied and lied and lied in their determination to keep them apart. All those long, bleak, empty days and weeks when she’d waited for him to come and get her. All those ‘No, he hasn’t made contact’ replies when she’d asked the question—asked and asked! And she’d been so gently let down, so lovingly pitied.

‘You are telling me that your parents lied to me?’ Andreas said harshly. ‘Why the hell would they want to do that?'

Louisa felt her spine quiver as she drew in a breath. To her the why was obvious. ‘They didn’t like you.'

‘We were married!’ he raked back. ‘Whether they liked me or not should not have come into it! We were man and wife and we had just lost our son! We needed each other! It takes more than dislike to want to keep us apart like that!'

‘It w-wasn’t just them.’ Louisa put her hands up to her face and rubbed at it as if trying to rub away the pain of what she was going to say next. Then she dropped her hands and looked up at him standing there like a rumbling dark mountain threatening to erupt. ‘I wrote to you too,’ she told him thickly. ‘I phoned you here at the family villa and at your office in Athens, only to be told you were out of the country … Did your parents or your brother or your secretary pass on any of my messages to you?'

He did not need to answer because she knew that they hadn’t. Now she knew it but not back then when everyone had been so nice and gentle and careful with her.