The Markonos Bride

His hard mouth flicked out a tense grimace. He’d found her sunbathing on the beach in front of the rented villa. It had taken them two hours to fall madly in love with each other, two weeks before they gave in to their raging desires and finally took their feelings over the edge, followed by two weeks of totally rampant, reckless loving then two weeks of hell once Louisa told him he’d made her pregnant.

Her parents had despised him. His parents had despised him—but they’d despised Louisa more.

‘They think I’m a cheap little slut…’

Andreas winced at the memory of those words leaving her pain-stifled throat. Back then he could not even deny the charge because his parents had thought of her in that way. Her parents had seen him as an over-privileged, over-indulged, over-sexed seducer of innocent young females, but he could take their contempt because he had been indifferent to it. Louisa, on the other hand, could not take his parents’ low opinion of her.

‘They will come to love you as much as I do once you produce their first grandson,’ he could hear himself reassuring her with all the careless arrogance of his youth.

It had been great to believe at the age of twenty-two that love could conquer everything. With hindsight and eight years to add to his twenty-two he could now positively say that if he had been forced to live in Louisa’s shoes back then he would have walked away from their marriage a lot sooner than she had made her escape.

Maybe she should have run sooner. If she had run then maybe their son would still be alive now and he would have more than this ache he lived with night and day along with this—

He stopped the car.

Climbed out of it.

Walked away from it with his shoulders racked like iron bars.

He came to a stop at the head of the peninsula that separated the harbour town on his left from the luxury villas spread out along the coast to his right. Pushing his hands into the pockets of his black silk trousers, he honed his frowning gaze onto the string of white ferry lights once again.

Time to let go of the past and move on, his father had said. Andreas wished the hell that someone would tell him how he could make the past let go of him.

Had Louisa let it go? The question flicked like the tip of a whip across his grim features. How would he know? How the hell would he know anything about her when they’d had no contact in five years? She could be shacked up with some nice, steady Englishman for all he knew, giving him those soft, loving touches and smiles and—

His stomach muscles contracted—all of him contracted: mouth, jaw, throat, chest, loins…

Turning away from what was now threatening to eat into him, Andreas wrenched at his tie as he walked back to the car. The strip of dark silk slid from around his shirt collar and landed on the passenger seat. He followed it with his jacket then flipped diamond-studded cuff-links out of his white shirt cuffs and discarded them the same way. A minute later and he was back behind the wheel and heading for town with his shirt tugged open at his brown throat and the sleeves rolled up his hair-roughened forearms, his mind grimly fixed on only one thing.

Finding a bar and getting drunk to blot out the memories.

Resting her forearms against the ferry rail, Louisa watched a set of car headlights glide over the peninsula that formed a natural barrier between the island’s tiny harbour town and the more luxurious homes which lay in a scatter of twinkling lights along the side of the hill. If she looked hard enough she would be able to pick out the lights belonging to the Markonos villa—but she didn’t look that hard. The villa might have been home to her once but she felt no attachment to it now.

A sigh feathered her as she leant against the ferry rail with the warm breeze gently blowing her silk gold hair back from her face. She’d been making this pilgrimage once a year for the last five years to visit her son’s resting place and not once in those five years had she stepped foot on Markonos land. It was as if, once she’d left Andreas, she’d severed almost all links with the Markonos name.

Coming here simply brought her back to her son.

‘OK?’ a gruff voice questioned beside her.

Turning her head to look up at the tall, dark, rather handsome young man who’d come to stand beside her, Louisa saw the anxious look in his eyes and smiled.

‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me, Jamie. I come back here too often for it to be a major stress to me.’

And time softens pain, she added silently as she turned to watch the set of car headlights disappear from view down the other side of the peninsula. It would be on its way to meet the ferry, she judged. By the time the ferry opened its doors, the tiny port would be swarming with activity, the café bars lining the waterfront alive with a festive atmosphere that traditionally hit the island once a week.

‘Do you remember any of this?’ she asked her younger brother.

He had been so young when they first came to this island, but now look at him, Louisa thought fondly as he dipped his long body so he could rest his forearms on the rail beside her own. The scrawny little boy with a thatch of blonde hair had grown into a male hunk—youthful-style. And his hair was no longer blonde but dark and cropped to suit the current fashion, his attractive face trying its best to shed the last of its baby softness that still lingered around his cheeks.

‘I remember standing right about here with you to watch as we rounded the hill,’ he murmured.

‘You mean you were hanging over the rail in excitement,’ Louisa teased him. ‘I was so scared you were going to topple over and fall in the water that I had a death grip on the waistband of your jeans.’

Jamie grinned, all flashing white teeth and man-boyish charm. ‘Mum and Dad were no use. They’d caught the holiday bug and were too busy canoodling further along the rail to notice if we both fell in the water.’

Louisa’s blue eyes widened. ‘You remember that?’

The grin changed to a grimace. ‘I remember too much about that time if you want the truth. Like you meeting Andreas and flipping your lid over him then all the craziness that followed which ended up with you being abandoned here.’

‘I was not abandoned!’ Louisa protested.

‘Our parents abandoned you, to the Greek family from hell.’

‘That’s just not true—’

‘Then Andreas abandoned you.’

‘Because he had to finish his degree,’ Louisa pointed out.

‘Because he got you pregnant,’ Jamie said bluntly, ‘was forced to marry you then ran away—the coward.’

‘Jamie!’ his sister gasped out. ‘I always thought you liked Andreas!’

‘I did,’ he shrugged, ‘until he messed you up then threw you out of his life.’

‘He did not throw me out of anything,’ Louisa denied, shocked that he was saying any of this. ‘I left Andreas of my own free will. And I would love to know, Jamie, why on earth you invited yourself along on this trip if you still feel so bad about what happened back then!’

Straightening away from the rail, her brother shoved his hands into the pockets of his low-slung baggy jeans. ‘For Nikos,’ he said. ‘I wanted to pay my respects to Nikos and I knew I wouldn’t get another chance for years once I go to uni and…’ he pulled in a deep breath ‘…and I’m looking forward to coming face to face with Andreas so I can punch him.’

Louisa couldn’t help it—she laughed. ‘He would kill you before you lifted your fist to him,’ she mocked. ‘Have you forgotten he’s six feet three inches tall and built like a tank?’

‘I’ve been working out,’ her brother said stiffly.

‘For this chance to punch Andreas?’

‘No,’ he shifted uncomfortably, knowing that his sister knew that he’d been working out purely and simply to impress the girls, ‘but I would still love the chance to have a go at him.’

‘Because you believe you have—what right?’

His chin thrust forwards. ‘The right of a brother who never did understand why Dad didn’t beat the hell out of Andreas years ago when he left you in the state you were in.’

Grief-stricken, in other words, Louisa recalled bleakly, so inconsolable Andreas had taken himself out of her presence to work out his own grief elsewhere. When she had finally given in to pressure and let her parents take her back to England with them, she’d expected Andreas to come and get her but he never had…

Shaking her head, she stopped herself from going down that particularly bumpy pathway. To recall how she’d eventually run back to him, only to discover how he had found his own form of consolation, was a fool’s game, she told herself.

‘Well, you are out of luck because Andreas won’t be here,’ she informed her brother. ‘His mother’s email said he’s in Thailand. And since this trip here is about Nikos not Andreas,’ she then added curtly, ‘I would prefer it if you kept your vengeful thoughts to yourself.’

With that she spun back to the ferry rail, frowning and wondering why she had bothered to defend Andreas when he had turned out to be such a rat, a wimp, a useless, faithless—