The Scandalous Warehams

This was certainly not something he had envisaged when he’d decided that Lizzie would make him a perfect pretend wife, Ilios thought grimly. Sleeping on the sofa whilst she occupied his bed, in order to protect her from herself …

CHAPTER NINE

‘COFFEE.’

It was a statement, not a question, and the familiar darkly smoky male voice in which it was delivered brought Lizzie abruptly out of her sleep.

Ilios, dressed in a white towelling bathrobe and smelling discreetly of clean, warm male flesh, was standing beside the bed—her side of the bed—holding out to her a stylish white china mug, obviously wanting her to take it from him. Obediently Lizzie struggled out of her warm cocoon of bedclothes to sit up, reaching for the mug with one hand whilst keeping the bedclothes pressed to her with the other.

‘I’m still not safe, then?’ Ilios drawled, a gleam of something approaching amusement in the golden eagle eyes that held Lizzie spellbound.

He was actually smiling! Delight flooded through her, causing her to smile back at him before she could stop herself as she took the mug he was holding out to her. Until recollection of their conversation of the night before made Lizzie groan inwardly, and curse whatever had been responsible for her reckless folly.

Unable to come up with a suitably crushing and mature response, she looked away from him, almost sloshing coffee onto the bedding when she saw that the sofa cushions she had carefully put in place last night had gone.

Her eyes wide with disbelief and censure, she accused Ilios, ‘You took the cushions away.’

‘I had no other choice. I’m Greek! I have to think what it would do to my reputation as a man if Maria arrived and found that you had barricaded yourself on one side of the bed in isolation.’

‘You could have told her that we’d had a quarrel.’

‘I could have,’ Ilios agreed. ‘But there is a saying that you should never sleep with your anger or without your wife. Maria is of the old school, and she would believe that the more intense the quarrel, the more passionate the making up. In Maria’s eyes a quarrel between man and wife can result in only one thing—the arrival of a new baby nine months later.’

Lizzie shuddered inwardly and trembled outwardly. Why had he said that? He must know the effect it was likely to have on her after what she had told him. If this was his way of ensuring that she didn’t give way to her desire for him, then Lizzie didn’t think it was going to work very well.

‘There must be something you can say to Maria that would make her accept that we should sleep in separate rooms—after all, we aren’t even married yet.’

‘No, there is nothing,’ Ilios told her. ‘You must know that in Greece, especially this part of Greece, a man’s maleness is something he must prove to all those who know him in order to win and maintain their respect. That means being the master of his own house. No Greek male would ever publicly admit that his wife’s sexual advances were unwelcome.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that you that you told her that,’ Lizzie informed him indignantly.

Ilios looked down at the bed. Make-up free, with her hair down round her shoulders and the part of her body that wasn’t swathed in bedcovers shrouded by what looked like an oversized tee shirt, Lizzie looked nothing like a temptress of any kind. So why was his body telling him in no uncertain terms that she was, and that it was very tempted by her?

Absently glancing around the room, Lizzie noticed something she had not taken in before—the bedding on other side of the bed was pristinely neat. Untouched, in fact.

She turned accusingly to Ilios. ‘You didn’t sleep with me, did you?’

When his eyebrows rose she corrected herself hastily.

‘I mean you didn’t sleep in this bed last night.’

‘No. I didn’t.’

‘So where did you sleep, then?’

‘On the sofa. It was late when I finished working, and I didn’t want to disturb you. You see, you were sleeping on my side of the bed. I could have moved you in your sleep—without waking you, of course—but, given what you had told me, I didn’t think it wise to run the risk of you waking up in my arms and thinking …’

‘That I’d reached for you in my sleep?’ Lizzie guessed.

‘Something like that,’ Ilios agreed tersely. What he had been going to say was that he hadn’t wanted her waking up and thinking that he returned her desire and wanted her. Nor was he going to admit that the thought of holding her in his arms had tormented his body with such a savagely fierce sexual ache for her through the long, slow hours of the night that he hadn’t been able to sleep.

‘I’ve been thinking that perhaps we should just be engaged. Not actually get married. And then—well, you could tell Maria that I’m not the kind of woman who shares a bed with her husband before he is her husband,’ Lizzie told Ilios.

‘I need a wife, not a fiancée. You know that. And besides, it’s too late.’

‘Too late?’ Lizzie’s heart had started to thump uncomfortably heavily. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve got an appointment at eleven-thirty this morning with the notary who has arranged all the paperwork for our wedding. He will accompany us to the town hall, so that the formalities can be finalized, and then we can be married.’

‘Today? So soon? But surely that isn’t possible? I mean, doesn’t it take longer than that to arrange things?’

‘Normally speaking, yes, but when I explained to my friends at the town hall how impatient I am to make you my wife, they very kindly speeded things up for us. Manos Construction is currently contracted to do some refurbishment work on certain parts of the city, and the local government is keen to get that work finished ahead of schedule.’

‘You mean you bribed them into making it possible for us to get married so quickly?’ Lizzie accused him.

‘No, I did not “bribe” them, as you put it.’ Anger flashed in Ilios’s eyes. ‘I do not conduct my business by way of bribes—I thought I had already made that clear to you. All I did was agree to do what I could to ensure the contract is finished ahead of time and to the highest standard. Something I always insist on. We are subject to earthquakes here. It is always important that this is taken into account on construction projects, although some less than scrupulous contractors do try to cut corners. Now, I shall get dressed whilst you finish your coffee, and then leave you in peace to get dressed yourself.’

Peace? How was it possible for her to have anything remotely approaching peace now that she had met Ilios? Lizzie asked herself grimly just over an hour later, when she stood in the dressing room she was now sharing with her soon-to-be husband, studying her own reflection.

She was wearing an off-white wool dress with a bubble skirt and a neat boxy matching jacket—the nearest thing she had been able to find amongst her new clothes that looked anything like ‘bridal’. Not that this was a proper wedding, or she a proper bride, of course. She must remember that. She was hardly likely to forget it, was she? It had been a shock to learn that they were getting married so quickly, but she suspected that she should have guessed Ilios wouldn’t want to waste any time putting his plans into practice.

She walked towards the door. It was a strange feeling to know that the next time she looked at her reflection in this mirror she would not be Lizzie Wareham any more. She would be Mrs Ilios Manos.

CHAPTER TEN

‘REMEMBER that you agreed to this,’ Ilios warned Lizzie as they stood together on the steps leading of the town hall.

Ilios’s notary, who had been with them the whole time whilst the simple ceremony making them man and wife had been taking place, stood back discreetly as Ilios took her arm.

Not trusting herself to speak, Lizzie nodded her head and forced a brief tight smile. It was all very well telling herself that it wasn’t a real marriage, nor a proper wedding, nor Ilios her real husband—there had still been that dreadful moment when they had stood together before the official marrying them and inside her head she had seen the small church in the village where she had grown up, and herself dressed in white, with her father standing proudly at her side, her mother fussing over her dress and her sisters laughing, Ilios watching them smiling, and she had felt a tearing, aching sense of loss strike her right to her heart.

‘Come,’ Ilios urged her.

The sun was shining, drying pavements still wet from the rain that had fallen whilst they were inside the building, and the breeze was cool. Summer, with its heat, was still many weeks away, and for the first time since she had agreed to marry Ilios Lizzie longed desperately for those weeks to fly past, so that she would be free to go home to her family. It had felt so wrong, so lonely getting married without them—even if it was a pretend marriage—and she ached with nostalgia for her childhood and homesickness for her sisters and the twins.

The sunlight shone brightly on the newness of her wedding ring. She must stop feeling sorry for herself and remember why she had agreed to marry Ilios, she told herself—why she had had to marry him. He was still cupping her elbow, very much the attentive bridegroom—no doubt for the benefit of the notary to whom he was now speaking in Greek. Both of them were looking at her, their conversation excluding her, reminding her that she was an outsider in a foreign land and very much alone.

The pressure of Ilios’s hold on her arm urged her closer to him, as though … as though he had somehow sensed what she was feeling and wanted to reassure her—just as a real husband would have done. That, of course, was ridiculous. Even if he had guessed how she was feeling he was hardly likely to care, was he? She could feel his thumb lightly rubbing her skin through her jacket. He was probably so used to caressing his lovers that he didn’t even realise what he was doing, Lizzie thought waspishly, as she tried to ignore the effect his absent-minded caress was having on her body. He was turning towards her, smiling warmly at her—a false smile, for his audience, of course.

‘Forgive us for speaking in Greek, agapi mou,’ he told her. ‘We were just discussing some business. But now, Nikos, I am impatient to take my beautiful wife for a celebratory lunch.’

The notary had soon gone, and Ilios was handing her back into his car.

Lizzie had assumed that Ilios would take her straight back to the apartment, and leave her to go on to his office, but instead he parked the car in a convenient space outside an elegant-looking restaurant.

‘I didn’t think you were serious about us celebrating,’ Lizzie told him.

‘I wasn’t—but we do have to eat,’ he pointed out dismissively, before getting out of the car and coming round to her door to open it for her.