Книга - A Passionate Marriage

A Passionate Marriage
Michelle Reid


Wanting his wife… back!Greek tycoon Leandros Petronades married Isobel on the heels of a wild affair. But, within a year, the marriage crashed and burned. Three years later Leandros wants to finalize their divorce. He's found a girl who will make him a suitable wife… so unlike fiery Isobel!But face-to-face again with Isobel in Athens, Leandros is in for a shock: their all-consuming mutual attraction is just as strong as ever! Suddenly, his plan has changed and he's ready to tame his headstrong wife… by whatever means it takes!









A Passionate Marriage





Michelle Reid











www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)




CONTENTS


CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE




CHAPTER ONE


LEANDROS PETRONADES sat lazing on a sunbed on the deck of his yacht and looked out on the bay of San Estéban. Satisfaction toyed with his senses. The new Spanish resort had developed into something special and having enjoyed a very much hands-on experience during its development, he felt that sense of satisfaction was well deserved. Plus the fact that he had multiplied his original investment, he was business-orientated enough to add.

He had done a lot of that during the four years since he took over from his late father, he mused idly. Multiplying original investments had become an expectation for him.

Which was probably why he’d found this project just that bit different. It had always been more than just another investment. He had been in on it from the beginning when it had been only an idea in an old friend’s head. Between them, he and Felipe Vazquez had carefully nurtured that idea until it had grown into the fashionable new resort he was seeing today.

The problem for him now was, where did he go from here? The resort was finished. The luxury villas dotted about the hillside had their new owners, the five-star hotel, golf and leisure complex was functioning like a dream. And San Estéban itself was positively bustling, its harbour basin filled with luxury sail crafts owned by the rich and famous looking for new places to hide out while they played. By next week even this yacht, which had been his home while he had been based here, would have slipped her moorings. She would sail to the Caribbean to await the arrival of his brother Nikos, who planned to fly out with his new bride in three weeks.

It was time for him to move on, though he did not know what it was he wanted to move on to. Did he go back to Athens and lose himself in the old cut and thrust of the corporate jungle? His wide shoulders shifted against the sun bed’s padded white cushion as an old restlessness began to stir deep within his bones.

‘No, it is not possible to go over the top with this.’ A soft female voice filtered through the open doors behind him. ‘It is to be a celebration of San Estéban’s rebirth, and a thanks and farewell to all who worked so hard to make the project happen. Let it be one of fireworks and merriment. We will call it—the Baptism of San Estéban, and it will become its annual day of carnival.’

A smile eased itself across his mouth as Leandros listened, and his shoulders relaxed as the restlessness drained away. The Baptism of San Estéban, he mused. He liked it.

He liked Diantha. He liked having her around because she was so calm and quiet and so terribly efficient. When he asked her to do something for him she did it without bothering him with the irritating details. She was good for him. She tuned in so perfectly to the way of his thinking.

He was almost sure that he was going to marry her.

He did not love her—he did not believe in love any more. But Diantha was beautiful, intelligent, exceedingly pleasant company, and she promised to be a good lover—though he had not got around to trying her out. She was also Greek, independently wealthy and was not too demanding of his time.

A busy man like him had to take these things into consideration when choosing a wife, he pondered complacently. For he must be allowed the freedom to do what was necessary to keep himself and the Petronades Group of companies streets ahead of their nearest rivals. Coming from a similar background to his own, Diantha Christophoros understood and accepted this. She would not nag and complain and make him feel guilty for working long hours, nor would she expect him to be at her beck and call every minute of the day.

She was, in other words, the perfect choice of wife for a man like him.

There was only one small obstacle. He already had a wife. Before he could begin to approach Diantha with murmurings of romance and marriage he must, in all honour, cut legal ties to his current spouse. Though the fact that they had not so much as laid eyes on each other in three years meant he did not envisage a quick divorce from Isobel being a problem.

Isobel…

‘Damn,’ he cursed softly as the restlessness returned with enough itchy tension to launch him to his feet. He should not have allowed himself to think her name. It never failed to make him uptight. As time had gone by, he had thought less and less of her and become a better person for it. But sometimes her name could still catch him out and sink its barbed teeth into him.

Going over to the refrigerated drinks trolley, he selected a can of beer, snapped the tab and went to rest his lean hips against the yacht rail, his dark eyes frowning at the view that had only made him smile minutes before.

That witch, the hellion, he thought grimly. She had left her mark on him and it still had not faded three years on.

He took a gulp of his beer. Behind him he could still hear Diantha’s level tones as she planned San Estéban’s celebration day with her usual efficiency. If he turned his head he would see her standing in his main stateroom, looking as if she belonged there with her dark hair and eyes and olive-toned skin, her elegant clothes chosen to enhance her beauty, not place it on blatant display like…

He took another pull of the beer can. Up above his head the hot Spanish sun was burning into his naked shoulders. It felt good enough to have him flexing deep-bedded muscles wrapped in rich brown skin.

Recalling Isobel, he felt a different kind of bite tug at his senses. This one hit him low down in his gut where the sex thing lurked. He grimaced, wondering if or when he would ever want another woman the way he’d wanted Isobel? And hoped he never had to suffer those primitive urges again.

They had gone into marriage like two randy teenagers, loving each other with a passion that had them tearing each other to pieces by the time they’d separated. He had been too young—she had been too young. They’d made love like animals and fought in the same ferocious way until—inevitably probably—it had all turned so nasty and bitter and bad that it had been easier to lock it all away and forget he had a wife than to risk allowing it all to break out again.

But, like his sojourn in San Estéban, it was over now—time to move on with his life. He was thirty-one years old and ready to settle down with a proper wife, maybe even a family…

‘Why the frown?’

Diantha had come up beside him without him noticing. Turning his head, he looked down into warm brown eyes, saw the soft smile on her lips…and thought of a different smile. This mouth didn’t smile, it pouted—provokingly. And those intense green eyes were never warm but just damned defiant.

‘I am attempting to come to terms with the fact that it is time for me to leave here,’ he answered her question.

‘And you do not want to leave,’ Diantha murmured understandingly.

Leandros sighed. ‘I have come to love this place,’ he confessed, looking outwards towards San Estéban again.

There followed a few moments of silence between them, the kind that allowed his mind to drift without intrusion across the empty years during which he had hidden away here, learning to be whole again. San Estéban had been his sanctuary in a time of misery and disillusionment. Isobel had—

It took the gentle touch of Diantha’s fingers to his warm bicep to remind him that she was here. They rarely touched. It was not yet that kind of relationship. She was his sister Chloe’s closest friend and he was honour-bound to treat her as such while she was here. But his senses stirred in response to those cool fingers—only to settle down again the moment they were removed.

‘You know what I think, Leandros,’ she said gently. ‘I think you have been here for too long. Living the life of a lotus-eater has made you lazy—which makes it a good time for you to return to Athens and move on with your life, don’t you think?’

‘Ah, words of wisdom,’ he smiled. It was truly uncanny how Diantha could tap in to his thinking. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘After the San Estéban celebration I have every intention of returning to Athens and…move on, as you call it,’ he promised.

‘Good,’ she commended. ‘Your mama will be pleased to hear it.’

And with that simple blessing she moved away again, walking gracefully back into the stateroom in her neat blue dress that suited her figure and with her glossy black hair coiled with classical Greek conservatism to the slender curve of her nape.

But she did so with no idea that she had left behind her a man wearing another frown because he was seeing long, straight, in-your-face red hair flowing down a narrow spine in a blazing defiance to everything Greek. Isobel would have rather died than wear that neat blue dress, he mused grimly. She preferred short skirts that showed her amazing legs off and skinny little tops that tantalised the eyes with the thrust of her beautiful, button-tipped breasts.

Isobel would rather have cut out her tongue than show concern for his mother’s feelings, he mentally added as he turned away again and took another grim pull of his beer. Isobel and his family had not got on. They had rubbed each other up the wrong way from the very beginning, and both factions hadn’t attempted to hide that from him.

Diantha, on the other hand, adored his mother and his mother adored her. Being such a close friend to his sister, Chloe, she had always hovered on the periphery of his life, though he had only truly taken notice of her since she had arrived here a week ago to step into the breach to help organise next week’s celebration because Chloe, who should have been here helping him, had become deeply embroiled in Nikos’s wedding preparations.

It had been good of Diantha in the circumstances. He appreciated the time she had placed at his disposal, particularly since she had only just returned to Athens, having spent the last four years with her family living in Washington, D.C. She was well bred and well liked—her advantages were adding up, he noted. And, other than for a brief romance with his brother Nikos to blot her copybook, she was most definitely much more suitable than that witch of a redhead with sharp barbs for teeth.

With that final thought on the subject he took a final pull of his beer can, saw a man across the quay taking photographs of the yacht and frowned at him. He had a distinct dislike of photographers, not only because they intruded on his privacy but also because it was what his dear wife did for a living. When they had first met she had been aiming a damned camera at him—or was it the red Ferrari he had been leaning against? No, it had been him. She had got him to pose then flirted like mad with him while the camera clicked. By the end of the same day they’d gone to bed, and after that—

He did not want to think about what had happened after that. He did not want to think of Isobel at all. She no longer belonged in his thoughts, and it was about time that he made that official.

The man with the camera turned away. So did Leandros, decisively. He suddenly felt a lot better about leaving here and went inside to…move on with his life.



Isobel’s own thinking was moving very much along the same lines as she sat reading the letter that had just arrived from her estranged husband’s lawyer giving her notice of Leandros’s intention to begin divorce proceedings.

She was sitting alone at a small kitchen table. Her mother hadn’t yet risen from her bed. She was glad about that because the letter had come as a shock, even though she agreed with its content. It was time, if not well overdue that one of them should take the bull by the horns and call an official end to a marriage that should have never been.

But the printed words on the page blurred for a moment at the realisation that this was it, the final chapter of a four-year mistake. If she agreed to Leandros’s terms, then she knew she would be accepting that those years had been nothing but wasted in her life.

Did he feel the same? Was that why he had taken so long to get to this? It was hard to acknowledge that you could be so fallible, that you had once been stupid enough to let your heart rule your head.

Or was there more to it than a decision to put an end to their miserable marriage? Had he found someone with whom he felt he could spend the rest of his life?

The idea shouldn’t hurt but it did. She had loved Leandros so badly at the beginning that she suspected she’d gone a little mad. They’d been young—too young—but oh, it had been so wildly passionate.

Then—no, don’t think about the passion, she told herself firmly, and made herself read the letter again.

It was asking her if she would consider travelling to Athens to meet with her husband—in the presence of their respective lawyers, of course—so they could thrash out a settlement in an effort to make the divorce quick and trouble-free. A few days of her time should be enough, Takis Konstantindou was predicting. All expenses would be paid by Leandros for both herself and her lawyer as a goodwill gesture, because Mr Petronades couldn’t travel to England at this time.

She paused to wonder why Leandros couldn’t travel. For the man she remembered virtually lived out of a suitcase, so it was odd to think of him under some kind of restraint.

It was odd to think about him at all, she extended, and the letter lost its holding power as she sat back in the chair. They’d first met by accident right here in England at an annual car exhibition. She’d been there in her official capacity as photographer for a trendy new magazine—a bright and confident twenty-two-year-old who believed the whole world was at her feet. While he was dashing and twenty-seven years old, with the looks and the build of a genuine dark Apollo.

They’d flirted over the glossy bonnet of some prohibitively expensive sports car. With his looks and his charm and his immaculate clothing, she’d assumed he was one of the car’s sales representatives, since they all looked and dressed like a million dollars. It had never occurred to her that far from selling the car they were flirting across he owned several of them. Realisation about just who Leandros was had come a lot later—much too late to do anything about it.

By then he’d already bowled her over with his dark good looks and easy charm and the way he looked at her that left her in no doubt as to what was going on behind his handsome façade. They’d made a date to share dinner and ended up falling into bed at the first opportunity they were handed. His finding out that he was her first lover had only made the passion burn all the more. He’d adored playing the role of tutor. He’d taught her to understand the pleasures of her own body and made sure that she understood what pleasured his. When it came time for him to go back to Greece he’d refused to go without her. They’d married in a hasty civil ceremony then rushed to the airport to catch their flight.

It was as he’d led her onto a private jet with the Petronades logo shining in gold on its side that she started to ask questions. He’d thought it absolutely hilarious that she didn’t know she’d married the modern equivalent of Croesus, and had carried her off to the tiny private cabin, where he’d made love to her all the way to Athens. She had never been so happy in her entire life.

But that was it—the sum total of the happy side of their marriage was encapsulated in a single hop from England to Greece. By the time they’d arrived at his family home the whole, whirling wonder of their love was already turning stale. ‘You can’t wear that to meet my mother;’ his first criticism of her could still ring antagonistic bells in her head.

‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’

‘The skirt is too short; she will have a fit. And can you not tie your hair up or something, show a little respect for the people you are about to meet?’

She had not tied her hair up, nor had she changed her clothes. But she had soon learned the hard way that stubborn defiance was one thing when it was aimed at a man who virtually salivated with desire for you even as he criticised. But it was not the same as being boxed and tagged a cheap little floozy at first horrified glance.

Things had gone from bad to worse after that. And—yes, she reiterated as her gaze dipped back to the letter, it was time that one of them took the initiative and drew the final curtain across something that should never have been.

In fact, Isobel had only one problem with the details Takis Konstantindou had mapped out in the letter. She could not see how she could spend several days in Athens because she could not leave her mother on her own for that long.



‘What time does her flight come in?’

Leandros was sitting at his desk in his plush Athens office. In the two weeks he had been back here he had changed into a different person. Gone was the laid-back man of San Estéban and in his place sat a sharp-edged, hard-headed Greek tycoon.

Was he happy with that? No, he was not happy to become this person again, but needs must when the devil drives, so they said. In this case the devil was the amount of importance other people placed on his time and knowledge. His desk was virtually groaning beneath the weight of paperwork that apparently needed his attention as a matter of urgency. He moved from important meeting to meeting with hardly a breath in between. His social life had gone from a lazy meal eaten in a restaurant on the San Estéban boulevard, to a constant round of social engagements that literally set his teeth on edge. If he lifted his eyes someone jumped to speak to him. If he closed those same eyes someone else would ensure that he opened them again. The wheels of power ground on and on for twenty-four hours of every day and the whole merry-go-round was made all the more intense because his younger brother Nikos was off limits while he prepared for his wedding day.

On his father’s death Leandros had become the head of the Petronades family, therefore it was his duty to play host in his father’s stead. His mother was becoming more neurotic the closer it came to Nikos’s big day, and was likely to panic if she did not have an open line to her eldest son’s ear. If he complained she told him not to spoil this for her then reminded him that he had denied her the opportunity to stand proud and watch him make his own disastrous union. And because thoughts of marriage were already on his mind, he was hard put not to snap at her that maybe Nikos could take a leaf out of his own book and run away to marry secretly. At least the day would belong only to him and Carlotta. If there was anything about his own marriage he could still look back on with total pleasure, it was that moment when Isobel had smiled up at him as he placed the ring upon her finger and whispered, ‘I love you so much.’ He had not needed five hundred witnesses to help prove that vow to be true.

His heart gave him a punishing twinge of regret for what he had once had and lost.

‘This evening.’ Takis Konstantindou pulled him back from where he had been in danger of visiting. ‘But she insisted on making her own arrangements,’ Takis informed him. ‘She will be staying at the Apollo near Piraeus.’

Leandros frowned. ‘But that is a mediocre place with a low star rating. Why should she want to stay there when she could have had a suite at the Athenaeum?’

Takis just shrugged his lack of an answer. ‘All I know is that she refused our invitation to make arrangements for her and reserved three rooms, not two, at the Apollo, one of which must have wheelchair access.’

Wheelchair access? Leandros sat forward, his attention suddenly riveted. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her? Has she been hurt…is she ill?’

‘I don’t know if the special room is for her,’ Takis answered. ‘All I know is that she has reserved such a room.’

‘Then find out!’ he snapped. Suddenly the thought of his beautiful Isobel trapped in a wheelchair made him feel physically ill!

He must even have gone pale because Takis was looking at him oddly. ‘It could change everything, do you not see that?’ His tycoon persona jumped to his rescue. ‘The whole structure on which we have based our proposals for a settlement may need to be revised to take into account a physical disability.’

‘I think you have adequately covered for any such eventuality, Leandros.’ The lawyer smiled cynically.

‘Adequate is not good enough.’ He was suddenly furious. ‘Adequate is not what I was aiming towards! I am no skinflint! I have no wish to play games with this! Isobel is my wife.’ Hearing that ‘is’ leaving his lips forced him to stop and take a breath. ‘I will leave my marriage with no sense of triumph at its failure, Takis,’ he informed the other man. ‘But I will hopefully leave it with the knowledge that I treated her fairly in the end.’

Takis was looking surprised at his outburst. ‘I’m sorry, Leandros, I never meant to—’

‘I know what you meant,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘And I know what you think.’ Which was why that derisory comment about Isobel being adequately compensated had made him see red. He knew what his family thought about Isobel. He knew that they probably discussed her between themselves in that same derogatory way. He had even let them—if only by pretending it wasn’t happening. But they were wrong if they believed his failed marriage was down to Isobel, because it wasn’t. Not all of it anyway.

Takis was wrong about him if he believed that he was filing for divorce because he no longer cared about Isobel. He might not want her back to run riot through his life again, but…‘Whatever anyone else thinks about my marriage to Isobel, she deserves and will get my full honour and respect at all times. Do you understand that?’

‘Of course.’ For a man who was twice his own age and also his godfather, Takis Konstantindou suddenly looked very much the wary employer as he gave a nod of his silvered head. ‘It never crossed my—’

‘Find out what you can before we meet with her,’ Leandros interrupted, glanced at his watch and was relieved to see he was due at a meeting elsewhere so could end this conversation.

He stood up. Takis took his cue without further comment and went off to do his bidding. Leandros waited until the door closed behind him, then threw himself back down into his chair. He knew he was behaving irrationally. He understood why Takis no longer understood just where it was he was coming from. Only two weeks ago Leandros had called up his godfather and informed him he wanted to file for divorce. It had been a brief and unemotional conversation to which Takis had responded in the same brisk, lawyer-like way.

But a few weeks ago, in his head, Isobel had been a witch and a hellion with barbs for teeth. Now, on the back of one small comment she was the young and vulnerable creature he had dragged by the scruff of her beautiful neck out of sensual heaven into the hell of Athenian society.

On a thick oath he stood up again, paced around his desk. What was going on here? he asked himself. What was the matter with him? Did he have to come over all macho and feel suddenly protective because there was a chance that the Isobel he would meet tomorrow was going to be a shadow of the one he once knew?

A wheelchair.

Another oath escaped him. The phone on his desk began to ring. It was Diantha, gently reminding him that his mother would prefer him not to be late for dinner tonight. The tension eased out of his shoulders, her soft, slightly amused tone showing sympathy with his present plight where his mother was concerned. By the time the conversation ended he was feeling better—much more like his gritty, calm self.

Yes, he confirmed. Diantha was good for him. She refocused his mind on those things that should matter, like the meeting he should be attending right now.



‘You’re asking for trouble dressed like that,’ Silvia Cunningham announced in her usual blunt manner.

Isobel took a step back to view herself in the mirror. ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ All she saw was a perfectly acceptable brown tailored suit with a skirt that lightly hugged her hips and thighs to finish at a respectable length just below her slender knees. The plain-cut zip-up jacket stopped at her waist and beneath it she wore a staunchly conventional button-through cream blouse. Her hair was neat, caught up in a twist and held in place by a tortoiseshell comb. She was wearing an unremarkable flesh-coloured lipstick, a light dusting of eye-shadow and some black mascara, but that was all.

In fact she could not look more conservative if she tried to be, she informed that hint of a defiant glint she could see burning in her green eyes.

‘What’s wrong with that suit is that it’s an outright provocation,’ her mother said. ‘The wretched man never could keep his hands off you at the worst of times. What do you think he’s going to want to do when you turn up wearing a suit with a definite slink about it?’

‘I can’t help my figure!’ Isobel flashed back defensively. ‘It’s the one you gave to me, along with the hair and the eyes.’

‘And the temper,’ Silvia nodded. ‘And the wilful desire to let him see what it is he’s passing up.’

‘Passing up?’ Those green eyes flashed. ‘Do I have to remind you that I was the one who left him three years ago?’

‘And he was the one who did not bother to come and drag you back again.’

Rub it in, why don’t you? Isobel thought. ‘I haven’t got time for this,’ she said and began searching for her handbag. ‘I have a meeting to go to.’

‘You shouldn’t be going to this meeting at all!’

‘Please don’t start again.’ Isobel sighed. They had already been through this a hundred times.

‘I agree that it is time to end your marriage, Isobel,’ her mother persisted none the less, ‘and I am even prepared to admit that the letter from Leandros’s lawyer brought the best news I’d heard in two long years!’

Looking at the way her mother was struggling to stand with the aid of her walking frame, Isobel understood where she was coming from when she said that.

‘But I still think you should have conducted this business through a third party,’ she continued, ‘and, looking at the way you’ve dressed yourself up, I am now absolutely positive that coming face to face with him is a mistake!’

‘Sit down—please,’ Isobel begged. ‘Your arms are shaking. You know what they said about overdoing it.’

‘I will sit when you stop being so pig-stubborn about this!’

A grin suddenly flashed across Isobel’s face. ‘Pot calling the kettle black,’ she said.

Her mother’s mouth twitched. If Isobel ever wanted to know where she got her stubbornness from then she only had to look at Silvia Cunningham. The hair, the eyes, even her strength of will came from this very determined woman. Though all of those features in her mother had taken a severe battering over the last two years since a dreadful car accident. Silvia was recovering slowly, but the damage to her spine had been devastating. Fortunately—and her mother was one for counting her blessings—her mind was still as bright as a polished button and unwaveringly determined to get her full mobility back.

But Sylvia had a tendency to overdo it. Only a few weeks ago she had taken a bad fall. She hadn’t broken anything but she’d bruised herself and severely shaken her confidence. It had also shaken Isobel’s confidence about leaving her alone throughout the day while she was at work. Then Leandros’s letter had arrived to make life even more complicated. It had been easier to just bring Silvia with her than to leave her behind then worry sick for every minute she was away from her.

On a tut of impatience Isobel went to catch up the nearest chair and settled it behind her mother’s legs. Silvia lowered herself into it without protest, which said a lot about how difficult she’d been finding it to stand. But that was her mother, Isobel thought as she bent to kiss her smooth cheek. She was a fighter. The fact that she was still of this world and able to hold her own in an argument was proof of it.

‘Look,’ Isobel said, coming down to her mother’s level and moving the walking frame out of the way so that she could claim her hands. ‘All right, I confess that I’ve dressed like this for a reason. But it has nothing to do with trying to make Leandros regret this divorce.’ It went much deeper than that, and her darkened eyes showed it. ‘He did nothing but criticise my taste in clothes. When he did, I was just too stubborn to make even one small concession to his opinion of what his wife should look like, wear or behave.’

‘Quite right too.’ Her beautiful, loyal mother nodded. ‘Pretentious oaf.’

‘Well, I mean to show him that when I have the freedom to choose what the heck I want to wear, then I can be as conventional as anyone.’

A pair of shrewd old eyes looked into their younger matching pair, and saw cracks a mile wide in those excuses just waiting for her daughter to fall right in.

A knock sounded at the door. It would be Lester Miles, Isobel’s lawyer. With a hurried smile, Isobel got up to leave. But her mother refused to let go of her hand.

‘Don’t let him hurt you again,’ she murmured urgently.

Isobel’s sudden flash of annoyance took Silvia by surprise. ‘Whatever else Leandros did to me, he never set out to hurt me, Mother.’ Mother said it all. For Silvia was Mum or sweetheart, but only ever Mother when she was out of line. ‘We were in love, but were wrong for each other. Learning to accept that was painful for us both.’

Silvia held her tongue in check and accepted a second kiss on her cheek while Isobel wondered what the heck she was doing defending a man whose treatment of her had been so indefensible!

What was the matter with her? Was it nerves? Was she more stressed about this meeting than she was prepared to admit? Hurt her? What else could Leandros do that could hurt her more than he’d already done three years ago?

Another knock at the door and she was turning towards it, her mind in a sudden hectic whirl. She tried to fight it, tried to stay calm. ‘What are you going to do while I’m out?’ she asked as she walked towards the door.

‘Clive has hired a car. We are going to do some sightseeing.’

Clive. Isobel’s mouth tightened. There was another point of conflict she had not yet addressed. Clive Sanders was their neighbour and very good friend. He was also what Isobel supposed she could call the new man in her life. Or that was what he could be if Isobel gave Clive the green light.

Clive had somehow managed to invite himself along on this trip—aided and abetted by her mother, she was sure. The first she’d known about it was when she’d been in the hotel foyer last night and happened to see him arrive. Clive had just smiled at her burst of annoyance, touched a soothing hand to her angry cheek and said innocently, ‘I am here for your mother. You’re supposed to be pleased by the surprise, you ungrateful thing.’

But she had been far from pleased or grateful. Too many people seemed to believe they had a right to interfere in her life. Clive insisted the trip to Athens fitted in with his plans for a much-needed break. Her mother insisted it made her feel more secure to have a man like Clive around. Isobel thought there was a conspiracy between the two of them, which involved Clive keeping an eye on her in case she went totally off the rails when she met up with Leandros again.

But she knew differently. For all that she’d just defended Leandros, she knew there was not a single chance that seeing him was going to send her toppling back into the madness of their old love affair. She didn’t hate him, but she despised him for the way he had treated her. He’d killed her confidence and her spirit and, finally, her love.

‘Don’t let him tire you out,’ was her clipped comment to Silvia about Clive’s presence here.

‘He’s a fully trained physiotherapist,’ Silvia pointed out. ‘Give him the benefit of some sense.’ Which was her mother’s way of making it known that she knew Isobel disapproved of him being here. ‘And Isobel,’ Silvia added as she was about to pull the door open, ‘a brown leather suit is not conventional by any stretch of the imagination, so stop kidding yourself that you’re out to do anything but make that man sit up and take note.’

Isobel left the room without bothering to answer, startling Lester Miles with the abruptness with which she appeared. His eyes widened then slid down over the leather suit before carefully hooding in a way that told her he thought her attire inappropriate too.

Maybe it was. Her chin went up. Suddenly she was fizzing like a simmering pot ready to explode because her mother was right—she was out to blow Leandros right out of his shoes.

‘Shall we go?’ she said.

Lester Miles just nodded and fell into step beside her. He was young and he was eager and she had picked him out at random from the Yellow Pages. Yes, she was dressed for battle, because she didn’t think she needed a lawyer to fire her shots for her—though she was happy for him to come along and play the stooge.

For today was redemption day. Today she intended to take back all of those things that Leandros had wrenched from her and walk away a whole person again. She didn’t want his money or to discuss settlements. She had nothing he could want from her, unless he planned to fight over a gold wedding ring and a few diamond trinkets that had made his mother stare in dismay when she’d found out that her son had given them to Isobel.

Family heirlooms, she recalled. ‘A bit wasted on you, don’t you think?’ his sister Chloe had said. But then, dear Mama and Chloe had not been in the bedroom when the precious heirlooms had been her only attire. They’d not seen the way their precious boy had decked out his wife in every sparkle he could lay his hands on—before he enjoyed the pleasure they gave.

Those same heirlooms still lay languishing in a safety deposit box right here in Athens. Leandros was welcome to them as far as she was concerned. It was going to be interesting to discover just what he was willing to place on the table for their safe return—before she told him she wanted nothing from him, then gave him back his damned diamonds and left with her pride!

The journey across Athens in a taxi took an age in traffic that hardly seemed to move. Lester Miles kept on quizzing her as to what was required of him, but she answered in tight little sentences that gave him no clue at all.

‘You are in such a powerful position, Mrs Petronades,’ he pointed out. ‘With no pre-nuptial agreement you are entitled to half of everything your husband owns.’

Isobel blinked. She hadn’t given a single thought to a pre-nuptial agreement or the lack of one, come to that. Was this why Leandros wanted to see her personally? Was he out to charm her into seeing this settlement thing from his point of view? The stakes had quite suddenly risen. A few family heirlooms didn’t seem to matter any more when you put them in the giant Petronades pot of gold.

‘Negotiations will stand or fall on which of you wants this divorce more,’ Lester Miles continued. ‘As it was your husband who instigated proceedings, I think we can safely say that power is in your hands.’

‘You’ve done your homework,’ she murmured.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It is what you hired me to do.’

‘Does that mean you might know why my husband has suddenly decided he wants this divorce?’ she enquired curiously.

‘I have not been able to establish anything with outright proof,’ the lawyer warned her, then looked so uncomfortable Isobel felt that fizz in her stomach start up again. ‘But I do believe there is another woman involved. She goes by the name of Miss Diantha Christophoros. She is from one of the most respected families in Greece, my sources tell me…’

His sources couldn’t be more right, Isobel agreed as she shifted restlessly in recognition of the Greek beauty’s name. A union between the Petronades and Christophoros families would be the same as founding a dynasty. Mama Petronades must be so very pleased.

‘She spent some time with your husband on his yacht recently,’ her very efficient lawyer continued informatively. ‘Also, your brother-in-law—Nicolas Petronades—will be marrying Carlotta Santorini next week. Rumour has it that once his brother is married your husband would like to follow suit. It could be an heir thing,’ he suggested. ‘Powerful families like the Petronades prefer to keep the line of succession clear cut.’

An heir thing, Isobel repeated. Felt tears sting the backs of her eyes and the fizz happening inside her turn to an angry ache.

To hell with you, Leandros, she thought bitterly.




CHAPTER TWO


TO HELL with you, Isobel repeated fifteen minutes later, when finally they came face to face in the elegant surroundings of Leondros’s company boardroom with all its imposing wood panelling and fancy portraits of past masters.

Here stood the latest in a long line of masters, she observed coldly. Leandros Petronades, lean, dark and as arrogant as ever. A man built to break hearts, as she should know.

He stood six feet two inches tall and wore a grey suit, white shirt and a grey silk tie that drew a line down the length of a torso made up of tensile muscle wrapped in silk-like bronze skin. He hadn’t changed, not so much as an inch of him; not the aura of leashed power beneath the designer clothing, or the sleek, handsome structure of his face. His hair was still that let-me-touch midnight-black colour, his eyes dark like the richest molasses ever produced, and his mouth smooth, slim, very masculine—the mouth of a born sensualist.

She wanted to reach out and slap his face. She wanted to leap on him and beat at his adulterous chest with her fists. The anger, the pain, the black, blinding pulse of emotional fury was literally throbbing along her veins. It was as if the last three years hadn’t happened. It could have been yesterday that she had walked out of his life. Diantha Christophoros of all women, she was thinking. Diantha, the broken-hearted one who had had to be taken out of Athens by her family when Leandros arrived there with his shocking new wife.

Did he think she didn’t know about her? Did he really believe his awful sister would have passed up the opportunity to let her know what he had thrown away in the name of hot sex? Did he think Chloe would have kept silent about the trips he made to Washington D.C. to visit his broken-hearted ex?

I hate you, her eyes informed him while the anger sang in her blood. She didn’t speak, she didn’t want to. And as they stared at each other along half the length of his impressive boardroom table the silence screamed like a banshee in everyone’s ears. His uncle Takis was there but she refused to look at him. Lester Miles stood somewhere behind her, watchful and silent as the grave. Leandros didn’t make a single move to come and greet her, his dark eyes drifting over her as if they were looking at a snake.

Well, that just about says it all, she thought coldly. His family has finally managed to indoctrinate him into their speciality of recognising dross.

Having just watched his wife of four years walk into his boardroom—and scanned her sensational legs—Leandros was held paralysed by the force of anger which roared up inside him like a lion about to leap.

So much for killing himself by imagining her a mere shadow of her former self, he was thinking bitterly. So much for feeling that overwhelming sense of relief when he’d found out it was not Isobel who was confined to a wheelchair but her mother—then feeling the guilt of being relieved about something so painfully tragic, whoever the victim! Silvia Cunningham had been a beautiful woman, full of life and energy. To think of that fine spirit that she had passed on to her daughter now quashed into a wheelchair had touched him deeply.

He was in danger of laughing out loud at his latest plan to make sure that Isobel’s mother was provided for within the settlement. Indeed that plan was not about to change because of what he now knew.

Only his plans for this beautiful, adulterous creature standing here in front of him, with her glossed-back hair, spitting green eyes and tight little mouth with its small upper lip and protruding bottom lip that made him want to leap on it and bite.

Where only hours ago he had been content to be unbelievably kind and gentle. He now wanted to tear her limb from limb.

Four years—for four long years this woman had lived inside him like a low, throbbing ache. He’d felt guilt, he’d felt sadness, he’d wanted to accord her the respect he’d believed she deserved from him by making no one aware of his plans to remarry until he had eased himself out of this marriage in the least hurtful way that he could.

But that was until he discovered that his wife was suffering from no such feelings of sensitivity on his behalf, for she had brought her lover with her to Athens! Could she not manage for two days without the oversized brute? Did he satisfy her, did he know her as intimately as he did? Could he make her tremble from her toes to her fingertips and cry out and grab for him as she reached her peak?

Cold fury sparked from his eyes as he looked her over. Bitterness raked its claws across his face. She was wearing leather. Why leather? What was it she was aiming to prove here, that she was brazen enough to wear such a fabric—bought with his money, no doubt—but worn to please another man?

‘You’re late,’ he incised, flicking hard eyes up to a face that was even more treacherously perfect than he remembered it. The gentle hairline, the dark-framed eyes, the straight little nose and that provoking little mouth. A mouth that knew how to kiss a man senseless, how to latch on to his skin and drive him out of his mind. He’d seen the oversized blond brute with the affable smile, standing in the hotel foyer wearing cotton sweats and touching her as if he had every right.

He should not have gone there. He should not have been so anxious to find out the truth about the wheelchair, then he would not have had to witness that man touching his wife in full view of anyone who wanted to watch.

His wife! Touching his wife’s exquisite, smooth white skin, making that skin flush when it only used to flush like that for him! She had not been wearing leather then, but tight jeans and a little white top that showed the fullness of her beautiful breasts!

Her wonderful hair had been flowing down her back, not pinned up as if she was some little prude. A lying prude, he extended.

‘This meeting was due to begin fifteen minutes ago. Now we will have to keep it brief,’ he finished his cutting comment.

Then watched as her witch’s green eyes narrowed at his clipped, tight tone. ‘The traffic was bad—’

‘The traffic in Athens is always bad,’ he inserted dismissively. ‘You have not been away from this city for so long that you could have forgotten that. Please take a seat.’

He took a seat. He pulled out a chair at random and threw himself into it with a force that verged on insolence. Takis was frowning at him but he ignored this lawyer’s expression. The other lawyer was trying not to show anything, though Leondros could see he was thoroughly engrossed.

Perhaps fascinated was a better word, he decided as he studied his wife’s lawyer through glassed-over eyes. The man was nothing but a young hawk, still wet behind the ears, he noted with contempt. What was Isobel thinking about, putting a guy like this up against himself and Takis? She knew of his godfather’s brutal reputation, she knew of his own! The only thing that Lester Miles seemed to have going for him was the cut of his suit and his boyish good looks.

Maybe that was it, he then thought with a tightening of just about every nerve. Maybe the body-builder was not her only man. Maybe this guy held a different place in her busy private life.

Irritation with himself made him take out his silver pen and begin tapping it against the polished boardroom table while he waited for this meeting to begin. Takis was shaking hands with Lester Miles and trying to appear as if Isobel’s husband always behaved like this. Isobel, on the other hand, was walking on those long legs down the length of the boardroom table on the opposing side to his. The leather suit stretched against her slender thighs as she moved and the jacket moulded to the thrust of her breasts. Was she wearing anything beneath it? Did she have the jacket zipped up to her throat simply to taunt him with that question?

Her chin was set, her flesh so white and smooth it didn’t look real—but then it never had. She chose to take the seat right opposite him. As she pulled the chair out his gaze moved to the smooth length of her slender neck, then up to the perfect shell-like shape of her ear, and his teeth came together with a snap. One cat-like lick of that ear and all of that cool composure would melt like wax to her dainty feet, he mused lusciously. He knew her, he knew her likes and dislikes, he knew every single erogenous zone, had been the one to take her on that journey of glorious discovery. He knew how to make her beg, cling, cry out his name in a paroxysm of ecstasy. Give him two minutes alone with her and he could wipe away that icy exterior; give him another minute and he could have her naked and begging for him. Or maybe he should be the one to strip his clothes off, he mused grimly. Maybe he should take her on the ride of their lives up against the panelled wall, with her skirt hitched up just high enough for his flesh to enjoy the erotic slide against leather while other parts of him enjoyed a different kind of slide, inside the hot, moist core of her ever-eager body.

It was almost a shame that he wasn’t into sexual enhancers, though it suddenly occurred to him that the body-builder looked the type. A new and blistering flash of his recently constructed fantasy now being enacted by the lover sent his eyes black with rage.

She sat down, bent to place her handbag on the floor by her chair, then sat up straight again—and looked him right in the eye. Hostility slammed into his face. His pulse quickened as the glinting green look lanced straight through him and war was declared. Though he wasn’t sure which of them had done the declaring.

She had certainly arrived here ready for a battle, though why that was the case he had no idea. It was not as if he had done anything other than suggest this divorce. Since it was very clear that she had not spent the last three years pining for him, her hostility was, in his opinion, without cause.

Whereas his own hostility…His narrowed eyes shot warning sparks across the table. She lifted her chin to him and sent the sparks right back. His fingers began to tingle with an urge to do something—they began tapping the pen all the harder against the polished table-top.

What is it you think you are going to get out of this, you faithless little hellion? he questioned silently as his lips parted to reveal the tight, warning glint of clenched white teeth. You had better be well prepared for this fight, because I am.

She placed her hands down on the table, long white fingers tipped with pink painted fingernails stroked the polished wood surface like a caress. His loins tightened, his chest began to burn. She saw it happen and her upper lip offered a derogatory curl.

Takis took the chair beside him. Lester Miles sat down beside Isobel. She turned to her lawyer and sent him a smile that would have made an iceberg melt. But Lester Miles was no iceberg. As he watched this little byplay, Leandros saw the young fool’s cheekbones streak with colour as he sent an answering smile in return.

It’s OK, I am here, that smile said to her. Leandros felt the lion inside him roar again. She turned to fix her gaze back on him. I am going to kill you, he told her silently. I am going to reach out and drag you across this table and spoil your little piece of foreplay with the kind of real play that shatters the mind.

‘Shall we begin?’ Takis opened a blue folder. Lester Miles had a black leather one, smooth, trendy and upwardly mobile. Isobel slid her hands to her lap.

Leandros continued to tap his pen against the desk.

‘In the midst of all of this tension, may I begin by assuring you, Isobel, that we have every desire to keep this civil and fair?’

Leandros watched her shift her gaze from his face to Takis. He felt the loss deep in his gut. ‘Hello, Uncle Takis,’ she said.

It was a riveting moment. Takis froze, so did Lester Miles, glancing up sharply from his trendy black leather dossier to sniff the new tension suddenly eddying in the air. The deeply respected international lawyer of repute, Takis Konstantindou, actually blushed.

He came back to his feet. ‘My sincere apologies, Isobel,’ he murmured uncomfortably. ‘How could I have been so crass as to forget my manners?’

‘That’s OK,’ she replied and, as Takis was about to stretch across the table to offer her his hand, she returned her eyes back to Leandros, leaving Takis suffering the indignity of lowering his hand and returning to his seat.

So she could still twist a room upon its head without effort, Leandros noted. You bitch, he told her silently.

The mocking movement of a slender eyebrow said—Maybe I am, but at least I won’t be your bitch for much longer.

The air began to crackle. ‘As I was about to say…’ clearing his throat, Takis tried again ‘…with due regard to the sensitivities of both parties, at my client’s instruction I have drawn up a draft copy of proposals to help ease us through this awkward part.’ Taking out a sheet of paper, he slid it across the table towards Isobel. She didn’t even glance at it, but left Lester Miles to pick it up and begin to read. ‘As I think you will agree, we have tried to be more than fair in our proposals. The financial settlement is most generous in the circumstances.’

‘What circumstances?’ her lawyer questioned.

Takis looked up. ‘Our clients have not lived together for three years,’ he explained.

Three years, one month and twenty-four days, Isobel amended silently, and wished Leandros would stop tapping that pen. He was looking at her as if she was his worst enemy. The tight mouth, the glinting teeth, the ice picks flicking out from stone-cold black eyes, all told her he could not get rid of her quick enough.

It hurt, though she knew it shouldn’t. It hurt to see the way he had been running those eyes over her as if he could not believe he’d ever desired someone like her. So much for dressing for the occasion, she mused bleakly. So much for wanting to blow him out of his handmade shoes.

Lester Miles nodded. ‘Thank you,’ he said and returned his attention to the list in front of him, and Takis returned to reading out loud the list of so-called provisions. Isobel wanted to be sick. Did they think that material goods were all she was here for? Did Leandros truly believe she was so mercenary?

‘When,’ she tossed at him, ‘did I ever give you the impression that I was a greedy little gold-digger?’

Black lashes that were just too long for a man lifted away from his eyes. ‘You are here, are you not?’ he countered smoothly. ‘What other purpose could you have in mind?’

Isobel stiffened as if he’d shot her. He was implying that she was either here for the money or to try to win him back.

‘Both parties have stated that the breakdown in their marriage was due to—irreconcilable differences,’ Takis put in swiftly. ‘I see nothing to be gained from attempting to apportion blame now. Agreed?’

‘Agreed,’ Lester Miles said.

But Isobel didn’t agree. She stared at the man she had married and thought about the twenty-three hours in any given day when he’d preferred to forget he had a wife. Then, during the twenty-fourth, he’d found it infuriating when she’d chosen to refuse to let him use it to assuage his flesh!

He’d met her, lusted after her, then married her in haste to keep her in his bed. The sex had been amazing, passionate and hot, but when he had discovered there was more to marriage than just sex, he had repented at his leisure during the year it had taken her to commit the ultimate sin in the eyes of everyone—by getting pregnant.

Leandros must be the only Greek man who could be horrified at this evidence of his prowess. How the hell did it happen? he’d raged. Don’t you think we have enough problems without adding a baby to them? Two and a half months later she’d miscarried and he could not have been more relieved. She was too young. He wasn’t ready. It was for the best.

She hated him. It was all coming back to her how much she did. She even felt tears threatening. Leandros saw them and the pen suddenly stopped its irritating tap.

‘Your client left my client of her own volition,’ Takis was continuing to explain to Lester Miles while the two of them became locked in an old agony. ‘And there has been no attempt at contact since.’

Yes, you bastard, Isobel silently told Leandros. You couldn’t even bother to come and find out if I was miserable. Not so much as a letter or a brief phone call to check that I was alive!

‘By either party?’ Lester Miles questioned.

The pen began to tap again, Leandros’s lips pressing together in a hardening line. He didn’t care, Isobel realised painfully. He did not want to remember those dark hours and days and weeks when she’d been inconsolable and he had been too busy with other things to deal with an overemotional wife.

‘Mr Petronades pays a respectable allowance into Mrs Petronades’ account each month but I do not recall Mrs Petronades acknowledging it,’ Takis said.

‘I don’t want your money,’ Isobel sliced across the table at Leandros. ‘I haven’t touched a single penny of it.’

‘Not my problem,’ he returned with an indifferent shrug.

‘Now we come to the house in Hampshire, England,’ Takis determinedly pushed on. ‘In the interests of goodwill this will be signed over to Mrs Petronades as part of the—’

‘I don’t want your house, either,’ she told Leandros.

‘But—Mrs Petronades. I don’t—’

‘You will take the house,’ Leandros stated without a single inflexion.

‘As a conscience soother for yourself?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘My conscience is clear,’ he stated.

She sat back in her chair with a deriding scoff. He dropped the pen then snaked forward in his chair, his black eyes still fixed on her face. ‘But why don’t you tell me about your conscience?’ he invited.

‘Leandros, I don’t think this is getting us—’

‘Keep your house,’ Isobel repeated. ‘And keep whatever else you’ve put on that list.’

‘You want nothing from me?’

‘Nothing—’ Isobel took the greatest pleasure in confirming.

‘Nothing that is on this list!’ Lester Miles quickly jumped in as a fresh load of tension erupted around them. Leandros was looking dangerous, and Isobel was urging him on. Takis was running a fingertip around the edge of his shirt collar because he knew what could happen when these two people began taking bites out of each other.

‘Mrs Petronades did not sign a pre-nuptial agreement,’ Lester Miles continued hurriedly. ‘Which means that she is entitled to half of everything her husband owns. I see nothing like that amount listed here. I think we should…’

Leandros flashed Lester Miles a killing glance. If the young fool did not keep his mouth shut he would help him. ‘I was not speaking to you,’ he said and returned his gaze to Isobel. ‘What is it is that you do want?’ he prompted.

Like antagonists in a new cold war they faced each other across the boardroom table. Anger fizzed in Isobel’s brain, and bitterness—a blinding, stinging, biting hostility—had her trembling inside. He had taken her youth and optimism and crushed them. He had taken her love and shredded it before her eyes. He had taken her right to feel worthy as the mother of his child and laughed at it. Finally, he had taken what was left of her pride and been glad to see the back of her.

She’d believed there was nothing else he could do to hurt her. She’d actually come here to Athens ready to let go of the past and leave again hopefully feeling whole. But no. If just one name had the ability to crush her that bit more, then it would be that of Diantha Christophoros.

For that name alone, if she only could reach him she would scratch his eyes out; if she could wrestle him to the ground she would trample all over him in her spike heels.

But she had to make do with lancing him with words. ‘I don’t want your houses, and I don’t want your money,’ she informed him. ‘I don’t want your name or you, come to that. I don’t even want your wedding ring…’ Wrenching it off her finger, she slid it across the table towards him, then bent and with a snatch caught up her bag. ‘And I certainly don’t want your precious family heirlooms,’ she added, holding her three witnesses silent as she took a sealed envelope out of the bag and launched it to land beside the ring. ‘In there you will find the key to my safety deposit box, plus a letter authorising you to empty it for yourself,’ she informed Leandros. ‘Give them to your next wife,’ she suggested. ‘They might not be wasted on her.’

Leandros did not look anywhere but at her face while she spat her replies at him. ‘So I repeat,’ he persisted, ‘what is it that you do want?’

‘A divorce!’ she lanced back through tear-burned eyes. ‘See how much you are worth to me, Leandros? All I want is a nice quick divorce from you so that I can put you right out of my life!’

‘Insult me one more time, and you might not like the consequences,’ he warned very thinly.

‘What could you do to me that you haven’t already done?’ she laughed.

Black eyes turned into twin lasers. ‘Show you up for the tramp you are by bringing your muscle-building lover into this?’

For a moment Isobel did not know what he was talking about. Then she issued a stifled gasp. ‘You’ve been having me watched!’ she accused.

‘Guilty as charged,’ he admitted and sat back indolently, picked up the pen again and began weaving it between long brown fingers. ‘Adultery is an ugly word,’ he drawled icily. ‘I could drag you, your pride and your lover through the courts if you wish to turn this into something nasty.’

Nasty. It had always been nasty since the day she’d married him. ‘Do it, then,’ she invited. ‘I still won’t accept a single Euro from you.’

With that she stood up and, to both lawyers’ deepening bewilderment, snatched up her bag and turned to leave.

‘Isobel, please—’ It was Takis who tried to appeal to her.

‘Mrs Petronades, please think about this—?’ Lester Miles backed him up.

‘Get out of here, the pair of you,’ Leandros cut across the two other men. ‘Take one more step towards that door, Isobel, and you know I will drag you back and pin you down if necessary.’

Her footsteps slowed to a reluctant standstill. She was trembling so badly now she actually felt sick. In the few seconds of silence that followed she actually wondered if the two lawyers were about to caution him.

But no, they weren’t that brave. He was bigger than them in every way a man could be. Height, size—bloody ego. They both slunk past her with their heads down, like two rats deserting a sinking ship.

The door closed behind them. They were alone now. She spun on her slender heels, her eyes like glass. ‘You are such a bully,’ she said in disgust.

‘Bully.’ He pulled a face. ‘And you, my sweet, are such an angelic soul.’

The my sweet stiffened her backbone. He had only ever used the endearment to mock or taunt. He was still flicking that wretched pen around in his fingers. His posture relaxed like a big cat taking its ease. But she wasn’t fooled. His mouth was thin, his eyes glinting behind those carefully lowered eyelashes, his jaw rigid, teeth set. He was so angry he was literally pulsing with it beneath all of that idleness.

‘Tell me about Clive Sanders.’

There was the reason for it.

She laughed, it was that surreal. He dared to demand an explanation from her after three years of nothing? Walking back to the table, she leaned against it, placed the flat of her palms on its top then looked him hard in the face. ‘Sex,’ she lied. ‘I’m good at it, if you recall. Clive thinks so too. He…’

The table was no obstacle. He was around it before she could say another word. The cat-like analogy had not been conjured up out of nowhere; when he pounced he did it silently. In seconds she was lying flat on her back with him on top of her, and in no seconds at all she was experiencing a different kind of sensation.

This one involved his touch and his weight and his lean, dark features looming so close that her tongue actually moistened with an urge to taste. It was awful. Memories of never holding back whenever he was this close. Memories of passion and desire and need neither had bothered to hold in check.

‘Say that again, from this position,’ he gritted.

‘Get off me.’ In desperation she began pushing hard against his shoulders, but the only things that moved were her clenched fists slipping against the smooth cloth of his jacket. She could feel the heat of his body, its power and its promise.

‘Say it!’ he rasped.

Her eyes flashed like green lightning bolts filled with contempt for everything he stood for. His anger, his arrogance, his ability to make her feel like this. ‘I don’t have to do anything for you any more, ever,’ she lashed at him.

He released a hard laugh that poured scorn onto her face. ‘Sorry to disappoint you, angel, but you still do plenty for me,’ and he gave a thrust of his hips so she would know and understand.

Shock brought the air from her lungs on a shaken whisper. ‘You’re disgusting,’ she gasped.

But no more than she was, when the cradle of her own hips moved in response and that oh, so damning animal instinct to mate dragged a groan from her lungs.

He laughed again, huskily, then reached up to tug the comb from her hair. ‘There,’ he growled as red fire uncoiled across his fingers, ‘now you look more like the little wanton I married. All we need to do now is see how wanton,’ and his fingers moved down to deal with the jacket zip. The leather slid apart to reveal her neat cream blouse with its pearly buttons up to her throat. Whatever the blouse was supposed to say to him, she did not expect the flaming clash of her eyes with his, as if she’d committed some terrible sin.

‘Why the sexy leather?’ he demanded. ‘Why the prim hairstyle and a blouse my mother would refuse to wear? What are you trying to prove, Isobel?’ he lanced down at her. ‘That there are different kinds of sexual provocation? Or is this the way you’ve learned to dress for your new lover? Does he like to peel you, layer by exquisite layer, is that it?’

‘Yes,’ she hissed into his hard face. ‘The more layers I have on the more I excite him! Whereas you lacked the finesse to notice me at all unless I was already naked in bed and thoroughly convenient for a quick lay!’

The quick lay struck right at his ego. Both saw the blistering flashback of his last urgent groping before she’d left him for good. Sparks flew, heat, pain then an anguish that coiled a sound inside his throat.

‘You bitch.’ The sound arrived in a hoarse whisper.

He’d gone pale and tears were suddenly threatening her again. On a thick whimper she tried to dislodge him with the pushing thrust of her body, making leather squeak against polish wood and the heels of her shoes come close to scoring deep marks in the wood.

‘Let me go!’ she choked out helplessly. He caught the sound with his mouth and his tongue, and a full onslaught followed of someone who needed to assuage what she had just flung up into his face. Within seconds she had lost the will to fight this man who knew exactly how to kiss her senseless and make her cling with the hungry need for more.

One of his hands was in her hair while the other was sliding between their bodies, making her spine arch sensually as the backs of his knuckles skidded over her breasts. The blouse sprang free, he was that deft with buttons, long fingers slid beneath a final covering of flimsy brown lace and claimed her nipple. She groaned in dismay but was already threading her fingers into his hair as she did so, making sure that he didn’t break away.

It was all so primitively, physically basic! The harried sound of their laboured breathing, the squeak of leather on polished wood. The heat of his lips and the lick of his tongue and the slow, deep, sinuous thrust of his hips against the eager thrust of her own, that even with the thickness of her skirt was pulling her deeper into a morass of desire. If he reached down and touched the naked flesh at her thighs she would be his for the taking; the tingling already happening there was so tight she could barely stop herself from begging for it.

Suddenly she was free. It happened so quickly that she wasn’t expecting it. Dizzy, disorientated, she lay there gasping and blinking as he arrived lightly on his feet by the table and between two chairs. She’d forgotten the anger with which he’d started this. But now she remembered, felt tears of humiliation fill her eyes and didn’t even bother to fight him when he took hold of her by the waist, lifted her up and swung her to her trembling feet.

He saw the tears, and a sigh rasped from him. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered shakily. ‘You always were an animal.’

‘You should not have brought your lover to Athens!’ he ground out. ‘You insulted me by doing so!’

She responded by instinct. A hand went up, caught him a hard, stinging slap to the side of his face, then she was grabbing up her bag and turning to walk away. Unsteady legs carried her forward, as her trembling fingers hurriedly tried to zip up her jacket—while her hair flowed down her spine like a red-hot flag that proclaimed what they had been doing.

He didn’t stop her, which she took as a further insult. When she arrived in the next room the two lawyers stared at her tear-darkened eyes and dishevelled appearance in open dismay.

‘Whatever he wants,’ she instructed Lester Miles. ‘Have him draw up the papers and I’ll sign them.’

With that she just kept on walking.

Leandros had never been so angry with himself in a long time. He’d just treated her like a whore and for what reason?

He didn’t have one. Not now that sanity had returned, anyway.

Three years.

He couldn’t believe his own crassness! Three years apart and he had reacted to the sight of her with her lover as if he’d caught them red-handed in his own bed! She was young and normal and perfectly healthy. She was beautiful and desirable and she had a sex-drive like anyone else! If she had utilised her right to sleep with another man, then what did that have to do with him now?

It had a great deal to do with him, he grimly countered that question. On a dark and primitively sexual level she still belonged to him. Not once in the last three years had he thought about her taking other lovers. How stupid did that make him? Supremely, so he discovered, because from the moment she’d stepped into this room he’d tossed half a century out of the window to become the jealously possessive Greek male.

Then he remembered the expression in her eyes that had brought with it the memory of the last time they had been together. Something thick lurched in his gut and he reeled violently away from what it was trying to make him feel.

Guilty as charged. An animal lacking the finesse of which he was once so very proud. The boardroom door opened as he was splashing a shot of whisky into a glass.

It was Takis. ‘She slapped your face,’ the lawyer commented, noticing the finger marks standing out on his cheek. ‘I suspect that you deserved it.’

Oh, yes, he’d deserved it, Leandros thought grimly and picked up the glass of whisky then stood staring at it. ‘What did she say?’ he asked grimly.

‘Give him anything he wants,’ Takis replied. ‘I am to draw up the papers and she will sign them. So take my advice, Leandros, and do it now before she changes her mind. That woman is dangerous. Whatever you did to her here has made her dangerous.’

‘She admitted it—to my face—that she’s sleeping with that bastard,’ he said as if it should explain away everything.

To another Greek male maybe it did in some small part. ‘Did you tell her that you want this divorce because you already have her replacement picked out and waiting in the wings to become your wife?’

Shock spun him on his heel to stare at Takis. ‘Who told you that?’ he demanded furiously.

Takis suddenly looked wary. ‘I believe it is common knowledge.’

Common knowledge, Leandros repeated silently. Common knowledge put about by whom? His hopeful mother? His matchmaking sister? Or Diantha herself?

Then, no, not Diantha, he told himself firmly. She is not the kind of woman to spread gossip about. ‘Gossip is just that—gossip,’ he muttered, more to himself than to Takis. ‘Isobel will not be here long enough to hear it.’

Did that matter to him? he then had to ask himself, and sighed when he realised that yes, it mattered to him. What was wrong with him? Another sigh hissed from him. Why was he feeling like this about a woman he hadn’t wanted in years?

He detected a pause, one of those telling ones that grabbed your attention. He glanced at Takis; saw his expression. ‘What?’ he prompted sharply.

‘She knows,’ he told him. ‘Her lawyer mentioned the Christophoros name before he went after Isobel.’

Leandros felt his mind go blank for a split-second. She cannot know, he tried to convince himself.

‘The guy knew quite a lot as a matter of fact,’ Takis went on and there was surprise and reluctant respect in the tough lawyer’s voice. ‘He knew that Diantha spent time alone with you on your yacht in Spain, for instance. He also mentioned conservative attitudes in Greece to extramarital affairs, then suggested we review the kind of scandal it would cause if two big names such as Petronades and Christophoros were linked in this way in a court battle. He’s a clever young man,’ Takis concluded. ‘He needs watching. I might even use him myself one day.’

Leandros was barely listening. His mind had gone off somewhere else. It was seeing Isobel’s face when she’d walked in here, seeing the anger, the hate, the desire to tear him to shreds where he stood.

‘Dear God,’ he breathed. Where had his head been? Why had he not read the signs? When she hurt she came out fighting. Make her feel vulnerable and expendable and she unsheathed her claws. Let her know she wasn’t good enough and she spat fire and brimstone over you then ran for cover as quickly as she could. Let her think she was being replaced with one of Athens’ noblest, and you could not hurt her more deeply if you tried.

‘The lack of a pre-nuptial is beginning to worry me.’ Takis was still talking to a lost audience. ‘She could take you to the cleaners if she decided she wanted to roll your name in the mud.’

Turning, Leandros looked at the table where the imprint of her body had dulled the polished wood surface. His stomach turned over—not with distaste for what he had done there but for other far more basic reasons. He could still feel the imprint of her down his front, could still taste her in his mouth.

Not far away, resting where it had landed when she tossed them at him, lay her wedding ring and the envelope containing access to the so-called family heirlooms.

What family heirlooms? he thought frowningly. It was not something his family possessed.





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