Kandy Shepherd – Stranded With Her Greek Tycoon (страница 1)
One night to win back his wife!
Can Hayley resist Cristos’s seductive charms?
After the demise of her marriage, Hayley fled to nurse her broken heart. Now she’s back to ask her husband, Cristos Theofanis, for a divorce—but he has other ideas! When a storm hits and they’re stranded together, Cristos has one night to prove himself. Can Hayley resist the temptation of Cristos’s kiss or will she find herself back in his arms?
KANDY SHEPHERD swapped a career as a magazine editor for a life writing romance. She lives on a small farm in the Blue Mountains near Sydney, Australia, with her husband, daughter, and lots of pets. She believes in love at first sight and real-life romance—they worked for her! Kandy loves to hear from her readers. Visit her at kandyshepherd.com.
Also by Kandy Shepherd
Sydney Brides miniseries
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Stranded with Her Greek Tycoon
Kandy Shepherd
ISBN: 978-1-474-07724-8
STRANDED WITH HER GREEK TYCOON
© 2018 Kandy Shepherd
Published in Great Britain 2018
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollins
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
To my dear friend Anne Yeates and her clever boys, for introducing me to the historic university town of Durham in Northern England—the inspiration for my hero and heroine’s past.
Contents
CRISTOS THEOFANIS HAD made such a monumental mess of his own marriage, he found it impossible to share in the joy as he watched his favourite cousin and his wife renew their wedding vows. Seeing their happiness in each other, the intimate smiles shared by a man and a woman deeply in love, made him fist his hands at the memories of what he had lost.
But he was careful to keep in place the mask he chose to present to the world—happy, without-a-care Cristos, unaffected by the losses that secretly haunted him. His pain was his own to keep all to himself.
The renewal ceremony had been held in the tiny white chapel perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the turquoise waters of the Ionian sea on his cousin’s privately owned island of Kosmimo. Now the happy couple was flocked by joyous well-wishers as they spilled out of the chapel. Cristos stood alone by a stunted cypress tree, marooned on his own black cloud of dark thoughts, his face aching from the effort of forcing smiles he didn’t feel.
Of course he wished his cousin well, but Cristos was haunted by memories of his own wedding five years ago in a register office in the medieval city of Durham in the north of England. He had looked down at Hayley, his bride, with pride and adoration and a wondering disbelief that such an amazing woman had agreed to share her life with him. In return, her eyes had shone with love and trust as she’d offered him both her body and, more importantly, her heart. A priceless gift. One that had been wrenched away from him.
Remorse tore through him like a physical pain. He had not seen his wife in more than two years. Two years and five months to be precise. He could probably estimate the time in hours, minutes even. For every second of that separation he had torn himself apart with self-recrimination and guilt. Now, he didn’t even know where Hayley lived, what she was doing. He had hurt her by not being there when she’d needed him. But she hadn’t given him a chance to make it up to her. With a ruthlessness he had not believed his sweet, gentle wife had possessed, she had left him and completely deleted him from her life.
As his cousin Alex and his wife Dell kissed to the sound of exuberant cheering, Cristos closed his eyes as he remembered the joy of kissing Hayley when the celebrant had told him he could claim his bride. They had been as happy as these two. Excited about the prospect of a lifetime together. Deliriously in love. Confident that all they’d needed was each other when the world had seemed against them.
‘We were once just like them.’ The words were no more than a broken murmur, as light and insubstantial as the breeze playing with the branches of the tree above him.
Cristos’s eyes flew open in shock at the wistful tones of a once familiar voice. Hayley. From somewhere below his shoulder, where she’d used to fit so neatly, he seemed to breathe in the elusive hint of her scent. Crazed by regret, he must be conjuring up a ghost from his past.
He turned his head. His heart jolted so hard against his ribs he gasped. She stood there beside him, looking straight ahead towards the church, not up at him, as if she couldn’t bear to meet his gaze. His wife.
He put out his hand to touch her, to make sure he was not hallucinating. Her cheek was soft and cool and very, very real. ‘It’s you, koukla mou,’ he said, his voice hoarse. He had not used that term of endearment for years—it belonged to her and her only.
Immediately he regretted his words. Drew back his hand. He had loved her unconditionally but she had thrown that love back at him. Yes, he had made mistakes he deeply regretted. But she had not given him the chance to remedy them. She had hurt him. Humiliated him. Put him through hell as he’d searched Europe for her. But she hadn’t wanted to be found.
‘Don’t call me that,’ she said. ‘I’m not your little doll or your gorgeous girl or whatever that word translates to. Not any more.’
‘Of course you’re not,’ he said tersely.
Her gaze flickered away from him and she bit her lower lip with her front teeth as she always did when she was nervous. Or dreading something. What was she doing here?
He stared at her, still scarcely able to believe she was real. Hungry, in spite of himself, for every detail of her appearance. She was wrapped against the late morning February chill in slim trousers and an elegant pale blue coat he had once bought for her from a designer in Milan. The coat, belted around her narrow waist, was the same but he was shocked to see Hayley was not. The image of her he had for so long held in his mind shimmered around the edges and reformed into a different version of his wife.
Her beautiful blonde hair that had tumbled around her shoulders in lush waves was gone, shorn into an abbreviated pixie cut. Like a boy was his first dismayed thought. He had loved her long hair, loved running his hands through it, tugging it back to tilt her head up for his kiss. But a deeper inspection made him appreciate how intensely feminine the new style was, feathered around her face, clinging to the slender column of her neck. Her features seemed to come into sharper focus, her cheekbones appeared more sculpted, her chin more determined. Her youthful English rose prettiness that had so attracted him had, at twenty-seven, bloomed into an even more enticing beauty.