Кейт Хьюит – Greek Affairs: To Take a Bride: The Markonos Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride / Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride (страница 10)

‘It never took much.’ His voice was grim again.

She swung back. ‘Is that any kind of excuse?’

Andreas just shrugged. He’d wanted her from the moment he had watched her walk off the ferry. And, even standing here regretting the whole damn mad incident, he felt fresh need already pumping away inside him like some greedy monster he had never been able to feed anywhere else.

He cast a glance at the way she was standing there, upset, shaking with shock and horror and the close onset of tears. Beautiful, he thought bleakly, still so beautiful, even with her hair all over the place and her clothes covered with dirt.

‘Wh-what if I get pregnant again?’

It came out of nowhere, the one thing he had not been prepared to hear. It totally shook him. ‘You said that to punish me,’ he pushed out hoarsely.

The way those dark blue eyes looked at him gave him his answer long before the breathy little, ‘No,’ arrived in his ears.

He bit out a word that made her wince, her kiss-swollen mouth quivering before she shot back bitterly, ‘Well, that just about covers it.'

Then she left him standing there. Throat clogged by hot, shamed tears, Louisa started walking. When he came up behind her, her shoulders racked up with rejection because she thought he was going to grab her again.

But he didn’t grab. ‘Just walk,’ he rasped as he stepped in front of her then began to lead the way back down the path.

Louisa followed him in thick, bubbling silence, shame consuming her a little more with each step. She did not look at him but kept her eyes fixed on the ground as they trod the soft sand on the beach. When they arrived at the hotel he stopped at the entrance and she kept on going. Neither bothered to offer up a hypocritical ‘goodnight'.

When she finally crawled back into bed she hid her head beneath the pillow and tossed bitter recriminations at herself until she finally dropped into an exhausted sleep only to be woken up a few hours later by a knock on her bedroom door.

Struggling to drag herself awake, she rolled out of the bed without knowing she had done it. Then her eyes connected with the pile of clothes left to fall where she’d dropped them and instant recall had her falling like a stone back onto the mattress as the whole shocking episode robbed her of the ability to stand up.

She’d had sex with Andreas like a slut with no morals. She cringed inside her own flesh.

‘Louisa!’ Jamie knocked again. ‘Breakfast—I’m starving!'

‘Coming,’ she called weakly. ‘S-see you down there.’ Then she dived for the damning heap of clothes and stuffed them to the bottom of her bag with urgent, trembling fingers as if hiding the evidence would take the crime away.

It didn’t. As she headed for the bathroom she groaned at the subtle aches in places that made her quiver in shame and she hated herself. Catching sight of her face in the mirror froze her to the spot in dismay. She looked washed out through lack of sleep and all tumbled and tousled. A shocking inner glow burned like a sultry secret in the darkened blue of her eyes and in the soft pulse of her still swollen mouth.

I look like a lush, she thought in disgust and spun away from the mirror to step beneath the punishing heat of the shower spray.

Ten minutes later, showered, dressed and feeling about as composed as she was ever going to feel, she joined her brother on the shady terrace that overlooked the beach. The sun was already hot and glinting like crystal on the blue water. As they sat quietly planning their day while they ate breakfast, vivid flashbacks of what she and Andreas had done kept catching her out to send her senses spinning into hot, dipping dives.

Someone stepped around the corner of the hotel building from the direction of the car park. Glancing up, she felt her senses take a different kind of dive.

Well, this is a first in five years, she thought cynically as her mother-in-law walked towards their table.

‘Kalimera, Louisa,’ Isabella Markonos greeted pleasantly. ‘Jamie, pethi mou, how you have grown since I saw you last!'

Flushing, Jamie stood up to suffer the airbrush of lips to his cheeks then hurriedly excused himself. He’d managed to arrange a lift into town with Yannis’s son Pietros which gave him a great excuse to escape.

‘The years have flown by so fast,’ Isabella murmured wistfully as she watched him beat his hasty retreat.

Louisa said absolutely nothing and after a short hesitation her mother-in-law took possession of Jamie’s vacated seat then lifted dark eyes to her face.

‘Andreas has left the island,’ she informed her gently. ‘He visited Nikos very early this morning then boarded his helicopter and flew away …'

CHAPTER FIVE

ANDREAS had gone …?

Louisa had to fight to hang on to a calm expression.

‘He is very angry with me,’ Isabella confided. ‘And I can see from the look in your eyes that you are angry with me too.'

Was that what her look said? Better than looking devastated, she supposed. ‘You had no right to interfere,’ she said.

‘When have I not interfered between the two of you?’ the older woman hit back. ‘Who else was there to do it? You were two children playing at being adults for most of your marriage. You needed someone to interfere simply to keep you both practical.'

Practical. Louisa almost let loose a laugh. When had she and Andreas ever been practical about this attraction they suffered for each other? Certainly not up there last night on the hill. And if Isabella wanted to go back that far, then who wanted to be practical at the age of seventeen or twenty-two?

Isabella had been very practical when she’d gently suggested that Louisa should have her pregnancy terminated. Louisa recalled the way she’d wept to Andreas, and he’d turned on his mother and hit the roof. Later, when Nikos was born, Isabella then gently suggested that she should take care of her grandson while Louisa finished her education—in England. Again she had wept and again Andreas had angrily turned on his mother.

‘It was me who suggested you might prefer to visit Nikos when you could be sure that Andreas would not be here.’ Isabella picked on the only practical suggestion she’d ever made that Louisa had no argument with. ‘It was therefore down to me to make the decision that such a situation could not be allowed to go on.'

Sitting back in her seat, Louisa looked at this beautiful, dainty Greek woman who possessed a heart of steel behind all the visible signs of softer living, and wondered what her practical solution was going to be if her son had to break the news to her that he could have made his estranged wife pregnant again?

‘You both need to move on with your lives,’ Isabella continued, unaware of what was going on inside Louisa’s head. ‘It has become very clear to me that neither of you were going to do that until you had confronted your past.'

‘So you set Andreas and me up for a face-to-face confrontation?'

‘You needed to look at each other and see that you are no longer the same two people you used to be—see for yourselves how widely you have grown apart!'

A vibrant flashback in which she’d played a very intimate part in Andreas’s life recently hit Louisa’s vision.

‘We came to love you dearly, Louisa,’ Isabella persisted in her oh-so-deceptive gentle voice. ‘And we hurt deeply for both you and my son when fate dealt you such a cruel tragic blow. My dearest wish would be to see both of you happy again—in love and married to some other wonderful person who will give you more children to help heal the gap in your hearts dear Nikos left behind.’

In a sad, painfully aching way, Louisa agreed with those wishes. She too would like to be truly happy again. But how could she ever be happy with someone else when the man she had been in love with since she was seventeen still commanded so much power over her?

‘It is time for you both to let go …’

It was the way Isabella said it that grabbed Louisa’s full attention. ‘You want me to stop coming to the island,’ she said.

For a moment Isabella said nothing, allowing her answer to sound in the paining silence that hovered over them for a second or two. Then she stood up and came round the table. As she bent to kiss Louisa’s cheek she repeated gently, ‘It is time.'

Then she walked away, leaving Louisa on her own to absorb that cold little stab of cruel truth.

Andreas had already left the island, making his statement about letting go by putting distance between them as quickly as he could. His mother was now telling her that when she left here she would prefer it if she did not come back.

She got up, tense—shivery suddenly though the sun was hot. Andreas had gone. His mother did not want her here. Up on the hill above the harbour stood a tiny domed chapel with its neatly kept gardens where her son had been laid to rest. Did Nikos need her to come here? Did she have to come all this way to find him? He lived in her heart, would always live there, she knew that, but—

The but suddenly lost itself in the next thought to shoot into her head. She had done a very stupid thing last night and now retribution was looming large in the form of a pregnancy she could not allow to become real.