Ultimate Heroes Collection

by Various Authors

  A devastating crash. His car brakes had failed and he’d gone off the road, into a tree. He was lucky to still be alive. But he had escaped, though badly battered and bruised—and now he was asking for her.

  Asking for her.

  As they had done back home, those words now pushed Rebecca into action, taking her towards the door, her hand lifting to tug at the ornate bell pull that hung beside it, hearing the sound jangle loudly deep inside the house.

  Andreas had been asking for her, the voice at the other end of the phone had said. Did she think she could come to Greece? Would it be possible for her to come to see him?

  Becca hadn’t needed to think. There had been no doubt at all in her mind and she had given her answer even before she had time to consider whether it was wise or not. But the truth was she didn’t care.

  Andreas had been in a crash, he was hurt—injured—and he was asking for her. She had barely put the phone down before she had dashed upstairs to start packing.

  Of course, the journey to Greece had given her too much time to think. Time to go over and over and over the conversation in her head and find all sorts of possible things to worry about and fret over.

  What had happened in the accident and how badly hurt was Andreas? Why did he want to speak to her when for almost a year he had kept his distance, maintaining a total silence, with no contact at all, apart from that single stiffly formal letter that she knew he had got his secretary to write and had simply scrawled his name at the bottom of?

  But it had been enough to know that Andreas had asked for her. And there was no way she was going to turn her back on him.

  She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she barely noticed the big door swing open and jumped, startled, when a voice exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘ Kyria Petrakos!’

  It was Medora, the elderly housekeeper who Andreas had said was the closest he had ever had to a mother. Medora, who had been the one person she had spoken to on that terrible day she had spent at the villa, before Andreas had so unceremoniously thrown her out. The one person who had had a smile for her then and still had now, it seemed.

  ‘Welcome! Come in! The master will be so happy to see you.’

  Would he? a little, niggling voice questioned in the back of Becca’s thoughts. Would Andreas truly be glad to see her? She had started out on this journey so determined and full of confidence, but somehow along the way all of that courage had seeped away.

  What if it had all been a terrible mistake? If Andreas had not been asking for her at all but for someone else? Or what if …?

  Her heart clenched at the thought of the possibility that Andreas had asked for her all right but that he had done so for reasons that were far from kind or even friendly. What if his motives were simply to add to the misery he had heaped on her a year ago?

  ‘Kyria Petrakos?’

  Another voice, a male one this time—the voice from the telephone call—broke into her thoughts, making her turn, blinking hard in the shadowy hallway after the brilliance of the sun outside. A young man, tall, dark, was holding out his hand to her.

  ‘My name is Leander Gazonas. I work for Kyrie Petrakos. It was I who telephoned you.’

  Leander’s handclasp was warm and firm, reassuringly so. It drove away some of the doubts and fears in Becca’s thoughts, and replaced them with new confidence and hope.

  ‘Thank you for getting in touch with me. I came as soon as I could.’

  ‘So would you like a drink—or a chance to freshen up? Medora will show you to your room.’

  If a room had been put at her disposal then it seemed that, for the moment at least, Andreas was not just going to turn round and reject her again. But where was Andreas himself? How was he?

  ‘If it’s all right, I’d like to see my …’

  The word died on her tongue and she found herself unable to actually say ‘my husband’ out loud.

  ‘I’d like to see Mr Petrakos, if that’s possible.’

  If there was anything that brought home to her just how ambiguous her presence here was, it was this. The way that she was standing here, in the hallway of the home of the man who was, legally at least, her husband, waiting for an invitation to move into the house, while somewhere else in the building Andreas, the man she had promised to love, honour and cherish—and who had made the same vow to her—was…

  Was what? Why was she being kept here, waiting like this? What had happened to Andreas? Where was he? Something about the look in Leander’s eyes made panic rise in her throat.

  ‘Is my husband all right? Where is he? How is he?’

  ‘Please don’t upset yourself, Mrs Petrakos.’

  The tone was soothing, obviously meant to calm, but still there was something about the man’s expression, his careful control of his words that set her nerves on edge. It was obvious that there was something he was holding back.

  ‘Your husband is as well as can be expected. But he is still under a physician’s care. So perhaps it would be best if …’

  ‘No! No, it wouldn’t be best—I want to see him now!’

  Becca actually flinched at the sound of her own voice. It was too high, too sharp, too tight—too everything—and she didn’t need the change that moved across the young man’s face, tightening every muscle, pressing his lips together, to tell her that she had overstepped some invisible mark, one she hadn’t been fully aware of. She didn’t have the right, the position, in this household, to make demands like that. She had no idea what orders Andreas had given before his accident or even after it. She didn’t even know whether he had given this Leander permission to contact her or if the young man had done it on his own initiative. And if that was the case …

  ‘Please…’ she added, unable to erase the raw note of desperation from her tone. ‘Can I see my husband now?’

  She saw doubt in the face before her and was about to give in to the despair that swamped her. But then, just as she was debating whether to open her mouth and plead or simply to try to push past him and head into the house—she could remember much of the layout of the place from the brief time she had spent in it in the past—Leander obviously reconsidered.

  ‘Very well—if you will come this way.’

  He would never know, Becca reflected, just how difficult she found it to keep behind him as he made his way up the wide, curving staircase and along the landing. With anxiety chewing at her thoughts, she wanted to rush ahead to get to Andreas’ room before he did. It was only when Leander came to a halt outside an unexpected door that she was thankful that she hadn’t. Because Andreas had obviously decided not to stay in the room that had been his when she had been at the villa before. The room that would have been theirs if the marriage hadn’t broken up as soon as it had begun. And as her footsteps slowed and stopped she knew that she should be grateful.

  How could she ever have gone into that room, with all the memories it held? How could she have coped with the past being thrown right into her face as soon as the door opened, and she saw the bed on which Andreas had made her his?

  Made her his and then rejected her without a second thought.

  It would destroy her, she knew. Already the way that her heart was beating high up in her throat was choking off the air to her lungs and making her head swim so that she felt faint.

  So she could only be grateful when Leander opened the door to a room she had never been into and stood there waiting for her to come past him.

  Becca’s legs felt weak beneath her, shaking in apprehension as she forced herself to walk into the room. What would Andreas look like? What sort of a mood would he be in? He had been asking for her, yes—but why?

  The image of her husband’s dark, furious face, the black eyes blazing, the beautiful, sensual mouth drawn into a hard, slashing line floated in her mind so that for a few moments that was all she saw when she was actually standing in the room. It obscured her vision, covering the reality of the man in the bed.

  But then she blinked and saw
Andreas for the first time since he had slammed the door in her face almost twelve months before.

  The bruises were the first things she noticed. Bruises that marred the smooth, olive-toned skin, turning it black and blue in a way that had her drawing in her breath in a sharp hiss. His eyes were closed, lush black lashes lying in dark crescents above the high cheek-bones, and a day or more’s growth of beard darkened the strong line of his jaw.

  Shock at the sight of him lying there so still and silent made her gasp. Her vision that had cleared for just a brief moment blurred again as tears of horror filled her eyes.

  ‘He’s unconscious!’

  She didn’t care that her distress showed in her voice, that the edge of fear sharpened it.

  ‘Asleep,’ Leander reassured her. ‘He was unconscious for a time, but the doctors wouldn’t let him out of hospital until they were sure he was on the mend.’

  ‘Can I stay—with him?’

  She didn’t know what she might do if Leander refused permission. She didn’t think that her legs would support her if she tried to walk out of the room. She could still barely see, and the fight to force back the tears, refusing to let them spill out down her cheeks, was one that took all her concentration.

  ‘Kyrie Petrakos asked for me,’ she added hastily when she saw that the younger man was hesitating. ‘I promise I won’t wake him—or do anything to disturb him.’

  At last he nodded.

  ‘He did ask for you,’ he said, indicating a chair with a wave of his hand. ‘But I should warn you that the blow to the head has left him with some memory problems—the doctors believe they will be only temporary. So he may be a little confused when he wakes. Would you like a drink sent up?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Becca assured him hastily, squashing down the weak thought that a cup of tea might warm the sudden coldness of her blood, give her a strength she so much needed. What she needed more was to be left alone, to have time to catch her breath, mentally, since the telephone call had rocked the balance of her world so desperately.

  As Leander left the room she sank down thankfully into the chair he had indicated, her legs giving way beneath the weariness that was both mental and physical, her eyes fixed on the still form of the man in the bed.

  She had promised not to wake him, not to disturb him, but the truth was that he was disturbing her for all he lay so silent and unmoving. The sight of Andreas, whom she had last seen so tall, strong and proud, lying still and pale in the bed was almost more than she could take. But it was worse than that.

  She’d spent the last year telling herself that this man had been a mistake, one she deeply regretted, but she was over him. It had taken just one glance at the man in the bed, at the dark, stunning profile, the broad naked chest where the bronzed skin showed livid, disturbing bruises, ones that made her heart clench just to see them, to rock that belief in her head. If she had seen him standing, if her first awareness had been of the powerful, forceful man he was, the man who had used her and then thrown her out of his home, perhaps it would have been different. This man was too quiet, too vulnerable.

  Too deceptively vulnerable, a warning voice sounded inside her head. Because at any other time, vulnerable was not a word she would ever associate with Andreas Gregorie Petrakos.

  ‘I hate him.’

  In a low, desperate whisper, she tried the word hate out for size, feeling it strange and alien on her tongue. For almost a year now, she had used it every day in connection with Andreas’ name. Used it and meant it.

  ‘I hate Andreas Petrakos,’ had been the first words she had said on waking and often the last ones that had been on her tongue at night. They had replaced and reversed the ones that had been there before, in the brief time before her marriage, when she had whispered to herself how much she loved this man, afraid to voice the thoughts aloud for fear that she might be tempting fate and the happiness she dreamed of would evaporate just as a result of saying them.

  She shouldn’t have bothered, Becca told herself bitterly. She hadn’t tempted fate but the cruel blow had fallen after all. Andreas had never loved her as she had loved him; in fact, his marrying her had only been an act of revenge.

  The man in the bed sighed, stirred, muttered something, immediately drawing her eyes to his face once again. Had those heavy, closed eyelids flickered once or twice, or was she just deceiving herself?

  Just the thought of it made her heartbeat kick up several notches, making her blood pound in her ears.

  What would she do if—when he woke? When he spoke?

  And what about these ‘memory problems’? How much had they affected him? Knowing Andreas as she did, she could just imagine how difficult he would find any limitation to his awesome mental abilities. He would hate it and it would chafe at him like a net thrown over a wounded lion, holding him captive. He would rage against it, and Andreas in a rage was a terrifying sight.

  But perhaps more importantly, she should also consider what this news meant for her. Would Andreas even remember that he had asked for her? And what had been on his mind when he had?

  The long-fingered hand that lay on the bed had definitely twitched, flexing briefly as he sighed again. There was a long, angry-looking scratch running from the base of his ring finger right to his wrist and it pulled on something deep in her heart to see the raw tear in the beautiful, bronzed skin that seemed so very dark in contrast to the soft white cotton of the coverings.

  Becca bit down hard on her lower lip to hold back the faint gasp that almost escaped her and she fought to push away memories of how it had felt to know the touch of that hand, have it caress her skin, rouse her to heated longing…

  ‘No!’

  She wasn’t going to let herself go down that road. To do so would destroy her even before she’d spoken to Andreas, or found out just why he’d asked for her. And she was having enough trouble holding on to her self-control as it was, with the bitter memories that assailed her at just being in this house.

  The bittersweet memories—because some of them she could never deny had been so very sweet. She had been so idyllically happy when she had arrived at the villa. So happy that she had thought that her heart would burst from sheer joy.

  But that had been before Andreas had taken that loving heart and ripped it into tiny pieces.

  ‘O opoios …’

  There was no mistaking it this time. Andreas had murmured the words, rough and low, but he had spoken. His eyes remained closed but his head stirred restlessly against the pillows as he swallowed, ran his tongue over his dry lips.

  ‘O opoios …?’ he said again, his voice grating as if he hadn’t used it for a long time.

  ‘Andre …’

  Becca’s voice matched his for hoarseness and lack of strength. She felt as if all the blood had drained from her body at the sound of that once so dearly loved voice that she hadn’t heard for a year.

  ‘Mr Petrakos …’

  That brought his eyes open in a rush, huge and dark, turning her way, frowning as he tried to focus on her face.

  What could she see in them? It certainly wasn’t welcome—but was it anger or rejection, or…?

  ‘Who—?’

  He heaved himself up on the pillows, propped himself on one elbow as he stared into her face, and the cold glare from his deep-set black eyes warned her that she was in trouble.

  ‘So tell me,’ he said slowly and clearly in English, ‘just where the hell have you been?’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘SO TELL me, just where the hell have you been?’

  He’d spoken in English, Andreas realised, but he had no idea why. Somehow when he’d opened his mouth, the words had just come out in that language, and he hadn’t even really thought about it.

  So what did that mean?

  Ever since he’d come round from the coma into which he’d fallen after the accident, nothing had been clear in his thoughts at all. He hadn’t even been able to remember his own name or where he lived, and it had taken a cou
ple of long, hellish weeks for anything that he was told to stick inside his battered brain.

  He’d been thrown about the car quite violently, and he’d hit his head hard, they’d told him. He was lucky to be alive, so a few scrambled thoughts, some hazy memories were not unexpected. Hazy he could cope with, scrambled too. It was the blank, empty hole where most of his memory of the past year or so should be that was really disturbing him.

  But the doctors had had an answer for that, too. It would come back, they had assured him. In its own time. He just needed to relax and wait.

  The problem was that no one told him how long he had to wait. Or what the hell he did if it didn’t come back at all. The last thing he felt was relaxed.

  And they never told him how to handle situations like this. Like waking up in his own room with a beautiful woman sitting in a chair, watching him.

  A beautiful woman he remembered from before the gap in his mind.

  She was of medium height, as much as he could tell, and with a neat, slenderly curved figure in a blue and green print dress under a short white cotton jacket. Her hair was almost as dark as his own, shaped in a neat, short feathery cut that framed the heart-shaped face, emphasising the high cheekbones and the rich curve of her soft mouth. But where the eyes that he saw in the mirror every day were black too, hers were a soft, washed-looking pale blue, the colour of the sea out in the bay on a cool, shadowy day.

  ‘You are Rebecca, aren’t you?’ he demanded again when the woman didn’t speak but simply stared at him with wide, stunned-looking eyes.

  ‘Yes, I’m—I’m Becca… Rebecca.’

  The words were English and on the soft, hesitant voice the accent seemed to fit as well. So somehow he’d been right when he had spoken to her in English.

  He didn’t even really know why English, only that it had felt so right.

  And something to do with this woman whose face had been the first thing that he had focused on when he opened his eyes. The woman who, he had to admit, had sparked off the first moment of real, sharp, intense interest he had felt since the day he had come round after the accident to a world turned upside down. At least he was still aware of the appeal of a beautiful female face, he thought bitterly, the sharp twist of desire reminding him that, no matter what was wrong with his mind, he was still functioning as a man for the first time since regaining consciousness.