Laurel nodded. “Fine. And you?”
“I always sleep well, when I am home.”
It was usually true, though not this time. He’d lain awake half the night, thinking about Laurel, lying in a bed just down the hall from his. When he’d finally dozed off, it was only to tumble into dreams that had left him feeling frustrated. He’d figured on working that off this morning through some honest sweat, but just the sight of his wife, standing like a barefoot Venus with the wind tugging at her hair and fluttering the hem of her sundress, had undone all his efforts.
Laurel cleared her throat. “What are you doing, anyway?”
“Being an idiot,” he said, and grinned at her. “Or so Spiro says. I thought it would be nice to plant a flower garden here.”
“And Spiro doesn’t approve?”
“Oh, he approves. It’s just that he’s convinced that I will never defeat the boulder, no matter how I try.” He bent down, picked up a handful of earth and let it drift through his fingers. “He’s probably right but I’ll be damned if I’ll give in without a fight.”
She couldn’t imagine Damian giving in to anything without a fight. Wasn’t that the reason she was here, as his wife?
“Besides, I’ve gotten soft lately.”
He didn’t look soft. He looked hard, and fit, and wonderful.
“Too many days behind a desk, too many fancy lunches.” He smiled. “I can always find ways to work off a few pounds, when I come home to Actos.”
“You grew up here, in this house?”
Damian laughed. “No, not quite. Here.” He plucked her sandals from her hand and knelt down before her. “Let me help you with these.”
“No,” she said quickly, “that’s all right. I can...” He lifted her foot, his fingers long and tan against the paleness of her skin. Her heart did another of those stutter-steps, the foolish ones that were coming more often, and for no good reason. “Damian, really.” Irritation, not with him but with herself, put an edge on her words. “I’m not an invalid. I’m just—”
“Pregnant,” he said softly, as he rose to his feet. His eyes met hers, and he put his hand gently on her flat stomach. “And with my child.”
Their eyes met. It was hard to know which burned stronger, the flame in his eyes or the heat in his touch. Deep within her, something uncoiled lazily and seemed to slither through her blood.
“Come.” He held out his hand.
“No, really, I didn’t mean to disturb you. You’ve work to do.”
“The boulder and I are old enemies. We’ll call a truce, for now.” He smiled and reached for her hand. “Come with me, Laurel. This is your home, too. Let me show it to you.”
It wasn’t; it never would be. She wanted to tell him that but he’d already entwined his fingers with hers and anyway, what harm could there be in letting him walk her around?
“All right,” she said, and fell in beside him.
He showed her everything, and she could tell from the way he spoke that he took a special pride in it all. The old stone barns, the pastures, the white specks in a lower valley that he said were sheep, even the squawking chickens that fluttered out of their way...it all mattered to him, and she could see in the faces of the men who worked for him, tilling the land and caring for the animals, that they knew it, and respected him for it.
At last he led her over the grass, down a gentle slope and into a grove of trees that looked as if they’d been shaped by the wind blowing in from the sea.
“Here,” he said softly, “is the true heart of Actos.”
“Are these olive trees? Did you plant them?”
“No,” he said, with a little smile, “I can’t take any credit for the grove. The trees are very old. Hundreds of years old, some of them. I’m only their caretaker, though I admit that it took years to restore them to health. This property had been left unattended for a long time, before I bought it.”
“It wasn’t in your family, then?”
“You think this house, this land, was my inheritance?” He laughed, as if she’d made a wonderful joke. “Believe me, it was not.” His smile twisted; he tucked his hands into his back pockets and looked at her, his gaze steady. “The only thing I inherited from my parents was my name—and sometimes, I even wonder about that.”
“I’m sorry,” Laurel said quickly. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“No, don’t apologize. You have the right to know these things about me.” A muscled knotted in his jaw. “My father was a seaman. He made my mother pregnant, married her only because she threatened to go to the police with a tale of rape, and left her as soon as I was born.”
“How terrible for her!”
“Don’t waste your pity.” He began walking and Laurel hurried to catch up. Ahead, a low stone wall rose marked the edge of the cliff, and the bright sea below. “I doubt it happened as she described it She was a tavern whore.” His voice was cold, without inflection; they reached the wall and he leaned against it and stared out over the water. “She told me as much, when she’d had too much to drink.”
“Oh, Damian,” Laurel said softly, “I’m so sorry.”
“For what? It is reality, and I tell it to you not to elicit your pity but only because you’re entitled to know the worst about the man you’ve married.”
“And the best.” She drew a deep breath and made the acknowledgment she’d refused to make until this moment “Your decision about this baby—our baby—wasn’t one every man would choose.”
“Still, it was not a decision to your liking.”
“I don’t like having my decisions made for me.”
A faint smile curved over his mouth. “Are you suggesting that I am sometimes overbearing?”
Laurel laughed. “Why do I suspect you’ve heard that charge before?”
The wind lifted his dark hair and he brushed it back off his forehead. It was a boyish gesture, one that suited his quick smile.
“Ah, now I see how things are to be. You and Spiro will combine forces to keep me humble.”
“You? Humble?” She smiled. “Not unless that old man is more of a miracle worker than I am. Who is he, anyhow? I got the feeling he’s more than someone who works for you.”
Damian leaned back, elbows on the wall, and smiled.
“What would you call a man who saves not only your life, but your soul?” A breeze blew a curl across her lips. He reached out and captured the strand, smoothing it gently with his fingers. “Spiro found me, on the streets of Athens. I was ten, and I’d been on my own. for two years.”
“But what happened to your mother?”
He shrugged. It was a careless gesture but it couldn’t mask the pain in his words.
“I woke up one morning, and she was gone. She left me a note, and some money... It didn’t matter. I had been living by my wits for a long time by then.”
“How?” Laurel said softly, while she tried to imagine what it must have been like to be ten, and wake up and find yourself alone in the world.
“Oh, it wasn’t difficult. I was small, and quick. It was easy to swipe a handful of fruit or a couple of tomatoes from the outdoor markets, and a clever lad could always con the tourists out of a few drachma.” The wind tugged at her hair again, and he smoothed it back from her cheek and smiled. “I was quite an accomplished little pickpocket, until one winter day when Spiro came into my life.”
“You stole from him, and he caught you?”
Damian nodded. “He was old as Methuselah, even then, but strong as an olive tree. He gave me a choice. The police—or I could go with him.” He smiled. “I went with him.”
“Damian, I’m lost here. Didn’t you have a sister? Nicholas—the boy who married my niece—is your nephew, isn’t he?”
“It’s how his mother and I thought of each other, as brother and sister, but, in truth, we weren’t related. You see, Spiro brought me here, to Actos, where he lived. The summer I was thirteen, an American couple—Greeks, but generations removed—came to the island, sear
ching for their roots. Spiro decided I needed a better future than he could provide and, since I’d learned some English in Athens when I’d conned tourists, he convinced the Americans to take me to the States.”
“And they agreed?”
“They were good people and Spiro played on all their Greek loyalties. They took me home with them, to New York, and enrolled me in school. I studied hard, won a scholarship to Yale...” He shrugged. “I was lucky.”
“Lucky,” she said softly, thinking of the boy he’d been and the man he’d become.
“Luck, hard work...who knows where one begins and the other ends? The only certainty is that if it hadn’t been for Spiro, I would be living a very different life.”
She smiled. “I’ll have to remember to thank him.”
“Will you?” His dark, thick lashes drooped over his eyes, so that she couldn’t quite see them. “If he’d left me on the streets, I’d never have stormed into your life and turned it upside down.”
“I know.”
The words, said so softly that they were little more than a whisper, hung in the air between them. Damian framed Laurel’s face in his hands. Her eyes gave nothing away, but he could see the sudden, urgent beat of her pulse in the hollow of her throat.
“Mátya mou,” he whispered.
“What does that mean? Mátya mou?”
Damian bent his head and brushed his mouth gently over hers. “It means, my dearest.”
She smiled tremulously. “I like the sound of the words. Would it be difficult, to learn Greek?”
“I’ll teach you.” His thumb rubbed lightly over her bottom lip. “I’ll do whatever makes you happy, if you tell me what’s in your heart.”
A lie would have been self-protective, but how could she lie to this man, who had just opened himself to her?
“I—I can’t,” she said. “I don’t know what’s in my heart, Damian. I only know that when I’m with you, I feel—I feel...”
His mouth dropped to hers in a deep, passionate kiss. For one time-wrenching moment, Laurel resisted. Then she sighed her husband’s name, put her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
CHAPTER TEN
LAUREL’S KISS almost undid him.
It was not so much the heated passion of it; it was the taste of surrender he drank from her lips.
She had been his, but only temporarily on that night in New York. Now, holding his wife in his arms on a windswept hill above the Aegean, Damian made a silent vow. This time, when he made love to her, she would be his forever.
Was he holding her too closely? Kissing her too hard? He knew he might be and he told himself to hold back—but he couldn’t, not when Laurel’s mouth was so soft and giving beneath his, not when he could feel her heart racing, and he knew that her desire burned as brightly as his. Desire, and something more.
He couldn’t think. All he could do was feel, and savor, and when she moaned softly and pressed herself against him, so that he could feel her body molded to his, he almost went out of his head with need.
“Damian,” she whispered. Her voice broke. “Damian, please...”
He thrust his hands into her hair, his thumbs tracing the delicate arch of her cheeks, and lifted her face to his. Her eyes were dark with desire; color stained her cheeks..
“Tell me,” he murmured, just as he had that first time, and he moved against her so that she caught her breath at the feel of him. “Say it, o kalí mou.”
Laurel brushed her lips against his. “Make love to me,” she sighed, and he caught her up in his arms and carried her to a stone watchtower that was a part of the wall.
The tower was ancient, older, even, than the wall. A thousand years before, it had been a place from which warriors safeguarded the island against pirates. Now, as Damian lay his wife down gently on a floor mounded with clean, sweet-smelling hay, he knew that the battle that would be fought here today was one in which there would be no way to tell who was the conqueror and who the conquered.
He told himself to undress her slowly, despite the hunger that beat within him. But when she moved her hands down his chest, down and down until she cupped his straining arousal, the last semblance of his control slipped away.
“Now,” he said fiercely, and he tore away her sundress.
Beneath, she was all lace and silk, perfumed flesh and heat. He tried again to slow what was happening but Laurel wouldn’t let him. She lifted her head, strained to kiss his mouth; she stroked his muscled shoulders and chest, drew her hand down his hard belly, and then her fingers slid under the waistband of his shorts. Damian groaned; his hands closed over hers and together, they stripped the shorts away.
At last, they lay skin against skin, heat against heat, alone together in the universe.
“Damian,” Laurel said brokenly, and he bent his head to hers and kissed her.
“Yes, sweetheart, yes, o kaló mou.”
And then he was inside her, thrusting into the heart of her, and in that last instant before she shattered in her husband’s arms, Laurel, at last, admitted the truth to herself.
She was in love, completely in love, with Damian Skouras.
* * *
A long time later, in the white-hot blaze of midday, they made their way to the house.
Someone—Eleni, probably—had closed the thin-slatted blinds at all the windows so that the foyer was shadowed and cool. Everything was silent, except for the soft drone of the fan blades rotating slowly overhead.
Laurel looked around warily. “Where’s Eleni?”
“Why? Do you need something?” Damian pulled her close and kissed her, lingeringly, on the mouth. “Let me get whatever it is. I’ve no wish to share you with anyone else just now.”
“I don’t need anything, Damian. I was just thinking...” She blushed. “If she sees us, she’ll know that we—that you and I—”
Damian smiled. Bits of hay were tangled in his wife’s hair, and there was a glow to her skin that he knew came from the hours she’d spent in his arms.
“What will she know, keería mou, except that we have made love?”
“What does that mean? Keerya moo?”
“It means that you are my wife.” He pressed a kiss into her hair. “And a husband may make love to his wife whenever he chooses.” He put his hand under her chin and gently lifted her face to his. “On Actos, in New York...any where at all, so long as she is willing. Do you agree?”
“Only if the same rules apply for the wife.”
Damian’s eyes darkened. “Has no one ever told you that democracy was invented here, in these islands?”
Laurel smiled. “In that case...”
She rose on her toes, put her mouth to her husband’s ear and whispered.
Damian laughed. “I couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said, and he lifted her into his arms, carried her up the stairs and into his bedroom.
* * *
The days, and the nights, flew past. And each was a revelation.
Damian, the man who could do anything from saving a dying corporation to making an endless assault against a boulder, turned out to have a failing.
A grave one, Laurel said, with a solemnity she almost managed to pull off.
He didn’t know how to play gin rummy.
He was, he assured her, an expert at baccarat and chemin de fer, and he admitted he’d even been known to win a dollar or two at a game of poker.
Laurel wasn’t impressed. How could he have reached the age of forty without knowing how to play gin?
“Thirty-eight,” he said, with only a glint in his eye, and then he said, well, if she really wanted to teach him the game, he supposed he’d let her.
He lost six hands out of six.
“I don’t know,” he said, with a sigh. “Gin just doesn’t seem terribly interesting.”
“Well, we could try playing for points. I’ll keep score, or I can show you... what’s the matter?”
“Nothing. It’s just... I don’t know. Points, scoring... it seems du
ll.”
“Okay, how about playing for money?”
“A bet, you mean? Yes, that would be better.”
“A nickel a hand.”
Damian’s brows lifted. “You call that interesting?”
“Maybe I should tell you that I’m the unofficial behind-the-runways-from-Milan-to-Paris gin rummy champion.”
“So? What’s the matter? Afraid of losing your tide?”
Laurel blew her hair back out of her eyes. “Okay, killer, don’t say I didn’t warn you. We’ll play big time. A dime a hand.”
Damian’s smile was slow and sexy. “I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we play for an article of clothing a hand?”
Laurel’s eyes narrowed. “You sure you never played gin before?”
“Never,” he said solemnly, and dealt out the cards.
Half an hour later, Laurel was down to a pair of jeans and a silk teddy. Her sandals, belt, shirt, even the ribbon she’d used to tie back her hair, lay on the white living-room carpet.
“No fair,” she grumbled. “You have played gin before.”
Damian gave her a heart-stopping smile and fanned out another winning hand. He leaned back against the cushions they’d tossed on the floor and folded his arms across his chest. “Well?”
Laurel smiled primly and took off an earring.
“Since when is an earring an article of clothing, keerta mou? An article of clothing for each losing hand, remember?”
Her heart gave a little kick. “You wouldn’t really expect me to—”
He reached out a lazy hand, drew his fingertip lightly over her breasts, then down to the waistband of her jeans. “Your game and your rules,” he said huskily. “Take something off, sweetheart.”
Laurel’s eyes met his. She rose to her feet, undid the jeans and slid them off.
“Your turn is coming,” she said, “just you wait and see.”
He smiled and dealt the cards. It pleased her to see that his hands were unsteady. Surely he would lose now.
“Gin.”
Laurel ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, and Damian’s eyes followed the gesture. Heat began pooling in her belly.
“Damian, you’re not going to make me...”
The Greek's Unwilling Bride Page 14
