by Lynne Graham
* * *
Socrates Seferis was seated in a wicker chair on the verandah enjoying coffee and tiny pastries when Rosie came downstairs to join him, freshly garbed in linen trousers and a bright blue tee. Her smile was hesitant. ‘I’m so pleased you wanted to see me again,’ she admitted frankly.
‘You and Alexius are adults. I shouldn’t have interfered and sitting on the sidelines like this …’ the older man smiled widely ‘… is proving very interesting.’
Rosie poured a cold drink from the tray on the table. ‘How … interesting?’
‘My godson has never brought a woman here before. This island is his bolthole. He is very protective of his privacy.’
‘I’m not surprised. I saw how the press behaved around him at the airport. Not a fun experience.’ Rosie winced at the recollection but she wanted to smile at the information her grandfather had just given her. It was good to know that she was not one more in a long line of female lovers brought to Alexius’s childhood home. ‘Have you been here before?’
‘Only once. His parents’ funeral,’ Socrates volunteered wryly. ‘They are interred in the private cemetery here.’
Her interest caught, Rosie leant forward. ‘You knew them? What were they like?’
‘I never moved in their elite social circle, consequently I can really only speak as an observer,’ the older man confessed. ‘I went to school with Alexius’s grandfather and that was my connection to his family and why I was asked to be Alexius’s godfather. His parents were both very rich and very young. They were also only children whose families pushed them together and their marriage was more or less a business merger. Once their families were satisfied by the production of a son and heir—Alexius—his parents lived separate lives. There was no divorce but there was no true marriage either.’
Rosie nodded. ‘That’s sad.’
‘But rather more sad for their son,’ Socrates countered ruefully. ‘I think his mother lacked the maternal instinct. Alexius was raised by the domestic staff and at the age of eight his parents placed him in an English boarding school.’
‘Eight years old? That’s very young to be sent so far from home, but no wonder he speaks such good English,’ Rosie mused, riveted by what she was learning. ‘He never mentions his childhood.’
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Socrates urged, sprawling comfortably back in his padded wicker chair. ‘Once I was in London on a business trip when I suddenly remembered that it was my godson’s tenth birthday. I’m an impulsive man and since I hadn’t seen the boy in quite a while I decided to buy him a gift and pay him a surprise visit at the school. When I arrived I was taken aside by his housemaster, who confided that the school was very concerned by the boy’s lack of contact with family and home. He never heard from his parents at all and they didn’t bother to visit even if they were in the UK. Summers he spent here on the island but as a rule neither parent was present, only the staff, who catered to his every whim. Alexius never learned what a normal family household was like because he never had that experience.’
Rosie was pale, imagining how lonely he must have been as a child, given everything necessary for his comfort and amusement but deprived entirely of parental love, interest and attention. ‘That must have been very wounding for him.’
Socrates elevated a bushy greying brow. ‘He’ll never admit that, but once I knew that he had no visitors at school I made it my business to see him whenever I was in London. He had plenty of friends, of course, and often visited their homes.’
Rosie sank into a reflective mood, grasping that she finally had the key to her lover’s essential detachment. Just like her he had been betrayed and excluded by the people who should have loved him and wanted to keep him close as a child. Great wealth might have shielded him from the early deprivations she had experienced, but, regardless, his mistreatment had been no less real than her own.
‘Would you like to come and stay with me in my home in Athens?’ her grandfather asked her baldly without the smallest warning. ‘You’d be very welcome.’
Rosie reddened and shifted in her seat, mortified by her reluctance, for she could now see that the older man was a warm-hearted person, willing to move past his own views of her current pregnant and unwed condition purely to build a family relationship with her. ‘I … er—’
‘Don’t want to leave Alexius,’ he slotted in, a glint of amusement in his dark eyes. ‘So, you are a couple?’
‘Right now … I’d like to spend more time with him,’ Rosie admitted in a rush, her colour higher than ever at being put on the spot to quantify something she couldn’t even begin to describe.
‘My invitation remains open. I would love to have you as a guest and I’d like to hold a party to introduce you to my friends and relatives,’ Socrates declared with enthusiasm. ‘But that can wait.’
‘I’m grateful that you understand,’ Rosie responded guiltily, for hadn’t she originally agreed to come to Greece to get to know her grandfather? When had she allowed Alexius to become the sole focus of her happiness and her dreams?
Socrates Seferis shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t marry him … feeling as you so obviously do about him,’ he confided equably. ‘But you’re old enough to know your own business best.’
After that slightly awkward exchange, Socrates told her about his problems with his own family and she admired his honesty and respected his wry admission that he had spoiled and indulged his children in an attempt to compensate them for the death of their mother. He moved on to discuss the fact that he had asked Alexius to get to know her and Rosie then told her grandfather about his godson’s deception, which the older man found surprisingly funny.
Alexius strolled lithely out to join them and mention that dinner would soon be served. Clad in an open shirt with every sleek muscular line of his body defined by cropped denim jeans, he took her breath away. She was amused to see Bas stumbling along in his wake, little tail wagging like a metronome as soon as he saw Rosie. She lifted the little dog onto her knee and introduced him to her grandfather.
‘He followed me into my bedroom and started chewing one of my shoes,’ Alexius delivered grimly, choosing not to admit that he had been relieved that his ankle was not the target again.
‘He does have bad habits. He wasn’t very well trained when he was a puppy,’ Rosie explained.
‘You spoil him. He’s an animal, not a human being.’
‘Well, I’m sorry about the shoe but I’m not putting him outside in a kennel!’ Rosie told him squarely.
Socrates watched the exchange as if he were in the front seat viewing an enthralling show and, catching him in the act, Rosie flushed with self-consciousness, wondering if she and Alexius looked as ill suited from the outside as she felt they had to be. Never mind his wretched money and pedigreed background, she thought painfully, he was so damned clever while she was always aware that she had to study long and hard to pass exams.
After dinner the two men chatted with an ease that relieved her fear that their confrontation on the day of her arrival had caused lasting damage to their relationship. The helicopter arrived to collect her grandfather and convey him home. She walked back indoors by Alexius’s side, suddenly shy again, tied in knots by the potential pitfalls of a relationship that had no boundaries or definition.
‘Did Socrates ask you to go home with him?’ Alexius asked darkly, scrutinising the shuttered look of her delicate profile with suspicion while noting the faint sunburn that had already turned her cheekbones pink, and lingering on the lush pout of her soft mouth.
Rosie lifted her head, pale hair falling back from her brow, her eyes evasive. ‘Yes.’
Alexius tensed. ‘And what did you say?’
‘Not just yet.’ Rosie swallowed, feeling like a shameless hussy for admitting that so openly, for obviously she had no reason to stay other than to share his bed.
His wide sensual mouth narrowed thoughtfully. ‘That’s good.’
‘Howev
er, I do intend to take him up on the invite soon,’ Rosie continued doggedly, keen to let him know that he was not saddled with her as a house guest in an open-ended arrangement. ‘I’m sure you’ll be jetting off somewhere soon to work.’
Alexius had come to a halt, his face taut, his eyes shielded. ‘I’m planning to take some time off. How soon is soon?’ he queried.
‘A … week?’ Rosie tested the concept on him uncertainly. ‘I don’t feel I can put my grandfather off much longer than that. After all, I did come to Greece to spend time with him and here I am staying with you.’
Alexius ran a teasing forefinger below her full lower lip that made her tingle, and she glanced up into his mesmerising eyes, liquid heat spiralling between her slender thighs. ‘A week isn’t long enough for what I want, moraki mou.’
‘This … us,’ she specified unevenly, ‘isn’t going anywhere.’
Alexius scooped her up in his arms, ignoring Bas, who was bouncing round their legs and barking at the move. ‘Right now, we’re going to bed.’
Sex, his first port of call, his main means of self-expression, she thought despairingly even as the wild excitement of his hungry mouth on hers and his arms crushing her to him leapt like a burning flame to her every pulse point. Sex, shorn of emotion, was the lowest possible denominator. But did that matter if she wanted to be with him more than anything else in the world? She shrugged off her doubts and insecurity, and reminded herself that she had turned down a marriage that would have tied him to her whether he liked it or not. She didn’t want to become the wife he felt duty bound to marry because she was carrying his child. Eventually, he would come to resent her for such a sacrifice. No, what little they had now was still more honest and true than a second-rate marriage would have been, she told herself urgently, for one truth she had divined: Alexius Stavroulakis was constitutionally incapable of accepting anything second-rate.
CHAPTER NINE
WHEN are you going to tell Alexius? was the question running on a constant loop inside Rosie’s head. Tell him that she was leaving tomorrow? Her grandfather had already arranged transport for her and set the date of the promised party for the weekend.
It wasn’t even as though her departure could be much of a surprise to Alexius, she reasoned ruefully, because the one week she had conceded at the start had stretched languorously into two weeks. Only the onset of Socrates’s regular phone calls had persuaded her to finally set a date. He was her grandfather, a man she liked and respected, and she knew very well that he was only thinking about her well-being. Letting the precious days trickle through her fingers like a dream she was frantically struggling to hold on to against all the odds wasn’t adult behaviour, she told herself urgently. She was pregnant; she couldn’t afford to drift for ever. She had to make a new life for the sake of her child and her grandfather was offering her the first stepping stone towards that sensible objective. She had stayed with Alexius because she had hoped against hope that he would show feelings for her that went beyond what they shared in bed.
Sadly, it hadn’t happened. Nor had he mentioned the marriage idea since the day he told her that he was withdrawing that offer, which implied that he had come round to her point of view and accepted that marriage wasn’t for him. His silence was deeply ironic at a time when Rosie was revising her convictions and beginning to believe that a good marriage could possibly be built on something other than mutual devotion. Alexius was so good to her: no man had ever treated Rosie so well and when it was happening on a daily basis she knew it was worthy of note.
They had explored the island together, bathed off idyllic deserted beaches and eaten out at the homely taverna in the dusty little village down by the harbour, where the local fishermen wandered up to chat to Alexius with a lack of concern for his exalted tycoon status that she knew he relished. He had no need of bodyguards on the island, which was why he so enjoyed his freedom there. He had even taken her out fishing, but that had been a calamity as the motion of the boat and the smell of the fish had made her unrelentingly sick. To console her for her weakness he had flown her to Rhodes the next day, amused when she was less interested in the shops than in touring the medieval walled city and learning its chequered history, but even so he had still contrived to buy her a spectacular diamond pendant at an exclusive jeweller’s that had proved the source of their only row during their time together.
‘I’ll give you whatever I want!’ Alexius had retorted angrily, refusing to compromise when she told him she was uncomfortable accepting such an expensive gift. ‘You’re sleeping in my bed, you’re expecting my baby—why do you expect me to treat you like a casual acquaintance? And what’s your problem anyway? Everything you’re wearing right down to the panties I’m looking forward to ripping off you later was bought by me!’
That unwelcome truth had landed like a concrete brick on Rosie’s proud head, crushing her, embarrassing her, infuriating her for, predictably, Alexius was never slow to deliver the ultimate verbal strike in a clash of personalities. But he had apologised, she reminded herself in consolation, even when she hadn’t expected him to apologise for only pointing out the truth.
‘Don’t make my money a barrier between us,’ he had urged that night in bed while he held her close, after an explosive bout of passionate make-up sex. ‘Don’t deny me the pleasure of buying things for you. I don’t like rejection.’
She was so happy with him, she acknowledged painfully, but she absolutely knew that returning to Athens to move in with her grandfather would translate as a rejection in Alexius’s judgemental eyes. He was very much an all-or-nothing personality. Even so, it wasn’t as if Alexius had asked her to live with him: if he had asked she would have said yes. But the point was that he hadn’t asked. Their stay on the island appeared to be more like a little break from routine on his terms and yet it had meant so much more to her.
Rosie folded another top and laid it in the suitcase with a sigh. He hadn’t asked her to fall in love with him. In fact, had he known he would undoubtedly have told her not to bother doing so. She remembered that Bas’s lead and his toys were downstairs and went to fetch them. As usual Alexius had spent the morning working in his home office and she had not seen him since breakfast. She was digging out a squeaky toy from below a table when he appeared.
‘I’ve done enough for one day, moraki mou,’ he mused, lounging in the doorway, black hair tousled, bronzed muscular torso on show below an open shirt worn with swimming trunks. Even dressed that casually, he exuded a throbbing, energising aura of power and temperament, a slight smile curving his beautifully moulded lips. As she looked her mouth went dry, her breath hitched in her throat and her heart lurched: he looked so gorgeous she could never believe that he could be hers in any lasting way. She always had the uneasy feeling that she was reaching for a guy light years out of her reach.
‘What are you doing scrabbling about the floor like that?’ he enquired levelly.
‘Finding Bas’s toys,’ she muttered, rising upright again to gaze back at him with wide green eyes of appreciation. Oh, how much more appreciative she would be tomorrow when she left the island, she conceded painfully, and Alexius would no longer be available. The prospect depressed her.
‘Tell the staff to find them,’ Alexius urged with the careless ease of a male who never did anything pedestrian that could be done by an employee. He focused his talents and time on business and on being a breathtakingly inventive and exciting lover.
At that risqué thought, her breasts tingled beneath her simple sundress, the bodice a little tight since pregnancy had swelled her flat chest to acceptable curves for the first time in her life. That new fullness of flesh there amused her, for it was only a temporary effect, but the reality that she was losing her waist and could no longer suck her slightly protruding stomach in did not amuse her at all. The body that Alexius swore he adored was changing and there was nothing she could do to stop that from happening. Soon Alexius might not even want to rip her panties off any more becaus
e she was losing her figure. Wasn’t it better to leave before his desire waned when at least that way she could conserve her pride? After all, pride was all a girl had left when she loved a man who didn’t feel the same way.
Alexius sensed her edginess and noticed the way her eyes dropped from his. He had known there was something amiss for the past forty-eight hours but had said nothing, holding back as was his wont from the lifelong awareness that that was the best way to hang on to power in any relationship. But something or someone had definitely robbed Rosie of her ever-present delight in life. She had a tremendous capacity for joy and more inclination to admire, appreciate and value the little things of life than he had ever met with in any other person, Alexius reflected with unabated wonderment. A beautiful sunset, a delicious meal or even a lame joke from an old fisherman could inspire her to smiles and laughter: she was cheerful, easy to please, and she had finally learned to accept his limits. She was the perfect lover.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Alexius asked abruptly, surprising himself with that leading question, but her nervousness nagged at him like a sore tooth. And not for nothing had Alexius devoured whole a thoroughly depressing book entitled Pregnancy Disasters. He knew exactly what danger signs to look out for and silently checked her every day for any suspicious symptom or visible and dangerous alteration.
Rosie smiled, determined not to spoil their last day together. ‘Of course I am.’
Alexius trailed long fingers through the tumbled fall of her hair across her shoulders, enjoying the familiar scent of her herbal shampoo. A cascade of images gripped him: Rosie grinning with enthusiasm with her hair blowing wildly back from her face on the boat, enjoying herself before the sickness bug took over; Rosie studying him in the morning as though he were the eighth wonder of the world; Rosie looking at him at all times of day as though he were the eighth wonder of the world, he repeated mentally as he met her dreamy green eyes full-on. He didn’t trade in dreams: when would she realise that? But he was content with what they had, wanted to stop the clock right there and then as she shifted into his arms without any prompting and offered her succulent mouth up to his.
