by Julia James
But she wasn’t. She wasn’t immune to him. She would never be. That was the power he had over her, the power that terrified her.
She took a deep, shuddering breath.
Looked at him. Looked right at him.
‘Just go, Theo,’ she said. Her voice was cracking. She was cracking. Cracking into fragments. ‘Just go.’
But he didn’t go. He stepped forward to her again, to where she had shrunk from him. He said something to her in Greek. It might have been Greek for idiot—she wasn’t sure. Her Greek wasn’t very good any more. If so, she wasn’t surprised. The word suited her. It was what she was. An idiot. A fool. A moron. One after another the words tolled through her brain, each one breaking her into smaller and smaller fragments. Her tears had stopped now. All run out. She was just a sodden, dripping mess.
Like her life.
She heard him say the word again—the one that probably meant idiot. Elithios. That was what it sounded like. Did he have to keep repeating it? She knew she was that—an idiot. Who else but an idiot would have done what she had?
She started to cry again. It seemed to be the only rational response in the circumstances.
Then Theo’s arms were coming around her. She was being crushed against him, his arms like steel bands around her. It made her cry more. The tears soaked into his shirt, because there wasn’t anywhere else for them to go. He hugged her more tightly, saying more things to her she couldn’t understand. Then he slid his arms from her and she nearly toppled off the high stool, but he caught her, held her face between his hands.
‘Idiot,’ he said, in English this time. His eyes looked into hers. ‘I thought myself a clever man—and all the time I was an idiot. Blind to what was right in front of me. Blind to everything—except one thing. One thing.’ His gaze searched hers. ‘This,’ he said.
He kissed her. Warm and close and for such a long, long time. Then his lips left her mouth and kissed her eyes.
‘Matia mou,’ he told her. ‘My eyes. My lips. My heart. My wife.’
He kissed her mouth again. This time it was warm, and close, but more—more than that. She felt the flame light in her body
Then she was being lifted off the stool and carried, still being kissed.
Fear sprang in her.
‘Theo! No—please! I can’t do this! I can’t. I can’t!’
He crossed the short distance to the bed, its duvet crumpled from where she had thrown it back, sleepless and tormented, an hour ago.
‘You can,’ he said to her, and lowered her down. ‘You must. And so must I.’
He took off his jacket and tossed it aside, and then his dress tie and shirt. Then the rest of his clothes.
Then he came down beside her. ‘It’s imperative,’ he said to her, ‘that we do this. Or the idiocy in our blood will take us over for ever. And we must not allow that, either of us. Not any more. Never again.’
He parted her bathrobe, spreading wide the material.
‘My most beautiful one,’ he said. Then he lowered his head and kissed each breast.
She shut her eyes. There was nothing she could do. Nothing at all. All will was gone. There was nothing left except sensation. Slow and sensuous and sweet. As sweet as honey…the honey that was easing through her veins.
His body was warm to her touch. Warm and strong. He murmured Greek to her, words she did not know, had never known, never heard. But they were honey in her ears, as his touch of her body was honey in her veins.
Slowly he kissed her, slowly he aroused her, slowly he entered her, holding her and cradling her, taking her with him on the journey he was making, to a land he had never visited before. Nor she.
They went to the land together, and found that distant shore, which was so close, so very close, after all. As close as their bodies to each other.
She cried again as the climax consumed itself in her, tears that came from a place deep within her.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said, and held her close. ‘Don’t cry.’
He soothed her till her tears had ebbed away, easing from her but never letting go of her, folding her to him so that her cheek rested on the strong wall of his chest. Her heart was full within her, but a great grief ran through her still.
She lifted her head to look at him.
Her eyes were troubled. So very troubled.
‘Theo—thank you. Thank you for giving me this time now. It’s taken away so much of the stain of what happened in Greece. And I’m grateful, very grateful to you for that. But go now—please. Please go.’ She swallowed painfully.
She sat up more, so that she was farther away from him and could half wrap the duvet around her. Then, with another swallow, she began to talk.
‘I should never have married you. I knew right from the start that I should not. Not just because I didn’t approve of our reasons for doing so—I gave in to the pressure anyway, for my uncle’s sake—for another reason. One I refused to face up to until it was far, far too late.’ Her eyes gazed down at him, still troubled. ‘A marriage like the one we went through could only possibly work if both parties felt the same about it, and about each other. To me it really was a sham, a show, nothing more—a charade meaning absolutely nothing beyond the mere surface. It was nothing more than play-acting, with me cast very temporarily in the role of Mrs Theo Theakis. The play would have finite run and then we’d both go off stage and get on with our real lives again, the purpose of the play achieved. That’s why…’
She swallowed yet again, and though she did not want to speak, she did, ‘that’s why I was so horrified when it actually finally dawned on me that you were…were making a move on me. I kept thinking I must be mistaken—I had to be mistaken! I mean, of course you couldn’t be doing what I thought you were! This wasn’t a real marriage—it wasn’t anything! The very idea that you would look at me…think of me…in that way was just absurd! And when I finally accepted that in fact you did think of me in those terms—it made me angry. It made me so, so angry. How dared you do so! Because to me there could only be one possible reason why you were doing it. It was an exercise in power. That was all. Flexing your sexual ego while you continued merrily with the women who’d made it so clear to me that that was your usual practice.’
A painful breath shook through her.
‘But I couldn’t cope with that—I knew I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t treat sex with you the way those other women did. And I knew—oh, God, I knew—that for you I wouldn’t be anything more than any other woman was.’
She shut her eyes again, then opened them determinedly. ‘Even when you threw at me that you had never slept with any other woman during our marriage, it just made it worse! It threw a whole new hideous light on what you’d done to me. You’d played the arch hypocrite—observing the letter of our marriage, refraining from your usual practice—but then, of course, realising you were facing months of celibacy, you’d decided that you might as well recourse to the one woman with whom you could, by your terms, have sex. Me.’
She shook her head slowly. ‘Oh, God, that made me even angrier! To be used like that! Used! Because it meant it didn’t matter who the hell I was—anyone you’d married for the reasons you and my uncle thought necessary—anyone would have done!’
‘So it didn’t matter. Because the outcome would be the same either way. When our marriage came to its allotted end, that would be the end of what you wanted from me. I would go home, as arranged, and that would be that.’
She pulled the duvet more tightly around her, as if it were to stanch a wound.
‘That would be that,’ she said again, and her voice was bleak. As bleak as winter wind. Then she forced a smile to her mouth. It was a little twisted, a little wry—and very rueful.
‘I didn’t handle things very well—did I, Theo? I should have been up-front with you. After all, you’d been up-front with me, that time I came to see you after Aristides had done his Victorian novel stuff on me. You were very up-front about why, in fact, a marriage on the ter
Her smile twisted painfully. ‘So in a way it’s all been my fault, hasn’t it? My fault for not being up-front with you. My fault for being stupid and weak enough to go along with what you wanted of me, and then, worst of all, to panic the way I did and let you totally misinterpret my relationship with Jem so that I could escape from you and know you wouldn’t come after me again.’
Her fingers started to pleat the edge of the duvet.
‘I just should have been honest with you all along.’ Her eyes rested on his face, as impassive as his eyes, which were just looking at her steadily. He had one arm crooked behind his head. Absently, with a slice of pain that seemed to scrape along every raw nerve in her body, she took in the roughened line of his jaw, the feathered sable of his hair, the complex musculature of his shoulder and lifted arm, the strong column of his throat. She would not be seeing them again. She would not be seeing him again. Everything was sorted now—all the truth told. Now it was time for Theo to go. Anger spent, poison lanced, all the secrets and lies disclosed. They could both now get on with their lives.
She would move to Devon with Jem to help run Pycott, visit her mother and Geoff in the autumn, hopefully even make peace with her uncle. But she would not go to Greece again.
That would be too painful, even now. Especially now.
Now there was only one more secret left—one more lie of omission.
That could never be told. Must never be told.
Because there was no point in telling. It would serve no purpose. None at all. So she would keep silent still, the secret deep within her to the end of her days.
‘So why did you sleep with me?’
His voice startled her.
He was looking at her, his expression still impassive. ‘You say you didn’t want an affair with me, as you termed it, and yet you did sleep with me when I met you on the island. I’m curious why.’
There wasn’t any feeling in his voice, but it was not emotionless in the way that could chill her like freezing water seeping into her shoes. His voice was simply—curious. Enquiring.
She gave a half-shrug. ‘I just gave in, that’s all. I mean, Theo, after all, it would hardly have come as surprise to you. I’m sure better women than me have given in. You’re pretty hard to resist.’
‘You managed pretty well.’ His riposte was dry.
His eyes rested on her. They were still impassive. But they were veiled—veiled in a way she had not seen before.
‘I’ll be honest with you—your reaction surprised me. I’d realised how alien the whole concept of a dynastic marriage was to you, and when I realised that was what Aristides wanted as part of our financial arrangement I was very sceptical that it could ever work with someone who had not been brought up to accept such things as normal. Yet I decided in the end that your phlegmatic English temperament would actually make it possible after all. You were capable of being composed and formal, I had noticed that the few times we were together before our marriage, and so I decided to go along with it. However, even within the temporary terms we’d agreed, it was still clearly something you found it hard to get your brain around. Then there was the whole business of adapting to life in Greece, having not been brought up there. You didn’t speak the language well, you were feeling your way into being Mrs Theo Theakis, with a life and lifestyle you weren’t used to. So I gave you time—it would have been stupid to do otherwise. Besides, I was so busy at work with Aristides’s company, as well as keeping my own affairs in order. Time is always the scarcest resource for me, Vicky. I knew from what had happened to your uncle’s business that the danger comes when you take your eye off the ball, and that wasn’t going to happen to me. So I know I didn’t have a great deal of time for you. But I argued that that was all to the good—it gave you the space you needed to make the adjustments you had to make.’
He shifted his weight slightly, his fingers beneath his head flexing at his neck.
‘Besides, though you were half-Greek, your nature was English. That was obvious. Obvious not just in your appearance, but in your taste and behaviour. All those understated clothes you wore! Very elegant, very restrained. Just like the way you conducted yourself. You didn’t get emotional, you weren’t demonstrative, you never picked up on any of the darts thrown at you by the likes of Christina Poussos. And you never picked up on something else, either.’
For a second so brief she thought she must have imagined it, the veil from his eyes lifted. Then, with a sweep of long lashes, it had come down again.
‘I have to tell you, appalled as you may be, that it was always my assumption that our marriage would not be a sham in one respect. You said just now that I would have married anyone who was Aristides Fournatos’s niece for the reasons I married you, but that isn’t actually true. I would never have married a woman I did not find sexually attractive. It would not have been…kind…to her to do so. But you, obviously, were sexually attractive. It would therefore be perfectly possible to have a non-celibate marriage. However, as I’ve just said, I knew I needed to allow you time to make the adjustments necessary to being my wife for the duration we’d agreed on. By then, you will appreciate, I had been celibate for longer than was usual for me. So I was…keen…to remedy that situation.’
It wasn’t icy water that was seeping into Vicky as she listened. She had seen Theo arctic with fury, had felt his freezing anger strip the skin from her bones.
But this—this was worse. This was Theo being a man of his class, his wealth, his circle, his normality. Deciding it was time to have sex with a woman he’d always intended to have sex with, whom he would not have entered into such a show marriage with on any other basis other than that she was sufficiently sexually attractive to him to warrant it.
He went on speaking. That same light, discursive tone.
‘So that is what I set about doing. It was very simple—I merely had to signal to you that the time had come to do what we would both enjoy. I had realised in those initial weeks that I would actually enjoy it more than I had originally assumed. That was because of you, you see. I was finding that your Englishness—all that understated, under-emotional cool—was proving surprisingly alluring. Intriguing. And as I proceeded with “making a move” on you, as you phrase it, it became yet more so. I realised that I was starting to want you really very much. Even if we had not been married, by then I would most definitely have sought an affair with you. Being married to you, in fact, merely added yet another layer of…allure…to you. It presented me with a façade of intimacy, and yet I had not laid a single finger on you. And then, I’m sorry to say, you made the most significant contribution to my condition.’
He looked at her, and somewhere very deep at the back of his eyes she could see something. Something that started, very slowly, to turn her inside out.
‘You resisted me. Avoided me. Blanked me. Stonewalled me. Fatal—completely fatal. Were you doing it on purpose? A feminine manoeuvre? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. It wasn’t relevant anyway. Because there was only one place you were heading for. Only one place I wanted you to be. And I got you there. Of course I did. There was no possibility of anything else. You wanted me as much as I wanted you. So I got you to the island, was there waiting for you, and I took you to my bed.’
There was something strange in his eyes.
‘If you had simply stayed there none of this would have happened, you know. We would have done what I had assumed all along we would do. We would have had a mutually enjoyable affair, for the duration of our marriage, and then, when it was no longer necessary for us to be married, we would have parted very amicably and gone our separate ways. That was my intention.’
He stilled. Vicky felt her heart slow. Her fingers clung to the duvet cover as she gazed down at him, half-fearful, half-numb.
‘But you didn’t stay, did you? You ran. You ran to another man. And in the moments when I looked at those photos of you with him I felt something I had never in my life felt before. Do you know, Vicky, what it was?’
She swallowed. ‘Your ego denting.’ Her voice was hollow.
He gave a laugh. Harsh and humourless.
‘Jealousy. Raw and primitive and leaping in me like a monster. The green-eyed monster, devouring me. I’d never felt it in my life before—why should I have?—and I didn’t even realise what it was. I just…possessed it…and it possessed me. Raged through me. It ate me alive from the inside out.’
She could see the cords of his neck standing out, the muscles of his arms tensed like steel.
‘Why? Why did it do that? What the hell was it, this jealousy? When Christina was my lover and announced to me that she was marrying I gave her sapphire earrings and my best wishes. When any other lover terminated a relationship before I did, my reaction was the same. The most I felt was irritation if the timing was inconvenient, or if it had been done deliberately to try and get a reaction from me. So where the hell did that monster come from when I saw you in those photos?’
She fingered her duvet.
‘You’re Greek, Theo. It’s probably some kind of atavistic response, seeing how I was legally your wife at the time. So it wasn’t really jealousy, just a bit more than a dented ego. It was that Greek macho male pride, self-regard, whatever…’
He said a word in Greek. She had a bad feeling she knew what it was, and it was something to do with the male reproductive system of cattle. Or possibly the far end of the bovine digestive system.
Then he spoke again. His voice was different now.
‘But there was something else besides the monster eating me alive. Something else that, although it didn’t devour me in tearing strips, drained me—quietly, silently, almost unnoticeably—drained me of my lifeblood.’
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