by Lynne Graham
‘Kiss me,’ Maxie begged.
‘Absolutely not…I’d go up in flames,’ Angelos groaned with incredulous force, tearing himself back from her with shimmering golden eyes full of frustration.
Maxie clutched the bed to stay upright. Angelos backed away one slow step at a time, like a recovering alcoholic struggling to resist the temptation of a drink. ‘Christos…you’re so beautiful, and so totally perfect for me,’ he murmured with hoarse satisfaction.
Maxie blinked. All she could focus on was the fact that he was leaving. Everything that mattered to her in the whole world was walking out, and it felt as if it was for ever. The shock of separation from him was so painful it swallowed her alive. And a kind of terror swept over her then, because for the first time she tasted the full extent of her own agonising vulnerability.
She watched him until the last possible moment. She listened to him striding fast down the corridor. She even strained to hear the lift but she couldn’t. And then she collapsed in a heap on the soft thick carpet and burst into floods of tears. Dear heaven, what an idiot she had been to set out to provide Angelos with a challenge! All of a sudden she could not credit that she had been so insane as to refuse the chance of making something of their marriage.
He had said that he hadn’t expected her to move into this apartment. He had said that she might not have noticed but things had changed. He hadn’t even mentioned that wretched argument over that equally wretched will of her godmother’s. ‘You might as well come home with me,’ he had drawled. Her stupid, stupid pride had baulked; he had sounded for all the world like a disgruntled male grudgingly facing up to an inevitable evil. But no matter how half-hearted that offer had seemed, shouldn’t she have accepted it?
She would’ve had something to build on then. Her rightful place as his wife. Instead, she had turned it down, gambled her every hope of happiness on the slender hope that Angelos would learn to love her and want her to be more than a mistress in his life. But, judging by his behaviour in the aftermath of that refusal, she appeared to have offered Angelos exactly what he wanted.
No, she had not made a mistake in rejecting that offer, she conceded heavily. How long would it have been before he resented the restraints of such a marriage? He had only married her for sex. She shuddered. There had to be a lot more than that on offer before she would risk figuring in the tabloids as the ultimate discarded bimbo yet again.
Angelos certainly wouldn’t have been offering a wife snatched moments of his time…nor would he have been taking off for a nightclub on his own. Maxie sobbed her heart out and then, after splashing her swollen face with loads of cold water, she surveyed her weak reflection in the mirror with loathing and climbed into her lonely bed.
Tonight she had got some things wrong, but ultimately she had still made the right decision. She had played right into his hands but it was early days yet, she reminded herself bracingly. Stamina—she needed buckets of stamina to keep up with Angelos. It was so strange, she reflected numbly, every time she rejoiced in the belief that she had got Angelos off balance, he retaliated by doing the exact same thing to her…
The instant Maxie was engulfed by the hard heat of a hair-roughened male body, she came awake with a start. Pulling away with a muffled moan of fright, she sat up in a daze. Dawn light was filtering through the curtains.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you up…’ Angelos murmured.
Utterly unconvinced by that plea of innocence, Maxie struggled to focus on him in the dim light. Against the pale bedlinen, he was all intriguing darkness and shadow. Her heart was still palpitating at such a rate, she pressed a hand to her breast and suppressed the lowering suspicion that Angelos might have more stamina than she had. ‘What are you d-doing here?’ she stammered helplessly.
‘It was a long drive home… what do you think I’m doing here?’ Angelos demanded with sudden disturbing amusement. He rolled over to her side of the bed at the speed of light to haul her back into his arms and seal her into all-pervasive contact with every charged line of his big, powerful frame.
‘Oh…’ Maxie said breathlessly.
‘I know anticipation is supposed to be the cutting edge of erotic pleasure but I am not really into self-denial, agape mou,’ Angelos confided huskily, his warm breath fanning her cheekbone. ‘It’s been a hell of a week…seven very rough days of wondering if you had left me and found another man.’
As it had genuinely not occurred to her that Angelos might interpret her departure from Chymos in that melodramatic light, Maxie was shaken. ‘But—’
‘The thought of you out there…loose,’ Angelos framed with a hoarse edge to his dark, deep drawl.
‘What do you mean by… “loose”?’
‘The world is full of men like me. If I saw a ravishing beauty like you walking down a street alone, I’d make a move on her like a shot!’
Maxie was not best pleased by that assurance. ‘If I ever have the slightest reason to think you’re two-timing me, I’ll be out of here so fast—’
‘How can a husband two-time his wife?’
‘He has an affair…or a mistress.’
‘Well, you’ve got the market cornered there, haven’t you?’ Angelos breathed with galling amusement, running his hands down to the curvaceous swell of her hips to cup them and urge her even closer.
Maxie quivered, her body responding with a wanton life all of its own, but she struggled desperately to keep on talking because potential infidelity was an extremely important subject, to be tackled and dealt with on the spot. ‘Wh-who was it said that when the mistress becomes the wife, a vacancy is created?’
‘Some guy who hadn’t had the good fortune to discover you,’ Angelos growled with blatant satisfaction. ‘You are not like other women.’
Maxie blossomed at what sounded like a true compliment. ‘Did you have a good time at the club?’
‘What do you think?’ Angelos nipped at the tender lobe of her ear in sensual punishment and curved her suggestively into contact with the straining evidence of his arousal. ‘I’ve been like this all night, hot and hungry and aching—”
Maxie kissed him to shut him up; he was embarrassing her. He seized on that invitation with a fervour that fully bore out his frustration. She came up for air again, awash with helpless tenderness. He was irredeemably oversexed but she just adored him. Something to build on. Obviously being a sex object was the something to build on. How the mighty had fallen, she conceded, and then Angelos kissed her again and all rational thought was suspended…
Maxie crept out of bed and tiptoed across the carpet to the chair where she could see Angelos’s clothing draped. She would get the list back before he found it. The very last thing their relationship needed now was the short, sharp shocking result of Angelos seeing that awful list of all that she had once thought was wrong with him. That list had been a real hatchet job. After all, when she had written it, she’d been trying to wean herself off him.
Maxie couldn’t believe her eyes when she discovered that the jacket she was searching wasn’t his dinner jacket! Before he had returned to her at dawn, Angelos had evidently gone back to his own apartment to change. She could’ve screamed… Stamina, she reminded herself, but her nerves were already shot to hell.
‘Maxie…what are you doing?’
Maxie jerked and dropped his jacket as if she had been burnt. ‘Nothing!’
‘What time is it?’ he queried softly.
‘Eight…’
‘Come back to bed, agape mou.’
Maxie was so relieved he hadn’t noticed what she was doing, she responded with alacrity.
An hour and a half later she sat across the dining-room table while breakfast was served by Angelos’s manservant, Nikos. He had imported his own staff to remedy the empty cupboards in the kitchen. His efficiency in sweeping away such problems just took her breath away. Now he lounged back, skimming through a pile of newspapers and onto his third cup of black coffee.
He was a fantastic lover, s
he thought dreamily. He could be so gentle and then so…so wild. And he ought to be exhausted after only a couple of hours of sleep, but instead Angelos emanated a sizzling aura of pent-up energy this morning. I’m never, ever going to get over him, she thought in sudden panic. I need my list back to deprogramme myself from this dependency.
Without warning, Angelos bit out something raw and incredulous in Greek and sprang upright, sending half his coffee flying. Volatile, volcanic, like a grizzly bear, Maxie reminded herself studiously. He strode across the dining-room, swept up the phone, punched out some numbers and raked down the line, ‘That piece on Maxie Kendall on the gossip page…who authorised that? You print a retraction tomorrow And after that she’s the invisible woman…you tell that malicious poison-pen artist to find another target. She’s supposed to be writing up society stuff, not trawling the gutter for sleaze!’
About thirty seconds later, Angelos replaced the receiver. Maxie was suffering from dropped-jaw syndrome. Only Nikos, evidently inured to the liveliness of life with Angelos, was functioning normally. Having mopped up the split coffee, he had brought a fresh cup, and he now removed himself from the room again with admirable cool.
Angelos slapped the offending newspaper down in front of Maxie. ‘This is what happens when you stroll round Paris without protection,’ he informed her grimly. ‘You didn’t even realise you’d been caught on camera, did you?’
‘No,’ she confided, and swallowed hard, still in shock from that startling knee-jerk demonstration of male protectiveness. She cast a brief glance at the photo. ‘But do you really think that newspaper is likely to pay the slightest heed to your objections?’
‘I own that newspaper,’ Angelos breathed flatly, his lean face sardonic. ‘And just look at what that stupid columnist has written!’
Maxie obediently bent her head. She put a finger on the lines of italic type to the right of the photo. The tiny words blurred and shifted hopelessly because she couldn’t even begin to concentrate with Angelos standing over her as he was.
The silence thundered.
Then a lean brown forefinger came down to shift hers to the section of type below the photograph. ‘It’s that bit, actually,’ Angelos informed her, half under his breath.
Maxie turned white, her stomach reacting with a violent lurch. ‘I never read this kind of stuff…and you’ve caught me out. I’m horribly long-sighted…
The silence went on and on and on. She couldn’t bring herself to look up to see whether or not he had been fooled by that desperate lie.
In an abrupt movement, Angelos removed the newspaper. ‘You shouldn’t be looking at that sort of sleazy trash anyway. It’s beneath your notice!’
The sick tension, the shattering fear of discovery drained out of Maxie, but it left her limp, perspiration beading her short upper lip. How could she tell him? How could she admit a handicap like dyslexia to someone like Angelos? Like many, he might not even believe that the condition really existed; he might think that it was just a fancy name coined to make the not very bright feel better about their academic deficiencies. Over the years Maxie had met a lot of attitudes like that, and had learnt that any attempt to explain the problems she had often resulted in contempt or even greater discomfiture.
‘Maxie…’ Angelos cleared his throat with rare hesitancy. ‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your eyesight, and I don’t think it’s a good idea at this stage in our relationship to pretend that there is.’
As that strikingly candid admission sank in, appalled humiliation engulfed Maxie. This was her worst nightmare. Angelos had uncovered her secret. She could have borne anybody but him seeing through the lying excuses that came so readily to her lips when her reading or writing skills were challenged. She sat there just Staring into space, blocking him out.
‘Maxie…I don’t like upsetting you but I’m not about to drop the subject.’ Angelos bent and hauled the chair around by the arms, with her still sitting in it. ‘You are very intelligent so there has to be a good reason why you can’t read ten lines in a newspaper with the same ease that I can. And, you see, I remember your notebook when you were waitressing…like a type of shorthand instead of words.’
Maxie parted compressed lips like an automaton. ‘I’m dyslexic…OK?’
‘OK…do you want some more coffee?’ Angelos enquired without skipping a beat as he straightened.
‘No, I’ve had enough…I thought you’d want to drag it all out of me,’ she said then accusingly.
‘Not right now, if it’s upsetting you to this degree,’ Angelos returned evenly.
‘I’m not upset!’ Maxie flew upright and stalked across the room in direct contradiction of the statement. ‘I just don’t like people prying and poking about in what is my business and nobody else’s!’
Angelos regarded her in level enquiry. ‘Dyslexia is more widespread than perhaps you realise. Demetrios, whose twenty-first I attended last night, is also dyslexic, but he’s now in his second year at Oxford. His two younger brothers also have problems. Didn’t you get extra tuition at school to help you to cope?’
Relaxing infinitesimally, Maxie folded her arms and shook her head dully. ‘I went to about a dozen different schools in all—’
‘A dozen?’ Angelos interrupted in astonishment.
‘Dad and I never stayed in one place for long. He always ended up owing someone money. If it wasn’t the landlord it was the local bookie, or some bloke he had laid a bet with and lost…so we would do a flit to pastures new.’
‘And then the whole cycle would start again?’ Angelos questioned tautly.
‘Yes…’ Maxie pursued her lips, her throat aching as she evaded his shrewd appraisal. ‘I was ten before a teacher decided that there might be an explanation other than stupidity for my difficulties and I was assessed. I was supposed to get extra classes, but before it could be arranged Dad and I moved on again.’ She tilted her chin, denying her own agonising self-consciousness on the subject. ‘In the next school, after I’d been tested, they just stuck me in the lowest form alongside the rest of the no-hopers.’
Angelos actually winced. ‘When did you leave school?’
‘As fast as my legs could carry me at sixteen!’ Maxie admitted with sudden explosive bitterness. ‘As my godmother once said to me, “Maxie, you can’t expect to be pretty and clever.” ’
‘I don’t think I like the sound of her very much.’
‘She was trying to be kind but she thought I was as thick as a brick because I was such a slow reader, and my writing was awful and my spelling absolutely stinks!’ Feeling the tears coming on, Maxie shot across the room like a scalded cat and fled back to the bedroom.
Angelos came down on the bed beside her.
‘And don’t you dare try to pretend that you don’t see me differently now!’ Maxie sobbed furiously.
‘You’re right You are incredibly brave to cope with something like that all on your own and still be such a firecracker,’ Angelos breathed grittily. ‘And if I’d known this when I had Leland in my sights, I’d have torn him limb from limb…because you couldn’t read that bloody loan contract, could you?’
‘Bits of it…I can get by…but it takes me longer to read things. I didn’t want to show myself up, so I just signed.’
‘Demetrios was fortunate. His problems were recognised when he was still a child. He got all the help he needed but you were left to suffer in frustration…you shouldn’t be—you mustn’t be ashamed of the condition.’
Tugging her back against him, Angelos smoothed her hair off her damp brow as if he was comforting a distressed and sensitive child, and she jerked away from him. He persisted. Out of pride, she tried to shrug him off again, but it was a very half-hearted gesture and recognised as such. Somehow, when Angelos closed his powerful arms round her, she discovered, nothing could possibly feel that bad.
‘What did that piece in the gossip column say anyway?’ Maxie wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
‘That the rumours
about you and I were complete nonsense. But that it looked like you had attracted another wealthy “friend”—the implication being that he was another married man.’
‘The columnist got that bit right.’ An involuntary laugh escaped Maxie.
Angelos’s grip tightened. ‘It didn’t amuse me.’
Maxie then dug up the courage to ask something that had been puzzling her all night. ‘Why aren’t you still furious about me deciding to marry you because of my godmother’s will?’
‘In your position, I might have reacted the same way. I fight fire with fire too,’ Angelos admitted reflectively. ‘I don’t surrender, I get even. But, you see, there comes a time when that can become a dangerously destructive habit…’
‘I’ll stop trying to top everything you do,’ Maxie promised tautly.
‘I’ll stop trying to set you up for a fall,’ Angelos swore, and then he surveyed her with sudden decision. ‘And we’ll fly back the island to enjoy some privacy.’
‘You really are a fabulous cook,’ Angelos commented appreciatively as Maxie closed the empty picnic hamper.
Maxie tried to look modest and failed. In the most unexpected ways, Angelos was a complete pushover. With all those servants around, and the ability to eat every meal at five-star locations if he chose, no woman had ever, it seemed, made the effort to cook for him, and he was wildly and unduly impressed by the domestic touch. If she cracked an egg, he made her feel like Mother Earth.
‘You could make some lucky guy a really wonderful wife,’ Angelos drawled indolently.
Maxie leant over him and mock-punched him in the ribs. Bronzed even deeper by the sun, narrow hips and long powerful thighs sheathed in a pair of low-slung cut-off jeans, Angelos was all lean, dark, rampantly virile male. She stared down at him, entrapped, heart thumping, breathing constricted. He threaded a lean hand into her tumbling hair to imprison her in that vulnerable position.
