He had to give it to his mother-in-law—she was not slow on the uptake. Her eyes went round. ‘In just half a day?’
He smiled; it was impossible not to. ‘It took less than half a day the first time we met,’ he admitted candidly.
‘That was before you broke Isobel’s heart and sent her home to me in little pieces,’ Silvia said brutally. Eyes as fierce and contrarily vulnerable as her daughter’s glared at him. ‘I won’t let you do it to her again.’
‘I have no intention,’ he assured. ‘But I warn you again, Silvia,’ he then added seriously, ‘Isobel is still my wife and is staying that way.’
Isobel’s mother studied his grimly determined expression. ‘I think you should try telling her that,’ she advised eventually.
‘Oh, she knows it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘She is afraid of what it is going to mean, that’s all.’
‘And the mistress?’
He mocked the question with a grimace. ‘Is a mere friend.’ The sooner certain other people recognised that the quicker he could settle down to convincing Isobel. ‘Where is the lawyer?’ he then asked thoughtfully.
‘Still on the terrace looking slightly poleaxed by high-society living.’
Nodding, Leandros went to walk past her then paused and instead bent his dark head to place a kiss on her cheek. Her skin felt as smooth as her beautiful daughter’s. But then Silvia was still a very attractive woman, even sitting here in this wheelchair. She had her daughter’s eyes and beautiful mouth, and, though her hair might not be as red as Isobel’s any more, it was still luxuriously silken.
‘I am happy to see you back here again, ee peteria,’ he told her huskily. ‘But I am not happy to see you confined to this thing.’
‘It won’t be forever,’ Silvia replied firmly. ‘I am getting stronger by the day and don’t usually spend so much time sitting here.’
‘Would it be too much for you to explain to me what happened?’
Ten minutes later he was going to find Lester Miles, with his head so filled with his new insight into Isobel and Silvia’s last few years while they’d fought Silvia’s battle together, that he didn’t notice Isobel sitting on the top stair, where she’d listened in on the whole illuminating conversation.
When he’d gone she came down the stairs and brushed her mother’s cheek with a silent salutation. She’d had no idea how tough her mother had found the last two years until she heard her confiding in Leandros.
‘Come on,’ she said softly. ‘Let’s go and check out your new accommodation.’ And, taking charge of the wheelchair, she turned it round to face the hallway.
‘You OK?’ Silvia asked.
‘Yes,’ Isobel answered.
‘You still love him don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she answered again; there was really nothing more either of them could add to it.
Together they checked over everything and found nothing to complain about. The rooms had used to be a fully self-contained study added on by a previous owner of the house who was a writer and liked his own space when he was working, so most of the necessary facilities had been built into the annexe. When the designers moved in they’d converted the whole thing into a state-of-the-art office for Leandros. But he’d rarely used it, preferring to use the conventional study in the main part of the house. Isobel had taken it over to use as a photo studio, where she’d developed her photographs and played around with them via the computer sitting in the corner on its state-of-the-art workstation.
With Diantha’s famed organisational skills, a bed had been added along with a couple of armchairs and a huge TV set. Reluctant though Isobel was to admit it, the place looked great.
‘I’ll want for nothing here,’ her mother announced with satisfaction. Even her luggage had been carefully unpacked and put away.
Now she must go and check on their other guest, she realised. ‘Where’s Lester Miles?’ she asked her mother.
‘Ask Leandros,’ she suggested. ‘He went looking for him a few minutes ago.’
But Lester Miles was being driven away from the house even as Isobel went to search him out. ‘What have you done with my lawyer?’ she demanded when she met Leandros in the hall.
‘He’s just left.’
Her very expressive eyes began to flash. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve sent him back to rough it at the Apollo!’
‘No.’ His mouth twitched. ‘He had to go back to England with some urgency. My driver is taking him to the airport.’
‘He won’t get a flight,’ Isobel stated confidently.
‘Oh?’ he murmured curiously. ‘Why not?’
‘Because all the flights to London are full—I already checked,’ she drawled.
‘How enterprising,’ he commended. ‘Were you hoping to escape before we made it to the bed or afterwards?’
Refusing to answer that, she turned and started up the stairs. Leandros arrived at her side.
‘I am flying your lawyer home—along with the Adonis. There,’ he smiled. ‘Am I not a graciously accommodating man?’
Refusing to rise to that bit of baiting, she kept her gaze fixed directly ahead.
‘Where are we going?’ he enquired lightly.
She was on her way to find her own luggage; where he was going did not interest her one little bit.
He smiled at her again. She wanted to hit him. ‘Is your mother comfortable?’ he enquired.
‘Perfectly, thank you,’ she answered primly.
The sound of low laughter curled her insides up. They arrived on the upper landing, where six doors led to elegant bedroom suites. Isobel made for one door while Leandros made for another. With their hands on the door handles they paused to glance at each other, Isobel with the light of defiance in her eyes, because the room she was about to enter was not the one they’d used to share. Leandros simply smiled—again.
‘Dinner,’ he said, ‘eight-thirty,’ and disappeared from view, leaving her standing there seething with anger and a sense of frustration because, by refusing to comment on the fact that she was clearly not intending to share a bedroom, he had managed to grab the higher ground.
Dinner was a confusing affair. Silvia was tired and had decided to eat in her room then watch a video film before going to bed. Isobel came down, wearing the same dress—since it was her only dress. Though she had taken a shower, pinned up her hair and added some light make-up.
Leandros on the other hand was wearing full formal dinner dress. He looked handsome and dashing and her heart turned over. ‘A bit over the top for an informal meal in, isn’t it?’ she remarked caustically.
‘I have to go out later,’ he explained. ‘My mother is expecting me, and, since I have been strictly unavailable to anyone today, either I turn up or she will come here to find out what I am playing at.’
Isobel wished she knew what he was playing at. There were undercurrents at work here that made her feel out of control. Yet she didn’t know why, because it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known about the dinner tonight. Diantha had mentioned it, being so efficient. What she had expected was that Leandros would make some concession for once in his important existence and have remained here with her.
Which was telling her what? she asked herself. She didn’t like the answer that came back at her, and that revolved around dear Diantha and his preference for where he would rather be!
They walked into the smaller of the two dining rooms that the house had to offer, like two strangers on their first date. Leandros politely held out a chair for her. Allise, she saw, had pulled out all the stops for this cosy dinner for two and the table had been dressed with the best china and candles flickered softly instead of electric lights.
She sat down. Leandros helped her settle her chair. By the time he’d moved away without so much as touching her even by accident, she was feeling so incensed she felt she was living within her own personal battle zone.
He sat down opposite. Candlelight flickered over lean, dark features completely stripped of his thoughts. He w
as beautiful. It wasn’t fair. The black of his jacket and the white of his shirt and the slender bow-tie gave sophistication a whole new slant. He reached for a napkin, shook it out then took a bottle of champagne out of its bucket of ice. The napkin was folded around the bottle. Long brown fingers deftly eased out the cork. It popped softly but did not dare to explode—not for this man who had learned how to open a bottle of champagne in his crib. Frothy gold liquid arrived in the crystal goblet in front of her without him so much as spilling a drop. He filled his own glass. She considered picking up hers and tossing the contents at him.
But the suspicion that he was already expecting her to do that held her hands tightly clenched on her lap. If he didn’t say something to ease this tension, she was going to be the one to explode…like the champagne cork should have done.
‘You can come with me, if you want.’
She sat there staring at him, unable to believe he had just said that—and as casually as he had done!
‘Thank you,’ she said coolly. ‘But I am watching a film with my mother.’
His grimace said—fair enough. He picked up his fizzing crystal goblet and tipped it in a suave toast to her. ‘Welcome home,’ he said, then drank.
If Allise hadn’t arrived with the food at that point, maybe—just maybe—Isobel would have reacted. But wars like this required nerves of steel and she had them, she told herself.
They ate in near silence. When she couldn’t push her food around her plate any longer, Isobel drank some of the champagne, which instantly rushed to her head. Her mouth suddenly felt numb and slightly quivery. She put the goblet down. Leandros refilled it. Allise arrived with the second course. When the last course arrived, Isobel refused the delicious-looking honey-soaked pudding and asked for a cup of black coffee instead. She’d drunk two glasses of champagne like a woman with a death wish because she knew as well as Leandros knew that she had no head for the stuff.
When the dreadful meal was finally over, she got up on legs that weren’t quite steady. Leandros didn’t get up but lazed back in his chair, studying her without expression.
‘Goodnight, then,’ she said.
He gave a nod in acknowledgement. She walked out of the room. She suffered watching the film with her mother out of grim cussedness, then escaped to her self-allotted bedroom, got ready for bed, crawled beneath the crisp white sheets, pulled them over her head and cried her eyes out.
He was with her, she was sure of it. He was standing in some quiet corner of his mother’s house, gently explaining the new situation. Would she beg, would she cry? Would he surrender to the liquid appeal in her dark eyes and stay with her tonight instead of coming home?
She drifted into sleep, only to be consumed by visions she did not want to see. It wasn’t fair. She hated him. He was tying her in emotional knots just like the last time. A pair of arms scooped her off the bed and jolted her out of sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘GET off me, you two-timing brute!’ she spat at him.
‘Well, that isn’t very nice,’ he drawled.
‘Where do you think you are taking me?’
‘You did not really think that I was going to let you sleep in any other bed than our own, did you? Foolish Isobel,’ he mocked as he lifted up a knee then swung her down onto another bed.
The knee stayed where it was, the rest of him straightened so he could remove his robe, his eyes glinted dark promises down at her, and because she was too busy trying to cover her dignity by tugging her ridden nightshirt over the shadowy cluster of golden curls at her thighs she missed her only chance to escape. He came down beside her in a long, lithe stretch of male determination. One hand slid beneath the fall of her hair while the other made a gliding stroke down her side from breast to slender thigh. Then it came back up, bringing her nightshirt with it.
He stripped it from her with an ease that left her gasping. She aimed a clenched fist at him, he caught it in his own hand, then his mouth was coming down to cover her mouth. She groaned out some kind of protest but it wasn’t enough to bring this to a halt. It was dark, it was warm and, as he subdued her, her senses were already beginning to fly. Seconds later she was lost in the hungry, driving intensity of the kiss.
Her fingers unclenched out of his grip on them, lifted then buried themselves in his hair. The kiss deepened. She could feel his heart pounding, felt the thick saturation of his laboured breath. Her body, her limbs, every sinew moved and stretched on wave after wave of desperate delight. He dragged his mouth away and looked down at her, no smile, no mockery, just heart-stunningly serious desire.
‘Did you go to her?’ she whispered painfully.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘Was she there?’
His eyes darkened. ‘Yes.’
Her fingers tugged at his hair until he winced. ‘Did you speak to her—touch her?’
‘No,’ he grated. ‘I had no reason to.’
The black ferocity of his gaze insisted that she had to believe that. Her mouth slackened into a wretched quiver. ‘I imagined all sorts,’ she shakily confessed to him.
‘I am with the only woman who has ever done this for me,’ he answered harshly. ‘Why would I lust after less?’
‘Three years, Leandros,’ she reminded him painfully. ‘Three years can make a man accept less.’
‘Were you unfaithful?’ He threw the pain right back at her.
‘No—never.’
‘Then why are we talking about this?’
They didn’t talk any more, not after his mouth claimed hers again and his hands claimed the rest of her with a grim, dark, fierce concentration that robbed her of the will to do anything but feel with every single sense she possessed.
She was possessed, Isobel decided later, when she lay curled in the secure circle of his arms. Her cheek rested in the hollow of his shoulder, her fingers were toying with the whorls of hair on his chest. There wasn’t another place she would rather be, but knowing it made her feel so very vulnerable. She didn’t think she was any better equipped now than she had been three years ago to deal with what loving a man like Leandros meant.
She released a small sigh. The sigh aggravated the muscles controlling Leandros’s steady heartbeat. She might be lying here in his arms but he knew she had problems with it. Did he take a leap of faith and force those problems out into the open so they could attempt to sort them out?
He trapped his own sigh before it happened. He didn’t want to talk. His eyes were heavy, his body replete and content. Her hair lay spread across his shoulder, her soft breathing caressed his chest and the darkness soothed him towards sleep.
She moved just enough to place a kiss on his warm skin, then followed it up with another pensive sigh. Contentment flew out of the window. He moved onto his side and flipped her onto her back then came to lean over her with his head supported by his hand.
‘What?’ she said and she looked decidedly wary.
‘Why the melancholy sighs?’ he demanded.
‘They were not melancholy.’
He arched an eyebrow to mock that little lie. She lowered dusky eyelashes until they brushed against skin like porcelain. Her mouth looked small and cute when he knew that the last thing you could ever call Isobel was cute.
‘I have this urge to stand you up against the nearest wall and shine a bright light in your eyes,’ he murmured drily. ‘We have just made love. You cried out in my arms and clung to me as if I was the only thing stopping you from falling off the edge of the earth. You told me you loved me—’
‘I did not!’ The desire to deny that brought her lashes upwards.
‘You thought it, then,’ he amended with a shrug meant to convey a sublime indifference to semantics. Then he reached out to gently comb her hair from her face, and was suddenly serious. ‘We need to talk, agape mou, about why we parted.’
Without the gentleness she might not have caught on to what he was actually daring to broach here. But he saw the light in her eyes change, saw them fl
ood with horror then with tears. ‘No,’ she said, then was leaping out of the bed and racing from the room.
By the time he had grabbed his robe and gone after her she was standing in the other bedroom, huddled inside the blue robe. His chest ached at the sight of her, at the sight of that robe that said so many things about the real Isobel, like the look of pure anguish whitening her face.
‘Will you stop running?’ he ground at her. ‘Just stop running from this,’ he repeated almost pleadingly. ‘If we do not face the past together, how are we supposed to move on?’
Isobel stood and shook and remembered why she hated him. If she could take back the last mad day then she would. Her heart hurt, her throat hurt; just seeing him standing there looking as if he was experiencing the same things made her want to wound him as he had once almost fatally wounded her. How could she have forgotten what he had done to her? How could she have lain in his arms and let herself ignore the kind of man she knew him to be?
‘You didn’t want our baby,’ she breathed. ‘Is that facing it?’
He winced as if the tip of a whip had just lashed him. ‘That is not true…’
‘Yes, it is,’ she insisted. ‘By the time I was pregnant I don’t think you even wanted me!’
‘No…’ He denied that.
‘I was the irritation you just didn’t need, and you made sure I knew it.’ But he was right; she could not run from this! It had to be faced before they made the same mistakes a second time and turned lust into love, which then turned into regret filled with frustration and bitterness. ‘You married me when you didn’t need to, we both knew that—you’d already enjoyed what was on offer after all! You lifted me out of working-class drudgery into wealth and luxury beyond compare then expected me to show eternal gratitude. But how did I pay you back for this generosity and goodness? I refused to conform. I refused to smile weakly and say “Yes, thank you, Mama,” when your mother lectured me on how I should behave.’
‘She was attempting to advise you.’
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