by Lynne Graham
‘If you are pregnant...then and only then could I understand Anton’s motivation,’ Constantine conceded grudgingly, and yet he was perceptibly devastated by what his own imagination had suggested.
And only now had that possibility even occurred to him, Rosie registered, and boy, did the idea make him sick! That naturally golden skin had assumed an unhealthy pallor as presumably the implications of such a development sank in. This was how Constantine Voulos would have looked had she revealed her true relationship to Anton, Rosie realised with a sudden stab of satisfaction.
Few would deny that Anton’s child, illegitimate or otherwise, might have some sort of claim on his estate. Had she chosen to tell the truth, Constantine would not have dared to insult her. She was Anton’s daughter, his only child, the very last of the Estrada bloodline... and certainly not some calculating little gold-digger!
‘You don’t answer me.’ Abruptly Constantine swung away and then he spun just as swiftly back, his strong features clenched and taut. ‘If I have stumbled on the truth, my opinion of you is unchanged, but I should apologise for having approached you in such anger.’
Morbid amusement touched Rosie. He was backtracking fast on his offensive. Was he afraid of her now, afraid of the power she might have to disturb the smoothly planned future he no doubt envisaged for himself as sole controller of Anton’s various business enterprises? The idea that she might be carrying Anton’s child was a threat that shattered Constantine Voulos.
‘But be assured,’ he drawled flatly. ‘Should there be a child, every possible test would be required to prove your claim.’
Rosie was helplessly entertained by the knots he was tying round himself. Having come up with his own worst-case scenario, he was forgetting the boundary lines he had mentioned earlier. ‘But wouldn’t that be terribly upsetting for Thespina?’
His breath escaped in a startled hiss, his eyes flashing ferocious gold. ‘Your malice is indefensible...’
The instant Rosie had voiced the words she had wished to retrieve them, had realised too late how she would sound. For a moment she had longed to strike back at Thespina and Constantine and now she was bitterly ashamed of that spiteful prompting. She dropped her head, closed the case and tugged it down off the bed. ‘I’m not pregnant. Go in peace, Constantine. I am not a threat to either you or Thespina,’ she muttered heavily.
Downstairs the doorbell shrilled, breaking the pulsing tension within the bedroom.
‘That’ll be my cab.’ Rosie moved past him with relief. Her knees felt wobbly but she was bolstered by a feeling of innate superiority. Her father had been wrong about Constantine, his ward and son in all but name. Constantine was not, after all, Mr Perfect—well, that was hardly a surprise, was it?
Anton had been naive to imagine that Constantine would generously open his arms to his own natural child. Rosie had never paid much heed to her father’s oftrepeated assurances that if Constantine was ever given the chance he would fall over himself to be welcoming to the sudden advent of a little sister... not that Anton had ever referred to her and Constantine in such gruesome terms as brother and sister!
No, instead Anton had talked with immense warmth and approval about ‘family obligations...family support...family honour’, blithely ignoring the fact that Rosie would sooner have put an end to her existence than become anyone’s obligation! Furthermore she had been born a dyed-in-the-wool cynic.
Constantine had reacted exactly as she had expected to the idea that Anton might have fathered a child—with shock, horror and dismay as he foresaw what an expensive dent such a child might conceivably make in his own financial expectations. Feeling that she was a better person than Constantine Voulos because monetary greed had no hold on her, Rosie held her head high.
‘Don’t open that door!’ Constantine suddenly bit out from behind her.
Rosie’s head spun. He was halfway down the stairs, his diamond-bright gaze centred on her with ferocious intensity. ‘What the—?’
‘Quiet!’ he whispered rawly, slashing an overpoweringly arrogant brown hand through the air in emphatic command.
With an exasperation she did not even seek to conceal, Rosie simply ignored his demand and yanked open the front door. Disorientatingly, however, it was not a cab driver who stood on the doorstep. Rosie blinked, gulped and froze.
A small, slim woman in a black suit stared at her in wide-eyed distress, every scrap of colour slowly fading from her olive skin. She took a hesitant step back and then stilled, a look of complete bewilderment drawing her brows together as Constantine’s large dark frame appeared behind Rosie.
Faced with her late father’s wife in the flesh, Rosie had stopped breathing. Not a muscle moved on her paralysed face as she struggled not to let her horror show. A heavy hand came down on her shoulder like an imprisoning chain of restraint. Constantine said something soft in Greek but Rosie could feel the savage tension holding his big, powerful body in tautly unnatural proximity to hers.
Without warning the older woman lifted her hand and gently caught Rosie’s fingers, raising them to study the emerald which trapped the sunlight in its opulent green depths. ‘The Estrada betrothal ring,’ she whispered unevenly, and then she slowly shook her head in comprehension. ‘Of course... Anton gave you the ring for her! Constantine, how foolish I have been; I should have guessed ... but why didn’t you tell me?’
In receipt of that bemused appeal, Constantine inhaled sharply and Rosie felt his rigidity. ‘It did not seem an appropriate time to make an announcement—’
‘Only a man could believe that...as if the news that you are to marry would not bring me joy at any time!’ Her face wreathed in a delighted smile, all her uncertainty and anxiety vanished, Thespina beamed appreciatively at Rosie. ‘Exactly how long have you been engaged to my son?’
‘Engaged?’ Rosie echoed in a daze of disbelief, the pink tip of her tongue snaking out to moisten her dry lower lip.
‘It is very recent,’ Constantine drawled flatly.
‘But you should have told me,’ Thespina scolded in a troubled but tender undertone. ‘How could you have believed that I would be distressed by your happiness? If you only knew what madness was in my thoughts as I came to this door—’
A taxi filtered noisily into the driveway. ‘My cab,’ Rosie muttered in stricken relief.
‘You are leaving? But I have only just met you,’ the older woman protested in surprise and disappointment.
‘I’m afraid that Rosalie has a plane to catch and she’s already running late,’ Constantine slotted in inventively, closing a lean hand round Rosie’s case before she could reach for it again and carrying it swiftly from the house, presumably to enable her to make a faster exit.
‘Rosalie... that is a very... a very pretty name,’ Thespina mused after an odd moment of hesitation, her eyes swiftly veiling before she glanced up again and continued with apparent warmth. ‘Forgive me for arriving without an invitation but I shall look forward to spending time with you very soon.’
‘I’m sorry I have to rush off like this,’ Rosie mumbled in a stifled voice, quite unable to meet the older woman’s eyes, twin spots of high colour highlighting her cheekbones.
Constantine already had the door of the cab open. She sensed that if he had had access to supernatural forces a smoking crater would have been all that survived of her presence. But as she began to slide into the cab he caught her with a powerful hand and lowered his arrogant dark head, diamond-hard eyes raking over her with cold menace. ‘We have business to discuss. When will you be back?’
‘Never.’
‘You’ll come back for the money all right,’ Constantine forecast between gritted teeth, the necessity of keeping his voice down lest he be overheard by Thespina clearly a major challenge to his self-control. ‘Now I must force myself to bid you goodbye as a lover would.’
‘If you want a knee where it will really hurt, go ahead,’ Rosie invited with a venomous little smile and scorching green eyes full of threat.
‘Theos...’ Constantine breathed rawly, his hard fingers biting into her elbow. Bending down with a grim reluctance she could feel, he dropped a fleeting kiss on her brow. One blink and she would have missed it.
Until he touched her, Rosie was as stiff as a little tin soldier, and then she shivered, backed away and scrambled at speed into the cab. It drove off and she could not even make herself look back or wave to add a realistic note to his masquerade. Her heart was racing so fast, she felt physically sick.
Her fingers clenched together tightly on her lap. She felt the ring and she was furious with herself, for hadn’t she asked for what she had got and the trouble she had caused? She should have moved out of the house the instant she’d learnt of Anton’s death! She should not have openly worn the emerald either.
Her stomach cramped up. She saw Thespina’s face as she had first seen it and repressed a shudder. At first Anton’s widow had looked devastated. The older woman had somehow found out about the house and she had valiantly come to face whatever or whoever she found there. And, like Constantine, her intelligence had supplied only one possible explanation for Anton’s surprising use of a second residence in London... that the husband she had loved and so recently lost had been keeping another woman.
Rosie felt horribly guilty. If Constantine hadn’t been the sleek, sneaky type of male who thought fast on his expensively shod feet, what would have happened? If he hadn’t pretended that he had given her the Estrada ring because they were engaged, what on earth would Anton’s wife have thought?
The sheer intensity of Thespina’s relief when she had believed she could lay both house and youthful redhead at Constantine’s door rather than at her late husband’s had been painful to behold. And her resulting sincere friendship had mortified Rosie. The art of deception was not one of her talents, even if in this case it had been a kindness to protect a woman who had never done anyone the smallest harm and who had already had more than her fair share of disappointment in life.
After all, Thespina had not been able to give Anton the child they had both so desperately wanted. One miscarriage after another had dashed their hopes. Only once had Thespina managed to carry a baby to term but the result had been a stillborn son, a shatteringly cruel and final blow to them after so many years of childlessness.
When Thespina had then sunk into deep depression, leaving Anton to struggle alone with his grief, their once strong marriage had begun to crumble. It had been during that period that Anton had been unfaithful with Rosie’s mother, Beth... Rosie crushed that discomfiting awareness out. But it was, she discovered, difficult to forget Thespina again. Had they really managed to set the older woman’s fears to rest? Had she been convinced?
Before she got on the train that would take her back to Yorkshire, Rosie found herself queuing for a public phone. She dialled the number of the house, praying that Constantine was still there. As soon as she heard his voice, she sucked in a deep breath and said stiffly, ‘It’s Rosie. Look, I meant what I said earlier. You can keep the money... OK?’
‘What sort of a game are you playing?’ Constantine launched back wrathfully down the line. ‘You think I am impressed by this nonsense? Thespina’s gone and we have to talk. If she hadn’t arrived, I wouldn’t have allowed you to leave. I want you back here right now!’
Rosie’s teeth ground together. It wasn’t as if she had even wanted to speak to Constantine Voulos again and she honestly didn’t give two hoots about the money. That had only been her opening salvo, calculated to soothe. Her conscience had driven her to the phone. She felt bad about Thespina. She wanted reassurance that her father’s widow hadn’t smelled a rat in their performance and had her worst suspicions reawakened. ‘I—’
‘You think I have got all day to waste on a trashy little tart like you?’ Constantine lashed in roaringly offensive contempt.
‘Just who do you think you are talking to?’ Rosie raked back at him, losing her own temper with a speed that left her dizzy. ‘Some brain-dead bimbo you can abuse? Well, let me tell you, you overgrown creep, it takes more than a big loud mouth and a flashy suit to impress me and this is one trashy little tart who has no plans ever to cross your path again!’
Shaking with temper and mortification, Rosie crashed the phone back down on the cradle and grabbed up her case again, furious that she had put herself out to phone him. Talk about wasting the price of a call! She had got too soft. Anton had done that to her. He had mown down her prickly defences and challenged her to meet his trusting generosity with her own.
But now that her father was gone she could not afford that kind of weakness. This was the real world she was back in, not that sentimental, forever sunny place which Anton had cheerfully and somewhat naively inhabited. And being soft was only an open invitation to getting kicked in the teeth...
CHAPTER TWO
MAURICE strolled wearily into the kitchen. Well over six feet in height, he had shoulders like axe handles and a massive chest, but hard physical work had taxed even his impressive resources. His thick mane of long blond hair hung in a limp damp tangle round his rough-hewn features. ‘Any chance you bought some beer while you were out shopping?’
Barely lifting her head from the grimy cooker she was scrubbing, Rosie threw him an incredulous glance. ‘You’ve just got to be joking!’
‘You can’t still be mad at me.’ Maurice treated her to a look of pained male incomprehension. ‘You should have phoned. If I’d had some warning that you were coming back, I’d have brought Loma in to clean up—’
Scorn flashed in Rosie’s eyes. ‘Your sister has a full-time job of her own. You should be ashamed of yourself, Maurice. When we moved in here, you promised you’d pull your weight. And the minute my back’s turned, what do you do?’ she demanded with fiery resentment. ‘You turn the cottage into a dirty, messy hovel and my garden into a junkyard!’
Maurice shifted his size thirteen feet uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t clean up because I wasn’t expecting you—’
‘Stop trying to shift the blame. Put those bulging muscles into shifting those hideous old baths off the lawn and into the barn!’
Maurice grimaced. ‘The barn’s full:
‘Then sell them on and get rid of them! They make this place look like a rubbish tip!’
‘Sell them on? Are you nuts? They’re worth a packet!’ Maurice was openly appalled by the suggestion. ‘I make more flogging one bath than you make in a week of selling knick-knacks on your market stall!’
Involuntary amusement filled Rosie, defusing her exasperation. Her conscience stabbed her too. Maurice had been her best friend since she was thirteen. She sighed. ‘Look... why don’t you go and have a shower? I’ll help you clear the garden later.’
But Maurice hovered and cleared his throat. ‘I should have said it yesterday but I couldn’t find the words... I’m really sorry you lost your dad so soon after him finding you.’
A lump ballooned in Rosie’s tight throat. ‘He was a nice bloke,’ she mumbled, and swallowed hard. ‘I was lucky I had the chance to get to know him.’
‘Yeah...’ A frown darkening his brow, Maurice hesitated before plunging in with two big feet. ‘But why leave London in such a rush when he seems to have left you a share of his worldly goods?’
‘I don’t want to talk about that—’
‘Rosie...you can’t keep on running away from people and situations that upset you.’
A fierce flush lit her cheeks. In self-defence she turned her head away. The reminder that that had been a habit of hers when she was younger was not welcome.
‘And you can’t leave a legacy hanging in legal limbo either. The executor will be forced to track you down. That’s his job.’
‘He’ll find it difficult. I left no forwarding address’
‘Collect what’s coming to you and I bet you could say goodbye to market trading and start up an antique shop here, just the way you always planned,’ Maurice pointed out levelly. ‘Then between us we could make an offe
r to buy this place from my uncle instead of renting it.’
Maurice’s fatal flaw, Rosie reflected wryly. A complete inability to miss out on any opportunity to make or attract money. And because of it he would probably be a millionaire by the time he was twenty-five. His architectural salvage business was booming.
‘You could make a better life for yourself. That’s obviously what your father wanted,’ Maurice continued with conviction. ‘And why do you act so flippin’ guilty about his widow? I’m quite sure he hasn’t left her destitute!’
Rosie spun round, pale and furious, but, having said his piece, Maurice took himself safely upstairs before she even reached the hall. Baulked of the chance to tell him to mind his own business, she scowled on the threshold of the tiny lounge, surveying the all-male debris of abandoned take-aways, squashed beer cans and car magazines. Her nose wrinkled. It was going to take her days to restore the cottage to its former cleanliness. With a rebellious groan, she rubbed at her aching back with a grimy hand and wandered out into the pale spring sunshine.
A silver limousine was in the act of turning in off the road. The impressive vehicle drew to a purring halt behind Maurice’s lorry. As Rosie watched with raised brows, a uniformed chauffeur climbed out and opened the rear passenger door. She started to walk towards the barn. It might be the one day of the week that Maurice didn’t open for business but he never turned away a customer. However, when a very tall, dark male sheathed in a breathtakingly elegant dove-grey suit emerged from the limo, Rosie stopped dead in her tracks, shock and dismay freezing her fragile features.
Sunlight arrowed over Constantine Voulos’s blue-black hair, gilding his tanned skin to gold and accentuating the hard-boned hawk-like masculinity of his superb bone structure. He strode across the yard towards her, his long, powerful legs eating up the distance with a natural grace of movement as eye-catching as that of a lion on the prowl. Rosie connected with glittering dark golden eyes set between dense black lashes. Her stomach clenched, her heart hammering thunderously against her breastbone.
