The Secret Wife

by Lynne Graham

His dark, tousled head swooped down, the tender, seductive caress of his mouth feathering against hers in silken persuasion of the cruellest kind. ‘But you feel like heaven on earth,’ he confided with a sinuous, slow and infinitesimal shift of his hips that sent a rise of reawakened pleasure travelling through her startled body. ‘Trust me, pethi mou...’

  Rosie melted like frost in sunlight, heat surging back in a stabbing little surge of excitement. The next time he moved she was waiting for that feeling and a second after that she was shocked to realise that she was desperately craving more of that astonishingly sensual sensation which sent every pulse racing.

  ‘OK?’ Constantine husked.

  OK? It was more than OK, it was... it was glorious and so deeply intimate that she felt possessed. Squeezing her eyes shut, Rosie felt the excitement rocket almost terrifyingly fast until all she could do was gasp and cling in abandoned surrender to the hungry, diving stroke of him inside her. And then, before she could even grasp what was happening to her, the heat mushroomed and stars exploded in a multicoloured frenzy behind her eyelids. As he shuddered above her in the grip of his own climax, the tidal wave of extraordinary pleasure still rocking her was mindless in its intensity.

  She didn’t want Constantine to move and disturb the incredible sense of peace and happiness filling her. And he was inextricably bound up with those feelings, she registered in confusion, instinctively loving the heat and weight of him and the achingly familiar scent of his damp skin.

  He lifted his dark head and stared down at her with stunning intensity. Rosie was held fast by that scrutiny and the raw tension now tautening his muscles but his black eyes were utterly unreadable. His mouth twisted. ‘You felt like a virgin.’ He vented a harsh, almost bitter laugh. ‘Or how I imagine a virgin would feel! Christo, what would I know about that?’

  Releasing her from his weight with startling abruptness, Constantine sprang off the bed. ‘I need a shower.’

  ‘Constantine...?’ Rosie whispered shakily.

  ‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ Constantine breathed roughly on the threshold of the bathroom without turning round to look at her again. ‘But right now I don’t feel good about this development.’

  In a shock made raw by a crawling sense of humiliation, Rosie lay listening to the shower running. Constantine regretted the ‘development’. Sexual hunger satisfied, Constantine couldn’t escape the scene of the crime quickly enough. A great lump closed over Rosie’s throat and her eyes stung and burned. She could have stopped him; she could have said no. But she had stupidly indulged herself, indulged him and refused to face up to what she was doing. Yet in her worst imaginings she could not have expected so devastating and immediate a rejection of their intimacy...or the feeling that she was being ripped slowly in two by the strength of her own turbulent emotions.

  Constantine emerged from the bathroom again. He banged through every piece of furniture in the room. Curiosity finally drove Rosie’s head up. Light glimmered over the long, golden sweep of his back. He was pulling on a pair of jeans, electric tension sizzling like wildfire from every jerky, impatient movement. Fascinated against her will, Rosie stared.

  ‘I’m going out,’ Constantine gritted over one brown shoulder.

  ‘Be my guest,’ Rosie managed, turning away again and feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life before. She had felt she knew Constantine but now she knew that she didn’t know him at all. She didn’t know why he was behaving as he was. She didn’t know what was on his mind. Self-loathing boiled through her slender frame. Well, that was what you got when you went to bed with a stranger.

  After lying awake for hours, Rosie finally slid into an exhausted sleep around dawn. Shortly after nine, voices below her window woke her up. Workmen were assembling to repair the roof. She had a shower, made unimpressed use of the extravagant number of luxurious new towels available, and while she wondered where Constantine had slept she despised herself for caring.

  Downstairs she passed by a closed door beyond which she heard Constantine and a ringing phone. Her strained mouth compressed as a maid directed her into the dining room. Breakfast was served but Rosie had little appetite. She was finishing her coffee when Carmina appeared, beaming behind a huge bouquet of flowers.

  ‘Forgive me,’ it said on the card.

  Two high spots of colour flared over Rosie’s taut cheekbones. Forgive him? Not if he crawled and begged for a hundred years! Her teeth gritted. ‘Get her some flowers,’ he had probably said to Dmitri. Oh, what a big effort Constantine had made! Why? He was stuck up a mountain, supposedly on his honeymoon, and sexually available women were thinner than hens’ teeth on the ground. The threat of celibacy undoubtedly struck horror into his oversexed bones. Had Constantine now decided that he had been too hasty in regretting their intimacy?

  Rosie thrust wide the door of the room being used as an office. As an entrance it failed. Everyone was too busy to notice her. A svelte brunette in her thirties was taking notes while standing up. Constantine was dictating in bursts of low-pitched Greek, while simultaneously conducting a conversation on the phone. A young man was seated, muttering over a computer terminal, while another was ripping several feet of paper out of a fax machine.

  Rosie crossed the room to the electric shredder, hit the button and started stuffing flowers into the metal jaws. The shredder chewed up the first few inches of the floral sacrifice, wedged shut on the stalks and cut out with a complaining beep of warning. Silence slowly spread and Rosie spun round.

  Constantine had lowered his phone. She saw only him, raging green eyes connecting with glittering black as he sprang upright. Sheathed in a lightweight suit in pale grey, he looked devastatingly handsome. As their companions melted out of the room without being asked, Rosie sucked in a deep breath, found it insufficient to cool her temper and battered the remaining blooms in seething frustration against the inanimate shredder before flinging them to the floor in a violent gesture of contempt.

  ‘You unbelievable creep! How dare you give me flowers?’

  ‘Last night shouldn’t have happened,’ Constantine gritted between clenched teeth, brilliant black eyes unflinching. ‘But what is done is done.’

  Disconcerted by that initial statement, Rosie paled, and even though she knew she ought to agree with the sentiment expressed she was attacked by an amount of pain that tensed every muscle in her slender body. Her lashes dipped to conceal her confusion. ‘You were determined to get me into bed,’ she condemned.

  ‘Theos... given the overwhelming attraction between us, that conclusion was inevitable! But I’m not very proud that last night I wasn’t able to keep my hands off my guardian’s mistress,’ Constantine stated with fierce candour.

  Belated comprehension sank in on Rosie, making her marvel at her lack of perception. Once again, Constantine’s firm belief that she had had an affair with Anton had made its prejudice felt...and how, she reflected painfully, recalling the bitter force of his rejection only hours earlier. But with understanding came an odd sense of relief and then a rise of stark frustration. Her chin came up, green eyes flashing a direct challenge. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that Anton and I were not lovers?’

  Shimmering dark golden eyes collided ferociously fast with hers. Constantine expelled his breath in a driven hiss. “There’s a fool born every minute but I’m not one of them.’

  She could go and drag in Carmina and ask her to show that photograph and repeat what Anton had told her, but how embarrassing that would be for all of them... and then what? Even if she actually managed to convince Constantine that she was Anton’s daughter, where did they go from there? She might want to clear her name but she couldn’t forget what Constantine had admitted with such impressive conviction the night before.

  If he knew who she really was, would he start thinking of her as some sort of ghastly obligation and out of respect for Anton feel forced to change his behaviour accordingly? She cringed from that idea. At least on these terms they met on level gr
ound. The time would certainly come when she would try to prove her identity but that time was not now, when she couldn’t bear to think that owning up to being Anton’s illegitimate child might make Constantine pity her.

  Staring into those scorching dark eyes, Rosie felt her heart lurch and her mouth run dry. Constantine gazed back at her in the pounding, pulsing silence. Without warning it was incredibly difficult to breathe. Shock reeled over her because this time she couldn’t even pretend that she didn’t know what was happening to her.

  ‘You told Anton that you were pregnant,’ Constantine contended in a ragged, dark growl as he drew inexorably closer. ‘It was a cheap trick but that is why he demanded that I marry you.’

  ‘I don’t play cheap tricks,’ Rosie told him breathlessly, struggling to hang on to her wits as her skin heated and her breasts swelled into throbbing sensitivity. She pressed a betraying hand to the pulse flickering a crazy beat at her collarbone.

  ‘Christos ... you play me like a witch casting a spell!’ Constantine countered with sudden glancing rawness. ‘I want you even more now than I wanted you last night—’

  ‘Tough,’ Rosie said with tremulous bite, a quiver of deep overpowering longing sheeting over her with the efficacy of a mind-blowing drug, leaving her more dizzy and disorientated than ever. Her dazed green eyes clung to his hard, dark face in a tormented craving that cut like glass through her pride and slashed it to ribbons.

  In response, Constantine reached out, curved his fingers firmly over her stiff shoulders and pulled her across the floor into his arms. And since that was where every inch of her wanted to be she couldn’t fight. He crushed her to him in a shatteringly sexual embrace, a powerful hand pressing her into intimate contact with the bold, hard thrust of his arousal. Rosie shivered violently, her legs turning hollow. He took her mouth with hot, hard hunger and the heat of desire blanked out every. thought. She clutched at his broad shoulders, knit frantic fingers into his thick black hair and feverishly kissed him back.

  He sank down into his swivel chair with her on top of him, lean hands roving beneath her loose T-shirt, skimming over the smooth, taut skin of her ribcage in search of the pouting mounds above. Encountering her bra, he groaned with frustration against her reddened mouth, released the fastening with dexterity and spread both hands possessively over her bared breasts. Fierce sensation engulfed her in a wild tide of shuddering response. If she had been standing up, she would have fallen down.

  Meshing a hand into the tumble of her hair, Constantine held her back from him, his breath coming in tortured bursts. The phone was ringing off the hook, the fax still noisily spewing paper. A flicker of disconcertion drew his winged ebony brows together. Momentarily he closed his eyes as if he was fighting for control, a muscle pulling taut at the corner of his sensual mouth. His thumb rubbed over an achingly erect pink nipple and Rosie trembled and gasped as if she were in a force-ten-gale, bowing her head over his, resting her forehead in his luxuriant hair, torn apart and weak as water with need.

  ‘You are driving me off the edge, pethi mou,’ Constantine confided with ragged bite. ‘Possibly a working honeymoon was not one of my brighter ideas.’ Suddenly he stood up, both arms anchored around her, and set her down on the edge of the desk, sending papers flying with a decisive sweep of one arrogant brown hand. ‘But then if I want to make love to my wife in the middle of the day that is my business.’

  Rosie’s lashes fluttered. ‘I’m not your ...’ she began, yet her voice trailed away again, wiped out by the change she’d discovered within herself, the sea change that had crept up on her without her noticing. His wife, she savoured in a sudden stark surge of possessiveness that shook her.

  Tugging the wide-necked T-shirt down her arms to entrap her and then slowly extracting her hands, Constantine delved his tongue between her parted lips with a growl of immense satisfaction. The hunger he could heighten with just one more kiss blazed a fiery trail that plunged her into quivering sensual oblivion. He skimmed caressing fingers over the straining pink buds of her nipples, making her burn and shift and moan with pleasure beneath his mouth, and then he was pressing her back, his hands skimming up her thighs to drag her cotton skirt down out of his path as he pulled her to him.

  Clenched by an excitement that made breathing a torment to her struggling lungs, Rosie focused on him with wondering eyes, her racing heart threatening to arrest as she drowned in the passionate intensity of his gaze. Utterly entrapped, she arched her spine like a willing sacrifice.

  ‘You make me ache...’ His deep, dark drawl was ragged with arousal as he lowered his mouth to her pouting breasts. ‘I want to be inside you so badly, I’m shaking, pethi mou.’

  The hot pleasure took her by violent storm, strangled moans torn from deep in her throat as he worked his way slowly down her quivering length, and by the time he reached the tensing, jerking concavity of her stomach Rosie was just a mass of melting, gasping nerve-endings, only managing to stay on the desk because he had her pinned there. He was torturing her and she couldn’t bear it. He hooked his fingers into the waistband of her high-cut cotton panties and she was on the very brink of exploding with the sheer force of her anticipation when, without the smallest warning, Constantine froze, grabbed up her T-shirt and flung it across her. Her startled eyes flew wide.

  Constantine strode towards the opening door at the same time as a thunderous crash of smashing china and rattling metal sounded in the hall outside.

  In shock, Rosie jumped a foot in the air. Other noises which she had tuned out swam back into her awareness. The phone was still ringing, the fax still buzzing. She blinked in frantic bemusement. Only one item of clothing stood between her and complete nudity, she registered strickenly. In broad daylight, she was spread across Constantine’s desk like a brazen trollop. Oh, dear heaven...

  Constantine snapped the door softly shut again. ‘One of the maids was bringing in coffee. Dmitri intercepted her. He gave her such a fright she dropped the tray. I haven’t done anything like this since I was a teenager,’ he murmured with sudden rueful amusement.

  Rosie refused to look at him. ‘Go away!’ she said shakily.

  ‘Why?’

  She was burning alive in an agony of mortification. ‘Get out of here while I get my clothes on!’

  ‘Don’t you think that would be just a little absurd in the circumstances?’

  ‘Bloody hell... can you never do anything I ask you to do?’ Her strained voice cracked on the demand. ‘Do you always have to argue about it?’

  The door closed with a definitive thud.

  Pale as milk, Rosie shot off the desk like a shoplifter caught red-handed in the glare of spotlights. In a mad rush she fumbled clumsily for her bra and her skirt and then crawled about the floor until she finally located a missing canvas pump lying under a chair. As she dressed, tears drenching her distraught eyes, she studied the open window, and then, in sudden decision, pressed it wider to facilitate her exit. It was the work of a moment to hoist herself over the sill and out into the fresh air, thereby cravenly avoiding any immediate further contact with Constantine. Before she dealt with Constantine, she conceded painfully, she needed to deal with what was happening inside her own head.

  As she clambered over the stack of roof tiles in her path and worked her way round a ladder, she heard a car coming up the drive. It was a bright yellow four-wheel drive. Drawing the brash vehicle to a halt, the driver vaulted out, blond mane gleaming in the sunshine as he looked curiously around himself. Rosie froze.

  ‘Maurice?’ she whispered shakily, and then she shrieked, ‘Maurice!’ and closed the distance between them in ten seconds flat to fling herself at him with a strangled sob of welcome.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ENVELOPING Rosie in a bear hug, Maurice scanned her damp-eyed pallor beneath her wildly tousled hair, an anxious frown in his bright blue eyes. ‘You look bloody awful... what’s been going on?’ he demanded.

  ‘Let’s go for a drive!’ Pulling free of him, Rosie div
ed into the passenger seat of the four-wheel drive and looked at him expectantly. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  ‘Constantine.’ Maurice mimicked the soundtrack from Jaws.

  ‘Oh, stop being funny!’ Rosie cried as she cast hunted glances in all directions, her nerves shot to hell by an absolute terror of Constantine appearing and dragging her back out of the car. ‘I think I’m in love with him!’

  There it was, said, out in the open, Rosie’s worst nightmare come true, and Maurice didn’t even have the decency to look surprised.

  ‘What on earth are you doing over here?’ she asked belatedly.

  Maurice swung the brightly coloured vehicle into an unhurried U-turn. ‘I’ve been promising myself a holiday for a long time. The minute you said you were in Majorca, I saw sun and sand and I realised where you had to be heading. From there it was only a matter of studying the map.’

  While he drove down the steep mountain road at the crawling speed of someone terrified of heights, easing round every zigzag bend with an agonised death-grip on the steering wheel, Rosie thought feverishly about Constantine until her head spun and pounded with tension.

  Bang! He had stolen her tranquillity and her security. And what had he given her in return? A hideous sense of inadequacy and self-loathing and a temper as unreliable as an active volcano. If threatened by Constantine, shout. Only last night he had been telling her that she argued with him to hold him at hay! He had seen inside her and understood something she hadn’t understood herself and that was terrifying.

  The minute she had found herself holding fire on protesting her identity, the minute that she had found herself wishing that their marriage were a real marriage, she should have known that she was in love with him. But all Constantine had ever wanted from her was sex. She found him irresistible, he found her... available. If that tabloid hadn’t exposed their secret wedding, Constantine would’ve walked away from her that morning without a backward glance.