What the Greek's Wife Needs

by Dani Collins

  Tanja heard her friend and housemate, Kahina, call out that she was coming. Kahina’s brother, Aksil, entered and said crisply, “Kahina. There are men here for Tanja.”

  Tanja’s knees almost buckled, but she refused to endanger Kahina when Kahina had been so kind, harboring her through all of this. She would face whatever awaited her, but her hands were freezing and stiff, her whole body shaking.

  Illi’s little form felt snug and warm as Tanja touched her sleeping daughter. Her heart was sheared in two as she gave herself one last moment with her, biting her lip to prevent a scream of agony.

  She didn’t let herself give in to the hysteria. To think the what-ifs. There was no time. Heavy footsteps were scuffling into the bungalow. She touched her lips to the cheek of the four-month-old and deeply inhaled her sweet scent. Tears scorched her eyes, and her throat was so tight she could hardly breathe.

  As she straightened, she felt as if her chest was crushed beneath a slab of concrete. Her feet pushed through quicksand as she made herself walk out of the bedroom to meet her fate.

  Four men stood inside the door. Aksil must have run from his home across the street when he saw the soldiers arrive on the stoop. He wasn’t wearing shoes and his head was uncovered. He hugged Kahina protectively into his side with a tense nod.

  Two men wore olive-green uniforms and cradled automatic rifles in their arms.

  The last man who appeared from behind them was as tall and wide and swarthy as the soldiers, but he wore a navy blue pullover atop black trousers and footwear that, in another life, she would have pegged as sailing shoes.

  She brought her gaze back to his unshaven jaw, his ruffled dark hair and his fierce glower. The floor seemed to tip beneath her, causing her head to swim and her heart to swoop into her stomach. It soared, then hit the floor.

  “Oh, my God!” She clapped her hand over her blasphemy—as if these mercenaries genuinely cared about religious observances. They imposed their restrictive laws for control, not true concern for modesty or faith.

  But what on earth was her husband doing here? Could she even call Leon Petrakis that? They hadn’t seen each other in five years. Not since he had abruptly left just days after their quiet wedding because his father had passed away without warning.

  Do you want me to come with you?

  No.

  He had completely shut down from the charmingly seductive playboy she’d married. A week later, he had finally responded to one of her many texts asking when he would be coming back.

  I’m not.

  That had been that. He hadn’t said much to her brother, Zachary, either. Leon had supposedly been waiting for the full release of his trust fund on his thirtieth birthday. He’d promised to inject capital into the marina when that happened, but he had ghosted the lot of them, destroying her brother’s livelihood and their father’s retirement in the process. Tanja had given up her school savings to help bail out Zach and still owed on the student loans she’d taken to finish her degree.

  All of that meant she would rather kill and eat Leon Petrakis than be dragged out of bed to look at him, yet he opened his arms and spoke with what sounded like...tenderness?

  “Agape mou. At last. I’m here to take you home.”

  He moved forward in long, confident strides, like the lion he was named for, snaring her with easy strength and pulling her into his tall, muscled frame.

  Her heart lurched in alarm at the sheer size of him. She’d forgotten this dynamic energy of his, this magnetism and sex appeal. How he made her feel utterly cherished as he crushed her close.

  It was a lie, of course. She felt his disingenuousness in the hardness of his muscles as he cradled her. She saw it in his features, distant and closed off. He wasn’t so much older as altered. He was still beautiful, but now he was fierce. Hardened and serious. Everything about him was amplified. This was Leon two-point-O. Leaner and sharper and stronger.

  The scent of salt breeze filled her nostrils along with damp cotton and faint notes of aftershave or some other manly, exclusive product. Underlying all of that was a scent that was masculine and familiar. Personal. Him. It was elemental power and a barbaric will that enveloped her the way his arms did, in a claim, like an animal leaving his scent on his mate.

  Despite how false she knew this embrace to be, after so many weeks of worry, her body bought what he was selling. She gave an involuntary shudder and leaned into him, unconsciously latching onto him as a piece of her old life and the security and stability she yearned so badly to get back to.

  She was losing her mind to fear, she realized, because some latent, ridiculous remnants of her crush on him pulsed heat through her. She hated him. She had decided that years ago, but instead of thrashing him with her fist and decrying him as the heartless profligate he was, she relaxed. Her most primitive self drew in his presence the way her lungs took in oxygen—as though it was something that could be absorbed and used to keep her alive.

  Leon cupped her jaw to tilt her face up and stroked a thumb across her cheekbone. The men with guns disappeared, and tingles of pleasure raced across her skin as her husband bent his head and set his mouth warmly against her unsteady lips.

  An unexpected spark leaped between them, bursting in her chest like fireworks, sending a singed line out to her fingertips, into her loins and down to her toes.

  His flinty gaze flashed in surprise, as though he experienced something like it, as well.

  They had only been lovers a few short weeks, but seeing that ember flare within him caused her own to intensify. Her mouth softened, and he deepened their kiss in a slow rock of his lips across hers.

  She let her lashes flutter closed and leaned more completely into him. It was so intoxicating, so perfect and needed and right. She pressed into her toes, sealing their mouths. It was exactly as it had been five years ago. His kiss was hard and hot and held a hurricane of passion behind it that would have swept her into its eye if he hadn’t tightened his hands on her and set her back on her flat feet.

  She swayed, stunned to discover reality crowding in like dark shadows.

  None of this made sense. Not his presence here or her pounding heart or the way her hands refused to unclench from his soft pullover.

  Keeping his arm around her, he faced the soldiers, speaking French, which was more common than English here, after the local dialect.

  “See? As I told you. She’s my wife. She came to teach English, but when the changeover happened she was unable to leave without a male relative. I’ll take her home now.”

  Changeover, she thought dimly. Such a well-scrubbed euphemism for foreign military invasion. She went with it, though. She slid her arm around his lower back and leaned into his side. Her other hand stayed on his chest, tensely crushing the soft knit as she gazed up at him, searching for clues as to how he’d known where to find her. Why had he come? She’d been sure he’d forgotten she existed.

  The soldiers shifted restlessly, exchanging looks of deep skepticism. “You live here? Without any male relative?” one asked her.

  Aksil quickly spoke up. “My sister and Ms. Melha—”

  “Mrs. Petrakis,” Leon inserted.

  “Yes, of course.” Aksil nodded. “Mrs. Petrakis taught with my sister at the girls’ school before it closed. I take my sister shopping when they need food, but Kahina will come stay with my family now.” Aksil tightened his arm protectively around her.

  Leon nodded as though it was all decided. He would have swept Tanja to the door, but she balked. The words what about Illi? formed on her tongue.

  Even as his gaze flashed an urgent don’t test me into hers, her daughter let out the beginning of a staccato cry, the irritable one that meant she wanted to sleep, but her tummy had decided she was hungry. Tanja suspected Illi was going through a growth spurt, and desperation was turning her inside out because they were so low on formula.

&nb
sp; The sound of Illi’s cry froze everyone into stillness.

  Tanja looked to Kahina. Her friend would be welcomed at her brother’s, but his house was already full of Kahina’s nieces and nephews. Asking Kahina to take Illi would be more than an imposition. Illi would take food from the mouths of Aksil’s children.

  Illi might not have come from Tanja’s body, but Tanja was her mother now. She wouldn’t go anywhere without her daughter. That’s how she had come to be trapped here.

  There would be no taking back the way she played the next seconds, but there was only one way she could play it. This was her chance, her one chance, to take her baby home.

  “Agape mou.” She gazed imploringly up at Leon. “You must be so excited to meet your daughter.”

  As outrage flared in the depths of his eyes, Leon’s expression hardened before cracking into a faint smile. “It’s all I’ve thought about,” he said in a distant voice.

  “I’ll get her.” Kahina hurried into Tanja’s bedroom.

  * * *

  Get in. Get out. Get a divorce. That had been Leon’s straightforward plan when he had received the email from Tanja’s brother, Zach.

  Tanja is trapped on Istuval. She needs a male relative to take her out. My wife is due any day or I would go myself. Dad’s on crutches and can’t travel. Since you are technically still her husband...

  Technically? He was her husband, despite the five years of estrangement. Dissolving his marriage hadn’t been a priority while Leon had been rebuilding his father’s empire. Divorce papers would have invited his wife to gouge him for a settlement, jeopardizing all he was trying to regain, so he’d let that task slide.

  With this rescue, Leon had seen an opportunity to end things without her trying to soak him. He’d headed to Malta where he’d bought a racing trimaran, readied the vessel, set aside bribery cash in various currencies, and stocked up on diapers and formula.

  Zach’s email had said “they” were desperate for baby supplies. Leon had taken that to be a collective “they.” That Zach was advising he bring infant goods to grease palms.

  Leon hadn’t been given a chance to mention the supplies or the money to his inquisitors. The moment he’d come near the harbor, he’d been boarded. He and the trimaran had been searched and the infant supplies moved onto the dock when he moored. He’d been roughed up, and accused of smuggling and trying to profiteer on the island’s black market.

  He had told the truth—he was here to collect his wife. He didn’t have a marriage certificate on him, though, which had made the soldiers skeptical. The identification he did have could have got him detained for a ransom demand if they’d understood exactly who he was. He had a contingency plan in place for that, but thankfully it wasn’t needed. Yet.

  He’d been put in a vehicle and driven here to see his wife.

  And his baby?

  Given the supplies he’d brought, the existence of a baby was almost a blessing. Almost—because this was definitely not his baby appearing in the arms of the woman who lived with Tanja. He hadn’t had any sort of contact with Tanja—intimate or otherwise—in five years.

  “This is Illi.” Tanja’s voice was husky with deep, maternal love as she took the girl.

  Something flickered in his mind’s eye like a flashbulb taking a photo. He absorbed her tone and the tender way she cradled the baby so protectively. His memory took a snapshot to dwell on the fine details later because right now he had to stay anchored in the tension permeating the air around them.

  The baby had neither Tanja’s straight, red-gold hair, her pale complexion nor her hazel eyes. The infant’s black curls and light brown skin could pass for mixed race if Tanja had slept with a man who looked like him, though. Which she must have done.

  Why that dug such a deep thorn into him, Leon couldn’t say. Their marriage had been a moment of temporary madness that he only recollected as a statement of fact. His father was dead. His age was thirty-five. His legal status was “married.”

  How Tanja had conducted her life these last years was none of his business.

  But where was that other man? Surely he would be as affronted to have Leon named his baby’s father as Leon was at having another man’s baby passed off as his? Leon could hardly keep his dumbfounded fury off his face.

  He manufactured a smile, though, hyperaware of the scrutiny they were under and that, regardless of who this baby’s father was, the infant was completely helpless and innocent. If she was Tanja’s, for the purposes of this rescue, she was his.

  “She’s beautiful.” He tried to look smitten even though he’d never really looked at a baby before. This one was whimpering as she nuzzled her face into Tanja’s chest.

  “I’ll make her a bottle.” The other woman took the baby again and hurried away.

  “I was upset that you and I were apart. My milk didn’t come,” Tanja said with an apologetic smile toward the soldiers for speaking of such things.

  “See?” Leon leaped on her remark to prove his lie. “Her brother told me diapers and formula were difficult to find here. I brought them for my daughter.”

  One of the soldiers accepted that with a bored look toward his compatriot. He seemed ready to leave. His fellow soldier wore the look of a man with a hard-on for power. Leon hated men like that. He’d been raised by one and feared he had turned into one, which was why he was so filled with bitter self-loathing.

  “Why were you here and not with your husband when you had the baby?” the antagonistic one asked Tanja.

  “Things are different in Canada,” she began while Leon spoke at the same time. “My father died—”

  Leon bit back a curse and set his arm around her again, squeezing in a signal to let him do the talking.

  She was nothing but skin and bones. That alarmed him, but he was more concerned with getting through the next few minutes without an arrest.

  “We married in Canada, but I had to return to Greece when my father died.” Ancient history, but true. “Tanja was already scheduled to come to work here. She didn’t know she was pregnant or she wouldn’t have traveled.” He gave her a stern frown. Naughty wife.

  He felt her stiffen, but she smiled apologetically at the men. “By the time I realized, I was too far along to go back. It’s been difficult to make arrangements to leave.”

  Flights had to be chartered and women weren’t allowed to leave the house, let alone the country, without a male relative.

  The soldiers flicked their attention between him and Tanja, seemingly aware they were being strung along but unsure what the truth really was.

  “My sister is a widow,” the man from across the street piped up. “She let Mrs. Petrakis and the baby stay here as an act of charity. My uncle is a cleric.” He mentioned the man’s name, and presumably the uncle outranked these foot soldiers because they both stood straighter. “He’s aware of all of this. Let me fetch him. He will determine if all is in order with her departure. Then we’ll have no more inquiries from their governments.”

  The bored one nudged the grumpy one and gave a coaxing nod. The other sighed and jerked his head to send the brother out into the night.

  From behind them, the baby’s fussing abruptly ceased. Tanja broke away to say, “Why don’t you feed Illi while I pack?”

  Leon was starting to think they had a Broadway act in their future, if not a career in espionage. “I’d love to.”

  The little midge was placed in the crook of his arm. Milk leaked from the corners of her greedy mouth as she pulled at the nipple on the bottle. Sleepy brown eyes blinked open briefly. Her damp lashes were ridiculously long, her gaze trusting and oblivious of the thick undercurrents threatening to swamp and drown all of them. She let her eyelids grow heavy enough to close again, the simple action causing something to shift uncomfortably in his chest. Like the door on a stone vault was set ajar and a whistling breeze was stealing in. It ou
ght to have been cold and uncomfortable, but it was warm and beckoning.

  From the bedroom, he heard the swift thump of drawers and zippers being opened and shut. If the women communicated, they did it silently enough that the only other sound was the gulping from the baby.

  Leon didn’t bother contemplating how outrageous it was that he was pretending to be this baby’s father. All he cared about was getting off this island with Tanja. Zach could have warned him she had a kid, but fine. Package deal. Whatever. His help with the baby should encourage Tanja toward an amicable dissolution of their marriage.

  Tanja reappeared with a small case and an overstuffed bag that she pushed an empty baby bottle into. “Is she finished? I’ll make another so it’s ready while we travel.”

  She draped a cloth on his shoulder and guided him to hold the infant there.

  The baby wobbled her head, then burped and let her head drop into the hollow of his shoulder. She was the tiniest creature he’d ever held and provoked a strange fire of protectiveness that stung his arteries. Her little noises of distress had him rubbing her back, silently conveying that she was safe, even though they were all balanced on a knife’s edge.

  Tanja rattled around in the kitchen. One of the soldiers checked his watch.

  The door opened and the brother returned. “My uncle is on his way,” he assured them, sounding as though he’d been running. “Five minutes.”

  Five minutes stretched to a tension-filled ten, then an excruciating fifteen. At least the baby fell asleep. Tanja held her and gently swayed, her movement hypnotic enough they all watched.

  She looked like she hadn’t eaten in a month, Leon noted. Her cheeks were hollow, her mouth tense, her eyes bruised with sleeplessness.

  That fragility made the pit of his stomach feel loaded with gravel. His memory of her was one of athletic leanness with firm, subtle curves. She’d been quick with smiles and banter, and had possessed a core of surety that had made him think their affair would be a simple pleasure between unfettered adults.