Stranded with Her Greek Tycoon Page 8

  He flung himself down on the sofa that was to be his bed. She placed the glasses on either side of the coffee table, kicked off her slippers and sat down in the chair opposite, drawing her knees up tight. ‘What do you want to talk about?’ she asked.

  ‘Anything and everything. Finishing your degree,’ he said. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘As you know, I was close to finishing when I left Durham. But the way we moved around it seemed impossible. Mine weren’t the kind of subjects you could study in an online podcast from a hotel room in Paris.’

  He frowned. ‘I didn’t mean for it to happen that way. I always felt bad about it.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you. It was a decision we made together.’

  For her, there hadn’t been a choice between staying behind by herself in Durham while her new husband lived in London or Paris or Milan. Back then, every minute without him had been a minute not lived. He had felt the same. ‘We couldn’t have done it any other way. But I was never going to be happy without a career of my own.’

  ‘Granted,’ he said.

  ‘I got credit for my studies at Durham and was admitted to the degree at the University of New South Wales. I fell on my feet.’

  ‘And found a job.’

  ‘While I was at uni I did an internship with a solar energy company. They asked me to get in touch when I graduated. So I did.’

  Cristos picked up his glass of water and put it down again without drinking any. ‘All this time you were living a completely different life, one I can’t even imagine,’ he said slowly. ‘What about the guy back there?’

  ‘He’s a friend,’ she said.

  ‘A friend with benefits?’ he said tersely.

  ‘No! We haven’t even dated.’ Now it was her turn to pick up her glass, take a sip of water to moisten a suddenly dry mouth. ‘But he’s nice. And who knows what might happen after I’m divorced?’ She looked down at the glass.

  ‘There must have been other men.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t interested.’

  ‘I find that difficult to believe,’ he said.

  Now she looked up to meet his gaze full on. There was no point in talking in circles. ‘I was in a very bad way after losing the baby. Dating was the last thing on my mind.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you telling me...?’

  ‘There hasn’t been anyone since you. There wasn’t anyone before you. There’s only been you, Cristos. Legally I’m still married to you. I couldn’t sleep with another man while I was still your wife. It wouldn’t have been right.’ And she hadn’t wanted it—hadn’t wanted another man touching her. It had been too soon, she had rationalised.

  Cristos made an inarticulate sound deep in his throat. ‘I thought... I imagined...’ He choked out the words.

  She realised she hadn’t actually given a thought to Tim since she’d set eyes on Cristos again. Tim, who would be waiting at the airport in Sydney to meet her like the good friend that he was. The kind man who had tried to kiss her and she had pushed him away.

  Because he wasn’t Cristos.

  ‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Freed from that inconvenient wife. What about that gorgeous American model who was always hanging about? Ginny. I felt sure you and her—’ She put up her hand. ‘Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I really couldn’t bear to hear about you with someone else. Even...even when I don’t want you for myself.’

  In turn he held up his right hand, his fingers splayed to display his wide gold wedding band. ‘I didn’t take this off. I still considered myself married to you. That meant being faithful to my wife. Like I always was when we were together. There haven’t been other women for me. From the moment I met you in the pub in Durham, there was only ever you.’

  Hayley wasn’t often lost for words but she struggled to breathe, let alone speak. Silence hung between them for a long moment. ‘That can’t be true,’ she managed to choke out.

  ‘Believe it,’ he said.

  ‘Not Ginny? I felt sure—’ Never had she felt shorter or more wide-hipped than in the presence of tall, rangy Ginny.

  ‘I talked business with Ginny. Nothing else.’

  ‘That last morning, she called the apartment wanting to speak to you.’

  ‘About nothing but a deal I was discussing with her,’ he said dismissively. It had sounded more than that to Hayley but she hadn’t exactly been in a good frame of mind. Besides, this was hardly the time to argue it.

  ‘No Ginny, no one else? But you’re such a sexy man. And all those women wanting you. Even here today.’

  ‘I’m certainly not celibate for lack of offers. Perhaps I’ve been a fool. Staying faithful to a wife who didn’t want me. Who ran away.’ He turned his wedding band around and around his finger.

  She hadn’t expected this. Not in a million years had she expected this. Believing he had been unfaithful was one of the reasons she had hardened her heart towards him. Feeling ill, cramping, in pain, unable to reach her husband to help her, she had imagined him with another woman, with Ginny’s lithe limbs wrapped around him.

  His green eyes infinitely sad, Cristos started to slide off his wedding ring.

  Hayley’s mind was reeling. Her intake of breath was so swift it came out as a gasp. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Not now.’ She reached over to stay his hand. ‘Time enough for that tomorrow. You take off your ring. I take off mine. Then we say goodbye.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FOR MORE THAN two years Cristos had been torturing himself with thoughts of Hayley with another man.

  But she had stayed true to him.

  He could scarcely believe it. He wondered at her reasons. But he didn’t doubt her. To his knowledge, Hayley had never lied to him. He rode a great surge of exultation that rushed through his heart.

  He was still her only lover.

  Surely that meant something. He pushed his wedding ring firmly back into place. Perhaps, if he played his cards right, there could be a chance it would stay there. Because he still wanted her.

  It took all the self-control he could muster not to sweep her into his arms and kiss her—properly this time. Not some polite charade of a kiss for the benefit of observers. A hungry, passionate kiss that was a prelude to possessing her, to reminding her why no other man would ever make her body sing the way he could.

  Instead he relied on his gambler’s instincts and waited to see what she might say next.

  Being in a hotel room alone together gave a false sense of intimacy. But the coffee table was a barrier between them. Hayley leaned against the back of her chair, as if to emphasise the distance, perhaps to give him the impression she was relaxed. But her shoulders hunched defensively and she nervously twisted the ends of the hotel robe’s tie without seeming to realise she was doing so.

  She seemed swamped by the robe—a generic size designed for a woman less petite. It gave little hint of her slim, shapely body. The thick fabric wrapped over her breasts up to her neck, fell down past her knees. Her hair framed her face in tiny, damp tendrils—that short, short hair he was still getting used to. With her face free of make-up she looked very young. He had only two years on her but he felt infinitely older.

  Finally, she stopped fiddling with the tie of her robe. She looked up at him, her blue eyes clouded. ‘How did we get here, Cristos?’ She had always called him by his Greek name, had never shortened and anglicised it to Chris or lengthened it to Christopher as some of his English friends had done.

  He knew she didn’t mean here in Greece, here on this island. ‘I don’t have an answer for you. But here we are. In the same room. Speaking to each other. Trying to make sense of our past.’

  She jumped up from her chair, paced its length and back again. She rested her forehead in the heels of her hands, her fingers clutching her hair, then dropped them to look up at him. Her hair was tousled, her eyes r
ed rimmed. ‘I’m confused.’

  Cristos kept a poker face as he got up to stand near her. ‘Confused in what way?’ He had to tread cautiously, as if through a field of landmines.

  She flung out her hands. ‘This isn’t how it was meant to be. You. Me. Getting trapped here with you. Pretending we’re still together. I intended to give you the divorce documents and then be gone. To put our marriage behind us. But then you threw a curve ball—that you haven’t been with another woman. I’m reeling from your revelation. You see, I thought there must have been another woman in Milan, if not Ginny someone else. Maybe more than one.’

  He frowned. ‘Because I’m a man? That my gender makes me predisposed to cheat? Despite our marriage vows? You insult me. I loved you, Hayley. There was no other woman. I didn’t want anyone else.’

  ‘I so want to believe you. But it’s difficult for me to believe there weren’t women flinging themselves at you, Mr Sexiest Man in Europe.’ He had hated that name—bestowed on him by one of the international gossip magazines.

  ‘Of course there were,’ he said. ‘Thousands of them. More than one man could possibly handle.’

  That forced a reluctant hint of a smile. ‘Really.’

  ‘What did you call yourself earlier? An “inconvenient wife”? I never saw you as that. I didn’t want anyone but you. Even after you ran away. But you didn’t want to be found.’ He hadn’t thought of searching for her somewhere as far-flung as Australia.

  ‘No, I didn’t.’ Her face drooped; lines of weariness bracketed her mouth.

  He chose his next words carefully. ‘So, I didn’t date.’

  ‘But you’re such a sexy man.’

  ‘I’m also a man of self-control. Once we are divorced it will, of course, be different. I won’t want to stay alone.’

  Her mouth thinned. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Though how I’ll choose from among those thousands of women, I’m not sure. I might have to run auditions.’

  Hayley stifled a little whimper that tore at his heart. ‘That isn’t funny,’ she said.

  He took a step closer, so close he could breathe in her warm, freshly showered scent—lemon and thyme from the hotel’s artisan soap and shampoo overlaid the essential sweet scent of his wife. ‘I’m sorry. That was a joke in bad taste. The truth is once we split for good, I will find someone else.’

  He wanted her to deny the divorce. To say that after seeing him again she didn’t want to go through with it after all. But she didn’t. And the flame of his optimism flickered and dimmed.

  ‘I... I suppose so.’ But her uncertainty made him wonder about the guy in Sydney. How serious she was about him. Was there really another player in the game?

  ‘That is, if you are still determined to go ahead with the divorce.’

  She tilted her chin upward and met his eyes defiantly, but then betrayed herself by biting down on her lower lip. ‘Yes. I am. That’s why I came here. You want it too.’

  ‘We could always change our minds,’ he said. He gripped the tops of her arms and looked down into her face, urging her to give him the answer he wanted. She stilled under his touch; if she’d attempted to move away he would have let her go. But she didn’t.

  For a long moment she looked back up at him, her blue eyes clouded with uncertainty. He had to kiss her. To taste her sweet mouth, to try to communicate with touch what words could not. He drew her close, felt the warmth of her body through the cool silk of her pyjamas, her slender curves. He smoothed a thumb along her jaw, learning the feel of her soft skin again, traced the outline of her lips. She shuddered a little and he stopped. Then he dipped his head, brushed his lips gently against hers. Nothing too demanding. Nothing too passionate. He wanted her so desperately with the pent-up longing of years but he didn’t want to scare her off.

  She stayed rigid, as if bracing herself against her own response. Her breathing quickened but still she stayed still. She wasn’t ready. Reluctantly he drew away. He wouldn’t let her sense his disappointment.

  Then suddenly she was kissing him. She pulled his head down to hers, pressed her mouth urgently against his, whimpered her need. He drew her to him again and kissed her back. Her tongue slipped into his mouth, he met it with his and they danced the familiar dance as if there hadn’t been years since their last real kiss. He slid his hands down her back, pulled her closer. His optimism flamed back into life as if she had thrown accelerant on his hopes.

  Then Hayley abruptly pulled away. Her face flushed, eyes dilated, her mouth swollen. She looked down to the floor. ‘No. We can’t do this.’ She drew in her breath in a sob. Finally, after what seemed an age but was probably only seconds, she looked up, her expression determined. ‘I’m sorry, Cristos. That wasn’t fair of me.’

  ‘Not fair? In what way?’ he choked out. Fair wasn’t the way to describe the dynamics of that kiss. He struggled to get his breath back on an even keel.

  ‘I thought I’d talked myself out of my attraction to you,’ she said. ‘But it’s still there. I still want you.’

  And that was something to worry about?

  ‘I’ve never stopped wanting you.’ He felt fired by an urgency to reassure her. But she put up one small, pale hand to stop him. He knew that look of old—a ‘but’ was certain to follow.

  ‘But that isn’t enough. There has to be more than great sex to make a marriage, to make a family.’

  He had to stamp on a cynical laugh. Hayley spoke as if ‘great sex’ were something casually acquired—almost to be disparaged. She’d been untouched when she’d come to him. Did she really have no idea of how rare that perfect sexual connection they’d shared from the start was between a man and a woman? She’d had no other man to compare—but surely she’d be aware of how special it was?

  He frowned. ‘I don’t know where you’re coming from. Yes, we had great sex. But we had so much more than that. We had each other’s backs. We were life partners.’ His marriage to Hayley had given him everything that had been missing from his life—love, security, his own place in the world as her husband and, he’d hoped, the father of their child.

  She drew her mouth in a tight line. ‘Had being the operative word. Past tense. We started off brilliantly. But then things changed.’

  ‘Of course they did. We moved to different countries. I switched career. We grew up.’

  She made an impatient gesture as if waving away his words. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we started off equals. Both sitting on the same perch making the decisions that affected us both. Talking things over if we disagreed. Making compromises.’

  ‘That’s right, we did,’ he said, puzzled as to why she would bring that up.

  ‘Then it seemed all the compromises were one way. Made by me.’

  Behind the sweetness was a toughness in her stance, the way she stood with legs braced, a simmering aggression—as if a fluffy kitten had grown spikes like a porcupine. He frowned. ‘The way I remember it, we both made compromises.’

  She shook her head. ‘I remember it differently. The first thing to go was my career. Big compromise. There wasn’t much I could do without completing my degree. Maybe in London I could have got a halfway decent job. Even in Paris I spoke enough French to get work waitressing. Thank heaven for that gap year I spent working as an au pair in the south of France. But I didn’t speak a word of Italian. By the time we got to Milan I was pretty much a housewife. Just Mrs Theofanis. Housewife to a husband who was never there. Who kept me in ignorance about where he was, what he was doing. Not to mention the fact that you actually had a wife was a deep, dark secret.’

  He spread out his hands like an open book. ‘You knew where I was when I was on assignments.’

  ‘What about when you were “doing business”? I didn’t know where you were or who you were with. I felt I was pushed down rung by rung off that perch beside you until I found myself scrabbling on the ground below.�
� There was a note of anger, of bitterness he had never heard before. Or perhaps he had never listened.

  Cristos closed his eyes. ‘I had no idea you felt that way.’

  That was when he realised the first mistake he’d made. Choosing not to tell her the risks he was taking. Hiding from her the fact he’d knocked back lucrative modelling jobs so he could work on his own investments. Not when security had seemed so very important to her. ‘Everything I did was for you, for us.’

  Hayley played again with the tie on her dressing gown, twisting it tightly around her fingers like a tourniquet. ‘I wish I could believe that. Seemed to me the marriage became all about you.’

  He cursed under his breath. Not at her. At himself. ‘You know I never wanted you to be a “secret wife”.’

  Her voice softened. ‘I know. But it went on for too long. I began to feel invisible to you as well as to your fans.’ She dropped her eyes down to where her bare toes were making a small circle in the rug. ‘From invisible I began to feel inadequate.’

  ‘Koukla.’ He went to reach for her but she twisted away to evade his touch.

  ‘If you think you can kiss me into submission, forget it,’ she said. ‘That won’t work any more.’

  ‘I didn’t want to kiss you. No. I’ve always wanted to kiss you. I wanted to apologise. To say how sorry I am that you felt that way and that I didn’t know.’

  The modelling. That disruptive lifestyle. The pressures on him—and on her. It all came down to that. Again he cursed. How many times had he wished he had never showed Hayley the model scout’s business card? Yet he’d been able to piggyback on the good money he’d earned to make a fortune.