Greek Affairs: To Take a Bride: The Markonos Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride / Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride

It didn’t. As she headed for the bathroom she groaned at the subtle aches in places that made her quiver in shame and she hated herself. Catching sight of her face in the mirror froze her to the spot in dismay. She looked washed out through lack of sleep and all tumbled and tousled. A shocking inner glow burned like a sultry secret in the darkened blue of her eyes and in the soft pulse of her still swollen mouth.

I look like a lush, she thought in disgust and spun away from the mirror to step beneath the punishing heat of the shower spray.

Ten minutes later, showered, dressed and feeling about as composed as she was ever going to feel, she joined her brother on the shady terrace that overlooked the beach. The sun was already hot and glinting like crystal on the blue water. As they sat quietly planning their day while they ate breakfast, vivid flashbacks of what she and Andreas had done kept catching her out to send her senses spinning into hot, dipping dives.

Someone stepped around the corner of the hotel building from the direction of the car park. Glancing up, she felt her senses take a different kind of dive.

Well, this is a first in five years, she thought cynically as her mother-in-law walked towards their table.

‘Kalimera, Louisa,’ Isabella Markonos greeted pleasantly. ‘Jamie, pethi mou, how you have grown since I saw you last!'

Flushing, Jamie stood up to suffer the airbrush of lips to his cheeks then hurriedly excused himself. He’d managed to arrange a lift into town with Yannis’s son Pietros which gave him a great excuse to escape.

‘The years have flown by so fast,’ Isabella murmured wistfully as she watched him beat his hasty retreat.

Louisa said absolutely nothing and after a short hesitation her mother-in-law took possession of Jamie’s vacated seat then lifted dark eyes to her face.

‘Andreas has left the island,’ she informed her gently. ‘He visited Nikos very early this morning then boarded his helicopter and flew away …'

CHAPTER FIVE

ANDREAS had gone …?

Louisa had to fight to hang on to a calm expression.

‘He is very angry with me,’ Isabella confided. ‘And I can see from the look in your eyes that you are angry with me too.'

Was that what her look said? Better than looking devastated, she supposed. ‘You had no right to interfere,’ she said.

‘When have I not interfered between the two of you?’ the older woman hit back. ‘Who else was there to do it? You were two children playing at being adults for most of your marriage. You needed someone to interfere simply to keep you both practical.'

Practical. Louisa almost let loose a laugh. When had she and Andreas ever been practical about this attraction they suffered for each other? Certainly not up there last night on the hill. And if Isabella wanted to go back that far, then who wanted to be practical at the age of seventeen or twenty-two?

Isabella had been very practical when she’d gently suggested that Louisa should have her pregnancy terminated. Louisa recalled the way she’d wept to Andreas, and he’d turned on his mother and hit the roof. Later, when Nikos was born, Isabella then gently suggested that she should take care of her grandson while Louisa finished her education—in England. Again she had wept and again Andreas had angrily turned on his mother.

‘It was me who suggested you might prefer to visit Nikos when you could be sure that Andreas would not be here.’ Isabella picked on the only practical suggestion she’d ever made that Louisa had no argument with. ‘It was therefore down to me to make the decision that such a situation could not be allowed to go on.'

Sitting back in her seat, Louisa looked at this beautiful, dainty Greek woman who possessed a heart of steel behind all the visible signs of softer living, and wondered what her practical solution was going to be if her son had to break the news to her that he could have made his estranged wife pregnant again?

‘You both need to move on with your lives,’ Isabella continued, unaware of what was going on inside Louisa’s head. ‘It has become very clear to me that neither of you were going to do that until you had confronted your past.'

‘So you set Andreas and me up for a face-to-face confrontation?'

‘You needed to look at each other and see that you are no longer the same two people you used to be—see for yourselves how widely you have grown apart!'

A vibrant flashback in which she’d played a very intimate part in Andreas’s life recently hit Louisa’s vision.

‘We came to love you dearly, Louisa,’ Isabella persisted in her oh-so-deceptive gentle voice. ‘And we hurt deeply for both you and my son when fate dealt you such a cruel tragic blow. My dearest wish would be to see both of you happy again—in love and married to some other wonderful person who will give you more children to help heal the gap in your hearts dear Nikos left behind.’

In a sad, painfully aching way, Louisa agreed with those wishes. She too would like to be truly happy again. But how could she ever be happy with someone else when the man she had been in love with since she was seventeen still commanded so much power over her?

‘It is time for you both to let go …’

It was the way Isabella said it that grabbed Louisa’s full attention. ‘You want me to stop coming to the island,’ she said.

For a moment Isabella said nothing, allowing her answer to sound in the paining silence that hovered over them for a second or two. Then she stood up and came round the table. As she bent to kiss Louisa’s cheek she repeated gently, ‘It is time.'

Then she walked away, leaving Louisa on her own to absorb that cold little stab of cruel truth.

Andreas had already left the island, making his statement about letting go by putting distance between them as quickly as he could. His mother was now telling her that when she left here she would prefer it if she did not come back.

She got up, tense—shivery suddenly though the sun was hot. Andreas had gone. His mother did not want her here. Up on the hill above the harbour stood a tiny domed chapel with its neatly kept gardens where her son had been laid to rest. Did Nikos need her to come here? Did she have to come all this way to find him? He lived in her heart, would always live there, she knew that, but—

The but suddenly lost itself in the next thought to shoot into her head. She had done a very stupid thing last night and now retribution was looming large in the form of a pregnancy she could not allow to become real.

Truly pale now, the natural creamy tone of her skin wiped away, Louisa moved across the terrace like someone not of this life. An hour later and she was in town, standing outside the old-fashioned pharmacy with its distinctive green and white sign above the door. Tears were in her eyes and one of her hands was covering her trembling mouth because she knew now that she couldn’t do it. She just could not walk in there and calmly ask for the morning-after pill as if the tiny thing maybe struggling for life inside her did not have rights of its own.

It would be a part of her, a part of Andreas—a special part of their son. How she had even been able to convince herself she could just take a pill to ensure no child would come from what had taken place last night was appalling her now.

Let nature make the decision, she told herself as she turned and walked away again. Surely fate would not be so cruel as to make her pregnant again. Didn’t they say that lightning never struck in the same place twice?

She spent the next few days almost entirely with Jamie. She was quiet and withdrawn, though he was too busy enjoying himself to notice. Each morning they would eat breakfast together then he would walk her up to the chapel on the hill, stay with her for a little while before shooting off again, leaving her alone while he went back to the hotel.

Reclining on a sun bed in the shade of an umbrella, Louisa spent the rest of her day watching as Pietros, the hotel owner’s son, showed Jamie how to windsurf or how to ride his pride-and-joy jet ski, and they even talked someone into taking them out on his speedboat so that Jamie could try his hand at water-skiing too.

She tried not to think about Andreas. She tried not to beat herself up over what they had done. She tried not to agonise over the decision she had made outside the pharmacy. It won’t come to anything, she kept telling herself.

Then there were other times when Isabella’s blunt speaking would suddenly grab hold of her and she would take off on a tight-limbed, restless walk down the beach and battle with the tumbling morass of other feelings that swirled around her. It was a battle because, deep down, Lousia knew that Isabella was right. She had to let this island go.

Let Nikos go.

Let his father go.

Dressed in a pale blue wrap-around skirt and white summer top, Louisa sat on the stone seat set beside her son’s little grave with its marble headstone gleaming white in the sun. Today marked the fifth anniversary of his passing and she was glad she’d been able to convince Jamie to go with Pietros on a boat that was going out fishing for the day.

She needed to be on her own.

Moving to rest her forearms along the length of her sun-warmed thighs, she looked around her through blue eyes misted by the love she felt for this place. There was nowhere more beautiful on this earth than this tiny corner of Greece in her opinion. All around her the loving care and attention laboured on each square inch of the chapel and its garden was there to see in the carefully tended graves and the profusion of colour bursting from flowers that bloomed hot and bright in the fierce summer heat. Birds sang. The air was full of the scent of summer jasmine, and the tiny chapel with its handsome dome stood backed by a clear blue sky.

Nikos had been baptised here. She and Andreas had been married here, watched by curious islanders. She had been the quintessentially shy and uncertain blushing bride but because she had been carrying Andreas’s baby she had felt as if everyone looked on her as if—

Curtailing that memory, because it did not really matter any more what other people had once thought about her, she tried to concentrate on the here and now, and another painful decision she still had to make.

Did she leave here on the ferry in a few days’ time and never come back?

Lowering her face to her hands, she let her silk blonde hair flood forward to hide her face. It was all so muddled up, so painful and complicated. She wanted to think only about Nikos but all she could think about was herself! What was happening to her? What was going on inside her head?

A shadow suddenly fell across the sun to douse her in shadow. Pulling her face out of her hands, she had to squint to take in the tall, dark silhouette standing there. She couldn’t see his face because the sun was coming from directly behind him but she knew who it was.