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

‘When did you get back?’ she questioned flatly.

‘This morning,’ he said. ‘I had to leave quickly because of some business I could not neglect but …'

He shifted his stance, leaving the rest of his sentence unfinished as if he wished he had not said it at all. And the way he shoved his hands into the pockets of his trousers told her that he wasn’t comfortable here.

Or he was uncomfortable about being here with her, Louisa amended and sent her gaze drifting towards something sitting on the white marble ledge of their son’s headstone that had not been there the day before, which told her Andreas had been here once already today.

Early.

So as to avoid bumping into her. Even after five long years, did he still find it this difficult to be here with her? ‘We need to talk.’

‘Not today, Andreas,’ she refused quietly.

‘My mother told me what she said to you. She—’

Damn interfering Isabella. ‘You’ve bought a new car,’ she cut in.

‘I don’t want you to listen to her. She—’ ‘Another Ferrari,’ she interrupted. ‘A black one instead of your favourite red.’

‘It is no one else’s business what you or I—’

‘Do you think you’re too old for flashy red now, is that it?’

Reaching forward, she plucked up the little black toy Ferrari from its narrow shelf with a dry little smile softening her unhappy face. Each time she’d come here over the years, the little car had been changed for a different model. It was one of those small things that always touched a tender spot inside her because she knew it was Andreas who brought them here and that it usually meant he had also changed one of his many super-cars he had scattered around the globe.

‘I just felt like a change, that’s all,’ he answered gruffly, then impatiently, ‘Will you listen to me, Louisa? We need—'

‘You big liar, Andreas Markonos,’ she said. ‘You decided that red Ferraris are for the flashy young-bloods and you’ve grown much too sophisticated to be one of them so you bought black this time. Nikos is going to be so—'

‘Will you not speak like that!’ he ground out.

Louisa’s whole body jolted in shock at his anger. ‘Like what?’ she quavered.

He swung his back to her, swivelling on the heels of his black leather shoes. ‘As if he is still alive.'

Trembling now, all hint of softness wiped clean, Louisa replaced the little car on its ledge. Tension sawed into the thickening silence. Pushing her hands flat together in front of her, she said nothing. In a tangled sort of way, she understood. She did speak of Nikos as if he were still right here with her. Sometimes the feeling was so strong she could actually believe he was …

Pulling in a thick breath, she stood up as that sudden restlessness grabbed hold of her again to send her walking across the soft green of the carefully watered lawn to end up standing against the low wall that enclosed the chapel grounds, feeling as if the letting-go stuff was beginning to crowd in on her from all sides.

After a few seconds Andreas followed, making the fine hairs at the back of her neck tingle when he came to a stop behind her. ‘My apologies,’ he said heavily. ‘I did not intend to shout at you like that.'

Louisa dismissed his need to apologise with a tense little shrug. Her restlessness had nothing to do with his emotional outburst. This was after all a very emotive place.

Feeling the corner of her mouth tug down on a sad little grimace, ‘Do you come here a lot?’ she asked him quietly.

‘Each time I visit the island,’ he responded.

Louisa nodded. ‘But you belong here.’

No reply came to that. He did belong here. Whereas she did not.

Staring out towards the expanse of glistening blue ocean until her eyes began to sting, ‘This is the last time I will be coming here,’ she told him, voicing the decision she had been struggling with for days.

‘Don’t be foolish!’ he snapped. ‘As I have been trying to say to you, you don’t have to heed my mother’s interference!'

‘She’s right though. It is time I let go.’

‘Time,’ he repeated as if it were a rude word. ‘What has time got to do with what we leave behind here each time we have to go away?'

‘You feel that too?’ Swinging round to face him, Louisa released a sharp gasp when she found herself looking at a completely different man from the one she had expected to see.

Until now she had only seen him wrapped in the softening cloak of darkness and he had been too dangerously potent for her to deal with then. Looking into his lean face without the sun blinding her eyes, she now felt the impact of this new view of him with a shattering shock. The younger man she had first fallen in love with had gone—forever. What she’d seen as mere maturity under cover of darkness had done him absolutely no justice at all. He was totally, devastatingly handsome. Totally, devastatingly lean—both physically and on the inside, where it only showed in the aura she was picking up from him. Andreas was a man to whom compromise had become very thinly spread indeed. The mouth that had kissed her so thoroughly a few nights ago now had a hardness about it that placed a chill across her bones. And the eyes, those deep-set dark brown eyes, looked as though the darker passions of the other night were as alien to him as—as standing here in this pretty place talking with her at all!

‘Of course I feel it,’ he said harshly. ‘Do you think I am made of stone?'

‘Yes!’ Louisa heard herself answer. But worse than that, she was finally—finally feeling the full blunt impact of what his mother had been talking about. She was finally seeing why Isabella wanted the two of them to come face to face. The ordinary English girl and this powerful Greek man were in such different leagues now that if they’d met for the first time this week Andreas would not have given her a second glance!

Her arms wrapped tightly around her middle. She dragged her eyes away from him—but not before they’d taken in the sharply tailored dark business suit in some expensive fabric that made such a big statement about his wealth and how comfortable he was with the stunning sophistication with which he wore it. Even the way his pale blue shirt collar sat so smoothly around his brown throat made its own statement about an exclusivity he had been gifted with from birth. Seeing it all set Louisa reeling because—how was it that she hadn’t noticed this staggeringly elegant man developing inside him while they’d still been together as man and wife?

‘How can you even be considering deserting our son?’ he rasped at her.

Having to force herself to concentrate on what he’d just said to her, Louisa tugged some air into her lungs. ‘Haven’t you just told me that he isn’t here?’ she reminded him. ‘And you’re right,’ she added when his dark eyes flicked like hard black diamonds and his tense mouth parted to say something. ‘Nikos left here a long time ago. Travelling all the way out here once a year to visit what is really only a shrine to him is a pretty meaningless exercise when I know exactly where I can find him when I need him.'

‘Look at me when you say that,’ Andreas responded tautly. ‘Look into my face and tell me again that this place, this island, that small grave over there no longer mean a thing to you!'

The force of his anger widened her eyes on him. ‘That was not what I said,’ she denied. ‘And why are you so angry with me?’ she demanded. ‘Until a few days ago you were not even aware that I came here at all!'

His body tensed inside all of that elegant dark suiting. ‘That has nothing to do with it.'

‘Well, thanks,’ Louisa murmured bitterly.

Something ripped across his hard features. ‘I mean that we are not discussing my failings here, we—'

‘So you do know you have them.’

He twisted away from her but even the way he did that was smoothly controlled and elegantly graceful instead of packed full with those old unfettered passions belonging to the younger man she had once known—the man she had met on a hill the other night!

‘As soon as you could after we buried Nikos you walked away from me,’ she reminded him bleakly.

The chiselled edge of his jaw flexed. ‘There were too many people around. I—needed to be alone.'

‘And I didn’t?’

‘I am a man. It’s OK for a woman to break down and weep in front of others but a man must remain strong and supportive.'

Louisa uttered a thick laugh. ‘Well, you certainly failed there, Andreas.'

His hands came out of his pockets and bunched into fists and she knew they did. She’d hit a nerve and the sadness of it all was that she just did not care. He’d hurt her badly when he’d walked away from her that day and even now, five years on, she still found it impossible to forgive him for doing that.