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

That was some blunt confession to utter! ‘How dare you say that?’ She swung on him furiously.

He grimaced, the hand going back in his pocket. ‘Because you are still my wife?'

Stark, cold images of what he had been doing the last time she’d seen him in their apartment in Athens sprang like a burning blister into her head. Louisa tensed away from him then used up every single one of the next ten seconds to struggle with what was now crawling around inside her, while he dared—dared to lean against the side of the car and watch her with that lazily mocking challenge on his too handsome face!

She lost the battle. On a seething short breath she stabbed her left hand out. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘no gold wedding ring on my finger. No sign that I ever belonged to you at all! I use the name Jonson now—Miss Jonson! I do not think of myself as a Markonos any more!'

‘Washed me right out of your life?’ he quizzed idly.

‘Yes!’ she confirmed it.

He grabbed her and kissed her.

It was so unexpected that before she’d even realized what was happening he’d crushed her hard up against him and was in full, burning possession of her mouth. Lights switched on all over her body. It was that quick, that explosive, like being dragged into a seething cauldron of remembered intimacy that felt crazily as though she had never lost it at all!

Her breath caught in her throat as her lips responded, parting to his warm, moist invasion like hungry traitors to greedily invite him to do his worst. She didn’t want to believe this was happening—in some wildly shocked part of her brain she was horrified that he could still do this to her, yet at the same time she was drowning in the sheer pleasure of it, lost without a shred of control. His hands had control of her body, long fingers, passionately restless, moving on her hips and her spine. He was pressing her close; she could feel stirring evidence of his passion and felt her senses stir in response.

And through it all their mouths moved on each other, hot, hungry, deeply intimate. Oh, so dreadfully intimate it came as a terrible shock when he just as suddenly pushed her back from him, making the air between them splinter with the sound of their mutual thick groans.

Holding her at arm’s length, he let his fingers bite into her shoulders, eyes like glinting black lasers locked onto the swirling, shocked passion darkening her own.

Then he spoke, hard, tight, cruelly mocking. ‘Not quite washed me away, agape mou, hm?'

The unforgivable taunt crowned her tumbling sense of degradation. She began to tremble violently. Tears stung hotly in her throat.

‘Me and the thousand others,’ she hit back in thick and shaking, seething disgust then pulled free of him and ran into the hotel.

Andreas watched her go and struggled to believe he’d actually said and done that.

Why had he done it? What the hell was the matter with him?

A string of tight curses raked from his tense lips as he spun around to face the car, because he knew the answer. It lay in the million dark forces running riot inside him—not one of them fit to justify him grabbing her like that.

Her and the thousand others.

What a damn great joke, he thought bitterly, and another set of curses leapt from him as he tugged the car door open and slammed himself inside.

Still cursing, he took off from the hotel with a cruel spin of tyres.

Leaning back against the hotel doors listening to the tyres spit up gravel as the car took off, Louisa was trembling so badly she felt ready to sink into a weak, limbless huddle on the floor.

And her lips were throbbing, the hot, bitter tears that burned her eyes threatening to spill. How could he do that? How could he have just grabbed her and kissed her like that?

A shimmer of something horrendously desperate went riddling right through her. It settled like a sting between her thighs and on the tips of her breasts.

‘You OK?’

The sound of Jamie’s uncertain tone dragged her gaze to her brother. ‘I’m f-fine,’ she lied, fighting to pull herself together.

He did not look convinced. ‘Did he say something to upset you?'

‘No,’ she lied yet again. ‘We—we’re both suffering from shock, that’s all.'

But there was a lot more than shock rattling around inside her, Louisa had to admit hours later when she was still pacing her bedroom too shaken up to think beyond the whole face-to-face meeting with Andreas followed by that kiss and the humiliating way she’d fallen into it without a fight.

‘Oh, give me strength,’ she groaned as a flood of heat pooled low down in her abdomen, taunting her with her own wildly uncontrolled response.

How could she have done that? She couldn’t still want him. She didn’t want to still want him! Wrapping her arms around her body, she paced over to the window to stare out at the velvet-dark night. It was late and the old-fashioned double bed standing behind her should have been inviting, but each time she so much as glanced at it her stupid imagination conjured up an image of him lying there naked and waiting for her like a terrible guilty wish and—

With a jerk she took herself off to the tiny bathroom and switched the shower on. Ten minutes later, shivering with cold and grim determination, she dived between the cool linen sheets and told herself to get over that stupid kiss and go to sleep.

Andreas lounged on a chair on the terrace, the glittering darkness of his gaze fixed on the silk dark night. In front of him on a table stood the decanter of brandy and a large pot of strong coffee keeping warm on a burner.

He had changed his mind about getting drunk tonight.

His recent conversation with his parents had been short and pithy, his father’s only saving grace being that he had not known Louisa was on the ferry when they’d had their after-dinner chat.

His mother had been a different matter. Her lack of apology in the face of his anger had been nothing short of defiant. ‘I have to admit that I did not intend for you to just bump into each other as you did,’ she’d admitted. ‘But I did intend to make it happen before you flew off again. It is time, Andreas, that the two of you faced each other. Now perhaps you can both bring some kind of closure to your marriage.’

‘You set this up because you expect closure to result from it?'

‘What else? I am tired of watching you drift through the years in a state of marital limbo. It has to stop.'

Well, limbo was not where he was right now. He was angry, on Louisa’s behalf, that she had been subjected to this. He was angry for himself. He was perfectly happy with the way he ran his life. He did not want closure. He liked to recall what a lousy husband he had been. It helped to keep his emotions locked up tight.

Not so you would notice, mocked a voice in his head. You might be an emotional desert with every other woman you’ve known but one look at Louisa and you’re spinning right off the emotional planet!

And that was the reason why he was sitting here drinking brandy and strong black coffee. The brandy was the method by which he meant to numb what was flying around inside him, the coffee the means by which he aimed to keep himself awake while he did it so that by tomorrow he would have himself back in control. Then he would visit Nikos before flying away from here, he determined, leaving Louisa to commune with their son without his interference or fear of being grabbed and kissed by the man she clearly despised.

She’d kissed him back.

Her soft mouth had parted and she’d pressed in against him and it had been like—

Cursing as something hot went spurting through his blood, Andreas got up to pace the length of the terrace then back again.

What the hell was the matter with him? They’d been separated for five years! Had not set eyes on each other once in those five years! She had walked away from this island without offering him so much as a phone call to warn him she was going to go back to England, or to give him a chance to—

‘Damn,’ he cursed as he glared at the disappearing ferry lights and wished he could control what was happening to him. He was thirty years old now—a mature and sophisticated man! Yet he felt as fired up as that lusty twenty-two-year old had felt the night he first laid eyes on her.

Which said—what to him?

‘Ouch,’ Louisa choked as she caught the open toe of her sandal on an unseen stone and almost tripped up.

What other idiot would decide on impulse to go for a walk in the middle of the night? she railed at herself as she lifted up her foot to rub the bruised end of her big toe.

And how far had she come from the hotel since she started out on this crazy venture? With only a slithery moon hanging low in the sky, it was difficult to tell. When all of that hot, senseless restlessness had sent her creeping out of bed and eventually out of the hotel, she’d only intended to take a brisk walk down the beach. How she had ended up going as far as to strike out on one of the many narrow pathways scoured into the hillside by hundreds of years of grazing goats she had no idea.

Yes, she did, she then argued with herself. She’d decided that if she couldn’t sleep she might as well watch the sun come up. She’d intended to walk as far as a plateau of rock she had used to like to sit on to watch the sky slowly turn from navy blue to rich vermilion to a soft azure blue.