She didn’t turn to look at him, but her hand stopped rocking the baby carriage. And her heart gave an excited leap that left her feeling tense and shaky.
Still, at least her voice was steady when she answered coolly, ‘A week is a long time.’
‘Ah …’ He came forward, his footsteps sounding on the quarry-tiled floor beneath his feet. ‘I thought it best to leave you alone to—come to terms with your decision.’
So he was admitting to a retreat, she noted, and was oddly pacified by that—then even more so when he paused at the pram to bend down and inspect Melanie.
‘She’s asleep,’ he whispered. But it was the way he stroked a gentle finger over the baby’s cheek in much the same way that Claire did that touched a warm spot inside her.
Then, pulling up one of the other cane chairs, he sat down beside her. ‘How is the wrist?’ he enquired.
‘Better,’ she told him.
‘And the ribs?’
‘They don’t hurt when I laugh any more,’ she replied with a grin she turned to offer directly to him.
Then wished she hadn’t when her heart gave that funny leap again, making the tiny muscles deep in her stomach coil up in reaction. He looked lean and dark and sun-kissed, as if he’d just stepped off a plane from a place where the weather had been a lot pleasanter than it had been here in England.
She felt a tingling urge to reach out and touch his face just to feel if it was as warm as it appeared to be. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked instead, leaving the less tactile medium of words to assuage her curiosity.
‘You sound like a wife,’ he mocked, his dark eyes flickering slightly as he scanned her face where even Claire had noticed the stray-waif look was beginning to fade.
‘Not yet,’ she drawled in answer. ‘And for all you know I may have changed my mind.’
‘Have you?’
The urge to prolong his agony and lie almost got the better of her, but in the end she said, ‘No,’ and they were both silent for several minutes. The baby made a snuffling sound and she began rocking the pram again. It was all very—ordinary.
‘I’ve been in Greece,’ he announced, answering her earlier question. ‘With my grandmother,’ he added, and though his tone was level Claire knew instinctively that something was wrong.
‘She’s worse, isn’t she?’ she said.
‘Fading fast,’ he grimaced—then added briskly, ‘So I have set her a task to do to keep her mind occupied. She is planning our wedding as we speak.’
Startled, Claire straightened in the chair. ‘Our wedding?’ she repeated. ‘But I thought you wanted to present her with a fait accompli!’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘That would not have worked quite so successfully as the story I have now fed her.’
‘Which is—what?’ she demanded, only managing to keep her angry voice down in respect of the sleeping Melanie.
‘That you are young and very beautiful …’
Beautiful? Claire stared directly ahead and wondered how he could lie so glibly, because the one thing she wasn’t was beautiful! Passably attractive when at her best, she conceded. But nothing more than that.
‘I told her that we had shared a—liaison some time last year,’ he went on. ‘But because of your youth I broke it off, not knowing I was leaving you carrying my child …’
Lie number two, she counted, and began to see for the first time what mire of deceit she was about to fall into.
‘But I could not get you out of my mind—which was why I found it so impossible to agree to marry another woman while I still wanted you. So I went to see you,’ he explained. ‘And as for the rest—’ he shrugged ‘—it tells itself.’
It certainly did, Claire agreed, seeing herself as this tragic young woman who’d fallen for the big handsome Greek tycoon who was, by the sound of it, not far off his dotage.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the new slant I have put on our—story—’ he used the word dryly ‘—was done to serve a second purpose …’
Now what? Claire wondered, feeling the fine hairs on the back of her neck begin to prickle warningly.
‘For this way you don’t have to like the fact that you are marrying me,’ he explained. ‘Being the arrogant dictator that everyone seems to think I am—including you—no one is going to question the idea that you have been—coerced into becoming my wife for the sake of our child. Which also means you get your own bedroom without tongues wagging,’ he pointed out. ‘While I must—earn your affections again.’