‘I am to wait further instruction,’ Lester Miles informed her.
‘Really?’ she drawled. At whose command—Leandros’s or Takis Konstantindou’s? ‘Well, since I am the one you are supposed to take instruction from, Mr Miles, take the afternoon off,’ she invited. ‘Enjoy a bit of sightseeing and forget about them.’
It was what she intended to do anyway.
‘But, Mrs Petronades,’ he protested, ‘we are due to fly home tomorrow evening. We really should discuss what it is you want from—’
‘I don’t want anything,’ she interrupted. ‘But if this thing can be finished by me accepting everything, then I will.’ End of subject, her tight voice intimated. ‘They will be back tomorrow with their proposed settlements,’ she predicted. ‘I’ll sign and we will catch our flight home.’
Never to return again, she vowed as she left the poor lawyer standing there looking both puzzled and frustrated. He’d been looking forward to a good fight. He’d had a taste of it and liked it; she’d recognised that in the Petronades boardroom today.
As she stepped outside, the full heat of the sun beat down upon her head. She paused for a moment to get her bearings before deciding to revisit some of her old haunts that did not remind her of Leandros. There were plenty of them, she mused cynically, as she flopped her sunglasses down over her eyes then walked off down the street. While Leandros had played the busy tycoon during her year here in Athens, she had learned to amuse herself by getting to know the city from her own perspective rather than the one her privileged Greek in-laws preferred.
Leandros had just managed to park his car when he saw Isobel step into the street. About to climb out of the vehicle, he paused to watch as she stood for a moment frowning fiercely at everything before she reached up to pull her sunglasses over her eyes, then walked off.
Where was she going? he mused grimly. Why wasn’t she sitting in her room sobbing her heart out—as he’d expected her to be?
A stupid notion, he then decided when he took in what she was wearing. It was what he had used to call her battle-dress. When the hair went up in a pony-tail and her camera swung from her shoulder, and those kinds of clothes came out of the closet, his aggravating wife was making a determined bid for escape. How many times had he watched the back of that fine, slender figure disappear into the distance without so much as a word to say where she was going or why she was going there?
His jaw clenched because he knew why she had used to disappear like this. It had usually occurred after a row, after she’d asked him for something and he’d snapped at her because he’d been too busy to listen properly, and thought the request petty in the extreme. Guilty conscience raked its sharp claws across his heart. He’d been hell to live with, he recognised that now. He’d done nothing but pick and gripe and shut her up with more satisfying methods. And had never seen how lonely she’d been as she had walked away.
Climbing out of his sleek red Ferrari, he paused long enough to remove his jacket and tie then lock them in the boot. Then he intended to go after her.
But Leandros remembered the lover, and stopped as a whole new set of emotions gripped. Was he still in the hotel? Had she just come from him? Was he receiving the same walk-away treatment because he hadn’t listened to what she had been trying to say? Had they rowed about the disaster this morning’s meeting had turned into? Had she told the lover that she’d almost made love with her husband on the boardroom table before she walked away? Had they made love just now, in there, in that shabby hotel that suited clandestine relationships?
His mind knew how to torment him, he noted, as he slammed the car boot shut.
Where was his mother-in-law while all of this was going on? Was she lying on her sickbed with no idea that her daughter was romping with the body-builder in the next room? Ma
ybe he should go and talk to Silvia. Maybe he should tackle the lover while Isobel was out of the way.
But his mother-in-law was a dish best eaten cold, he recalled with a rueful half-grin at the memory of her blunt tongue. And he wasn’t cold right now, he was hot with jealousy and a desire to beat someone to a pulp.
Isobel disappeared around a corner; the decision about whom he was going to tackle first was made there and then. To hell with everyone else, he thought. This was between him and his wife.
It was good to walk. It was good to feel the tension leave her body the deeper she became lost in the tourist crowds. Isobel caught the metro into Piraeus, drank a can of Coke as she walked along the harbour, pausing now and again to snap photos of the local fishermen and their brightly painted boats. She even found her old sense of fun returning when they tossed pithy comments at her, which she returned with a warm grasp of Greek that made them grin in shocked surprise. Most people hated the busy port of Piraeus but she’d always loved it for its rich and varied tapestry of life.
An hour later she had walked to Zea Marina where the private yachts were berthed and ended up getting out of the heat of the sun in Mikrolimano beneath the awning of one of her favourite restaurants that edged the pretty crescent-shaped waterfront. She couldn’t eat. It seemed that her stomach was still plagued by a knot of tension even if the rest of her felt much more at peace. But she was content to sit there sipping the rich black Greek coffee while taking in the spectacular views across the Saronic Gulf to the scatter of tiny islands glinting in the sun.
Eventually Vassilou, the restaurant owner, came out to greet her with a warm cry of delight and a welcoming kiss to both cheeks. It was that time of the day when Athens was at its quietest because most people with any sense were taking a siesta. The restaurant had very few customers and Vassilou came to sit beside her with his coffee while he tested her Greek.
It seemed crazy now, that she’d learned the language down here with the real people of Athens and not up there in the rarefied air on Lykavittos Hill, or Kolonáki, where the wealthy Athenians lived in their luxury villas. No one up there had thought it worth coaching her in the Greek language. They spoke perfect English so where was the need?
The need was sitting right here beside her with his thick thatch of silver hair and craggy brown face and his gentle, caring eyes. Not many minutes later they were joined by a retired sea captain, who began telling her some of his old sea yarns. Soon the chairs at her small table had doubled along with the circle of men. The restaurant owner’s son brought coffee for them all and sat down himself.
Isobel was relaxed; she was content to sit and be entertained by these warm-hearted people. Despite her nightmare marriage to Leandros, she’d loved Athens—this Athens—and she’d missed it when she returned to London.
Suddenly she sensed someone come to stand behind her chair. Assuming it was another local, drawn to the little coffee-drinking group, she didn’t think to glance round. She simply continued to sit there on a rickety chair with her coffee-cup cradled between her fingers and her smile one of wicked amusement while she listened—until a hand settled on her shoulder.
His touch caused a jolt of instant recognition. Her body froze and she lost her smile. The old sea captain’s voice trailed into silence, and as each set of eyes rose to look at Leandros she had to watch the warmth die.
Not into frozen shock, she noted, but into looks of respect, the kind men gave to another when they recognised a superior man come down into their midst.
They also understood the gentle claim of possession when they saw it. These shrewd men of Greece understood the light, ‘Kalimera,’ when it was spoken with the smoothness of silk. ‘I understand now why my wife goes missing,’ Leandros drawled lazily. ‘She has other suitors with whom she prefers to spend the siesta hours.’
The words were spoken in Greek with the aim to compliment, and Isobel was not surprised when the grins reappeared. Men were always first and foremost men, after all. She sat forward to put down her coffee-cup, though ostensibly the movement was supposed to dislodge his hand. It didn’t happen; the long brown fingers merely shifted to curve her nape then he bent and she felt the warmth of his breath brush her jawbone just before the brush of his kiss on her cheek followed suit.
He must know that her expression did not welcome him, but he was trusting her not to reject him here in view of all of these interested eyes. And, oddly, she didn’t. Which troubled and confused her as she watched the sudden genial shift of bodies and listened to the light banter that involved excuses as the others left the lovers to themselves while they made a mass chair-scraping exodus to another table.