In Athens he was never less than perfectly groomed, dressed in beautifully tailored dove-grey or light tan suits over pristine, exquisite shirts, and he could look intimidating. But here, like this, though still just as shatteringly handsome, he seemed warmer, wonderfully approachable.
Easy to talk to. ‘I did get round to mentioning it—although I almost didn’t,’ she confessed, laying down her fork with a small sigh of repletion, listening to the soothing sound of the whisper of the sea as it caressed the shore far below, feeling more relaxed and at peace than she had felt in ages. ‘I was too busy listening to her telling me how you bought the farm and put the deeds in their names. Why didn’t you tell me?’ she probed gently.
His own fork abandoned, Dimitri leant back, his features shadowed now. ‘I thought you already knew—that your parents would have told you.’
Then, rough-edged, showing the first sign of discomfiture Maddie had ever seen in him, he leant forward again, fisting his hands on the top of the table, the gleam from the candle picking blue lights from his rumpled raven hair, and admitted, ‘That’s not true. I allowed you to believe that your parents’ security depended solely on your agreement to come back to me, stay with me. When the truth is that I would have helped them regardless, because I like them and saw the injustice of what cold, big-business brains could do to small, good people with no possible means of self-defence.’
Helplessly in love with him, Maddie felt her heart twist behind her breast. Behind the tough business tycoon façade beat the generous heart of a truly good guy—a guy who would always put his family first and, in time, learn to stop loving Irini and begin to love her instead. At least that was what she was now determined on. It might take some time, but it would be worth waiting for.
Her heart melted further, until she thought that poor organ must resemble a pool of hot treacle, when he castigated, ‘What I did was dishonourable! I threatened you, let that threat lie between us as the only way I could think of to make you come back to me! It was a despicable thing to do. So—’
Steeling himself, doing his best to appear to be relaxed over what in all honour had to be said, Dimitri leaned back in his seat again. For the first time in his adult life he was losing control, giving control over his happiness to another. Knowing it was what honour demanded didn’t make it any easier.
‘So the threat no longer exists,’ he intoned heavily. ‘It never did. You are free to make your own decisions about our marriage. You wanted to divorce me,’ he reminded her with a studied calm that almost killed him in its achievement. ‘If your reasons for wanting to end our marriage still exist—’ a sudden, involuntary downward slash of one strongly crafted hand betrayed the inner tension he was trying to hide ‘—and whatever they are or were, I do not want to hear them, then you are free to do as you think fit.’ He breathed in deeply, then stipulated forcefully, ‘However, I would demand that you remain in Greece, that I have full visiting rights where our child is concerned.’
Silence hung, thick and spiky with expectation. Maddie’s eyes were liquid sapphire, drenched with understanding. And awe.
This gorgeous man must have wanted her to return and take her place as his wife really badly for him to have done wha
t he had himself named despicable and dishonourable. And it would have taken guts for him to come straight out and admit that the threats had never been real, to let it be known that the tough exterior hid a marshmallow centre.
It hadn’t been about forcing her back to get her pregnant and then rob her of her child. She knew that now. She was expecting their first baby, and already he was talking about having more children. With her. All this talk of freeing her to sue for divorce if she still wanted to was just his way of satisfying what he saw as his honour!
Happiness bubbled up inside her like a hot spring. Their future could be good. Would be good, she mentally emphasized. Because, on the evidence, maybe he’d already started to forget Irini and begun to fall a little in love with her before she’d left him and asked for a divorce. And he had to have been desperate for that not to happen, otherwise he wouldn’t have compromised his so-valued honour and lied—in an oblique sort of way—about her parents being homeless if she dug her heels in and went for that divorce.
‘Well?’
His voice was flat, but Maddie, attuned to every single thing about him, detected the underlying tension. She had kept the poor darling in suspense for far too long. Patience, as she well knew, wasn’t a virtue that came easily to him.
She reached for his hand, felt his immediate response as he tightened his fingers around hers.
‘Like you, I think children need both parents around on a regular basis,’ she told him, with only the slightest emotional wobble in her voice she was pleased to note. ‘So we stay married.’
She would be making a crucial mistake if she were to follow the impetuous need to fling herself at him and tell him she loved him to death, and that it would take a bulldozer to prise her away from him.
It was too early in their new relationship to load that onto him. He was still having to deal with his strong feelings for Irini, and if, as everything she had seen with her own eyes and heard with her own ears pointed to, they had been in love, and lovers, for ages, then at the moment that was enough for him to contend with.
He was having to face the fact that his love for the other woman was doomed. That his unsuitable wife was already pregnant. That because of his sense of what was right he could no longer contemplate handing over a large part of the coming child’s care into the hands of a woman he had admitted possessed not a single maternal bone in her svelte and sexy body.
Maddie, fiddling with the stem of her glass, could only suppose that his passion for the other woman had so clouded his judgement that he had agreed to the cruel plan in the first place as being the only way out of the impasse.
And that his deep passion for another woman was something she was going to have to deal with in private if their marriage had any hope of succeeding. It was something that savaged her every time she thought about it and had to acknowledge that she was a very poor second best in his estimation.
Suddenly conscious of his silence, the quality of his concern-filled golden eyes, the tension stamped on his taut bone structure, she knew he was waiting for something more—some further assurance that she had changed her mind about leaving him and was now content to settle for being the mother of his children. She knew she had to lighten the atmosphere.
So, finding a teasing tone, she released the hand that still lay in his, ran the tips of her fingers across the slash of his rigid cheekbones and down to the corner of his sensual mouth, and told him, ‘And, apart from the good parents bit, the sex is out of this world!’ Inwardly she quailed at the lightness and sheer shallowness of that remark when she loved him so much it actually hurt, but she forced a smile, managed a tiny shrug. ‘Why would I deprive myself of it?’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ATHENS still sweltered in the late summer heat. It was pointless wishing he and Maddie were still on the island, safe and secluded. It smacked of cowardice, a head-in-sand syndrome, and that went against all he was!
But he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that there was tension in the air, because he could sense it—an unwelcome and unprecedented feeling that something catastrophic was about to happen.
Dimitri closed the door to his aunt’s quarters behind him, and fought to control both his unease and his anger.
His father’s sister had been back home for three days, and each of those days had been peppered with increasingly petulant demands to know where Irini was.
‘I haven’t heard from her in weeks. I expected her to come and welcome me home!’ had been her latest complaint. ‘She’s not answering her mobile phone, and that’s most unlike her,’ she’d fretted. ‘If her parents know where she is, they’re not saying. I can’t imagine what the big secret is! If anyone knows, you do! I know just how close the two of you are and always will be, despite your marrying a girl who’s little better than a peasant, with her eyes on your fortune!’