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!’
A man would have felt the full force of his fist at that, and known what it felt like to be flattened against the nearest wall!
As it was, his bitten out, ‘If I ever hear you say one word against my wife again, or learn that you’ve spoken unpleasantly to her, then I shall forget the duty I owe you and ask you to leave my home,’ had had to suffice.
Now he made a conscious effort to relax his rigid shoulders, unclench his teeth, calm down, and stride through the relative coolness of the house looking for Maddie. Not finding her, he bellowed to his housekeeper for information on where his wife was hiding.
He wouldn’t have admitted it to a living soul, but leaving her, even for an hour or two, left him feeling wired-up, unable to forget that day—such an ordinary day, or so he’d thought—when he’d returned and discovered she’d left him.
Today, a crucial early-morning business meeting had necessitated his absence, and Alexandra had waylaid him on his return. And infuriated him!
He wasn’t a fool. He could put two and two together as well as the next man. Since his aunt’s return from Switzerland a subtle change had come over Maddie. She was strangely subdued, even with him, and that worried him. And in his aunt’s presence, especially at shared mealtimes, she seemed to shrink into herself, as if trying to make herself invisible.
Couple that with the way she had seemed similarly subdued and withdrawn during the few weeks prior to the time when she’d shocked him rigid by demanding a divorce, and it didn’t take a genius to work out that his aunt had been throwing a few poisoned darts in her direction!
Time to sort it out!
No one would get away with upsetting his wife while he had breath in his body!
On the arrival of the stout personage of his longtime housekeeper, he learned that Kyria Kouvaris was in the garden. He huffed out a long sigh of relief, mentally chiding himself for doubting her, for fearing that she might have broken her promise to stay with him, make their marriage work.
He who had feared nothing in the whole of his life, believing whole-heartedly that he could bend any circumstance to his will, overcome anything that life threw at him, had discovered his Achilles’ heel!