CHAPTER EIGHT
CLEARLY in no mood to make the effort required to convince the staff that he was an attentive new husband, Sergios did not join Bee at the dinner table until she was halfway through her meal and the silence while they ate together screamed in her ears like chalk scraping down a blackboard.
‘I didn’t think you’d be the type to sulk.’
‘Am I allowed to shout at you, sir?’
‘Enough already with the sir,’ Sergios advised impatiently.
Her appetite dying, Bee pushed her plate away.
‘I’ll take you out sailing tomorrow morning,’ he announced with the air of a man expecting a round of applause for his thoughtfulness.
‘Lucky me,’ Bee droned in a long-suffering voice.
‘Later this week, I’ll take you over to Corfu to shop.’
‘I hate shopping—do we have to?’
The silence moved in again.
‘When I married you I believed you were a reasonable, rational woman,’ Sergios volunteered curtly over the dessert course.
‘I believed you when you said you wanted a platonic marriage,’ Bee confided. ‘Just goes to show how wrong you can be about someone.’
‘Do you think your own mother will be fooled by the way we’re behaving into believing that this is a happy marriage?’
Hit on her weakest flank by that question, Bee paled.
‘Don’t wait up for me,’ Sergios told her as he too pushed away his plate, the food barely touched. ‘Last month I took over my grandfather’s seat on the island council and it meets tonight. I’ll stay for a drink afterwards.’
Frustrated by his departure when nothing between them had been resolved, Bee phoned her mother and lied through her teeth about how very happy she was. She then tried very hard to settle down with a book but her nerves continued to zing about like jumping beans and at well after ten that evening she decided that, as she wasn’t the slightest bit tired, vigorous exercise might at least dispel her tension. At her request a pole had been fitted in the house gym and she had politely ignored Sergios’s mocking enquiry as to what she intended to do with it. Like all too many people Sergios evidently assumed that pole dancing was a lewd activity best reserved for exotic dancers in sleazy clubs. Clad in stretchy shorts and a crop top, Bee did her warm-up exercises to loosen up before putting on her music.
Sergios was resolutely counting his blessings as he drove back along the single-track road to his home. Unhappily a couple of drinks and all the jokes with his colleagues on the island council that had recognised his status as a newly married man hadn’t taken the edge off his mood. In fact he was engaged in reminding himself that being married was by its very nature tough. Learning how to live with another person was difficult. Nobody knew that better than him, which was why he had cherished his freedom for so long. Indeed the lesson of having once lost his freedom was engraved on his soul in scorching letters, for Sergios never forgot or forgave his own mistakes. He knew he should be grateful that Beatriz was so very attached to children who were not her own. She was a good woman with a warm heart and strong moral values. He knew he should be appreciative of the fact that if he came home unexpectedly he was highly unlikely to walk into a wild party…
When he walked into the lounge, however, he was vaguely irritated to find that Beatriz had not waited up for him, thereby demonstrating her concern for his state of mind and their marriage. He was hugely taken aback to recognise that he actually wanted her to do wifely things of that nature. That she had just taken herself off to bed was definitely not a compliment. It was hardly surprising, he acknowledged in sudden exasperation, that Beatriz should be confused about what he wanted from her when he no longer knew himself.
The bedroom, though, was also empty and Androula, plump and disapproving in her dressing gown, answered his call and informed him that Beatriz was in the gym. Having dispensed with his tie and his jacket, Sergios followed the sound of the music but what he saw when he glanced through the glass doors of the gymnasium brought him to a sudden stunned halt.
Beatriz was hanging upside down on a pole. By the time he got through the door she was doing a handstand and swirling round the pole, legs splaying in a distinctly graphic movement that he would not have liked her to do in public. He was astonished by how fit she was as she went through an acrobatic series of moves. That stirring display was so unexpected from such a quiet conservative woman that it made it seem all the more exciting and illicit. He watched her kick, toes pointed, slender muscles flexing in a shapely leg and in a rounded, deliciously plump derriere. Around that point he decided simply to enjoy the show. As she undulated sexily against the pole, full breasts thrust out, hips shifting as though on wires, he was hard as a rock and her sinuous roll on the floor at the foot of the pole was frankly overkill.
‘Beatriz?’ Sergios husked.
In consternation at the sound of his voice, Bee flipped straight back upright, wondering anxiously for how long she had had an audience. Brilliant dark eyes welded to her, Sergios was by the door, tall, darkly handsome and overwhelmingly masculine. Lifting her towel to dry the perspiration from her face, she paused only to switch off the music.
‘When did you get back?’
‘Ten minutes ago. How long have you been doing that for?’
‘About three years,’ she answered a little breathlessly, drawing level with him. ‘It was more fun than the other exercise classes.’
His gaze smouldering, he bent his dark head and crushed her parted lips hotly beneath his, ravishing her mouth with the staggering impact of a long, drugging kiss. A shiver of sensual shock ran through her as his arms came round her and she felt the hard urgency of his erection against her stomach.
‘Se thelo…I want you,’ he breathed raggedly. ‘Let’s make this a real marriage.’
Taken aback by that proposition, Bee tried to step back but Sergios had a strong arm braced to her spine as he walked her down the corridor. ‘We need to think about this,’ she reasoned, struggling to emerge from that potent kiss, which had made her head swim.
‘No, I believe in gut instinct. We’ve been thinking far too much about things,’ Sergios fired back with strong masculine conviction. ‘You’re not supposed to agonise over everything you do in life and look for all the pitfalls, Beatriz. Some things just happen naturally.’