And at the end of those months she could go back to England with the divorce settlement he was promising her after he’d got the merger he wanted.
Into her head sprang visions of the kind of life she could lead if she did not have to go back to the bleak, exhausting slog she’d come from.
I could get out of London! Move to the country or a beautiful cathedral town! Or even the seaside. Make a completely new life for myself! A life of my own choosing.
The vision hovered in her head. So incredibly tempting...
They reached the car and he opened the passenger door for her. As he did so, he paused, frowning, as if something had just struck him.
‘Where is your luggage? All the clothes you bought?’
Rosalie’s face hardened as she got into her seat and he did likewise, gunning the powerful engine.
‘I left them,’ she said. ‘And I wish to God I didn’t have to wear this outfit either! I’ll be sending it back to him from London.’
She heard Alexandros Lakaris say something in Greek. She thought he must be swearing, so perhaps that was just as well.
‘I’ll have them fetched for you,’ he said, his face grim with displeasure as he moved off into the roadway. He turned to her. ‘Would it persuade you to keep them if you knew that in fact it was me who paid for them? I was going to charge them to your father, but in the circumstances...’
‘I can’t accept them from you either!’ Rosalie exclaimed hotly. ‘How could you think I would?’
‘If you accept my proposal, then of course you can,’ he replied. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘you’ll need many more.’ He glanced across at her and there was that glint in his eye again. It did things to her that it shouldn’t. ‘As my wife,’ he said, ‘you would be superbly dressed...’
She made a face, trying not to see herself let loose in yet more gorgeous designer departments. ‘Is that supposed to persuade me?’ she posed.
‘Will it?’ he countered.
She shook her head. ‘I mustn’t let it,’ she answered in a low voice, looking down at her lap. She gave a sigh, then looked at him straight, took a breath. ‘Mr Lakaris, if—’
He cut her off with a frown. ‘I think we have gone long beyond the stage of formal address,’ he said wryly. ‘My friends,’ he went on, ‘call me Xandros.’
‘Well, whatever I call you,’ she persisted, ‘I have to be absolutely sure that I’m not...not...letting you buy me things. Expensive clothes. Expensive hotel rooms. Expensive meals, come to that...’
He frowned. ‘You were happy enough to buy clothes when you thought your father was paying.’
‘That’s different—he’s my father. But you’d be—’
‘Your husband,’ he supplied. ‘And you, as I set out at lunchtime, would be my wife,’ he went on, and there was a crispness in his voice that she could hear clearly. ‘A wife who is enabling me to make a lot of money, thanks to this merger!’ He glanced at her briefly. ‘Does that reassure you at all?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said uneasily.
‘Good,’ he replied decisively. ‘And now...’ he changed gear and the powerful car shot forward, before settling into a fast cruising speed along the highway ‘...let’s put all that aside for the time being. Tell me—how do you fancy driving out to Sounion? There’s an ancient temple there, and a dramatic headland. Let me show you something of Greece. If a couture wardrobe can’t tempt you to marry me, maybe Greece will!’
She heard humour in his voice, and he threw her a slanting smile.
His eyes went back to the road ahead, but Rosalie’s did not do likewise. That brief smile, crinkling his eyes and curving his sculpted mouth, had made her stomach flip.
Her gaze focussed on his strong, perfectly carved profile, the fine blade of his nose, the chiselled jaw, the faint furrow of concentration on his broad brow as he overtook a lorry and then eased his square long-fingered hands on the steering wheel again. She took in the breadth of his shoulders, the long, lean length of him—the whole incredible package of honed masculinity that was Alexandros Lakaris—and she was unable to tear her gaze away.
She was helpless to stop her father’s jibing words echoing in her head.
‘You’d be the envy of every woman in Athens!’
Galling though it was, how could she deny the truth of that jibing taunt her father had lanced at her? For she knew, with a burning consciousness, that when it came to temptation Alexandros Lakaris, all six feet of drop-dead gorgeousness, was in a league of his own...
She dragged her thoughts
away, her eyes away.