And who would never in a million years think about marriage.
Or children.
Or falling in love.
CHAPTER FOUR
VANESSA GAZED OUT over the night. Twenty storeys below, the River Thames gleamed, dark and opaque. She shivered. It was not just the winter’s bleakness—raw and biting in the damp British air—that made her do so. The bleakness was inside her as well.
It was because Markos was not there with her.
He had been gone longer than she’d thought he would be—well over a week now. And she had counted every day, felt each one like a hard, heavy weight dragging at her.
She was missing him badly. There was an emptiness inside her, a dull, raw, sick longing like acid in her stomach, a restlessness that made her pace, now, despite the cold and the late hour, up and down on the roof terrace of his Chelsea penthouse overlooking the river. But the central-heated warmth of the luxurious interior had suddenly seemed too hot, too breathless, exacerbating the sick feeling in her stomach that had been there since she’d come back from Austria, parted from Markos.
She halted, hugging her arms around her body. Oh, Markos, why are you away so long? I hate it when you are away from me! Please come back—please come back soon! Tomorrow—please. I miss you so much!
The words tumbled through her head, aching and hurting.
She had it bad, she knew. Loving and wanting like this, pining when he was not there, unable to settle to anything, unable to do anything—unable to live. Just—waiting. That was all she was doing. Waiting for him to come back to her.
She couldn’t even phone him or communicate with him. The mobile he had given her was for receiving his calls, not making her own to him—she didn’t even know hi
s personal number, which came up as ‘private’ on her screen, and phoning his PA would have been too mortifying. And, anyway, how could she phone him when he was in Athens on business? If he’d wanted to speak to her he would have done so. But he hadn’t. She hadn’t heard from him since she’d arrived in London.
The days had passed with brutal slowness. The Chelsea apartment was huge and luxurious, with a vast plasma-screen television, every form of sound equipment and a huge library of recordings. If she’d wanted, Housekeeping would have sent a chef up every night to cook a gourmet meal for her. But she had no interest in that. Going out shopping gave her something to do in the daytime. So did museums and concerts and the cinema and theatre matinees. She’d been to the cinema tonight to see a film, but it had been a sad love story and it had only depressed her. Besides, most of the people at the cinema had been either couples or groups of friends. She knew no one in London.
Oh, she’d met some of Markos’s acquaintances when she was out and about with him, but she was hardly on their social circuit. None of them would think to invite her on her own, without Markos. Not that she would have wanted to go. The circles Markos moved in were a million miles from those she was used to, and even after five months she did not feel comfortable among such people. Only when Markos was with her could she relax, devote herself to him and pay very little attention to anyone else beyond smiling and saying whatever was required socially—which, she knew, was very little. They saw her as the woman on Markos Makarios’s arm, that was all.
She didn’t care. All she wanted to be, in the entire world, was the woman on Markos Makarios’s arm.
She went on staring down at the cold, dark river, so far below. Waiting for Markos to come back.
So she could start living again.
Markos’s mood was foul. The flight had been delayed, making him late at Heathrow, and the ten days he’d spent in Athens had been purgatory. Every last complaint he’d known his father was going to throw at him he had—and more. Worse, the old man had upped the ante disastrously by holding a dinner party to which he had invited the latest prospective ‘good Greek wife’ for his errant son.
Apollonia Dimistris was, Markos had instantly seen, exactly the type his father would like for him. Expensively dressed without the slightest attempt to make her attractive, she was demure to the point of inarticulate. Her mother had been more than happy to fill the conversational gaps, and Markos had been forced to behave with rigid politeness the whole evening, raining down silent curses on his father’s head—most particularly when his father had made excruciatingly heavy-handed remarks about his age, decrepitude and his longing for the next Makarios generation to arrive, at which Constantia, Apollonia’s mother, had smiled with an infuriatingly satisfied look on her face.
Markos had finished the evening when, finally, the dinner party had dispersed, by escaping to his own rooms in the opulent Makarios mansion and drinking too many glasses of ouzo.
For the first time in ten days his mood lifted a thread.
Thank God he was away from Athens. Thank God he was away from his father. And thank God the woman waiting for him in his London apartment was as different from Apollonia Dimistris as a succulent peach from an unripe damson!
Vanessa would be waiting for him, he knew—waiting with open arms and a warm, willing body. Beautiful and giving and oh, so eager for everything he was going to give her.
He felt himself stir as he pictured the woman who had proved such an effective means of banishing the ennui that had been haunting him in Paris. He’d been without sex for ten days—and that was ten days too many.
He leaned back in his soft leather seat as the car creamed down the M4 into London. Relaxing his leg muscles, he started to loosen his tie.
He wanted no delays when he got to his apartment.
‘Markos!’
Vanessa’s voice was faint with disbelief. For one endless moment she just stood, out on the terrace, staring at the silhouette outlined against the sliding glass doors.
‘Oh, Markos!’