For Pleasure...Or Marriage?

His voice was short, as if he didn’t want to make the offer but knew he had to.

She shook her head briefly.

‘No, I’m all right,’ she repeated The shock was ebbing from her, leaving behind something quite different. Something very calm, very still.

It’s Markos, she told herself. Markos. Markos who has stormed down here and accused me of getting pregnant by another man.

She waited for the pain that the accusation, the assumption, must surely bring with it. Yet there was nothing. Only a great stillness inside her. As if something she had not realised still existed had just died.

But in its place came something else. A sure resolution that filled her, sustained her.

Slowly, she got to her feet. Markos started forward, but she held up a hand.

‘I just need to get a glass of water,’ she said, her voice quite calm. She glanced at him. ‘Would you like a drink? Coffee? Juice?’

He gave a curt shake of his head. His face was still taut, his dark grey eyes stormy, yet wary too, and with something else in them that she did not want to see and did not study.

She walked into the kitchen and took a bottle of chilled mineral water out of the fridge, filling up a glass for herself. She took a few careful sips, then came back into the living room. She resumed her seat by the table and took another sip of water, before placing it carefully on a cork mat to avoid any rings on the surface of the wood. Her other hand hovered over her abdomen, as if shielding her baby from the man before her.

Then she looked up and across to him where he stood, tension and simmering anger and whatever else was streaming through him in every muscle of his body.

‘What was the point of you coming here, Markos?’ she asked.

His brows snapped together, as if both her question and the way she’d asked it had taken him aback.

‘What was the point?’ he echoed, his voice low and savage. ‘You spend six months with me, then walk out on me without a word—a single damn word!—to another man, end up pregnant by him, and you ask me why I came here?’

She kept her eyes level on him. The same strange calmness was still inside her.

‘That’s what you think happened, is it?’ she asked.

Anger darkened across his face.

‘Don’t take that tone with me—not after what you did! And don’t even try and deny you’re pregnant!’ Accusation sliced from him.

Slowly, she shook her head. ‘No, I won’t try and deny it,’ she said. What would be the point? The evidence was visible.

Something flashed deep in his eyes as she spok

e. Then it was gone. She had no time to see what it was. But whatever it was didn’t matter. Not any more.

‘Then who was it? Answer me! Tell me who it was!’

There was a savagery in his voice that would have frightened her if she had not been so far beyond all feeling. She took in a breath, keeping it calm and even.

‘So, tell me, have you any contenders for the man who lured me away from you? Perhaps the charming Cosmo Dimistris, tempting me with his expensive emeralds? He was keen enough, after all—he seemed to find the situation piquant.’

A hardness had entered her voice, but it seemed not to register with him. Instead, his own face tightened and a burst of Greek issued from him, sounding harsh for such a mellifluous language. Then he swapped to English.

‘Do you think it funny to taunt me with your faithlessness?’ His grey eyes were like molten steel.

Something seared in her face. Her chin lifted.

‘Faithlessness? You are saying that to me? My God, you have a nerve!’ Then, just as suddenly, her chin sank, her eyes closing momentarily. ‘But of course you wouldn’t think so. To you it was an irrelevance. I know that.’

Her face shuttered, as if protecting her from an unbearable truth, but a second later her eyes opened again. She looked at Markos—who had once been everything to her, who could now be only nothing.

The aggression seemed to go out of her, and it was with a supernaturally calm, level gaze resting on him that she spoke.