‘Excuse me?’ Anna’s voice was blank and Leo said something in Greek.
Markos’s eyes were hard as steel. ‘You heard me,’ he said, his voice harsh, merciless.
‘I heard you,’ said Leo slowly, in English, ‘but I don’t believe you.’
‘Make that two of us,’ echoed Anna. ‘There is just no way Vanessa would take up with someone else that fast. She’d have been crying into her broken dreams for months before anyone would have had a chance of mopping her up!’
Markos’s chin lifted. His eyes flashed like swords.
‘Oh, yes? Well, I’m afraid your touching faith in her attachment to me is misplaced, my dear Anna.’ He gave a smile as savage as a wolf’s and as bitter as gall. ‘Or how come she’s carrying another man’s child?’
For a moment there was nothing but complete silence in the room. Then Anna spoke.
‘Vanessa’s pregnant?’
There was disbelief in her voice. Markos heard it, and his face hardened.
‘Are you sure about that?’ Leo echoed his wife’s doubt.
Markos’s eyes flashed, and he took another mouthful of whisky.
‘Yes,’ he said savagely. ‘I am sure.’
‘How do you know?’ Anna demanded.
‘I’m not blind. She’s pregnant.’
‘How did you find out?’ Leo amended.
Markos turned to him. ‘She did some modelling for a designer. Maternity wear. I saw the photos in an in-flight magazine. And when I finally tracked her down through the agency they’d used and confronted her, she didn’t deny it. She even taunted me to guess who’d got her pregnant! Who it was she’d sought consolation with after she walked out on me!’ The savagery in his voice was vehement.
‘Did she tell you who?’ Anna’s sharp voice was jabbing at him in places he didn’t want jabbed—places that were raw and bleeding inside him.
Markos’s head swung towards her.
‘She’s protecting him. I said I’d break his neck, and though by the end I promised her I wouldn’t touch him—’ bitterness saturated his voice ‘—after all, she’d gone to him willingly—she still wouldn’t tell me who it was. Not that it’s done her any good. He’s dumped her—paid her off with a box of a house in the back of nowhere, where she can’t cause any trouble!’
Anna’s folded arms clenched a moment. But her voice when she spoke was very controlled.
‘Tell me something—how many months pregnant is she, Markos?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ he said tersely.
‘Don’t you?’ she said. ‘Although she’s visibly pregnant? You know, I think you should care. I really think you should.’
His face darkened again. ‘And what the hell do you mean by that?’ he challenged.
Leo snarled in Greek, not liking the tone of his cousin’s voice towards his wife. Markos’s jaw tightened. But before he could say anything, Leo went on.
‘Because you need to know, little cousin,’ he said, very clearly, as if speaking to a child, ‘for the following reason.’
Then he explained what that reason was.
Music pounded in his ears, heavy metal thudding through his bones, even though it was being torn away in the wind rushing over the open top of the car as it sped down the motorway, heading southwest. Markos let the noise saturate him, obliterating his thoughts. He didn’t want to think, didn’t want to feel. Didn’t want to do anything except reach his target. And even that he didn’t want to reach.
But every mile eaten up by the powerful engine brought him closer.
This journey, though physically the same as he had made that first time, at the beginning of the week, was totally different. Then, rage had fuelled him. Rage and outrage that the woman he’d devoted himself to had held him so cheap that she had gone straight into another man’s arms—and got pregnant by him.