The Secret Wife

Thank heaven that after tomorrow she would never, ever see him again. That encounter had meant nothing to Constantine. In the heat of male lust and without even an ounce of liking or respect for her he had offered her a one-night stand. You couldn’t get much more sleazy, she thought painfully. He had been tempted but not so tempted that his better judgement hadn’t experienced a certain relief when she had turned him down. She had seen that in those surprisingly expressive eyes of his. She grimaced, exhaustion creeping over her like a heavy fog.

Waking with a start, she found Constantine staring down at her. Blinking in the lamplight, Rosie jerked bolt upright, a cold spasm of fear impelling her.

‘Do you us

ually go to bed with all your clothes on?’ Constantine enquired, studying the jeans and T-shirt she had put back on.

Taking in the short black robe he was wearing, shaken eyes widening at the slice of bare hair-roughened brown chest that was visible, Rosie leapt out of the other side of the bed.

‘Christos ... what do you think I was about to do? Attack you?’ he demanded, openly taken aback by her reaction.

‘The sofa is more my size.’

‘We can share the bed. It’s three in the morning and I have nothing on my mind but an overwhelming desire for sleep,’ Constantine asserted with distinct hauteur.

But Rosie closed the bedroom door without answering, traced her way across the dark room beyond and curled up wearily on the sofa. It felt as if she had only just closed her eyes when a loud, persistent knock started hammering on the door. She pushed her tousled head under a cushion and groaned, snuggling into the warmth of a blanket that hadn’t been there when she’d gone to sleep. Only when an impatient burst of Greek sounded did she lift her head again.

By then Constantine, clad in close-fitting charcoal-grey trousers and a white silk shirt, was yanking open the door. Dmitri surged in, waving a newspaper and showing every sign of a man throwing a fit. Constantine took the newspaper, exploded briefly back into Greek and then fell silent. Both men turned almost simultaneously to study Rosie...

Caught up in the drama, Rosie stared in wide, innocent enquiry back at them. Constantine opened the door again and the bodyguard departed with unconcealed eagerness. Then Constantine swung back to face Rosie.

‘You conniving, cheating little shrew!’ he condemned without warning, crossing the room in one long, powerful stride and raising her off the sofa with an even more powerful hand.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Rosie gasped, shocked by the rage burning in his black, diamond-cutting eyes.

‘Theos...you will suffer for this!’

‘What am I supposed to have done?’

‘I was a fool to trust you even this far... My lawyers warned me... why the hell didn’t I listen?’ Constantine grated, glowering down at her with such loathing and disgust that Rosie turned pale as milk and began to shake, a sick feeling stirring in the pit of her stomach.

He released his hold on her crushed fingers, drew himself up to his full, thoroughly intimidating height and watched her collapse on trembling legs down into the nearest armchair. He lifted a lean brown hand and spread his fingers, the extraordinary force of that single physical gesture capturing her shocked stare.

‘You really want to find out what it is like being married to me?’ Constantine bit out with a flash of pure fire in his mesmeric, menacing gaze. ‘You will wish every minute of every day that you had stayed in your slum dwelling where you belonged and you will be on your knees begging for a divorce before I am finished with you!’

CHAPTER FIVE

WITH extreme difficulty, Rosie snatched in a ragged breath to steady her jumping nerves. ‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about...’

‘Don’t you dare lie to me!’ Constantine thundered.

Rosie squinted with fearful curiosity at the newspaper he had flung on the coffee table. Constantine snatched it up again and displayed it like prosecution evidence. TYCOON’S SECRET WEDDING, ran the headline on the front page. Rosie gulped and then gaped at the familiar photograph of herself standing outside the cottage. The last time she had seen that photo, it had been inside a frame on the lounge mantelpiece. It had been taken the day she’d moved in, proud as punch of her first real home since childhood.

‘Maurice...’ she whispered with pained comprehension, for surely only Maurice could have given that picture to the Press.

‘Maurice,’ Constantine savoured with seething satisfaction. ‘I will break him in two!’

‘No, it wasn’t Maurice!’ Rosie gasped in horror, recognising that satisfaction for what it was and even more appalled by the sight of Constantine’s clenching fists and rampant aura of physical violence. She coiled her shaking hands together and her tongue stole out to moisten her dry lips. ‘It wasn’t Maurice.... it was me.’

‘Why try to protect him? He was your accomplice. You must have phoned him to tell him where we were staying because you didn’t know our destination until we arrived.’

‘Yes, I phoned him,’ Rosie muttered tightly, and bent her fiery head, the appalling tension in the room tensing her muscles so hard that they ached.

‘I presume that you realise what you have done.’ His accented drawl fell like a whip, the anger reined back to a chilling coldness which made the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck prickle. ‘Thespina will soon know that a wedding has taken place. She has friends in London and she will naturally demand an explanation of my strange failure to inform her of my marriage. Did you think of that...did you even care?’

Rosie flinched, tears of strain stinging her eyes.

‘No, of course you didn’t care. You couldn’t see beyond your own greed. Anton left you nothing in his will and you resented that, didn’t you?’ Constantine condemned with raw-edged distaste. ‘No doubt you dreamt of great riches. But two weeks before his death Anton took out a crippling loan to buy a mouldering ruin on the island of Majorca. Sentiment drove him to stake everything he possessed against that single, insane purchase and he was far too proud to approach me for either advice or assistance.’