The Secret Wife

Standing up, Rosie straightened, and her aching back protested. She rubbed her damp hands down over her grubby shorts and grasped the glass with a determined smile. ‘This garden... it’s beginning to look good again, don’t you think?’

Carmina settled down on the flight of stone steps rediscovered only the day before as a result of Rosie’s industrious labour and folded her plump arms. Her wrinkled face was troubled as she surveyed the pruned shrubs and the border of old climbing roses which now stood revealed where there had once been only a tangled thicket of undergrowth. She sighed. ‘The marriage ... it is not looking so good.’

Wincing, Rosie tilted her tense face up to the sun and then drank deep of the lemonade. It quenched her thirst but the effort of forcing liquid past her tightening throat muscles hurt. ‘Carmina—’

‘This is not what your father wanted,’ Carmina told her stubbornly. ‘You and Constantine... this marriage was his dream for the future.’

‘Dreams don’t always work out ...’ In fact, Anton’s dream had plunged her into a real nightmare, Rosie reflected wretchedly.

Over the past three days, living under the same roof as Constantine had become an agonising ordeal and no matter how hard she tried she had found it impossible to rise above that rejection and behave as if nothing had happened. She just couldn’t bear to be in the same room as him. She just couldn’t bear to look at him or speak to him. She could only suppress her turbulent emotions in hard physical work, and at night she was so darned tired, she ought to have been sleeping like the dead...but she wasn’t.

She tossed, she turned and then she slid into an uneasy doze, only to wake up in hot-faced shock from dream after erotic dream about Constantine. What she did to him, what he did to her and the incredible number of unlikely places in which they carried out these shameless fantasies of hers ensured that her nights were far more exhausting than her days. And her inventive imagination made it even more impossible for her to meet Constantine’s eyes.

‘He does not know that you are Don Antonio’s daughter,’ Carmina complained in a tone of reproof. ‘That is a very big secret to keep from your husband.’

‘I know what I’m doing, Carmina.’

‘How can you say that? There is no peace in Son Fontanal. We all creep about the house ... no smiles, no laughter. That fancy cook ... he says if one more meal comes back to him uneaten he will leave!’

‘Constantine has a filthy temper.’

‘With a wife labouring in the garden all day, he has reason. You are neglecting your husband.’

Not in her dreams, she wasn’t. ‘He thrives on neglect.’

With a disapproving clicking of her teeth, Carmina shook her head and got up to go. ‘You are as stubborn as he is.’

Rosie settled back down to her weeding with renewed vigour. If her father was looking down on her and Constantine now, she knew he would be blaming her too. But from the moment that Constantine had asserted that had she been related to Anton he would have felt obligated to stay married to her Rosie had been determined not to try to attract and hold him on that basis.

Having smoothly seduced her into bed, Constantine had then freely admitted that his sole interest in her was sexual. Had he known she was Anton’s daughter, he would have tried to pretend that there was more to their relationship but all the time he would’ve been feeling trapped and resenting her like mad. And to try to tell him now when they were at daggers drawn and when she had no real proof to offer... what would be the point?

‘Why did you send away the gardeners I engaged?’

Startled, Rosie twisted round on her knees. A big black shadow had blocked out the sun. She focused on Constantine’s hand-stitched Italian loafers and looked no higher. ‘I prefer to do the work myself.’

“There are several acres of ground here.’

‘Well, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands, haven’t I?’ Her treacherous gaze started wandering up from the hem of his beautifully tailored grey trousers to the extensive length of his lean, hard thighs. Her stomach clenched and turned over.

Constantine released his breath in an explosive hiss. ‘You won’t go out to lunch, you won’t go out to dinner...you won’t even go out for a drive...’

They did nothing so safe in Rosie’s night-time fantasies. Her guilt-stricken appraisal strayed to the hard, muscular flare of his hip and the taut flatness of his stomach then lower again and she closed her eyes in absolute anguish as she realised that she was eating him up with her eyes. ‘I’d be wasting my time and yours.’

‘You nourish a grievance like a child revelling in a monumental sulk!’

‘I’m not sulking. I just don’t think we have anything left to say to each other. You said it all.’

‘Christos ... at least stand up and look at me when you’re speaking to me!’ Constantine grated rawly, bending down without warning to close one strong hand over hers and tug her upright.

Rosie pulled herself free and backed away several steps. Involuntarily her evasive gaze clashed with diamond-hard dark eyes. It was even worse than she had feared. That collision cost her dear. It was like being run over by a truck, thrown into the air with heart fearfully hammering and the breath wrenched from her body, all control wrested from her.

She shivered, every muscle taut as the hunger hit her in a stormy, greedy wave, a desperate, obsessive wanting that paid no heed to pride or intelligence. She wanted to touch him s

o badly, her fingernails bit sharp crescents into her hands. The simmering tension in the atmosphere heightened, until she could hear the accelerated thump of her heart in her ears.

‘What I said to you...’ Brilliant dark golden eyes challenged her levelly, his sensual mouth twisting. ‘Has it occurred to you that perhaps I wasn’t ready to answer questions about us?’

She wanted to believe him—she wanted to believe him so badly, she could almost taste her own desperation. But it had taken him too long to come up with that justification and suddenly Rosie despised herself for even listening. She started walking away. ‘I need a bath—’