The blood pounded in her ears. “Why does he feel so threatened?” She couldn’t disguise the tremor in her voice.
He studied her features for a long time. “Because he found us together at my flat a few weeks ago.”
She felt her heart die. “What flat?” she whispered.
“I keep one in the Plaka, for business contacts when they have to stay over.”
“And you never told me?”
“I didn’t intentionally keep it a secret from you, Dominique. The truth is I have flats in various places in Greece for when I travel on business.”
When she groaned at this oversight he dismissed as unimportant, he said, “The situation with Olympia isn’t what Theo thinks. I swear it. But I can’t talk about it yet. You know I love you.” He reached for her and crushed her in his arms. “It’s until death, agape mou.”
Yes, she knew he loved her. She also knew a lot of men who had wives they loved and mistresses they enjoyed on the side.
Olympia was seven years older than Dominique. Beautiful, full-figured, strong-willed. Dominique sensed she’d hero-worshipped Andreas for years. The attraction had probably been there since Olympia’s early teens, when her relationship with Maris had thrown her into Andreas’s company.
Yet reason told her that if he’d wanted to marry Olympia he would have done so, before Dominique had ever run in a marathon that happened to pass by his villa.
So what had happened to change him? Had he discovered too late that Dominique’s disfigurement was a turn-off? Was it pity he’d ended up feeling for her, and he’d waited to give her a divorce until he felt she could handle it?
Maybe he’d found her so lacking physically he’d discovered Olympia was the woman he should have married after all.
It took no imagination to understand why Andreas had sought the other woman out when he wanted a change from his child bride, who some people mistook for a boy from a distance.
Dominique turned away from the porthole.
She might no longer be his waif-like bride, but she was still his wife. If pity wasn’t the reason he’d taken so long to give her a divorce, maybe it had more to do with Theo. Maybe Andreas had been waiting for Theo to grant Olympia her freedom first. Theo was a proud Greek too.
In pain at the trial, he might have decided to make his wife suffer by exposing her affair with Andreas yet still keeping her bound to him. If Ari was Andreas’s son, then Theo’s pain would have made him crazy for a while.
Dominique couldn’t pretend she wasn’t shocked by the child’s existence, but she’d come back to Greece to ask her husband’s forgiveness for not trusting him.
If she were to run away now, and not give Andreas a chance to explain why Olympia and Ari were installed in the bedroom Dominique had once shared with him, then she’d learned nothing over the past year.
Determined that this time she would fight fire with grit, she climbed under the covers, willing oblivion to come.
At some point the phone rang by her bed, jerking her from a sound sleep. She was surprised to discover it was morning. Only one person would be calling her, and it wouldn’t be Andreas.
Still, her heart raced as she picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“It’s Paul. May I come by your room?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Dominique scrambled out of bed to get dressed. She quickly put on new lingerie and slipped into a pair of khaki shorts and a sleeveless cotton top in a plum color.
By the time she heard his knock she’d run a brush through her hair and applied a pink frost lipstick.
“Come in, Paul.” She held the door open for him. He’d shown up with the file he’d pulled from his briefcase yesterday morning. “Why don’t you sit down at the table?”
Without waiting for his reply she started packing things in shopping bags. She felt his eyes on her. When he didn’t say anything, she took the initiative.
“I’ll make this easy for you. Andreas needed time before he was ready to grant me a divorce. Now I’ve discovered I need time to think about it, so I’m not going to sign anything yet.”
“I figured as much when you didn’t act on it in Sarajevo.”