The Secret Wife

Rosie unglued her tongue from the roof of her mouth. She was trembling. ‘You have an incredible imagination!’

Constantine spread his elegant brown hands in a gesture of flagrant mockery. ‘But how can you try to deny what we both know to be true? The very first time you saw me, you felt the heat rise between us. I felt it too. Raw sexual attraction, nothing more complex—’

Rosie forced a jagged laugh that hurt her throat. ‘Your conceit is unbelievable.’

‘Never challenge a Greek unless you’re prepared to meet fire with fire,’ Constantine drawled softly. ‘But then perhaps that is exactly what you would like...?’

The atmosphere was so tense that her heartbeat thundered while those black eyes smouldered over her in challenging gold enquiry. A brisk knock sounded on the door and she jumped. Dmitri entered.

On dreadfully wobbly legs, Rosie retreated to the couch. There were goose-bumps all over her skin and she was horribly aware of the dull ache in her breasts and the painful tightness of her nipples. Just by standing there, just by looking at her like that, talking to her like that, he had done that to her body. That was scary; that was very scary indeed.

He had attacked on her weakest flank, smiling at her animosity because he could afford to smile while he laid bare the sexual charge between them. ‘Raw sexual attraction’ —no, that didn’t embarrass him. Why should it? Constantine was Greek to the backbone, earthy in his blunt acknowledgement of nature’s most driving force. But perhaps Rosie was most shaken by his unashamed admission that what she was feeling he was feeling too...

But then he was ninety per cent sexual predator, only ten per cent civilised. Hadn’t she got great taste? Bitterly resenting the unfamiliar sense of inadequacy assailing her, Rosie watched Dmitri flip out a sleek portable computer and set it on the desk by the window. A porter entered with a fax machine and hurried to install it. Then a waiter arrived with a tray of coffee... coffee for one! Rosie’s eyes flared. Seeking guidance, the waiter tried to catch her attention but Rosie ignored him, too proud to indicate a need for anything that would be supplied as a mere afterthought.

Meanwhile Constantine talked in fluent French on a mobile phone, his back turned to her, one large brown hand dug into the pocket of his well-cut, elegant trousers, his silk-lined jacket elbowed back to display a murderously flat stomach, the jut of a lean, taut masculine hip and long, long, powerful thighs. He looked so incredibly good in his clothes, she stopped breathing altogether at the thought of what he must look like out of them. Then, truly appalled by a kind of curiosity she had never experienced before, Rosie reddened fiercely, lifted the remote control within her reach and switched the television on to a satellite music channel.

‘If you want to listen to music, use the set in the bedroom,’ Constantine told her, breaking off from his call with a look of extreme irritation and then swinging away again.

Rosie bounced upright, digging angry hands into her pockets. ‘I’ll go out for a walk.’

His imperious dark head turned. ‘No. You stay in the suite. Go and wash your hair or something,’ he advised impatiently. ‘I have work to do.’

Rosie breathed in so deeply, she was frightened she would burst and scream round the ceiling like a punctured balloon. ‘I do what I like, Mr Voulos.’

‘Not around me, you don’t.’ Casting aside the mobile phone, Constantine slung her a long, hard look of warning.

Her hands balled into fists inside her pockets. ‘And what makes you think that?’

‘I should have locked you in the boot of the limo for the night and hired someone else to play the bridal role. What am I getting in return for my money? You look about fifteen in that get-up. The hotel staff must think I’m a pervert...not that anyone in their right mind would credit that we are a newly married couple! And when you’re not sulking it’s yap, yap, yap.’ Flashing black eyes raked over her in unconcealed exasperation. ‘It’s like having a chihuahua, snapping and snarling at my heels!’

Rosie shuddered with incredulous wrath. ‘How dare you?’

‘If you had had me in your bed for four months, you would at least know when to shut up and make yourself scarce!’

‘You would be dead,’ Rosie spelt out in a voice that shook with pure rage.

‘You think so?’ A slow-burning smile of savage amusement slashed his strong dark features. ‘No, I think you would have learnt how to behave around me by the end of the first week. Unlike Anton, I’m low on patience and high on expectation and right now you are scoring zero all the way down the line.’

‘Not ten minutes ago you were trying to make a pass at me!’ Rosie condemned in outrage. ‘But you knew you weren’t going to get anywhere, so now you’re being deliberately offensive!’

Constantine tilted his arrogant dark head to one side and narrowed his eyes to allow them to wander with slow incredulity over her. ‘That was a pass?’ he derided in disbelief. ‘So that’s what’s biting you. I’m supposed to be panting with uncontrollable lust, am I? And you call me conceited? At this moment you have all the sex appeal of a vagrant—’

‘If you say one more word, I’ll... I’ll...’

A winged ebony brow rose enquiringly. ‘You’ll what? You’ll bite?’

Speechless with rage, Rosie could only gasp, green eyes blazing like emeralds in her hotly flushed face.

Constantine dealt her a cold smile of menacing strength. ‘Let’s get one thing straight, little rag-doll. You bite me, you’ll get bitten back to the bone. And if you’re cherishing the wild and ambitious hope that I plan to become your next wealthy meal-ticket you’re losing touch with reality. I felt the heat but I have no intention of melting—’

‘You ignorant, arrogant swine!’ Rosie splintered, finding her tongue.

‘I have this curious feeling that our minds are finally meeting in perfect harmony,’ Constantine murmured lazily, his lush black lashes lowered over brilliant dark, incisive eyes. ‘And the thought for the day is...better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s fool!’

Rosie shivered with rage and backed away from him. Never in her life had she felt as if she could kill... until now. She wanted Maurice’s muscles. She wanted to knock Constantine off his feet, swing him around her head and then pound him into a pulp.

The mobile phone buzzed again.