The Secret Wife

His arrogant dark head turned. ‘You’ll have to excuse me. I have a visitor.’

For the space of three minutes, Rosie was frozen to the carpet by that careless dismissal. Either Constantine didn’t believe that the ring was genuinely missing or he was being very clever in his pretence of distrust and ignorance . He had to be lying—he had to be! Her restive gaze fell on the telephone and stilled. Only then did it occur to her that she didn’t know the international code for the UK. A minute search of the room revealed no directory. She didn’t even know how to dial the operator in Greece, so how could she contact Maurice?

Frustration currenting through her in a wild surge, she marched out into the hall again and then hesitated, frowning as she heard voices. Constantine and his visitor. His late caller was female and, surprisingly, English. Curiosity took her to the ajar door. She glanced in.

‘Louise...’ Constantine was saying very, very drily.

A gorgeous brunette with legs as long as rail tracks and even better exposed was reclining on a chaise longue, making very unconvincing play with a frilly handkerchief.

‘But to read something like that in a newspaper... I was devastated, Constantine! How could you get married without telling me? You said you wouldn’t be marrying for years and years and I’m really not at all sure that I can find it within myself to continue as your mistress now that you have a wife,’ Louise moaned in a petulant lament, flicking back her glamorous dark mane of hair while her steel-blue gaze carefully judged her effect on the target of her complaints.

Unfortunately that target was out of Rosie’s view but that did not inhibit her. Eyes sparkling like emerald gemstones, Rosie pressed the door back and planted herself on the threshold. ‘I think I can help you to make up your mind,’ she murmured sweetly. ‘Come within one hundred yards of Constantine again and I will scratch your eyes out!’

The brunette reared up in comical shock. Constantine spun round, black eyes aflame with sheer incredulity.

‘As for you,’ Rosie breathed, folding her arms with undeniable enjoyment in her role and fixing her full attention on her fake husband, who curiously felt rather more like a husband than he had yet, ‘I suggest you remove your ladyfriend from my home immediately ... because I never make a threat I can’t carry through on.’

At the repetition of his own words of earlier in the day, Constantine turned pale beneath his bronzed skin. An incandescent blaze of gold shimmered in his eyes before he veiled them, his sensual mouth compressing into a bloodless line of self-restraint. Constantine silenced. Well, well, well, how the mighty have fallen, Rosie savoured without pity.

The brunette strolled out provocatively slowly past Rosie. She was about a foot taller. Then she paused and glanced back with a curious malicious smile in Constantine’s direction. ‘It may seem a strange thing to say in the circumstances but your little jailbait bride has just made my day. Why do I get this feeling that life as you know it is over? She’ll give you hell and you deserve it!’

Rosie watched Louise depart, secretly impressed to death by her cool, dignified exit. As a door slammed in the distance, she sighed, ‘I’m so glad you didn’t break her heart. Well, how did I do?’

The silence pulsed as if it were about to explode.

‘How ... did ... you ... do?’ Constantine framed between audibly grinding teeth.

‘In the newly married woman stakes ... was I convincing? I mean, there is just no way a wife would walk past a scene like that in her own home. As you reminded me, I am not just a guest here.’

Constantine swung away from her and spread lean brown hands in an unsteady arc of scantily leashed rage. She had the feeling that he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened to him. He swore raggedly half under his breath in his own language. Then he murmured, not quite levelly. ‘Do you have a single sensitive bone in your body?’

Rosie shook her fiery head. ‘Not where you’re concerned. I was a bit worried that I might be reading the signals wrong and that your ladyfriend might be sincerely attached to you. But she wasn’t, was she? So no harm done.’

‘You did it quite deliberately. I am preventing you from contacting that prehistoric ape Maurice and in return you decided to start screwing up my private life.’

‘Newly married men don’t have private lives.’

‘You think not?’ Constantine purred like a big jungle cat as he prowled round her in an ever-shrinking circle of intimidation. ‘Are you not a part of my private life? Have you not forced me to acknowledge you as my wife?’

Rosie suffered a sudden alarming loss of confidence, for the first time wishing she hadn’t been quite so eager to confess to sins she hadn’t committed earlier in the day. ‘Constantine—’

‘What?’

Rosie took a tiny backward step, her heart thumping somewhere in the region of her throat. ‘I think it’s time I went to bed.’

‘So do I.’ Constantine closed his arms deftly around her slim frame and swept her off her feet.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Rosie shrieked.

‘What I should have done last night!’ Constantine started up the stairs with determination.

‘Put me down! Have you gone crazy?’

‘It’s your own bloody fault! Christos...you keep on pushing and pushing!’ Constantine roared down at her accusingly. ‘I put you in a room as far away from me as I could get you and still keep you under the same roof! I was determined not to be tempted by you again. I have tried to keep my distance—’

‘Well, you’re not trying very hard now, are you?’ Rosie snapped back tempestuously. ‘And if you don’t let go of me right this minute I’m going to hit you so hard you’ll be knocked into the middle of next week!’

‘Your mouth is bigger than you are,’ Constantine growled, his deep voice thickening in a manner that sent Rosie’s self-preserving instincts shooting to full power. ‘Why not kiss me instead?’