The Secret Wife

As Constantine drew level with her, he stopped dead. Without the smallest warning, he bent and swept her off her feet into his arms. Rosie was silenced by complete shock.

‘What I have to say to you does not require an audience,’ Constantine splintered in a menacing undertone. ‘And isn’t it traditional to carry

the bride over the threshold?’

Rosie’s last view of the helicopter took in Dmitri, whose rock-like visage usually defied interpretation. Not on this occasion, however. Constantine’s bodyguard wore a huge appreciative grin.

Scarlet-cheeked, Rosie spat, ‘Put me down!’

‘Make me,’ Constantine challenged, stalking through the open doors of Son Fontanal.

Rosie struck his back with two outraged fists. ‘You’ll have to do better than that, little rag-doll—’

‘Don’t call me that...I hate it!’ she launched at him as he started up a wide stone staircase.

‘But it is so appropriate. If I was the kind of husband you deserve, I would be on the happy brink of beating the stuffing out of you!’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Rosie gasped.

‘That I have to come up with another method of punishment—and I have had plenty of time to toy with several interesting possibilities, haven’t I?’ Constantine murmured in a sizzling purr of threat as he thrust open a carved door. ‘In three nightmare days, I have flown from Athens to Manchester, from Manchester to London and from London back to Athens...and then from Athens to Palma. I want someone to pay in spades for that travel itinerary.’

‘I don’t know why you bothered—’

‘Do you want to know what kept me going?’ Constantine yanked her off his shoulder, tossed her in the air to clamp two incredibly strong hands beneath her arms and then held her in suspension, face to menacing face. Rosie’s immediate surroundings shrank to her own shocked and tiny mirror image in a pair of implacable, glittering black eyes.

‘No...’ she whispered, dry-mouthed and hypnotised.

‘The thought of this moment,’ Constantine spelt out not quite evenly as she gazed back at him like a mesmerised rabbit. ‘When I show you how a Greek husband treats a runaway wife—’

‘Not your wife...’ Rosie fumbled with great difficulty to find that disjointed denial. Her brain felt for all the world as though it was set in cement. Not a single rational thought clouded her head. The warm, musky scent of him overlaid with a faint hint of some citrusy aftershave floated into her flaring nostrils, and the more she breathed, the more dizzy and peculiar she felt.

Constantine’s intent gaze flashed pure scorching gold. He murmured something rough in Greek and settled her down on the big carved bed that she hadn’t even noticed. She sat up again very slowly, her legs and arms oddly unresponsive to her bidding.

Constantine reached down a hand, flipped her gently back against the heaped-up white linen pillows and grated, ‘Stay there!’

Rosie stayed put. Wide-eyed, she watched him discard his tie, his jacket and rip at his silk shirt with scant concern for the buttons. Her tongue was welded to the roof of her mouth. A disturbing tremor ran through her tautening length. Her entire attention was nailed to Constantine’s bare chest, her spellbound gaze wandering from the gleaming brown skin of his shoulders to the black triangle of curling hair hazing his powerful pectoral muscles.

It was so hard to breathe, even harder to keep her fingers curling into her palms when this insane part of her craved the freedom to shift forward a mere foot to the edge of the bed and touch ... run exploring fingertips over that smooth golden skin, investigate the undeniable allure of that hard, flat stomach and that truly fascinating little silky furrow of dark hair which started just below his navel and travelled all the way down until it disappeared under the low-slung edge of a pair of black briefs. He was just in the act of hooking a finger into those briefs when Rosie realised in horror that she was gawping at him like a woman at a male strip show.

‘Take your clothes off,’ Constantine said.

Rosie had twisted her head away so fast, she was all but suffering from whiplash, face as hot as a furnace, gut feelings of shame and shock reverberating through her blitzed brain. So he had a really beautiful body. Was that any excuse to behave like a peeping Tom? But it was even worse to recognise the swollen heaviness of her breasts and the hot liquid sensation of unforgivable excitement burning somewhere she didn’t even want to think about. What had he said?

Constantine saved her the trouble of plundering her dazed mind for recollection. He said it again. Her bright head whipped back as fast as the head of a swivelling doll, huge green eyes agog at the command.

‘OK,’ Constantine gritted with savage impatience, and reached for her in one alarmingly fast motion.

‘What are you doing?’ Rosie screeched as her oversized T-shirt went flying over her startled head and he anchored a businesslike hand into the elasticised waistband of her leggings. Preoccupied by an instinctive need to cover her braless breasts with spread fingers, she was decidedly hampered in the undignified tussle which followed. Her leggings and her briefs were wrenched off together to the accompaniment of her aghast shrieks and breathless and impotent efforts to fight him off.

Clamping a hand like an iron vice to her forearm, Constantine held her fast and flipped the sheet over her frantically struggling body. Sliding into the bed with her, he rolled over and anchored an arm round her waist and yanked her back into electrifying contact with his hot, muscular masculinity. Rosie went rigid. He wasn’t wearing a stitch and neither was she and she just could not believe that he had forcibly stripped her naked!

‘I’ll go to the police and report you for this the minute I get out of this room!’ Rosie gasped the instant she got oxygen back into her straining lungs.

‘Be sure to tell them that I am your husband. I should think they’ll laugh themselves sick—’

‘You are not my husbandl’ Rosie spat with renewed vigour. ‘And if you dare to lay a finger on me—’

‘Shut up and go to sleep,’ Constantine growled, spreading his big, powerful body across the bed with a deep, luxuriating groan of contentment and forcing her to move with him.