The Secret Wife

‘Constantine...?’ Rosie whispered shakily.

‘I am sorry I hurt you,’ Constantine breathed roughly on the threshold of the bathroom without turning round to look at her again. ‘But right now I don’t feel good about this development.’

In a shock made raw by a crawling sense of humiliation, Rosie lay listening to the shower running. Constantine regretted the ‘development’. Sexual hunger satisfied, Constantine couldn’t escape the scene of the crime quickly enough. A great lump closed over Rosie’s throat and her eyes stung and burned. She could have stopped him; she could have said no. But she had stupidly indulged herself, indulged him and refused to face up to what she was doing. Yet in her worst imaginings she could not have expected so devastating and immediate a rejection of their intimacy...or the feeling that she was being ripped slowly in two by the strength of her own turbulent emotions.

Constantine emerged from the bathroom again. He banged through every piece of furniture in the room. Curiosity finally drove Rosie’s head up. Light glimmered over the long, golden sweep of his back. He was pulling on a pair of jeans, electric tension sizzling like wildfire from every jerky, impatient movement. Fascinated against her will, Rosie stared.

‘I’m going out,’ Constantine gritted over one brown shoulder.

‘Be my guest,’ Rosie managed, turning away again and feeling more alone than she had ever felt in her life before. She had felt she knew Constantine but now she knew that she didn’t know him at all. She didn’t know why he was behaving as he was. She didn’t know what was on his mind. Self-loathing boiled through her slender frame. Well, that was what you got when you went to bed with a stranger.

After lying awake for hours, Rosie finally slid into an exhausted sleep around dawn. Shortly after nine, voices below her window woke her up. Workmen were assembling to repair the roof. She had a shower, made unimpressed use of the extravagant number of luxurious new towels available, and while she wondered where Constantine had slept she despised herself for caring.

Downstairs she passed by a closed door beyond which she heard Constantine and a ringing phone. Her strained mouth compressed as a maid directed her into the dining room. Breakfast was served but Rosie had little appetite. She was finishing her coffee when Carmina appeared, beaming behind a huge bouquet of flowers.

‘Forgive me,’ it said on the card.

Two high spots of colour flared over Rosie’s taut cheekbones. Forgive him? Not if he crawled and begged for a hundred years! Her teeth gritted. ‘Get her some flowers,’ he had probably said to Dmitri. Oh, what a big effort Constantine had made! Why? He was stuck up a mountain, supposedly on his honeymoon, and sexually available women were thinner than hens’ teeth on the ground. The threat of celibacy undoubtedly struck horror into his oversexed bones. Had Constantine now decided that he had been too hasty in regretting their intimacy?

Rosie thrust wide the door of the room being used as an office. As an entrance it failed. Everyone was too busy to notice her. A svelte brunette in her thirties was taking notes while standing up. Constantine was dictating in bursts of low-pitched Greek, while simultaneously conducting a conversation on the phone. A young man was seated, muttering over a computer terminal, while another was ripping several feet of paper out of a fax machine.

Rosie crossed the room to the electric shredder, hit the button and started stuffing flowers into the metal jaws. The shredder chewed up the first few inches of the floral sacrifice, wedged shut on the stalks and cut out with a complaining beep of warning. Silence slowly spread and Rosie spun round.

Constantine had lowered his phone. She saw only him, raging green eyes connecting with glittering black as he sprang upright. Sheathed in a lightweight suit in pale grey, he looked devastatingly handsome. As their companions melted out of the room without being asked, Rosie sucked in a deep breath, found it insufficient to cool her temper and battered the remaining blooms in seething frustration against the inanimate shredder before flinging them to the floor in a violent gesture of contempt.

‘You unbelievable creep! How dare you give me flowers?’

‘Last night shouldn’t have happened,’ Constantine gritted between clenched teeth, brilliant black eyes unflinching. ‘But what is done is done.’

Disconcerted by that initial statement, Rosie paled, and even though she knew she ought to agree with the sentiment expressed she was attacked by an amount of pain that tensed every muscle in her slender body. Her lashes dipped to conceal her confusion. ‘You were determined to get me into bed,’ she condemned.

‘Theos... given the overwhelming attraction between us, that conclusion was inevitable! But I’m not very proud that last night I wasn’t able to keep my hands off my guardian’s mistress,’ Constantine stated with fierce candour.

Belated comprehension sank in on Rosie, making her marvel at her lack of perception. Once again, Constantine’s firm belief that she had had an affair with Anton had made its prejudice felt...and how, she reflected painfully, recalling the bitter force of his rejection only hours earlier. But with understanding came an odd sense of relief and then a rise of stark frustration. Her chin came up, green eyes flashing a direct challenge. ‘How many times do I have to tell you that Anton and I were not lovers?’

Shimmering dark golden eyes collided ferociously fast with hers. Constantine expelled his breath in a driven hiss. “There’s a fool born every minute but I’m not one of them.’

She could go and drag in Carmina and ask her to show that photograph and repeat what Anton had told her, but how embarrassing that would be for all of them... and then what? Even if she actually managed to convince Constantine that she was Anton’s daughter, where did they go from there? She might want to clear her name but she couldn’t forget what Constantine had admitted with such impressive conviction the night before.

If he knew who she really was, would he start thinking of her as some sort of ghastly obligation and out of respect for Anton feel forced to change his behaviour accordingly? She cringed from that idea. At least on these terms they met on level gr

ound. The time would certainly come when she would try to prove her identity but that time was not now, when she couldn’t bear to think that owning up to being Anton’s illegitimate child might make Constantine pity her.

Staring into those scorching dark eyes, Rosie felt her heart lurch and her mouth run dry. Constantine gazed back at her in the pounding, pulsing silence. Without warning it was incredibly difficult to breathe. Shock reeled over her because this time she couldn’t even pretend that she didn’t know what was happening to her.

‘You told Anton that you were pregnant,’ Constantine contended in a ragged, dark growl as he drew inexorably closer. ‘It was a cheap trick but that is why he demanded that I marry you.’

‘I don’t play cheap tricks,’ Rosie told him breathlessly, struggling to hang on to her wits as her skin heated and her breasts swelled into throbbing sensitivity. She pressed a betraying hand to the pulse flickering a crazy beat at her collarbone.

‘Christos ... you play me like a witch casting a spell!’ Constantine countered with sudden glancing rawness. ‘I want you even more now than I wanted you last night—’

‘Tough,’ Rosie said with tremulous bite, a quiver of deep overpowering longing sheeting over her with the efficacy of a mind-blowing drug, leaving her more dizzy and disorientated than ever. Her dazed green eyes clung to his hard, dark face in a tormented craving that cut like glass through her pride and slashed it to ribbons.

In response, Constantine reached out, curved his fingers firmly over her stiff shoulders and pulled her across the floor into his arms. And since that was where every inch of her wanted to be she couldn’t fight. He crushed her to him in a shatteringly sexual embrace, a powerful hand pressing her into intimate contact with the bold, hard thrust of his arousal. Rosie shivered violently, her legs turning hollow. He took her mouth with hot, hard hunger and the heat of desire blanked out every. thought. She clutched at his broad shoulders, knit frantic fingers into his thick black hair and feverishly kissed him back.

He sank down into his swivel chair with her on top of him, lean hands roving beneath her loose T-shirt, skimming over the smooth, taut skin of her ribcage in search of the pouting mounds above. Encountering her bra, he groaned with frustration against her reddened mouth, released the fastening with dexterity and spread both hands possessively over her bared breasts. Fierce sensation engulfed her in a wild tide of shuddering response. If she had been standing up, she would have fallen down.

Meshing a hand into the tumble of her hair, Constantine held her back from him, his breath coming in tortured bursts. The phone was ringing off the hook, the fax still noisily spewing paper. A flicker of disconcertion drew his winged ebony brows together. Momentarily he closed his eyes as if he was fighting for control, a muscle pulling taut at the corner of his sensual mouth. His thumb rubbed over an achingly erect pink nipple and Rosie trembled and gasped as if she were in a force-ten-gale, bowing her head over his, resting her forehead in his luxuriant hair, torn apart and weak as water with need.