Apollo filled the doorway easily. Sasha’s mouth felt dry. She was aware of her feet hurting from the high sandals. And a dull ache at the front of her head.
‘We weren’t sharing a room?’
Slowly he shook his head. ‘No.’
Sasha desperately wanted to know why and he looked as if he expected her to ask that question but for reasons she couldn’t understand she didn’t want to know. Just yet.
Because this would also, surely, explain his cool and aloof manner. Why the housekeeper had looked at her so warily.
She had a very tenuous grip on reality as it was, and she didn’t know if she was prepared to hear more revelations about herself.
So she said nothing and walked into the room. It was luxurious, as she’d come to expect in a very short space of time. Carpet so plush her heels sank right into it. Instinctively, she slipped off the sandals, relishing the relief and the sensation of the soft covering underfoot.
She was aware of the massive bed dressed in cool and pristine-looking linens to her left-hand side but ignored it, not liking the way she was so aware of it.
She carried the sandals in her hand over to where French doors opened out onto a balcony that was big enough to hold a sun lounger and table and chairs. From here she could see that the villa had another wing, one storey high, with a smaller terrace covered over with trellis. The outdoor pool was just beyond this area, surrounded by bougainvillea. There were loungers and a changing area.
The grounds sloped away from here, down the hill, leaving the vista open to Athens and the sea beyond.
The full extent of this sheer luxury sank in. It was overwhelming.
She turned back into the room, blinded for a moment by the sun. When her eyes adjusted again she realised that Apollo was a lot closer than she’d expected.
Immediately her pulse quickened and her skin seemed to get tight and hot all over. The bed loomed large behind him. He looked at her with a strange expression, as if fixated, for a moment. She noticed that he had undone his tie and it hung loose now. His top button was open, revealing the strong column of his throat.
He blinked, and the moment was gone. He stepped back and went to a door in the wall, opening it. ‘This is your walk-in closet and the bathroom.’
Sasha followed him, feeling light-headed and a little jittery. But those disturbing sensations and the way he’d just looked at her fled her mind when the space revealed itself and she looked upon more clothes than she could have ever possibly seen in her life. And shoes. And jewellery, in a special glass cabinet.
The clothes—dresses, skirts, trousers, shirts, jeans, leisure-wear—were stacked, hanging and folded in a room the size of a small boutique. There was every colour of the rainbow.
Without even realising she’d moved, Sasha found herself reaching out and touching a glittering lamé dress in dark blue. It slid between her fingers. It looked hardly capable of staying on a body.
She dropped it and looked around, half-horrified as much as fascinated. ‘These are all...mine?’
Apollo was still trying to get his body back under control. For a moment when Sasha had turned from the balcony back into the bedroom, she’d been backlit by the sun, turning her hair into a blazing strawberry-blonde halo around her head.
Her flimsy silk top had clung lovingly to her breasts, the lace of her bra just visible under the delicate material. And he’d had an almost
uncontrollable urge to stride forward and take her by the arms and demand to know what she was playing at with this wide-eyed act of innocence. She’d played that card before.
But that urge had fled, to be replaced by a far more dangerous one when she’d looked at him as if he was a wolf about to gobble her up. Instead, all he’d wanted to do was crush that temptingly lush mouth under his and punish her for reawakening this desire, which had lain mercifully dormant for the past three months, in spite of her best efforts to seduce him.
But not any more. It was awake and ravenous. And she was playing him with this little game. After all, feigning amnesia would be child’s play to a woman who had feigned a lot worse.
He’d had enough of the charade. His anger burned bright and hot and he told himself it was that, and not desire that he was feeling.
He said in a low voice that barely contained his anger, ‘You know damn well these are all your clothes because you spent many vacuous hours shopping for them with my credit card. You might have fooled the doctors and nurses at the hospital but there’s no one here but you and me now, so who are you trying to fool with this act, Sasha? What the hell are you up to?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘WHAT THE HELL are you up to?’
Sasha looked at Apollo and it took a few seconds for his words to sink in, they were so unexpected. But then there was almost a strange sense of relief to have the tension bubble over into words so that she could find out why he’d been acting so coolly with her.
She felt his anger but it didn’t scare her. It perplexed her.
‘What are you talking about?’