It took only seconds for her to know she’d been deserted. The reason for that desertion chose one of the vacated chairs and sat down. He didn’t look at her immediately but frowned slightly as he gazed into the distance with his mouth pressed into a sombre line and the length of his eyelashes hiding his thoughts. He had lost his jacket and tie, she noticed, and the top two buttons to his shirt had been tugged free. He looked different here in the humid weight of natural sunlight, less the hard-headed business tycoon and more the handsome golden-skinned man she had first fallen in love with.
Her heart gave an anxious little flutter. She converted the sensation into a sigh. ‘How did you know where to find me?’ she asked then added sardonically, ‘Still having me watched, Leandros? How quaint.’
The sarcasm made his dark head turn. Their eyes connected, the flutter dropped to her abdomen and she sank back in her chair in an effort to stop herself from being caught in the swirling depths of what those dark eyes could do to her if she let them.
‘You speak and understand my language,’ he said quietly.
It was not what she had been expecting him to say. But she hid her surprise behind a slight smile. ‘What’s the matter?’ she mocked. ‘Did you think your little wife too stupid to learn a bit of Greek?’
‘I have never thought you stupid.’
Her answering shrug dismissed his denial. ‘Inept and uninterested, then,’ which added up to the same thing.
He didn’t answer. He was studying her so intently that in the end she shifted tensely and found herself answering the dark question she could see burning in his eyes. ‘I have always had a natural aptitude for languages,’ she explained. ‘And this…’ her hand gave a gesture to encompass Piraeus in general ‘…was my classroom three years ago, where I learned Greek from the kind of people you’ve just scared off in your polite but esoteric way.’
‘Esoteric,’ he repeated. ‘You little hypocrite,’ he denounced. ‘I have yet to meet a more esoteric person than you, Isobel, and that is the truth. You lived right here in Athens as my wife for a year. You slept in my bed and ate at my table and circulated on a daily basis amongst my family and friends. Yet not once can I recall you ever mentioning your trips down here to your classroom or revealing to any one of those people who should have been important to you that you could understand them when they spoke in Greek.’
‘Oh, but I heard so many interesting titbits I would never have otherwise, if they’d known I understood,’ she drawled lightly.
‘Like what?’
Light altered to hard cynicism. ‘Like how much they disliked me and how deeply they wished poor Leandros would come to his senses and see the little hussy off.’
‘You didn’t want them to like you,’ he denounced that also. And his eyes threw back the cynical glint. ‘You made no attempt to integrate with anyone who mattered to me. You just got on with your own secret life, picking and choosing those people you condescended to like and holding in contempt those that you did not. If that isn’t bloody esoteric then I misunderstand the word.’
‘No, you just have a very selective memory,’ she replied. ‘Because I don’t recall a moment when any of those people you mention cared enough to show an interest in anything I said or did.’
‘Most of them were afraid of you.’
She laughed, that was
so ridiculous. His expression hardened. The anger of this morning’s confrontation had gone, she noticed, but what had taken its place was worse somehow. It was a mood with no name, she mused, that hovered somewhere between contempt and dismay. ‘You slayed them with your fierce British independence,’ he continued grimly. ‘You sliced them up with your quick, sharp tongue. You mocked their conservative beliefs and attitudes and refused to make any concessions for the differences between your cultures and theirs. And you did it all from a lofty stance of stubborn superiority that only collapsed when you were in my bed and wrapped in my arms.’
Isobel just sat there and stared as each accusation was lanced at her. Did he really see her as he’d just described her? Did he truly believe everything he’d just said?
‘No wonder our marriage barely lasted a year,’ she murmured in shaken response to it all. ‘You thought no better of me than they did!’
‘I loved you,’ he stated harshly.
‘In that bed you just mentioned,’ she agreed in an acid-tipped barb. ‘Out of it? It’s no darn wonder I came looking for my own world down here where I belonged!’
‘I was about to add that unfortunately love is not always blind.’ He got in his own sharp dig. ‘I watched you cling to your desire to shock everyone. I watched you take on all-comers with the fierce flash of your eyes. But do you know what made all of that rather sad, Isobel? You were no more comfortable with your defiant stance than anyone else was.’
He was right; she’d hated every minute of it. Inside she had been miserable and frightened and terribly insecure. But if he thought that by telling her he knew all of this gave him some high moral stance over her then he was mistaken. Because all it did was prove how little he’d cared when he’d known and had done nothing to help make things easier for her!
Love? He didn’t know the meaning of the word. She had loved. She had worshipped, adored and grown weaker with each small slight he’d paid to her, with his I’m too busy for this and Can you not even attempt to take the hand of friendship offered to you? What hand of friendship? Why had he always had something more important to do than to take some small notice of her? Hadn’t he seen how unhappy she was? Had he even cared? Not that she could recall, unless the rows had taken place in their bed at night. Then he’d cared because it had messed with that other important thing in his life—his over-active desire for sex! If she’d sulked, he’d thrown deriding names at her. If she’d said no, he’d taught her how quickly no could be turned into a trembling, gasping yes!
‘Talk, instead of sitting there just thinking it!’ he rasped at her suddenly.
She looked at him, saw the glint of impatience, detected the pulsing desire to crawl inside her head. Well, too late, she thought bitterly. He should have tried crawling in there three years ago!
‘What do you want, Leandros?’ she demanded coldly. ‘I presume you must have a specific reason for tracking me down—other than to slay my character, of course.’
‘I was not trying to slay anything. I was attempting to…’ He stopped, his mouth snapping shut over what he had been about to say. ‘I wanted to apologise for this morning,’ he said eventually.
‘Apology accepted.’ But as far as Isobel was concerned, that was it. He could go now and good riddance.
He surprised her with a short laugh, shook his dark head then relaxed into his chair. ‘Bitch,’ he murmured drily.