LITMIR.BIZ

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in their determination to keep them apart. All those long, bleak, empty days and weeks when she’d waited for him to come and get her. All those ‘No, he hasn’t made contact’ replies when she’d asked the question—asked and asked! And she’d been so gently let down, so lovingly pitied.

      ‘You are telling me that your parents lied to me?’ Andreas said harshly. ‘Why the hell would they want to do that?'

      Louisa felt her spine quiver as she drew in a breath. To her the why was obvious. ‘They didn’t like you.'

      ‘We were married!’ he raked back. ‘Whether they liked me or not should not have come into it! We were man and wife and we had just lost our son! We needed each other! It takes more than dislike to want to keep us apart like that!'

      ‘It w-wasn’t just them.’ Louisa put her hands up to her face and rubbed at it as if trying to rub away the pain of what she was going to say next. Then she dropped her hands and looked up at him standing there like a rumbling dark mountain threatening to erupt. ‘I wrote to you too,’ she told him thickly. ‘I phoned you here at the family villa and at your office in Athens, only to be told you were out of the country … Did your parents or your brother or your secretary pass on any of my messages to you?'

      He did not need to answer because she knew that they hadn’t. Now she knew it but not back then when everyone had been so nice and gentle and careful with her.

      Conspiracies. She shivered. Their marriage had been cunningly manipulated by two families who’d conspired to make it come to an end. Even her visits back to this island had been carefully coordinated to ensure that she and Andreas did not meet.

      ‘What you said about my brother.’ Andreas prompted darkly.

      ‘I used to tell you about Alex bating me and you used to just brush it off as sibling jealousy. And you know what?’ she said starkly. ‘I think you were right. At least Alex was open about what he thought about me, while.’ while the rest of them smiled nicely as they stabbed us in the back. ‘I knew you blamed me f-for what happened to Nikos—'

      ‘Will you stop staying that?’ Andreas sighed. ‘I did not blame you!'

      ‘Why not, when I blamed myself?’ she choked out. ‘And it was my own guilt that they worked on, wasn’t it? They used it to let me go on believing that you …'

      She couldn’t say any more because the tears really were threatening now.

      ‘I have to go and deal with this.’ The way he suddenly burst out of his stillness left Louisa blinking as he strode through the archway like a man about to—

      Leaping up from her chair, she ran after him. ‘Andreas—!'

      He was halfway up the steps that led to the lobby when she called him. He stopped but he didn’t turn, the full length of his frame stiff with anger.

      ‘Please,’ she begged him. ‘Don’t go off angry like you used to do when you didn’t like something!’ ‘You’re upset.’

      ‘Of course I’m upset. So are you! But think about it,’ she pleaded. ‘Charging off to slay them all isn’t going to change anything now!'

      ‘They stole five years from us,’ he roughed out hoarsely.

      ‘Yes.’ Her voice quivered. But it wasn’t only them who’d done that. She was thinking about the woman she’d seen him with—the one part of their conversation earlier he had oh, so carefully edited out!

      His wide shoulders flexed inside the blue shirting. ‘They reduced us both to complete failures as a husband or wife in our own eyes …'

      Louisa had to cover her unsteady mouth.

      ‘And to sitting alone at our son’s graveside when we should have been sitting there together …'

      Oh, it was all so unforgivably cruel when put like that. ‘I suppose they believed it was the best thing for both of us at the time or—'

      ‘You believe that?’ He swung round to blister a burning look at her.

      ‘Yes—no!’ She gave a helpless shake of her head. ‘I don’t know what to think—I’m still reeling too much from the shock to think!'

      ‘Well, I am not reeling, so you can leave me to deal with it.’ He turned away again.

      ‘By climbing onto your jet plane and flying to England so you can have my parents lined up and shot?’ she cried out. ‘Well, don’t go fighting my battles for me, Andreas. I don’t need you to do anything for me any more!'

      Wrong thing to say.

      Louisa knew it the moment that his shoulders racked up and the air began to crackle. When he turned around, one glance at his face and she knew all the anger inside him and the monstrous feelings of hurt had made a switch to something else.

      ‘I think we have strayed away from the main plot a little,’ he murmured, coming back down the steps.

      ‘Meaning what?’ she asked warily.

      ‘Meaning that this started out as a discussion about you and me enjoying the exciting wonders of unprotected sex on a hill.'

      ‘Are we about to have another fight about whether I’m pregnant or not?’ she sighed out. ‘For goodness’ sake, one mistake does not automatically make a baby!'

      Her half-shrieked words echoed off painted walls but he didn’t even blink. ‘It did with Nikos. One time without protection. One beautiful boy exquisitely conceived. One marriage hastily arranged.'

      Louisa closed her eyes and tried to keep a grip on her temper because she knew where this was leading. ‘I am not taking up the role of your wife again on the wild off-chance that we’ve done the same thing again!'

      ‘Wild does not cover it.’

      He sounded so close suddenly that she flicked her eyes open, her insides tumbling when she saw just how close he had come. Looking up into his face was like putting your fingers too close to a burning flame—dangerous, she likened as his sheer height and breadth and muscled strength snatched away her breath. Pure self-defence made her ease back from him, her breasts fluttering on an unsteady breath when she found her spine flattened up against the wall.

      He followed—lazily, a wide shoulder coming to rest on the wall to one side of her, a long arm stretching across her to brace the flat of his palm on the wall on her other side, the whole manoeuvre aimed to trap her inside a circle of that oh-so-macho web of leashed power.

      ‘Let us deal with this issue once and for all,’ he murmured ever so softly, ‘and keep looking at me while we talk, agape mou,’ he instructed when she shut her eyes again to block it all out. ‘I want you to see in my face that I am not playing around here.'

      Louisa knew that already. She knew it with every slowly shredding nerve in her body that this was no game. She tried for some air that would help keep her head clear, couldn’t help moistening her suddenly dry lips as she lifted her chin and slowly opened her eyes. This close up he was without doubt the most frighteningly gorgeous man she had ever encountered—or ever wanted to encounter, she extended helplessly. One Andreas had always been more than enough for her.

      ‘All right,’ wrapping her arms across her breasts, she tried for a careless shrug, ‘say what you want to say.'

      ‘You don’t want to see blood spilt and I do. So I will make a deal with you.'

      ‘What kind of deal?’

      ‘Be my wife again, in every sense, and I will attempt to control my desire to spill blood.'

      ‘This is silly,’ she shot out. ‘Why talk about this now when we will know one way or another in a couple of weeks if it even needs discussing at all? Once I’m back in England and can buy a testing kit without causing another Markonos scandal to erupt here, of course.’ She could not resist the sarcastic tag-on.

      ‘Because

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