Eligible Greeks Sizzling Affairs
The Good Greek Wife?
Kate Walker
Powerful Greek,
Housekeeper Wife
Robyn Donald
Greek Tycoon,
Wayward Wife
Sabrina Philips

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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The Good Greek Wife?

KATE WALKER was born in Nottinghamshire and grew up in a home where books were vitally important. Even before she could write she was making up stories. She can’t remember a time when she wasn’t scribbling away at something.

But everyone told her that she would never make a living as a writer, so instead she became a librarian. It was at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, that she met her husband, who was also studying there. They married and eventually moved to Lincolnshire, where she worked as a children’s librarian until her son was born.

After three years of being a full-time housewife and mother she was ready for a new challenge, so she turned to her old love of writing. The first two novels she sent off to Mills & Boon were rejected, but the third attempt was successful. She can still remember the moment that a letter of acceptance arrived instead of the rejection slip she had been dreading. But the moment she really realised that she was a published writer was when copies of her first book, The Chalk Line, arrived just in time to be one of her best Christmas presents ever.

Kate is often asked if she’s a romantic person, because she writes romances. Her answer is that if being romantic means caring about other people enough to make that extra-special effort for them, then, yes, she is.

Kate loves to hear from her fans. You can contact her through her website at www.kate-walker.com, or e-mail her at kate@kate-walker.com.

For Lee Hyat Thank you for the reviews, the publicity, all your help over the years, but specially for your friendship

Chapter One

THE setting sun only barely lit the winding path that Penny was following, making it impossible for her to walk fast, however much she wanted to.

No, the truth was that deep down inside she wanted to run. She wanted to get away from the villa as quickly as possible, to run as far and as fast as she could possibly manage. She wanted to run and run and never come back, to get away from the poisonous atmosphere in the house she had left behind. But the truth was that up until now any such action had been impossible.

And now?

Well, now she knew that she could leave—perhaps she ought to leave. But doing so would be to admit to herself that there really was no longer anything more to hope for. That her dream of love and a future was over, gone for good. Dead like her fantasies.

Dead like…

No, even now she still couldn’t put Zarek’s name, her husband’s name, at the end of that sentence. If she did that then she was admitting that everyone else was right and she was the foolish one, the only one who had taken so long to let go.

To admit that she no longer had a husband. That the man she had adored and married was never coming home again.

Reaching the spot where the path petered out onto the shore, she kicked off her sandals and paced onto the pebbled beach. Out at sea, she could just make out the dark shape of a small rowing boat and the man who sat in it, broad shoulders hunched away from her, his head just a black silhouette against the sunset. He was wearing some sort of hat—a baseball cap pulled down low so there was no way she could decipher any of his features.

Even now the thought of someone on the water made her shudder inwardly. Out there, somewhere thousands of miles away, Zarek had lost his life. The depths of the ocean were his only grave. That was what she had had so much trouble coming to accept.

And she was going to have to accept one further, even more hateful truth. The fact that even when he had been alive Zarek had never truly loved her. Their marriage had been a lie, on Zarek’s part at least. To him it had been purely a cold-blooded plan for an heir, never the love match she had believed it. So why was she still holding onto his memory when it was so obvious that he wasn’t coming back?

Finding a smooth outcrop of rock just above the tiny horseshoe shaped harbour, she plonked herself down on the makeshift seat and rested her elbows on her knees, supporting her chin in them as she stared out at the small craft bobbing on the restless waves. Sitting there, just staring out into the darkness, she let her unwilling memory go back over the scene she had just left behind.

‘Penelope…’

The voice had come from behind her, just as she reached the front door of the villa and had her fingers on the handle, ready to turn it. It made her freeze into stillness, keeping her eyes directed away and fixed on the heavy wood in front of her.

‘Are you going somewhere?’

There was no mistaking just whose voice it was. Only one woman had that cold, distant tone that made her sound as if she were speaking through a cloud of ice, freezing the words in the air as they came out.

And only one woman called her Penelope in quite that way. Using the full version of her name to make it sound like a criticism or a reproach when everyone else—her own family or everyone who liked her—only ever used the shortened form of Penny or even Pen.

Not her mother-in-law. Or, to be more correctly precise, her stepmother-in-law.

‘I thought I’d go out for a walk.’

‘At this time of the day?’

‘It’s cooler in the evenings. And I prefer it that way.’

Still she didn’t turn round. She didn’t need to, of course, but more than that she didn’t want to. She could already see Hermione Michaelis’ elegant figure in her mind’s eye. Slender to the point of emaciation, her hair kept unnaturally jet black with the constant use of hair dye, so that the few streaks of grey that were starting to appear were carefully disguised in an attempt to look so much younger than her fifty-nine years.

‘I still haven’t really adjusted to the heat in the daytime.’

‘After so long?’ her mother in law queried, making Penny bring her sharp teeth down on the softness of her bottom lip in an effort to bite back the instinctive retort that had almost formed on her tongue.

‘So long’ was only a relative term, depending on who used it. To Hermione maybe the past two years or so had seemed like an age. An age in which she had to live with her unwanted daughter-in-law, who now stood between Darius Michaelis’ second wife and the full control of Odysseus Shipping, which was what she had been aiming for from the very first moment she had met Zarek’s father.

And ‘so long’ barely described the past two years that Penny had lived through ever since the news about Zarek’s fate had come through to the island. The news that had turned her life upside down, destroying the hope of future happiness, and taking away with it any chance of being able to tell her husband how she truly felt about him.

The brief time of her marriage seemed to have flashed by in the blink of an eye, but the two years since then had taken an eternity to live through. An eternity that had dragged out to seem longer and longer with every day of hope that perhaps this was the day he might return. And then the dreadful, appalling moments that had killed all hope of that for ever. Since then her life had been something to be endured, a desert to live through. Empty and arid, without the love she had once hoped for.

No, who was she kidding? Even before he had vanished—been killed, they said—Zarek had never offered her the love she dreamed of, Penny told herself with bitter realism. He had married her in a cold-blooded business arrangement, entering into a marriage of convenience because it suited him to do so, because he wanted an heir. And she was the one who had been fool enough to think it was something else.

‘My skin is sensitive to the sun—and I don’t want to burn. That can be so aging.’

The faint hiss of Hermione’s breath in between clenched teeth told her that her deliberate dart had hit home. The older woman was paying the price for a lifetime of sun worshipping and the effects that none of her hugely expensive facials and even a recent facelift could really eradicate.

‘So are you taking the dog?’ Hermione turned the last two words into an expression of total distaste.

There was only one dog that she could mean. Argus, the great black and white hound who had once been so devoted to his master Zarek and who seemed to be the only other living soul who along with Penny mourned his loss. In the first few weeks after Zarek had gone missing, she had feared that they would lose Argus as well as the big sheepdog had pined for his owner, turning his head away from all food. But in the end he had transferred his devotion to Penny herself and now followed at her heel almost everywhere she went, lying under her desk when she had to work.

‘I think not. He’s already had a long walk today and the last time I looked he was fast asleep.’

Fast asleep on her bed if the truth was told but there was no way she was going to admit as much to Hermione. Her mother-in-law was only looking for an excuse to get rid of the big dog and Penny wasn’t going to take any risks that way. Argus had kept her company when she had needed a friend most. His warm, reassuring bulk was there by her side in the darkness of the night. His long, shaggy fur had absorbed the tears she had shed on that dreadful night when the appalling truth that Zarek was in fact dead had been reported to them. The dog was the one living link to her lost husband and she would always love him for that.

‘Nasty flea-bitten creature.’

Penny could practically see Hermione’s mouth curl in disgust but she wasn’t going to turn and check if she was right.

‘There’s one thing I can assure you and that is that my dog does not have fleas.’

Wrenching the handle roughly, she pulled the door open and stepped forward, enjoying the rush of air, scented with the tang of the sea, that flooded into her face. She felt trapped and confined—a feeling that was becoming the norm in a way that made her lungs constrict so that it was almost impossible to breathe naturally.

‘Don’t be long. It’s getting dark already.’

Concern? Now that was new in a way that brought her head finally swinging round to meet Hermione’s black glittering eyes. Immediately she knew that if she had been thinking that the older woman had her safety at heart, she was wrong. The light that was in that gaze was cold and predatory. The look of a cold-blooded buyer eyeing up her investment to check that all was well. Or a breeder with plans for producing a number of prize-winning offspring from a rather skittish brood mare.

No, that had been Zarek, Penny forced herself to acknowledge inwardly. He was the one who had seen her only as breeding stock for his dynasty.

‘I’ll be fine…’

‘We need to talk to you…’

Penny’s voice clashed with Hermione’s, the sound of that ‘we need to talk to you’ making Penny’s heart clench and thud roughly against the side of her ribs.

She knew only too well just what that ‘need to talk’ would entail. She had to. It was the one thing that Hermione and the rest of the family always wanted to talk about.

‘I’ll be back when I’m back,’ she flung in defiance, pushing herself out of the door and into the freedom of the garden before Hermione could do anything to prevent her.

She almost ran down the path, her feet flying over the pebbles as they carried her as quickly as possible. She actually feared that Hermione would come after her, grab at her arm and drag her back, hauling her back inside the house to face ‘the family’ and the things they wanted to talk about. The older woman was capable of it.

Out at sea, the man in the small boat had given up on the fishing or whatever it was that had taken him onto the dark ocean this late. He was reaching for the oars, the powerful muscles in his arms and shoulders tensing under the white long-sleeved tee shirt as he began to pull against the waves. He must be a strong man, Penny reflected privately. Only someone with a great deal of muscular power could make that much progress against the swell of the tide. Watching him, she felt an unexpected shiver of awareness wash over her skin, perhaps as a result of the cooling breeze that blew in from the sea.

Or possibly it was the effects of the unhappy feelings that plagued her at the thought of that ‘talk’ that awaited her when she got back to the villa. When Hermione and her sons, Jason and Petros, would start on at her again, trying to persuade her to make the decisions they had been itching for her to come to for so long. At least they had had the sensitivity and the tact to let the last month go by without ever saying a word. They’d let her have the second anniversary of Zarek’s disappearance, the day that marked the announcement of his death, without their insistent demands that it was time to look ahead instead of back, to plan the future, to ‘move on’.

‘Oh, Zarek…’

Dropping her face into her hands, Penny pressed her fingers hard against her closed eyes. Sometimes the misery could still grab her by the throat and make her wonder how she could live the rest of her life without ever seeing him again. He might not have loved her but she had adored him.

‘I’ll never forget you…’

But the realisation of the truth made the words catch in her throat even as she whispered them behind her hands. Because the truth was that with each day that passed she was finding it harder and harder to recall exactly the devastating attraction of her husband’s forceful appearance, the powerful bone structure and sexual appeal of his stunning features. If she tried to visualise him against the darkness of her closed lids she found that the image danced and blurred before her and she could no longer form that oncebeloved face in her mind.

The banging of heavy wood against wood jolted her out of her reveries. The fisherman had reached the land, his boat thudding against the pillars of the small jetty as he came up close. As she lifted her head to watch she saw him reach out to pull the vessel even nearer, his oars taken from their locks and dropped at his feet.

He really was a big man, Penny told herself, watching as the lean, powerful frame was silhouetted against the last of the sun, now sinking finally beyond the horizon. Tall, but not bulky—his rangy figure had a controlled power about it as he vaulted easily onto the jetty, bringing with him a coil of wet rope, the drops of seawater that fell from it glistening in the lingering remains of the light. It was the first time in so very long that she had even been aware of a man and how his body looked that she felt her heart kick hard against her ribs in a sense of shock at what she was thinking.

This much closer, she should have been able to see his face but the baseball cap that was pulled down low over his forehead hid so much. And the little that was left was concealed by the thick growth of a dark and bushy beard, which together with the overlong black hair falling onto the straight, strong shoulders gave him a wild, rather primitive look that made her toes curl into the pebbles in slightly shocked response.

Perhaps it was time that she made him aware of her. Let him know she was here.

‘Good evening…’

No response. Clearing her throat carefully, she tried her amateurish Greek.

‘Kalispera.’

That brought his head swinging round in her direction. She caught the flash of dark eyes narrowed against the setting sun and he adjusted his hat, tugging it down even lower as a defence against the glare.

‘Kalispera.’

His voice was rough and unexpectedly non-friendly. Not aggressive; not hostile. Just very clearly not welcoming her approach. Which was unexpected and unusual. In all her time on the island never once had she approached the small town of Kioni without being greeted with warmth and friendliness from the locals so that her stumbling attempts at the Greek language had been no barrier at all to communication.

‘Is the fishing good?’

What had she said now to make him stare at her for a moment so searchingly and intently that she felt almost as if his hidden gaze were a laser directed straight at her, threatening to shrivel her where she stood? Suddenly apprehensive, she found she was tensing, nerving herself for some sort of attack—not knowing what or why. Too late she wished that she had bothered to take the time to go and collect Argus and take him out with her on this evening walk. Not for nothing had the big dog been given a name that meant vigilant guardian, and if he had been with her then this disturbingly cold and unapproachable male would very definitely know to stand back, keep his distance.

Not that he showed any sign of actually wanting to approach her, because having considered her question for an inordinately long amount of time he suddenly shook his head abruptly.

‘No,’ he growled, tossing the word at her like a discarded piece of litter. ‘Not good.’

And, turning away from her, he tugged hard on the rope to draw it up onto the jetty before looping it through an iron ring nailed into the wood and pulling it tight to fasten the boat to its mooring. A moment later he was crouching down to check that the knot was secure, the movement making the long, strong muscles in his legs and thighs bunch and flex as they took his weight

Again that disturbing shiver of response that Penny now knew had nothing to do with the cool of the evening in spite of the chill from the wind off the sea crept over her skin.

What was happening to her? Penny’s head seemed to swim under the impact of the unexpected sensations, the unwanted thoughts that assailed her.

Was it really possible that the senses she had thought had died with Zarek were now coming awake again? Was she, as everyone had told her she would, finally really starting to take an interest in life again—in other men? But why would this man, this scruffy bearded, rough-voiced fisherman pique her interest so much? Or was it just that tonight she felt so lost, so alone that any man would act as a distraction from the bleakness of her thoughts?

Feeling uncomfortable and restless, she pushed herself to her feet but then found that she couldn’t move, couldn’t get away. Instead her gaze stayed locked on the strong, lean form of the man before her. Her throat felt dry and tight too, her heart thudding disturbingly so that she found it hard to breathe.

She should never have come out like this. Her tense mood and the uncomfortable meeting she had had with Hermione, the ‘talk’ she knew was coming, had all combined to knock her off balance so badly that she was no longer able to think straight. In fact she wasn’t thinking at all, sitting here in the gathering dusk, her gaze hooked and held by a complete stranger. Yes, he had a good body—a great body—but was that enough to scramble her brain this way?

But then the fisherman stood up again and some movement of his head brought the little of it that was not concealed under the hat or the growth of beard into the light of a lamp at the side of the harbour. The sight of the jagged line of an ugly scar had Penny’s breath hissing in sharply between her teeth, a faint sound of shock and horror escaping her involuntarily. White against the tanned darkness of his skin, it marred the line of dark beard on the right side of his face, skimming his temple and disappearing into the shadows thrown by his cap.

‘Oh, my…’

The shocked exclamation died on her lips as something in her voice brought him swinging round to face her again. And everything about his stance, the way he held himself, the tension in the long straight spine and the way his hand clenched over the end of the rope that he held warned her that he had heard her response and that for some reason he didn’t like it.

‘That—that must have hurt…’ she managed, her own body tensing warily under the burn of his dark-eyed glare.

‘It did.’

His tone made it plain that he begrudged her the answer.

‘And n-now?’

‘Ohi.’

A shake of his head emphasised the denial.

‘So how—?’

Hastily Penny caught herself up. What was she doing? Had she actually been about to ask him what had happened, how he had come by the injury? She must be crazy. Here she was alone in the darkness with a dark, powerful and clearly unwelcoming stranger and she was pushing him for answers he clearly did not want to give.

And why, why, was she even remotely interested? What was it about this stranger that had so unsettled her that she had actually wanted to know what had caused the injury that had marked him so badly? Wasn’t the fact that it was so evidently the result of some terrible violence enough to clamp her foolish mouth shut?

‘So many questions,’ the fisherman mocked now, and the low voice carried over the silence to where she sat on her rock, some dark edge in it making her spine tense, her stomach twisting in sharp apprehension. ‘Why so curious?’

‘I…’

She was halfway to her feet, but the need to keep her eyes on the big, bulky figure silhouetted against the setting sun meant that she didn’t dare to move too fast or too obviously for fear that she would show him how keen she was to get away.

‘You…?’ he queried, that disturbing note in his voice deepening worryingly. And he took a step forward, towards her. Pushing her to her feet in a rush.

‘Penelope?’

Another voice broke in on them, coming out of the darkness along the shoreline. A male voice; a voice she knew and recognised.

‘Penny?’

‘Jason!’

She would actually have welcomed the arrival of any member of those she privately labelled The Family at this stage of things. But Jason was the only one of Zarek’s stepbrothers who was actually kind to her. Closer to Penny in age than any of the rest of the family, and startlingly handsome—conventionally good-looking where Zarek had been dark and devastating—he had been approachable, even warm and sympathetic from the moment she had arrived on Ithaca as a young, naïve bride.

And it had been Jason who had warned her that Zarek’s marriage plans had been the cold-blooded hunt for a wife who would give him an heir. A fact that Zarek himself had confirmed when she’d challenged him, asking why he’d proposed to her.

‘Isn’t it obvious? I couldn’t keep my hands off you,’ her husband had said. ‘And I knew we would make beautiful babies together—and that’s all that mattered.’

‘You OK, agapiti mou?’

The term of affection was new, but it was what she needed. It was enough to have her on her feet and swinging round to him, nervous steps taking her towards him in a rush that had her almost tripping over herself on the slipping sand. Like a bird winging home to its nest, she ran straight for Jason, unthinking, hands reaching out to him.

Jason opened his arms too so that she ran into them, almost collapsing up against his hard length and burying her face in the crisp cotton of his shirt. Long arms came round her, holding her tight.

And that was when second and then third thoughts forced themselves into Penny’s whirling brain, taking the instinctive, mindless fear that had pushed her into movement and pushing it aside, replacing it with a sudden feeling of having made a terrible mistake. Fear of the stranger was one thing, but from Jason’s reaction he had taken her response to mean much more than she had meant. He was holding her too tight, too close.

Too close for what she really wanted.

‘Penny…’

And that tone had altered, putting something new into the use of her name, a thickness she had never heard and certainly wasn’t meaning to encourage. The fisherman might have spooked her, twisting her nerves into fearful response, but a sudden slow crawl of unease down her spine gave her the unwanted sense of out of the frying pan and into the fire.

‘Jason…’ she tried experimentally, aiming to lift her head from where it was pressed against his chest, ease herself away from the limpet grip he had on her.

As she had feared his arms tightened round her, holding her still. Already unsettled by her encounter with the fisherman, and painfully aware of the fact that he must still be watching her, she felt as if her head was about to explode with stress. She didn’t want this and if Jason thought he had found the perfect time to make a move…

Suddenly she knew she had had enough. Enough of this situation, this family. She didn’t belong here and she never had. She had always been second best, unwanted and unpopular with Zarek’s stepmother and stepbrothers. And second best to Zarek too.

So why was she so determined to stay here where she wasn’t wanted? To cling onto memories that had never really been true, no matter how much she might wish they had. Perhaps if she escaped, she could leave, go home. She could be by herself and try to find another way of living. She could always take Zarek with her in her heart.

And that gave her the perfect way to distract Jason, to turn his thoughts onto other, more important things—more important to Jason, anyway. Even if Hermione’s aggression was not Jason’s way, he was every bit as hungry for control of Odysseus Shipping as his mother.

‘I want to call a board meeting for tomorrow,’ she said, raising her voice so that she could be heard over the crash of the waves.

It worked. She felt the change as soon as she spoke, the new and different tension in Jason’s body, the gleam in his eye that he couldn’t disguise as he looked down at her. He even loosened his hold on her so that she could step back away from him. ‘Why?’ he asked, not sounding at all as if he believed there was any reason other than the one she knew he was hoping for. ‘I’m sick and tired of this whole business, Jason.’ The tension that had gripped her earlier pushed the words out in a rush, giving them far more emphasis than she had planned.

‘I want to get away from here, start living again. I’m tired of treading water. It’s more than time this whole business was sorted out and everything finalised so that we can get on with our lives. I can’t inherit unless we have Zarek’s death declared and legalised. So let’s do that. Let’s put it all behind us—’

‘I’ll get onto it right away,’ Jason broke in on her, his tone revealing only too clearly how much her words had pleased him. He even gave her another hug but thankfully it had lost the sexual overtones of the earlier one. His ambition and greed were a more powerful force—or perhaps, more likely, the sexual flirtation had only been used with the hope of bringing things to this point. Another reason to be glad that she had made her decision.

‘Exactly how do you want to play this?’

But Penny had had enough. Painfully aware of their silent watcher, the unsettling atmosphere he had created, she just wanted to get back inside, seek the privacy of her room.

‘Not now, Jason. Not here. He—’

‘Who?’ Jason questioned sharply. ‘Who’s “he”?’

‘That man…’

Flinging out her arm, Penny gestured wildly in the direction of the harbour and the spot where the fishing boat was tied up.

‘What man?’

‘He…’

But Penny’s voice died away as she turned in the direction she’d indicated and saw only the boat bobbing at its mooring, the water lapping against the harbour side and the lamp illuminating an empty and silent space where the mysterious man had once been. He had gone silently and secretly, and she had no idea just what he had heard or seen or why it should bother her that he had overheard any of their conversation. But all the same, something uncomfortable and uneasy nagged at her mind at the thought that he had been there at all, and the rapid, uneven beat of her heart was the lingering effect of her unnerving and unsettling encounter with him.

Chapter Two

HE WOULD need to be more careful in the future, the fisherman told himself as he headed away from the harbour and towards the small, single-storey, white-painted house that he had made his home since he had arrived on the island a few days before.

He had almost given himself away there, speaking English—speaking at all when it was so possible that Penny might recognise his voice and know that he was alive. Alive and back on Ithaca for the first time in over two years.

And he didn’t want her to know that. Not yet. Not until he had had a chance to check the lie of the land, see just how things were. It might only have been two years—just twenty-four short months—since he had been on Ithaca, and a much shorter space of time since he had realised that the place even existed, but to him it felt so much longer than that. It seemed as if it were a whole lifetime since he had set foot on the island. Then he had thought that he would be back within the week. He had never anticipated that it would be years before he saw his home and his wife again.

But now he was back. And not before time it seemed, he told himself as the door to the cottage slammed shut behind him and he marched into the single, cramped living room. It appeared that the reports he had been hearing were true. His stepmother and her family were moving in on the business. Hermione had always had her eyes set on Odysseus Shipping and now it seemed that his absence had given her the encouragement she needed to make a play for control. And he knew just how that control would be won. Through one of Hermione’s sons.

And Penny had run straight into Jason’s arms. She had been planning having him declared dead with his detested stepbrother. And the wild fire of fury that had flared inside him at the sight had been a struggle to bring under control. It was fierce, it was unthinking, it was irrational, but the sight of the woman—the wife—he had come back to find enfolded in the arms of the man he knew had been scheming his downfall for all of his adult life had had him fighting with himself not to react in anger. Unable to stay and watch, he had turned on his heel and marched away before the urge to declare himself there and then had got the better of him.

Shaking his head, he fixed his eyes on the now moonlit sea as it lapped against the edge of the beach below the cottage, the slow, dark swirl of the waves suiting his mood completely.

Jason had already taken the first steps towards acquiring what he and his mother had always wanted. His elder stepbrother had barely waited for Zarek’s disappearance to be confirmed before he had been trying to apply for power of attorney to run Odysseus Shipping. He hadn’t hesitated to make his move as soon as the opportunity had presented itself. But of course the legal control rested with Zarek’s wife.

With Penny, who had had a far greater return on her investment of time in their marriage than she could ever have hoped to achieve.

Or thought she had.

He rubbed at the ugly scar that marked his temple, grimacing as the wound throbbed with the ache of memory.

That was one of the reasons he had come back to Ithaca in total anonymity, his true appearance obscured behind the wild growth of beard and hair. And it seemed that it had worked. Tonight he had come face to face with his wife for the first time in years and she had shown no sign of recognising him.

But just hearing her voice again had brought it all back.

‘Go, then!’

The memory was so clear that he actually glanced up and in the mirror over the fireplace almost as if he expected to see that the door had opened while he had been absorbed in his thoughts and Penny had walked into the room.

‘If you’re going, then go! I don’t know why you’re even telling me this. It’s not as if you’re asking my permission!’

Shaking his head to try and drive the sound of his wife’s voice, still shrill even after all these years, from his mind, he paced across the room to the window to stare out at the now moonlit sea where it lapped against the pebbles of Dexa beach. The wind was getting up, making the olive trees sway wildly in the breeze.

He was damn sure he hadn’t been asking for permission or anything like it. The truth was that after the way their marriage had all but disintegrated in the short time they’d been together he’d firmly believed she would be as grateful for a break as he was. She’d even backed away from him sexually, and sex had been one of the things that had been right between them at the start. The glue that had kept them together.

‘Just go—’ she had flung at him, her sexy mouth distorting in the force of her rejection of him. ‘But be warned, if you go, then don’t expect me to be here waiting for you when you return.’

So had she waited? He’d thought she had when he had discovered that she was still here on Ithaca. He’d even allowed himself to wonder just for a moment whether she might hold out some hope that he would come back. From what she’d just said it seemed that it was the legalities resulting from his disappearance that had kept her here, not any lingering loyalty to her marriage.

But then she’d made it only too plain exactly why she’d married him in the first place. He’d been fool enough to believe her declaration that she wanted children—longed for them, she’d said—when in fact she’d been lying through her teeth. She’d even been taking the pill and when he’d confronted her with the evidence she’d thrown it back in his face.

‘Bring children into this marriage—you have to be joking. Where did I sign up for that? Where was that written into the pre-nup you got me to sign?’

He’d never thought he’d need to do that. He’d signed and sealed the financial details, but never made them dependent on the one reason he’d determined on marriage in the first place.

And Penny had proved herself nothing but a scheming little gold-digger. She’d married him for those financial details and never intended to carry out her part of the agreement. Never intended to give him the heir he so longed for. Even if he had come back safe and sound from the Troy, she would still have come out of their brief marriage a millionaire in her own right. He had been happy to agree to very generous terms, never thinking he would have to fulfil them before he had even celebrated his first wedding anniversary. For ten short months of commitment, Penny would walk away with a huge profit.

But not as much as she would profit from his supposed death. From the will that he’d changed in her favour when they had married. One thing was clear. She wanted to realise her assets, get her hands on the company.

It must have felt like the answer to her prayers—as if all her birthdays had come at once—when he had done exactly what she’d wanted. He hadn’t come back, leaving the field wide open to her. She hadn’t even had to go to the trouble of divorcing him and so risking losing half the money she had married him for.

Pushing his hands through the long mane of hair, he faced his reflection in the mirror and saw the darkness in the eyes that stared back at him, the tautness of the jaw line under the thick growth of beard. Remembered anger tightened his lips until they almost disappeared. There was a way to deal with this that would have much more impact, and it seemed that Penny herself had just given him the perfect opportunity he had been looking for.

He’d been away too long—an absence he had not been able to do anything about—but the last week or two he had spent waiting and watching, just to see what he would be walking into when he made his return. That was all over now. The time for waiting and watching was past.

Heading into the tiny, primitive bathroom, he opened a cupboard and reached for scissors, a razor. It was time he came out from behind his concealing disguise and made his presence known.

Zarek Michaelis was back. And very soon the whole world would know it.

And so too would his errant, untrustworthy wife.

He was looking forward to seeing the look on her face when she realised that she was not going to get her greedy fingers on the fortune that she had hoped—believed—was hers. Or that the new life she had declared that she wanted would not be on the cards any time soon.

When she discovered that the husband she had believed was dead and out of her life for good was in fact very much alive and ready to take back the reins of his previous existence.

‘Penelope, it really is time to make a decision.’

Hermione leaned forward as she spoke, dark eyes boring into the face of the woman opposite her, long fingernails tapping on the polished wood of the boardroom table to emphasise the point she was making.

‘We can’t let things go on any longer as they are.’

‘We?’ Penny questioned, determined not to let Zarek’s stepmother run this meeting, have things all her own way.

There was no escaping the decision that she had known she had to face some time. The decision everyone had been demanding she make for a year or more now. And deep down she knew she’d already made it. But it didn’t mean that she was happy about it.

‘We are all shareholders,’ her mother-in-law pointed out, the bite of acid on the words making Penny flinch inwardly.

‘Minority shareholders,’ she flashed back, determined not to show how her stomach was tying itself in knots; the fight she was having to keep at least some degree of composure in the face of the bitterness of the inevitable.

‘But nevertheless Odysseus Shipping is a family concern.’

It was Petros, Hermione’s second son and Jason’s younger brother who spoke, shifting his bulky form on his chair in a movement that echoed the impatience in his voice.

‘And you are blocking us from playing a part in running the company,’ he tossed over the table at her. ‘We all need to put our expertise to work to keep it running—and growing. Without Zarek it has become a rudderless ship.’

His stiff tone and totally focused expression gave no sign at all of even noticing the pun.

‘It needs someone in charge.’

‘I am in charge,’ Penny declared, stiffening in her seat.

This was how it had been from the moment that Zarek had first been declared missing. The rest of the family had barely given her time to register the loss of her husband, let alone grieve for him, before they had been putting pressure on her to find a new head of the family firm, and at least once every month they had dragged the subject of his successor up again. She’d tried to hold it together, she really had. But she’d had enough.

‘It’s a shipping empire,’ Petros dismissed her protest with a contemptuous wave of his hand. ‘A man should be in charge because we all know Zarek isn’t coming home. And until things are made official then the company will always be in a shaky state. A prey for rumour and scandal in the papers. An insecure bet for investors.’

‘You know what has to be done.’ Jason leaned forward now to distract her attention. Obviously he had seen the way her jaw had tightened, her breath hissing in between clenched teeth, and he was clearly worried that she was going to go back on what she’d told him last night. ‘Penny, it’s over two years since Zarek went missing. There has been no sign of him, no word in all that time. It’s time we accepted what we all know as the truth and had him officially declared dead.’

There. It was out. The words seemed to land on the table with a deafening thud, lying there in front of her in an almost solid form. Too real to reject or deny. But now when it came to it she didn’t know if she could go through with this.

‘It takes seven years to have someone who’s missing officially declared dead.’

‘Not in a case like this,’ Jason reminded her. ‘Not when there is so much evidence as to what really happened and that you can file a petition to have him legally declared dead. You know that everything points to the assumption that Zarek died that day on the boat. Even the pirate chief himself said…’

‘I know what he said!’ Penny’s tone was sharp as much from the knowledge that she really didn’t have a leg to stand on as from the fear of hearing those words spoken aloud again.

‘That’s him,’ the leader of the pirates who had boarded the Troy, the boat that Zarek had been on on the very last day he had been seen, had said when they had shown him a photograph of Zarek during the investigation into what had happened. ‘That’s the one. And, yes, he’s dead. I put a bullet in his head myself.’

He had been so openly defiant, so proud at the thought that he had killed one of the hated Westerners, the rich who had so much more than he and his band had ever had, that he hadn’t even cared that he had convicted himself of murder with his own words.

‘And then I watched him fall overboard into the ocean…He’s shark food by now for sure.’

Penny shivered in spite of the sun beating through the window at her back. She had had nightmares about those words for months, could still wake up in a cold sweat with them pounding at her head, making her heart race in panic. In her nightmares she had seen Zarek’s face as he had walked away from her, his expression cold and hard, eyes dark and shuttered. The knowledge that she had lashed out in her own pain, using the words that were guaranteed to drive him from her, still haunted her with the thought that they had been the last words he had heard from her. And now, when she saw him again, in her dreams, she knew that the glaze on his eyes was put there not by anger but something far more devastating.

‘Then you know that the lawyers told us that someone who had been exposed to “imminent peril” like that and failed to return can be declared dead well before the legal time limit is up.’

‘I know…’

She knew but she didn’t want to face it. Making that decision would mean admitting that Hermione and her sons had finally dragged her down.

Suddenly in the distance there was a faint scream and a crash that brought her head swinging round, eyes going to the door from behind which the sound had come.

‘What…?’

‘One of the stupid maids being clumsy, I suspect,’ Jason commented dryly, shrugging off the interruption. ‘I suspect that means that our coffees will now be delayed. Penny…’

‘And the girl will have to replace the broken crockery out of her wages,’ Hermione added snappishly, frustration at the fact that things were not going her way obviously showing in her voice.

Pushing back her chair, she got to her feet and headed for the door, obviously determined to reprimand the poor girl severely at the very least. And it was that small action that pushed Penny out of her inertia, reminding her forcefully of just why she had made her decision last night. Why she so wanted to get out of here.

‘You’re so right, Jason,’ she declared with force. ‘Zarek’s gone and Odysseus Shipping is all mine to do with as I please. So once the formalities are over—if we can work out terms— then the company is yours, Jason.’

And she would be free to live her own life.

Reaching for the glass of water in front of her, she lifted it, tilting it in Jason’s direction in mockery of a toast, not daring to lift it to her lips for fear that her throat had closed up so badly that the water would choke her.

‘The king is dead,’ she proclaimed, making her voice sound as light and careless as she possibly could. ‘Long live the king.’

Her words fell into a strange and disturbing silence. A silence that seemed to reach out and enclose her, tangling round her throat and making it impossible to breathe.

Suddenly Jason wasn’t looking at her. He had turned away and was staring in the opposite direction. They were all staring that way. Everyone in the room had their eyes fixed on where the door had swung open, pushed firmly but not violently from the other side so that it created a wide, wide space. And everyone was staring into that wide space, shocked, stunned, almost as if they had seen a ghost. Even Hermione had come to a complete halt, one long, elegantly manicured hand going up to her throat in a gesture of horror.

‘Jason…’ Penny began, but the name died on her tongue, shrivelled on it by the realisation of just what was happening in the same moment that a voice—an impossibly, unbelievably, shockingly familiar voice—spoke, cutting across her in a rough, sardonic drawl.

‘Long live the king? I think not, agapi mou…’

A sensation like a blow to the head made Penny’s thoughts spin sickeningly, the room blurring before her eyes as she struggled to turn and look too. To make her gaze focus on the dark, powerful shape of the man in the door.

It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be! There was no way this was possible. It had to be a dream—or a nightmare—or both at once. Because there was no way it could be happening that…

‘Because to make that follow, then, as you say, the first king must actually be dead…’

And fixing his eyes on her shocked face, his burning gaze seeming to be drawing out all the blood that Penny could feel had drained from her face so fast that she thought it must leave her looking like a ghost, the new arrival took a couple of steps forward, moving further into the room.

‘And as you can see, gineka mou, I am very much alive.’

‘I—you—’

Penny tried to get to her feet but abandoned the attempt after only a moment, finding that her legs were too weak to support her. Her feet seemed to be balanced on a floor that was strangely uneven, rocking and swaying beneath her as if a huge flood had suddenly come along and lifted the house from its foundations, carrying it out onto the wildest swirling sea. And the look Zarek turned on her was cold and dark, one that killed any impulse to fly into his arms, even after the distance of these two dreadful years. It was a silent, black reminder of the fact that the last time they had been together they had ripped the fragile camouflage covering off their marriage and exposed the lies and deceit that were at the centre of it. Exposing it for the lie it was.

Slumping back into her seat, she shook her head faintly, sending her hair flying out around her face, then passed a shaking hand in front of her eyes, rubbing at them to clear them of this impossible hallucination.

But when she blinked hard and looked again he was still there. Dark and powerful and strong as ever with a forcefully carved face and deep burning eyes that seemed to flay off a much needed layer of skin, leaving her feeling painfully raw and vulnerable, totally exposed.

It had been so long since she had seen him in the flesh, rather than in the photographs she studied every day, that it was almost like seeing him for the first time. Seeing how devastatingly attractive he was, how big and powerful, his lean, rangy figure in the plain white shirt and steel-grey suit easily dominating the room and making everyone else look so very small and insignificant.

‘Zarek…’ she croaked, her throat closing up around the sound so that she could barely get it out. ‘Y—you…’

‘Indeed, agapiti mou…’

His response was a small, cynically mocking bow of ac knowledgement, his probing gaze not leaving her face for an instant.

‘Zarek Michaelis. Your absent husband. Home at last.’

Chapter Three

HOME at last.

Who was he trying to kid? Zarek wondered. Even as he spoke the words he knew that there was no way this return felt at all like coming home.

Of course he was back on Ithaca, back inside the family house, the place where he had lived from his childhood and where he’d always looked forward to returning to whenever he’d been away. But somehow this time nothing felt the same. Nothing had that feeling of rightness, of completeness that it had had before.

Which was hardly surprising. After all, he had just walked in on a discussion of a plan to have him legally declared dead. With that on their minds, none of them was going to be glad to see him walk through the door large as life and infuriatingly, unfortunately alive.

Not even Penny.

Not even his wife, who had actually been toasting the fact that he was dead as he opened the door. And was now staring at him as if he was her nightmares come to life.

But what had he expected? That she would run to him on a cry of delight, fling herself into his arms? He’d be every kind of a fool if he’d even dreamed of that. She’d told him as much to his face. And last night would have taught him that dreams of her waiting for him were nothing to base his future on.

But forewarned was forearmed and so there was little to surprise him in the way that she just sat in her chair, slim and elegant in a dark green sleeveless linen dress, eyes wide, staring at him as if he had indeed risen from the dead right before her. If anything she seemed worse—even more appalled than Hermione, and his stepmother looked as if the devil incarnate had just risen up from hell to appear before her.

‘So,’ he drawled cynically, injecting dark mockery into his voice as the silence lengthened and dragged out. ‘Is this any way to greet the prodigal son? I was expecting the fatted calf at least.’

‘Then you should have let us know that you were coming!’

Hermione had managed to regain some control but the hiss of fury in her words betrayed the way she was feeling deep inside.

‘Or even that you were alive—it would have been nice to know.’

‘I did not know myself—that I was coming.’

Zarek couldn’t be unaware of the way that his answer had only incensed her further, the flare of her nostrils, the flash of fury in her eyes revealing just what she thought of his response. But quite frankly he didn’t give a damn. And he had no intention of launching into the lengthy and complicated explanation of how he came to be alive, and why he hadn’t let them know about it until now. Not here and not in front of everyone including Odysseus Shipping’s lawyer, their accountant and half the assembled members of the board, it seemed.

‘I thought that I might wait awhile longer—and learn as much as I could about the home I was to return to. It has been an interesting experience to say the least. But suffice it to say that I am here. And I am staying. So…’

Leaning forward, he picked up a pen that was lying on the polished wood of the table together with a sheet of paper that held, as he knew it must, a precise order of business as prepared by Leander, whose obsessive concern for detail had not, it seemed, eased up any in the time he had been missing.

‘So this…and this…’

With a rough slashing movement he scored the pen through the first point of business and then another and another. All of them dealing with the plans to have him declared dead and transfer the management of Odysseus Shipping to his stepbrothers, just as he had expected.

‘…can go—and this…’

A couple more decisive strokes of the pen and the entire proceedings for the meeting had been obliterated apart from…

‘“Any other business”,’ he quoted cynically. ‘Well—is there any other business?’

One swift glance at the stupefied faces all around him gave him his answer and he screwed up the agenda into a tight ball and tossed it in the general direction of the waste-paper bin, heedless of whether it actually landed there or not.

‘Then I now declare this meeting at an end. And you…’

His pointed look was directed at everyone not the immediate Michaelis family.

‘Can go home.’

It was as if the command, and the general flurry of movement, with chairs pushed back and people getting to their feet, had broken the spell that had held almost everyone frozen in shock. Suddenly Jason—Jason—was coming towards him, his hand held out in greeting.

‘It’s good to have you back. Amazing.’

He actually sounded as if he meant it, Zarek reflected cynically, and if the grip that enclosed his hand was just a little too much, a degree over the top, then that was only to be expected. Jason had always been good at playing the brother card, the friendly smiling brother, when Zarek knew that deep down the younger man hated his guts for being the oldest son, the real son. The only one who would inherit.

Petros on the other hand, like his mother, could not conceal his displeasure and disappointment at the return of the man he must have hoped had gone out of his life for good, leaving the way open to a far wealthier future than he had ever dreamed of. He looked as if he couldn’t get out of there fast enough and quite frankly Zarek would be glad to see him go. To see all of them go and leave him alone.

All of them except Penelope.

His wife was still sitting just where she had been when he had walked into the room. In that very first moment she had made a tiny movement, a sort of jump in her seat, and all colour had drained from her face as her eyes widened in shock. That was all.

And now she might as well be carved from marble, she sat so still and pale. It was impossible to read what was going on in her head, behind those clouded eyes. And it was almost impossible not to turn and walk out of the room, leaving all of them—but most of all leaving her—behind him.

Was that the face of an innocent woman? A woman who had been mourning the supposed death of her husband, living with his loss for the past two years? Or was it the face of a woman who, if the scene he had witnessed last night had anything to do with it, had been looking forward to moving on, taking with her the fortune she had earned through a few short months in his bed?

Where was the warm welcome that any husband had a right to expect under such circumstances? Where was the gasp of relief, the rush into his arms, the ardent embrace that told him how much he had been missed? That she was so glad that he was home safe. That she was so glad that he was alive and had come back to her.

But this was just what he should have expected from her on his return. Hadn’t she threatened—promised—him that this was how it would be?

‘If you go, then don’t expect me to be here waiting for you when I get back!’

Once again Penny’s angry voice, the furious words she had flung at him, echoed down through the years from the day he had left Ithaca and set out on the Troy.

‘This marriage isn’t worth staying for as it is. If you walk out that door then you are saying it’s over…’

But he had walked out of the door. Of course he had. The trials for the Troy were important, vital if they were to get the new design completed and on the market. And he’d thought he was giving them both room to breathe, to think. But then he’d believed he’d be gone and back again in a couple of days. Not a couple of years.

So why was she still here? Why had she stayed? For him in the hope that he would come back and they could start again, try to do something to redeem the hell that their marriage had become? Or had the news of his ‘death’ reached the island soon enough to stop her from leaving as she had said she would? And what had she stayed for? The vast inheritance that would now be hers rather than the part-share that would have come to her in a divorce settlement? Or the closeness with Jason that perhaps had been there all the time, but he had been too blind to see?

The scar along his right temple throbbed and ached, making him rub at it in discomfort, and he caught the sudden twist of Penny’s head in sharp reaction. So if she hadn’t known who he was last night, she did now.

And it worried her, that much was clear from the look—of guilt?—of apprehension that flashed across her face.

‘Welcome back…’

‘Good to see you safe…’

The conventional greetings, the slightly tentative slaps on the back, a shake of his hand, were the instinctive responses of the men who had worked for him. But he barely really heard them, acknowledged them only in an abstracted way. His attention was focused solely on the woman at the opposite side of the room.

‘And what about you, sweet wife?’

Zarek turned towards where Penny still sat at the far end of the table, an empty water glass gripped in a hand that was clenched rather too tight, with the knuckles of her fingers showing white.

‘Wh—what about me?’

‘Nothing to say?’ he challenged.

‘No…’

Nothing she could manage to get her thoughts under control enough to put into any sort of order, Penny told herself privately. Her head was still spinning, her mind totally unfocused. Now she knew exactly why the maid whose scream they had heard had reacted as she’d done, dropping the tray of coffee cups in shock at Zarek’s unexpected and unbelievable appearance. In that first moment that he had walked through the door, Penny felt she might actually do the same and send the glass she held flying to the floor to shatter into a thousand tiny pieces, and it was only the polished surface of the table underneath it that saved it from destruction.

She had reacted on a violent sense of shock in the moment she had first seen him, half rising to her feet and then sinking back down again just as sharply, frozen in a whirling storm of complete disbelief, bewilderment and not knowing what to do. And just like the maid who had reacted so forcefully to Zarek’s arrival home, she didn’t know if she wanted to scream out loud in an ecstasy of joy or express a wild rush of fear at what she saw.

The first impulse—to get to her feet, dash towards him and fling herself straight into his arms—had barely formed when a sudden powerful blast of reality hit her in the face with the memory of how they had parted. The shock of it was what had had her staying in her seat when every yearning sense in her body wanted to drive her close to this man, to feel the warmth of his body, inhale the scent of his skin. She wanted to have his arms close around her, know their strength supporting her as they had done in the past.

But the terrible sense that she had no right to do that any more, not after what had happened, kept her fixed in her place. The fear that if she even tried then he would reject her with cold and hostile disdain weighted her down even more. She couldn’t make herself move though her heart raced in confused excitement and her eyes were fixed in hungry yearning on the dark, lean—too lean, she noted in some distress—form of the man before her.

‘There’s nothing I want to say here.’

Because now it seemed as if just holding onto the tumbler was the only thing that was keeping her under control. As if the hard glass were some sort of lifeline that she was clinging onto in desperation and if she let go then the tidal wave of emotions that had been building up inside her all day would break loose and swamp her completely.

‘I don’t think we should discuss our private business in front of everyone.’

‘No, you’re right.’ Zarek nodded unexpectedly. ‘What we need to talk about is private and personal. We don’t need to share.’

The last remark was made with pointed emphasis and an equally pointed flick of black, thickly lashed eyes in the direction of Jason and his mother and brother. The three members of the Michaelis family were lingering between Zarek and the door, clearly unsure as to what their next move should be. In public, before the other members of the meeting, they had needed to show a united front, to make it look as if they were delighted to see Zarek back and welcomed him unreservedly. That they were glad to have his hands back on the controls of Odysseus Shipping. But now, when everyone else had left, an uneasy calm descended on the room. An uneasiness that Zarek was aggravating by his comment about keeping things private.

‘We all need to talk…’

It was Jason who put the words into the silence, the disquiet that Penny felt she could actually breathe in from the atmosphere.

‘We need to know what happened…’

‘And you will learn—in good time.’

Zarek spoke without taking his darkly burning gaze from Penny’s face, the words almost tossed over his shoulder at his stepbrother. Jason was saying the things she should be saying. The words she couldn’t find the strength or the courage to form on her tongue.

‘But for now you will surely acknowledge that there are some things that are private between husband and wife and are not to be shared with anyone else?’

Was she deceiving herself, Penny wondered, or had that deep, slightly husky voice subtly emphasised that ‘husband and wife’ as if deliberately driving home the fact that here was something in which Jason’s presence was not at all welcome? Staking a claim, so to speak, like some powerful wolf moving in to demonstrate possession of his mate, the wild hairs along his spine lifting in open challenge.

‘Of course, but—’

‘In good time,’ Zarek repeated, reaching out a hand to the edge of the door and pulling it open wide, the meaning of his message clear. He wanted everyone out of here and Jason would be a fool to ignore the signs. They were dismissed and that was it.

But still he lingered, looking across at Penny, a question in his eyes.

‘Penny?’ he queried, appearing to check how she felt.

How did she feel? She supposed to some it would seem wonderful that her husband, this man who had been away missing for so long—who had once been believed to be dead—would lay claim to her like this. To them it might appear that he was still so ardently in love that he couldn’t wait to be alone with his wife, to restore the links of their marriage, renew their relationship.

But recalling what had happened between them before he had left, the rifts that had opened up between them, dividing them from each other, she knew she couldn’t see it that way at all. Oh, yes, Zarek wanted to be alone with her but for his own personal, darker reasons rather than any loving reunion. And she could only begin to guess at just what those reasons might actually be.

But, ‘It’s fine, Jason,’ she said, exerting every ounce of control she could manage to keep her voice firm and even when inside her nerves were quailing at the thought of how far from fine everything was. ‘Absolutely fine.’

Was there some light of approval in the flash of the dark eyes he turned in her direction? The niggling worry that there was also something else had her shifting in her seat, finding herself able to move at last. Her brain seemed to have started working again too, sending the message Zarek is back—Zarek is back!—into her thoughts in a mixture of wild delight and shuddering apprehension. What was she to think? Yes, Zarek was back—but just who was this man who had been missing for two years? And what had happened to him while he had been away?

Exactly who had come home to her?

Chapter Four

PENNY pushed herself to her feet as Jason, Hermione and Petros made their way out of the door, tight knots forming in her stomach at the thought of being alone with her husband for the first time in so long.

She had never felt like this before, not even in the very beginning when she had first known him and had become his bride so very soon after that. Then she had been fizzing with excitement, just waiting for everyone else to go and leave them alone so that she and Zarek could become truly man and wife.

She had been so sure then. Sure that he wanted her—that he loved her. After all, he’d married her, hadn’t he? At barely twenty-two she had been so very young, so naïve in matters of the heart, and even more innocent of the force of physical desire. It was only later that bitter disillusionment had set in and she had come to realise that Zarek was more than capable of wanting without any sort of love.

The door was shut, everyone else was gone. Shifting from one foot to another, Penny nerved herself for whatever was to come. At least standing upright she felt better equipped to face him. She had always been considered too tall by most men, but never for Zarek Michaelis. Somewhere in his past family history there had been an ancestor—probably his Irish great-great-great-grandfather who was always referred to as The Giant—who had brought a gene for height into the family and Zarek had inherited that in maturity. Even at five feet ten, Penny had to tilt her head back slightly to meet his eyes.

‘So now…’ she said as he closed the door a little too firmly for her mental comfort. ‘What…?’

But the words caught in her throat as if a knot had tied tight around them, preventing her from getting them out. She could only stand and stare as Zarek lifted a hand to the right side of his face, just by his temple, and rubbed at the skin as if something there was troubling him.

‘Are you all right?’ she questioned sharply. ‘Is something wrong?’

When he didn’t respond but simply stood, back stiff, shoulders tight, head turned away from her, she felt the rush of memory like a sort of stinging mental pins and needles flood into her mind.

Someone else had done just that. And not too long ago. The memory seemed to dance at the corners of her thoughts, slipping away whenever she tried to get a grip on it. But right now she had other, more important concerns on her mind.

‘What is it? Zarek? Do you have a headache?’

Still he didn’t answer but stood motionless as a statue so that she launched herself towards him, covering the short space between them in a matter of seconds and whirling round in front of him.

‘Tell me what’s wrong?’

Without pausing to think, she reacted instinctively, lifting her hand to cover his where it still lay against his face, pressing her fingers over his as she looked up into his dark, shuttered face, seeing the way his heavy lids had come down over the darkness of his eyes. Hiding them from her.

‘Tell me!’

For the space of a couple of jerky heartbeats he didn’t move a muscle, but then at last he shifted slightly, moving the weight of his body from one foot to another, and drew in his breath on a slow, deep sigh. The warmth of his flesh reached her through the fine cotton of his shirt and the movement brought a waft of a deeply sensual scent, the ozone from the sea, sunshine on skin, and underneath it all the warm, musky scent that was personal to Zarek alone.

And in a split second the mood of the moment had changed. Where there had been nerve-twisting apprehension there was suddenly a heart-stilling tension. In Penny’s veins the blood seemed to pulse infinitely slowly, shockingly heavy. Her breath too seemed frozen, leaving her with her mouth slightly open, unable to inhale, unable to think.

All she was aware of was the feel of Zarek’s skin under her fingers, the heat and the softness of it, with the power of muscle and bone beneath the supple flesh. It was as if sparks had flown from his skin to hers, holding her melded to him, unable to move.

And the burn along her nerves reminded her only too painfully of how it had once been between them. The way that she had never been able to resist his touch, his kiss. The way that her body was yearning for it, reaching towards him even now.

‘Zarek…’

His name was just a whisper across lips that were suddenly parched and dry, her tongue seeming to tangle on the sound so that she had to swallow hard to ease the discomfort in her throat. ‘Zarek…’

‘No…’ Zarek said, his eyes still closed against her, his voice rough and seeming slightly ragged at the edges. ‘Don’t…’

‘Don’t what?’

But then he opened his eyes and looked down into her face and she knew exactly what he meant. What exactly he did not want her to do.

He didn’t want her to touch him. He was rejecting without words the feel of her hand on his, the connection of skin on skin. He didn’t have to say a word; it was there in his face, in his eyes.

And that was when she realised just what a terrible mistake she had made. Impulse and concern had made her break through the barriers that she had felt between them. The barriers that she had erected in her mind in self-defence because of the need to protect herself from the shock of his sudden arrival, the memory of all that had been between them before he had left.

‘So your wife is not allowed to touch you?’

‘My wife…Were you ever truly my wife?’

His eyes burned into hers as he raised his other hand to fasten around her fingers, clasping them tightly under the warmth and roughness of his palm. And as he pulled at it, bringing it down and away from his face, the force of his hold made her wince as her fingers were squeezed together.

But a moment later the slight discomfort was forgotten as shock ricocheted through her thoughts, making her head spin.

‘You!’

She spat the word at him as she fought for control, struggled with the need to lash out with the hand that was free or launch herself straight at him, pounding her fist on his chest.

‘It was you!’

She had seen the long white line of the scar before but then it had gleamed in the cold burn of the moonlight, the only visible part of a face that had been hidden by a cap, the fall of long dark hair, a heavy beard. The last time she had seen that scar it had been on the face of the man she had believed was a fisherman.

‘You were spying on me!’

The memories of the previous night, the recollection of Jason’s arms around her, and the thought of those dark burning eyes watching her put a new tension into her voice.

‘Spying?’ Dark cynicism rang in Zarek’s voice. ‘That word implies that you have something to hide.’

‘As opposed to you who was hiding from me.’

She shouldn’t be doing this, Penny told herself. She shouldn’t be taking the conversation down this route. What she should be doing was asking Zarek where he had been, what had happened to him. She should want to find out—she did want to find out—just how he had come by that dreadful scar and what had happened to him. But she couldn’t make her mouth actually form the questions. Her tongue seemed to have frozen and her throat wouldn’t work on those words. Instead she heard the provocative and aggressive words come out as a challenge.

The thought that he had come home earlier but had not let her know that he was alive burned in her heart. That he had hidden from her, watched her, waiting—for what?—for her to betray herself in some way, was like a knife twisting in the wound. She had once been convinced that when she knew that he was alive and well she would be so happy, and had even allowed herself to think they might just have a chance to start all over again.

And now this…

Did she need further proof that, whatever else had happened while he was away, nothing had changed his mind about their marriage? He still regarded her with suspicion, as someone who was not to be trusted. Not as the woman he had loved and missed. But then of course she had known that that was the case from the start.

‘Don’t you think that I had the right to find out just what had been happening while I was away?’

‘You didn’t want to see me? Ask me.’

Another of those darkly blazing looks told her that he didn’t need to ask. That in his mind she was already tried and condemned without a chance of appeal.

‘“I want to get away from here, start living again,”’ he quoted cynically, leaving her in no doubt that he had heard every word of her talk with Jason. ‘“I’m tired of treading water.”’

‘You really shouldn’t listen in to other people’s conversations,’ she flashed back, knowing with a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach just how he would have interpreted it. ‘Don’t you know that it’s a fact that eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves?’

‘I’m sure that most never actually overhear their wife planning to have them declared dead.’

‘You were dead! At least—I—we thought you were.’

‘And that was how it suited you.’

His grip on her tightened as he spoke, crushing her fingers. But it was not the biting pressure that shocked her, rather the rush of wild electricity up her arm, tracking a burning pathway along her nerves that frightened her with its instant and shocking reaction. How could he still affect her in this way when deep inside she knew the truth about the coldness of his heart?

‘I don’t want this,’ she managed, tensing her muscles against his hold, pulling herself away from him as far as she could while he still kept her hand prisoner.

She had to get away, to find some space and quiet in which to collect her thoughts and decide how to go forward.

‘Let me go!’

If he reacted against her, if he held her tighter, pulled her close, then she did not know what she would do. The swirl of ambiguous feelings inside her head was like a tornado, throwing her off balance and leaving her unable to think.

‘I said let me go!’

The speed with which he released her added to the sense of shock, making her sway and stumble, almost fall. But it was fear that he would come for her again that had her reeling away, grabbing out at a nearby chair for support.

‘Don’t come near me! I don’t want you near me!’

Oh, you liar, you liar, her conscience reproached her bitterly. You weak, cowardly liar. She wanted nothing so much as his arms around her, his body close to hers, to hold her and comfort her, to warm her and melt away the hard core of ice that seemed to have formed at the centre of her heart.

But Zarek simply folded his arms across his broad chest and regarded her coldly through eyes that seemed to have been formed from burnished steel, polished so hard that they were opaque and closed off against her.

‘Of course not,’ he drawled with bitter cynicism. ‘After all, you never really wanted me back.’

It was only what she’d told him. If you go, don’t expect me to be waiting here when you come back. Bitter pain had made her lash out at the time, knowing she would rather die than have him realise just how much she had loved him when he had seen her only as a willing body to warm his bed—and a brood mare to conceive his child. But it still stung viciously to have her wild, unthinking words turned against her in this way.

‘You’ve sprung this on me—appearing from the dead. I— need some time,’ she managed, trying for appeasement but getting nowhere with it if the cold burn of his gaze was anything to go by. And the way those powerful arms were crossed tight over his chest was like a rigid shield, deflecting any appeal she might direct at him.

‘Then take it.’

‘What?’

With her own defences ready formed for battle, his sudden capitulation was so unexpected that it took all the defiance from her, leaving her limp as a deflated balloon.

‘Take it.’

It was more of a command this time, snapped at her with contempt that was like a slap in the face. It seemed that he had had enough of baiting her, for now at least. That shocking, taunting mood seemed to have evaporated, leaving instead something that sounded disturbingly like a cynical weariness.

‘If you need the time to adjust to the fact that the husband you hoped was dead—’

‘Never hoped!’

She couldn’t let that pass. No matter how terrible things had been between them, she had never once hoped he was no longer still alive. And she was appalled that he might even think so.

‘How could I ever hope that?’

‘Hoped was never coming back…’ Zarek amended without even the tiniest amount of a concession in his tone. ‘Then take that time. I know that I sprung my arrival on you and heaven knows I too need some space.’

It was like a slap in the face, making pain twist in her stomach. She felt as if the room were closing in on her, crushing the breath from her body, making her feel sick with distress. He had been back—what?—barely an hour, and already he wanted space—to escape from her.

‘To accustom myself to being here again. It has been a long time.’

Something in his tone brought Penny up sharp, made her look at him more closely. Only now did she see the evidence of new lines about his nose and mouth, the tiniest flecks of grey in his hair at the temples. Evidence that hinted at the fact that his life hadn’t been totally easy while he had been missing. She had forgotten everything that the counsellors had told them, the advice they had been given at the beginning of all this, when they had believed that Zarek might be found and might be on his way back to them before the end of the year.

Wherever he’s been, they’d said, whatever has happened to him, he will need time and space to adjust. He was held hostage, his life was in danger. It was unlikely that he would be able to just walk into the house and take up his old life where he had left off.

The wave of reaction that swept over her at the thought made her feel sick and ashamed, a terrible sense of guilt pushing her into rash, unguarded words.

‘I’m sorry—I should have thought—do you need anything—want anything? Have you eaten? A sandwich? Some coffee perhaps?’

She sounded like the most inexperienced and gauche hostess greeting a complete stranger for the very first time. And obviously Zarek thought so too from the way that his beautiful mouth twisted and his dark eyes gleamed with something dangerous and cruel. One long, tanned hand lifted in a flicking gesture of dismissal.

‘No—nothing. If I need anything, I can find it for myself— or get one of the staff to see to it. I do still have the staff in the house, I take it?’

‘Of course you do.’

Flinging the answer back at him, she emphasised the you so as to make sure he realised that she had heard and noted that arrogant ‘I’, which made it plain that he was back here in his role as owner of the villa, MD of Odysseus Shipping, lord of all he surveyed.

And her husband.

And what of her then? As his wife did she still have a place in this house? And for how long? While Zarek had been missing she had had a role to play, but now that he was back…

Did he even still want her as his wife?

‘Then you have nothing to worry about.’

And with that she was dismissed. As if she needed the message rammed home he turned his back on her, walking across the room to stare out of the window, one hand pushed deep into his trouser pocket, the other lifting once again to press against the scar above his eye.

In the doorway, Penny paused, half turned back to him.

‘Zarek…’

But his only response was an impatient gesture of his dark head, repulsing without hesitation the tentative approach.

‘Go!’ he said and it was a command she would be a fool to ignore. ‘Just go.’

Well, what had she expected? Penny asked herself as reluctantly she turned away again and made herself move away, letting the door fall shut behind her.

Zarek Michaelis. Your absent husband. Home at last.

The mocking words he had tossed at her sounded in her head as she walked down the long, sunlit hall, heading for the stairs.

He was home, but it was obvious that nothing had changed. And because of that the wonderful joy and delight she should have been able to find in his return were totally missing. Zarek was back in body perhaps, but in his mind, and most of all in his heart, he was as lost to her as ever.

Perhaps more so. Because at least the Zarek who had gone away had put on a good pretence of being her husband when they were together. He had made it plain that in one sense at least—the sexual one—he wanted her.

He had wanted her in his arms, in his bed. He had barely been able to keep his hands off her and at least that way she had been able to get close to him. Able to keep him with her.

But that had been before the dreadful row they had had; now it seemed that even that had waned, taking with it the only chance she had of holding him.

‘Don’t,’ he had said when she’d touched him. And he’d kept his eyes closed to reinforce the rejection in his words.

Zarek had only ever wanted her sexually, never loving her. He had hidden it in the past, but it seemed that he was no longer taking the trouble to hide anything any more. His cold dismissal of her just now proved that. Even that wanting seemed to have died in the time he had been away.

She had got him back from the dead and finally lost him for ever all in the same moment, it seemed.

Chapter Five

THE sound of Argus scratching at the door and whining to be let out was what woke Penny from the deep, dark sleep into which she had tumbled, how long later she had no idea. Night had fallen while she had dozed and the room was now in almost complete darkness, with only the glimmer of the moon coming through the cloud-hazed sky to throw any light onto things.

‘Argus—no!’

The words came automatically, the result of so many other mornings being woken like this, and feeling afraid that Hermione would hear and be outraged both at being woken so early and the damage she would declare the dog was doing to the door.

‘Stop that! Give me a minute and I’ll…’

The words faded as she came more fully awake, sitting up on the bed and looking around her, her thoughts blurring as the truth of reality hit home.

It wasn’t morning, she realised, it was evening. Late evening on the day that her life as she knew it had been turned upside down.

Late evening on the day that Zarek had come back from the dead.

‘Zarek!’

Just the thought of him had her almost leaping from the big double bed, whirling round to stare at the side of it where, during the days of their marriage, Zarek had always slept. This was after all his bedroom, so wouldn’t it be logical that he would come in here if he wanted to sleep? She had been so deeply unconscious that he could have come into the room, into the bed, and she wouldn’t have noticed. She couldn’t begin to decide if the shiver that ran down her spine at the thought was one of excitement or dread. How would she have felt if she had woken to find her husband lying beside her in their marriage bed?

‘No!’

Shaking her head to drive the tormenting thoughts away, she pushed herself into action, hurrying across the room to open the door and let Argus out. Freed, the dog hurried off down the corridor, claws pattering on the polished wooden floor. The whole upper part of the house was in total darkness and she had to grope her way along before she could find a switch to bring some light to the place.

‘Argus—wait…’

She should have checked the time before she’d left the room. Her watch was still on the bedside cabinet and she felt so disorientated that she had no idea how late in the night exactly. The last thing she wanted was to disturb the household and have Hermione and her sons descend on her, full of complaints.

And Zarek?

Once again her nerves twisted so sharply that she almost missed her footing and went tumbling down the wide, curving staircase. She had no idea where her husband was or what he might have been doing while she had been asleep. And not even knowing how long—hours, or just minutes—she had been away from him, she couldn’t even start to guess.

She had never intended to fall asleep. The only thing she had wanted was some time to herself, in peace and quiet, to try to adjust to what had happened and to bring herself to some sort of acceptance of the way that her life had been turned totally upside down in just a few short minutes. But the way that Zarek had dismissed her, ordering her from the room with that aggressive movement of his head, had shaken her to the core. She had sunk down onto the soft surface of the bed with a sigh, then flung herself back against the pillow and closed her eyes, meaning to force herself to try and think…

But the images that had floated across the screen of her eyelids had made any sort of rational thought impossible. All that she saw was a stream of snapshots of Zarek, the man she had adored, had loved to call her husband, in the days before the terrible realisation that she had never truly been the wife of his heart. Her mind had taken her back to their wedding day, not quite three years before, when she had walked down the aisle towards where he stood by the altar, tall and proud, devastatingly handsome—and totally secure in his own skin.

She hadn’t been able to believe that this man had even noticed the insignificant junior secretary in the import and export business that worked so often with Odysseus Shipping, let alone asked her to marry him. And that he was here, now, prepared to go through with the ceremony. Only the previous night, for the first time since their engagement, he had let slip the cool, courteous mask that he wore when he was with her, and had finally revealed a burningly sensual, fiercely passionate man underneath.

That night had shown her that Zarek did at least want her with a desire that had stunned her. A heated hunger in which the words cold and rational had no place at all. And then she had been happy to give herself to him because she had believed she really was loved. It was only later, when she had come to know the truth, that she had started to withdraw from him.

Remembering it again now, Penny felt her legs tremble beneath her and she had to grab at the banisters for support. She’d fallen asleep on the memories of her wedding night and as a result her dreams had been filled with wild, erotic fantasies that had had her tossing and turning in the throes of burning need.

She hadn’t felt like that since the first lonely time when Zarek had left for the test voyage for his yacht, the Troy, walking out on her in anger, to give her time to think, he had said, to get her head together. And then later, when he had been declared missing, and when she had believed he was never coming home. The yearning hunger, the aching need—the physical need, at least—had slowly subsided over the last year, but it seemed that all Zarek had to do was to walk into a room and once again she was swamped by a tidal wave of need, one that had hit her with its full strength in the moment that she had touched him, and that now had sent disturbing echoes through her dreams.

But Zarek had clearly not felt the same.

‘No,’ he had said. Just a single word. But there had been such total rejection in his tone, and in the coldly burning look that had accompanied it, that she could have been in no doubt that total rejection was what he meant. And rejection was all he felt. Even the burning passion that had once flared between them had gone now, dying as a result of whatever had happened in the years he had been away.

But would it have been any different if the hijack had never taken place? If he’d come back three days later as had been planned. Penny felt as if something cold and nasty had just slid down her spine at the thought. Zarek had married her because he wanted a child, an heir who would ensure that Odysseus Shipping stayed in the family and there was no risk that it would ever come under the control of his stepmother and brothers.

The ground floor of the villa was in total darkness too, still and silent as if everyone had left, abandoning the place. But going where?

And where was Zarek? Would he have actually left, so very soon after arriving home again? A cold hand seemed to squeeze at her heart at the thought that he might just walk out and never come back again. Simply leaving her with the knowledge that he was alive and so was their marriage. But a marriage that it seemed he did not want any more.

‘Zarek?’

Uncertainty made her voice wobble as she called out into the darkness.

‘Anyone there?’

A deep bark startled her, making her jump as Argus suddenly lifted his head and pointed his narrow black nose in the direction of the garden room. Another bark, shorter and sharper this time, before the dog took off at speed towards the scent or the sound that he had detected. Not for Argus the indecision and hesitation that came from not knowing what his reception would be. He was totally sure of his welcome and he bounded through the partly open door, his joy and excitement evident in every movement.

But then Argus had it exactly right, Penny reflected, following the big dog at a much slower pace. Zarek would of course be overjoyed to see him.

‘Argus!’

The delight in Zarek’s deep voice reinforced her belief that he would be more than happy to see his hound and prepared Penny for what she would see as she went into the room herself.

The moon was shining through the big patio doors that were open to the sight of the gleaming waves that swayed and tossed between the cliffs and the horizon, the sound of them breaking against the rocks on the shore. Zarek sat in a wide comfortable armchair just inside the room, his face, his whole body, in shadow.

‘Argus!’ he said again, slapping one hand against his thigh to call the dog to him. A moment later he was cradling the animal’s big black and white head in both his palms, rubbing the rough fur and crooning softly in low-toned Greek. And Argus, instead of bounding round his master in overwhelming joy at his return, as she had expected, simply gave himself up to the bliss of being reunited. His eyes closed and the only thing that moved was his big tail that was wagging furiously.

It was foolish to be jealous of a dog, Penny told herself. But at the same time she couldn’t help envying the hound’s simple pleasure in the moment. And his total confidence that he would be welcome, that Zarek would be as delighted to see him as he was to see his master.

It would all have been so much easier if she could have run straight into her husband’s arms in the moment that he had first walked into the room. But of course Argus had endured none of the distance, the arguments, the stand up fights that had marred the days before Zarek’s departure. He was loved for what he was, not given house room simply because of what Zarek wanted from him. And, besides, he was happy to acknowledge the man as his master and to obey his every command.

Penny couldn’t help feeling that if, like the dog, she had come when called, or at the slap of a hand against a thigh, then things might not be so tense and awkward. Instead they were like two opposing armies, facing a stand-off, waiting for the instruction either to attack or stand down. And she didn’t know which one was most likely.

But how she longed to hear the gentleness in her husband’s voice that he now directed towards the hound, or to feel his hands on her, stroking, caressing as they were moving over the animal’s big head and down his long back.

‘You kept the dog.’ Zarek’s voice broke into her uncomfortable thoughts, making her start slightly, lifting her eyes from the dog’s black and white head to look into her husband’s face. Not that she could see anything of Zarek’s expression. The darkness of the shadows by the wall was too intense, hiding everything.

‘Of course I kept him,’ she managed stiffly. ‘What else did you think I’d do?’

‘He wasn’t your pet. And you were never that much of a dog person.’

‘No. But of course I kept him at the beginning when we still thought that you might come back.’

She wasn’t yet going to admit that at the beginning the dog and his needs had seemed to be the only things that had kept her going. That the reason he slept on her bed was because she hadn’t been able to sleep alone and that most nights she had wept into the dog’s shaggy fur. Zarek might never have loved her but she had loved him and the thought that he was lost or dead had torn at her already wounded heart.

‘Besides, he pined for you so I had to look after him—and after that Argus and I—came to an understanding.’

‘Thank you for that.’

Zarek’s strong fingers were still buried in the rough fur, Argus’ head on his knee, the dog looking up into his master’s face with such blind devotion that she felt tears sting at her eyes. Once she had felt like that, hungry for Zarek’s attention, desperate for any casual word that fell from his lips, any caress he offered her. But that had been before she had realised that she was only ever second best and that the man she loved didn’t feel the same way about her.

‘It’s very dark in here,’ she said abruptly, needing to break the mood.

Swinging away, she searched for the light switch, found it. Her fingers were on it when Zarek spoke sharply from behind her.

‘Don’t!’ It was a command not a request but a moment later he softened it slightly by adding, ‘I always loved the sight of the moonlight on the waves. I missed it.’

This was her cue to ask where he’d been while he’d missed the sea, but even as she opened her mouth to do so her nerves failed her. She was manoeuvring in the dark, both physically and mentally, and she was having to grope her way slowly through the shadows, trying to find some sort of a path that would help her.

‘Whatever you want.’

She moved to a chair opposite him. At least this way the light from the moon gave her some hope of being able to read the expressions on his face.

‘What time is it?’

‘Around eight.’

Zarek didn’t even trouble to glance at his watch. It seemed that the hour was a matter of total indifference to him. He couldn’t care less if it was night or day.

‘So late?’

How had she come to sleep so long? Was it the exhaustion after the stress of the day? Or the rush of relief at knowing that Zarek was home. That he was safe. She still couldn’t quite absorb the fact for all that she was sitting looking at him with the sound of his voice in her ears, the scent of his skin reaching her nostrils. Her fingers itched to reach out and touch, to reassure herself that he was real. To feel the warmth of his flesh under her hands. But the fear of how he might react held her back.

She didn’t feel she could take another of those cold-eyed rejections. Not now with what seemed like several layers of her skin flayed away, leaving her nerves raw and exposed.

‘Where is everyone?’ she asked to distract herself.

Normally at this time the staff were busy preparing the evening meal. The family would meet for drinks before dinner. But of course there was no way that this was any sort of an ordinary day.

‘Gone.’

‘Gone where?’

Zarek’s shrug dismissed the question as unimportant.

‘Home—or wherever they spend their evenings.’

‘Everyone?’

This time his only response was a curt nod.

‘Even Jason—and Hermione?’ Penny found it hard to believe that Hermione would relinquish her place in the family home after she had been so determined to move in.

‘Even Jason—and especially Hermione.’ Zarek didn’t give either of the names any particular emphasis but all the same it seemed to Penny that they had a dark underlining to his tone.

‘How did you persuade Hermione to leave?’

She hadn’t been able to achieve that herself in almost two years, even when she had asked Zarek’s stepmother point blank to go. Since then Hermione had been a constant, nagging presence, critical of everything she did.

‘If she wanted to keep the generous allowance she receives from Odysseus Shipping then there was no argument.’ The cynicism that twisted Zarek’s mouth sounded darkly in his voice. ‘She was very easily persuaded.’

‘So there’s no one here?’

Was that slight shake in her voice apprehension, relief, or even a strange sort of anticipation? Penny couldn’t begin to decide for herself and, from the faint frown that she saw draw Zarek’s dark brows together so briefly, neither could he.

‘No one but us—and Argus.’

Zarek moved at last, getting to his feet to open the big glass doors to the garden so that the dog could go outside. Once again Penny felt an affinity with the hound as he padded reluctantly forward, obviously needing to get outside, but wanting to be sure that Zarek would not disappear again if he turned his back. Did she look at him like that? she wondered. Could the sense of disbelief, the fear that it might all be an illusion after all, show in her eyes when she watched him?

‘But why?’

‘I thought we had a lot of catching up to do. We need to talk. And that we would do it better if we were on our own.’

‘Oh.’

It was all she could manage, and the gulp as she swallowed down the word gave away more than she was at all comfortable with.

Zarek turned from the door, leaning back against the wall and pushing his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers. Penny knew it wasn’t possible but he really did seem to have grown bigger in the last few moments—taller and stronger and darker. And definitely more dangerous, with that ominous ‘we need to talk’ sounding like a warning bell for what was coming next.

Chapter Six

SHE WOULD HAVE LIKED to have got to her feet. At least then, standing up, she would have been more on a level with him. But she would also betray her discomfort, scrambling to her feet like a frightened child, and moving uncomfortably from one foot to another.

‘Don’t you think you should eat first?’

That at least would give her an excuse to get up from her chair. And if she could spend some time on practicalities like preparing food in the big kitchen then it would be a distraction from his threatening presence, the discomfort of being here like this with a man she knew so well in some ways and yet who was a total stranger in others.

‘I’m not hungry.’

It was a dismissal of what he had recognised as her attempt at diversion, she knew. He had no intention of being dissuaded from the path he was determined to follow.

‘Though I wouldn’t mind a drink,’ Zarek conceded.

‘Of course…’

She was on her feet and turning towards the dresser where the wine was kept when the foolishness of her actions hit home. This was Zarek’s home after all.

‘No, I haven’t forgotten,’ Zarek murmured dryly seeing her hesitation, the embarrassed look she turned on him. ‘Two years is not so very long.’

‘It seemed long enough!’ Her temper flared again, setting her off balance once more. ‘No sign of you, no word from you. I didn’t know what had happened—’

‘I was hardly in a position to give you a phone call,’ Zarek cut across her, breaking into the flow of reproach like the slash of a knife. ‘How did Hermione end up living here? Did you invite her to move in?’

‘No, I did not! She invited herself and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Have you ever tried to get your stepmother to do something she didn’t want to do?’

‘As a matter of fact I have.’

Zarek expertly removed the cork from a bottle of rich red wine and poured a generous amount into a couple of glasses.

‘Well, I don’t happen to have the promise of a generous income—or the threat of withholding one—to dangle over her head like a carrot. Hermione arrived when the news of your disappearance had just broken—I didn’t know what to do for the best. I thought it might after all be an idea if we were all in one place until we found out just what had happened.’

And she had been reeling in shock and distress. It didn’t matter how she and her husband had parted, learning that his yacht had been hijacked by pirates and Zarek himself taken hostage had left her unable to think straight, so that she hadn’t had the strength to fight Hermione over anything.

‘And Jason…’

Something in the way that Zarek reacted—or, rather, his complete lack of reaction—sent her a warning signal that she was entering dangerous territory. She knew what Zarek had seen and heard on the harbour front only the day before. Her husband might not love her but he was her husband and a traditionally possessive, jealous Greek husband at that. He would not take at all kindly to seeing his wife in the arms of another man. Particularly if that man was his hated stepbrother.

‘And Jason…’ Zarek prompted almost casually, holding out one of the glasses of wine towards her. Because of the darkness in the room, she couldn’t read his face properly but the stiffness of his long spine, a clipped edge to his use of his stepbrother’s name, made all the little hairs on the back of her neck lift in wary apprehension.

‘Jason dealt with all the practical things—liaising with the police, the press. He was very—helpful.’

Besides, Jason had been kind and considerate then and his support had been welcome at a time when she most needed it.

‘Good for Jason.’

It was impossible to interpret the strange note in Zarek’s voice as he lifted his glass to his mouth and took a deliberate sip of the wine. But Penny didn’t care what his mood was. If there was any doubt in his mind about what he had seen then it was time she made things perfectly clear. His opinion of her was low enough as it was. She didn’t want to add any further complications to the already explosive mix.

‘We’re not lovers,’ she said starkly and saw his head come up very slightly, though he controlled the movement almost at once.

‘Did I say anything?’

‘No—but you’re thinking it.’

‘Oh, is that what I’m thinking?’

Another slow deliberate sip of his wine, but, watching him, Penny saw how long it took him to swallow it. The burn of his eyes challenged her with the fact that he could have been thinking something else entirely but she wasn’t yet ready to go there. Better to clear the air with the things she could deal with here and now rather than rake up old problems and risk ripping open old wounds.

That would have to come, but it was early days yet—not even days! She was still feeling her way with this man who was her husband and yet, after the time he had been missing, now seemed like a stranger to her. She knew his face, his stunning features, his voice, his mannerisms. But was the Zarek she had married, the Zarek she had been intimate with, made love with—no, no—the man she had had sex with—still inside this façade that was so well known and yet somehow totally unfamiliar to her? For now she would do better to stay on safer ground. If Zarek’s detested brother could ever be considered safer.

‘I know how it might have looked to you, but if you’d stayed around last night then you’d have seen how I pushed him away.’

‘Forgive me—’ the twist to Zarek’s mouth, the cynical emphasis to the words made them anything other than a genuine apology ‘—but I was still trying to absorb the fact that my wife wanted me declared dead.’

‘Not wanted. It was the only practical thing to do.’

‘And of course you have been carefully planning the most practical way of dealing with things. With Jason’s help.’

‘I needed someone’s help.’

Penny drank some of her own wine, feeling the rich red liquid burn its way down her throat. The kick of the alcohol entering her blood gave an added spark to the volatile cauldron of emotions bubbling inside her. Sick and tired of managing in the dark—in all ways—she ignored Zarek’s previous command and moved to click on the nearest lamp, flooding the room with light before swinging round to face him with a challenge.

‘And as you said, you were hardly in a position to do anything.’

She was not sure if the light was now helping or actually making matters worse. Yes, she could see Zarek’s expression, but did she really want to know just how intent his eyes were on her face? Did she want to look into their dark depths and see the burn of suspicion, the coldness of contempt? And in the light her eyes were once more drawn to the ugly scar that marked his temple, twisting and distorting the beautiful bronzed skin.

Impulsively her free hand lifted again, needing to touch it, to touch him. She wanted to reassure herself that he truly was real, and at the same time she had a crazy, irrational need to smooth her fingers over that scar as if by doing so she could ease the long-ago pain the wound must have caused him.

But something that flared deep in those stunning eyes had her wrenching her hand down again, clenching it into a fist at her side. She took another swift, snatching drink of wine to bolster her courage.

‘What did happen to you?’ she asked brusquely, not having enough self-control to try and think of some more careful way of phrasing the question. ‘We were told you were—dead.’

‘You heard about the pirates?’ Zarek asked, moving to the open patio doors where he leaned against the wall and looked out into the garden, watching Argus, who was happily investigating something that clearly smelled very appealing.

Penny nodded.

‘I found it hard to believe at first. It doesn’t sound at all twenty-first century. But since you were taken, there have been several other ships that have been boarded by pirates. We saw the reports on the television—saw the pirates get into that small boat and leave the yacht. But at the time we didn’t know that you were with them—that they’d taken you hostage.’

‘No one knew.’

Zarek sipped at his wine again, staring out into the moonlit garden, his attention, his focus, seeming to be totally elsewhere. In an absent-minded gesture he lifted his free hand and rubbed at the ugly scar on his temple, making her shiver in distress at the thought of how he had come by it. She hated to see the evidence of that hurt, was saddened by the way that it marred the male beauty of his face. But, at the same time, in some way it only added to rather than detracted from the powerful impact of his forceful features.

‘The small boat they tried to get away in was covered so the troops who were going to board the ship couldn’t see inside. It was pitch black in there—foul.’

With another swallow of his wine, Zarek frowned at the gleaming path the moonlight made along the sea.

‘They were all nervous, panicking—possibly high on something…’

Penny found that the glass she held was shaking violently as her hand trembled in reaction to the stark, matter of fact way he was reporting the story. He might have been talking about someone else entirely—or recounting a story he had heard. She could only imagine with horror how it had felt to be in that situation. To be trapped in that small, dark boat, bobbing on the expanse of the ocean in the middle of the night, with a group of pirates who were all out of control and even more dangerous as a result.

And the last memory he would have had of her was of the angry, lying words, she had flung at him before he had left for the Troy.

‘They were arguing amongst themselves. Some of them wanted to use me as a hostage—to try and get a ransom out of the company at least.’

With an effort Penny tried to raise her glass to her lips. Perhaps a taste of wine might calm her nerves, reduce the sense of revulsion she felt at the thought of Zarek being trapped in that situation. But her hand was shaking even more, so that she couldn’t manage it.

‘And then when the shooting started all hell broke out.’

‘Oh, my—’

Zarek’s head swung round as Penny finally lost her grip on her feelings and slammed down her drink on the nearest window sill, crashing it against the window.

‘Penny?’

‘They said…’

Her throat closed over the words, refusing to let them out, and her eyes were wild as she looked into his dark gaze. Swallowing hard, she tried again.

‘They said—he said—that he p-put—’

It was unbearable to think of the words, let alone say them. And even with Zarek standing there before her, whole and safe, making a lie of the pirate leader’s claim, she still found the idea too horrific to contemplate.

‘He said that he put a bullet in you—your head.’

Burning tears were swirling in her eyes, blurring her vision, but she recognised rather than saw the now-familiar gesture as he rubbed at the scar once more. And the thought of how he had come by it made her dig her teeth in hard to her lower lip to hold back the moan of distress that almost escaped her.

‘Then he gave himself rather too much credit.’ Zarek’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. ‘And exaggerated his success. He might have planned to do that but the truth is that he missed. His aim was off. The bullet grazed my head and knocked me flying—out of the boat and into the sea. Penny?’

His question was sharp, urgent, his tone changing completely. And suddenly he was right beside her, having moved up close, his powerful body almost touching hers as he stared down into her face. And when Penny ducked her head to dodge that searing, probing gaze, he dumped his wine glass down beside hers and put a strong warm hand under her chin, lifting her face towards his.

‘What’s this?’

It was impossible to resist his control as he turned her face to the left, into the light, and she could sense the frown that drew his dark straight brows sharply together.

‘What’s this?’ he demanded again, his voice rougher now and his accent deepening on the hard-toned question. ‘Tears?’

Penny fought to twist her chin away from his forceful hold, to hide her betraying expression. But finding she wasn’t strong enough, instead she lifted a shaking hand to dash roughly at her eyes, brushing the moisture from her lashes.

‘Yes, tears,’ she flung at him furiously, determined to face it out now.

Of course he hadn’t expected tears. They had never had that sort of a marriage—at least not in Zarek’s mind. And the bitterness of that bit so deep that she was almost out of her head with the agony.

‘And what’s so shocking about that, hmm? What did you expect? Laughter? Three cheers?’

‘You would have cared?’ He actually sounded stunned.

‘Of course I would have cared! And not just “cared” in the past but still care now! I might not want to be married to you any more, but I sure as hell would never, ever have wished you dead!’

The last word came out on a choking gasp. One that was as much from the sensual shock of realising just how close he was now as from the anguish that came with the memory of how it had been when she had really thought that he had died in the pirate attack.

‘So you thought of me once or twice in the time I was away?’

‘Yes, I thought of you! We might not have had a marriage worth saving but there were—things—about you that I—that I missed…’

Her throat dried in a sudden rush of heat as she foolishly looked up on those words and met the burning fire of his gaze. Her heart skipped a beat then lurched into a rapid, thudding rhythm that was almost painful as it slammed against the sides of her ribcage, sending the blood pounding through her veins, pulsing round her head.

How could something so dark blaze so fiercely? she wondered as she felt herself come close to melting in the intensity of his eyes. The effect was doubled, strengthened all the more because it met with exactly the same feeling inside her own body. The same hotly yearning hunger. The aching need that drove all rational thought from her mind and left just a burn of molten desire.

‘Penny…’ Zarek said slowly and his voice was ragged at the edges so that she knew the need that had her in its grip had taken hold of him too.

So what had happened to that cold command of ‘Don’t’? There was no rejection, no distance in the look he turned on her. It was pure fire and lightning, searing where it landed. And it landed on her hair, then on her eyes, then burned across her mouth so that she opened her lips in a gasp of much-needed air.

And then forgot to breathe at all as Zarek reached out his hand and touched her cheek. Still holding her eyes locked with his, he let his fingers trail down to the side of her jaw, following the line of the bone until his touch reached her still-open mouth. His thumb rested on the lower lip, pulling it down very slightly, very softly. And she couldn’t resist the temptation to slide out her tongue to taste it, taking the essence of his skin into her mouth as she did so.

Which immediately made her want more. Her breasts felt tight against the lace of her bra, her skin seemed to ache for the touch of his hands and she knew that her eyes were heavy-lidded and sensual, her pupils dark, telegraphing her feelings without the need for words.

But of course Zarek had no use for words. Even after two years apart, his senses were totally attuned to the signals she was unable to control. She saw his body still, the tension in the long muscles communicating a need that was like a visible force, reaching out to enclose her. His fierce, unblinking eyes were black as night, his touch on her face a brand that marked her out as his, and the hiss of his breath in between his lips was a sound that seemed to shiver all the way down her spine as she heard it.

‘I missed things too,’ he murmured, low and rough. ‘Mou elipses—I missed you—but most of all I missed this…’

And his head bent to take her mouth with his.

Chapter Seven

SHE had forgotten the sensation of drowning, Penny thought hazily as Zarek’s mouth closed over hers, the heat and hardness of his kiss making her senses swim. She had forgotten how it felt as if a dark wave of sensuality was breaking over her head, taking her down into the depths of passion where she lost her last grip on control, gave herself up to the sensation that possessed her.

One touch of Zarek’s mouth on hers and she was once more the naïve young virgin he had first taken to bed, at the mercy of her hunger for him. A hunger that no other man had ever been able to awaken in her. And waking up was what it felt like. Waking from a deep dark sleep in which there had been no sensation, no light, no warmth, no joy.

Now she was flooded with heat and hunger, a sensation of coming back to life and seeing the glory of delight that was possible.

Her head fell back under Zarek’s kiss, her hands going up to clutch at his arms, hold him near to her. Her lips opened under the pressure of his and she felt the heated, sensual slide of his tongue as he invaded the moist interior of her mouth. No amount of wine could have more of a head-spinning effect than the taste of him, no tantalising appetiser could stir her appetites as swiftly and as powerfully as it did.

‘I have missed this,’ Zarek muttered again, his voice thick and raw, his accent deep on every word. ‘Missed it and thought about it so often at night. Longed for it. Hungered for it.’

He had gathered her up into his arms, crushing her tight against the heat and hardness of his body. Her head was pressed to his chest, feeling the wall of his ribcage under the soft cotton of his shirt. The race of his heart was like thunder in her ears and at the base of his strong neck she could see the heavy pulse that gave away how fiercely he was aroused. The force of his response sparked off an answering reaction in her own body. Moist heat pooled between her legs, in intimate evidence of the hunger he made her feel so easily.

‘Zarek…’

His name felt strange on her tongue even though she’d used it before in the time since his sudden shocking arrival back in her life. But then it had been just a sound of shock. Now she was using it as a term of endearment, a recognition of something special, the name of her husband.

The man who had had the right to touch her as he was doing now. To stroke his hands over the shape of her body, sliding down her back, fingers tracing the line of her spine, until they splayed out over her hips, curved over the swell of her buttocks to press her even closer to him. His hips cradled her pelvis, the heat and swell of his erection hard against the softness of her feminine mound. Acting purely instinctively, she moved seductively against him, brushing against his arousal and hearing him groan low in his throat.

‘Gineka mou, gineka mou…Ise panemorfi. You are so beautiful,’ Zarek translated his muttered Greek, obviously needing her to understand.

Penny snatched in a shaken breath on a sound that even she was not quite sure whether it was a tremulous laugh, a gasp, or even an uncontrollable sob of response.

‘I know. I know.’ She whispered the words against his lips. ‘You told me, remember?’

They had been some of the first words in his language that he had ever taught her.

Gineka mou…my wife. Ise panemorfi. You are so very beautiful.

And he had spoken them to her on their wedding day. Murmured them to her as they lay in bed. Whispered them in her ear as he took possession of her body for the very first time, took her virginity and made her his completely. And finally he had cried them aloud, in the heat of his passion and the throes of his climax as the thundering orgasm took them both right over the edge of the world, it had seemed, and out to spin in the wilds of uncharted space beyond.

At the time she had had no idea of what sexual fulfilment could possibly mean. She had dreamed and fantasised of course, yearned for Zarek’s kiss, his touch. But she had had no concept of just how powerful a force of need could overwhelm her, the ecstasies that were within her reach when she abandoned herself to the skilled and knowing touch of her forcefully passionate lover. She only knew that she had given herself to him happily and willingly because she loved and had believed herself to be loved. She had thought that that was what made the difference.

Ten months of marriage had taught her all she needed to know. Ten months of marriage had given her time to learn, to discover her own latent sexuality and find herself as a sensual woman. A woman whose needs and desires were as hot and responsive as the man who made love to her each night.

And those needs, those hungers now rushed to the surface in a surge of demanding, stinging need in response to the caresses, the kisses of the man who had taught her everything she knew. Her one, her only lover.

She’d missed these sensations, missed him, and she couldn’t hold back the ardent response that shuddered through her as she gave herself up to them for the first time in so long—far too long.

Zarek’s hands were at her breasts, cupping their soft weight through the fine material of her clothing, making her moan aloud in a sound of hunger that she could just not hold back. It was not enough. She needed more. She needed the full sensation of his caress against her skin and she almost felt that she would have torn open the front of her dress to give him access if he didn’t give her what she wanted.

But at the same time she wanted to use her hands to unfasten his clothing too. To wrench the buttons of his shirt from their fastenings, strip the fine cotton from his powerful torso, expose the muscled lines of his chest and shoulders to her hungry touch, her seeking mouth.

And Zarek was there ahead of her anyway. He needed no urging, no impatient encouragement as he used his mouth to ease the delicate straps of her green dress aside, fastening his teeth on one and tugging it down and over her shoulders. At the same time his hands were busy with the front of the garment, sliding it down over her straining, aching breasts to expose the creamy curves, the pink, tightly budded nipples that curled and hardened even more under the arousing caress of his knowing hands.

‘Oh, Zarek…’

This time his name was a long, sighing cadence of delight as his thumbs swept over the swollen tips. The rough caress sent burning arrows of pure pleasure along every nerve pathway to centre in the most feminine core of her being, where they piled further hunger, built even more need on the yearning that was already driving her to total distraction. She couldn’t take much more of this, couldn’t take any more…the thought was like a beating refrain inside her head, making her feel as if her mind would blow apart if she was subjected to this onslaught of sensation for very much longer. She couldn’t take much more and stay in one piece and yet she knew that if Zarek so much as considered stopping then she would disintegrate, would fall into pieces in a totally different way.

‘I want you…’

She wasn’t sure which one of them said the words first. The truth was that the declaration was torn from both of them in almost the same moment so that the rough-voiced assertion sounded as if there hadn’t been two single people speaking it but one of them as a whole, both male and female proclaiming the overwhelming primal need that had them in its grip.

‘I want you…’ Penny managed again, her low, shaken voice sounding like an echo that had fallen from the very first pronouncement and was now fading away into a broken whisper, almost drowned out by the crash of the waves against the cliffs beyond the open door. ‘I want you.’

‘And you shall have me,’ was Zarek’s ardent response as he lifted her from the floor, swinging her up into his arms and carrying her swiftly from the room.

The hallway and stairs were still in almost total darkness but Zarek seemed to have eyes like a cat so that he didn’t hesitate for a moment but strode swiftly up the stairs, even taking them two at a time at one point, in his haste to reach their bedroom. Kicking open the door, he hurried her across to the bed where he tumbled her down on the covers, coming down beside her in an instant.

‘Ise panemorfi…Ise panemorfi.’

He was muttering the phrase over and over again, punctuating each word with a kiss on a different part of her exposed body. Her face, her shoulders, her arms, down the slopes of her breasts. And then, at last, at long, long last, his mouth closed, hot and hungry, over one tight nipple. Sharp teeth scraped it so gently for a moment, before he suckled hard to relieve the tiny pain, making her arch against him with a low, wordless cry of pleasure.

‘Z-Zarek…’

His name was all she could manage as any thought and the ability to find coherent words were obliterated by the sheer force of the sensual storm that took her. Acting blind, she had managed to pull open his shirt, tug it part way off his shoulders, so that at least her hands could explore the warm, tight contours of his chest, tangle in the rough haze of black body hair that tickled her palms, curled around her fingertips.

Zarek’s hands were dealing with her dress, taking it down further at the front, tugging it up at the skirt to expose her legs, the plain white knickers that were now her only covering apart from the band of bunched material at her waist. And they didn’t last for long under the determined assault of those powerful hands that tore them apart as if they had been made of nothing more substantial than tissue paper.

She had barely time to gasp in shocked excitement when those wicked fingers, gentler now, were stroking through the dark curls he had exposed, finding the moist cleft between her legs, the tiny bud that pulsed with hungry need.

She was so aroused that the first intimate touch of his hand on her had her crying out and throwing her head back against the pillows, her eyes closed so that she could focus on the shock waves of pleasure that rocked her world.

‘I missed this…’ Zarek’s rough mutter close to her ear echoed her own private thoughts and all the time that knowing hand teased and tormented her, building the desire to the point where it almost broke her, then easing back to take her away from the edge just for a moment. ‘And I know you did too. Missed what we had together…’

Penny had no idea where the sudden change of mood came from. The abrupt and totally unexpected switch from blind and greedy passion to a new and very different frame of mind, one that shocked her out of the heated sense of oblivion into which she had fallen. It was as if someone had suddenly opened a window, letting in an icy rush of cold night air that feathered over her exposed skin, cooling her blood and making her shiver in shocked response. As if a cold, cruel voice had spoken out of the blue, and the words she heard inside her head had the force of a slap in the face, jolting her back to bitter reality with a rush.

Missed what we had…

Missed what we had…

And what had they had? Blazing passion, true—a burning physical desire that had blinded her to everything else. But nothing more. There had been nothing between them but sex. At least on Zarek’s part.

And was she going to let him just walk back into her life—and into her bed again—without so much as an argument? When Zarek had left for the Troy she had known that she had never meant her wild and hurting threats that she would not wait for him. She’d told herself that if she stayed, then when he returned she had to stand up to him. That there had to be more to make this marriage work, her love alone wasn’t enough to sustain it, and something was going to have to change.

Two years was a much, much longer wait than the few days she had been expecting, but her resolve needed to still be so much the same. More so if she was to be able to survive as Zarek’s wife ever again.

Nothing would change if she gave in at the first kiss, the first caress.

‘Zarek…’ She tried to speak but it seemed that all strength had drained from her voice and nothing audible came out.

‘Gineka mou…’

Zarek had no such trouble and as he pressed his mouth against her breast again his words were perfectly audible. As was the darkly possessive note in them.

Gineka mou…My wife.

He was staking his claim on her once more, using sex to do so. That was how he’d won her, how he’d held her blind and deceived for the first six months of their marriage. But then she’d learned the truth…

‘No!’

This time she had no trouble in making herself heard. The cry of rejection was loud and clear, echoing round the empty house. In the same moment she tried to push at Zarek, push him away from her. Free herself from his possessive and dangerously enticing hold. His hands still caressed, his mouth pursed to press another kiss against her breast and she could feel the hot, moist touch of his tongue against her skin. Another moment and she would be lost again. Already she could feel the tidal waves of dark desire sweeping over her, threatening to drown out the frantic voice of sanity and self-preservation.

‘I said no!’

With urgent, desperate hands, she pushed at him but he was too big, his powerful body too heavy for her attempts to move him. So throwing caution to the wind she resorted to desperate measures. Reaching out, she grabbed a handful of his black hair—two—twisted her fingers in it, refusing to let herself think about the silky slide of it in her grip, and tugged. Hard.

‘Gamoto!’

She didn’t have to know much Greek to understand that Zarek’s violent explosion of sound was definitely a swear word. She only had to see the way his head came up, his eyes flaring sharply.

‘What the…?’

‘I said no!’

Surprise gave her an advantage she hadn’t expected and with a frantic wriggle, another push, she was free of his confining weight, out of the bed and thudding onto the floor. Panic carried her halfway across the room, almost falling as she struggled to keep her balance and get as far away from him as possible so that he couldn’t reach out and grab her, use his superior strength to hold her, keep her prisoner.

‘What the hell…?’

If Zarek’s eyes had been sparking irritation before, now they were positively incandescent. They burned with fury, turning a look on her that she felt really should have shrivelled her into a pile of dust where she stood, silhouetted against the window, the moonlight lighting her from behind.

‘You…’

Zarek stopped abruptly, clearly fighting to bring himself under control. With an effort he drew in a long harsh breath between his gritted teeth and raked an angry hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his forehead so that the harsh white line of the cruel scar showed up so much more clearly in stark relief.

‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded again, his words falling ragged and raw into the shocked stillness of the night. ‘What sort of game—?’

‘No game!’ Penny put in frantically, suddenly terribly afraid that he might still consider this some risky sort of foreplay, designed to heighten anticipation, increase appetite, and decide to go along with what he thought she wanted.

She had had a narrow enough escape as it was, barely managing to escape before the dark seas of need had closed over her head completely, drowning her for ever. If he touched her again she didn’t know if she had the strength to resist him.

‘No game at all! I’m deadly serious…’

The look he flung at her almost totally destroyed what little was left of her self-control, but, heaving in a desperate breath, she forced herself to face him with as much strength and defiance as she could muster.

‘This has gone far enough—too far. I don’t want it. I don’t want you.’

‘Liar!’

It was low and deadly and this time his eyes burned molten with rejection of every word she’d said.

‘You little liar. You wanted me every bit as much as I wanted you. You said so—’

‘I was wrong…’

‘And your body said so too. It’s still telling the same story.’

A wild, contemptuous gesture in her direction emphasised the angry words.

‘You can’t deny—’

‘Oh, but I can—I will!’

Her voice was pitched too high, too shrill. It sounded too despairing, too desperate to protect herself. Which was hardly surprising when she could barely bring her whirling senses back under any degree of control. Her pulse was still pounding in her veins, sounding like thunder in her head.

‘You would?’

Cynical disbelief rang rough in Zarek’s voice, making her shiver because she knew that she couldn’t refute. He knew that she was lying and so did she.

‘You’d deny this…’

Before she could even realise that he had moved he was at her side in three long strides. Hard hands clamped around her naked shoulders, bruising fingers digging into the skin as he swung her round in front of him. This way she faced the big full-length mirror set into the wardrobe on the opposite side of the room.

‘You’d deny this?’ Zarek repeated savagely. ‘Look at yourself!’

Penny closed her eyes tight. she didn’t want to look—didn’t need to look. She knew what he meant; knew what she would see. But a rough shake of her shoulders forced her to open them again. When she did so the first thing she saw was Zarek’s dark eyes looking over her shoulder, meeting hers in the glass. That was bad enough but the burn of something dangerous in that glittering stare made her drop her gaze and face her reflection squarely, wincing in embarrassment as she did so.

It was worse than she had expected.

The green dress was bunched up around her waist, her wildly disordered clothing exposing her breasts. The creamy flesh still marked with red as the result of his kisses, the abrasion of his late evening stubble against the sensitive skin. Her hair was a wild bird’s nest around her face, tumbling in tangled chaos on to her shoulders. Her nipples were still hard and flushed with pink, faintly gleaming with the moisture left on them by his tormenting mouth.

Her breasts stung where they were now exposed to the air and rapidly cooling from the heated response of just moments before. And between her legs the throbbing need his deliberately provoking caresses had awoken and then stoked with every touch was still a burning torture of demand. One that made her feel it might actually drive her to lose consciousness from the agonising frustration of having to fight it. Just for a second she felt weak enough to sag back against Zarek’s strength and support, but realised in time how appalling a mistake that would be.

‘I mean—I can’t deny that it happened. That I responded.’

It seemed that was not the response Zarek was expecting. The grip on her shoulders eased slightly, becoming loose enough for her to twist away. At least this way she didn’t have to look at herself, or meet his darkly accusing eyes.

‘I’d be a fool to try and do that—wouldn’t I? I mean— look at me…’

No, that was a mistake. Bringing his eyes to her exposed body, reminding him of how she looked, how he had made her look, was not going to help her in this. With a flare of hot embarrassment flooding up into her cheeks, she tugged at the skirt of her dress with one hand, the top of it with another, both movements having very little practical effect.

‘Here…’

To her total shock and consternation, Zarek moved across the room, snagged a blue silky robe from the back of the door, shook it out and held it open.

‘What?’

‘Put it on…’

At the sight of her wary-eyed hesitation, he muttered an imprecation in savage Greek.

‘I am not going to harm you.’

‘I know…’

Whatever else there might have been between them—or not—Penny knew Zarek was not was physically cruel or hurtful.

But these were not normal circumstances. She still had no idea at all what had happened to Zarek while he had been away. The whole time of his absence had started with the violence of the hijacking of the Troy by the pirates. Then there had been the ordeal of being held hostage in the tiny, enclosed boat, the bullet that had been meant for his head and had only by some miracle missed by inches.

And after that? That had all been in the very first week—God knew what had happened in the years afterward.

Oh, but the truth was that even when they had been together, she had never truly known him. She had married him in a rush, in the heat of the biggest crush she had ever had in her life. She had been wildly in love, with the emphasis on wild, but she had never really known the man she had married. That had been proved to her by later developments.

‘I’m sorry—I know you wouldn’t harm me under normal circumstances!’

It was meant to be a peace offering, a verbal olive branch, and although Zarek nodded in acknowledgement it didn’t subdue the blaze in his eyes or ease the tension in his jaw and shoulders.

‘Then cover yourself up and perhaps we’ll be able to talk— normally.’

The bitterly cynical emphasis on the last word made Penny wince, as did the bleakly efficient way he was setting about restoring his appearance to—that word again—normality. The way he buttoned up his shirt, tucked it in where she had pulled it adrift at the waist, smoothed the disordered hair her clutching fingers had tangled, spoke very clearly of his instant withdrawal from her.

What had happened to the hot-blooded, fiercely passionate man who had carried her up to his bed just a short time before? Had he really existed? Or had she been deluding herself? Had that been just another sign of cool calculation on Zarek’s part? Like the way he had decided to marry her in the past.

The way he had chosen her as the potential mother for his heirs.

Chapter Eight

SHIVERINGLY cold in spite of the warmth of the September evening, Penny stumbled across the room to where Zarek still held out the blue silk robe and pushed her arms roughly into the sleeves. It was all she could do not to snatch the robe away from him as he pulled it up around her shoulders, but the ordeal didn’t take long. A moment later she was back over the other side of the room, dragging the sides of the robe together and belting it as tightly as possible around her waist. It was made of soft and thin material, so it was little use as protective armour against him, but at least she was covered and felt more secure that way.

‘You never needed to armour yourself against me.’ Zarek’s drawl stunned her with its hint of dark amusement. Even more so with its uncanny echoing of the word in her own thoughts. ‘And you never used to play games in bed—at least not those sort of games.’

‘I wasn’t playing any sort of game.’

‘No?’

With the blue robe wrapped round her, Penny felt a little more secure and able to face his cold-eyed derision.

‘I wasn’t playing at anything. I know I responded—there was always that spark—OK, more than a spark—of passion between us.’

‘As I recall, you couldn’t keep your hands off me. And vice versa. But then I’m not the one denying the blatantly obvious.’

‘I’m not denying it,’ Penny persisted. ‘I’d be a fool to even try. It’s there, obviously it is—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to act on it.’

Whatever else Zarek had been expecting, it was not that. His dark head went back sharply, his eyes narrowing till they were just gleaming slits in his tanned face.

‘I’m not someone who just jumps into bed with any man in the first moment I see him, no matter how strong the provocation.’

He knew that. She saw the acknowledgement of it in his eyes even though he said nothing in response. She’d come to him a virgin and, in spite of an almost overwhelming longing to change that situation before then, she had been a virgin on their wedding night.

‘I’m not just any man.’

‘But I don’t know you.’

‘I’m your husband!’

It was a sound of fierce exasperation blended with total disbelief of what she was saying. Penny took several steps backwards, away from him, stopping short when she found that her back had come up against the wall. She could see from his face that he thought she had gone completely mad, right before his eyes, and even in her own mind her argument sounded weak and unsubstantial. But then he had got exactly what he wanted from their marriage. She wasn’t yet prepared to open up her heart to him and confess the truth—that he wasn’t the husband she needed.

She had more pride than to admit that until she knew more clearly exactly where she stood.

‘So you keep telling me.’

‘Are you saying you don’t believe I am who I claim to be? What do you want—a DNA test?’

Penny flinched at the malign humour in his dark tones but, pushing her hands into the pockets of the silk gown and curling them into tight, defiant fists, she managed to find the strength to continue in spite of feeling that she was suddenly desperately fighting for her life.

‘N-no—I don’t need that.’

‘Then start acting like you know me. I’m your husband—the man you married—and you damn well know it. And if you need any further confirmation—something we both know—then let me remind you that I am also the man who made sure that you—or at least an image of you—was added to the carving on our bed.’

One long tanned hand pointed back at the dishevelled bed they had just left.

‘Yes—as a mouse!’ Penny flung back at him.

She knew he was referring to the ornately carved wooden headboard that had been one of the wedding gifts at their marriage. Apparently these carvings were a tradition in the Michaelis family and were usually made up of symbols and images to represent the bride and groom, their families and elements from their lives. When the headboard had been given to Zarek and Penny it had all seemed to be about boats and the sea, with very little that related to her personally. When she had protested, Zarek had said that he would make sure she was added. She had come back from her wedding reception expecting at the very least to see a rose or two for her English nationality, or even a soaring oak tree as a play on her maiden name of Wood.

It had taken her a long time to find the tiny field mouse almost hidden in one corner of the ornate bed head.

‘Was that what you thought of me? As a mouse? A creeping, sneaking, terrified little mouse?’

‘Well, certainly not now,’ Zarek replied dryly, strolling over to a chair by the window and dropping down into it. ‘Right now you are—what is it that old film was called?—The Mouse that Roared.’

Was that actually a gleam of humour in the darkness of his eyes? Penny couldn’t be sure and because of that she didn’t dare risk rising to his teasing.

‘You have changed, Penny.’

If only he knew how much.

‘I’ve had to change—had to learn how to stand on my own two feet. One moment I was a new wife, embarking on a very different sort of life in an alien country—with in-laws who weren’t exactly pleased to see me arrive in their home, but with my husband by my side to help me through. The next I was…’

Breaking off, she could only shake her head, twisting the tie belt of her robe round and round her fingers, tying it in knots and then tugging them free again.

‘The next you were what?’ Zarek prompted when she couldn’t find the words to go on. ‘You didn’t seem to be struggling quite as much as you would have me believe. Certainly not with the in-laws.’

‘You think so?’

Outrage had Penny letting drop the narrow belt as she put her hands on her hips and faced him defiantly.

‘You want to try living with your stepmother complaining about every thing every minute of the day. With everything you do being wrong—and everything that dear Jason and Petros do is absolutely perfect.’

It was only when Zarek’s mouth quirked up into an unexpected and totally unguarded smile that she realised just how rigidly he had controlled his features from the time he had arrived until now. Even when he had been intent on seducing her, no trace of true emotion had shown through the tight muscles, only the burn in his eyes giving away any sort of feeling. It had been almost as if he had been determined not to show anything. So now she felt her insides twist, her heart lurch as she recognised the unexpected softening in his face.

‘I did,’ he acknowledged dryly. ‘I lived with that constant carping from the moment my father first brought Hermione home. And then when he married her and moved her and her sons into the house…’

He shook his head slowly, mouth twisting again at the memories.

‘I was glad to escape to boarding school in England.’

‘How old were you?’

Penny knew that her voice sounded slightly breathless because she was struggling with a tightness in her chest that came from the fact that Zarek had actually opened up about something in his past. When they had married he had always insisted that the past was irrelevant. That it was the here and now that mattered.

‘Seven.’

‘So young!’

At seven she had gone to the small village school just down the road. She couldn’t imagine how it would have felt not to be able to go back home at the end of each long, tiring day.

‘But I suppose you had Jason and Petros for company? No?’ she questioned when Zarek shook his head again.

‘They never went away to school. They had private tutors here on the island.’

Catching the sound of her swiftly indrawn breath, he switched on another smile, one that was totally different from before.

‘I much preferred it that way. And if I could have stayed at school through the holidays I would have preferred that too.’

The words were flat, emotionless, but all the same Penny felt that she saw something of the reasons why Zarek had always been so totally set against his stepfamily, his unyielding resolve that they would never get their hands on Odysseus Shipping.

And that perhaps was some part of the explanation why he had been so determined on having a family—an heir—as soon as possible. But it did nothing to ease the sense of being used, seen not as a wife but as a womb to carry that child, which was how she had ended up feeling in their marriage. And that was why she had resorted to taking the contraceptive pill, the discovery of which had sent Zarek incandescent with rage just before he had left for the Troy.

‘And your father?’ she asked and once more Zarek shook his head.

‘He gave Hermione whatever she wanted. He just wanted a quiet life and, to get that, he had to let her run things the way she wanted them.’

‘Then you’ll understand why I was ready to get out of here. You walk back in and assume that I’ve just been sitting here quietly, waiting for you to return. Perhaps doing a little embroidery to pass the time.’

The realisation that she had in fact been doing something like that made her heart skip a little uneven beat. She didn’t really expect an answer to her question and she didn’t get one. Instead Zarek continued to sit as motionless as a statue, even his eyes hooded and opaque.

‘How do you know that I hadn’t decided I’d had enough long ago and divorced you?’

‘On what grounds?’ Cool and swift, it had a bite as lethal as that of a striking snake.

‘Desertion?’ she parried sharply, refusing to let herself think of the way that he had never meant his marriage vows. Never intended to love and cherish. ‘You haven’t been in contact for two years.’

Something had changed. She couldn’t tell quite what it was, only that something in the atmosphere in the room was suddenly very different. Zarek hadn’t moved or spoken but everything about his long, still body communicated a new and very different form of tension.

‘I believe that we have already established that I was hardly in a position to phone you or to send many text messages.’

The dry, slightly mocking words only added to the already strung-out way she was feeling, knocking her over from irritation into full-blown exasperation.

‘When you were captured originally, perhaps! But you got away from them. That same week, if I have it right. And after that? There are two whole years with not a word, not a message. Nothing to let me know that you were still alive.’

‘Perhaps that’s because I didn’t know that I was.’

‘What…? What do you mean? That doesn’t make sense.’

But even as she asked the questions Zarek moved at last, getting to his feet and prowling restlessly across the room to stand by the window, staring out at the now moonlit waves. And as she saw his hand come up to rub at his head, at the ugly scar that marked his temple, she felt her heart thud just once, hard and cruel, at the reminder that he had been literally just inches away from death. How long it would have taken him to recover from that she had no idea.

‘I mean that for a long time even I did not know who I was,’ Zarek said, still not looking at her so that he didn’t see the way that her hands had gone to her mouth as if she could wish her foolish words back. ‘When I hit the sea I had already blacked out. I have no idea how long I drifted. I was just lucky that I was eventually picked up by a man in his yacht. He took me back to his home in Malta.’

‘Malta!’

Penny felt she might choke on the word. Was that where Zarek had been all this time? When she had been imagining all sorts of horrors, the thought of his lifeless body tossed into the ocean with a bullet in his head, he had been on that beautiful Mediterranean island.

So near and yet so far.

And what had he been doing all that time while she had been left stranded, neither a wife nor a widow? Not knowing whether to mourn him or to wait for him.

‘Don’t they have phones in Malta? Writing paper? Envelopes? A post office?’

That brought Zarek swinging round to face her, a faintly wry smile twisting his beautiful mouth in his shadowed face. That smile twisted a knife in her insides with its memory of how he had once looked, in the early days of their marriage, when he had been smiling at something she had said.

‘I wouldn’t have known who to contact. At the start, when I was unconscious and ill from exposure, I had no identification on me, no way of anyone knowing who I was. And when I did come round, I was no help.’

‘Oh, come on…’ Penny began, but then the full impact of just what he had said hit home to her and the words faded into nothing as her mind reeled in shock. ‘Do you mean…? Are you saying…?’

‘I’m saying I had amnesia—the wound on my head—the shock—exposure—any of it could all have caused it or added to the effect—but I couldn’t remember a damn thing. I knew I was alive—I was male and…’

He threw up his hands in a gesture expressing resigned acceptance of defeat.

‘That was it. So I couldn’t help anyone by telling them who I was or who might be looking for me. I didn’t know if I was married or single. If I had any family and where they were. I spoke English—that was what my rescuer spoke to me—but not Maltese. I also spoke French, Greek, Italian—so in which of those countries did I look for any clues?’

‘Amnesia…’

Penny could only echo the word in a sense of shock and bewilderment. It was so obvious now that she knew. It explained so many things, which was a relief.

And it also took away that feeling of outraged injustice at the thought that she had been left abandoned, suffering the torment of believing him dead when all the time he had been alive and well and living in Malta.

Suddenly it was as if that sense of outrage had been all that had been holding her upright. As if the removal of the indignation had been like tugging a rug from under her feet, throwing her totally off balance. Was it possible that her own lingering anger and hurt at all that she had found out about him just before he had left for the Troy had coloured her judgement, making her see hurts where none was intended, cruelty where he had never planned any?

But all the same he had come back to the island incognito, if not in disguise. He had come in secret, concealed behind the big beard, the long hair. And he had set himself to watch her, to observe what she was doing. For how long? Just how many days—weeks—had he been there?

‘Wh-when did you start to remember things?’

‘Only slowly. I’m not sure if I fully recall everything yet. For perhaps the first year I didn’t know anything. But occasionally I would have flashes of memory or dreams—’

He broke off abruptly as an unexpected sound interrupted his words. A sound that made Penny blush and made a rare, stunningly genuine smile of real amusement cross his face.

‘What was that?’

‘What?’ It was an attempt at distraction, one that didn’t work as her empty stomach growled again, more loudly this time.

‘Are you hungry?’

It was so long—too long—since she’d seen that teasing smile on his face. And having seen it resurface, she felt she would do anything to keep it there. There had once been a time when they were happy together, even if, underneath it all, Zarek had only been pretending.

‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘No—a lot…’

It was the first time she had sounded genuine, unconstrained, since she had leapt from the bed as if all the hounds of hell were after her, Zarek reflected. The first time she had sounded at all like the woman—little more than a girl—that he had married. And she pressed her hands to her belly as if somehow she could silence the growl of hunger that sounded once again.

‘Me too, now,’ he admitted, finding he could say it to this softer, younger-looking Penny. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’

‘Neither have I.’

She said it with a sort of astonishment that made him smile at her obvious sudden self-discovery.

‘I didn’t manage anything this morning because—the meeting was on my mind. And since then, well…’she shrugged, her expression becoming almost shame-faced ‘…things rather intervened.’

‘They did. For me too.’

It seemed ridiculous to be having this rather inane conversation about food in the darkness of the late evening in the silence of the big house. Especially in the heated atmosphere that had been boiling between them earlier. But privately Zarek found that he was admitting he was actually rather enjoying it. It was a relief to have a slight lull in the tension and abrasive aggression of the rest of the day. The constant need to keep his focus on what was being said and how it was being expressed. After his investigations of the past weeks, the sense of always looking over his shoulder had become so much a part of his life that he was glad to let it drop for a while.

And not just in the time since he had rediscovered who he was. The worst thing about getting his memory back had been recalling the way that had been a part of his life for so long. Knowing that Hermione and her poisonous sons were always waiting and watching, just hoping for a chance to stab him in the back. They had tried their damnedest when his father had been alive, putting any barrier they could between him and his parent, and in the two years since Darius had died had redoubled their campaigns in the hope of moving in on Odysseus Shipping.

And they had almost succeeded. If he had not walked in on the board meeting when he had…

But exactly what part had Penny played in that?

‘Let me get you something.’

‘There’s no need…’

‘Well, who else is going to do it, seeing as you’ve given the whole staff the night off?’

She made the comment sound light but he could still read the tension in her eyes, the faint quiver of her bottom lip. She obviously felt vulnerable and exposed alone in the house with him like this. Which was exactly how he wanted it. How he had planned it all the way along. Until he knew exactly what his lovely wife had wanted…

She had declared to his face that she and Jason were not lovers—had not been lovers. And he found that he believed her. How could she respond to him as she had just done if she had ever been intimate with his stepbrother? She had been as much at the mercy of frustrated hunger as he had felt after two long years away.

Which meant that the passion they had just shared still blazed between the two of them, though she seemed determined to deny it. For the life of him, he couldn’t see why. Unless she had something else to hide.

And she had been good at hiding things. A sudden flash of memory reminded him of the way, the last time he had been in this room, he had planned to leave a gift, some of her favourite perfume, in a drawer in her dressing table for her to find while he was away. Instead, the perfume had ended up in the waste-paper basket, thrown there in a dark fury when he had found the packs of contraceptive pills…

For a moment the memory of the bitter disillusionment that had savaged him then came back to slash at him. He had married Penny because she had driven him half mad with wanting but also because she had seemed different. Because she had appeared to offer something so unlike the poisonous atmosphere of lies and greed. Because she had seemed innocent and open. So when he had found that she had been deceiving him all along, he had vowed that never again would he let a beautiful face, an innocent air, mislead him.

But, oh, dear heaven, she was lovely.

The sensual thought sprang from nowhere into his mind, knocking him sideways mentally, and very nearly physically. It had such a force that he actually almost staggered under it, taking a single involuntary step to the side to steady himself as he did so. His body was still burning with the heated response that had seared through him such a short time before. He might have himself back under control but the hungry ache just would not go away and it left a throbbing bruised sensation along every nerve that still came close to making him want to groan aloud.

Now he knew why he had never been able to touch another woman in the time he had been away. Never had the inclination even though there had been plenty of opportunity, plenty of chances on offer to him. But even when he had still been struggling with his memory, when he hadn’t yet recalled just who he was, some inner instinct had created a restraint that had held him back from taking advantage of any of them.

And, looking back, he knew that the only women who had ever interested him had shared his wife’s sleek dark hair, her tall, willowy build and huge deep blue eyes. The brutal kick of sexual hunger that thought brought made him rush to force his mind onto other, less provocative matters.

‘A meal would be welcome. As would a shower.’

He even managed a smile. It wouldn’t hurt to be civilised for a while, even if the feelings he was burying behind the smile were very far from civilised and only just barely under control.

‘The plumbing at the cottage was very much on the primitive side.’

The rush of relief into her eyes was one that set his teeth on edge. Did she really think that she had got away with it after all? That everything was now sweetness and light between them? If she did then she had no real recollection of the man her husband was. She had lost out on a lot when he had come home, her plans to leave and start a new life ruined by the fact that she could not have her husband declared dead as she had planned. He had rushed into a relationship with her once before and lived to rue the day he had met her. He was not going to let himself get trapped that way again. But he could afford to take things rather more slowly for a while.

‘It must have been. Well, you can take this bathroom while I…’

Belatedly she realised how she sounded, the gracious lady-of-the-manor act she was putting on with a welcome guest. But he was no guest in his own home and whether he was actually welcome was something he had yet to finally prove one way or another. That burned in his gut so viciously that he knew it must show in his eyes, in the uncontrolled glare he turned on her suddenly smiling face.

It had her stumbling over her words, coming to an abrupt halt and snatching in a raw, ragged breath before she made herself go on in a very different tone altogether.

‘I’m sorry—I mean—I’ll use one of the other bathrooms. Of course.’

‘Of course,’ Zarek echoed dryly.

In the past they had shared many showers in the big luxurious wetroom that formed the en suite bathroom to the master suite in the villa. Long, indulgent showers that had often ended up with them back in bed at least once before they ever decided it was time to dry off and get dressed again. Now she looked as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the room and…

Or did she? OK, she looked edgy as hell, already moving a careful step and then another towards the door. But there was a darkness in her eyes that didn’t fit with the image of careful retreat. It was the sort of darkness that he suspected was still in his eyes too, making his pupils huge, swallowing up all the colour of his irises. It was the darkness of awareness, of arousal. And just to see it made his throat ache with the effort of holding back everything he wanted to say.

The way her arms were folded tight under the soft swell of her breasts, pushing them up and forward, sent his blood pulsing hot and heavy through his head. And her hands curved to cup their softness in a way that made the bite of sensual jealousy a torment he could barely keep under control. He wanted to stride forward, to tug her arms away from their defensive position, hold them prisoner high above her head, keep them there while he plundered her mouth with his, tasting her sweetness, taking her lips’ hungry response into his own.

The blue robe might be fastened tight around her slender frame in a way that spoke of determined defence, of protection from his touch, from his kisses, but it was no defence against his eyes or his thoughts. He could still see the outline of the rucked up dress, the pleats of cotton at her hips and waist. But below that the soft silk clung lovingly to the fine curves of her thighs, the shadowed place between them, reminding him, sharp as a cruel knife, of how close he had been to being able to bury himself in her and find the heaven of release he sought. The release of oblivion in ecstasy.

It was a cruel irony that he had only just come to remember his life and there was so much of it that he wished he had never recalled. An even crueller stab of fate was the fact that Penny had been the first memory to return. Thoughts of her had been there in flashes, haunting his dreams, just out of reach, even before he had known who she was. It had been the need to find her that had driven him to try harder and harder to remember.

And then, when he had recalled just who she was, he had felt that burn of disillusionment all over again.

‘If you need a change of clothes…’ Penny’s voice broke into his thoughts.

‘It’s all right…’

This was something he had already decided he would have to concede on. He had been away for two years. The reports had had him dead. Anyone—everyone—would have thought that it was a crazy thing to do to hang onto his clothes for that long. After his mother had died, even his own father had had to acknowledge that, adore her as he had, he couldn’t keep his first wife’s wardrobe when she had been gone six months.

‘I understand if there’s nothing here.’

‘No—’

She had crossed to the wardrobe that had always been his, was fumbling with the handle. Pulling it open, she stood back so that he could see. The sight of every item of his clothing still hanging neat and straight just as he had left them over two years before had an effect like a punch to his guts, driving all the breath from his body.

‘You kept them…’

But that had her lowering her face as if in embarrassment, brushing off his comment with an awkward little flick of her head.

‘You know where the towels are…’

She almost ran from the room, leaving him staring after her, his mind see-sawing sickeningly as he tried to adjust to what had just happened.

She had kept all his clothes. In spite of the fact that she had been told he was dead, she had kept all his clothes as carefully and as well cared for as she had done when he was there. She hadn’t cleared them out or packed them away, but had kept them here, in their bedroom. The room in which she still slept.

So what did that mean?

But he had seen her with Jason that first night. Seen the way she had run into his stepbrother’s arms. And heard her…

‘I want to get away from here, start living again. I’m tired of treading water…I can’t inherit unless we have Zarek’s death declared and legalised. So let’s do that. Let’s put it all behind us…’

And then, just as he reached the door this morning, that final, dismissive toast she had made, obviously with Jason in mind.

‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’

So how did that square with the same woman who had kept every item of clothing he possessed for the time he had been gone? Did this mean that Penny had actually been hoping that he would come back?

In which case, why the hell had she bolted from his bed as if his touch appalled her?

Shaking his head, Zarek headed for the bathroom, discarding his clothes as he went.

He had taken his time about coming back, had sent a private investigator to check out the situation here on Ithaca first, before he had even made the journey from Malta and then moved onto the island incognito because he had wanted to watch and see for himself. Because, face it, the return of his memory had brought with it bad memories as well as good. Memories of feelings that the intervening two years could only have added to, made worse, dug in deeper.

And the woman he had come back to—the wife he had found waiting for him—was not at all what he had expected. For a start, he had never expected her to be here at all.

Turning on the shower full force, Zarek stepped under the rush of water and let it beat down on his head.

In fact there was just one way in which she was just the same as when he had left. And that was that she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. The woman who only had to walk into a room to crank the heat up by one hundred degrees. Whose smile was an enticement to seduction. The woman who could make him burn with heat and hunger with one look, one word in her beautiful voice falling from her sexy soft lips.

She was a temptation strong enough to distract him from the way he really needed to be thinking, the things he had wanted to find out before he took up his old way of life again. His marriage was going to be so very different this time, or it was not going to exist at all.

But even as he told himself that the all-too-familiar heavy tightening in his groin warned him of what just thinking about Penny could do to him. The sort of reaction that stopped him thinking, drove the blood away from his brain and down to other, much more basic parts of his body. He’d already almost been caught that way once tonight. And thinking, not responding, was what he needed to do.

With a heavy sigh he reached up and turned the control on the shower to cold and forced himself to stand under it for far, far longer than he needed to get clean.

Chapter Nine

‘THAT was wonderful, thank you.’

Zarek pushed his plate away from him, reached for his wine glass, and leaned back in his chair to sip at the goldentoned liquid with a sigh of contentment.

‘It’s so long since I tasted baked feta with peppers that I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed it. And baklava…I didn’t know that you knew how to make it.’

‘Marta taught me,’ Penny said, referring to the cook who usually ran the villa’s kitchen with a rule of iron. ‘I’ve been having cooking lessons with her—for something to do.’

She didn’t add that she had specially learned how to make the simple dish and others like it because her instructor had told her that they were Zarek’s favourites. She’d already given far too much away by revealing that she had kept all his clothes in the wardrobes since the time of his disappearance.

‘So that’s how you spent your time.’

‘Part of it anyway.’

Once again Penny couldn’t look at him but fixed her eyes on the dark line of the horizon. Even after ten o’clock at night it was still warm enough to sit out on the terrace beside the swimming pool and that was where she had served the quick and simple meal she had put together for them after she had emerged from the shower.

She hadn’t stayed under the water for long. Once safely in the sanctuary of a bathroom belonging to another bedroom, at the far end of the landing from the master suite she and Zarek had once shared, she had been quick to strip off the blue silk robe, tossing it onto the bed and then freezing in horror at the sight that confronted her in another full-length mirror.

‘Oh, my…No!’

Had she really looked such a shocking mess? With her dress dragged down and pushed up, actually torn in one place, she looked more like the victim of an assault than a passionate lover happy to give herself to the man she adored. Her underwear had disappeared, lost who knew where, and her hair was a complete bird’s nest falling in wild and knotted disarray around a shock-pale face. Even the untypical light traces of make-up that the thought of today’s dreadful board meeting had driven her to put on were smudged and smeared around her eyes, the soft tinted lipstick totally kissed off.

‘No!’

Penny put her hands to her face, covering her eyes to block out the sight, then almost immediately snatched them away again. She couldn’t bear to stay like this a moment longer. A long, hot shower would make her feel better, restore some sense of balance, repair her damaged self-esteem.

At least that was what she hoped for. What actually happened was that as she removed and discarded what little was left of her clothing all she could think of was the way that it had felt to have Zarek’s urgent hands on her dress, snatching aside the straps, dragging her skirt up high to expose her legs…She could almost still feel his touch everywhere on her skin, on her face, her breasts…her thighs. Somehow those hungry fingers had seared a path over her flesh, one that would not vanish even when she was many metres away from him, separated from his presence by the thickness of several walls.

Even diving under the shower and turning it on full force hadn’t helped. The heat of the water had followed the path of the heated touch, trickling between her breasts, sliding down to the dark curls between her legs, along her thighs…Making her freeze under the rush of the water as she felt it pound down on her head, seeming to thump out the syllables of Zarek’s name against her skull. Over and over again without a pause.

Za—rek. Za—rek…Until she could bear it no longer but lurched out of the shower, water stinging her eyes. She had no way of knowing if it was the flow from the shower or the tears that threatened, only that she was half blinded by it, groping roughly for her towel before snatching from the rail at it and rubbing her face hard.

How was it possible that she had gone into the shower to feel clean, to wash away the scent of Zarek’s body on hers, the feel of his touch, and yet now she felt worse than before, tainted, marked for ever? It was as if his caresses had been a brand, his kisses scarring her for life. She would never be free of the darkly sensual hold he had over her, the fetters of sexuality that had bound her to him from the very first.

And was that all that it was? she couldn’t help wondering now. She had fallen head over heels for Zarek when she had first met him, and she had truly believed herself in love at first sight. But had it been anything more than a hugely powerful crush, the first stirrings of her female sexuality? She hadn’t known what sexual desire really meant and so she had only thought of the way she had felt for Zarek in terms of love and giving her heart.

But her time married to this man had taught her that he, at least, was capable of claiming her as his in purely sexual terms. Of wanting her only for the wild and white hot passion that flared between them every time they touched. Every time they kissed. He had wooed her, won her, seduced her, married her, made her his, without a single trace of love for her. He had wanted her in his bed, to warm and satisfy his body and to create an heir for the company that was really the only thing that touched his heart, or what part of a heart he actually possessed.

‘I married you for a child!’ The last angry words he had flung at her before leaving for the Troy came back to haunt her once more. ‘If you want this marriage to continue then that is non-negotiable.’

A sensation like the trickle of something slow and icy slipped down her spine at the thought. And that sense of creeping cold was made all the worse by staring out at the moonlit sea and remembering all those other nights she had sat out here on the terrace, doing exactly that. Then she had had to fight so hard against the nightmarish thoughts of Zarek’s lifeless body tossed overboard from the pirates’ boat and left abandoned in the water. Just the memory she had of those thoughts made Penny shiver convulsively in spite of the warmth.

‘Cold?’ Zarek shocked her by the speed and focus with which he reacted, turning his attention—the attention she had believed was fixed on the view before them—onto her in the space of a heartbeat.

‘No—not really,’ she managed on an awkward laugh. ‘Someone just walked over my grave.’

Then, when his dark brows drew together in a frown of confusion and incomprehension, she had to force herself to continue and explain the superstition.

‘When you get a shiver like that it’s said to mean that someone somewhere is walking over the spot where you’re going to be buried. It’s just an old wives’ tale. I think the scientific explanation is that the shiver is a response to the release of stress hormones.’

She was rambling and betraying her nervousness by doing so. She could see it in the darkness of Zarek’s eyes, shadowed in the flickering light of the candles she had set on the table around them. He was back to watching her too closely for comfort and the steady, intent observation he subjected her to made her shift uncomfortably in her seat.

‘And are you?’ he asked at last, lifting his wine glass to his lips again but not swallowing as he studied her over the top of it. ‘Stressed, I mean.’

‘Of course I am!’

This at least she could answer with total honesty, for a moment or two anyway. She still found it almost impossible to believe that he had come back from the dead. That he was here, sitting with her in the warmth of the evening with the sound of his breathing in her ear, the scent of his skin in her nostrils.

‘Why wouldn’t I be stressed? I started this morning as I have done for the past two years, thinking that I was alone—a widow—that my husband was dead. And then suddenly the door opens and there you are—large as life and twice as ugly. And—and…’

‘And?’ Zarek prompted when she stumbled over the words, unable to go on. Setting his glass down on the wooden table top, he leaned towards her, elbows resting on his thighs, chin supported on his hands. ‘And?’

He was too close. Too dangerously close in every way. She could see the way that his chest rose and fell with each breath, the shadow at his jaw line of the growth of that black beard even though he must have shaved only that morning. This close, and looking into his eyes, she could see how they were not totally dark but the deep brown was flecked with gold, like sparks flying up from a fire. And the scent of his body was like some spice in her nostrils, making her blood heat, her heart pound.

‘And now my life is upside down and inside out and I don’t know where I’m going or who I am.’

‘My wife.’

He inserted the words with smooth precision, like sliding the point of a stiletto into her ribs, so smoothly and easily that at first, at the start, she didn’t actually feel any of the pain it was inflicting on her.

‘You are my wife.’

It was so calm, so controlled, so totally sure that that was all that mattered. And the absolute certainty, the note of dark possessiveness, made her skin chill once more, the tiny hairs at the back of her neck lifting in tension as she managed to control another of those shivers this time.

‘Nothing has changed.’

‘Oh, but it has!’

Talking with Zarek now was rather like skating over a deep, murky pond that was just covered with thin ice. She was sliding every which way, unable to quite get her grip on what was really happening, while all the time being aware that under the ice were the coldest, blackest, most dangerous depths, just waiting for the moment that her foot went through the surface and she tumbled in. Then she had the desperate feeling that the waters would close right over her and the icy cold would steal all her breath away and leave her to drown.

‘Things have to have changed. It’s been two years since I saw you—a lot has to have happened in that time. Two years in which I don’t know where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what has happened to you.’

‘I could say the same for you.’

Was that darker note that threaded his voice the result of the same sort of careful control she was imposing on herself, the fight not to let the discussion tumble over into the anger that had destroyed them the last time? Or was it one of warning, telling her she was treading on treacherous ground?

‘Oh, I’ve just been here, all the time. But you…’

‘All you have to do is ask.’

Could it really be that simple? But life with Zarek had never been simple anyway. So why should it start being so now, with the weight of the complications of his disappearance added to the way things had been before?

Ask. OK, then…

‘You said you had amnesia. You didn’t remember anything?’

‘Not a thing.’

Was she imagining things or had he actually leaned just a little closer? She was drowning in his eyes, her senses seduced by the warm, clean scent of him. But she couldn’t allow herself to be enticed that way. That was how she had fallen into love—her juvenile childish love—with him at the beginning. She had to hold onto her heart until she knew if it was safe to give it ever again.

‘So what was it that started to bring your memory back to you?’

He took just a moment too long before answering her. The space of perhaps two heartbeats instead of one in a way that set her even more on edge. But his answer when it came was calm, and apparently open enough.

‘Believe it or not, it was those damn pirates who helped to break down the walls my mind had built around it. I couldn’t believe that I was having images of an attack, hearing the word pirates in the twenty-first century. And so I started to look things up, track down stories about pirates in the press, on the Internet. At first it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.’

Needing to break the almost mesmeric hold his closeness had on her, Penny forced herself to sit back, reach for her glass.

‘But then one name kept going round and round in my head—the Troy…Careful.’

The last word was a warning as Penny swallowed too quickly, too awkwardly, and almost choked on her wine. She had been hoping for another name—her own name. The name of his wife. But no, the first things that had come back to him were connected with his company.

‘You never could handle retsina,’ Zarek said in mild amusement. ‘In fact I always thought you hated it.’

‘It wasn’t to my taste at first,’ Penny acknowledged. ‘But I have to admit that I’ve grown to like it better.’

‘Another of those things that have changed while I’ve been away.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t expect everything to just come to a halt—stay there, frozen in ice because you weren’t here.’

Pure nerves had pushed the wild words from her tongue. And she knew what was twisting those nerves into painful knots so that she couldn’t think straight.

‘Of course not.’

‘Of course not!’ Penny snapped. ‘We couldn’t just give up on things. Life had to go on. For everyone. I mean, even…’

‘Even…?’ Zarek prompted when her throat closed up and she couldn’t finish the name.

Penny reached for her glass again, took another fortifying sip of wine. Nerves had made her slip on the words, but suddenly she was determined to have this out. Time it was out in the open and faced.

‘Even for bloody Odysseus Shipping.’

Oh, she had his attention now. If she thought that nearly black gaze had been focused before, now it had the burn of a laser so that she expected her skin to actually scorch where it rested.

It was too much to see the sudden change from stillness to attention. To watch his face change, the sudden light of interest in his eyes.

But, “Bloody Odysseus Shipping?” was all he said and his tone was quite mild, enquiring. ‘You were desperate to get rid of it,’ he added in the same sort of tone.

‘Is that so impossible to believe?’

Pushing her chair back with an ugly scraping sound on the stone-tiled terrace, she got hastily to her feet and reached for his empty plate. Stacking it on top of her own, she winced inwardly at the crashing sound it made. She wasn’t deliberately clattering them together, it just sounded that way. Her hands weren’t as steady as she wanted and she cursed how much they gave away of her inner turmoil.

‘I mean, I’m no hot-shot businesswoman. I’m a secretary—a very junior secretary at that. And when a company loses its chairman to sudden death—an accident at sea—and there is no one ready and trained to take his place, then apparently the values of shares waver—people wonder about their connections with the firm. Didn’t you hear? I mean, I assume that you did a lot of investigating, checking on facts—looking into things before you came back to Ithaca. Just so that you knew what was going on.’

She actually paused and looked up at him, waiting for his answer. Not that she needed it. She knew already that he must have checked out all the details of what was happening on Ithaca before he had even thought about coming home. That was the sort of man Zarek was. He never made a move until he had all the facts.

‘You didn’t know!’ she exclaimed as his head went back in shock. ‘You really didn’t find out about that?’

‘I knew.’

Zarek’s confirmation was a low growl as she made herself turn and head towards the kitchen with the dirty plates. She wouldn’t allow herself to look back but she heard the pad of his bare feet on the tiles as he came up behind her.

At least the simple task of loading the plates and cutlery into the dishwasher meant that she could keep her back to him, focusing hard on the job in hand. But all the same she felt as if she could sense the tension coming off him in waves and directed at the back of her head, so sharp that it almost penetrated her skull.

‘Then you’ll understand why it felt like a millstone round my neck. And all the time I had Hermione and your stepbrothers on my back too. Telling me that nothing I did was right. That the company needed a man in control. So, yes, in the end I gave in. I’d had enough. I was going to walk away, go back to England. Start my life over again. Yes, I know you never wanted them to have the company, but what else could I do? It’s not as if I had a child whose inheritance I had to fight for too.’

Too late she realised just what she had said, the minefield into which she had wandered. And the silence from behind her was so deep, so intense that she could practically feel it closing around her, sealing off her lungs, taking the breath from her body.

‘No, you made sure of that.’

His voice had turned to ice. Icy shards that seemed to slash at her exposed and vulnerable skin.

‘You knew I wanted a child. You led me to believe you wanted one too.’

Washing-powder tablet…rinse aid…Penny forced herself to focus on the mundane details to stop her mind going into meltdown as she hunted for an answer.

‘I didn’t want your heir.’

She could answer him this way while she had her back to him and he couldn’t see her face. It meant that she couldn’t see his expression but that hardly mattered. It was much more important that he didn’t know her answer for the half lie that it was. She hadn’t wanted only to provide him with an heir, but the thought of a small baby with Zarek’s black hair and deep brown eyes almost destroyed her. Her eyes were blurred with focusing on the front of the dishwasher so fiercely rather than let any tears form.

‘But that was why we married—why I became your husband.’

Slamming the dishwasher door shut—the noise and force deliberate this time—Penny pushed herself up from the squatting position and pressed the start button fiercely.

He was leaning against the worktop, arms folded across his powerful chest, but the tension in the long body showed the position to be anything other than the relaxed one it appeared to be.

‘But there’s so much more to being a husband than just declaring it.’

Did something change in those eyes or was it just the flicker of the candlelight throwing a different set of shadows into them?

‘What was missing? Was I cruel to you? Did I treat you badly—not give you everything you wanted?’

‘You gave everything I could have dreamed of.’

If they were talking about material things. But from the moment that she had known how much she needed his love, then marriage, his beautiful homes, all the riches he had were as nothing compared with what she wanted most in all the world. And she had more pride than to beg for something he couldn’t give her.

‘And yet you didn’t want to stay—you didn’t want a child.’

Just as she couldn’t read his face, she couldn’t interpret his tone.

‘We didn’t have a marriage to bring a child into. A child has the right to have two parents who are happy to be together, and not just because of the life they had created between them.’

Two parents who loved each other.

She’d finished drying her hands on a towel and now she tossed it down onto the marble surface beside the sink. She’d prevaricated for as long as she could, avoided meeting his eyes until she could do so no longer. If she didn’t turn now and look him in the face it would be so obvious that she was avoiding him that she would not be able to dodge it any more.

‘I was wrong to marry you. My parents married just because I was on the way and it was a terrible mistake. They tore each other apart—and I was always caught in the crossfire.’

‘We didn’t even get that far,’ Zarek murmured dryly.

‘No—because I realised I should never have said yes in the first place.’

‘So why did you stay when I was declared missing?’

‘Someone had to hold things together. I discovered that you had left everything to me in your will. And there was always just the possibility that you might come back.’

‘And now that I am back?’

‘I really don’t know.’

Simple honesty was all that she was capable of. In spite of the sleep she had had earlier that day she was suddenly desperately tired. It was as if the tension that had been holding her upright and keeping her going in all the time that Zarek had been away had now totally evaporated, taking with it her spirit and the strength of her spine. Her mind seemed hazed, her thoughts muddied.

‘You don’t know why you married me?’ Zarek questioned sharply, throwing her even further off balance.

How was she expected to answer that without bringing the L word into things? Right now, attack seemed the better form of defence.

‘Don’t you think it’s a little late to be asking that now? It never occurred to you to ask it when you were about to put a ring on my finger? Well, no, I don’t suppose you did. Because for you it was all cut and dried, wasn’t it? A cold-blooded business deal. You wanted me and you wanted a child. Marry me and you’d get both.’

Zarek shifted his weight from one hip to the other, but apart from that his expression remained unchanging.

‘Not all such deals are cold-blooded.’

‘No, of course not—we were pretty hot-blooded most of the time. And that gives you the reason why I married you. Great sex.’

When he dared to frown as if he needed more explanation she lost her grip on her tongue and really let him have it.

‘I was twenty-two. You’re pretty gorgeous—and rich. What’s not to like?’

‘Yes, there was that.’

‘There definitely was.’

Somehow the defiance she dredged up from deep inside her made it easier than she thought to face that dark-eyed gaze.

‘But while you’ve been away I’ve had time to grow up. And…and…’

Watching him wipe the back of his hand across his face, she found she was stumbling over her words. If she was tired then he looked drained, and she recognised the way that he pressed his fingers to the scar at his temple as a warning sign.

Looking at him more closely, Penny saw the shadows under his eyes, the faint cloudiness in the polished jet gaze. She thought that she knew how he felt. It was now well past midnight and she felt as if she had lived through several lifetimes in less than twenty-four hours. Right now she felt as if she was losing her grip on being able to control where the conversation went and what, underneath it all, it might mean.

‘But I don’t think now is the time to discuss it. It’s been a long day. And we’ve both had so much adjusting to do since you came back.’

Dear heaven, was it only this morning? Just a few short hours before and yet she felt as if he had been back for ever. As if he had never been away. But he had been missing and that had had such an effect on her life that she had no idea quite when she would feel as if her existence was back under her control once more.

‘We do need to talk more. But not tonight. It’s late—and I’m—I’m tired.’

She accompanied the words with a stretch and a yawn to emphasise them but the truth was that she didn’t have to put on any sort of a show. Now that she thought about it she was worn out, aching with tiredness right through to the bone, her head spinning nauseously.

Or perhaps it was the result of the stress of the day. A long day of trying to adjust to all that had happened, a day of shocks and bewilderment that had kept her feeling raw and on edge with every hour that passed.

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