A Stormy Greek Marriage (6 page)

A couple of delicious mouthfuls into the dessert she was savouring, Billie discovered that Alexei’s gaze was positively welded to her. ‘What?’ she prompted, her face warming.

‘You’re a very sensual woman,
mali mou.
’

Lashes veiling her gaze, Billie shook her head in instinctive disagreement. ‘I don’t think so.’

Brilliant golden eyes glittering, Alexei sprang upright. ‘But you just don’t see yourself the way I do.’ He reached down to tug her up out of her seat and bent his handsome dark head to kiss her.

Her heart was thumping so loudly she was afraid he would hear it and guess that she was a total pushover when he got that close to her. The familiar scent of him sent shivers down her spine and warmed the hollow in her tummy, leading to a shower of sharp spiky little longings in an infinitely more private place.

‘I was enjoying the dessert,’ she dared before his sensual mouth could connect with hers.

Eyes gleaming, Alexei threw back his a head and laughed with appreciation. ‘Is this your idea of playing it cool?’

‘Why would I act like that?’ she traded.

‘Maybe because you know how much I want you,’ Alexei husked, rubbing his cheek against the extended length of her throat as he bent her head back. ‘But it won’t work because your heart is racing and I can feel you trembling against me,
mali mou.
’

As his lean, muscular body shifted against her, she registered the forceful swell of his erection and the heat of her desire intensified. She turned her face under his and found his mouth hungrily for herself and didn’t begrudge the male satisfaction in the growling laugh that vibrated low in his throat. Suddenly all the seething emotion of the past weeks was welling up inside her with explosive effect and the glory of his mouth on hers set her alight.

Stepping back from her, Alexei closed a lean hand over hers and walked her out of the dining room. Her troubled thoughts warred against her intentions. Yet in spite of everything that had passed between them, Alexei had come home to her and he still wanted her. Wasn’t that some cause for celebration? Didn’t that prove that she had more of a hold on her bridegroom than she had dared to hope? But how could he simply ignore the fact that he believed she was trying to palm off some other man’s child on him? She just wanted him with her…
but she wanted her son too.
She also felt guilty that she had dressed up and dined in state while Nicky was being put to bed for the night by his great-aunt.

‘Shouldn’t we be talking about more serious stuff?’ she asked Alexei abruptly.

As if jolted by a sudden flash of lightning, Alexei swung round to rest silencing fingers against her soft mouth, preventing her from saying anything more. ‘No,’ he breathed harshly. ‘I don’t want to talk about any of it because if I have to stop and think, I would know that I shouldn’t be here with you.’

That blunt admission unnerved Billie and shook her to her very core. Generally, Alexei was decisive, disciplined, tough and immovable regardless of how difficult situations became. He had never got into the emotional aspect of events. But right now she felt rather as if she were trying to deal with a split personality, a stranger. He
knew
he shouldn’t be here with her? Yet here he
was
? It was as though he had built a wall between the revelations on their wedding night and the present, spelling out the fact that only his ability to blank out and suppress those revelations allowed him to be with her again now. She gazed up at him with wide green eyes full of dismay and, in a move that suggested that her vulnerable look disturbed him, Alexei lifted her up against him and crushed her berry-tinted lips beneath his with a hungry impatient fervour that put her troubled thoughts to flight.

Billie gasped as Alexei blazed a trail of kisses across her shoulder, tugging the straps down on her dress and burying his face in the warm valley between the full globes of her breasts as he urged her down on the bed. She kicked off her shoes while his fingers slid up her thigh to the narrow band of her thong. In a swift movement, he wrenched the tiny garment off and tossed it aside. Her breath caught in her throat, channelled in urgent gasps of helpless anticipation.

Alexei was standing over her shedding his clothes
with a seething impatience that thrilled her. Lean strong face taut, he viewed her with scorching golden eyes. As he cast aside his shirt, he bent down and raised her up to pull her dress off her without unzipping it. She heard the rip of material, for it had been a neat fit. He flicked loose the catch on the balconette bra that had merely acted as an extra line of suspension and, with it gone, she was naked.

‘No, don’t you dare try to cover a centimetre of that beautiful bare flesh,’ Alexei censured huskily, lifting her up the bed to settle her in a pose that concealed nothing from his burning gaze. ‘This is what I wanted from the moment I saw you in the bath earlier. Within seconds I was hotter than hell for you,
moraki mou.
’

A high-voltage smile of extraordinary sexual power tilted his beautiful mouth and it was just as if he lit a fire inside her. In a flash Billie went from feeling hideously awkward in her unadorned skin to lying back in quivering readiness and acceptance. He wrenched off his silk boxers and came down to her. All rock-hard muscle from his magnificent torso to his flat stomach and long powerful thighs, he was hugely aroused. He brought her hand to the virile shaft rising from the thick dark curls at his groin.

Feeling the pound of the pulse at the heart of her and the moisture there, she closed her fingers round his hard male heat and watched his thick dark lashes sweep down with an uninhibited sensual pleasure that sent the blood pounding at an insane rate through her own veins. With a new boldness she drew him down to her and used her mouth to caress his straining masculinity.

Within the space of a minute he pulled back from her. ‘I can’t take too much of that,’ he confided, his
dark deep accented drawl rough with erotic meaning. ‘I want to be inside you too badly.’

And he touched her then with infinite skill, his thumb teasing her swollen bud and making her release an abandoned little cry and shiver even as a lean finger probed the slick wetness of her lush opening. As her hips bucked in a movement as old as time he entered her all too willing body with a single driving thrust. Her spine arched and her teeth clenched on the extraordinary tide of sensation as his engorged length stretched her tight inner depths.

‘You feel like hot silk,’ Alexei ground out, rising over her while gliding into her tender flesh with strong, stirring strokes that fuelled her growing excitement to ever greater heights.

He wanted to make it last but her sheer abandonment to pleasure and the frantic urgency of her movements pushed him to the edge very quickly and created a chain reaction. As Alexei surged into her with ever greater power, it was too much for Billie and she soared into a convulsive orgasm, writhing and crying out with the bittersweet pain of release. While she was still struggling to surface from the incredible intensity of that climax, Alexei’s magnificent body shuddered over hers in the grip of the same overwhelming finale.

Afterwards, Billie felt emptied and adrift, totally shattered by the intensity of what she had just experienced. But this time, Alexei did not pull away from her, making her feel alone and uncertain at a most vulnerable time. Still trembling from the explosive force of his own release, he kept her in the circle of his strong arms and kissed her brow in a surprisingly gentle salutation.

‘Alexei…’ she whispered softly in acknowledgement,
her body surrendering to her exhaustion, her eyes sliding closed.

‘You’re worth going to hell and back for,’ he murmured with growling carnal satisfaction. ‘Nobody has ever given me that much excitement,
moraki mou.
’

And Billie drifted off to sleep in his arms, happier than she had ever dreamed she might be after that awful nerve-racking two weeks apart from him. The sex was amazing, she was willing to agree, but that tender kiss and his relaxation with her in the aftermath meant a great deal more to her. She wondered if she would ever fully understand the man she loved. He was so complex, volatile and in every respect unpredictable. And on that frustrated acknowledgement she sank into the deepest sleep she had enjoyed in many weeks.

She awakened, befogged by drowsiness and bewildered, to the bright light of an island morning. Alexei, fully dressed, was standing over the bed.

‘Is there no end to your deceptions?’ he demanded of her in savage condemnation.

Astonished by that attack, Billie pushed herself up clumsily against the pillows, suddenly conscious of her nudity and holding the sheet to her breasts. Running trembling fingers through her wildly tousled red hair to rake it back off her face, she mumbled, ‘What are you talking about? What’s wrong?’

‘
This
…this is what’s wrong!’ Alexei bit out rawly, flinging a newspaper down on the bed for her to look at. ‘You and Damon Marios holding hands on my private beach!’

Her face stiff with shock, Billie glanced down at the page and froze, her skin turning clammy, her throat closing over. It was not the best photo she had ever seen and
it seemed to have been digitally enhanced for clarity, but it did show her and Damon on the beach, clearly engaged in intent conversation, her hand in his, her face turned up to his. She was dismayed to recognise that even though her dialogue with Damon had been entirely innocent of even flirtation the photo was misleading, as was the closeness of their bodies.

She flung her head back, green eyes very bright. ‘This is not what it looks like,’ she whispered shakily.

‘I
T WAS
taken by a telephoto lens. The paparazzo must’ve been in a boat,’ Alexei grated between clenched teeth, and then he swept the newspaper off the bed again in an angry gesture of repudiation. ‘What the hell is going on between you and Marios? Is he the father of your baby?’

‘No, he is not. We’re friends, nothing more. All that happened between us was a rather emotional conversation. Damon was telling me why his marriage had ended.’

‘Exchanging sob stories, were you? Getting all touchy-feely?’ Alexei glowered at her unimpressed, his lean dark features hard with angry denunciation. ‘I don’t believe you. Damon was your first love and you’ve always had a thing for him. I can well understand too why you would want to conceal your child’s identity on Speros after Damon chose to reconcile with his estranged wife last year.’

At that crack, Billie turned very pale, for it struck her as terrifying that it could take only one piece of misinformation to provide a foundation for a seemingly convincing case against her. ‘I’ve never been intimate with Damon. He is
not
the father of my child,’ she intoned afresh, desperate to make Alexei listen to her.

Alexei swore only half under his breath. ‘
Na pas sto dialo!
Go to hell,’ he told her roughly. ‘I’m leaving. In a couple of days the DNA results will be available and I refuse to see you again until then.’

In consternation, Billie watched him stride towards the door. ‘Where are you going?’

‘London. I’ll see you at Hazlehurst in forty-eight hours,’ he spelt out grimly.

He didn’t even have to pack, Billie acknowledged limply, because Alexei kept capsule wardrobes all over the world at the properties he used the most. He was walking out on her again. After a night that had filled her with a crazy burst of hope for the future, he was leaving and she was devastated by that development.

It was the work of an instant to run to the door and shout furiously down the corridor after him, ‘You’re a total coward, Alexei Drakos!’

She knew that hurling that accusation at a proud Greek male was like waving a red flag in front of a maddened bull and, sure enough, her tall, muscular husband wheeled straight round in his tracks to throw her an outraged look of incredulity from fierce golden eyes.

‘I mean it…every word!’ she flung in provocative addition, only belatedly becoming conscious that she was stark naked, and closing the door hurriedly to seek something to wear.

And true to the arrogant Drakos tradition of fearless confrontation, Alexei powered back down the corridor again and thrust the bedroom door back open so violently that it crashed back against the wall. Halfway into his discarded shirt, Billie faltered. She had never seen him so irate, his eyes blazing above the patrician
cheekbones showing prominent and pale beneath his bronzed skin, his lean hands clenched into fists. ‘How dare you accuse me of such behaviour?’

‘Because you’ve been running away ever since I told you the truth about our child. You left the yacht on our wedding night and you’re leaving me now, walking out all over again,’ she condemned bitterly. ‘How does that solve anything? Last night you wouldn’t even talk. You won’t discuss anything with me!’

‘What the hell is there to discuss?’ Alexei raked back at her in a lion’s roar of intimidation that made her tremble, his powerful stance as aggressive as it was dogmatic. ‘You’ve told me nothing but stupid stories that a child could tear apart.’

‘Those were not stupid stories!’

Alexei came several steps closer. ‘You’ve lied and lied and lied again to me,’ he derided. ‘Why do you think I would want to listen to more of the same?’

‘I
had
to lie…I didn’t know what else to do,’ she shot back at him shrilly. ‘Why does everything have to be about you? What do you think it was like for me when you took up with Calisto and told me you were thinking about marrying her?’

Alexei stretched out his arms and then dropped them again in a volatile gesture of frustration and impatience. ‘I’m not listening to this nonsense again. Nothing you have told me justifies your behaviour. You’ve got nothing left to say. Lies are lies, no matter what the circumstances. I won’t live with them or forgive them.’

White with anger, he studied her standing there in his half-buttoned shirt, her tangle of colourful red hair spread round her shoulders. He dealt her a bitter look of cynicism. ‘We’re over, we’ve got to be. Sizzling sex
isn’t enough to keep me with you,’ he delivered with harsh emphasis, and this time when he turned to leave she said nothing and she made no attempt to bring him back.

That evening after Billie had tucked Nicky up for the night in her own home, she found herself engaged in a bitter debate with her mother.

‘Your marriage is already over bar the shouting,’ Lauren told her daughter sourly.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ Billie reasoned. ‘Once Alexei realises that Nicky is his son…’

‘He’s not like his father who was desperate for an heir,’ the older woman pointed out bluntly. ‘You’re so naïve, Billie. Men aren’t driven to be fathers the same way women are driven to be mothers. It’s different for them, so wise up. Alexei has already told you that the marriage is over and in my opinion the discovery that he has a kid isn’t going to change that.’

‘You’re such a pessimist,’ Hilary scolded her sister from the lamp-lit corner where she had been trying to read a book.

‘Billie has to look out for her own interests now,’ Lauren argued forcefully. ‘Alexei consulted his lawyers when he organised that DNA test. Billie should see a good divorce lawyer while she’s in the UK. Hilary, stop looking at me like I just took an axe to Santa Claus! Alexei is a Drakos—let’s face it, her marriage was always going to end in tears. His father only finally settled down because he was getting too old to stray and you can’t hope for that with a guy who’s only thirty-one.’

Billie breathed in deep. In truth she was finding her
mother’s ominous predictions more than she could comfortably cope with just at that moment. She offered to make some supper and went out to the kitchen, for she had already learned that the only way to keep a grip on her worries was to physically
do
something. Idleness while she had nothing but anxious thoughts whirling inside her head had become a torment. Much as she loved Nicky, she missed the buzz of working.

She was taking Nicky to Hazlehurst with her and had already arranged for Anatalya’s daughter, Kasma, to travel with her and help her look after her son. After all, unlike Alexei, Billie already knew the results of the DNA test and she was convinced that she and Alexei would have a lot to talk about. She was praying that Alexei would find himself more interested in being a parent than her sceptical mother had forecast. A child could bring them together again, couldn’t it? Unfortunately she remembered reading somewhere that a child only made matters worse in a failing relationship and she could only hope that Nicky would have a more positive effect on their marriage. Surely Alexei would not divorce her for being the mother of his only child?

The following day while she was engaged in packing for their trip to England, Anatalya brought her a letter, addressed to her as Alexei’s wife but heavily marked private and confidential. Opening the missive, she sank down on the bed to read it after her eyes flew wide on the first shocking sentence, ‘I believe it is possible that I may be your father…’

Slowly and carefully, Billie read the letter. For all its startling opening, it was a remarkably sensible and far from dramatic communication in which its writer,
Desmond Bury, explained that he had fallen in love with her mother, Lauren, when she’d come to work as a teenage receptionist at his father’s vehicle-repair garage. An engagement had followed during which Lauren had fallen pregnant. Sadly, by then, Lauren had decided that she no longer wanted to marry Desmond and, having told him that she intended to seek a termination, she had dumped him for another man. He’d had no further contact with Lauren until he’d come upon a newspaper article about Billie’s engagement to Alexei, which had also featured a picture of her with Lauren. Ever since he had been wondering if Billie could be his daughter, for her age and colouring fitted that scenario. The letter concluded with a small paragraph on Desmond’s history. He had eventually married and was now the widowed owner of a flourishing chain of garages. If Billie believed that she might be his daughter, he would like the opportunity to meet and get to know her.

Five minutes after her third reading of the missive, Billie drove down to the village with Nicky to see her mother and handed her the letter. ‘Is there any truth in this? Is it possible that this man could be my father? Were you once engaged to him?’

Lauren grimaced and rolled her eyes theatrically several times while she read the letter. ‘Yes to all those questions,’ she said grudgingly. ‘But he’s got no right telling you that I considered a termination while I was carrying you…’

‘I think he may only have mentioned that because he wanted me to know that he would have taken an interest in me sooner had he known I existed,’ Billie responded mildly. ‘And I don’t blame you for considering it…’

‘Well, you can thank Hilary for the fact I didn’t go
ahead with it!’ Lauren fielded tight-mouthed. ‘But I’ve got no regrets where Desmond was concerned. He was a bore, middle aged at twenty-five, a pipe-and-slippers man, not my type at all.’

‘So why, when I was a teenager, did you tell me that I was the result of a one-night stand?’ Billie asked painfully. ‘That upset me and I honestly thought you didn’t know
who
my father was.’

Lauren laughed heartily at that candid admission. ‘I thought you would blame me for not marrying Desmond and giving you a more conventional childhood.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t marry him just for the sake of it,’ Billie told the older woman truthfully. ‘It would never have worked out if you were so different.’

‘Will you get in touch with Desmond?’ Lauren prompted with a frown. ‘You know, he’s really not an exciting person.’

‘If he is my father, I would like to meet him.’

‘Oh, he is definitely your father,’ Lauren confirmed with a sigh, as if she was more embarrassed than anything else by that.

The next day Billie arrived in London and climbed into the limo that would waft her, Nicky and Kasma to Hazlehurst. She had dressed with care in a beautifully elegant dark purple suit, rescued from looking like office apparel by a short skirt, high heels and snappy accessories. Kasma, who had only been abroad once before, was excited by everything she saw while Nicky looked adorable in a practical blue-striped playsuit and little jacket. The closer they came to their final destination, the more nervous Billie became.

Basking in early summer sunlight, Hazlehurst looked idyllic. The house wore its Georgian beginnings with
style and elegance. The redoubtable housekeeper looked surprised when Billie arrived with a child in tow but wasted no time in calling another member of staff to escort Kasma and her charge upstairs to the nursery floor. Even before Billie was directed into the drawing room to see Alexei, her tummy was rolling and her skin dampening with nervous perspiration.

The tall front windows had a wonderful view of the lawns that ran below beech trees clad in the fresh green of their seasonal finery. Poised to one side of that view, Alexei looked formidable, sheathed in a dark pinstripe business suit of flawless cut and tailoring. His lean, darkly handsome face was taut and unrevealing, but his brilliant eyes glittered with a light that warned her that appearances could be deceptive, and that he was by no means as calm as he might seem on the surface. Alexei was, after all, studying her as if he had never quite seen her before.

‘You…
know
,’ Billie guessed immediately, her voice emerging strangely squeaky and insubstantial from her lips. Even when he intimidated her, he could still take her breath away with his stark male beauty and high-voltage sexual magnetism. No matter what thoughts ran through her anxious mind, at the back of those thoughts she was recalling the hard driving rhythm of his lean powerful body on and inside hers and the ecstasy of release that had allowed her, for such a brief time, to feel close to him. Was it any wonder that her throat was dry and her lungs reluctant to give her more oxygen?

‘I received the DNA results early this morning. At first I couldn’t credit it,’ Alexei imparted between compressed lips, more than a hint of ferocious self-discipline still etched in his tense stance and forbidding aspect.

‘You should have known I wouldn’t lie about something that was so easily proven one way or other,’ Billie dared, lifting her chin in challenge. ‘Of course, Nicky is your child.’

‘But I remember nothing,’ Alexei growled in a driven undertone, his incapacity in that field evidently now a source of deep resentment. ‘Although I now know it obviously happened, it’s still a challenge for me to accept that I slept with you that night and that I was so careless that I got you pregnant.’

Dismayed by that punishing choice of wording, Billie flinched. ‘All I can say is that we were both upset and vulnerable that evening and when we were together it didn’t feel wrong or out of place.’

His intense stare made her feel as though he would like to get inside her memory of that evening and take it from her rather than simply share it with her. She sensed his duality in the strong current of aggression that still ran beneath his self-disciplined surface and wondered at it. He was not reacting to the revelation of Nicky’s paternity as she had hoped or expected and yet she could not have said precisely what was wrong with his attitude.

‘I don’t want platitudes from you. I want to know exactly what happened between us…’

Unsure as to what he meant by that statement, Billie worried at her lower lip with her teeth. ‘The
obvious
happened—’

She collided with unrelenting dark golden eyes. ‘I want to know what I did, what I said, what you did—every detail,’ Alexei told her flatly.

Embarrassment swallowed Billie whole and glued
her tongue to the roof of her mouth. ‘I don’t remember much,’ she fibbed in desperation.