Susanne James - Irresistible Greeks - Passion and Promises - The Greek's Marriage Bargain / A Royal World Apart / The Theotokis Inheritance

‘Why did you bring me here, Xenon?’ she demanded. ‘I mean, really? You say it was to bring comfort to your grandmother—’

‘That desire was genuine,’ he interrupted coolly.

‘And what else? Did you picture this scene when you made your suggestion? The inevitable showdown which would result when I found out that I’d be expected to share a bed with you?’

For a moment he didn’t answer and when he did, his words were accompanied by an odd kind of smile. ‘Yes, I pictured it,’ he answered slowly. ‘Though not at first.’

She stared at him, her heart beating very fast. ‘Tell me.’

He lifted his shoulders in a careless kind of shrug and once again she could see the bunching of muscle beneath his shirt. ‘I admit that when I came to your house that day I was little more than curious. I wanted to see the woman I had married and to see what life had done to her. I’d even promised myself that I would give you your divorce papers, if I were so inclined. And then you opened the door and...’

His voice tailed off in a way which made Lexi look at him suspiciously. Because Xenon didn’t do hesitation. And neither did he screw his eyes up as if he had been presented with a problem he couldn’t quite work out. Because wasn’t he the man with the answers to everything?

‘And what?’ she prompted.

‘I realised I still wanted you,’ he said simply. ‘I wanted you in a way I’ve never wanted any other woman, not before and not since. I wanted you in my arms. I still do. I look at you, Lex, and my body aches for you. I want you so badly that I can hardly think straight. Even now.’

She felt the dull crash of disappointment—for these were not new words. They were words he’d spoken many times when he’d been wooing her—when she’d bewitched and infuriated him by refusing to fall straight into his arms. They were expressions of high emotion he used when he was trying to get something which was just out of reach. He’d never said them when they would have meant something. He’d hadn’t spoken of wanting her when she’d been lying in that hospital bed with her womb raw and empty and the feeling that she had failed him as a wife.

‘We can’t,’ she said in a hollow voice.

‘Why not?’ he demanded, his eyes blazing like blue jewels in the dimness of the shuttered room. ‘Because you haven’t got the guts to face the fact that you want me, too? Why can’t you just come out and admit it? If not to me—then at least to yourself. That what we have isn’t over. And that it isn’t going to go away.’

She felt the quickening stab of fear and the even fiercer stab of desire. She felt the blurring of past and present. She thought about the secrets she had locked away.

‘You just like a challenge,’ she declared. ‘You’re a man who has everything. Who can get anything. You just want the one thing that’s eluding you.’

‘This has got nothing to do with challenge,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he met the spark of defiance in hers. He was aware of something primitive flooding through him. A tide of pure possession which he could not stop. ‘And everything to do with the realisation that you are my woman and you always have been. And nothing will ever change that.’

The raw declaration thrilled her almost more than it appalled her. She wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t. But Lexi knew that she couldn’t be swayed by words which were driven by nothing more than lust and a sense of ownership.

‘I can’t do it,’ she said. ‘We can share a bed and maintain this charade if that’s what it takes to get my brother off the hook, but that’s all.’ With an effort she tried to ignore the prickling of her breasts. The way that they had become heavy and sensitive—as if they wanted nothing more than for him to bend his lips to kiss them, shaping his lips around them and tormenting her with the feathery little lick of his tongue.

She shivered, trying to blot the erotic image from her mind and to focus on something other than the sudden hot, melting ache between her legs. ‘It’s over, Xenon,’ she croaked. ‘There’s no way back. And there’s no way I’m ever getting intimate with you again.’

CHAPTER SIX

‘SO, ALEXI. MY son tells me that you are something of a silversmith these days.’

Lexi put her wine glass down and produced another friendly smile, even though her face was beginning to ache. She felt like someone who had undergone a police interrogation, since Xenon’s mother had been firing questions at her for most of the overlong meal. And her arrogant son hadn’t done a thing to help her out.

Dressed impeccably in navy, with pearls gleaming at her throat, Marina Kanellis was an elegant woman whose once-beautiful face bore a vaguely startled look, as if life had disappointed her. Lexi knew she’d been made a widow when Xenon was barely eighteen and not for the first time she wondered why the bilingual socialite had never considered marrying again. Unless she was one of those women who loved only one man...

This line of thought was a little too uncomfortable to pursue. Instead Lexi concentrated on watching the candlelight flickering over the heavy crystal and silver, telling herself that the meal would soon be over and then she would be able to make her escape. She had tried to answer her mother-in-law’s queries as cheerfully as possible—even though she had been chewed up with nerves when she’d first sat down.

Yet she couldn’t deny that tonight Marina had seemed almost kind and much less terrifying than before. Maybe that was because these days she felt more mature and much less intimidated. And, of course, less worried that she was going to make some terrible social gaffe and make Xenon ashamed of her. She no longer had anything to lose, did she?

So she turned to Marina Kanellis and smiled.

‘“Silversmith” sounds a bit grand for what I do,’ she said.

‘But you are making jewellery?’

Lexi nodded, her fingertips brushing against the two elongated silver triangles dangling from her ears as if she were showcasing her handiwork. ‘Yes, I am.’

‘And you enjoy it?’ asked Marina.

‘I love it,’ Lexi answered. ‘I’ve got my own little workshop in the village and I enjoy being my own boss. It gives me the kind of freedom I’ve never had before.’

‘I can imagine.’ Marina Kanellis sipped from her glass of water. ‘I never worked, of course. Not before my marriage nor after it. It was not considered appropriate for a woman to work, particularly if she was a Kanellis woman, with all the responsibilities which went with that role.’

Lexi looked into Xenon’s piercing blue eyes. Help me out here, she beseeched him silently and to her astonishment she saw an answering glint of comprehension.

‘Modern women like to work, Mitera,’ he said, with the tone of somebody who had made the recent discovery that the world was round. ‘Some obviously need to work for economic reasons—but others do it because it gives them a purpose in life. It fulfils them in a way that nothing else can—something which men have known for centuries. And who are we to knock that?’

Lexi wondered if her own expression reflected the dazed bemusement of her mother-in-law’s. She looked across the table at her husband in disbelief. Xenon coming out with an opinion about women which didn’t sound as if it had been formed two centuries ago? This from the man who had been adamant that she should be a stay-at-home wife?

At the time, he had explained that they had far too much money for his conscience to allow her to work. Which in theory Lexi had tried to understand. She had told herself that she had married a Greek and that she had to accept there would be cultural differences.

But what did a woman do all day when she wasn’t working and there were servants to run her life for her? Especially if she was a woman who didn’t like to ‘do’ lunch, or spend hours shopping?