Anne McAllister - The Santorini Bride

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

COMING NEXT MONTH

ONE MORE hill.

Looking up the stone steps that twisted up from the dock, Martha could see the house at last. Thank God.

When she’d got off the launch in Santorini she’d thought, “I’m home.” But she’d forgotten the climb and she hadn’t told Ariela, the local lady who took care of the house, that she was coming. So no one knew to meet her.

No matter. She’d been determined to get here on her own, to be here on her own. The climb was just the last part of it. Still, she was exhausted and sweating, and her duffel bag, packed for a move back to New York, not a spur-of-the-moment desperate flight to Greece, felt like lead as she dragged it behind her.

She looked up again. In the shimmering summer heat the walls of the two-story, white-stuccoed building seemed almost like a mirage, a dream. Martha had been running on adrenaline so long that it could well have been a hallucination, if she didn’t know she was down to her last dollar, having spent nearly every cent in her savings account to get her plane ticket from JFK yesterday afternoon.

Was it only yesterday?

It seemed like another lifetime since she had blithely and eagerly bounded up the stairs to her boyfriend, Julian’s, loft apartment in Tribeca, already anticipating his killer grin, his open arms that would grab her and swing her around in joy when she announced she was back for good, that she had finally finished the mural in Charleston that had taken her out of New York for the past month, and that while she was gone she’d made a decision—she was ready at last to share his bed.

She had opened the door, calling his name. Then, hearing the sound of the shower, she had thrown caution to the wind. What better way to prove to him that she was ready for the intimacy he’d demanded—

And so she’d kicked off her sandals, stripped off her shirt and was shimmying out of her skirt as she’d opened the bathroom door.

And discovered Julian wasn’t alone.

Through the steamed glass she could see two bodies beneath the spray—Julian, his blond hair plastered flat, and some curvaceous brunette with an all-over tan. Their bodies bare, their limbs entwined.

Martha had stopped dead, gut-punched, rooted to the spot as she gazed unblinkingly at the sight of her fantasies, her dreams and hopes crashing to bits.

And then the cool blast of air she’d brought in when she’d opened the door caused Julian to look up. He wiped a hand over the glass, clearing it briefly to stare straight at her stunned face.

His mouth opened and an expletive formed on his lips. Martha’s own mouth was as frozen as her feet as she watched the woman rub against him unaware. Julian shut his eyes for a moment, then opened them and met her gaze again. This time there was less shock and more defiance.

And thank God, Martha found that her feet would move.

She spun away, snatching up her shirt to cover her own bareness, her foolish vulnerability. She yanked it on, face burning, heart slamming—but nowhere near as hard as she slammed the door on her way out.

She’d run down the stairs, her duffel bag banging along behind her, desperate to get away into the street where crowds of people passed, unconcerned, unaware of her humiliation, of her world spinning out of control. Nothing had changed for them.

But for Martha the world had just gone upside down.

She had spent the month she was in Charleston thinking about Julian, about their relationship, about whether he was “the one.” She’d taken things slow, unwilling to just jump into bed with him because he was gorgeous and charming and sexy and wanted to go to bed with her.

She’d seen her sister, Cristina, do far too much of that. Martha had always been determined she was going to be “sure” before she ever became intimate with a man.

Fat lot of good it had done her. She’d finally been sure and Julian had found someone else!

She couldn’t stay with him, obviously. In fact she couldn’t even bring herself to stay in New York. It might have ten million people in it, but it wasn’t big enough for both of them. She had to get out.

There were any number of places she could have gone—to her parents’ house on Long Island, to her brother Elias in Brooklyn, to her brother Peter in Hawaii, even to Cristina—though God knew she would never do that. The only person in her family she couldn’t run to was her twin brother, Lukas, because Lukas was always wandering around somewhere—New Zealand this time, she thought, but who knew, really. Everyone else would have taken her in. And Peter and Elias at least wouldn’t even have asked a million nosy questions.

But she couldn’t do it.

She didn’t want to see any of them, didn’t want to witness their sympathy or even their silent commiseration. She just wanted to get away.

And so she’d come to Santorini.

It wasn’t running away from home.

Her parents had been born here. So had her grandparents. And even though all of her own family—and most of the extended family—were long gone to seek their fortunes in the far corners of the world, they all held Santorini in their hearts. The ancestral house was still here.

In the most fundamental sense of the word, Santorini was home.

Some of her earliest and definitely best memories were of times spent in their house high on a Santorini hillside overlooking the deep Aegean sea. Her parents had moved them from the city to Long Island and back half a dozen times while Martha had been growing up.

No place had ever become the home Santorini was.

She loved it. The minute she’d stepped onto the hot pavement and looked up at the rows of whitewashed houses climbing the hills, she’d known things would get better.

She could breathe here. She could be herself here. She could start again.

She hadn’t been here since she’d come with her parents for a week in January. Then the weather had been almost cool. Now in midsummer it was blazing hot, and Martha was sweating and exhausted as she set her shoulders, then grabbed the handle of her duffel and began to haul it again up the narrow winding street.

The house would be empty. The refrigerator would be shut off and the cupboards bare. She would have to do the shopping and the cooking, but she didn’t care. It would be good to do everything herself. Keeping busy would be a good thing. Immersing herself in the life of the island would distract her and, she hoped, help her get her bearings, look to the future, make new plans.

She certainly had no intention of going on with the old ones—even if Julian had rung her cell phone while she was en route to the airport.

“It’s not as if Andrea means anything to me,” he’d said, sounding wounded, as if Martha was just supposed to accept him making love to another woman.

“Right. No big deal,” she’d said acidly. “I’m sure she’ll be pleased to hear that.”

“Well, what do you expect?” Julian had demanded, trading wholly inappropriate hurt for even less warranted indignation. “You never gave me any, did you?”

It didn’t seem the time to say she had come intending to do just that.

“Smart of me, I’d say,” she bit out.

“You’re a cold fish, Martha. If you’d ever shown a little passion—”

“You want passion? I’ll give you passion!” And Martha had flung the cell phone out the open taxicab window into the road where it had been instantly squashed by an eighteen-wheel semi. She only wished it had been Julian, not the phone, who’d been flattened.