Michelle Reid - A Passionate Marriage

‘Why the sexy leather?’ he demanded. ‘Why the prim hairstyle and a blouse my mother would refuse to wear? What are you trying to prove, Isobel?’ he lanced down at her. ‘That there are different kinds of sexual provocation? Or is this the way you’ve learned to dress for your new lover? Does he like to peel you, layer by exquisite layer, is that it?’

‘Yes,’ she hissed into his hard face. ‘The more layers I have on the more I excite him! Whereas you lacked the finesse to notice me at all unless I was already naked in bed and thoroughly convenient for a quick lay!’

The quick lay struck right at his ego. Both saw the blistering flashback of his last urgent groping before she’d left him for good. Sparks flew, heat, pain then an anguish that coiled a sound inside his throat.

‘You bitch.’ The sound arrived in a hoarse whisper.

He’d gone pale and tears were suddenly threatening her again. On a thick whimper she tried to dislodge him with the pushing thrust of her body, making leather squeak against polish wood and the heels of her shoes come close to scoring deep marks in the wood.

‘Let me go!’ she choked out helplessly. He caught the sound with his mouth and his tongue, and a full onslaught followed of someone who needed to assuage what she had just flung up into his face. Within seconds she had lost the will to fight this man who knew exactly how to kiss her senseless and make her cling with the hungry need for more.

One of his hands was in her hair while the other was sliding between their bodies, making her spine arch sensually as the backs of his knuckles skidded over her breasts. The blouse sprang free, he was that deft with buttons, long fingers slid beneath a final covering of flimsy brown lace and claimed her nipple. She groaned in dismay but was already threading her fingers into his hair as she did so, making sure that he didn’t break away.

It was all so primitively, physically basic! The harried sound of their laboured breathing, the squeak of leather on polished wood. The heat of his lips and the lick of his tongue and the slow, deep, sinuous thrust of his hips against the eager thrust of her own, that even with the thickness of her skirt was pulling her deeper into a morass of desire. If he reached down and touched the naked flesh at her thighs she would be his for the taking; the tingling already happening there was so tight she could barely stop herself from begging for it.

Suddenly she was free. It happened so quickly that she wasn’t expecting it. Dizzy, disorientated, she lay there gasping and blinking as he arrived lightly on his feet by the table and between two chairs. She’d forgotten the anger with which he’d started this. But now she remembered, felt tears of humiliation fill her eyes and didn’t even bother to fight him when he took hold of her by the waist, lifted her up and swung her to her trembling feet.

He saw the tears, and a sigh rasped from him. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered shakily. ‘You always were an animal.’

‘You should not have brought your lover to Athens!’ he ground out. ‘You insulted me by doing so!’

She responded by instinct. A hand went up, caught him a hard, stinging slap to the side of his face, then she was grabbing up her bag and turning to walk away. Unsteady legs carried her forward, as her trembling fingers hurriedly tried to zip up her jacket—while her hair flowed down her spine like a red-hot flag that proclaimed what they had been doing.

He didn’t stop her, which she took as a further insult. When she arrived in the next room the two lawyers stared at her tear-darkened eyes and dishevelled appearance in open dismay.

‘Whatever he wants,’ she instructed Lester Miles. ‘Have him draw up the papers and I’ll sign them.’

With that she just kept on walking.

Leandros had never been so angry with himself in a long time. He’d just treated her like a whore and for what reason?

He didn’t have one. Not now that sanity had returned, anyway.

Three years.

He couldn’t believe his own crassness! Three years apart and he had reacted to the sight of her with her lover as if he’d caught them red-handed in his own bed! She was young and normal and perfectly healthy. She was beautiful and desirable and she had a sex-drive like anyone else! If she had utilised her right to sleep with another man, then what did that have to do with him now?

It had a great deal to do with him, he grimly countered that question. On a dark and primitively sexual level she still belonged to him. Not once in the last three years had he thought about her taking other lovers. How stupid did that make him? Supremely, so he discovered, because from the moment she’d stepped into this room he’d tossed half a century out of the window to become the jealously possessive Greek male.

Then he remembered the expression in her eyes that had brought with it the memory of the last time they had been together. Something thick lurched in his gut and he reeled violently away from what it was trying to make him feel.

Guilty as charged. An animal lacking the finesse of which he was once so very proud. The boardroom door opened as he was splashing a shot of whisky into a glass.

It was Takis. ‘She slapped your face,’ the lawyer commented, noticing the finger marks standing out on his cheek. ‘I suspect that you deserved it.’

Oh, yes, he’d deserved it, Leandros thought grimly and picked up the glass of whisky then stood staring at it. ‘What did she say?’ he asked grimly.

‘Give him anything he wants,’ Takis replied. ‘I am to draw up the papers and she will sign them. So take my advice, Leandros, and do it now before she changes her mind. That woman is dangerous. Whatever you did to her here has made her dangerous.’

‘She admitted it—to my face—that she’s sleeping with that bastard,’ he said as if it should explain away everything.

To another Greek male maybe it did in some small part. ‘Did you tell her that you want this divorce because you already have her replacement picked out and waiting in the wings to become your wife?’

Shock spun him on his heel to stare at Takis. ‘Who told you that?’ he demanded furiously.

Takis suddenly looked wary. ‘I believe it is common knowledge.’

Common knowledge, Leandros repeated silently. Common knowledge put about by whom? His hopeful mother? His matchmaking sister? Or Diantha herself?

Then, no, not Diantha, he told himself firmly. She is not the kind of woman to spread gossip about. ‘Gossip is just that—gossip,’ he muttered, more to himself than to Takis. ‘Isobel will not be here long enough to hear it.’

Did that matter to him? he then had to ask himself, and sighed when he realised that yes, it mattered to him. What was wrong with him? Another sigh hissed from him. Why was he feeling like this about a woman he hadn’t wanted in years?

He detected a pause, one of those telling ones that grabbed your attention. He glanced at Takis; saw his expression. ‘What?’ he prompted sharply.

‘She knows,’ he told him. ‘Her lawyer mentioned the Christophoros name before he went after Isobel.’

Leandros felt his mind go blank for a split-second. She cannot know, he tried to convince himself.

‘The guy knew quite a lot as a matter of fact,’ Takis went on and there was surprise and reluctant respect in the tough lawyer’s voice. ‘He knew that Diantha spent time alone with you on your yacht in Spain, for instance. He also mentioned conservative attitudes in Greece to extramarital affairs, then suggested we review the kind of scandal it would cause if two big names such as Petronades and Christophoros were linked in this way in a court battle. He’s a clever young man,’ Takis concluded. ‘He needs watching. I might even use him myself one day.’