Читать книгу: «Eligible Greeks: Sizzling Affairs», страница 2

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.