A Stormy Greek Marriage (3 page)

‘Spare me the moral philosophy speech,’ Alexei derided. ‘You may be my wife but one thing hasn’t changed: I still expect a straight answer to a direct question.’

‘You asked me who my first lover was but, quite honestly, you have no right to ask me that question!’ Billie dared, flashing that answer back to him in retribution.

Alexei dealt her an arrested appraisal, her insubordination clearly coming as an unwelcome surprise to him.

Billie was trembling. ‘I mean, how do you even dare to ask me that question?’

His golden gaze was splinteringly hard and unyielding. ‘I dare because you’re my wife and nothing in your life should be hidden from me.’

Billie tried and failed to swallow at that bold, startlingly idealistic expectation. A tiny pulse at the base of her throat was flickering wildly. The tip of her tongue snaked out to moisten the taut dryness of her full lower lip. ‘
You
were my first lover…but you don’t remember the time we spent together—’

His ebony brows drew together. ‘What the hell kind of nonsensical claim is that?’ Alexei demanded, his raw impatience unhidden.

‘It may sound like nonsense to you at this moment, but it’s still the truth. On the night of your parents’ funeral, when everyone else had gone home, you had been drinking and you went to bed with me,’ Billie recounted, her agitated fingers knotting into the too long sleeves of her robe and tugging in a restive motion at the cuffs.

‘Any moment now you’ll be telling me that you were abducted by aliens! Are you crazy?’ Alexei jibed, tossing back the bedding and springing from the bed, a tall, powerful figure all the more daunting unclad. ‘Or are you drunk? That’s the only explanation I can come up with!’

‘We made love in the guest suite where I was staying at the time. We had no contraception. You were heading back to your own room for condoms when you tripped and fell down the steps by the swimming pool. When you came round, you didn’t remember that you’d been with me…’ Billie’s taut voice quivered with tension as he came to a halt, wheeled round and stared at her with frowning questioning force: she had finally won his full attention. ‘You thought you’d been in the swimming pool because your hair was damp but you’d only been in the shower…’

Dark eyes blazing wrathful gold, he studied her, his lean, strong visage clenched into forbidding lines. ‘No, Billie,’ he cut in icily. ‘You’re very ingenious but I won’t fall for a story like that. You tell me that we slept together on the one night of my life that I can’t fully recall and you expect me to believe you? How stupid do you think I am?’

In a growing state of confusion, Billie gazed back at him. She had known it would be a challenge to make him believe her, but it had not crossed her mind that he might suspect her of fitting fictional facts to an actual event to provide back-up for what he deemed to be lies. ‘But we really
were
together that night.’

‘So, according to you, unlike every other woman I have ever met, you gave me your body and expected nothing in return—not even an acknowledgement from
me?’ Alexei slashed back at her with incredulous scorn. ‘At least come up with lies that make some sense!’

Anger licked like a hungry flame out of her bone-deep anxiety. She felt as if she were fighting for her life and certainly for the love of it. Not so very long ago they had enjoyed an instant of perfect harmony out on deck and she had been so happy. ‘When have I ever lied to you?’ she queried emotively.

‘What about those weeks before our wedding when you were playing the innocent little virgin charade? You need to fine-tune those principles I mistakenly thought you had. It’s not the lie you allowed to stand, it’s the fact that you were dishonest that disgusts me.’

Every word Alexei spoke flailing her like a whip, Billie had lost colour. Her body, so lately hot and damp from the vigour of his lovemaking, suddenly felt cold and shivery. Her green eyes dominated her heart-shaped face but the anger that had awakened inside her was already climbing higher and growing stronger in her defence. How dared he say that she disgusted him after all she had gone through on his behalf? She had stood by in silence while he romanced Calisto and slept with her. She had endured her pregnancy and the birth of his child without his support.
How dared he judge her?

‘Don’t you dare tell me that I disgust you!’

Hard-as-granite dark golden eyes raked over her slight figure before finally condescending to meet her incensed gaze. ‘It’s the truth and that’s all I’ve ever wanted or expected from you: the truth,’ he told her insistently. ‘If you can’t even give me that, what have we got?’

That harsh question assailed her like water dripping incessantly on stone, for no matter what excuses
she gave and no matter what words she spouted she would still be faced with the reality that she had lied to him. And just then, as he stepped into the shower and switched on the controls, Alexei was a formidable presence, terrifyingly immovable in his stubborn conviction. Rigid with tension, she went back into the stateroom. She quailed at the prospect of telling him about Nicky right there and then. If he couldn’t even credit her claim that he had once made love to her, how likely was it that he would accept that he was the father of the child he didn’t yet know she’d had?

Her slender hands clenched into fists as she attempted to will greater strength into herself. Hilary had insisted that her niece should tell Alexei the truth before the wedding, and Hilary had been right, Billie acknowledged with fierce regret over her own weakness. Instead of respecting the sound ethical base of her aunt’s argument, Billie had listened to Lauren, her self-serving and avaricious mother, who had never let notions of what was right and decent come between her and anything that she wanted. Billie had wanted that wedding ring at any cost, and now that she had it on her finger it felt like an own goal, a mockery, an empty promise…
why
? They had only been married for a matter of a few hours and Alexei had just told her that she disgusted him.

Billie sat down on the richly upholstered chair and surveyed her extravagant surroundings with blank eyes. Although it was warm, she felt cold. Shock was setting in and hitting her hard. He was the guy that she loved and she had burned her boats so thoroughly that she did not know how to go back and retrace her steps. Just then, damage control seemed an impossibility. Nothing that she could say or do would alter the fact that she had
lied. And in the same moment she recognised just how much falling in love and having a child had altered her, for she was so much more emotional than she had once been. That made her feel so vulnerable and she longed to slide back into the practical, less sensitive shell of the young woman she had once been.

Towelling his wet body roughly dry with impatient hands, Alexei listened to the silence from the adjoining room. The silence only inflamed him more. He should have had the truth out of her by now, not those ridiculous lies! Discarding the towel, he strode into the communicating dressing room to pull out clothes. He was so angry that there was a tremor in his lean muscular hands. He stared down at them with brooding dark eyes and clenched his teeth together hard. Billie, whom he had trusted.
Ise Vlakas!
Stupid, he called himself angrily. Why had he placed such faith in her when he had long known that precious few women could be trusted? He had long accepted that many women would do virtually anything to get close to a man as hugely wealthy as he was. But that for her own ends Billie should attempt to make use of that particular night when he had drunk too much was an act of even more serious subterfuge and one that he considered unforgivable. To add more lies to the lies she had already allowed to stand between them was inexcusable. To think that he had thought her intelligent, worthy of being his wife,
perfect
…

Although in one sense, she had been perfect, Alexei conceded grudgingly as his mind roved back to their brief intimacy. A prickling heat at his groin and the stirring heaviness of renewed arousal assailed him while he recalled his bride’s surprising wildness between the
sheets. Her eager responsiveness and complete lack of control when he touched her had excited him—
she
had excited him more than any woman had in a long time. Any man would have rejoiced in receipt of such fervour. That passionate receptiveness had not been what he expected from a woman who was well known for her rigid self-discipline and old-fashioned notions.

Old-fashioned?
His handsome mouth curled with renewed derision. What was truly real about Billie? And what was fake? Only hours earlier he would have sworn she was genuine one-hundred-carat gold, the real article, a woman he could actually respect…and
now
? He wondered if Damon Marios had taken her virginity, or whether it had been one of his other employees, or even whether the identity of Billie’s secret lover lay far back in her youth. But why should the man’s identity even matter to him? He had never been a possessive man, particularly when it came to sex. He was too practical to be otherwise. The crux of the matter was that Billie had lied.

Distaste filling him afresh, Alexei strode out of the dressing room, across the spacious stateroom and out of it again without even acknowledging her presence. He would give Billie time to consider her options before he left
Sea Queen.
He was already considering his own: he had no intention of staying married to a woman he couldn’t trust.

F
RESH
from the shower, Billie tackled her tangled and damp hair until it dried in a heavy silken swathe across her shoulders. She breathed in deep and set off to find Alexei. She was not a coward, she had
never
been a coward; he would listen to her, he
had
to listen to her. That was the only hope of salvation that she had left. Yet she knew how hard Alexei Drakos could be, how uncompromising, how very cold-blooded when his own interests were at stake…

Alexei was working at his laptop in the office just as if it were the middle of his working day rather than halfway through his wedding night. His luxuriant blue-black hair gleamed below the discreet down-lighters, lush dark lashes casting crescent shadows across his exotically high cheekbones. It was a pose she had seen him in a thousand times before and she had known exactly where to find him—at times of stress, Alexei always took refuge in work. But she could read the tension still etched into the lineaments of his classic profile and the warning flare of his straight aquiline nose as he lifted his proud dark head and saw her in the doorway and his grim golden eyes hardened.

‘I know you’re angry with me but I have to talk to
you,’ Billie said with low pitched urgency. ‘I have to tell you what I’ve done—’

‘What you’ve
done
?’ Alexei repeated drily, a slanting brow quirking in emphasis. ‘Does this relate to Lauren’s loaded comments about knowing where the bodies are buried?’

That was a question that Billie would have preferred not to have to answer just then. But the awareness that she could not afford to play with the truth even just a little froze her in place. Slowly she nodded in reluctant affirmation of that point and watched his lean strong face darken in angry acknowledgement.

‘Even your mother knows what I do not?’ Alexei demanded.

‘Yes. I did try to keep it all private but I’m afraid she worked out what I didn’t tell her for herself,’ Billie confessed quietly.

Alexei let his gaze roam over her small straight figure. For once what she wore enhanced rather than concealed her body and it was obvious that she was naked below her robe. The lush curves of her breasts were clearly delineated by the thinly draped silk and the tip-tilted swollen nipples that had thrilled to his attention were still tantalisingly prominent below the fine material. The heaviness stirring at his groin forced him to shift position in his seat while he wondered cynically if that revealing wrap had been chosen purely for his benefit.

Regardless of that suspicion, desire slivered through him and the strength of his sudden heated arousal took him aback. Just for once, satisfaction had not led to satiation. But then the very force of what he was feeling, that pungent mass of anger, bitterness and disillusionment,
required a physical response; he was far more comfortable with his body’s natural appetites than he was with words or emotions. Determined to ease himself in the most effective way of all, he extended a lean hand to her in silence and with a wary look of surprise in her green eyes she was quick to grasp his fingers. Banding his arms round her slight length, he crushed her to his big powerful frame and claimed her soft mouth with hot, driving hunger.

‘Se thelo.’
Alexei told her bluntly that he wanted her in roughened Greek and as the heady combination of yearning and relief at that invitation gripped Billie it left her infinitely weak. His embrace had blown her vague expectations out of the water and with every erotic plunge of his tongue her legs felt more boneless and less able to provide independent support. So keen was she to bridge the gulf between them at that moment that he could have done virtually anything with her and she would have offered no objection.

With a bold tug on the sash of her robe so that the edges fell apart, Alexei lifted her up onto the desk. He moulded the lush, creamy swell of her breasts, tugging at her swollen nipples, before he lowered his dark head to close his mouth urgently to a pouting peak while he pushed her legs apart so that his fingers could slickly massage the tiny bud of her arousal and probe the excruciatingly tender pink flesh beneath. She whimpered, excitement shrieking through her in a great rampant roar of heat, her body eager for release from the terrible tension. That fast, she could think of nothing but the urgent craving that his skilful caresses had induced.

Her arms linked round his neck and she trembled as he settled his hands below her hips and pulled her
closer to stand between her spread thighs. There was a split second when she was aware that he was donning protection and sanity almost came back to her but, an instant later, he drove his rigid shaft into her hot velvety depths and her slim body bucked and writhed in ecstatic response. He pushed her flat and raised her thighs to pound into her tight wet channel with ravishingly forceful thrusts. Sounds she couldn’t control escaping from her throat, she was at the mercy of intense sensation and extraordinary pleasure. She was flung to a height and then the pressure and tightness in her pelvis broke and fireworks exploded inside her in a wild, jerking, totally uncontrolled release.

‘
Efharisto
…thanks. That took the edge off my temper.’ Alexei lifted her off the desk and deposited her in a bemused heap in a nearby armchair.

Blinking rapidly and still all of a quiver from the raw passion he had unleashed on her, Billie watched blankly as he strode into the washroom. She looked down at her naked breasts and, with a stifled exclamation of shock, reared upright to tie the robe securely closed again. That seeming necessity did, however, make her think of that well-known saying that talked of bolting the stable door after the horse had already bolted. She was so shocked by what had just happened between them that she was trembling.

She had not known that it was possible to make love like that, for everything to be so intense and wild that it overwhelmed every other thought and decent consideration. Nor had she ever suspected that she might have the capacity to enjoy such an encounter and that new knowledge shamed her in her own eyes. Indeed she was devastated by his demonstration of savage sexual
power over her, because even though no such intimacies had even been on her mind he had taken her from cool passivity to the hottest orgasm without the slightest hesitation or difficulty.
That took the edge off my temper
, he had said, as if the taking of her body was on a par with a good gym workout. Her face burned scarlet at the recollection.

Across his desk as well, she recalled in consternation, mortified by the awareness that in spite of the chasm between them she had let him do exactly as he liked. Even so, it was still their wedding night, wasn’t it? Saying no to her highly sexed husband would not be the wisest path to take if she wanted to heal the breach between them. And, of course, anything that could reduce the tension between them was sensible and good, she reasoned, raking her tangled hair back off her damp brow with an unsteady hand. After all, she still had to talk to him, but the prospect of doing so while her body still hummed, tingled and downright ached from the sexual
Blitzkrieg
of his was a major challenge.

Only the dark shadow of masculine stubble roughening his strong jaw line and sensual mouth marred Alexei’s visual perfection when he rejoined her. His cream linen chinos and sweater were as expensive, tailored and sophisticated in style as any more formal wear. Black hair brushed back from his brow, Alexei looked startlingly handsome but worryingly untouched by the emotional vulnerability threatening her equilibrium. All over again she longed for the detachment and self-control she had once been able to call on around him, for it had protected her from pain.

‘I believe you said that you had something to tell me,’ Alexei drawled cool as ice, as if that episode
of hot breathless sex had taken place only in her imagination.

Locking pained green eyes to his angular bronzed face, Billie said quietly, ‘You
were
with me on the night of your parents’ funeral. After your fall I knew that you’d lost a couple of hours and were actually suffering from concussion, even possibly a form of amnesia, but I couldn’t persuade you to seek medical help.’

Alexei straightened his broad shoulders, his imposing height of over six feet casting a long forceful shadow across the dimly lit room. His entire attitude was detached, even businesslike. ‘I can’t accept any part of your story. I would never have slept with you in such circumstances, and as for that tale you told about sex without contraception? I’m afraid that could only have happened in the fictional realms of your brain because, drunk or sober, I don’t ever take risks in that line.’

In her eagerness to persuade him, Billie leant forward. ‘I’m not lying and maybe you’ll understand that better once I’ve told you everything—’

Dense ebony lashes screening his stunning eyes to a dangerous gleam of gold, his lean dark features were a mask of disdain.
‘Everything?’
Alexei repeated with a saturnine look of mockery that sent the blood drumming heavily into her cheeks. ‘What other strange fantasies have you dreamt up for my amusement?’

That piece of ridicule made Billie want to slap him hard. Her fingers clenched tightly together on that dangerous impulse. ‘Maybe I was wrong not to tell you the truth months ago, but once you met Calisto the whole situation changed and I didn’t feel I had any choices left. I assumed you were in love with her—you pretty much told me you were going to marry her. I had just
discovered that I was pregnant. I was planning to tell you but you couldn’t even remember sleeping with me—’

Black brows pleating together, Alexei cut boldly into that recitation. ‘You were pregnant? By whom?’

Billie flung him a fevered glance of frustration. ‘You’re not that slow on the uptake—I conceived on the night of the funeral; I fell pregnant by you. You may not remember it but we made love twice without precautions.’

Alexei released his breath in a sharp exhalation, his instant dismissal of that possibility clear by his expression.

‘Hilary’s son is actually
my
son,’ Billie spelt out, refusing to be daunted by that discouraging silence. ‘He’s my baby. I gave birth to him while I was on my career break in London. The only reason I asked for the leave was so that I could conceal my pregnancy.’

His brilliant eyes suddenly shimmered like a firework display, his outrage at what she was saying etched into every harshening angle of his lean darkly handsome features. ‘Hilary’s child is yours? You are telling me that you have actually given birth to a baby? That you deliberately concealed that fact from me and let me go ahead and make you my wife?’ he roared at her in a sudden wrathful attack that made her shrink back momentarily into the shelter of her seat, shaken by his vehemence. ‘And now you dare to try and pass off some other man’s child as mine?’

Rigid with tension and with perspiration dampening her brow, Billie faced him. ‘It’s not like that at all. Nicky
is
your son. I’ve never been with another man.’

Alexei wasn’t really listening. What he had learned
was sufficient for him to make a judgement. A red mist of rage was burning through his brain while he struggled to put together what she had told him. His bride was a mother…she had a
child
? Appalled by that revelation, he remembered the seam of scar tissue low on her abdomen, which only hours earlier she had passed off as ‘a gynaecological thing’. A Caesarean scar, he guessed, for the first time seeing a solid foundation to what had initially struck him as incredible claims. He could not at first get over his sense of shock that she could have concealed so much from him and even the most cursory appraisal of the past year or so warned him that Billie must have spun him an elaborate ongoing pack of lies in an outrageous attempt to pass off her child as his. Of course, she was anything but stupid. She knew that that was the only circumstance that might give her the hope that he wouldn’t divorce her.

Golden eyes steadily chilling to the temperature of a sunlit iceberg, Alexei surveyed her. ‘What a devious little schemer you are! You have the nerve to sit there looking me in the eye while you confess that you lied and cheated your way to the altar knowing that I would never have married you had I known the truth about you!’

Billie leapt up, her long, thick, wine-red hair rippling like bright ribbons across her shoulders and sliding across her cheekbones to highlight her pallor. ‘That’s not how it was, Alexei. There were lies and I’m sorry for that, but there was no cheating. Nicky is your son. How was I supposed to persuade you of that fact when you couldn’t even recall being with me?’

‘I assume you have heard of DNA testing?’

Hotspots of pink deepened the hue of Billie’s cheeks in reaction to that unexpected taunt.

‘This kid is…what age?’ Alexei queried.

‘He’s four and a half months old. But when he was born you were still with Calisto and thinking about marrying her,’ Billie referred to his ex-girlfriend, Calisto Bethune, with a heavy heart. ‘I didn’t want to cause trouble. I saw no benefit to anyone in doing that. It seemed to me,’ she continued painfully, ‘that you didn’t want to remember being with me, and that probably everyone concerned would be happier if that night remained a secret.’

‘I don’t believe for one moment that your child is mine,’ Alexei declared with icy conviction. ‘I refuse to believe it. I hope you don’t plan to take these insane stories into court with you. You will make a laughing stock of yourself—’

‘Into…court?’ Billie echoed shakily. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Do I really need to spell out the fact that what you’ve just told me is grounds for divorce?’

Billie turned as cold as though he had just plunged her into an ice bath, consternation and shock gripping her hard. ‘I know that you’re shocked by what I’ve told you—’

‘Of course I’m shocked by the image of you, your mother and your aunt plotting against me like Macbeth’s three witches! ‘Alexei derided with ferocious bite.

Billie’s temper flared and she flew upright. ‘It’s ridiculous to talk like that. Nobody
plotted
against you! When I persuaded Hilary to pretend that Nicky was her child, my only motivation in doing so was to hide Nicky’s parentage and protect you.’