After what had felt like a very public entrance, the booth felt too cosy and he felt too close, her spine tingling at the dark timbre of his accented drawl, gooseflesh rippling across her skin when he carelessly brushed her hand with his as he passed her the menu. Iridescent sea-glass eyes enhanced by lush black lashes surveyed her levelly from across the table, his lean, dark, classically handsome features so strikingly flawless that, for a split second, she couldn’t rip her attention from his spectacular bone structure.
His obvious relaxation taunted her simmering tension. Winnie could feel every breath she drew along with the wanton tightening of her nipples and the lick of pulsing heat curling between her thighs. It was unnerving that he could still awaken those responses in her treacherous body and it made her hate him more than ever for destroying the idealistic, romantic innocence that had been hers before she met him.
‘You’re incredibly quiet tonight,’ Eros remarked lazily. ‘I used to like that about you.’
‘But a quiet woman is less of a challenge.’
‘By the time I met you I had had enough of being challenged,’ Eros admitted, lashes dipping, evading her scrutiny as if he already feared that he had revealed too much.
Challenged by his wife? Possibly Tasha had discovered his infidelity, although she had not appeared remotely suspicious of Winnie when she’d arrived at the country house and Winnie had behaved like an employee for Tasha’s benefit for the first time in weeks. She had made a meal for his wife and it had hurt her pride to play the servant, driving home the lesson of how very foolish she had been to get into bed with a man whom she knew next to nothing about. It hadn’t helped either to see a wife very much more beautiful than she was herself. Tasha was a sleek, shapely blonde with lively blue eyes and a pronounced air of energy, chattering into her phone constantly to rap out instructions to an employee and answer queries in a variety of languages. Beautiful, accomplished and confident, everything Winnie was not.
Winnie had packed and left that house and her job that same day, filled with shame and regret. Memories could be so cruel, she registered abruptly, realising that she had carried that demeaning sense of being less and second best ever since that humiliating day.
‘We will make this marriage work,’ Eros told her arrogantly over the first course of the meal. ‘It has to work for Teddy.’
Chilled inside by that insistent statement, Winnie toyed with her food, thinking about Teddy, who was perfectly happy with his mother and his aunts. But for how long will that phase of his childhood last? a little voice prompted her for the first time. Children grew up fast and developed more complex needs. Eros would still have visiting rights though, and Teddy would learn to value his father and divide his loyalties as all children of parents who lived apart had to do. He would be fine, absolutely fine, she told herself bracingly.
‘This is very important to me,’ Eros intoned in the smouldering silence. ‘Why do I get the impression that you’re not even listening?’
Winnie faked a yawn with her hand. ‘I’m sorry. I’m very tired.’
It would be the first time a woman had fallen asleep on him, Eros reflected grimly, exasperated by her silence, her seeming refusal to make the smallest effort. What was the matter with her? This was not Winnie as he recalled her, but then she had walked out on him, become a mother alone, struggled to survive and the experience was bound to have changed her. Yet if they were to stay together, they had to find a bridge between the past and the present. Sex? He knew he couldn’t wait to have her under him again, over him, in front of him...just about any way he could have her.
No, that hadn’t changed, he acknowledged reluctantly, that raw driving hunger to possess that she incited and which he had never understood or accepted. It had hurt his pride, it had exasperated him with her, with himself because he distrusted anything he couldn’t control and he hadn’t been able to control the fierce need she provoked. Yet he had repeatedly tried to explain it to himself, talk himself out of those urges, constantly challenging himself with self-denial while he fought to get his discipline back.
Unarguably, however, the truth remained that Winnie sat there in an ugly cloaking black dress that revealed nothing of her very sensual curves and with only the smallest encouragement he would still have spread her across the table and fallen on her like a sex-starved animal.
‘YOU LOOK AMAZING!’ Vivi sighed as Winnie performed a twirl in front of the built-in cheval mirror on the wall of the luxury cabin.
It was a beautiful dress, fashioned of Venice lace and organza, cut to fit Winnie’s shapely figure like a glove. An enticing row of pearl buttons ran down her spine to her hip. The sweetheart neckline emphasised her sister’s curves while the mermaid style flared out from her knees with very real elegance and not with the kind of fullness of fabric that would have accentuated Winnie’s diminutive height.
‘We all do but, like all brides, Winnie takes the crown,’ Zoe murmured fondly. ‘I feel like pinching myself to see if this is real. Here we are on a fabulous yacht, cruising to our sister’s wedding on a private island... It’s like a dream or like suddenly being plunged into a movie.’
‘I wonder if you’ll feel quite so chirpy when it’s your wedding day,’ Vivi remarked with an edge of warning.
‘But we don’t have to worry about that. Grandad is going to whisk us all away again before we need to worry about consequences.’ Zoe’s bright confidence in Stamboulas Fotakis’s ability to work miracles was unconcealed. ‘Eros wanted to transport all of us to the island because he made the island a no-fly zone to keep the paparazzi from buzzing the wedding from above,’ she reminded her siblings. ‘And Grandad got around that change of plan by borrowing a pal’s massive yacht for the occasion.’
‘Yes, Grandad’s pretty wily,’ Winnie agreed, still studying her reflection, her heart beating so fast with nerves it felt as though it were thumping through her entire body like a ticking time bomb on countdown.
‘Pittee,’ Teddy told her, yanking on her gown for attention.
‘Pretty? That’s a new word. Wonder where he picked up that one,’ Vivi commented, snatching her nephew up into a hug. ‘No, you’re not allowed to touch Mama’s dress with those little hands, but I’m wearing black, so you can do all the grabbing you want round Aunt Zoe and me!’
Teddy giggled with delight as Vivi turned him upside down, swung him round and dumped him on the massive bed for a spot of tickling and the sort of rough play he adored. Winnie paced anxiously. Eros had visited them in London twice to see Teddy but Winnie hadn’t seen him since that tense and disturbing evening meal they had shared. She had been at work, for, although her grandfather and Eros had both scoffed at the idea of such dutiful behaviour, Winnie had worked out her notice, giving the restaurant owner time to find and engage her replacement.
The yacht was slowing down radically to enter the harbour and dock. When they disembarked they were heading straight to the church before moving up to the Nevrakis house on the hill for the reception. When it came to making the return trip to Athens, both Winnie and her sisters already had their instructions. All they had to do was slip away and walk back down to the little harbour, where the yacht would await their arrival. Teddy would be brought there in a separate manoeuvre. ‘Why not leave straight