‘Shall we go?’ she said.
Lester Miles just nodded and fell into step beside her. He was young and he was eager and she had picked him out at random from the Yellow Pages. Yes, she was dressed for battle, because she didn’t think she needed a lawyer to fire her shots for her—though she was happy for him to come along and play the stooge.
For today was redemption day. Today she intended to take back all of those things that Leandros had wrenched from her and walk away a whole person again. She didn’t want his money or to discuss settlements. She had nothing he could want from her, unless he planned to fight over a gold wedding ring and a few diamond trinkets that had made his mother stare in dismay when she’d found out that her son had given them to Isobel.
Family heirlooms, she recalled. ‘A bit wasted on you, don’t you think?’ his sister Chloe had said. But then, dear Mama and Chloe had not been in the bedroom when the precious heirlooms had been her only attire. They’d not seen the way their precious boy had decked out his wife in every sparkle he could lay his hands on—before he enjoyed the pleasure they gave.
Those same heirlooms still lay languishing in a safety deposit box right here in Athens. Leandros was welcome to them as far as she was concerned. It was going to be interesting to discover just what he was willing to place on the table for their safe return—before she told him she wanted nothing from him, then gave him back his damned diamonds and left with her pride!
The journey across Athens in a taxi took an age in traffic that hardly seemed to move. Lester Miles kept on quizzing her as to what was required of him, but she answered in tight little sentences that gave him no clue at all.
‘You are in such a powerful position, Mrs Petronades,’ he pointed out. ‘With no pre-nuptial agreement you are entitled to half of everything your husband owns.’
Isobel blinked. She hadn’t given a single thought to a pre-nuptial agreement or the lack of one, come to that. Was this why Leandros wanted to see her personally? Was he out to charm her into seeing this settlement thing from his point of view? The stakes had quite suddenly risen. A few family heirlooms didn’t seem to matter any more when you put them in the giant Petronades pot of gold.
‘Negotiations will stand or fall on which of you wants this divorce more,’ Lester Miles continued. ‘As it was your husband who instigated proceedings, I think we can safely say that power is in your hands.’
‘You’ve done your homework,’ she murmured.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It is what you hired me to do.’
‘Does that mean you might know why my husband has suddenly decided he wants this divorce?’ she enquired curiously.
‘I have not been able to establish anything with outright proof,’ the lawyer warned her, then looked so uncomfortable Isobel felt that fizz in her stomach start up again. ‘But I do believe there is another woman involved. She goes by the name of Miss Diantha Christophoros. She is from one of the most respected families in Greece, my sources tell me…’
His sources couldn’t be more right, Isobel agreed as she shifted restlessly in recognition of the Greek beauty’s name. A union between the Petronades and Christophoros families would be the same as founding a dynasty. Mama Petronades must be so very pleased.
‘She spent some time with your husband on his yacht recently,’ her very efficient lawyer continued informatively. ‘Also, your brother-in-law—Nicolas Petronades—will be marrying Carlotta Santorini next week. Rumour has it that once his brother is married your husband would like to follow suit. It could be an heir thing,’ he suggested. ‘Powerful families like the Petronades prefer to keep the line of succession clear cut.’
An heir thing, Isobel repeated. Felt tears sting the backs of her eyes and the fizz happening inside her turn to an angry ache.
To hell with you, Leandros, she thought bitterly.
CHAPTER TWO
TO HELL with you, Isobel repeated fifteen minutes later, when finally they came face to face in the elegant surroundings of Leondros’s company boardroom with all its imposing wood panelling and fancy portraits of past masters.
Here stood the latest in a long line of masters, she observed coldly. Leandros Petronades, lean, dark and as arrogant as ever. A man built to break hearts, as she should know.
He stood six feet two inches tall and wore a grey suit, white shirt and a grey silk tie that drew a line down the length of a torso made up of tensile muscle wrapped in silk-like bronze skin. He hadn’t changed, not so much as an inch of him; not the aura of leashed power beneath the designer clothing, or the sleek, handsome structure of his face. His hair was still that let-me-touch midnight-black colour, his eyes dark like the richest molasses ever produced, and his mouth smooth, slim, very masculine—the mouth of a born sensualist.
She wanted to reach out and slap his face. She wanted to leap on him and beat at his adulterous chest with her fists. The anger, the pain, the black, blinding pulse of emotional fury was literally throbbing along her veins. It was as if the last three years hadn’t happened. It could have been yesterday that she had walked out of his life. Diantha Christophoros of all women, she was thinking. Diantha, the broken-hearted one who had had to be taken out of Athens by her family when Leandros arrived there with his shocking new wife.
Did he think she didn’t know about her? Did he really believe his awful sister would have passed up the opportunity to let her know what he had thrown away in the name of hot sex? Did he think Chloe would have kept silent about the trips he made to Washington D.C. to visit his broken-hearted ex?
I hate you, her eyes informed him while the anger sang in her blood. She didn’t speak, she didn’t want to. And as they stared at each other along half the length of his impressive boardroom table the silence screamed like a banshee in everyone’s ears. His uncle Takis was there but she refused to look at him. Lester Miles stood somewhere behind her, watchful and silent as the grave. Leandros didn’t make a single move to come and greet her, his dark eyes drifting over her as if they were looking at a snake.
Well, that just about says it all, she thought coldly. His family has finally managed to indoctrinate him into their speciality of recognising dross.
Having just watched his wife of four years walk into his boardroom—and scanned her sensational legs—Leandros was held paralysed by the force of anger which roared up inside him like a lion about to leap.
So much for killing himself by imagining her a mere shadow of her former self, he was thinking bitterly. So much for feeling that overwhelming sense of relief when he’d found out it was not Isobel who was confined to a wheelchair but her mother—then feeling the guilt of being relieved about something so painfully tragic, whoever the victim! Silvia Cunningham had been a beautiful woman, full of life and energy. To think of that fine spirit that she had passed on to her daughter now quashed into a wheelchair had touched him deeply.
He was in danger of laughing out loud at his latest plan to make sure that Isobel’s mother was provided for within the settlement. Indeed that plan was not about to change because of what he now knew.
Only his plans for this beautiful, adulterous creature standing here in front of him, with her glossed-back hair, spitting green eyes and tight little mouth with its small upper lip and protruding bottom lip that made him want to leap on it and bite.
Where only hours ago he had been content to be unbelievably kind and gentle. He now wanted to tear her limb from limb.
Four years—for four long years this woman had lived inside him like a low, throbbing ache. He’d felt guilt, he’d felt sadness, he’d wanted to accord her the respect he’d believed she deserved from him by making no one aware of his plans to remarry until he had eased himself out of this marriage in the least hurtful way that he could.
But that was until he discovered that his wife was suffering from no such feelings