As if on cue, the photographer put the camera to his eye and fired off a ream of shots of them.
She took a long breath and rose from the table, pulling herself to her full height. ‘I would have agreed to do it without the threats and blackmail.’
‘I couldn’t take the risk you would say no. I haven’t seen you in ten years. For all I knew you were holding a grudge against me. I had to consider if you’d deliberately withheld the failure of our annulment as a weapon to use against me when a time came that suited you.’
‘What? How could you think such a thing?’ She shook her head, trying to comprehend it. Ten years ago she’d laid herself bare to him, in all senses, and he thought her capable of something like that?
‘Manipulation is a common thing in my world. I can count the number of people I trust on two fingers.’
‘Well, you’ve certainly mastered the art of manipulation yourself,’ she said bitterly. Where was the man she’d married? That man had been nothing like this.
A pulse throbbed in his jaw. ‘I am trying to protect my nephew.’
‘When adults go to war it’s always the child who suffers the most.’ She knew that better than anyone. ‘I would never stand by and let it happen if there was something I could do about it. You didn’t need to go to such grotesque lengths for my help. You didn’t need to make me hate you more than I already do.’
‘I’m sure the thirty million I’m offering will sweeten the pill.’
‘No amount of money will recompense for the loss of my business and the invasion of my privacy.’
‘You want more money?’
She caught the sneer on his lips, which only fuelled her fury further. ‘Don’t try and make me out to be a money-grabber,’ she snapped. ‘If you hadn’t given Celebrity Spy! so much gossip to shout about, you wouldn’t be in this mess and you wouldn’t need me to get you out of it—your moral fibre wouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. Your parents wouldn’t be able to paint you as an unfit guardian.’
Another flash of anger resonated from his eyes but his lips formed into a taut smile. ‘Your opinion of my character means nothing to me. All I want is your agreement. Do I have it?’
‘I don’t have any damn choice.’
‘I’m pleased you can see that.’
‘But let’s get one thing straight. Our marriage will be as short as possible and strictly platonic.’
The pulse in his jawline throbbed harder. ‘Married couples in my family share adjoining rooms. It’s an arrangement that will suit us.’
‘Good. And any adjoining door will have a lock.’
‘Yes.’ His eyes glinted through the darkness, impossible to read. He got to his feet and pulled some notes from his wallet. ‘It’s time to go—we have a hotel to check into.’
‘We?’
‘Yes, kardia mou,’ he said with a mocking smile. ‘We are setting the seeds for the rekindling of our marriage. We have been pictured dining together. That photographer has been given the name of our hotel. I guarantee you he has a scooter in easy reach for him to rush there and meet us. Come the morning, the world will know we have spent the night together. All that will be left for us to do is make a statement, which I have already prepared.’
‘My God, you’ve planned everything.’
‘You don’t get to my position without forward thinking.’
‘Really? I could have sworn you’d got to your position through a fate of birth.’
It gave fleeting satisfaction to see his face darken at that comment.
‘But really, Xander, is this necessary? Do you really think your parents are going to be fooled by us getting back together when they didn’t even know I existed? Don’t you think they’ll find it convenient?’
When he replied his voice was tightly controlled. ‘It’s not my parents we need to convince, it’s the judge, and, unless you want to forfeit the money, I suggest you make it very convincing.’
* * *
‘You have got to be kidding me.’ Elizabeth’s voice was flat but her amber eyes blasted incredulity and fury right at him.
Xander brought the car to a stop at the front of La Maison Blanc Hotel. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘Why here?’
‘Because it’s fitting. This is where we married and now it’s where we’re rekindling our marriage.’
‘And to hell with my feelings, eh?’ She shook her head with loathing. ‘Just when I didn’t think it was possible to hate you more...’
‘Hate me as much as you want in private, but in public...’ He nodded at the scooter that had come to a screech at the hotel’s entrance.
She sucked in her cheeks and contemplated the photographer, whose camera was still around his neck. ‘This is pointless. No one’s going to believe we’re for real, especially not a judge. I hate you. And you never even mentioned me to your family or...’
‘I never mentioned you to anyone because the topic was too painful,’ he cut in smoothly. ‘We never wanted to part but we were too young at the time and we knew it would never work. You called me when the scandal first erupted to offer your support. My world was falling apart around me and you were there for me.’
He stretched out a hand to touch her face. The soft, almost translucent skin still felt like satin to his touch. Before she could flinch away he wound his fingers round the back of her head and gathered a large mass of her thick hair into his fist. He wondered what had happened to her curls. He’d adored the shaggy mop of hair she’d sported a decade ago.
‘It was in the course of one of our discussions that we realised our annulment had never gone through and we were still married.’ He leaned closer and studied the soft kissable lips that were pressed tightly together sucking in the rounded cheekbones.
Did those lips still taste the same? Would they still fit to his as if they’d been moulded specially?
She’d stopped breathing. Her eyes had widened, her face a frozen mask.
Still gazing at her mouth, resisting the urge to run a finger over it, he continued, ‘It was also through the course of our talks on the phone that I remembered how special you were to me and all my old feelings for you came back. I convinced you to meet me here because I wanted to see if the old magic was still alive. We realised how much we still loved each other and decided that we’d both matured enough to make our marriage work.’
He released his hold on her hair and let his fingers drift down the slender neck he had once kissed every part of, and felt the tiniest of shivers under his fingers.
Her eyes were wide and stark on his.
A long-forgotten memory sluiced him; their first time together, her dreamy pleasure, her soft moans...
The flash of the photographer’s camera cut through the moment and pulled him back to the present.
He removed his hand from her neck.
Elizabeth might have an allure that sang to his senses but this was one relationship he had no intention of taking to the bedroom. Things were going to be difficult enough between them without throwing sex into the mix.
It gave him no pleasure to threaten and blackmail her but he couldn’t afford to give her a way out. Loukas was all he cared about and he would do whatever it took to keep his nephew out of his parents’ clutches, even if it meant destroying the woman he had once thought himself in love with.