‘I know—I heard you. So did half the guests,’ Mia observed, waving graciously and bestowing a serene smile on the bride’s indignant parents.
Undeterred, Aunt Theodosia continued, ‘This family needs more babies. What is wrong with you young people nowadays? When are you going to have some babies, Christos?’
Christos bent and pressed his lips in a courtly gesture to the frail, age-spotted old hand. ‘When I find someone with as much spunk as you.’ Or, failing that, red hair. He blinked, wondering where that thought had come from.
The old lady tried to hide her pleased smile. ‘If you do,’ she predicted, ‘it might well be the making of you. That other girl—what was her name?’
‘Melina.’
‘That was it. I didn’t like her. She smiled too much.’
Across the aisle, Melina wasn’t smiling at all. In fact she was looking daggers at a girl with red hair, who Christos had barely taken his eyes from.
CHAPTER THREE
‘WHY do you encourage her, Christos?’ his mother reproached him as she walked down the aisle.
While he lent an attentive ear to his mother, Christos continued to watch the troublesome redhead as she sat down, concealing all but the top of her fiery head from his view.
‘Carl looked furious,’ Mia added in a hushed tone. ‘Especially as Sally is pregnant.’
The column was situated so that in addition to the top of her head he could see her neat feet, and as she crossed one leg over the other her ankle-length coat fell back to reveal a pair of worn denim jeans.
‘What’s the problem with security, Mother?’
‘There isn’t a problem,’ Mia admitted, blissfully unaware that she didn’t have her son’s total attention. ‘I just had to get you away from Aunt Theodosia before you made her say something else outrageous.’
Christos wondered if kissing the unknown redhead, fitting his mouth to hers and parting her moist pink lips, would be considered outrageous. If not, his fertile and overactive imagination was capable of conjuring several alternatives that almost certainly were!
Aware that he was breathing too fast, Christos made a conscious effort to slow his rapid, laboured respirations—not an easy thing to do when your head was filled with imaginings about the taste and touch of a woman.
‘I doubt if anyone has ever made Theodosia do or say anything.’
‘Your voice sounds strange, Christos,’ his mother said, reaching up and touching a cool maternal hand to his brow. ‘And you’re hot,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I do hope you’re not coming down with something. I have never considered air travel healthy.’
‘Well, if I die of something airborne you will have the satisfaction of knowing it was at your instigation I flew halfway around the world to be here.’
‘You,’ his mother retorted tartly, ‘are as bad as Theodosia.’
‘Thank you. I just hope I can grow old as disgracefully as she has.’
His mother cast him a reproachful look, before pausing to be charming to someone important.
‘You know, Mother, I think you’re wrong about the security problem.’
Mia’s eyes widened in alarm. ‘There is a problem? What?’
‘Nothing I can’t handle,’ Christos said, his eyes fixed on the top of that burnished head.
He began to work his way to the rear of the church. On auto-pilot, he returned the nods and smiles he received, all the time never losing sight of the redhead.
As she pulled the collar of her ankle-length coat up around her neck, to frame her face, the breath snagged in his throat. He had never seen her face before, yet somehow he felt as though he had known it all his life.
A man could only go on blaming jet lag for so long. Then he had to take responsibility himself.
A babe in arms chose that moment to cry, its whimper of complaint magnified by the building’s impressive acoustics. By reflex her eyes—like every eye in the place—momentarily turned towards the ear-splitting sound.
He stood with his tall shoulders braced against a stone pillar and pondered the mild electric shock that had passed through his body as those eyes, the deepest and most shocking shade of blue he had ever encountered, had connected with his. He doubted the moment had been shared. He had the impression she hadn’t even registered his presence.
The irony of being ignored was not lost on a man who was used to women pulling every trick in the book to capture his attention.
As he watched, the beautiful stranger raised a hand to her throat under the heavy overcoat, and he saw her chest lift as she exhaled and, biting her lower lip, began to stare straight ahead, an expression of rigid control and ferocious focus on her softly formed fine-boned features.
He studied the strangely familiar face at his leisure. She had the pale, lightly freckled complexion of a natural redhead. Her small nose, in profile, was gently tilted at the tip, and though her wide mouth was drawn taut by the tension that held her entire body rigid, he imagined that under normal circumstances it would be soft.
He got hot as he began to think thoughts inappropriate for the inside of a cathedral. The thoughts concerned that mouth. He not been a victim of such mindless lust since his hormones went crazy in his teens—maybe not even then.
As the place began to fill up he took the seat directly behind the redhead, positioning himself so that he could see her profile. She remained unaware of his scrutiny.
By the time Becca had finally entered the Cathedral the light-headed sensation she had been suffering for the past hour had been joined by a constant low-pitched buzz in her ears. She’d had to thrust her hands into her pockets to hide the fact they were trembling.
Worrying that she might fall into a dead faint at any moment and ruin everything had made it hard for her to maintain the confident air she had adopted, working on the theory that if she looked as if she belonged it might delay the inevitable moment of discovery.
She suspected all her symptoms had a lot to do with her caffeine tolerance. The fourth cup of coffee she had drunk at the motorway services to keep her alert had been a mistake. Her trembling knees had made sitting down sometime soon a priority.
She’d been looking for a likely place to wait for her moment when she’d seen one of the uniformly handsome young men who were smoothly directing guests to their seats bearing down on her, all charm and slick efficiency. She’d frozen and looked wildly from left to right. Then, taking a deep breath and pinning on a painfully bright smile, she’d begun to wave at some invisible person in the crowd, before walking purposefully in that direction.
What am I doing?
As she had slowed to let an elderly lady in an incredibly large hat pass, the full enormity of what she was about to do had hit her. It had been like running full-tilt into a brick wall. The fact was that deep down, until that moment, Becca hadn’t expected to get this far.
Well, what were the odds? You just didn’t walk uninvited into the big society wedding joining the only daughter of one of Britain’s highest profile entrepreneurs to a scion of the fabulously wealthy Carides family.
The knot of anger lodged behind her breastbone had swelled as she’d thought of the family who imagined that money gave them the right to trample over the feelings of ordinary people. A person who had gone through life not hating anyone, Becca was now finding it surprisingly easy to hate anyone who carried the name of Carides.
Head down, avoiding eye contact she’d given a relieved sigh as she’d spotted an unoccupied pew, but as she’d taken her seat she’d realised