Innocent Surrender. Robyn Donald

around hopefully, as if their destination might materialize on the horizon. “It’s only a couple of hours to Cabo.”

      Demetrios had stared at her. “Flying,” he’d agreed. “Sailing it’ll probably take us about a week.”

      “A week?” Lissa’s voice was so loud and so shrill he thought they probably could have heard it in Des Moines.

      “Well, depending on the winds, of course, but—”

      But she hadn’t let him get any more out than that. She’d lit into him with a fury he’d only seen before on the set when she’d played a drug addict deprived of her source. She’d got an Emmy nomination for the performance.

      It turned out she hadn’t been acting. It turned out Lissa had more than a small drug habit. She’d been intending to score some in Mexico, though Demetrios hadn’t known it at the time. There was a whole lot about Lissa he hadn’t known then—things that even now he wished he’d never known.

      It would have made it easier to forgive her. To forgive himself.

      That disastrous trip had occurred just six months into their marriage. Later he’d thought it was the beginning of the slide downhill. Even that wasn’t true. The slide had begun before she’d even walked up the aisle to become his wife.

      He’d been fooled. Conned. Duped into believing he’d found the woman of his dreams.

      Because he’d wanted it so much that he’d convinced himself? Or because Lissa had played the role so well?

      How much had been intentional misdirection and how much had simply been bad judgment? Demetrios had no idea still.

      All he could remember is that she’d looked so perfect on their wedding day. So content. So happy, Anny looked that way now—happy, her eyes closed, her face in repose.

      But hers was not like Lissa’s version of “happy.”

      Lissa’s “happiness” had always had an effervescence to it. She had bubbled, emoted, reacted. She had acted happy.

      Sitting here now basking in the sunshine, eyes shut, wind in her hair, Anny wasn’t acting. She simply was.

      There was no bubbliness, no bounce. No reaction. Her emotion was quiet, accepting, serene—and, heaven help him, enticing in its very stillness.

      Dangerously enticing.

      And Demetrios understood quite clearly now what Anny meant about making love with him being “dangerous” because it would involve her heart.

      Indulging these thoughts about Anny—seeing in her the antithesis of Lissa—was dangerous in the extreme. It could undermine his resolve. It could make him vulnerable.

      She didn’t have to entice him intentionally. It was worse, in fact, that she wasn’t. It made him want things he had promised himself he would never want again.

      “You’re going to get a sunburn if you keep doing that,” he said gruffly.

      Anny’s eyes flicked open in surprise. She dipped her head so that Theo’s sun visor shaded her face again and she sat up straight, then smiled up at him. “You’re right,” she said, flexing her shoulders and stretching like a cat in the sun. “But it feels wonderful.”

      To his ears, her voice almost sounded like a purr. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say in the face of such inocent happiness.

      He found himself wishing she were more like Lissa so she would be easier to resist.

      At the same time he couldn’t help being glad she was not.