‘And it didn’t?’
She shook her head. ‘I thought that I could fight against it, that it would be like fighting the hurdles I had to overcome when our parents died, and I will, only at the moment, after tonight and the champagne, I just don’t think …’
‘So it’s only tonight that you don’t want to spend in my bed?’
‘No, it’s not just tonight.’
‘So it isn’t just the champagne either?’
Lizzie couldn’t speak. She couldn’t look at him, and she couldn’t run from him either. All she could do was simply shake her head.
‘I’d be lying if I said that I’d never been propositioned by a woman before, and I’d be lying even more if I said that I’d either welcomed or enjoyed the experience,’ Ilios told her abruptly. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I’m a man who does his own hunting, who selects the woman he wants and pursues her—not the other way around.’
Lizzie’s head came up. ‘I wasn’t propositioning you,’ she denied fiercely. ‘I was just trying to explain—to warn you.’ When he made no response she continued determinedly, ‘I could sleep in the guest room, and then in the morning …’
Ilios was shaking his head.
‘No. Now that I am aware of the situation you may rest assured that you can safely leave it to me to take the right steps to deal with it. That was what you wanted, after all, wasn’t it? For me to take responsibility for the situation?’
‘Yes,’ Lizzie was forced to agree.
‘Right. I have some work to do—costings to check—and some e-mails to send. So why don’t you make yourself at home in what will now be our bedroom and stop worrying? It is a husband’s duty to protect his wife, is it not?’ Ilios’s whole manner was dismissive, and indicated that he no longer felt the issue worthy of discussion.
‘I’m not your wife—and anyway, a lot of women would take exception to the idea that they might need to be protected,’ Lizzie felt bound to point out.
‘This is Greece,’ Ilios told her firmly. ‘And you are both worrying needlessly and imagining problems where none need exist.’
If she did go to bed now, with any luck she would be asleep before Ilios came to join her. In all probability that was why he was staying up to do some work, Lizzie reflected, as she picked up her coat and nodded in acknowledgement of what he had said.
Ilios’s bedroom was twice the size of the guest suite, with both a bathroom and a wetroom attached to it. Not that Lizzie allowed herself to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary in the modern bathroom, with its limestone floor and walls, and its huge bowl-shaped bath.
The bed, as Ilios had told her, was very big—wide enough, surely, for two parents and at least four children; plenty wide enough for two adults to sleep in totally separate. Even so, Lizzie looked at the large sofa on the other side of the bedroom and then, still wrapped in her towel, went over to it. One by one she carried the cushions from it over to the bed, where she laid them meticulously down the middle of the immaculate pale grey silk and cotton cover.
There! That should stop her, should she attempt to do anything silly in her sleep.
Now all she had to do was find the cotton pyjamas she had brought with her from home.
Ten minutes later, wearing the tee shirt top and cut-off trousers, Lizzie pulled back the bedclothes and got into ‘her’ half of the bed.
Ilios rubbed his hands over his face to ease the tiredness from it and then looked at his watch. Almost two a.m. Lizzie should be asleep by now. Had he really needed to do this? an inner voice scoffed at him. After all, he was perfectly capable of ensuring that nothing happened that he did not want to happen. Wasn’t he? Or maybe, given the lengths he was going to to avoid joining her, he wasn’t as sure as he’d like to be.
He looked at the sofa. If that was how he felt, then he had better not take any risks, hadn’t he? Picking up the cashmere throw that was draped just so over one of the sofas, Ilios lay down with the throw over himself, flicking the remote to switch off the lights.
This was certainly not something he had envisaged when he’d decided that Lizzie would make him a perfect pretend wife, Ilios thought grimly. Sleeping on the sofa whilst she occupied his bed, in order to protect her from herself …
CHAPTER NINE
‘COFFEE.’
It was a statement, not a question, and the familiar darkly smoky male voice in which it was delivered brought Lizzie abruptly out of her sleep.
Ilios, dressed in a white towelling bathrobe and smelling discreetly of clean, warm male flesh, was standing beside the bed—her side of the bed—holding out to her a stylish white china mug, obviously wanting her to take it from him. Obediently Lizzie struggled out of her warm cocoon of bedclothes to sit up, reaching for the mug with one hand whilst keeping the bedclothes pressed to her with the other.
‘I’m still not safe, then?’ Ilios drawled, a gleam of something approaching amusement in the golden eagle eyes that held Lizzie spellbound.
He was actually smiling! Delight flooded through her, causing her to smile back at him before she could stop herself as she took the mug he was holding out to her. Until recollection of their conversation of the night before made Lizzie groan inwardly, and curse whatever had been responsible for her reckless folly.
Unable to come up with a suitably crushing and mature response, she looked away from him, almost sloshing coffee onto the bedding when she saw that the sofa cushions she had carefully put in place last night had gone.
Her eyes wide with disbelief and censure, she accused Ilios, ‘You took the cushions away.’
‘I had no other choice. I’m Greek! I have to think what it would do to my reputation as a man if Maria arrived and found that you had barricaded yourself on one side of the bed in isolation.’
‘You could have told her that we’d had a quarrel.’
‘I could have,’ Ilios agreed. ‘But there is a saying that you should never sleep with your anger or without your wife. Maria is of the old school, and she would believe that the more intense the quarrel, the more passionate the making up. In Maria’s eyes a quarrel between man and wife can result in only one thing—the arrival of a new baby nine months later.’
Lizzie shuddered inwardly and trembled outwardly. Why had he said that? He must know the effect it was likely to have on her after what she had told him. If this was his way of ensuring that she didn’t give way to her desire for him, then Lizzie didn’t think it was going to work very well.
‘There must be something you can say to Maria that would make her accept that we should sleep in separate rooms—after all, we aren’t even married yet.’
‘No, there is nothing,’ Ilios told her. ‘You must know that in Greece, especially this part of Greece, a man’s maleness is something he must prove to all those who know him in order to win and maintain their respect. That means being the master of his own house. No Greek male would ever publicly admit that his wife’s sexual advances were unwelcome.’
‘I wasn’t suggesting that you that you told her that,’ Lizzie informed him indignantly.
Ilios looked down at the bed. Make-up free, with her hair down round her shoulders and the part of her body that wasn’t swathed in bedcovers shrouded by what looked like an oversized tee shirt, Lizzie looked nothing like a temptress of any kind. So why was his body telling him in no uncertain terms that she was, and that it was very tempted by her?
Absently glancing around the room, Lizzie noticed something she had not taken in before—the bedding on other side of the bed was pristinely neat. Untouched, in fact.
She turned