And then, when he had recalled just who she was, he had felt that burn of disillusionment all over again.
‘If you need a change of clothes…’ Penny’s voice broke into his thoughts.
‘It’s all right…’
This was something he had already decided he would have to concede on. He had been away for two years. The reports had had him dead. Anyone—everyone—would have thought that it was a crazy thing to do to hang onto his clothes for that long. After his mother had died, even his own father had had to acknowledge that, adore her as he had, he couldn’t keep his first wife’s wardrobe when she had been gone six months.
‘I understand if there’s nothing here.’
‘No—’
She had crossed to the wardrobe that had always been his, was fumbling with the handle. Pulling it open, she stood back so that he could see. The sight of every item of his clothing still hanging neat and straight just as he had left them over two years before had an effect like a punch to his guts, driving all the breath from his body.
‘You kept them…’
But that had her lowering her face as if in embarrassment, brushing off his comment with an awkward little flick of her head.
‘You know where the towels are…’
She almost ran from the room, leaving him staring after her, his mind see-sawing sickeningly as he tried to adjust to what had just happened.
She had kept all his clothes. In spite of the fact that she had been told he was dead, she had kept all his clothes as carefully and as well cared for as she had done when he was there. She hadn’t cleared them out or packed them away, but had kept them here, in their bedroom. The room in which she still slept.
So what did that mean?
But he had seen her with Jason that first night. Seen the way she had run into his stepbrother’s arms. And heard her…
‘I want to get away from here, start living again. I’m tired of treading water…I can’t inherit unless we have Zarek’s death declared and legalised. So let’s do that. Let’s put it all behind us…’
And then, just as he reached the door this morning, that final, dismissive toast she had made, obviously with Jason in mind.
‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’
So how did that square with the same woman who had kept every item of clothing he possessed for the time he had been gone? Did this mean that Penny had actually been hoping that he would come back?
In which case, why the hell had she bolted from his bed as if his touch appalled her?
Shaking his head, Zarek headed for the bathroom, discarding his clothes as he went.
He had taken his time about coming back, had sent a private investigator to check out the situation here on Ithaca first, before he had even made the journey from Malta and then moved onto the island incognito because he had wanted to watch and see for himself. Because, face it, the return of his memory had brought with it bad memories as well as good. Memories of feelings that the intervening two years could only have added to, made worse, dug in deeper.
And the woman he had come back to—the wife he had found waiting for him—was not at all what he had expected. For a start, he had never expected her to be here at all.
Turning on the shower full force, Zarek stepped under the rush of water and let it beat down on his head.
In fact there was just one way in which she was just the same as when he had left. And that was that she was the sexiest woman he had ever seen. The woman who only had to walk into a room to crank the heat up by one hundred degrees. Whose smile was an enticement to seduction. The woman who could make him burn with heat and hunger with one look, one word in her beautiful voice falling from her sexy soft lips.
She was a temptation strong enough to distract him from the way he really needed to be thinking, the things he had wanted to find out before he took up his old way of life again. His marriage was going to be so very different this time, or it was not going to exist at all.
But even as he told himself that the all-too-familiar heavy tightening in his groin warned him of what just thinking about Penny could do to him. The sort of reaction that stopped him thinking, drove the blood away from his brain and down to other, much more basic parts of his body. He’d already almost been caught that way once tonight. And thinking, not responding, was what he needed to do.
With a heavy sigh he reached up and turned the control on the shower to cold and forced himself to stand under it for far, far longer than he needed to get clean.
Chapter Nine
‘THAT was wonderful, thank you.’
Zarek pushed his plate away from him, reached for his wine glass, and leaned back in his chair to sip at the goldentoned liquid with a sigh of contentment.
‘It’s so long since I tasted baked feta with peppers that I had almost forgotten how much I enjoyed it. And baklava…I didn’t know that you knew how to make it.’
‘Marta taught me,’ Penny said, referring to the cook who usually ran the villa’s kitchen with a rule of iron. ‘I’ve been having cooking lessons with her—for something to do.’
She didn’t add that she had specially learned how to make the simple dish and others like it because her instructor had told her that they were Zarek’s favourites. She’d already given far too much away by revealing that she had kept all his clothes in the wardrobes since the time of his disappearance.
‘So that’s how you spent your time.’
‘Part of it anyway.’
Once again Penny couldn’t look at him but fixed her eyes on the dark line of the horizon. Even after ten o’clock at night it was still warm enough to sit out on the terrace beside the swimming pool and that was where she had served the quick and simple meal she had put together for them after she had emerged from the shower.
She hadn’t stayed under the water for long. Once safely in the sanctuary of a bathroom belonging to another bedroom, at the far end of the landing from the master suite she and Zarek had once shared, she had been quick to strip off the blue silk robe, tossing it onto the bed and then freezing in horror at the sight that confronted her in another full-length mirror.
‘Oh, my…No!’
Had she really looked such a shocking mess? With her dress dragged down and pushed up, actually torn in one place, she looked more like the victim of an assault than a passionate lover happy to give herself to the man she adored. Her underwear had disappeared, lost who knew where, and her hair was a complete bird’s nest falling in wild and knotted disarray around a shock-pale face. Even the untypical light traces of make-up that the thought of today’s dreadful board meeting had driven her to put on were smudged and smeared around her eyes, the soft tinted lipstick totally kissed off.
‘No!’
Penny put her hands to her face, covering her eyes to block out the sight, then almost immediately snatched them away again. She couldn’t bear to stay like this a moment longer. A long, hot shower would make her feel better, restore some sense of balance, repair her damaged self-esteem.
At least that was what she hoped for. What actually happened was that as she removed and discarded what little was left of her clothing all she could think of was the way that it had felt to have Zarek’s urgent hands on her dress, snatching aside the straps, dragging her skirt up high to expose her legs…She could almost still feel his touch everywhere on her skin, on her