‘Believe it or not, it was those damn pirates who helped to break down the walls my mind had built around it. I couldn’t believe that I was having images of an attack, hearing the word pirates in the twenty-first century. And so I started to look things up, track down stories about pirates in the press, on the Internet. At first it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.’
Needing to break the almost mesmeric hold his closeness had on her, Penny forced herself to sit back, reach for her glass.
‘But then one name kept going round and round in my head—the Troy…Careful.’
The last word was a warning as Penny swallowed too quickly, too awkwardly, and almost choked on her wine. She had been hoping for another name—her own name. The name of his wife. But no, the first things that had come back to him were connected with his company.
‘You never could handle retsina,’ Zarek said in mild amusement. ‘In fact I always thought you hated it.’
‘It wasn’t to my taste at first,’ Penny acknowledged. ‘But I have to admit that I’ve grown to like it better.’
‘Another of those things that have changed while I’ve been away.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t expect everything to just come to a halt—stay there, frozen in ice because you weren’t here.’
Pure nerves had pushed the wild words from her tongue. And she knew what was twisting those nerves into painful knots so that she couldn’t think straight.
‘Of course not.’
‘Of course not!’ Penny snapped. ‘We couldn’t just give up on things. Life had to go on. For everyone. I mean, even…’
‘Even…?’ Zarek prompted when her throat closed up and she couldn’t finish the name.
Penny reached for her glass again, took another fortifying sip of wine. Nerves had made her slip on the words, but suddenly she was determined to have this out. Time it was out in the open and faced.
‘Even for bloody Odysseus Shipping.’
Oh, she had his attention now. If she thought that nearly black gaze had been focused before, now it had the burn of a laser so that she expected her skin to actually scorch where it rested.
It was too much to see the sudden change from stillness to attention. To watch his face change, the sudden light of interest in his eyes.
But, “Bloody Odysseus Shipping?” was all he said and his tone was quite mild, enquiring. ‘You were desperate to get rid of it,’ he added in the same sort of tone.
‘Is that so impossible to believe?’
Pushing her chair back with an ugly scraping sound on the stone-tiled terrace, she got hastily to her feet and reached for his empty plate. Stacking it on top of her own, she winced inwardly at the crashing sound it made. She wasn’t deliberately clattering them together, it just sounded that way. Her hands weren’t as steady as she wanted and she cursed how much they gave away of her inner turmoil.
‘I mean, I’m no hot-shot businesswoman. I’m a secretary—a very junior secretary at that. And when a company loses its chairman to sudden death—an accident at sea—and there is no one ready and trained to take his place, then apparently the values of shares waver—people wonder about their connections with the firm. Didn’t you hear? I mean, I assume that you did a lot of investigating, checking on facts—looking into things before you came back to Ithaca. Just so that you knew what was going on.’
She actually paused and looked up at him, waiting for his answer. Not that she needed it. She knew already that he must have checked out all the details of what was happening on Ithaca before he had even thought about coming home. That was the sort of man Zarek was. He never made a move until he had all the facts.
‘You didn’t know!’ she exclaimed as his head went back in shock. ‘You really didn’t find out about that?’
‘I knew.’
Zarek’s confirmation was a low growl as she made herself turn and head towards the kitchen with the dirty plates. She wouldn’t allow herself to look back but she heard the pad of his bare feet on the tiles as he came up behind her.
At least the simple task of loading the plates and cutlery into the dishwasher meant that she could keep her back to him, focusing hard on the job in hand. But all the same she felt as if she could sense the tension coming off him in waves and directed at the back of her head, so sharp that it almost penetrated her skull.
‘Then you’ll understand why it felt like a millstone round my neck. And all the time I had Hermione and your stepbrothers on my back too. Telling me that nothing I did was right. That the company needed a man in control. So, yes, in the end I gave in. I’d had enough. I was going to walk away, go back to England. Start my life over again. Yes, I know you never wanted them to have the company, but what else could I do? It’s not as if I had a child whose inheritance I had to fight for too.’
Too late she realised just what she had said, the minefield into which she had wandered. And the silence from behind her was so deep, so intense that she could practically feel it closing around her, sealing off her lungs, taking the breath from her body.
‘No, you made sure of that.’
His voice had turned to ice. Icy shards that seemed to slash at her exposed and vulnerable skin.
‘You knew I wanted a child. You led me to believe you wanted one too.’
Washing-powder tablet…rinse aid…Penny forced herself to focus on the mundane details to stop her mind going into meltdown as she hunted for an answer.
‘I didn’t want your heir.’
She could answer him this way while she had her back to him and he couldn’t see her face. It meant that she couldn’t see his expression but that hardly mattered. It was much more important that he didn’t know her answer for the half lie that it was. She hadn’t wanted only to provide him with an heir, but the thought of a small baby with Zarek’s black hair and deep brown eyes almost destroyed her. Her eyes were blurred with focusing on the front of the dishwasher so fiercely rather than let any tears form.
‘But that was why we married—why I became your husband.’
Slamming the dishwasher door shut—the noise and force deliberate this time—Penny pushed herself up from the squatting position and pressed the start button fiercely.
He was leaning against the worktop, arms folded across his powerful chest, but the tension in the long body showed the position to be anything other than the relaxed one it appeared to be.
‘But there’s so much more to being a husband than just declaring it.’
Did something change in those eyes or was it just the flicker of the candlelight throwing a different set of shadows into them?
‘What was missing? Was I cruel to you? Did I treat you badly—not give you everything you wanted?’
‘You gave everything I could have dreamed of.’
If they were talking about material things. But from the moment that she had known how much she needed his love, then marriage, his beautiful homes, all the riches he had were as nothing compared with what she wanted most in all the world. And she had more pride than to beg for something he couldn’t give her.
‘And yet you didn’t want to stay—you didn’t want a child.’
Just as she couldn’t read his face, she couldn’t interpret his tone.
‘We didn’t have a marriage to bring a child into. A child has the right to have two parents who are happy to be together, and not just because of the life they had created between them.’