She stared at her rather drab image in the mirror. It was stupid to feel ashamed of waitressing when it was a job she had done with pride and efficiency during many periods of her adult life. But this felt different, and maybe that was because it was. She was going to have to wait on the father of her child and pretend that he meant nothing to her.
Shutting the door quietly behind her, Laura went outside to find Alex splashing around with Stavros in the shallow end of an enormous swimming pool.
‘Mum!’ he yelled. ‘Look! Stavros is teaching me breaststroke!’
Laura smiled as the seal-dark wet head of the student emerged from the water. ‘Thank you, Stavros.’
The student grinned as he gestured for Alex to come forward. ‘I like to teach, and he shows promise. Young children learn quickly. Come, Alex, show your mama what you can do.’
Alex doggy-paddled over to the edge of the pool and stared up at her, and Laura’s heart turned over as she saw the look of pure joy on his little face. ‘Don’t get tired, will you, darling?’ she said.
‘Mum!’
‘Did you have breakfast?’
‘Yes, I had it with Constantine.’ Alex grinned. ‘We had yoghurt—with honey! And Constantine and me went and picked oranges from the tree and then we squeezed them!’
She gazed down at him, thinking how easily her son had slotted into life here—already. And how easily he seemed to be slotting into a relationship with Constantine, too. Why, he must have felt as if he had landed in heaven with all the space and beauty which surrounded him
The dark flicker of fear invaded her heart once more. Fear that Alex might just fall in love with Greece and the powerful man who had fathered him—and might not want to return with her to their grey and penny-pinching life back in England …
‘Lovely, darling,’ she managed to say. ‘Well, I’m supposed to be working, so I’d better go and see what Demetra wants me to do.’
Laura made her way to the kitchen to find Demetra, who seemed to have assumed the role of mother hen. First she insisted that Laura sit outside and eat some bread and honey, and drink some of the thick, strong coffee.
‘You are too thin,’ Demetra commented as she pushed a bowl of bread towards her. ‘A woman needs her strength.’
Tell me about it, thought Laura wryly, as she sliced a peach into gleaming rose-tinged slices. But mental strength was surely just as important as the physical kind—and you couldn’t build that up with bread and honey! But she felt oddly moved by the older woman’s kindness—because it had been so long since someone had fussed over her like this.
And at least working was therapeutic—it was hard to stay troubled when your fingers were busy chopping salads and stuffing vine leaves. Demetra showed her how to make a sweet pastry dish which was soaked in lemon syrup after baking—as well as a pudding studded with nuts and raisins and flavoured with cinnamon and cloves.
Laura leaned back against the range. ‘Where did you learn how to cook like this, Demetra?’
‘Oh, I have cooked all my life,’ answered Demetra simply. ‘First for my husband and then for my living. You see, I was widowed when Stavros was just a baby, and so I came here to work for the Karantinos family. They have been good to me. And Kyrios Constantine is a good man,’ she added fiercely. ‘He used to fish with my husband—and when he died he put Stavros through school and university and made sure the boy wanted for nothing.’
The housekeeper’s words of praise for Constantine preoccupied Laura as she began to lay the table on the terrace, beneath a canopy of leaves. But the last thing she needed was to hear praise lavished on him. She wanted to put him out of her mind—at least until tonight.
‘Do you know, I could stay here all day watching you do that?’ murmured a deep voice from the shadows, and Laura whirled round to find Constantine at the other end of the terrace, his black eyes fixed on her. Clearly fresh from the shower, with tiny droplets of water bejewelling the black hair, he had changed from jeans and T-shirt into dark trousers and a thin silk shirt, and he had shaved, too.
‘How long have you been standing there?’ she accused, her heart beginning to race with a ridiculous excitement.
He began walking towards her, his progress made slow by an exquisitely painful arousal. ‘Long enough to see that delightfully old-fashioned pinafore dress stretched tight over the delectable curve of your bottom,’ he murmured. ‘Making me want to touch it again, quite urgently.’
Laura sent an agonised glance in the direction of the kitchen, even though the rattle of china told her that Demetra was not within earshot. ‘Constantine, don’t. Please. Somebody might hear.’
His black eyes mocked her. ‘Ah, Laura! You see how already we are colluding like lovers—even though we are not yet lovers? For that pleasure I must wait—and I am not a man who is used to waiting.’
‘No, I can believe that,’ she said quietly, holding the tray in front of her as if it were a shield.
He lowered his voice until it was nothing but a silken caress which whispered over her skin. ‘Do you know that I feel as a man in prison must feel, ticking off the seconds and the minutes and the hours?’
Laura swallowed. ‘Constantine—’
‘So that the whole day seems stretched out in front of me like a piece of elastic,’ he continued inexorably. ‘Which is tightening unbearably—tighter and tighter—until the time when it snaps and I can once more feel your lips on mine and your honeyed heat as it welcomes me into your body.’
‘Stop it,’ she whispered as the siren song of desire began a slow pulsing through her veins ‘Please, stop it. Or how will I compose myself in front of the others?’
‘You didn’t think through the potential problems of making such an erotic date with destiny, did you?’ he taunted.
She hadn’t counted on being on such an erotic knife-edge, no. ‘Do you think your father’s going to ask me anything?’
‘If he does, then just answer his questions truthfully,’ he said, his whole mood suddenly sobering. ‘If you think you can manage that.’
‘You’re … making it sound as if you think I’m a liar,’ said Laura unsteadily, trying to read his expression—but it would have been easier to have sought some sort of meaning from a statue.
Constantine shook his head. ‘I haven’t quite decided what you are,’ he said softly. ‘Or just what your agenda is.’
Her heart slammed against her ribcage. ‘Who says I have an agenda?’
‘Women always do—it’s in their genetic make-up.’
‘You’re a cynic, Constantine.’
‘No, agape mou,’ he contradicted softly. ‘I am simply a very rich man who has seen female ambition in its every form. And you—of all women—have the opportunity to try to take me for everything you can get your hands on.’
‘You think that I’d do that?’ she demanded breathlessly.
‘I told you—I haven’t made up my mind yet,’ he returned.
And yet Laura had confounded every one of his expectations of her. Her refusal to marry him and her stubborn insistence on coming here to work instead had left him feeling unsettled. After a lifetime spent dodging matrimonial commitment to some of the world’s most eligible women, he had assumed that this humble waitress would leap at the chance of being a rich man’s wife—yet she had done the very opposite. So was she simply being devious, or principled?
‘Now—if