trigger them: a smell…texture. As earlier, one second she had been trying to get the sand off her feet before putting on her sandals, the next—zap!
It had been incredibly vivid.
Her foot had been in Angolos’s lap, his dark head down-bent, gleaming blue-black in the sun as he’d brushed the sand from between her toes. The touch of his fingers had sent delicious little thrills of sensation through her body. He had felt her shiver and his head had lifted. Still holding her eyes, he’d lifted her foot to his mouth and sucked one toe.
Her hand had pressed into the sand as her body had arched. ‘You can’t do that!’ she gasped. Snatching her foot from his grasp, she lifted her knees to her chin.
Angolos’s expressive mouth quirked. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re killing me,’ she confessed brokenly.
The way he looked at her, the hungry, predatory gleam in his glittering eyes, made her insides melt. ‘You won’t have long to wait, yineka mou,’ he reminded her. ‘Tomorrow we will be man and wife.’
Back in the present, Georgie opened her clenched fists. Her palms were damp and inscribed with small half-moons where her neatly trimmed fingernails had dug into the flesh. She sighed and rubbed her palms against the seat of her shorts. Would she ever be able to think about her husband without having a panic attack?
‘They could hardly keep their hands off one another.’
The salacious details…This I can really do without.
‘I’m no prude,’ the older woman continued, ‘but really…she couldn’t keep her hands off him…’
Mortifying though her grandmother’s comment was, Georgie, not a person given to self-delusion, had to admit that it was essentially true.
Always a little scornful of her contemporaries’ messy and, it seemed to her, painful love affairs, she had been totally unprepared for the primal emotions Angolos had awoken in her. She had been totally mesmerised by him.
‘My son and I disagree on most things, but on that occasion we were of one mind. Robert said to her, “Sleep with the man if you must, live with him even, but marry him…! Insanity.”’
‘But one we have all experienced, Ann,’ came the rueful response.
To imagine the two elderly women experiencing the insanity of blind lust that she had felt with Angolos made Georgie blink.
‘The girl has reaped the consequences of her stupidity.’
The scorn in her grandmother’s voice brought a flush of mortified colour to Georgie’s sun-warmed cheeks. She had made a big mistake and she was willing to own up to it, but she sometimes thought that if her family had their way she would still be eating humble pie when she was eighty!
‘She was very young.’
‘Young and she thought she knew it all.’
‘The young always do. He…the man in the magazine…he looked older?’
‘Thirty-two or something like that, I believe, at the time. You have to understand that Georgie was very young for her age…very naïve in many ways, and he had been around the block several times. Oh, a handsome devil, of course. I’m not surprised she fell for him.’
The admission amazed Georgie; to her face her grandmother had never offered any understanding.
‘You think he took advantage…?’
‘Well, what do you think? A man with one failed marriage to his credit already and Greek.’
From her grandmother’s tone it was hard to tell which fault she found harder to forgive in the man: the fact he had been married or the fact he was Greek.
‘I knew the moment I saw him he couldn’t be trusted. I told her, we all told her, but would she listen? No, she loved him.’
‘Still, you must be proud of the way she has rebuilt her life, and she has a lovely child.’
‘A child who has never even seen his father.’
‘Never? Surely not…?’
‘Refused point-blank. Angolos Constantine made it clear that he wanted nothing whatever to do with the child. And neither he or any member of his precious family have ever been near…a blessing, if you ask me.’
It was foolish, but even after this time the truth still had the power to hurt. The knot of pain and anger in Georgie’s chest tightened as her glance turned towards the small figure who was crossing the patchy lawn towards her.
His small, sweet face was a mask of concentration as he carried his bucket of pebbles. Her fond gaze followed him as he placed his burden carefully down on the ground and, falling to his chubby knees, began to dig in the soft ground.
The love she felt for her child—the love she had felt for him from the first moment they had laid his warm, slippery little body in her arms—contracted in her chest. She had imagined that magic moment would be shared with Angolos.
How wrong she had been!
She had given birth alone. There had been no husband to hold her hand or breathe through the pain with her, and no one to share the magical moment of birth with.
So Angolos had fallen out of love with her…or more likely he had never been in love with her at all…?
Just why was the question mark attached to that thought, Georgie? A man could not treat anyone he had had any feelings for the way Angolos had treated her.
She had accepted that.
Sure you have!
But how could he reject this child they had produced together? Nicky was perfect…How could anyone not want him? How could any parent not love their own child?
‘It’s just as well that her family were here to pick up the pieces.’
Her grandmother’s observation was clearly audible, but Georgie had to strain to hear the other woman’s reply. That was the thing about eavesdropping—once you started it was hard to stop.
‘That’s so sad. How can a man not want to see his child?’
‘You tell me. All I know is he hasn’t given her a penny and Georgie is too stubborn to ask for what is hers by rights. I told her she should file for divorce and take him for every penny she can. There was no pre-nuptial agreement. I’m afraid Georgie is just like her mother that way—not a practical bone in her body.’
What would Gran say, Georgie wondered, if she knew about the account that Angolos topped up with money every month? Whatever she said she’d say it loudly, especially if she knew that not a penny of the money had been touched!
By now there was a lot of money in that account.
‘Mummy…’ The tired treble awakened Georgie to the danger of Nicky hearing the conversation
