‘Don’t.’ Her voice shook as she silenced him.
Heaving in his breath, Andreas supposed that she was probably right and silence at this moment was the only way to deal with what they had just done. Yet right on the back of that grim thought a sudden thick laugh caught hold of him. ‘We never could control it, could we?'
It was like lifting the lid off a volcano, she launched the flat of her palm at his face.
‘No …’ He caught her wrist before the hand had a chance to make contact. ‘You don’t slap my face because you cannot control yourself around me, Louisa.'
‘I hate you,’ she whispered, wrenching her wrist free so she could spin her back to him, her slender arms wrapping around her body in soul-cutting self-defence. ‘How could we do that?’ she tremored. ‘How could we just fall on each other like that?'
‘It never took much.’ His voice was grim again.
She swung back. ‘Is that any kind of excuse?’
Andreas just shrugged. He’d wanted her from the moment he had watched her walk off the ferry. And, even standing here regretting the whole damn mad incident, he felt fresh need already pumping away inside him like some greedy monster he had never been able to feed anywhere else.
He cast a glance at the way she was standing there, upset, shaking with shock and horror and the close onset of tears. Beautiful, he thought bleakly, still so beautiful, even with her hair all over the place and her clothes covered with dirt.
‘Wh-what if I get pregnant again?’
It came out of nowhere, the one thing he had not been prepared to hear. It totally shook him. ‘You said that to punish me,’ he pushed out hoarsely.
The way those dark blue eyes looked at him gave him his answer long before the breathy little, ‘No,’ arrived in his ears.
He bit out a word that made her wince, her kiss-swollen mouth quivering before she shot back bitterly, ‘Well, that just about covers it.'
Then she left him standing there. Throat clogged by hot, shamed tears, Louisa started walking. When he came up behind her, her shoulders racked up with rejection because she thought he was going to grab her again.
But he didn’t grab. ‘Just walk,’ he rasped as he stepped in front of her then began to lead the way back down the path.
Louisa followed him in thick, bubbling silence, shame consuming her a little more with each step. She did not look at him but kept her eyes fixed on the ground as they trod the soft sand on the beach. When they arrived at the hotel he stopped at the entrance and she kept on going. Neither bothered to offer up a hypocritical ‘goodnight'.
When she finally crawled back into bed she hid her head beneath the pillow and tossed bitter recriminations at herself until she finally dropped into an exhausted sleep only to be woken up a few hours later by a knock on her bedroom door.
Struggling to drag herself awake, she rolled out of the bed without knowing she had done it. Then her eyes connected with the pile of clothes left to fall where she’d dropped them and instant recall had her falling like a stone back onto the mattress as the whole shocking episode robbed her of the ability to stand up.
She’d had sex with Andreas like a slut with no morals. She cringed inside her own flesh.
‘Louisa!’ Jamie knocked again. ‘Breakfast—I’m starving!'
‘Coming,’ she called weakly. ‘S-see you down there.’ Then she dived for the damning heap of clothes and stuffed them to the bottom of her bag with urgent, trembling fingers as if hiding the evidence would take the crime away.
It didn’t. As she headed for the bathroom she groaned at the subtle aches in places that made her quiver in shame and she hated herself. Catching sight of her face in the mirror froze her to the spot in dismay. She looked washed out through lack of sleep and all tumbled and tousled. A shocking inner glow burned like a sultry secret in the darkened blue of her eyes and in the soft pulse of her still swollen mouth.
I look like a lush, she thought in disgust and spun away from the mirror to step beneath the punishing heat of the shower spray.
Ten minutes later, showered, dressed and feeling about as composed as she was ever going to feel, she joined her brother on the shady terrace that overlooked the beach. The sun was already hot and glinting like crystal on the blue water. As they sat quietly planning their day while they ate breakfast, vivid flashbacks of what she and Andreas had done kept catching her out to send her senses spinning into hot, dipping dives.
Someone stepped around the corner of the hotel building from the direction of the car park. Glancing up, she felt her senses take a different kind of dive.
Well, this is a first in five years, she thought cynically as her mother-in-law walked towards their table.
‘Kalimera, Louisa,’ Isabella Markonos greeted pleasantly. ‘Jamie, pethi mou, how you have grown since I saw you last!'
Flushing, Jamie stood up to suffer the airbrush of lips to his cheeks then hurriedly excused himself. He’d managed to arrange a lift into town with Yannis’s son Pietros which gave him a great excuse to escape.
‘The years have flown by so fast,’ Isabella murmured wistfully as she watched him beat his hasty retreat.
Louisa said absolutely nothing and after a short hesitation her mother-in-law took possession of Jamie’s vacated seat then lifted dark eyes to her face.
‘Andreas has left the island,’ she informed her gently. ‘He visited Nikos very early this morning then boarded his helicopter and flew away …'
CHAPTER FIVE
ANDREAS had gone …?
Louisa had to fight to hang on to a calm expression.
‘He is very angry with me,’ Isabella confided. ‘And I can see from the look in your eyes that you are angry with me too.'
Was that what her look said? Better than looking devastated, she supposed. ‘You had no right to interfere,’ she said.
‘When have I not interfered between the two of you?’ the older woman hit back. ‘Who else was there to do it? You were two children playing at being adults for most of your marriage. You needed someone to interfere simply to keep you both practical.'
Practical. Louisa almost let loose a laugh. When had she and Andreas ever been practical about this attraction they suffered for each other? Certainly not up there last night on the hill. And if Isabella wanted to go back that far, then who wanted to be practical at the age of seventeen or twenty-two?
Isabella had been very practical when she’d gently suggested that Louisa should have her pregnancy terminated. Louisa recalled the way she’d wept to Andreas, and he’d turned on his mother and hit the roof. Later, when Nikos was born, Isabella then gently suggested that she should take care of her grandson while Louisa finished her education—in England. Again she had wept and again Andreas had angrily turned on his mother.
‘It was me who suggested you might prefer to visit
