‘Wild does not cover it.’
He sounded so close suddenly that she flicked her eyes open, her insides tumbling when she saw just how close he had come. Looking up into his face was like putting your fingers too close to a burning flame—dangerous, she likened as his sheer height and breadth and muscled strength snatched away her breath. Pure self-defence made her ease back from him, her breasts fluttering on an unsteady breath when she found her spine flattened up against the wall.
He followed—lazily, a wide shoulder coming to rest on the wall to one side of her, a long arm stretching across her to brace the flat of his palm on the wall on her other side, the whole manoeuvre aimed to trap her inside a circle of that oh-so-macho web of leashed power.
‘Let us deal with this issue once and for all,’ he murmured ever so softly, ‘and keep looking at me while we talk, agape mou,’ he instructed when she shut her eyes again to block it all out. ‘I want you to see in my face that I am not playing around here.'
Louisa knew that already. She knew it with every slowly shredding nerve in her body that this was no game. She tried for some air that would help keep her head clear, couldn’t help moistening her suddenly dry lips as she lifted her chin and slowly opened her eyes. This close up he was without doubt the most frighteningly gorgeous man she had ever encountered—or ever wanted to encounter, she extended helplessly. One Andreas had always been more than enough for her.
‘All right,’ wrapping her arms across her breasts, she tried for a careless shrug, ‘say what you want to say.'
‘You don’t want to see blood spilt and I do. So I will make a deal with you.'
‘What kind of deal?’
‘Be my wife again, in every sense, and I will attempt to control my desire to spill blood.'
‘This is silly,’ she shot out. ‘Why talk about this now when we will know one way or another in a couple of weeks if it even needs discussing at all? Once I’m back in England and can buy a testing kit without causing another Markonos scandal to erupt here, of course.’ She could not resist the sarcastic tag-on.
‘Because it isn’t just about the pregnancy now. I want more than that.’ He ignored her sarcasm. ‘I want my lost five years back.'
Her folded arms tightened. ‘You can’t have them back, Andreas.'
‘Then someone has to pay for their loss.’
‘Oh, stop being so disgustingly primitive,’ she snapped crossly. ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—I thought it was the Greeks who pulled the rest of us out of the Dark Ages!'
He smiled at that. ‘Quick,’ he commended. ‘But you will not change my mind. You come back to me or our two families will pay the price.'
Her sensitive stomach turned queasy again. ‘I’ll give you an answer in a couple of weeks.'
‘I can do a lot of damage in a couple of weeks, agape mou.‘
Her chin shot up. ‘Stop calling me your darling when you’re standing here trying to intimidate and blackmail me!'
‘You would prefer me to use other incentives …?’
Eyes spiralling into a darker shade of blue, Louisa didn’t need to ask what those other incentives would be. ‘I should have known you would bring this right down to its most basic function,’ she muttered.
‘Sex,’ he dared to name it, ‘now, in one of the furnished bedrooms,’ he offered. ‘Think about it,’ he urged. ‘You and me coupling like we used to do, driving each other mad for hours and hours.’ Bringing up a hand he gently touched the telling burn in one of her cheeks. ‘We could enjoy a whole afternoon of glorious unprotected sex with no interruptions from—'
‘What do you mean—unprotected sex?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious.’ He smiled. ‘I want to make you pregnant.'
Robbed of breath, Louisa stared up at him. ‘You mean you actually want there to be a baby?'
‘I have thought of little else since our wild encounter on the hill,’ he admitted candidly. ‘Call me broody if you like,’ he mocked sardonically, touching the trembling fullness of her mouth. ‘I want to plant another seed inside your womb and be around this time to watch it grow.'
‘Stop it.’ She jerked her head back. ‘This is crazy.’
‘And it gets worse,’ he confessed. ‘You see, I began wanting this all the more once the name Max Landreau raised its threatening head. And do you know why?'
Louisa shook her head, not even trying to out-think a madman.
‘Because the idea of you conceiving another man’s child was just so unacceptable to me you were lucky you were with our son when I came looking for you, or I probably would have strangled you on the mere off-chance that you might be pregnant to another man!'
‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘You are unbelievable!’
‘Well, try thinking of it this way round. Ask yourself, my reluctant wife, how you would feel about me seeding my child in another woman …'
It was a blow Louisa had not anticipated. It flattened her back to the wall and whitened her face. ‘How did you get to be so brutal?’ she whispered.
His hands came up to frame her face, long fingers so incredibly tender as they slid her hair behind her ears. It was an old gesture and a familiar one he had used to make as a form of apology.
‘Primitive and brutal I might be but it hurts, hm?’ he persisted nonetheless. ‘It turns you inside out. My mother threw us together to make us see that we had nothing left between us but she could not have been more wrong if she had tried, because there is plenty left between us. You tremble,’ he husked. ‘I tremble because we still feel this much for each other.'
‘It’s just sex and the shock of what you said,’ Louisa dismissed all of that. ‘It will pass.'
‘But I don’t want it to pass.’ Lowering his head, he brushed his warm lips across hers.
And her lips clung—they clung!
‘Think about it,’ he urged. ‘Think about what we shared on the hill and what is still eating away inside us right here and now. Think of all the loving waiting for us the moment that you say yes to me. And think of the brother or sister we will make for Nikos and how happy he will be for us that we found each other again. We have a chance to make something good out of so much badness. All you have to do is agree to stay with me …'
She melted into thick, blinding tears.
Smothering a curse, Andreas wanted to take the words back. He despised himself for saying them at all! But he was not going to take them back because he meant them, every single aching one. They’d been cheated of the right to decide for themselves what happened to their marriage five years ago. They’d been manipulated by people who’d insisted on seeing them as children playing at marriage because they’d been foolish enough to conceive a son. In their twisted wisdom their families had
