The tough tycoon playing the tough tycoon, she likened with a smile.
Then right out of nowhere he would just crash through that outer casing, gather her up and take her to bed, or if he found her lazing on the beach he would strip off, catch hold of her and stride with her into the sea in playful mood—then take her to bed.
The two faces of Andreas Markonos, she mused. The tough and the playful—both were too deliciously charismatic for her peace of mind.
None of which helped her to look beyond the moment when the ferry sailed back in. Getting up, she walked into the bedroom, only to pull to another stop when she saw her bags standing there still lined up against the wall, saying more about the temporary nature of what she was doing here than anything else did.
What happened when she picked up those bags to leave here?
An image of Andreas striding off in one direction while she walked off in the other sent a cold little shiver chasing down her spine. She huddled into the towel. Her life was in England. Andreas’s was in Greece. She was no longer the young girl she had used to be, willing to play the placid little wife while he shot off to do the important bread-winning stuff. She had a life, a job she loved and a sense of her own value that had come to mean a lot.
Frowning, she chose fresh clothes out of her now depleted selection, dressed and dried her hair. She’d just stepped into the kitchen when the sound of a jet-ski had her glancing outside to witness the flourishing way her brother guided the craft up the shingle beach.
Looking tall and tanned and rakishly sea-sprayed, he strode up to the house. ‘Hi,’ he said as he stepped into the kitchen, then sent a quick look around. ‘Where’s Andreas?'
‘Using the office at the other house,’ she answered casually.
‘Good. That makes it easier because he turns to stone when I mention your boss.'
‘You had no right to bring Max up at all,’ Louisa said crossly.
‘I know, but at the time I enjoyed watching him suffer.’ Jamie grinned, unrepentant. ‘Anyway, Max is why I’m here. He rang the hotel this morning looking for you. He was not pleased when I said where you were.’ Digging his hand into the pocket of his shorts, he pulled out a folded slip of paper and handed it to her. ‘He wants you to ring him pronto, something urgent.'
Looking down at the note, Louisa unfolded it. ‘Switch your damn mobile on!’ Jamie had scored with a flamboyant mimic of how Max must have relayed the message to him. ‘I have to speak to you—now!'
‘But he knows I switch off my phone when I come here.’ She frowned.
Jamie just shrugged. ‘He sounded very pushy.’
Still frowning, Louisa turned and walked back through the house to the bedroom, wondering what crisis could have erupted at work to put Max in such a bad mood? It wasn’t like him, Max thrived on crises. In the four years she’d worked for him he had never attempted to intrude on her vacations with hot little missives like this.
Jamie followed her, obviously too curious to know what the emergency was about to just shoot off again. He leant against the bedroom doorframe to watch as she fished her mobile phone out of her bag and switched it on. An instant flurry of text messages and voice mails tumbled into her inbox—all from Max.
Ignoring them, she hit quick-dial. The moment she made the connection, Max’s voice was burning her ear. ‘What the hell is going on, Louisa?’ he demanded furiously. ‘I thought it was over between you and your ex.'
‘Max, I don’t know what you—’
‘I am in the process of being stalked, my business interests picked over like chicken bones. My private life is being probed—by Andreas Markonos!'
Louisa closed her eyes and sank down onto the edge of the bed. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘You have to be mistaken, Max. Andreas wouldn’t—'
‘Old skeletons are suddenly falling out of my cupboards and threatening to talk to the tabloids if I don’t get rid of you, so don’t try to tell me that Markonos is not responsible. What I want to know is why!'
Holding her head in her hands, Louisa closed her eyes, struggling to make sense of it all. ‘I don’t know why,’ she whispered.
‘In all the years you’ve worked with me you haven’t so much as mentioned his name after your initial interview, and you have been making your annual pilgrimage to his island—clearly this time you decided to enjoy an intimate interlude with your estranged husband too, hm?’
Louisa shot to her feet. ‘That’s just not true, Max!’
By the door, Jamie straightened his stance.
‘So what happened?’ Max wasn’t listening. ‘Did you decide to taunt him with our relationship and the ruthless bastard decided to respond by trying to ruin me?'
‘Stop it,’ Louisa said. ‘You and I don’t have that kind of relationship and you know it. There isn’t a tabloid out there that would dare print any sleaze about you, Max—you own most of them! Look, give me a couple of hours and I’ll find out what’s going on and get back to you.'
She cut the connection, shaking all over.
‘What was all that about?’ Jamie demanded.
Flicking a paper-white look at him, she said, ‘Can you ask Pietros if he can give me a lift to the Markonos villa?'
‘Sure,’ her bother shrugged, fishing out his mobile, ‘but I wish you would tell me what’s going on.'
‘I’ll tell you when I know.’ As she turned away her mind was racing, trying to put the pieces of this jumbled jigsaw together. She recalled Andreas playing it quiet and remote each time he came back from the villa and a hot sting of suspicion shot down her spine.
But surely Andreas wouldn’t do anything like this. It was just too underhand. This had to be one of his family’s doing, she decided and was shocked how relieved she felt to come up with an alternative explanation that acquitted Andreas from blame.
By the time she’d climbed into Pietros’s old car, leaving Jamie to take the jet-ski back to the hotel, she’d totally convinced herself that she was on her way to the Markonos villa to break the news to Andreas that his family were playing dirty tricks again. Kostas came out onto the shady veranda as they drove up to the villa’s elegantly sprawling white frontage. Thanking Pietros, she climbed out of the car then stood for a few seconds, hovering as she looked at the house, and suffered a deep reluctance to move any closer to it.
She didn’t want to go in there, she admitted to herself as she made her feet take her up the wide marble steps towards a smiling Kostas. It was weird how this villa had become the monster of her past in her mind where all her saddest memories resided.
‘Is Andreas here?’ she asked the old family retainer.
‘He is in the study,’ Kostos nodded, stepping to one side of the open door so she could precede him inside. ‘It is good to see you here again, kyria,’ he said warmly.
Louisa just smiled and nodded and kept on going, walking on cool, polished sandstone across the spacious
