TWELVE
SHE didn’t see Andreas again until they landed at a private airstrip in Athens, which gave her more than long enough to list every nasty, sneaky thing he had done, so she was wound up like a spring-loaded clock by the time he reappeared to escort her into the waiting limousine.
A chauffeur-driven limousine with no central partition to give her the privacy she needed to say what she wanted to say—not that a partition would have made much difference because Andreas, she discovered, was quite capable of putting up his own partition.
So the air simmered between them as they drove into Athens and the closer they got to the luxury houses and apartment blocks of Kolaniki the more uptight she became.
‘I don’t want to visit your parents,’ she bit out when that horror scenario flicked into her head.
He said nothing, his closed profile making her fingers itch so badly to slap him into a reaction that she had to curl them into fists on her lap.
What was he up to—what was he thinking?
Andreas knew exactly what he was up to but the hell if he was going to let her know it—he wasn’t that brave. His throat tightened when he tried to swallow as they bypassed the road leading to the luxury houses that dotted Kolaniki Hill with its famous views over Athens and he felt her stiffen in the seat beside him. He was taking such a big risk here he wasn’t that certain he could carry it through.
‘I hate you,’ she whispered when they pulled into the forecourt of his apartment block. She was white as a sheet now, eyes too big and too dark in the pinched strain of her face. ‘I don’t know how you can bring yourself to do this to me.'
The chauffeur climbed out of the car.
‘Try cutting me a bit of slack, agape mou,’ Andreas returned huskily. ‘I need to do this. We need to do it.'
Need to do what, though? Break her heart all over again?
The chauffeur opened her door for her, giving her little option but to step out of the car’s air-conditioned interior into the full humid weight of the afternoon heat.
It had taken barely an hour to get here, barely an hour to repeat a trip she had last made five years before. Now her heart was flailing around in her stomach. Any second now she knew she was going to be sick.
Andreas climbed out on the other side of the car and gave a nod at the chauffeur, who disappeared back inside the car and drove it away around the side of the building to where the garages were situated, leaving the two of them staring at each other across the empty gap.
He looked big, lean, tough—determined. Having got her this far with his grim bullying tactics, Louisa didn’t doubt she would find herself yanked over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift if she did not let him finish whatever it was he was so hell-bent on doing here.
So she made herself cross the gap separating them, chin up, blue eyes so cold they even felt like chips of ice. As she continued past him into the building’s elegant foyer the flat of his hand arrived, warm against the base of her spine.
Yet another statement of possession, she noted with a stinging tensing of her body as she flinched right away from him. She didn’t want him to touch her—she didn’t want to be here at all.
They stepped into the waiting lift like two separate entities and rode up to the top floor without saying a word. He did not take his darkly hooded eyes from her face, while she stared at the floor and hoped to God she could get through this without throwing up.
The lift opened directly into the apartment with its open-plan luxury that looked exactly the same as it had done five years ago, only without the evidence of partying to litter it up. It still bore the same classic modern furniture that had man stamped all over it because Andreas had owned this apartment long before she had come into his life.
The lift door swished shut, she couldn’t hold back a cold shiver, and her arms flung themselves around her body as if doing so would ward off what was throbbing away inside her trying to get out.
But still he hadn’t finished with this torture, coming to place that hand back on her spine, he ignored her stiffened rejection of it this time and made the hand a stubborn arm which propelled her across the living room to a door that, she recalled to her sinking horror, led through to the other rooms in this vast and elegantly sprawling place.
‘Don’t …’ she couldn’t stop herself from quivering out when he stopped outside the door to their old bedroom.
Still keeping her trapped by that controlling arm, he flung the door open and urged her inside. For the next thirty seconds she just stopped functioning, her knees went hollow, her throat closing up. Everything was the same in here—everything, right down to the huge bed with its snowy white linen she only had to take a fleeting glance at to need to push a hand up to cover her mouth. Once again the only things missing were the littered signs of occupation.
‘The last time you came here I would have willingly died rather than let you see what you did,’ his voice came deep and gruff from behind her, ‘but I was out of it, beyond the point of being any use to anyone, including a wife who deserved to find a man waiting here for her, not a stoned-out-of-his-head wimp.'
Well, he said it, Louisa thought starkly, pressing her fingers up to her lips, only to feel them tremble against her chattering teeth.
‘I want to beg your forgiveness.’
Right here at the scene of his crime? ‘Not a good venue for begging me for anything,’ she whispered.
‘An explanation, then,’ he persisted tautly. ‘Will you accept an explanation?'
Oh, God, did she have to? ‘Look,’ she spun round, aiming her hurt gaze at a point somewhere between his tense left shoulder and the door, ‘y-you don’t need to do this. I had already accepted wh-what I’d seen here or I would not have let you—'
‘Stop lying to me,’ he ground out.
She knew her face was white because it felt white! She knew her lips were trembling and her heart was pounding and—'I don’t need you to do this, Andreas! I don’t want you to do this! I just w-want to get out of here—'
‘Well, I need to do this!’ He reached out to catch hold of her shoulders, two tense hands gripping her as if they wanted to give her a damn good shake. ‘It cannot hurt you to listen,’ he said roughly.
No? ‘Confession might be good for your soul but it does absolutely nothing for mine!'
‘I love you!’ he raked out. ‘I have always loved you! I never stopped loving you. I don’t want to stop loving you! Does that make your soul feel good?'
With a rasping sigh he let go of her, pacing away across the room like a man who regretted saying all of that now it was out and it was too late.
Totally silenced, Louisa stared after him, watching as he lifted a clenched fist as if to send it grinding into the wall in front of him—then he changed his mind and turned.
‘Do you remember Lilia?’ he asked huskily.
Lilia? Louisa found she couldn’t remember
