that the water would choke her.
‘The king is dead,’ she proclaimed, making her voice sound as light and careless as she possibly could. ‘Long live the king.’
Her words fell into a strange and disturbing silence. A silence that seemed to reach out and enclose her, tangling round her throat and making it impossible to breathe.
Suddenly Jason wasn’t looking at her. He had turned away and was staring in the opposite direction. They were all staring that way. Everyone in the room had their eyes fixed on where the door had swung open, pushed firmly but not violently from the other side so that it created a wide, wide space. And everyone was staring into that wide space, shocked, stunned, almost as if they had seen a ghost. Even Hermione had come to a complete halt, one long, elegantly manicured hand going up to her throat in a gesture of horror.
‘Jason…’ Penny began, but the name died on her tongue, shrivelled on it by the realisation of just what was happening in the same moment that a voice—an impossibly, unbelievably, shockingly familiar voice—spoke, cutting across her in a rough, sardonic drawl.
‘Long live the king? I think not, agapi mou…’
A sensation like a blow to the head made Penny’s thoughts spin sickeningly, the room blurring before her eyes as she struggled to turn and look too. To make her gaze focus on the dark, powerful shape of the man in the door.
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be! There was no way this was possible. It had to be a dream—or a nightmare—or both at once. Because there was no way it could be happening that…
‘Because to make that follow, then, as you say, the first king must actually be dead…’
And fixing his eyes on her shocked face, his burning gaze seeming to be drawing out all the blood that Penny could feel had drained from her face so fast that she thought it must leave her looking like a ghost, the new arrival took a couple of steps forward, moving further into the room.
‘And as you can see, gineka mou, I am very much alive.’
‘I—you—’
Penny tried to get to her feet but abandoned the attempt after only a moment, finding that her legs were too weak to support her. Her feet seemed to be balanced on a floor that was strangely uneven, rocking and swaying beneath her as if a huge flood had suddenly come along and lifted the house from its foundations, carrying it out onto the wildest swirling sea. And the look Zarek turned on her was cold and dark, one that killed any impulse to fly into his arms, even after the distance of these two dreadful years. It was a silent, black reminder of the fact that the last time they had been together they had ripped the fragile camouflage covering off their marriage and exposed the lies and deceit that were at the centre of it. Exposing it for the lie it was.
Slumping back into her seat, she shook her head faintly, sending her hair flying out around her face, then passed a shaking hand in front of her eyes, rubbing at them to clear them of this impossible hallucination.
But when she blinked hard and looked again he was still there. Dark and powerful and strong as ever with a forcefully carved face and deep burning eyes that seemed to flay off a much needed layer of skin, leaving her feeling painfully raw and vulnerable, totally exposed.
It had been so long since she had seen him in the flesh, rather than in the photographs she studied every day, that it was almost like seeing him for the first time. Seeing how devastatingly attractive he was, how big and powerful, his lean, rangy figure in the plain white shirt and steel-grey suit easily dominating the room and making everyone else look so very small and insignificant.
‘Zarek…’ she croaked, her throat closing up around the sound so that she could barely get it out. ‘Y—you…’
‘Indeed, agapiti mou…’
His response was a small, cynically mocking bow of ac knowledgement, his probing gaze not leaving her face for an instant.
‘Zarek Michaelis. Your absent husband. Home at last.’
Chapter Three
HOME at last.
Who was he trying to kid? Zarek wondered. Even as he spoke the words he knew that there was no way this return felt at all like coming home.
Of course he was back on Ithaca, back inside the family house, the place where he had lived from his childhood and where he’d always looked forward to returning to whenever he’d been away. But somehow this time nothing felt the same. Nothing had that feeling of rightness, of completeness that it had had before.
Which was hardly surprising. After all, he had just walked in on a discussion of a plan to have him legally declared dead. With that on their minds, none of them was going to be glad to see him walk through the door large as life and infuriatingly, unfortunately alive.
Not even Penny.
Not even his wife, who had actually been toasting the fact that he was dead as he opened the door. And was now staring at him as if he was her nightmares come to life.
But what had he expected? That she would run to him on a cry of delight, fling herself into his arms? He’d be every kind of a fool if he’d even dreamed of that. She’d told him as much to his face. And last night would have taught him that dreams of her waiting for him were nothing to base his future on.
But forewarned was forearmed and so there was little to surprise him in the way that she just sat in her chair, slim and elegant in a dark green sleeveless linen dress, eyes wide, staring at him as if he had indeed risen from the dead right before her. If anything she seemed worse—even more appalled than Hermione, and his stepmother looked as if the devil incarnate had just risen up from hell to appear before her.
‘So,’ he drawled cynically, injecting dark mockery into his voice as the silence lengthened and dragged out. ‘Is this any way to greet the prodigal son? I was expecting the fatted calf at least.’
‘Then you should have let us know that you were coming!’
Hermione had managed to regain some control but the hiss of fury in her words betrayed the way she was feeling deep inside.
‘Or even that you were alive—it would have been nice to know.’
‘I did not know myself—that I was coming.’
Zarek couldn’t be unaware of the way that his answer had only incensed her further, the flare of her nostrils, the flash of fury in her eyes revealing just what she thought of his response. But quite frankly he didn’t give a damn. And he had no intention of launching into the lengthy and complicated explanation of how he came to be alive, and why he hadn’t let them know about it until now. Not here and not in front of everyone including Odysseus Shipping’s lawyer, their accountant and half the assembled members of the board, it seemed.
‘I thought that I might wait awhile longer—and learn as much as I could about the home I was to return to. It has been an interesting experience to say the least. But suffice it to say that I am here. And I am staying. So…’
Leaning forward, he picked up a pen that was lying on the polished wood of the table together with a sheet of paper that held, as he knew it must, a precise order of business as prepared by Leander, whose obsessive concern for detail
