It’s silly.’
Foreboding nudged at Andreas, who excelled at second-guessing those who surrounded him. She buried her head in his shoulder. He smoothed her hair. Handsome mouth taut, he closed his arms round her. If he were patient she would tell him what was wrong. She was quite incapable of keeping anything important from him. Her confiding habits were engrained, he reminded himself.
‘I’m sorry…I suppose I’ve just come over all emotional thinking about our anniversary,’ Hope mumbled in a muffled voice.
Lush black lashes lifted on guarded dark golden eyes. ‘Anniversary?’
‘Don’t you know that in another few days we’ll have been together for two whole years?’ Hope lifted her tousled head, a happy smile of achievement on lips still swollen from his kisses. ‘I want to celebrate it.’
Two years? His gaze narrowed, his lean, darkly handsome face impassive, concealing his stunned reaction to that news. Had she really been in his life that long? He was appalled that he had neglected to notice her staggering longevity. Two years? Marriages didn’t last that long. When had she become the equivalent of a fixture? She had inserted herself into his daily routine with astounding subtlety. She was just…there. She didn’t cling but the tendrils of her existence were as meshed with his as ivy round a tree. That was not an inspiring analogy. But when had he last slept with another woman? He squashed the instant sliver of guilt that even the thought ignited. He had been incredibly faithful to her. Acknowledging that reality set his even white teeth on edge. Inexplicable as it seemed to him, she had infiltrated his freedom like an invisible invading army and conditioned him in ways that were foreign to him. Angry surprise turned him to ice as though he were in the presence of the enemy.
‘I’m not into anniversaries with women,’ Andreas delivered, brilliant eyes dark as coals and diamond-bright. ‘I don’t do the sentimental stuff.’
Hope could hardly breathe. She wanted to put her hand over his beautiful mouth and prevent him from saying anything more. She could not bear that he should fulfil any part of Vanessa’s disparaging forecast, yet she was equally unable to let that laden silence lie. ‘But it’s special to me that you’ve been a part of my life for so long.’
Andreas shrugged a muscular bronzed shoulder and firmly lifted her off him. ‘We have a good time together. I value you. But it would be inappropriate to celebrate an anniversary. That’s not what we’re about.’
Hope felt like someone tied to the railway tracks in front of an express train and the roar of the metal monster was his words crushing the dreams she had cherished and ripping apart her illusions. In one lithe, powerful movement, he sprang off the bed and headed into the bathroom. She lay there cold and shocked and shattered. In her presence he had changed from the guy she loved into an intimidating stranger with cold eyes and a harsh, unfeeling voice and he had pushed her away. She got up to pull on the ice-blue wrap lying on a nearby chair. But she was forced to sink back down onto the bed because her head was swimming. It was that stupid dizziness again, she thought wearily. Perhaps it was an ear infection that was interfering with her sense of balance.
I value you. What sort of a declaration was that? That Andreas knew the exact extent of her worth? In terms of convenience? No, he didn’t do sentimental but, perhaps more tellingly, he had not cared whether or not he wounded her feelings. He had to be very sure of her to put a blanket ban on even a minor celebration. Biting her lip and with a knot of fear forming inside her, Hope tightened the sash on her wrap. But anger was also slowly stirring out of the ashes of the hurt caused by his humiliating response to her perfectly innocent remarks.
Taut with angry, frustrated tension, Andreas leant back against the limestone wall in the power shower and let the water stream down over his magnificent bronzed body. Usually he was still in bed with Hope at this stage of the evening. His chill-out time with her had been wrecked. Taken by surprise, he had been tactless. He wanted to punch something. Their relationship was as near perfect as he had ever hoped to achieve on a casual basis. Hope never made unreasonable demands and appeared to have no greater ambition in life than to make him happy. And she was bloody brilliant at making him happy, Andreas acknowledged grudgingly. He did not want to lose her. But what did he do with a mistress who did not know she was a mistress? A mistress who wanted to celebrate anniversaries as if she were a wife? Theos mou… He winced. What had come over her?
Most probably, Andreas reasoned with a surge of fierce resentment, Hope’s shrewish friend, Vanessa, was responsible. Was it she who had destroyed Hope’s sunny contentment? Who else could it have been? Once or twice Hope had repeated Vanessa’s revealingly acidic remarks about men. Andreas had gained the distinct impression that Hope’s best friend would fry him alive in hot oil if she ever got the chance.
That his association with Hope should be so misjudged and so undervalued outraged Andreas. He was proud of the way he treated Hope. He looked after her. She was a very happy woman. Why? He kept all the nasty realities of life at bay. He even made her dreams come true. Although she had no suspicion of the fact, eighteen months earlier it had been his influence that had won her a place on a design course at a leading art college. Thanks to him she had since graduated and begun fashioning handbags that he was secretly convinced no sane woman would ever wish to buy. He had a shuddering recollection of the one shaped like a ripe tomato. But the point was, Hope was cheerfully content…or, at least, she had been until the serpent had entered Eden.
Andreas was towelling himself dry when Hope entered the bathroom. She drew in a slow, deep breath to steady herself and fixed turquoise blue eyes bravely on him. ‘So if we can’t have anniversaries, what can we have?’
Six feet four inches tall, black hair still wet from the shower and crystalline drops of water still sparkling on the ebony curls defining his powerful pectoral muscles, Andreas froze. He had not expected a second assault in that line. The first had been startling enough. Winged ebony brows drew together. ‘I don’t believe I follow…’
Hope realised that there was a lump in her throat, a lump that was swelling with every second that passed with the threat of tears. ‘I…I suppose I’m asking is this it for you and me?’
‘Clarify that,’ Andreas instructed in the cool tone he used in the office to make underlings jump. But his dark golden eyes shimmered with intensity. He could not credit the idea but for a split second he wondered if she was threatening to dump him.
‘Once you told me that nothing stays the same and that everything must progress,’ Hope reminded him unsteadily. ‘You said that the things that remain static wither and die. Yet from what I can see, in the last two years we haven’t changed at all.’
Right there and then, Andreas decided that in the future it would be wiser to keep all words of wisdom on the score of goal-orientated achievement targets and healthy change to himself.
Every word Hope spoke came from her heart and nothing was pre-planned or judged for its effect. She was very upset. Horribly conscious of his cool distance, she was desperate to make sense of what was happening between them. She needed the reassurance of finding out exactly where she stood with the man she loved.
‘So what about us?’ Hope continued half under her breath, doggedly pushing the question out, refusing to surrender to her inner fears. ‘Are we going anywhere?’
Incredulous that Hope should be subjecting him to such an onslaught, Andreas snatched in a charged breath and reached for her with determined hands. Gathering her small, curvaceous body to him, he reclaimed her mouth in a fierce, sweet invasion that left her quivering with disconcertion. ‘Back to bed?’ he murmured with hungry intent as he finally lifted his arrogant dark head.
Her
