trapped with her back against a wall, but she was damned if she was going to run away in panic and leave the field to him. She might just as well surrender right here and now and tell Cyril the truth about their meeting herself.
She could at least give Theo Antonakos a run for his money.
Deliberately she picked up her own glass, swirled the wine around in the bottom of it, then looked him straight in the eye again.
‘Well, obviously, I do go to London every now and then—but not often. And to tell you the truth, I can’t remember the last time I was there.’
Her defiance caught his attention. One black brow lifted sharply in sardonic response and he inclined his dark head in a small acknowledgement of the way she had parried his attack.
Oh, but she was good, Theo admitted to himself. This Skye Marston was a superb actress—so good that, if he didn’t now know exactly what was going on, he would have been totally convinced by her performance.
He had met her precisely twice—for less than a day at a time—and on those occasions she had been perhaps half a dozen different women, changing her personality and her behaviour as quickly and easily as he changed his clothes.
Looking at her now, no one would ever guess that she had been that nervous, distressed creature in the London bar, let alone the wild, passionate woman who had been in his bed that night.
Now here she was the picture of cool elegance in that sleek turquoise silk dress, sleeveless and with a deep vee neckline. Silver glittered at her ears and around the long graceful neck, exposed by the way she had piled that glorious rich coloured hair up at the back of her neck, and she looked calm, relaxed and totally in control.
But she couldn’t really be in control, any more than he could. She had to know that their shared secret was there, between them, like a dark shadow.
He lifted his glass again to drink, then reconsidered and only pretended to sip from it. His head was clouded enough. His thoughts had been reeling since the instant in which his father’s announcement had hit him like a punch to his jaw, and he still hadn’t decided what to do about it.
‘You don’t want to go out—to clubs—or bars?’
He wasn’t quite sure who was watching whom—only that it seemed to him as if there were no one in the room but the two of them. His father might have disappeared completely, and the quiet, decorous presence of a couple of maids barely impinged on his consciousness.
‘Skye doesn’t frequent clubs and such.’
It was Cyril who answered, reminding Theo sharply of the fact that he was there, at the head of the table. That this was his house—his father’s home—and the woman opposite was his father’s future bride.
‘That’s one of the things that attracted me to her. Her innocence. She’s not like so many modern young women.’
This time Theo really did have to gulp down a large mouthful of his wine, if only to stop himself from laughing out loud, or making some cynical comment, revealing just precisely how he felt about that statement.
So she had his father totally conned. The old man had no idea at all what she was really like.
So why didn’t he just tell him? Why didn’t he just open his mouth and say the words?
Your fiancée is not at all the woman you think she is.
The words sounded so clearly inside his head that for one heart-stopping moment he almost thought he’d said them aloud and froze, waiting for the explosion that would follow.
But nothing happened. The declaration had just been in his imagination and the conversation continued just as be-fore—his father blithely ignorant of the emotional grenade that had almost exploded right in his face.
Because that was the effect it would have had. In one split second, Cyril Antonakos would have gone from being the proudly possessive fiancé of a beautiful, stylish, sexy…
Oh, Theos, so devastatingly sexy…
A gorgeous, glamorous, much younger woman.
One moment, Cyril would have been the envy of all men with such a woman on his arm—the next he would have known the sordid truth.
‘Her mother has been unwell. So Skye spends most of her time at home, caring for her.’
Except when she’s out trawling bars, picking up strange men…
Once more Theo had to bite down hard on his lower lip to stop the words from escaping.
Skye’s stunning eyes had dropped, staring down at her hands on the table, and it was all he could do not to laugh out loud in cynical admiration. As a pose of innocent modesty, it was damn near perfect—except that he knew it was a lie and so did she.
So why didn’t he just admit it? Why didn’t he announce to his father that the woman Cyril thought was a sweet, unworldly, family type wasn’t anything of the sort?
Because if he did then, as well as damning her, he would destroy himself in his father’s eyes. In fact, he would probably end up painted as the villain of the piece and Cyril would turn his back on him once and for all—for good this time. His father would cut him out of his life without a second thought.
And he had vowed that if his father ever held out an olive branch of peace he would grab it with both hands. That he would do everything in his power to repair the breach that had come between them; end the estrangement if he possibly could.
That was why he was here now. Why he had come to be the best man at the wedding—unaware of just who the bride his father had chosen was. He knew what interpretation his father would probably put on it. That he had come crawling back because he thought that doing so would change Cyril’s mind about cutting him out of his will.
Well, if that was the case, then he would take a great delight in letting the old man know that he had no need at all of anyone else’s money. He had more than enough of his own.
But this island was a very different matter. Helikos had come to Cyril through his first wife—Theo’s mother. It had been in her family for centuries. Calista Antonakos had been buried here, as had both her father and mother before her. It was Theo’s rightful inheritance, and one he would fight for with the last strength in his body. He certainly didn’t intend to lose it because of some little gold-digger who had caught his father’s attention. This year’s wife who, if she followed the example of every other Kyria Antonakos, would be here and gone again in the space of a couple of years.
‘That is unusual,’ he managed, knowing from the tiny flicker of a glance in his direction that Skye was unable to control that the acid tone of the words hadn’t been lost on her. ‘I have to admit that in anyone else I might find it hard to accept about any modern young woman. But, having met your lovely fiancée, I can believe anything of her. Why, when I first encountered her this afternoon, she was embarrassed at being caught in just her swimming costume—in spite of the fact that it was a far more modest design than so many I have seen.’
She was listening hard again. All her attention was focused on his face, and the way those slender, elegant hands were nervously folding her napkin over and over on itself betrayed the inner tension that
