is this place?’ she finally gave in and asked him.
‘Mine.’ He said it with a low, rasping economy that told her his mood had not improved at all.
So much for curiosity, she thought with a grimace, spied a huge fridge opposite and was drawn to it by a sudden raging thirst. Tugging open the doors, she discovered it had been stocked full with just about everything to tempt anyone’s appetite. Ignoring the sudden hungry snap her stomach sent her, she selected a bottle of chilled water and unscrewed the cap as she elbowed the fridge doors shut.
Too thirsty to wait to hunt down a glass, she tipped back her head and drank greedily straight from the bottle. When she finally felt quenched enough to lower the bottle again, her blue eyes widened then stilled when she found that Andreas had turned and was staring through heavily hooded, glinting dark eyes at her extended throat.
Her heart gave a thump and a trickle of cool water lodged in her throat. She had to cough to clear it. The choky little sound brought his gaze up to lock onto the dews of water still clinging to her lips. Her very flesh began to tingle with that tight sting of overwhelming intimacy that came with the deeply bedded knowledge of everything about each other, which exposed what they were thinking or feeling even if neither wished to be so transparent. In this case Louisa would not have been in the least bit surprised if he’d leapt on her like a big hungry cat.
Because they’d always had this … gift for making the air between them pulse with sexual awareness. It had happened at the ferry terminal. It had happened on the hill. It had happened twice already today when he’d watched her wrap-around skirt slide apart. Andreas had looked at her exposed thigh and the heat of his desire to reach down and stroke her exposed flesh had struck right at the very centre of her sexual heart. Now here it was happening again as he stared at her water-dewed lips.
She licked the dew away with a flick of her tongue. The heavy black curves of his eyelashes flickered and the sizzling sting arrowed itself in a three-pronged attack on the tips of her breasts and between her thighs.
‘Thirsty,’ she said jerkily in the hope that speech would banish the unwanted sensation.
It didn’t.
‘How long had you been at the chapel before I arrived there?’ he demanded huskily.
The husky tone didn’t do much for her comfort either. ‘I can’t see that it matters.’ She shrugged the question away while wishing to hell that he didn’t look as good as he did.
‘It matters if you have been foolish enough to let yourself become dehydrated.'
He was right, she was forced to acknowledge with a frown. She had desperately needed the water but now that its deliciously cooling effect had reached her stomach she was beginning to feel ever so slightly queasy, and the skin on her arms and her shoulders felt tight and hot, which told her she had spent way too long in the sun.
‘Such husbandly concern,’ she mocked, lifting the bottle up so she could read the label, just in case she’d accidentally drunk something more lethal that water, ‘but it’s absolutely wasted on me, Andreas, when I don’t answer to you any more.'
‘If I gathered you up and stretched you out on that table you would answer to me,’ he growled out. ‘So stop trying to pretend you don’t give a damn about me when you know you still light up like a blowtorch whenever you look at me or I look at you.'
Stung by the horrible truth in that, ‘Maybe I light up the same for any man,’ Louisa retaliated. ‘I mean, think of all those years I’ve had to manage without you around to light my torch!'
Taking him on in the mood he was in was pretty stupid, Louisa recognised the moment he took his hands out of his pockets and she saw the darkening look hardening his face.
‘Well, that brings us neatly back to Max Landreau,’ he said and began moving towards her, coming in so close it was all she could do not to take a defensive step back. But that would give him an edge she refused to let him have, so she held her ground even though that ground felt oddly shaky beneath her feet.
‘I’m not going to talk to you about Max,’ she declared stubbornly, then frowned when she realised that a lot of things felt rather shaky right now, including her voice.
Twisting the cap back on the bottle, she turned to place it on the counter and almost staggered when the quick movement made her head start to swim.
‘Why not?’
Turning back to him, she frowned even more when his lean, dark bulk kept floating in and out of focus and nausea made a second grab at her stomach.
‘I need the loo,’ she said, fixing her muzzy gaze on the archway.
His hand closing around her arm stopped her from moving towards it. ‘We will finish this before you walk away.'
‘There is nothing to finish.’ Tugging free of his grip, she stepped around him and tried her best to walk in a straight line, only to find Andreas had moved to block her path.
Staring dizzily at the dark blue strip of his tie hanging down the front of his shirt, she laid a hand across her churning stomach. ‘Andreas, I don’t …'
‘You either tell me about Landreau or we do it the hard way,’ he warned her grimly. ‘And heed this, Louisa,’ he added, ‘you will not be leaving this house until I know everything about you and him—understand?'
Oh, she understood all right. Trying to ignore what was rumbling round inside her, she lifted her eyes to his angry face. ‘Where do you get off believing that you have that right?'
He sucked in his breath. ‘You are my wife. You belong to me.'
‘I do not belong to you!’ she cried out. ‘Will you stop saying that? I stopped belonging to you when you didn’t bother to come and get me five years ago! Now, please let me—’
‘What do you mean, I didn’t bother to come and get you? Where do you get off, telling a damn lie like that?'
This wasn’t the time for this. She was in real danger of losing the contents of her stomach on his shoes if she didn’t get to a loo quickly. But there was something in his harsh rasp that made her pause.
‘You couldn’t even manage a single telephone call to England to speak to me,’ she accused shakily. ‘I waited and waited for you to come and get me but you didn’t want to, did you, Andreas? As your brother Alex was so fond of telling m-me, I was the mistake you had to live with, but never, for one second, did I believe all of his mean rubbish until Nikos died and you took off to Athens to console yourself with another woman!'
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE, it was out. The one secret she had been hugging inside herself for so long it actually ripped at the tissues of her ravaged senses to tear it free! If she had been less distressed she might have noticed the way his whole stance had frozen.
‘I h-hate you for that,’ she whispered. ‘I will never forgive you for doing that!'
His voice when it came was thick and hoarse. ‘Alex—my brother told you I …'
She nodded then wished she hadn’t when it set off the whole sick, dizzying feeling again. ‘And I might
