but like Pandora she felt herself unable to stop herself from framing the question she knew Leon was silently willing her to ask.
‘Then what do you want?’
‘I want you, Chloe.’ He said it so softly, she thought she must have misunderstood, but there was no misunderstanding his next words. ‘I want you, because you are my wife. No Greek allows his wife’s desertion of him to go unpunished, and your greatest punishment, I think, will be to be forced to return to the role you abandoned so precipitately—and publicly.’
Chloe blenched, turning desperately aside, but it was too late. Fingers like steel trapped her wrist, hauling her up against a chest which she could now see was rising and falling with the force of the rage pent up inside it.
‘You little bitch, you really know where to hit where it hurts, don’t you? But you’re going to pay, Chloe. You should have remembered when you left me that I’m Greek, and Greeks never forget an insult—or forgive it.’
‘I won’t come back to you,’ Chloe managed to get out. ‘I won’t!’
Leon’s dark features seemed to swim above her in a dark mist, his lips contorted into a savagely bitter facsimile of a smile.
‘Oh yes, you will,’ he told her menacingly. ‘And not only that, you’ll give me a son to replace the one you destroyed.’
From a great distance Chloe heard a high-pitched, terrified protest as a great chasm of blackness opened up and engulfed her, and she fell down and down as though she were falling into the deepest pits of Hell itself.
‘MADAME is tired and must be left to sleep.’
It was several seconds before Chloe could place the faintly accented voice. At first she thought she was in Paris—Paris, where she had lived as a young girl and grown used to hearing her native tongue spoken with a faint French inflection, but then the hazy clouds of sleep parted and she remembered exactly where she was and why.
She sat bolt upright in a double bed which, huge though it was, made scarcely any impression at all in a room so large that it could easily have accommodated her tiny London flat twice over.
It was decorated in softest greens and silver. Mermaid colours. She blenched as she realised where she had remembered those words from. It had been on her honeymoon: Leon had used them to describe a gown he had bought her in St Tropez. Leon. She closed her eyes, willing herself to stay calm, and when she opened them again a small plump woman was hovering anxiously at the side of the bed.
‘The master said to let the kyria sleep. Gina,’ she scolded the small girl standing behind her, holding a breakfast tray, ‘you have disturbed Madame with all your noise!’
The girl looked ready to burst into tears, and Chloe shook her head, forcing a smile.
‘No… no, it’s quite all right. Just leave the tray.’
The events of the previous evening were beginning to flood back, and she shuddered as she remembered the look on Leon’s face as he told her that he meant to be revenged on her for publicly shaming him by leaving him, and not just that. She was glad that there was no one in the room to witness the way her hand trembled as she recalled the ferocity in Leon’s voice when he told her that she would bear him a son—to replace the life she had destroyed, he had said. She pushed her tray aside, swinging her legs out of bed, stumbling across to the large curtained window. The life she had destroyed. Hysteria bubbled up inside her. Did he still think he could deceive her? And why the change of heart?
‘Chloe?’
She whirled round, gasping with shock. She hadn’t heard him enter her room. She would have given anything not to have to face him like this, disadvantaged by the flimsy nightdress she was wearing and the evidence of her fear written plainly in her eyes. He, in direct contrast, was wearing an immaculate business suit, his dark hair damp as though he had recently stepped out of the shower. A shuddering sensation of weakness swamped over her, her body traitorously reminding her of other occasions—occasions when she had shared his shower with him, taking sensual pleasure in the act. Panic flared suddenly and she turned round, her eyes darkening to misty purple as she pleaded with him.
‘Let me go, Leon. You can’t keep me here indefinitely—it isn’t possible. Why are you doing this? I can’t see any purpose in it.’
‘Can’t you? Then you must be incredibly thick-skulled. I thought I made my meaning more than plain last night.’ He followed the flickering glance of her eyes to the large bed, and laughed mirthlessly. ‘Last night was simply a respite. And besides, when I take you in my arms I want you to be very sure of what’s happening to you, Chloe. You won’t be allowed to escape me by fainting like some Victorian heroine.’
‘You mean you expect me… you….’ Suddenly she couldn’t speak for the huge lump in her throat. Oh, she knew that last night Leon had told her exactly why he had brought her to this island—an island which apparently was only inhabited by himself and his staff—but somehow she had never expected him to go through with it.
‘You can’t do this!’ she protested wildly when he continued to look at her. ‘You simply can’t do it. It’s against the law.’
‘For a man to take possession of his wife?’ he asked with deceptive suaveness. ‘Not against Greek law, Chloe. In fact, many of my countrymen would think I have been decidedly forbearing. You run off and leave me; humiliate me in front of all my friends, encourage them to question how I can maintain control of a huge business empire if I cannot control one small woman, and then you tell me what I can and can’t do? On Eos my word is law, Chloe, and by going to Thos you played straight into my hands. I had been wondering how to coax you back to Greece for some time—that you should choose to do so of your own free will was an unexpected bonus.’
A dreadful suspicion was beginning to take root in Chloe’s mind. She stared across the room.
‘You mean you….’
‘I arranged for your “friend” to desert you?’ He laughed, the sound mirthless. ‘You always were a poor judge of character, weren’t you? His “friendship” proved surprisingly inexpensive. But don’t worry, you won’t miss him. Was he your only lover?’
It was on the tip of Chloe’s tongue to tell him the truth, but she bit back the words, unwilling for Leon to know that since the break-up of their marriage there had been no one else. Even now she could scarcely take it in that Leon had actually planned for her to come to Eos, for Derek to desert her and for her to be brought here to this tiny island.
‘I could have simply had you kidnapped in England, of course,’ he drawled, accurately reading her mind. ‘But this way is far less… complicated. You see, Chloe, when you left me, you did far more than simply break up our marriage. In Greece we take such things seriously, and for a woman to leave her husband casts a slur upon him that is not easily removed.’
‘So what am I supposed to do? Tell everyone that I didn’t mean it and that you’re really Mr Wonderful?’ Her lip curled. ‘You’ve overreached yourself, Leon. The moment you let me leave this island I’ll leave you again, and if you keep me incarcerated here no one is going to believe the fallacy that we’re reunited.’ She lifted her head and stared proudly at him. ‘The only way I would conceive your child would be
