etched with the Nevrakis name. His family had helped to build the church and the little primary school on the steep cobbled street running up out of the village. She had dreamt of Teddy starting school there one day... In a daze, she shook her thumping head in a vain effort to clear it.
‘I like you,’ the older man reproved her gently. ‘And yet you are in your quiet little way every bit as defiant as your father was. I don’t want Nevrakis to hurt you again. That is why I told you about the island.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve nothing more to say to you right now,’ Winnie said tightly as she rose from her seat, striving not to recall Eros’s forecast that her grandfather would hurt her.
Or had it been more of a case of Eros fearing what the older man might choose to tell her? A faint shudder of distress and revulsion racked Winnie’s slight frame, her eyes prickling a tearful warning and forcing her to blink rapidly. Eros had got an island out of marrying her, a sort of marital buy one, get one free offer. How was she supposed to feel about that? Of course he hadn’t told her. He wasn’t a fool. He was bright enough to know how any woman would feel if she knew a man had had to be bribed into marrying her. Oh, she perfectly understood his silence on the subject, just as she understood the anguished regret flooding her.
Once again, she had walked, blindfolded by love, into a disaster. To make that mistake once with a man was unpleasant, but to make it twice was unforgivable...
‘You’ve only just arrived. You can’t leave now,’ Stam protested in dismay.
‘But you’ve said what you wanted to say to me. You pushed me into marrying him and now you’re trying to push me into leaving him, and I won’t be pushed again,’ Winnie told him flatly. ‘What happens next is my business.’
Only she didn’t know what would happen next, didn’t know what she intended to do with the information she had been given. Beyond confronting Eros, she could see no further, but she paused at the door of the office to look back at her grandfather. ‘Whatever happens between Eros and I, I still hope to see you visiting your great-grandson on Trilis some day soon because he shouldn’t be affected by adult squabbles.’
‘Squabbles?’ Stam echoed in disbelief at that insulting term for what he deemed to be a perfectly natural hostility towards the man who had dared to wrong his granddaughter. ‘I’ll never visit you or Teddy there!’
‘That’s sad,’ Winnie murmured ruefully. ‘Family should come first, even if you can’t always approve of what they’re doing with their lives.’
Winnie walked stiffly back out to the foyer, where her bodyguards awaited her. She was in a daze. Eros had married her to get the island back. Eros had forced her to marry him to ensure that he got that island back. Evidently, her grandfather had employed the perfect carrot to tempt. On her own, she hadn’t been tempting enough for a man who had already been through one unsatisfactory marriage and would naturally have been chary of locking himself into a second marriage with a woman he might lust after but didn’t love.
And that was her situation in a nutshell, she decided sickly while her security team engaged in a series of frantic phone calls to organise a departure that had come much sooner than anyone had expected. Pale as death, she stared at the wall, willing herself to be strong and make decisions. Eros had never loved her and that was unlikely to change. Even for Teddy’s sake she couldn’t stay in a marriage in which his essential indifference would chip away at her self-esteem every day until she had nothing left.
She was strong, independent, she reminded herself resolutely. She would confront him and deal with the situation without getting overemotional or crying or shouting. Shouting would be pathetic. Shouting would reveal that she had been hurt. She would be cool, dignified. As she worked that out, her shoulders eased back, her head lifted higher...and at the same time she would somehow make Eros Nevrakis very, very sorry that he had ever been born...
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