Emma’s husband.
Her heart slammed to a stop, her feet taking root in the sand. The atmosphere darkened as if storm clouds had covered the sun. Was it the effect of his inimical stare? For a second she couldn’t breathe, an invisible band constricting her lungs as she stared into that face, so familiar and yet so different.
Then, abruptly, her heart started pumping harder than before. She sucked in a faltering breath.
He was still the most handsome man she’d ever seen with his coal-black hair and olive-gold skin contrasting with clear, slate-blue eyes. Eyes that right now seared her right down to the soles of her feet.
Desperately Emma tried for dispassionate as she surveyed those proud features that looked like they’d been etched by a master’s hand. Strong nose, square jaw, the tiniest hint of a cleft in that determined chin. Only the small silvered scar beside his mouth, barely visible, marred all that masculine perfection. Perversely, it accentuated how good-looking Christo really was.
Handsome is as handsome does. She could almost hear her grandmother’s voice in her ears.
This man had proved himself anything but handsome. Or trustworthy. Or in any way worth her notice.
Wrangling her lungs into action again, Emma took a deep breath and conjured a reassuring smile for Dora. ‘It’s okay. Perhaps you’d like to organise some tea for us in the main salon? We’ll be up shortly.’
As acts of hostility went, it was a tiny one, ordering tea when she knew Christo liked coffee, strong and sweet, but it was a start. Emma preferred conciliation to confrontation yet she had no intention of making him feel welcome.
Silence enveloped them as Dora hurried away. A silence Emma wasn’t eager to break.
She told herself she was over the worst. The shock, the disillusionment, the shattered heart. But it was easier to believe it when the man she’d once loved with all her foolish, naïve hopes wasn’t standing before her like an echo of her dreams.
Yet Emma wasn’t the innocent she’d been a week ago. Christo Karides had seen to that. He’d stripped her illusions away, brutally but effectively. She was another woman now.
Pushing her shoulders back, Emma lifted her chin and looked straight into those glittering eyes. ‘I can’t say it’s good to see you, but I suppose it’s time we sorted this out.’
* * *
Christo stared at the woman before him, momentarily bereft of words for the first time in his adult life.
He told himself it was the shock of seeing her safe and healthy, after almost a week of worry. It had been uncharacteristic of gentle, considerate Emma to vanish like that, as all her friends and relatives kept telling him. He’d worried she’d been injured or even kidnapped.
Till she’d called her aunt and left a cryptic message saying she was okay but needed time alone.
Time alone!
His blood sizzled at her sheer effrontery.
What sort of behaviour was that for a bride? Especially for the bride of Christo Karides, one of the most sought-after bachelors in Europe, pursued wherever he went.
That had been another first—finding himself frantic with anxiety. Christo recalled the scouring, metallic taste of fear on his tongue and the icy grip of worry clutching his vitals. He never wanted to experience that again.
Nor did he appreciate being made a laughing stock.
Or enduring the questioning looks her relatives had given him, as if her vanishing act was his doing! As if he hadn’t spent weeks carefully courting Katsoyiannis’s delicate granddaughter. Treating her with all the respect due to his future wife.
Christo clamped his jaw, tension radiating across his shoulders and down into bunching fists.
It wasn’t just discovering Emma hale and hearty that transfixed him. It was the change in her.
The woman he’d married had been demure and sweet-tempered. She’d deferred to her grandfather and been patently eager to please Christo, with her ardent if slightly clumsy responses to his kisses.
The woman before him was different. She sparked with unfamiliar energy. Her stance, legs apart and hands planted on hips, was defiant rather than placating.
The Emma Piper he knew was a slight figure, slender and appealing in a muted sort of way. This Emma even looked different. She wore a skimpy bikini of bright aqua. It clung to a figure far more sexy than he’d anticipated, though admittedly he’d never seen her anything but fully dressed. Her damp skin glowed like a gold-tinted pearl and those plump breasts rising and falling with her quick breaths looked as if they’d fill his palms to perfection.
A feral rush of heat jagged at his groin, an instant, unstoppable reaction that did not fit his mood or his expectations.
Christo dragged his gaze up to her face and saw her eyebrows arch in query, challenging him as if he had no right to stare.
As if she wasn’t his runaway wife!
‘You’ve got some explaining to do,’ he murmured in the soft, lethal voice that stopped meandering board meetings in a second.
But, instead of backing down and losing the attitude, Emma jutted her rounded chin, lifted her cute, not quite retroussé nose in the air and planted her feet wider, drawing his attention to her shapely legs.
The heat in his groin flared hotter.
Slowly she shook her head, making her tangled, wet hair slide around her shoulders. Sunlight caught it, highlighting the dark honey with strands of gold he’d never seen before. But then they’d spent most of their time indoors, in her grandfather’s house or at nearby restaurants. The bright Greek sunshine revealed details he simply hadn’t noticed.
‘You’ve got that the wrong way around.’
‘Sorry?’ Christo drew himself up to his full height, looking down on the slim woman before him. But, extraordinarily, she simply stared back, her mouth set in a mulish line. Her stare was bold rather than apologetic.
For a second he was so surprised he even wondered if the impossible had happened. If this wasn’t Emma but some lookalike imposter.
But Christo Karides had never been one for fantasy. He’d been a pragmatist since childhood, with no time for fiction.
‘Have you any idea how worried everyone was?’ His voice was gruff, hitting a gravelly note that betrayed the gut-deep worry he’d rather not remember. ‘I even called the police! I thought you’d been abducted.’
He’d mobilised the best people to scour Melbourne and the surrounds, praying something terrible hadn’t happened to his quiet little spouse.
There were ruthless people out there, including some ready to take advantage of a defenceless woman. His brain had kept circling back to the possibility that when he found her it would be too late. He’d never felt so helpless. The memory fed his fury.
‘I rang my aunt to explain that I was safe.’
