barriers and that possibly she hadn’t chosen the best time to complain, but his habit of shifting away from all contact in the immediate aftermath of intimacy had always hurt her feelings. ‘You’ve never had a problem with hugging me if I’m upset about anything, have you?’
‘Well, no, but—’
‘So, pretend I’m upset,’ Billie urged with all the enthusiasm of a woman who believed she had found the perfect solution to his lack in the affection department.
Gio settled dazed eyes on her. ‘What?’ he breathed in disbelief.
‘After sex,’ Billie told him bluntly. ‘Just think. She’s upset, now I have to hug her.’
‘I don’t want to think of you being upset after we make love.’
‘Have you got an argument against absolutely everything?’ Billie asked him in a pained tone. ‘I was trying to work out a strategy which would suit us both.’
‘Forget the strategy,’ Gio advised, anchoring both arms firmly round her and hauling her back against him with gritted teeth. ‘I’ll work on it...OK?’
‘OK,’ Billie agreed, satisfied, running an exploring hand down over his hair-roughened torso and then teasingly lower in an operation destined to prove to him there would be advantages to a change of behaviour that brought him physically closer.
‘OK,’ Gio said again but in a deep husky purr. ‘Very OK...’
An hour later they were outdoors, lying relaxed on the huge upholstered recliner on the deck and watching the flames from the brazier shooting up against the night sky. Discarded dishes from the packed fridge were scattered around, evidence of the substantial meal they had contrived to eat. Billie laced her fingers round the stem of her champagne flute and heaved a contented sigh. ‘It’s incredibly peaceful here with just the sound of the sea in the background.’
‘I always loved that sound when I was a kid. My parents used to bring us down here and...’ Gio’s voice trailed away into silence.
Billie glanced up at him, aware of the tension now stiffening his long, lean length against her. ‘And...what?’ she pressed. ‘It’s great that you’ve got some good memories of your childhood.’
‘My sisters and I were very young then. It was long before my parents broke up...before my father met the love of his life.’ Gio voiced that emphasis with biting derision.
‘Oh...and she was?’ Billie jumped straight into the opening he had given her because he had always avoided the subject of his parents’ divorce.
‘An English fashion model called Marianne. She was his mistress and when she became accidentally pregnant—with the boy who later turned out not to be my father’s—he decided that he couldn’t live without her.’
‘Oh,’ Billie said in quite another tone, discomfited by the similarities she saw to their own previous relationship, wondering if she was at last learning the reason why Gio had always maintained an emotional distance in their relationship.
‘My sisters and I returned from boarding school for our summer break and learned that our whole lives had changed. My father had divorced my mother and stuck her in an Athens apartment. Suddenly we weren’t welcome on Letsos or in our childhood home any more because my father—and it is a challenge to compliment him with that label—had married Marianne and she refused to have the children of his first marriage hanging around.’
The depth of Gio’s bitterness shocked Billie but she could imagine how horrible it must have been for him and his sisters to see their mother rejected and all of them excluded from everything they had become accustomed to believing was theirs. ‘Didn’t your grandfather intervene? You said he owned this island.’
‘He couldn’t disown his son though, and naturally he didn’t want to make an enemy of his new daughter-in-law. He does regret, however, that he didn’t do more to help my mother, but at the time he was really struggling to repair the damage Dmitri’s extravagance and marriage breakdown had already done to the family and the business.’
‘Did you have much contact with your father after the divorce?’ Billie asked.
‘No, after that one meeting, I only saw him one more time. Marianne very much resented the fact that he had had other children. Love,’ Gio breathed witheringly, ‘can be a very destructive emotion. My father destroyed his family in the name of love and my mother never recovered from the treatment she suffered at his hands.’
Billie was thoughtful because she was finally seeing when Gio had reached the conclusion that the softer human emotions could be toxic. As a child, Gio had seen the consequences of what he believed to be love in all its selfish, dangerous glory when his father had sacrificed his family so that he could be with the woman he wanted.
‘You can’t say that a parent’s love for their child is destructive,’ she commented mildly. ‘Most people see it as supportive.’
‘A man of principle can do what he should do for his family without prating about love,’ Gio asserted with a slight shudder as he tightened his arms round her. ‘I don’t need to love you to look after you.’
Billie’s eyes stung painfully. He, most certainly, hadn’t been looking after her when he had chosen to marry Calisto two years earlier but that was not a memory she wished to rouse. Instead she set down her glass and pillowed her head against his shoulder.
‘I suppose,’ Gio said, after a great deal of unusually introspective thought, ‘I do love Theo but it’s because he’s little and helpless. He’s got all the appeal of a puppy or a kitten. I took dozens of photos of him on my phone before I left Yorkshire and I couldn’t wait to see him again.’
Billie thought it was sad that at that moment she envied her son for having that amount of pull with Gio after such a short acquaintance.
‘I couldn’t wait to see you either...as you know when I turned up today before you could even make it to the church,’ Gio confided, nuzzling his unshaven jaw line softly along the line of her creamy throat, feeling extraordinarily at peace for the first time in a very long time and wondering what it was about her that had that effect on him. ‘I don’t know why I did that. It was absolutely crazy.’
‘I didn’t mind,’ Billie interposed, squirming round in the circle of his arms to look down at him instead of up at the stars.
His lean, strong face was still a touch bemused by his own behaviour that morning and it was obvious that he was still mulling that over. ‘You know, somewhere in the back of my mind, I honestly think I was afraid you mightn’t turn up at the church... Isn’t that insane?’
If he had known how much she loved him, he would have known he was quite safe on that score, she reflected ruefully. No, no matter how mad she had been with him she would never have jilted him at the altar.
* * *
‘My goodness, it’s a huge house,’ Billie breathed as the four-wheel drive parked outside a very large sprawling villa set high on the hillside and surrounded by glorious tropical gardens.
‘It has to be big for family get-togethers and it’s been extended by almost every generation since it was built.’ His tension pronounced enough to attract Billie’s notice,
