he was trying to give none of them reason to think he was favouring any of them. None of them, nor any of the other women at the party, had the slightest allure for him. Even after a second glass of vintage champagne.
Restlessly he looked about him, hoping against hope that someone, somewhere, would catch his eye. But as his gaze ran over the assembled females dispassionately not a single one made him look twice.
‘ … in the Caribbean … ‘
The fragment of speech brought him back. One of the women—a voluptuous brunette with lush lips and a traffic-stopping figure—was talking, it seemed, about a proposed cruise. She was pausing invitingly for him to say something.
But he wasn’t seeing her …
He was seeing Marisa leaning against him, curled up beside him on the wide palanquin-style sun-shelter in front of their cabana, overlooking the beach, sipping a cocktail with him as they watched the sun go down in a blaze of gold and crimson. Her body so soft, so warm nestled against him. Her pale hair was like a golden rope down the backless sundress she was wearing. His mouth was brushing the satin of her hair, his hand cupped her shoulder, holding her close … so close.
The warmth of her body—the sweetness of its scent—the heady longing of desire, of possession, wrapping them together.
His mouth nuzzled at her cheekbone. She turned her face to his, caught his lips with hers, let him draw her down upon the soft, yielding surface …
‘What do you think?’
The brightly voiced enquiry roused him painfully, and he had to refocus his eyes, his mind. ‘Is a cruise around the Caribbean a good idea? Or is it better to be based on land?’
He gave an absent half smile. ‘I guess it depends how vulnerable you are to seasickness,’ he answered, hoping it was a suitable answer in a conversation he had paid no attention to.
‘Oh, I get horribly seasick,’ one of the other women contributed, and turned her eyes full-on to Athan. ‘There are so many gorgeous islands. Which one do you recommend? St Bart’s? Martinique? Barbados—though that is so over-popular now, alas!’
He answered at random. His thoughts were far away, across the ocean, on the only Caribbean island he cared about. St Cecile. The one that held all his memories of Marisa.
I want her back.
The words formed in his head before he could stop them. Burning and indelible.
He wanted Marisa back. That was all there was to it. Simple, and straight to the point.
I don’t care who she is—what she was to Ian—why I did what I did. I just want her back. I don’t care how impossible it is.
He had finally admitted it. Faced up to and acknowledged the truth he’d been trying to deny ever since he’d stalked out of her apartment, having told her that everything between them had been a set-up—a lie.
But he could deny the truth no longer. He wanted Marisa back again …
But I can’t—it’s impossible. Out of the question. It’s the most damn out-of-the-question thing in the world!
He had to put it out of his head. Put her out. Whatever it took. He looked anew at the bevy of beautiful women dancing attendance on him. He had come here tonight to this glittering social gathering, to where he was a familiar face, the Athenian high society circuit, with the specific purpose of finding another woman to take his mind off the one he couldn’t have. But the problem was he didn’t want any of them. Not a single one.
Dispassionately he assessed them, and those around him in the ornate salon. Even those not blessed with natural beauty were wearing haute couture numbers, shimmering with expensive jewellery, coiffed and manicured to the nines, looking fabulous and elegant whatever their age. Yet not one of them appealed.
Marisa could float in with just with a towel wrapped round her, not a scrap of make up and her hair in a ponytail, and she would still be the only woman I want.
With a heavy, self-accusing sigh at his own hopeless weakness, he rejoined the conversation. It was not the fault of the women here that he didn’t want them. At the very least he owed them courtesy and attention.
Somehow he got through the remainder of the evening until he felt he could bid his hostess goodbye and finally beat a retreat. Back in his own apartment, glad to be on his own again at last, he went out on to the balcony. Though it was still chilly, winter was over now. Spring would be blessing the land again soon, and then the heat of the Aegean summer. For now he welcomed the cool—welcomed looking out over the Athens skyline, polluted though the air was, and thinking his own thoughts.
OK, he reasoned, for a change marshalling his brainpower to a purpose, not of corporate affairs or the economic problems besetting the world, but to his own dilemma. He had to be blunt about this. He wanted a woman it was impossible to have. Impossible because it would damage his family, jeopardise his sister’s shaky marriage. Having anything more to do with the woman who had nearly destroyed it was unthinkable.
Yet when he had tried to divert his attention to another woman—any woman!—he had found to his dismay that he might as well have been gazing at a cardboard cut-out.
There was, therefore, only one solution. It was staring him in the face, but it wasn’t one he was particularly attracted to. But still there it was.
Celibacy.
Going without.
Abstinence.
He took a heavy breath. It would be hard, but it was his only option right now. Somehow he had to purge the last influences of Marisa Milburne from him, and living like a monk was his only effective method. And what he would have to do in order to ensure that he could achieve that purging was refuse to think about her, remember her, long for her. He’d fill his head up with other stuff.
Work would be good ‘other stuff’ …
He gazed out bleakly, glimpsing the ancient rock of the Acropolis crowned with the ruins of the Parthenon. A temple to Athena. The patroness of Athens. A virgin goddess. The goddess of wisdom and fortitude.
He would need both those qualities in quantity from now on.
Marisa watched the dark blue car wind its way slowly down the narrow lane from the cottage back towards the village and the road beyond that led out of Devon, back towards the motorway that headed for London. Her heart was heavy and torn, but she had done the right thing—she knew she had.
Ian had pleaded with her, but she had held firm—cost her though it had.
I had to do it—I had to convince him that I just can’t be part of his life any more. Not now—not ever.
He had arrived, despite all her pleas to him by text and phone not to, that morning. He had been aghast that she had moved out of the flat in London he’d leased for her, begged her to reconsider, change her mind—come back.
But of course she couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Athan Teodarkis had made that impossible. Unthinkable.
Going back to her old home, her old life, was the only thing that was possible. Here at the very least she could hide. Hide from everything—and everyone. Ian insisting on confronting her here had been an ordeal, but draining though it had been, and upsetting, she knew that it had had to be done to convince him she’d made her decision and was going to stick to it. So now—painfully—he’d gone, leaving the knowledge that she could not possibly tell him what his brother-in-law had done to her burning inside her like acid.
As she watched Ian’s car disappear around the curve of the lane she shut her eyes, feeling a kind of relief at his departure that was at odds with the wrench of watching him leave her life. She felt breathless and suffocated by all the emotion pressing down upon her. On an impulse she went back inside the cottage and changed her indoor shoes for a stout,