The Greek’s Chosen Wife

she had. ‘She was crying and she kissed me…I pushed her away-’

‘Of course, I was long gone by that stage…and I really don’t care now anyway,’ Prudence delivered between compressed lips, twin spots of high colour illuminating her cheekbones. ‘All I want from you now is a divorce.’

‘Forget it…you’re an Angelis; you’re my wife. This entire conversation is offensive-’

‘No, it’s not.’ Her blue eyes were dark with growing emotion. ‘Offensive is you thinking that you have the right to tell me I can’t have a divorce.’

Nik squared broad shoulders that were sheathed in the finest suiting available, breathed in deep and released a slow, measured hiss. ‘Don’t you think that we should give marriage a trial before we start talking about a divorce?’

CHAPTER TWO

A FALLING FEATHER would have sounded like a giant rock in the silence that followed that question.

Shattered, Prudence opened her mouth and shut it again, discovering that Nik’s gaze was welded to her full lips. She flushed, wondering why he was staring. She studied him with a frown because she didn’t trust her own hearing. He could surely not have said what she thought he had just said? And if he had spoken those words, no doubt she had somehow misunderstood his meaning.

Aware that his legendary skills as a negotiator had let him down badly, Nik attempted to recoup. ‘Think about this sensibly. Eight years ago, we were kids. So we did what we had to do and went through the motions and then we parted. We didn’t even try living together. But we’re older and wiser now.’

Prudence felt as if a rocket was about to fire off inside her; containing the shockwaves was almost more than she could handle. She shut her eyes tight. What was the matter with him? Eight years on, eight years after breaking her heart into a million pieces with his essential indifference, he was suggesting trying out marriage like a new pair of shoes. She wanted to scream-but not before she strangled him for daring to offer what she had once most craved, before she had finally got up the strength to break away. She thought of the contents of the wooden chest by the wall behind him and her fast-beating heart steadied and almost stilled as the old anguish tore at her. Not tall enough, not thin enough, not pretty enough for a guy so good-looking he turned male and female heads in the street.

‘No, thanks,’ Prudence said as if he had offered her a drink she didn’t want.

Shock slivered through Nikolos, his golden eyes darkening. He could not credit that instant refusal. She was winding him up, he thought forbiddingly. In the back of his mind he had always known that he would settle down with her. Eventually. He had never doubted it, never really even needed to think about it. He had known she would wait for him, wait with the steady, strong patience of the intelligent woman that she was until he was ready to make that commitment.

‘Think about what you’re saying,’ Nik urged huskily. ‘This is you, this is me and we’re already married-’

‘Only on paper-’

‘But we could make it real,’ Nik drawled softly, the dark timbre of his accented intonation shimmying down her taut spinal cord like a dangerous-weather warning.

Prudence worked very hard at blanking him out. Goodness knew, she had had plenty of practice resisting Nik’s intense charisma. Once a stray smile or even the hint of warmth in his gaze had made her silly heart race. But not any more, she reminded herself fiercely.

‘I don’t want to make it real.’

Nik reached for her with sure, steady hands and she let him ease her closer. Her heart was pounding behind her ribcage. Her brain was telling her to back away, laugh it off and extricate herself with style. There was just one problem: she didn’t want to. A little voice had swum up from her subconscious to tell her that it was all right and perfectly acceptable to be curious about how it would feel if he held her close.

‘I may be no good at the romantic angle…but I excel in other fields,’ Nik purred.

‘You’re very modest.’ She was so tense, so wound up with fizzing expectation that she could hardly breathe. In the grip of intense confusion, she was no longer thinking. In fact she was luxuriating in the touch of the long brown fingers smoothing across her cheek to spear into her hair and tip up her face for the raking inspection of his stunning golden eyes.

‘Humility doesn’t win battles.’ He lowered his arrogant dark head. ‘If you run away this time, I’ll come after you…’

A tight little knot had formed in her tummy. She pressed her thighs tightly together. The peaks of her breasts felt incredibly sensitive, the rosy tips distended and tingling. Warm colour mantled her cheeks. Just when she was on the brink of grabbing him, he brought his marauding masculine mouth down on hers. It felt impossibly intimate and incredibly good. She clutched at his jacket to stay upright. Thud-thud-thud went her heartbeat. The invasion of his tongue beyond the tender fullness of her lips pierced her with a deep, aching longing that made her shiver. She wanted more. Her body was like a spring wound up too tight. She wanted to drown in the sweet, wicked pleasure he offered and forget her pride. But as he pulled her closer she knocked her heel on the wooden chest by the wall and cold shame engulfed her as she recognised her hunger and her weakness for what they were.

Tearing herself free of his hold, she staggered away a couple of steps and struggled to calm herself, while attempting to ignore the shrieking sensation of loss tugging at her nerve-endings.

Breathing heavily, Nik resisted an urge to haul her back to him like a caveman. ‘What’s wrong?’

Mortified by her behaviour, she could not stand to look at him. What was wrong was encapsulated in the contents of the chest by the wall, she reflected painfully. She wondered if he had registered that her response had hit earthquake scale and that her legs were still threatening to buckle. ‘I shouldn’t have let that happen-’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I want a divorce.’

‘Why?’ Nik prompted, swift as a panther about to pounce. ‘Is there another man in your life?’

Astonishment almost made Prudence laugh out loud at that question. Mentally she was in a total spin: his suggestion that they make their marriage real had already shattered her with its sheer unexpectedness. The kiss, brief as it had been, had been overkill for her sorely taxed nerves. ‘If there was, it would be none of your business-’

‘Theos…of course it would be my business!’ Nik launched at her, dropping the velvet-smooth approach with a vengeance.

It was the provocation Prudence needed. Stalking past him, she wrenched up the lid of the chest and bent down to lift out a haphazard bundle of photograph albums and scrapbooks. She turned round and clumsily dumped them right at his feet. ‘No…the women between those pages are your business…I’m not and I never will be!’

An electrifying silence fell.

‘What is this?’ Nik swept up a scrapbook. He didn’t want to open it. But cowardice was not his way and he did so. His arrested attention was claimed by tabloid cuttings, magazine articles and picture after picture of him with other women. He felt sick. ‘You put this together?’

Prudence folded her arms in a defensive stance. ‘It was wonderful aversion therapy.’

‘But we weren’t living together. We have never lived together as man and wife,’ Nik countered in a fast-footed and healthy recovery that she could only regard as magnificent, surrounded as he was by all the undeniable evidence of his notorious reputation as a womaniser. ‘But if I had you, I wouldn’t need those kinds of amusements any more.’

Amusements? Women as toys, entertaining distractions for the lighter moments of life. Leo had been right and she had been ingloriously wrong: Nik was an old-style Greek tycoon. An unrepentant womaniser with double standards. It was typical that he should think that she would only want a divorce because she had met someone else. Perhaps honesty was the best policy.

With her emotions all over the place and her lips still tingling from the hard heat of his, Prudence was eager to gloss over the animosity in the air and smooth things back to normal. ‘There is nobody else involved in this. I wasn’t going to tell you at this point but I have made certain plans and I can’t go ahead with them until we’re divorced.’