When the show finished, he’d stared into her eyes and in that moment he’d known he would cancel attending Prince Talos’s private after-party. Who cared about showing the world that he’d won back the woman who’d jilted him when he could take her home and devour her all over again?
Who could think of revenge when burning desire consumed your every movement? When the soft skin of the object of your revenge as well as of your desire kept brushing against your arm? When her soft hands held yours as tightly as you held hers?
But now they were back, he knew he needed a moment to gather himself together.
‘Drink?’ he suggested.
He wanted to make love to her so badly, but this time he wanted to take it as slowly as he should have done the first time...her first time. Ever.
He led her through to his favourite living area, a vast room that led onto the veranda, separated by a wall of glass. He pressed the button to open the wall then went to his bar. ‘What do you want?’
She smiled softly then headed through the gap that had opened onto the veranda, saying over her shoulder, ‘Whatever you’re having.’
I’m having you, he thought as he opened a bottle of ouzo, poured a large measure of it into a cocktail shaker, then did the same with the vodka. Then he added the juice of a lemon, some orange juice and, remembering to add them only at the last moment, chunks of ice. Then he gave it a good shake before straining it into two tall glasses.
He carried their drinks outside, where he found her barefoot on the lawn below the veranda, staring out at the black sea before her, the moonlight illuminating her pale face.
‘Here,’ he said.
She took it from him with a smile and sipped it through the straw. Her eyes flickered. ‘A Greek Doctor?’
He grinned. ‘You remember?’
A mischievous glint sparkled in her eyes. ‘I remember getting my first hangover on these. And my last.’
‘Still?’ That was a night he’d never forgotten. Helena, unused to drinking more than the odd glass of wine, had devoured more than her share of the cocktail one night early on during their stay on Sidiro. He’d had to carry her back to the small hotel room. She’d alternated between clinging to him like a limpet throughout the night to retching over the side of the bed. In the morning she’d clutched her head tightly and vowed never to drink so much again. In all their time together after that, she never had.
She took another sip and nodded. ‘I learned my lesson.’ Eyes holding his, she swirled the contents of her glass. ‘I always learn my lessons.’
He contemplated her. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’
‘Only that you and I... I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.’
‘What wrong idea would that be?’
‘That we’re getting back together. We’re not. When we go back to Sidiro, our relationship goes back to being purely professional.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HELENA HELD HER breath while she waited for Theo to respond.
She hadn’t intended to put it so bluntly, but Theo was not a man for subtlety. It was best to spell things out, otherwise he would deliberately misconstrue it for his own advantage.
‘But you have thought of us getting back together,’ he said with a gleam in his eye.
‘I’ve been thinking about us a lot,’ she admitted. ‘Time tends to blur the past. It makes us nostalgic.’
‘You are nostalgic for me?’
She had to laugh. ‘Nostalgic for your insatiable ego.’
‘You’re blaming my ego for you running away?’
‘I didn’t run away. I left.’
‘You ran away from me.’
‘Are you suffering from selective memory or something? I never ran away from you. I left you and you know perfectly well why I did, and they are reasons that haven’t changed even if nostalgia has blunted the edges.’
He shook his head sardonically and raised his glass. ‘As I remember it, you decided I was going to be a terrible husband and father and—’
‘I never said that,’ she cut in, startled. For all his teasing tones, there was a biting message. This conversation was going in a direction she had not anticipated. In her head, she’d envisaged making it clear to Theo that any intimacy between them was to be confined to this villa and Theo immediately agreeing with her—although no doubt with his fingers crossed behind his back—and then whisking her off to bed to make love. Because this was just unfinished business, she’d realised while trying to watch the show. Theo had that right. If he’d dropped his ridiculous insistence that they wait until they were married before making love and they had actually done the deed all that time ago, the itch would have been scratched. The unknown would have been known.
He took a long drink of his cocktail. ‘You certainly implied it.’
‘No, you interpreted it that way. I didn’t mean you would be a bad husband for anyone, just a bad husband for me—out there in this big wide world is a woman you would be perfect for.’
That was not a ripple of jealousy streaming through her at the thought of Theo settling down. She would not allow that, not tonight.
He winked. ‘You’re saying I’m perfect?’
She only just held back from giving his arm a playful slap. Some intimacies must not be allowed back out. ‘For someone else, yes. And I definitely did not say you’d be a bad father because I actually think you’d be a great one.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know...’ She thought wildly. ‘You’re fun. You’re generous. You’re protective. You’re easy to talk to. You don’t judge.’ Everything her father wasn’t.
‘All the wonderful qualities you ran away from.’
‘I didn’t run, I walked, and I would walk again because the flip side is that you’re a control freak.’
Her assertion was so offensive that for a moment Theo’s mind went blank. ‘I am not.’
‘Theo, you wanted to control everything. Look at my career—you took
