NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared Elvi for the startling effect of Xan’s mother, Ariadne, whose temperament was so very different from her only child’s.
A helicopter had delivered Xan and Elvi to the huge sprawling white villa that overlooked a wooded cove on the island of Thira. As she climbed out a small woman accompanied by a pack of dogs stood up from a seat on the wide front terrace and came hurrying down the steps to eagerly greet them, dogs leaping and bouncing in concert. And from that moment, Elvi doubted that even Xan had managed to get a word in edgeways, for Ariadne talked in a constant stream, hopping confusingly from one topic to the next. She spoke fluent English, however, relieving Elvi’s main fear that Xan would be the only person around who understood her, and the older woman was both friendly and welcoming.
On the way through the opulent house, Elvi received a stream of information. Ariadne’s mother had been English and Ariadne did not normally live in the big villa, having her own home in the village by the harbour. But when Xan entertained the wider family, Ariadne always acted as his hostess.
‘First wife seniority!’ Ariadne joked. ‘Xan doesn’t like his stepmothers much but he accepts his brothers and sisters and, naturally, Delphina wanted her wedding staged here and her brother doing the service—’
‘Her brother’s a priest?’
‘Lukas is a Greek Orthodox priest and Tobias, the other son, is gay. Not that I’m criticising, but Xan did turn out more conventional than his brothers,’ Ariadne proclaimed with pride. ‘And it goes without saying that he’s the cleverest. Delphina’s a dear, you’ll love her. She and Takis fell in love at school, almost like Helios and me... Xan’s father, you know. But of course, Helios and I didn’t attend the same school. I was the village doctor’s daughter and we met when he went fishing. Like Xan, Helios was gorgeous.’ Ariadne loosed an extravagant sigh as if she was looking back in time before continuing briskly, ‘But he was also weak and unreliable and quite unable to keep his trousers zipped. Not very good at making money either. By the time Helios passed he had even mortgaged this house. Xan rescued all of us from penury.’
‘Xan’s...’ Elvi hesitated as the eyes of Xan’s mother locked with fixed attention to her face. ‘He’s quite a character,’ she pronounced lamely.
The older woman showed the way into a bedroom where confusion seemed to have broken out between two maids over Elvi’s luggage. Ariadne smiled even wider and rested a supervisory hand on Elvi’s arm to guide her away from the small domestic dispute they had interrupted. ‘Do you know how many years I’ve been waiting for my son to bring a woman home with him?’ she asked earnestly.
‘Oh...’ Elvi reddened. ‘Xan and I are not...er, serious or anything like that,’ she hastened to declare.
‘Xan doesn’t know how to do serious. Not after witnessing the sort of shenanigans he grew up with in this house...all those wives, the live-in lovers who didn’t make it to the altar, the screaming dramas,’ Ariadne told her with scorn. ‘All Helios’s children suffered but Xan was older and he endured the most.’
Elvi frowned. ‘He lived with his father, not you, after...er...the divorce?’
‘Helios refused to give up custody of his eldest son. I was distraught. Losing your husband to another woman and then losing your only child at almost the same time was a huge shock for me.’ Ariadne paused in the sunlit corridor lined with magnificent paintings, her rounded but still attractive face full of remembered pain and regret. ‘I was young and heartbroken but I was also selfish. I walked away to make a fresh start instead of staying on the island and accepting that I could only be a part-time mother to my son.’
Elvi was listening closely, deeply interested in what she was learning about Xan’s childhood. ‘Walked away?’ she encouraged, impatient to hear more.
But Ariadne, who had paused on the threshold of a much larger and more magnificent bedroom than she had previously shown to Elvi, was no longer looking at her. She was studying her son and she addressed him in Greek, her attitude one of humour while Xan stood there, his tall, powerful figure rigid, his bronzed face impassive, responding to the older woman with a non-committal shrug that nonetheless telegraphed a temper on a short fuse to Elvi’s increasingly observant eyes. Faint dark colour edged his killer cheekbones, a gleam of hot gold brightening his gaze.
‘I will leave you with your...friend.’ Xan’s mother laughed in emphasis, standing back as Elvi’s cases were brought in. ‘Dinner is in an hour.’
Xan strode out onto the balcony that overlooked the sea. The Aegean Sea, almost as blue as Elvi’s eyes, he brooded grimly, exasperated by his mother’s infantile game-playing.
‘So...’ Elvi hovered uncertainly by the glass doors. ‘What was that all about?’
Xan swung back, lithe as a jungle predator and as immaculate as he had been at dawn that morning, shirt still crisp and white, tie still straight. No, he badly needed a shave, she noted with relief, grateful he wasn’t quite perfect when the linen sundress she had worn from travelling was as creased as though she had slept in it and bore a coffee stain.
‘I haven’t brought a woman to the island with me before.’
‘I know. Your mother said.’
‘To prevent her from reading too much into your visit, I said you were just a friend—’
‘I said we weren’t serious,’ Elvi hastened to add.
‘But Ariadne called my bluff,’ Xan admitted, his beautiful stubborn mouth curling with annoyance. ‘She put you in another room and naturally I countermanded that instruction.’
Elvi inwardly cringed and her cheeks reddened with embarrassment. In a household with other guests, all of them presumably Xan’s relatives, staying in his room put her under the spotlight more than she would’ve liked, had she had a choice. And she didn’t have a choice, she reminded herself ruefully.
‘Ariadne’s desperate for me to get married and produce grandchildren for her,’ Xan revealed in an aggrieved undertone. ‘But I’m nowhere near ready for that step.’
Elvi shrugged a stiff shoulder. ‘Well, I imagine you’ll do exactly as you like anyway and she knows that.’
Always throwing oil on troubled waters, that was Elvi, Xan noted, and it was a novel approach to a man quick to impatience and anger, but rather soothing to be around, if you needed to be handled as though you were an unstable explosive device. Was that how she saw him? To his own surprise, he asked her that question.
‘Well, you’re naturally intolerant,’ Elvi pointed out almost apologetically, as if the unlovely trait of intolerance could not possibly be his own fault. ‘You are very precise in your expectations and accustomed to other people meeting those expectations, either because you’re paying them to do so or because you’re used to people going out of their way to please you.’
‘Both,’ Xan agreed, impressed by her honesty and her tact. He didn’t think he had ever been insulted or criticised so politely. ‘Are you planning to go out of your way to please me any time soon?’
Elvi stiffened, her cheeks flushing, her mouth compressing. ‘Probably not.’
Xan swung away to hide his smile because she would assume he was laughing at her and he wasn’t. She was teaching him almost as much as he was teaching her and by the time she learned and accepted that sex was merely sex, he would probably be bored, he told himself stubbornly, striving to ignore the reality that simply the thought of getting her into the same bed at the end of the tedious evening ahead sent a throbbing, stabbing pulse of raw erotic craving through him. She would have an enjoyable holiday on Thira and then he would send her home. She would be restored to happy-clappy positivity, merely a little less innocent and the sordid aspects of their original arrangement would be tidily airbrushed over into something more acceptable.
Unaware of Xan’s plans for her immediate future, Elvi smoothed down her dress, black, fitted with a lower neckline than she liked, but undeniably elegant.
‘Wear your diamonds,’ Xan advised, emerging from the bathroom in all his naked glory, so tall and bronzed with powerful pectorals and taut ropes of muscle visible across his flat abdomen.
With difficulty, Elvi dragged her eyes from that view, her body uncomfortably warm despite the air conditioning. ‘They’re not my diamonds—’
‘I bought them for you.’
‘I don’t want them.’
‘But you can wear them when I tell you to,’ Xan cut in, flipping open the jewel case to extract the necklace and anchor it round her throat while she struggled to lift her hair out of his path.
She had sworn she would not do as she was told but here she was doing it like everyone else around Xan, Elvi reflected angrily. ‘I’m leaving them behind when we part—’
Xan shrugged an indifferent shoulder. ‘And when do you think that might be?’
‘A week?’ Elvi looked at him hopefully.
And without warning, Xan felt a surge of rage splinter through him. It was that hopeful look that implied that she could not wait to regain her freedom and escape him. A woman had never ever shown Xan that expression before.
‘No chance,’ he countered succinctly, his attention involuntarily lingering on the voluptuous display of her breasts in the dress. It wasn’t so much that the neckline was too low as that she had rather more than could be easily contained.
‘My face is at this level,’ Elvi told him thinly, all too well aware of where his scrutiny had strayed.
‘Obviously I’m going to look... I love your curves,’ Xan retorted squarely. ‘But I think you should change into another dress. I don’t want anyone else looking.’
Thoroughly irritated by being asked to change when she was fully dressed, but disliking even more having her chest on display, Elvi stepped back into the built-in closet where her clothing had been hung to rifle through the selection for another option. She yanked out the blue dress she had worn for the party he had taken her to and dug out a different bra to go with it, disappearing into the bathroom for the exchange, tossing over her shoulder, ‘I don’t see why it should bother you if anyone did look!’
Xan compressed his wide sensual mouth while he thought about that. He didn’t know why the idea bothered him, but it did. Her glorious hourglass shape was eye-catching and he didn’t want to share it. Fortunately, she was not one of those women, and he had met quite a few, who deliberately exposed as much flesh as possible in the hope of attracting more male attention.
‘Much better,’ Xan pronounced when she reappeared, flushed and slightly tumbled, to settle exasperated eyes on him. ‘I hope the swimwear you have isn’t too revealing—’
Elvi rolled her eyes as she stepped through the doorway into the corridor ahead of him. Even the most modestly cut swimwear made her look like an old-style pin-up girl, a fact that had put her off swimming sessions at a young age. ‘So, interestingly, you have a prudish streak too,’ she remarked snidely.
Still insulted by her enthusiasm for leaving him to return to her workaday, poverty-stricken existence, Xan refused to rise to the bait.
Downstairs, a crowd of guests were enjoying pre-dinner drinks and Elvi was introduced to Xan’s relations. The bride-to-be, Delphina, was a pretty brunette with a ridiculously shy version of Xan’s eyes while her mother was a brassy blonde, who loosed a sarcastic laugh of disbelief when Elvi, asked what she did for a living, mentioned her most recent employment in a craft shop.
‘You see, Callista,’ Xan murmured in the mildest of tones. ‘Some women do choose to work for a living.’
‘I would just have ignored her,’ Elvi whispered in reproof as they moved away.
‘I’m not a fan of turning the other cheek,’ Xan retorted crisply. ‘Callista lives off the rich men she sleeps with and she had no business sneering at you. It’s a wonder Delphina has turned out as well as she has.’
‘Sleeping with rich men to get by sounds very much like work to me,’ Elvi dared.
Xan froze and glanced down at her with a sudden frown.
‘Oh, I wasn’t getting at you,’ Elvi said with mock innocence. ‘After all, I did it to keep my mother out of prison and off drink, which is rather different.’
‘Skase!’ Xan shot down at her in a raw undertone.
‘Meaning?’
‘Shut up...drop the subject,’ Xan bit out furiously as he leant down to her level.
‘Well, you really can’t go around with that “one rule for me but a different rule for everyone else” take on everything,’ Elvi pointed out helplessly.
‘I can do whatever I like—’
‘And it’s thoroughly bad for you,’ Elvi told him firmly.
Xan swore under his breath, inflamed by her sheer nerve. Why didn’t she worry about offending him, as other women did? He stood by watching his mother introduce Elvi to his remaining sisters, noticing how animated the conversation between them all became. Of course, he should’ve expected that, he told himself calmingly. His sisters all lived in the real world, unlike his former stepmother, Callista. One sister was an engineer with her own company, another was a doctor, the third a happy housewife with four children, two of which were very cute five-year-old female twins. Another and stronger generation of his family, he labelled with satisfaction, for not one of his siblings exhibited the money-grabbing greed of his former stepmothers. Yes, he had bought them all houses and financed their business projects, but essentially his brothers and sisters were independent, falling back on his wealth only in times of misfortune.
They sat down to dinner. By that stage it was clear to Xan that Elvi had gone down like a prize trophy with his family because his mother was pumping her about her love of dogs, while the wretched untrained little beasts formed begging round their feet, and his sisters were chattering to Elvi as though she were one of the family. It was her friendly gene, Xan decided, only becoming perversely annoyed when Elvi disappeared off to see his mother’s latest craft project, which he knew would be an absolute disaster. Ariadne Ziakis might be the acclaimed author of several very weighty archaeology tomes and a professor in her university department, but she was not talented with her hands.
‘I was doing the stitch wrong!’ his mother proclaimed when she returned to the table to drink her coffee. ‘And this wonderful girl showed me how to do it and it was so easy when you know how...’
Ne...yes, Elvi went down with the family like award-winning chocolate.
Tobias, always timid, confided in Elvi about his latest relationship breakdown, when he could barely bring himself to acknowledge that he was gay to Xan’s face. Lukas pontificated happily about worldly indifference to the suffering of refugees and revealed that he had met the woman he hoped to marry. One sister revealed that she was pregnant again, another admitted to a serious boyfriend. Xan watched in silent astonishment while his family opened up to Elvi in a way they never did with him. Delphina related the entire story of her humdrum relationship with Takis in the kind of detail that would send most people to sleep, but Elvi listened as if she were hearing the most romantic story she had ever heard.
Maybe she genuinely did think that sort of stuff was romantic, Xan reflected in awe as not even a giggle escaped Elvi when she heard about Takis’s marriage proposal: harbour restaurant, family party, roses at the table, bended knee, so conventional Xan’s teeth hurt with saccharine overload just listening. Elvi was nice, he decided, in the most flexible interpretation of that overused word. People blossomed around her, drawn by her sincere interest, warmed by her kind and optimistic outlook on life. She was the absolute antithesis of him, Xan decided.
‘She’s adorable. Put a ring on her finger fast,’ his mother urged as she said goodnight to him.
‘She’s far too kind and caring for you,’ his eldest sister, the engineer, opined. ‘You’ll probably make her miserable.’
‘Oh, I just love Elvi.’ Delphina sighed blissfully, very much the lovestruck bride the night before her wedding.
‘Elvi would make a good wife,’ Lukas, the priest, told him staunchly. ‘She’s a godly woman.’
‘She’s a pet,’ Tobias pronounced with starry eyes as Xan identified Elvi by his mother’s side, down on her knees petting the scruffy dogs. ‘Such a good listener.’
Chilled by that amount of family enthusiasm, Xan accepted the accolades without comment and reclaimed Elvi from the pet contingent with difficulty. On the upper landing, she paused to study a portrait. ‘Is that your father?’
‘Yes,’ Xan confirmed, his attention locked to her rather than the painting. Her dress exposed her slender spine, where he already knew the soft, smooth skin felt like silk, and the fine fabric below her waist outlined the ripe, rounded swell of her bottom. His libido kicked in with lusty fervour and he coiled his hands into fists of restraint. Everything was going to be different this time, he assured himself. There would be no grabbing, no rushing, no cutting of sexual corners.
‘When did he die?’ she asked, still looking at the canvas.
‘Nine years ago.’
‘You do look very like him,’ Elvi conceded as she moved on, her heart skipping a beat as Xan closed his hand over hers, engulfing her smaller fingers.
‘Thankfully that resemblance is all we shared.’ Xan thrust wide the door of his bedroom and she brushed against him, her face turning up, her eyes blindingly blue and bright above her soft full mouth, and that view cut through his self-discipline like a knife through butter.
Xan ran his fingertips lightly down the bare line of her spine and she trembled, suddenly fiercely aware of him, her body involuntarily awakening to his touch. He edged her back against the wall and stroked her hair back from her flushed face. ‘Now tell me that you want me...’
Elvi dealt him a stubborn glance because only the champagne during the flight had forced that admission from her. ‘You don’t need the ego boost.’
‘Why are you still fighting something so natural?’ Xan demanded, as if she was being thoroughly unreasonable.
‘It’s not natural to me,’ Elvi argued, struggling not to melt into the lean, powerful contours of his body as he penned her in by the wall. He was so warm and he smelt amazing, her nostrils flaring on the familiar scent of him. Her nipples prickled, swelling and tightening, and an edgy pulse beat between her thighs.
Xan could not credit how stubborn she could be. He could not fathom how a woman so seemingly soft and warm and eager to please those around her could then be so resistant when it came to pleasing him. ‘You’re only making this harder for yourself.’
Elvi was so tense as she fought her arousal that she was barely breathing, her small body stiff. ‘I don’t think so. This is who I am. If I changed that, I couldn’t respect myself any longer.’
‘Only you would care to think about such things,’ Xan intoned thickly. ‘This close to you, I can only think about how much I want you—’
He pushed closer, pressing her back against the wall, and even through their clothes she could feel the hard, insistent length of him against her stomach. A jolt of hungry need took her by storm, drying her mouth, stealing her breath, sending her heart hammering. ‘Xan...’ she heard herself whisper almost pleadingly.
‘Powerful, isn’t it?’ Xan husked, his hands bracing on either side of her head, his eyes a hot scorching gold enhanced by lush black lashes. ‘So powerful you can’t think of anything else.’
‘You’re teasing me,’ Elvi said breathlessly, her fingers splaying across his shirt front, the heat of his muscled chest encouraging her hand to flex and the fingers to spread in something very like a caress.
Xan pulled her hand down to where he really needed her attention and her fingers traced his bold length through the fabric of his trousers, her shy fascination powerfully erotic. He wanted to rip off his clothes there and then and teach her everything she didn’t know and, gripped by that image, he shed his jacket where he stood and yanked off his tie, unbuttoning his shirt with one hand, unzipping with the other.
It was as though Elvi’s heartbeat had extended to thump through her entire body. She felt giddy, overexcited despite her nerves. Recognising Xan’s feverish eagerness for her touch removed her fear of doing the wrong thing. That he could crave her caresses as much as she craved his was a revelation and a tremendous equaliser. She pushed down his boxers and found him, she glided her fingers up and down before she got down on her knees. He shuddered as she found him with her mouth and he arched his hips, groaning something hoarse in Greek. She swirled her tongue, tantalising, teasing while she stroked and cupped and savoured him. His hand tightened in her hair and then he yanked her back up to him, kissing her as though his life depended on that connection.
He cannoned off the corner of a dresser as he hauled her bodily over to the bed, stood her up, struggling with the backless dress and its complicated closure. There was a ripping sound as he simply lost patience and tore the fragile fabric down the middle. She looked up at him in shock.
‘I can’t wait...’ Xan confided fiercely, flipping her round to unfasten the bra that anchored at her waist. ‘What a strange contraption,’ he muttered, his hands rising to mould the full swell of her breasts, tugging at her straining nipples and then ravishing her mouth with his again, his tongue plunging deep, extracting a startled cry of urgency from her.
They landed on the bed with a bounce and she had no idea how they had got there from the door. Xan ripped off his shirt and flung it aside, yanking off what remained of his clothing at the same time, his impatience unconcealed. He crawled up the bed like a lethal predator, golden eyes ablaze as he repositioned her to his satisfaction.
‘No, not this time,’ he censured when she tried to inch beneath the sheet. ‘No barriers, no boundaries, moli mou. You’re a work of art and I want to look at you.’
He was all male power and muscle sheathed in sun-kissed skin from his wide shoulders to his lean hips and strong thighs. The thrusting, potent proof of his arousal made damp heat rise at the heart of her.
‘I promise to drive you out of your mind with pleasure,’ Xan breathed with raw sensuality.
Sliding down the bed and parting her thighs to feast on her with his mouth, he took her entirely by surprise. She gasped, yanked unavailingly at his black hair, and then finally surrendered to wild sensation. He teased her with his skill, and her frantic tension grew and grew while the hollow ache between her legs became unbearable. She tossed and she turned and then she writhed, lost in the excitement until she soared to a glorious peak and the world splintered into a multicoloured shower of fireworks.
Xan grinned down at her bemused face and sank into her with one powerful thrust. His groan of sheer unalloyed pleasure made her feel even hotter. This time her body craved him and she was much more relaxed and there wasn’t even a hint of discomfort, only the wonderful rolling tide of exquisite sensation as his every movement sent smouldering pleasure winging through her.
‘Don’t stop,’ she gasped at the height of another peak, every nerve straining greedily for more.
And Xan laughed with pure unashamed enjoyment, pulling back from her briefly to flip her over onto her knees to continue, driving deeper into her receptive body with every cry he wrenched from her until finally Elvi reached the highest summit of rapturous excitement and a seething rush of convulsive delight sent paroxysms of electrifying pleasure travelling through her exhausted length.
‘Please don’t make me move until tomorrow,’ she mumbled, face down on the bed.
‘I thought you were into cuddling.’
‘Are you hot and sweaty?’ she asked prosaically.
‘You want me to shower first?’
Elvi turned back over and laughed with helpless appreciation. ‘Only joking!’
Xan closed an arm round her and pulled her close. It wasn’t a hug or a cuddle but it was more of a connection than he had offered before and it soothed her racing thoughts and the anxiety she was holding at bay.
‘You used a condom, didn’t you?’ she checked worriedly.
‘Of course. Are you still worrying about that?’ he said in surprise.
‘Worrying comes naturally to me,’ she admitted.
‘Worrying is a waste of energy that can be better employed. I want to have you again,’ Xan confided, pressing a kiss to a sensitive pulse point below her ear, making her squirm.
‘Already?’ she gasped, huge blue eyes lifting to his lean, darkly handsome face, instantly rejoicing in the sleek dark beauty of him laced with the wilder elements of his tousled hair and stubble.
Xan nodded very seriously. ‘I’ve got a major backlog of Elvi hunger to clear. I’m going to be very demanding, moli mou...’
A little flame of anticipation kindled wickedly low in her pelvis at that news. For the first time Elvi acknowledged just how much she revelled in Xan Ziakis, clothed or unclothed. It didn’t matter how much he infuriated her, it didn’t stop her craving him with every fibre of her being. It was only physical attraction, nothing more serious, she told herself with determination, telling herself to move with the times and stop judging herself for a situation she couldn’t change. After all, their arrangement wouldn’t last for ever and the real world would reclaim her soon enough.
Before she’d met Xan, she had sunk into a rut and stopped thinking about her own future, she acknowledged ruefully. Perhaps Joel had had a point when he’d criticised her for her absorption in her family. When Xan moved on, she decided that she would change her attitude. She would seek a more challenging job or even training that would enable her to be more ambitious. Her mother and brother were finding their own feet now and would no longer need to rely on her to the same extent.
When Xan emerged from the bathroom, Elvi was fast asleep. He had to fight the temptation to wake her while he studied her with brooding disquiet. Sex had never been so intense for him and his voracious desire to have her again disturbed him. He wasn’t treating her the way he normally treated a mistress. He didn’t know what it was about her that got to him deep down where he had sworn never to let a woman go again.
And inexplicably and unnervingly, she made him keep on changing his mind. What had happened to his determination not to touch her until she invited him to do so? What had happened to his decision to let her go free in five days?
Even worse, Elvi made him want more and he liked that even less.
Was it the fact that he was her first lover? Did he somehow feel responsible for her now? He reminded himself that he had wronged her and that he had deliberately set out to redress that damage. But that didn’t explain why he hadn’t just let her go or why he was tempted to put his arms around her when she was asleep and there was no chance of sex. Thee mou...that urge was freaking him out! He was even more unsettled by the tangle of clothing untidily littering the bedroom floor. That wasn’t like him either. He was quick to remove the evidence of his lack of patience and control, but throughout the exercise he was acknowledging that he should not allow any woman to affect him the way she did and he was urging himself to walk away fast.
* * *
Elvi drifted slowly out of a deep sleep to greet the dawn. Light was filtering through the curtains and she was too warm. She muttered a complaint and the sheet was tossed back, Xan’s fingers returning to the place which made her writhe and heat up even more. A slight gasp escaped her as he shifted against her, all power and potency and temptation and then he was where she needed him to be, sinking into her welcoming body with urgent force. But then the tempo changed to sensually slow and her tension ramped up accordingly, heart hammering with frantic longing, her body gripped by fierce, needy impatience. She pushed back against him, wanting, needing, and with a husky sound of appreciation, he speeded up, delivering what her body was programmed to crave in a heart-stopping, blood-stirring storm of sensation that peaked and then left her floating.
‘I ordered breakfast in bed for you,’ Xan murmured lazily. ‘I have some work to catch up on before I have to walk Delphina into the church.’
‘It’ll take me all my time to get ready for the wedding,’ Elvi sighed, feeling like a hot sweaty mess even while her whole body purred with little aftershocks of pleasure.
Xan strode out of the shower and she watched him dress, her brow furrowing while she ate. He seemed very preoccupied, his dark classic profile taut, his stunning eyes veiled. Something had changed, she grasped on a level she didn’t quite understand: there was something different about Xan. A distance she hadn’t noticed the night before? The first hint that their arrangement was already heading towards its natural end? Was he getting bored with her? It was what she wanted, what she needed. She had to pick herself back up and get her life back on track. Unfortunately, that did not clarify why her skin chilled and her tummy succumbed to a nauseous lurch at the thought of their parting.
There was no way she was becoming attached to Xan, she reasoned with firm conviction. She wasn’t that foolish or that quick to allow her feelings to control her. At heart she was sensible and practical and a stranger to the kind of dangerous emotions that were likely to upset her. For goodness’ sake, she had only been with him a few days, long enough to learn that sexual pleasure was a lot more seductive than she had ever dreamt but nowhere near long enough to start thinking too warmly of a man she disliked.
And she did dislike him, she thoroughly disliked him, Elvi reminded herself with satisfaction. Xan was immoral and unscrupulous and he expected the whole world to revolve around him and his needs and wants. All he cared about was making money and maintaining a stress-free sex life. They weren’t even in a relationship. Everything Xan did and said spelled out that message because he didn’t want her to misinterpret an intimacy that was not destined to last.
The sooner it was over between them, the better it would be for her, she told herself staunchly. She had changed as well. She would never be so naïve or trusting again. But that made her stronger rather than weaker...didn’t it?
Two hours later, Elvi was garbed in an elegant dark green dress and accompanying Xan’s eldest sister, Hana, and her family to the village church. A former monastery, the large church sat at the heart of a very picturesque little village overlooking the harbour. The pews were packed, even though Hana had said that Delphina had wanted a very small wedding attended only by relatives. Elvi’s attention was fully engaged taking in the wonderful painted ceiling and icons that made the candlelit church interior so colourful and warm. And then beside her, Hana said something abrupt in Greek and turned her head to look at the woman smilingly taking what appeared to be the last available seat in the row in front of them.
Hana’s husband put his finger to his lips to silence the speech that was visibly brimming on his wife’s lips as her dark eyes hardened with annoyance.
It wasn’t the time or the place to ask who the woman was. She was certainly eye-catching, Elvi conceded admiringly, and evidently not bound by the tradition that suggested that only brides should wear white at a wedding. The brunette in the shimmering white dress was very tall, very slim and graceful and she had the face of an angel with big dark eyes, flawless features and a sultry pink mouth.
Elvi watched a sort of selective shimmy take place amongst the guests, heads turning as much as they dared, all eyes skimming in the direction of the late arrival, a low buzz of comment following. Clearly, whoever the woman was, her attendance was unexpected and food for a good gossip.
Xan dealt with the sudden appearance of the only woman who had ever broken his heart without batting a single eyelash. His first reaction was irritation, because even though Angie would have received an invite, being the bridegroom’s cousin, she should have stayed away because Xan’s family universally loathed her. His second reaction was that, although he despised her, she had worn well in their years apart.
When he received a lingering look of invitation from her, his inventive brain projected an image he very much liked. Two birds...one stone. Revenge and the freedom to move on in one perfect little package, he decided with ice-cold logic. Sometimes doing the right thing could mean doing it by nefarious means. It would be the wisest move he had ever made and would certainly kill at source his family’s ridiculous conviction that he was ready to settle down.