What have I done?
But she knew. She knew the answer. She had done what she knew she would have to do. Unfinished business, Theo had called it. He was right.
‘Open your eyes.’
His words cut through her coldness.
She forced her eyes open. He was looking down at her, and his eyes were colder than she had ever seen them before in her life.
‘Don’t play your tricks with me again—not if you want your money. Understand?’
Then he was gone, walking into the en suite bathroom, shutting the door. She heard the shower start to run. Slowly, very slowly, she pulled the bedclothes over her.
A stone, hard and painful, blocked her lungs.
Theo’s hands curved tightly around the steering wheel of his car, and he pressed his foot down on the accelerator. The low, lean vehicle sprang forward with a throaty roar. Gravel crunched under its tyres as he headed down the drive, opening the gates with a flick of an electronic switch and turning out on to the road beyond, dimly lit by a tired, waning moon.
He drove fast. But not fast enough to outrun his memory. Hot, pulsing memories of the sex he had just had.
Black emotion filled him. A dish eaten cold? No, it had been scalding, molten hot! His mouth thinned. She’d tried to turn the tables on him, manipulate him. Call the shots.
He’d let her do it—this time.
This time—deliberately, knowingly—he’d gone along with her. Let her play the vamp, lure him upstairs, set the pace. He’d chosen to let her do so, wanting to see just what she would do.
And now he knew. Theos, now he knew!
It had taken all his strength—all of it—to get out of there the way he had.
Leave her the way he had.
When every burning instinct had wanted to keep him there…
Cold snaked down his back. What had happened in his moment of white-out had been nothing, nothing of what he’d intended.
It was just a reflex—nothing more. Nothing more than that.
Or an illusion. He hadn’t really felt her heart beat against his. Her arms tighten around him like that.
Deliberately he forced a hard, contemptuous smile to his lips. It had been just another trick of hers, that was all. One of the repertoire of tricks she’d tried out on him all evening, showing him her true colours, as he had known them to be since the moment he had seen those damning, condemning photos and discovered the truth about her
His hands clenched on the driving wheel as he pressed down yet harder on the accelerator, cutting through the night, back towards Athens.
He knew what she was. He didn’t need to know anything else about her.
And what he knew about her damned her. Damned her completely.
The way she’d been tonight only confirmed it—as if he’d needed any such confirmation about just what kind of woman he’d married. Victoria Fournatos was as shameless as she was adulterous, and she deserved no quarter. None.
And that was exactly what she’d get from him.
It was all she deserved.
He drove on, into the blackness of the night.
But he would be back. Oh, he would be back, all right. He hadn’t finished with her yet.
Not by a long way.