‘You managed pretty well.’ His riposte was dry.
His eyes rested on her. They were still impassive. But they were veiled—veiled in a way she had not seen before.
‘I’ll be honest with you—your reaction surprised me. I’d realised how alien the whole concept of a dynastic marriage was to you, and when I realised that was what Aristides wanted as part of our financial arrangement I was very sceptical that it could ever work with someone who had not been brought up to accept such things as normal. Yet I decided in the end that your phlegmatic English temperament would actually make it possible after all. You were capable of being composed and formal, I had noticed that the few times we were together before our marriage, and so I decided to go along with it. However, even within the temporary terms we’d agreed, it was still clearly something you found it hard to get your brain around. Then there was the whole business of adapting to life in Greece, having not been brought up there. You didn’t speak the language well, you were feeling your way into being Mrs Theo Theakis, with a life and lifestyle you weren’t used to. So I gave you time—it would have been stupid to do otherwise. Besides, I was so busy at work with Aristides’s company, as well as keeping my own affairs in order. Time is always the scarcest resource for me, Vicky. I knew from what had happened to your uncle’s business that the danger comes when you take your eye off the ball, and that wasn’t going to happen to me. So I know I didn’t have a great deal of time for you. But I argued that that was all to the good—it gave you the space you needed to make the adjustments you had to make.’
He shifted his weight slightly, his fingers beneath his head flexing at his neck.
‘Besides, though you were half-Greek, your nature was English. That was obvious. Obvious not just in your appearance, but in your taste and behaviour. All those understated clothes you wore! Very elegant, very restrained. Just like the way you conducted yourself. You didn’t get emotional, you weren’t demonstrative, you never picked up on any of the darts thrown at you by the likes of Christina Poussos. And you never picked up on something else, either.’
For a second so brief she thought she must have imagined it, the veil from his eyes lifted. Then, with a sweep of long lashes, it had come down again.
‘I have to tell you, appalled as you may be, that it was always my assumption that our marriage would not be a sham in one respect. You said just now that I would have married anyone who was Aristides Fournatos’s niece for the reasons I married you, but that isn’t actually true. I would never have married a woman I did not find sexually attractive. It would not have been…kind…to her to do so. But you, obviously, were sexually attractive. It would therefore be perfectly possible to have a non-celibate marriage. However, as I’ve just said, I knew I needed to allow you time to make the adjustments necessary to being my wife for the duration we’d agreed on. By then, you will appreciate, I had been celibate for longer than was usual for me. So I was…keen…to remedy that situation.’
It wasn’t icy water that was seeping into Vicky as she listened. She had seen Theo arctic with fury, had felt his freezing anger strip the skin from her bones.
But this—this was worse. This was Theo being a man of his class, his wealth, his circle, his normality. Deciding it was time to have sex with a woman he’d always intended to have sex with, whom he would not have entered into such a show marriage with on any other basis other than that she was sufficiently sexually attractive to him to warrant it.
He went on speaking. That same light, discursive tone.
‘So that is what I set about doing. It was very simple—I merely had to signal to you that the time had come to do what we would both enjoy. I had realised in those initial weeks that I would actually enjoy it more than I had originally assumed. That was because of you, you see. I was finding that your Englishness—all that understated, under-emotional cool—was proving surprisingly alluring. Intriguing. And as I proceeded with “making a move” on you, as you phrase it, it became yet more so. I realised that I was starting to want you really very much. Even if we had not been married, by then I would most definitely have sought an affair with you. Being married to you, in fact, merely added yet another layer of…allure…to you. It presented me with a façade of intimacy, and yet I had not laid a single finger on you. And then, I’m sorry to say, you made the most significant contribution to my condition.’
He looked at her, and somewhere very deep at the back of his eyes she could see something. Something that started, very slowly, to turn her inside out.
‘You resisted me. Avoided me. Blanked me. Stonewalled me. Fatal—completely fatal. Were you doing it on purpose? A feminine manoeuvre? I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. It wasn’t relevant anyway. Because there was only one place you were heading for. Only one place I wanted you to be. And I got you there. Of course I did. There was no possibility of anything else. You wanted me as much as I wanted you. So I got you to the island, was there waiting for you, and I took you to my bed.’
There was something strange in his eyes.
‘If you had simply stayed there none of this would have happened, you know. We would have done what I had assumed all along we would do. We would have had a mutually enjoyable affair, for the duration of our marriage, and then, when it was no longer necessary for us to be married, we would have parted very amicably and gone our separate ways. That was my intention.’
He stilled. Vicky felt her heart slow. Her fingers clung to the duvet cover as she gazed down at him, half-fearful, half-numb.
‘But you didn’t stay, did you? You ran. You ran to another man. And in the moments when I looked at those photos of you with him I felt something I had never in my life felt before. Do you know, Vicky, what it was?’
She swallowed. ‘Your ego denting.’ Her voice was hollow.
He gave a laugh. Harsh and humourless.
‘Jealousy. Raw and primitive and leaping in me like a monster. The green-eyed monster, devouring me. I’d never felt it in my life before—why should I have?—and I didn’t even realise what it was. I just…possessed it…and it possessed me. Raged through me. It ate me alive from the inside out.’
She could see the cords of his neck standing out, the muscles of his arms tensed like steel.
‘Why? Why did it do that? What the hell was it, this jealousy? When Christina was my lover and announced to me that she was marrying I gave her sapphire earrings and my best wishes. When any other lover terminated a relationship before I did, my reaction was the same. The most I felt was irritation if the timing was inconvenient, or if it had been done deliberately to try and get a reaction from me. So where the hell did that monster come from when I saw you in those photos?’
She fingered her duvet.
‘You’re Greek, Theo. It’s probably some kind of atavistic response, seeing how I was legally your wife at the time. So it wasn’t really jealousy, just a bit more than a dented ego. It was that Greek macho male pride, self-regard, whatever…’
He said a word in Greek. She had a bad feeling she knew what it was, and it was something to do with the male reproductive system of cattle. Or possibly the far end of the bovine digestive system.
Then he spoke again. His voice was different now.
‘But there was something else besides the monster eating me alive. Something else that, although it didn’t devour me in tearing strips, drained me—quietly, silently, almost unnoticeably—drained me of my lifeblood.’
His right hand, which had been lying inert at his side, lifted. It touched along her knuckles as her fingers clutched the duvet to her. Then he twined his fingers into hers.
‘I hurt, Vicky. I hurt so much.’
His voice was quiet.