He did not want to think about what had happened after that. He did not want to think of Isobel at all. She no longer belonged in his thoughts, and it was about time that he made that official.
The man with the camera turned away. So did Leandros, decisively. He suddenly felt a lot better about leaving here and went inside to…move on with his life.
Isobel’s own thinking was moving very much along the same lines as she sat reading the letter that had just arrived from her estranged husband’s lawyer giving her notice of Leandros’s intention to begin divorce proceedings.
She was sitting alone at a small kitchen table. Her mother hadn’t yet risen from her bed. She was glad about that because the letter had come as a shock, even though she agreed with its content. It was time, if not well overdue that one of them should take the bull by the horns and call an official end to a marriage that should have never been.
But the printed words on the page blurred for a moment at the realisation that this was it, the final chapter of a four-year mistake. If she agreed to Leandros’s terms, then she knew she would be accepting that those years had been nothing but wasted in her life.
Did he feel the same? Was that why he had taken so long to get to this? It was hard to acknowledge that you could be so fallible, that you had once been stupid enough to let your heart rule your head.
Or was there more to it than a decision to put an end to their miserable marriage? Had he found someone with whom he felt he could spend the rest of his life?
The idea shouldn’t hurt but it did. She had loved Leandros so badly at the beginning that she suspected she’d gone a little mad. They’d been young—too young—but oh, it had been so wildly passionate.
Then—no, don’t think about the passion, she told herself firmly, and made herself read the letter again.
It was asking her if she would consider travelling to Athens to meet with her husband—in the presence of their respective lawyers, of course—so they could thrash out a settlement in an effort to make the divorce quick and trouble-free. A few days of her time should be enough, Takis Konstantindou was predicting. All expenses would be paid by Leandros for both herself and her lawyer as a goodwill gesture, because Mr Petronades couldn’t travel to England at this time.
She paused to wonder why Leandros couldn’t travel. For the man she remembered virtually lived out of a suitcase, so it was odd to think of him under some kind of restraint.
It was odd to think about him at all, she extended, and the letter lost its holding power as she sat back in the chair. They’d first met by accident right here in England at an annual car exhibition. She’d been there in her official capacity as photographer for a trendy new magazine—a bright and confident twenty-two-year-old who believed the whole world was at her feet. While he was dashing and twenty-seven years old, with the looks and the build of a genuine dark Apollo.
They’d flirted over the glossy bonnet of some prohibitively expensive sports car. With his looks and his charm and his immaculate clothing, she’d assumed he was one of the car’s sales representatives, since they all looked and dressed like a million dollars. It had never occurred to her that far from selling the car they were flirting across he owned several of them. Realisation about just who Leandros was had come a lot later—much too late to do anything about it.
By then he’d already bowled her over with his dark good looks and easy charm and the way he looked at her that left her in no doubt as to what was going on behind his handsome façade. They’d made a date to share dinner and ended up falling into bed at the first opportunity they were handed. His finding out that he was her first lover had only made the passion burn all the more. He’d adored playing the role of tutor. He’d taught her to understand the pleasures of her own body and made sure that she understood what pleasured his. When it came time for him to go back to Greece he’d refused to go without her. They’d married in a hasty civil ceremony then rushed to the airport to catch their flight.
It was as he’d led her onto a private jet with the Petronades logo shining in gold on its side that she started to ask questions. He’d thought it absolutely hilarious that she didn’t know she’d married the modern equivalent of Croesus, and had carried her off to the tiny private cabin, where he’d made love to her all the way to Athens. She had never been so happy in her entire life.
But that was it—the sum total of the happy side of their marriage was encapsulated in a single hop from England to Greece. By the time they’d arrived at his family home the whole, whirling wonder of their love was already turning stale. ‘You can’t wear that to meet my mother;’ his first criticism of her could still ring antagonistic bells in her head.
‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’
‘The skirt is too short; she will have a fit. And can you not tie your hair up or something, show a little respect for the people you are about to meet?’
She had not tied her hair up, nor had she changed her clothes. But she had soon learned the hard way that stubborn defiance was one thing when it was aimed at a man who virtually salivated with desire for you even as he criticised. But it was not the same as being boxed and tagged a cheap little floozy at first horrified glance.
Things had gone from bad to worse after that. And—yes, she reiterated as her gaze dipped back to the letter, it was time that one of them took the initiative and drew the final curtain across something that should never have been.
In fact, Isobel had only one problem with the details Takis Konstantind
ou had mapped out in the letter. She could not see how she could spend several days in Athens because she could not leave her mother on her own for that long.
‘What time does her flight come in?’
Leandros was sitting at his desk in his plush Athens office. In the two weeks he had been back here he had changed into a different person. Gone was the laid-back man of San Estéban and in his place sat a sharp-edged, hard-headed Greek tycoon.
Was he happy with that? No, he was not happy to become this person again, but needs must when the devil drives, so they said. In this case the devil was the amount of importance other people placed on his time and knowledge. His desk was virtually groaning beneath the weight of paperwork that apparently needed his attention as a matter of urgency. He moved from important meeting to meeting with hardly a breath in between. His social life had gone from a lazy meal eaten in a restaurant on the San Estéban boulevard, to a constant round of social engagements that literally set his teeth on edge. If he lifted his eyes someone jumped to speak to him. If he closed those same eyes someone else would ensure that he opened them again. The wheels of power ground on and on for twenty-four hours of every day and the whole merry-go-round was made all the more intense because his younger brother Nikos was off limits while he prepared for his wedding day.
On his father’s death Leandros had become the head of the Petronades family, therefore it was his duty to play host in his father’s stead. His mother was becoming more neurotic the closer it came to Nikos’s big day, and was likely to panic if she did not have an open line to her eldest son’s ear. If he complained she told him not to spoil this for her then reminded him that he had denied her the opportunity to stand proud and watch him make his own disastrous union. And because thoughts of marriage were already on his mind, he was hard put not to snap at her that maybe Nikos could take a leaf out of his own book and run away to marry secretly. At least the day would belong only to him and Carlotta. If there was anything about his own marriage he could still look back on with total pleasure, it was that moment when Isobel had smiled up at him as he placed the ring upon her finger and whispered, ‘I love you so much.’ He had not needed five hundred witnesses to help prove that vow to be true.
His heart gave him a punishing twinge of regret for what he had once had and lost.
‘This evening.’ Takis Konstantindou pulled him back from where he had been in danger of visiting. ‘But she insisted on making her own arrangements,’ Takis informed him. ‘She will be staying at the Apollo near Piraeus.’
Leandros frowned. ‘But that is a mediocre place with a low star rating. Why should she want to stay there when she could have had a suite at the Athenaeum?’
Takis just shrugged his lack of an answer. ‘All I know is that she refused our invitation to make arrangements for her and reserved three rooms, not two, at the Apollo, one of which must have wheelchair access.’