‘Three years, Leandros,’ she reminded him painfully. ‘Three years can make a man accept less.’
‘Were you unfaithful?’ He threw the pain right back at her.
‘No—never.’
‘Then why are we talking about this?’
They didn’t talk any more, not after his mouth claimed hers again and his hands claimed the rest of her with a grim, dark, fierce concentration that robbed her of the will to do anything but feel with every single sense she possessed.
She was possessed, Isobel decided later, when she lay curled in the secure circle of his arms. Her cheek rested in the hollow of his shoulder, her fingers were toying with the whorls of hair on his chest. There wasn’t another place she would rather be, but knowing it made her feel so very vulnerable. She didn’t think she was any better equipped now than she had been three years ago to deal with what loving a man like Leandros meant.
She released a small sigh. The sigh aggravated the muscles controlling Leandros’s steady heartbeat. She might be lying here in his arms but he knew she had problems with it. Did he take a leap of faith and force those problems out into the open so they could attempt to sort them out?
He trapped his own sigh before it happened. He didn’t want to talk. His eyes were heavy, his body replete and content. Her hair lay spread across his shoulder, her soft breathing caressed his chest and the darkness soothed him towards sleep.
She moved just enough to place a kiss on his warm skin, then followed it up with another pensive sigh. Contentment flew out of the window. He moved onto his side and flipped her onto her back then came to lean over her with his head supported by his hand.
‘What?’ she said and she looked decidedly wary.
‘Why the melancholy sighs?’ he demanded.
‘They were not melancholy.’
He arched an eyebrow to mock that little lie. She lowered dusky eyelashes until they brushed against skin like porcelain. Her mouth looked small and cute when he knew that the last thing you could ever call Isobel was cute.
‘I have this urge to stand you up against the nearest wall and shine a bright light in your eyes,’ he murmured drily. ‘We have just made love. You cried out in my arms and clung to me as if I was the only thing stopping you from falling off the edge of the earth. You told me you loved me—’
‘I did not!’ The desire to deny that brought her lashes upwards.
‘You thought it, then,’ he amended with a shrug meant to convey a sublime indifference to semantics. Then he reached out to gently comb her hair from her face, and was suddenly serious. ‘We need to talk, agape mou, about why we parted.’
Without the gentleness she might not have caught on to what he was actually daring to broach here. But he saw the light in her eyes change, saw them fl
ood with horror then with tears. ‘No,’ she said, then was leaping out of the bed and racing from the room.
By the time he had grabbed his robe and gone after her she was standing in the other bedroom, huddled inside the blue robe. His chest ached at the sight of her, at the sight of that robe that said so many things about the real Isobel, like the look of pure anguish whitening her face.
‘Will you stop running?’ he ground at her. ‘Just stop running from this,’ he repeated almost pleadingly. ‘If we do not face the past together, how are we supposed to move on?’
Isobel stood and shook and remembered why she hated him. If she could take back the last mad day then she would. Her heart hurt, her throat hurt; just seeing him standing there looking as if he was experiencing the same things made her want to wound him as he had once almost fatally wounded her. How could she have forgotten what he had done to her? How could she have lain in his arms and let herself ignore the kind of man she knew him to be?
‘You didn’t want our baby,’ she breathed. ‘Is that facing it?’
He winced as if the tip of a whip had just lashed him. ‘That is not true…’
‘Yes, it is,’ she insisted. ‘By the time I was pregnant I don’t think you even wanted me!’
‘No…’ He denied that.
‘I was the irritation you just didn’t need, and you made sure I knew it.’ But he was right; she could not run from this! It had to be faced before they made the same mistakes a second time and turned lust into love, which then turned into regret filled with frustration and bitterness. ‘You married me when you didn’t need to, we both knew that—you’d already enjoyed what was on offer after all! You lifted me out of working-class drudgery into wealth and luxury beyond compare then expected me to show eternal gratitude. But how did I pay you back for this generosity and goodness? I refused to conform. I refused to smile weakly and say “Yes, thank you, Mama,” when your mother lectured me on how I should behave.’
‘She was attempting to advise you.’
‘She was cold and critical and so dismayed by me that I don’t know how she managed to stay in the same room with me half the time!’
‘So you played up to that criticism, is that it?’ he bit out. ‘Or should I say you played down to it just for the hell of watching her squirm?’
‘I stayed away from it!’ she corrected. ‘Or didn’t you notice?’ She was aching and throbbing as it all came rushing back. ‘I went out and found my own kind of people.’ Her hand stretched out to encompass the view of Athens lying beyond the window.