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‘I cut short my meetings once I realised you would be back early.’
‘Now, why would you have done that?’ she questioned suspiciously, although he could not for the life of him imagine anything she had to be suspicious of.
‘You stayed a very short time with your grandfather and I was worried that the visit had somehow upset you,’ he admitted pointedly.
‘It didn’t take long for Grandad and I to say all that we had to say to each other,’ Winnie told him ominously, staring at him.
It offended her sense of justice that even after a very busy day, Eros still looked spectacular, his charcoal-grey suit smooth and unwrinkled, exquisitely tailored to his lean, powerful body, his shirt white and immaculate, his green silk tie still straight and, yes, that shade exactly picked up the hue of his stunning eyes. Only the breeze outside that had tousled his luxuriant black curls and the dark encroaching shadow of stubble accentuating his beautifully shaped mouth suggested that hours had passed since their last meeting.
Eros quirked a winged ebony brow. ‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Now, why would you ask me that question?’ Winnie asked sweetly. ‘Is your conscience bothering you?’
‘You’re acting very oddly,’ Eros remarked drily, and glanced around in the humming silence. ‘Where are the staff? Where’s Teddy?’
‘I gave the staff the night off and Agathe took Teddy down to the village to have tea with her parents. They asked to meet him,’ she told him grudgingly.
‘Are you cooking tonight, then?’ Eros enquired lazily.
‘You’d better hope not. I might be tempted to poison you if I had to feed you,’ Winnie told him roundly.
‘So, Stam told tales,’ Eros gathered without skipping a beat, his intonation as cool as an icicle.
Inflamed by that controlled coolness, Winnie shifted several feet and lifted an opulent gilded china vase from a table.
‘Very ugly, isn’t it?’ Eros commented.
‘Not as ugly as the truth of what you did to me,’ Winnie countered, studying him with a blazing anger she could no longer hide.
‘What did I do?’ Eros asked sibilantly, thinking that there was no way that she would throw the vase because she was not the scene-throwing, violent type.
A split second later, Eros learned his mistake as his wife pitched the vase at him with all the force of a shot-putter throwing for a world record. He ducked and she missed, the vase shattering harmlessly against the wall behind him.
‘You let my grandfather bribe you into marrying me!’ Winnie condemned in wrathful disgust.
‘No, I didn’t,’ Eros fielded succinctly.
‘He gave you an island to marry me!’ Winnie flung back at him in shrill disagreement.
‘I took the island because he was offering it but that’s not why I married you,’ Eros told her emphatically.
‘You accepted this island as a bribe,’ Winnie repeated, refusing to listen.
‘It would’ve been foolish not to accept it when I was planning to marry you anyway,’ Eros declared, stalking forward as she coiled her hands into fists and made a desperate slashing movement with one of them, frustrated by his self-assurance in the face of her accusation.
A big hand engulfed one of hers in his to hold her fast in front of him and his brilliant green eyes clashed with angry brown. ‘The only truly important thing that happened the day I first met your grandfather was his revelation that I was the father of a son. Yes, he offered me this island and my family once had a great attachment to this place, but that offer would not have driven me all the way to London to see you, nor would it have made me marry you. It was Teddy who initially motivated me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You didn’t tell me the truth about the island or anything!’ Winnie threw back at him tempestuously.
‘Of course I didn’t,’ Eros took the wind out of her sails by replying. ‘I was very angry before I married you. I was furious that you had kept my son from me,’ he reminded her, retaining his grip on her hand when she tried to snatch it away again. ‘But I got over that anger and I didn’t want you to distrust me any more than you already did. Telling you about the island within weeks of marrying you would have damaged our relationship and I wasn’t prepared to risk that. We had enough difficult ground to cover without borrowing trouble.’
‘I refuse to listen to your excuses,’ Winnie told him between angrily gritted teeth.
‘They’re not excuses—they’re the reasons why I remained silent. Why shouldn’t I have accepted the island when he offered it? My father did ask me to try to reclaim Trilis if I could ever afford to do so. But because I didn’t grow up here and wasn’t familiar with it, this place didn’t mean as much to me as perhaps it should’ve. Once I saw it for the first time, I felt differently,’ he conceded ruefully. ‘I felt a connection, although not, admittedly, with this grandiose house.’
Winnie shook her head in a kind of blind panic, terrified of being persuaded out of her belief that she had to leave him to find the happiness she craved. ‘I’m going to move out and find somewhere to stay in Athens...so you’ll still be able to see plenty of Teddy.’
‘I would need to see plenty of you as well for that arrangement to work,’ Eros fielded forcefully. ‘We can’t live in separate houses. I need both of you to survive.’
‘You have never needed me!’ Winnie exclaimed, wrenching her hand angrily free of his.
‘All that’s changed,’ Eros countered ruefully, ‘is that I no longer fight that need. Two years ago, when you walked out on me, my life suddenly lost all focus.’
‘Nonsense, you didn’t even miss me!’ Winnie argued vehemently.
Eros rested level green eyes on her. ‘Of course, I missed you. By the time you left you had contrived to become the centre of my world.’
Winnie frowned at that startling statement. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It wasn’t supposed to turn out like that. It was supposed to be a casual affair but it was never casual between us,’ Eros reasoned with a wry curl to his sculpted mouth. ‘I was working eighteen-hour days just so that I could rush down to the country to spend long weekends with you. I was phoning you every day, sometimes more than once. I was behaving like a teenage boy in love for the first time. Often, I walked through the door and within minutes we were in each other’s arms. That’s not a fling. That’s not a casual relationship. But I was in denial about that because I was still marri
ed and I didn’t have the courage or the experience to recognise how important a part of my life you had become.’
‘I remember you pushing me away.’
‘Because sometimes I felt out of control with you and it unnerved me because I wanted you too much for my peace of mind. I tried to tell myself that being with you wasn’t harming anyone even though I knew that I was lying to myself. Nevertheless, I still couldn’t make myself break off our relationship either,’ he admitted in a driven undertone, his beautiful green eyes disturbingly unguarded in their anxious intensity as he studied her. ‘The fact that I felt everything for you that Tasha wanted me to feel for her only made me feel worse.’
Involuntarily, Winnie was listening. ‘Did it?’
‘After the divorce when I was still thinking about how I had failed I decided that I was no better than my womanising father,’ he said gruffly. ‘I had made you unhappy and I had made Tasha unhappy. She was my wife and she loved me and yet I couldn’t love her back. I watched my mother go through that with my father when he fell for another woman and I couldn’t stand to do that to anyone else. With that on my conscience I didn’t feel that I had the right to pursue any personal happiness.’
Winnie stared back at him, disconcerted by the amount of guilt he still bore from the past. ‘You should never have agreed to marry her and her father should never have put pressure on you to marry her.’
‘And if I did marry her, I should have gone for a divorce the minute she began having relationships with other men,’ he added heavily. ‘But I’d agreed to that and it wasn’t fair to change the rules because they no longer suited me. I tried to keep my promise to her and when I turned to you, I failed, so I didn’t make you any promises.’
