AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I wish he had hit me.” Kerry was not even listening to her.
“How can you say that? Alex would never touch you. He thought you were being assaulted. Any man would have…no,” Carina sighed unhappily. “It was not right what he did. We saw one thing. He saw another. We saw the girl swim out towards the boat. It was obvious that there was nothing questionable. But Alex…Alex is crazy jealous of you.”
Kerry was enveloped in her own despair. She didn’t hear Alex come in, but his wrathful, “Who are you to keep me from my wife?” penetrated. She shifted away in automatic recoil. She couldn’t even bring herself to look at him.
“You animal,” she whispered, unable to silence the reaction.
His flushed complexion lost colour.
She realised that he wouldn’t leave her alone without an explanation. Woodenly, resentfully, she summed up a brief hour spent chatting to some young holidaymakers. It was punctuated and interposed by Alex’s imprecations.
“Ah…you start talking to strangers, not even strangers from your own background,” Alex gritted. “Cheap tourists. Perhaps you forget who you are. You don’t belong with such people.”
No, it was Alex she did not belong with. Once he had been a stranger. He would have remained one had she not possessed a bright, outgoing personality and the thick-skinned bravado of a friendly teenager. “I spoke to you in a lift,” she murmured helplessly.
To her surprise, he was quick to grasp the connection. “That was different.”
No, it hadn’t been different. She had always talked to people around her. She had always liked meeting new friends. Alex had been attracted by her vivacity, but he had caged her for the same trait. He chose to forget too that those cheap tourists came from a background of greater prosperity than her own.
“Is that how you met? In a lift?” Much intrigued, Carina was eager to lighten the brooding atmosphere.
Kerry’s eyes were wry. “He practically cut me dead.”
“Per dio…;” Alex raked. “You go back six years to complain!”
She had still to look at him, though she didn’t need to look. His lean, strikingly handsome features were permanently inside her head.
“I’ll leave you alone.” Carina escaped uncomfortably.
As the door shut, Alex planted himself where she could no longer avoid visual contact. “What is the matter with you? Hmm?” he demanded, dulled golden eyes pinned to her in derision. “You were flirting. How else did you get into the situation? They didn’t even know who you were. My wife does not mix with people who trespass on private property. Have you no sense of propriety? No sense of discretion? Must I have you watched every place you go?”
Every harsh word lashed into her. She had no answers for him. A thick, impenetrable wall of glass separated them in understanding. She was only twenty-three years old, and just over a year of that time had been spent in the goldfish bowl of Alex’s elitist society. But Alex had never granted her trust. She recognised how he had confined her with his family and vetted everyone she met. Her only escape route had been through Vickie. Alex had subconsciously behaved from the outset as if her betrayal was written into the stars. Somehow it helped to see that his excessive possessiveness had existed even then without just cause. She was not responsible for its birth.
“I want to leave with Ricky and Carina,” was all she said.
Their relationship was impossible. The poison of distrust and jealousy infiltrated every corner of Alex’s mind. A flirtatious glance, a little animated chatter with a man anywhere between twenty and fifty and Alex would be suspicious. It would only get worse. He would imprison her and suffocate her until only enmity and resentment lay between them.
“No!” Alex seethed on another feverish blaze of anger.
It hurt that she should know exactly what he was thinking. He was incredulously reacting to the news that he was in the doghouse when he had only done what any Greek husband would have done to a man making advances to his wife. He was furious that she had not made a more detailed explanation. He was outraged that she was not ashamed of herself. And at the back of it all, he honestly believed that she had encouraged Dave. That was riling him too. He had punished the perpetrator, but not the instigator. His own code wouldn’t let him lay violent hands upon a woman. But for how long could that restraint hold out?
She slept for a while, her own constant lassitude nudging and not quite connecting with some nebulous recollection. Carina was there again when she woke up. “I’m staying for a few days,” she announced.
Kerry sat up. “But you’re supposed to be going to New York tonight,” she objected.
Carina smiled. “Ricky can survive on his own for a few days. It’s a service apartment and he’ll be working all the time.”
“You don’t need to stay.”
“Alex asked me to,” she revealed reluctantly. “He’s worried about you.”
“He wants to make sure that you join me on my next walk along the beach, I suppose,” Kerry gathered with bitter distaste.
“No, of course he doesn’t.” Carina pressed her hand in reproof. “He feels that you need a woman’s company. Do you feel like dinner?”
She nodded. “Where’s Alex?”
“Down in the taverna, getting drunk,” Carina flushed. “Ricky left him there. You were shocked by what he did. Don’t you understand how upset he is?”
Kerry’s face shuttered as she got off the bed, keen to have a bath and a change of clothes. “It’s not remorse, I’m sure. How was Dave?”
“He was all right,” Carina repeated, a tinge of disapproval in her tone. It was heartless of Kerry to enquire a second time about her amorous assailant when her husband was drinking himself into oblivion down in the village. “His friends took him away. They were not decent young people, Kerry. That same young man insulted a fisherman’s daughter in the village last night and started a fight.” Gathering steam, she looked up. “And two girls and three men on a boat, none of them married. This speaks for itself. You are too trusting, Kerry.”
In the privacy of the bathroom, Kerry appreciated how a few hours of grace had altered Carina’s views. She could not see fault in Alex for long. Thus she had reduced Alex’s violence by making the tourists into promiscuous troublemakers. Kerry was no doubt in the wrong for speaking to them at all, and excused for her over-familiarity by a gullible nature. Or were Carina’s suspicions running parallel with Alex’s now that her brother had done something so appallingly uncharacteristic as hitting the bottle?
He had to let her go now for both their sakes. On that beach, she had seen her na;auive hopes for the future shattered by hard reality. Even if Vickie and Jeff did approach him, she seriously doubted that Alex would even give them a hearing. The poison had got too deep a hold in four years apart.
“Do…do you love Alex?” Carina blurted out over dinner, her plump face primed for a snub.
“Love’s not always enough,” she answered heavily. “He doesn’t love me, but he has to keep me to prove something to himself. Letting go would be as healthy for him as it would be for me. We can’t live in the past now.”
It was too deep for Carina. She chewed her lower lip. “How can you talk about leaving him? You are only newly married again. Alex was happy when we arrived. Why are you so hard on him?”
* * *
MUCH LATER, Kerry turned over in her bed, and her lashes flickered up on the dark silhouette of the figure sunk in an armchair in the corner of the room. “A…Alex? Good lord, what time is it?” she whispered, shaken by his silent presence.
“Does it matter?”
She rested back again, shrouded by the same numb depression. “No.”
“You should not be afraid of me,” he breathed harshly. “Earlier you behaved with me as if I was…Cristo!” He sprang upright fluidly, his eyes glittering in the moonlight as he emerged from the shadows. “You are my wife, you are the mother of my child…what happened today? It was not my fault. For that to occur again—to see you wit
