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One of the house staff was holding her chair, and she took it with a murmured thank you. It came out automatically in Greek, and the realisation made her uneasy. She didn’t want to feel she was in Greece. Didn’t want to do anything.
Except get this over and done with.
She cast a belligerent eye at Theo as he took his own place.
Why the farce of dining with me? Why not just lug me straight up to that ludicrous bed and do what you brought me here to do?
But she mustn’t think about that—that was a bad idea, very bad. She took another mouthful of vermouth. Then, seeing that a glass of white wine was being poured for her, she seized that and drank from that instead. It didn’t mix well with the vermouth, but she didn’t care. She wanted the alcohol.
Needed it.
‘If you’re thinking of passing out cold on me, think again.’
Her eyes flashed to the far end of the table. Words rose in her mouth, words that would tell him that being out cold would be the best way of facing what he had in mind for her. But the presence of the staff, however impassive their expressions, stilled her. Instead, she made a show of pushing her wineglass aside in favour of the tumbler of sparkling mineral water that had also just been poured for her.
They ate in silence. It was difficult to do anything else while the staff hovered. Vicky wasn’t sure whether she was glad they were there or not. Their presence kept a veneer of normality over the proceedings, but to her that only made it even more hypocritical.
How she got through the meal she did not know. Theo said nothing more to her, seemed preoccupied. And she did her best not to look at him. Nor to let herself think. Or feel. Feel anything at all. She must not, she knew. She must just sit there, lifting food to her mouth and lowering her fork again. Taking sips, repeatedly, of the wine poured for her by the silent, soft-footed staff who waited on them. Did they find it odd that their employer and his latest mistress sat and ate in complete silence? If they did, she didn’t care—wouldn’t care. God knew what they’d seen here in their time! She didn’t want to think about it. Let alone imagine it…
Theo, with all his willing, willing women…
Well, not me! Not me!
Anger spurted through her. Then, like a house of cards, it collapsed.
A voice sliced into her head. Low, insidious, and so, so deadly.
Liar…
She stilled. Every muscle in her body freezing.
Liar, came the voice again, the one inside her head.
You were willing once…
In the end…
Of their own volition, drawn by a power she could not resist, her eyes went to him. She felt her breath catch in her lungs.
Why—why did it happen every time she looked at him? Because ever since she had first laid eyes on him she had felt it—felt his power. Power to disturb her. Dismay her.
And power to do much, much more to her. To make her do what she so did not want to do.
Her mind slid away to the past, the wine in her veins making it all too easy to do so, and memory suffused through her.
From the moment, so vivid still in her mind, when he had let his eyes rest on her as she stood at the foot of the stairs, and she had seen and felt his intent, he had hunted her down.
Relentless, purposeful, knowing what he wanted and set on getting it. Until, at the last, he had breached her resistance.
The island. How had she been insane enough to go there? She had thought it a refuge, a haven. A place where she could hide—escape. She should have known it was not that at all. That it was a trap, a lure, and once there she would have no place to run. No retreat.
She had fled there, to the private island Theo had mentioned in passing, never realising, in her stupidity, that she had done exactly what he had wanted her to do. Played right into his skilled hands. That the deliberate pressure he had exerted on her in the immediately preceding days, when he had racked up the tension so that she was incapable of rational thought, had all been part of his campaign.
The campaign had not been hurried or precipitate. No, it had started slowly, oh, so slowly, from that fateful initiation. A slow, deliberate process of letting her know, little by little, what his intentions were. Even when she had realised, disbelievingly, that she really was not misunderstanding the signs, that for some insane reason Theo Theakis thought he could enjoy her in his bed, he had continued.
I should have challenged him right there and then! Told him where to get off!
But she hadn’t—little by little, week by week, he had worked on her. A look, an assessing regard, a flicker of awareness of her, the way he spoke to her, set his eyes on her. Until, finally vulnerable, trapped within the demands of her fake marriage with all the terrifying opportunities for an intimacy that had never, never been in the contract, he had turned on her the full force of the potency of his power and magnetism.
