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He would not go anywhere near Marisa Milburne.
So far he hadn’t, and Athan intended it to stay that way. He didn’t believe Ian would try, now that he knew that his brother-in-law knew about her, but he wasn’t taking chances. On the other hand job-hunting should, Athan profoundly hoped, keep Ian’s mind off his intended mistress—former intended mistress, he reminded himself grimly—at least for the time being.
He sighed heavily.
I have to get over her! I have to put her away, in the past, and not let myself think about her or remember her and the time we had together. It’s over—gone, finished. She’s out of Ian’s life—out of mine.
For good.
But it was one thing to adjure himself to forget Marisa—to refuse to let himself go back down those tempting, dangerous pathways of his mind—quite another to achieve it. He stared out over the Athens skyline. Where was she now? he found himself thinking. She’d cleared out of London—out of the apartment Ian Randall had paid for—and gone. That was all he cared about—all he could allow himself to care about. The fact that she had disappeared. Disappeared as swiftly as she had appeared. Had she left London altogether? Or just gone to live somewhere else in the city?
Had she found another man? Another lover?
An image, hot and tormenting, leapt in his mind’s eye.
Marisa in another man’s arms—another man’s bed …
He thrust it out of his head, refused to let it back in. It was nothing to him—nothing!—whether or not she’d found another man to fill her life with. That was all he must remember—all he must allow himself to think.
Grimly he crossed to his drinks cabinet, yanking open the doors. Maybe a shot of alcohol would banish the image from his head. Give him the peace he sought.
I need another woman.
The crudity
of his thought shocked him, but that, he knew, was what it boiled down to. There was only one way to get Marisa Milburne out of his consciousness and that was by replacing her in it. He took a heavy intake of breath. OK, so how about starting right now? He could fill every evening with a hectic social life if he wanted—and right now that seemed like a good idea. A whole lot better than resorting to alcohol, for a start.
Shutting the drinks cabinet doors again, he strode from the room.
An hour later, changed from lounge suit to dinner jacket, he was mouthing polite nothings in a crowded salon at a cocktail party, wondering whether he needed his head examined. At least three women, each of them stunningly beautiful, were vying for his attention, and he was trying to give none of them reason to think he was favouring any of them. None of them, nor any of the other women at the party, had the slightest allure for him. Even after a second glass of vintage champagne.
Restlessly he looked about him, hoping against hope that someone, somewhere, would catch his eye. But as his gaze ran over the assembled females dispassionately not a single one made him look twice.
‘ … in the Caribbean … ‘
The fragment of speech brought him back. One of the women—a voluptuous brunette with lush lips and a traffic-stopping figure—was talking, it seemed, about a proposed cruise. She was pausing invitingly for him to say something.
But he wasn’t seeing her …
He was seeing Marisa leaning against him, curled up beside him on the wide palanquin-style sun-shelter in front of their cabana, overlooking the beach, sipping a cocktail with him as they watched the sun go down in a blaze of gold and crimson. Her body so soft, so warm nestled against him. Her pale hair was like a golden rope down the backless sundress she was wearing. His mouth was brushing the satin of her hair, his hand cupped her shoulder, holding her close … so close.
The warmth of her body—the sweetness of its scent—the heady longing of desire, of possession, wrapping them together.
His mouth nuzzled at her cheekbone. She turned her face to his, caught his lips with hers, let him draw her down upon the soft, yielding surface …
‘What do you think?’
The brightly voiced enquiry roused him painfully, and he had to refocus his eyes, his mind. ‘Is a cruise around the Caribbean a good idea? Or is it better to be based on land?’
He gave an absent half smile. ‘I guess it depends how vulnerable you are to seasickness,’ he answered, hoping it was a suitable answer in a conversation he had paid no attention to.
‘Oh, I get horribly seasick,’ one of the other women contributed, and turned her eyes full-on to Athan. ‘There are so many gorgeous islands. Which one do you recommend? St Bart’s? Martinique? Barbados—though that is so over-popular now, alas!’
He answered at random. His thoughts were far away, across the ocean, on the only Caribbean island he cared about. St Cecile. The one that held all his memories of Marisa.
I want her back.
The words formed in his head before he could stop them. Burning and indelible.
