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As she got up Jon leapt up as well and the doorbell went in one long shrill shriek as if the caller’s finger had accidentally got stuck to the button.
‘A shame your PR lady is arriving so late,’ Bee remarked.
‘That was just a ruse, Bee,’ Jon snapped, his fair features twisting with bad temper and momentarily giving him the aspect of a disgruntled little boy.
‘Evidently, Sergios was right to tell me that I’m too trusting,’ Bee was saying as Jon angrily yanked open the front door, annoyed by the timely interruption.
Bee was totally shattered to see Sergios poised on the doorstep. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in astonishment. ‘How did you find out where I was?’
His eyes had a smouldering glitter and were welded to Jon’s discomfited face. ‘Why did my wife say that I was right to call her too trusting?’
Bee really couldn’t be bothered with Jon at that moment. The whole silly lunch set-up had thoroughly irritated her, but she didn’t want Sergios to thump him. And that, she sensed, very much aware of the powerfully angry aggression Sergios exuded, was quite likely if she didn’t act to defuse the tension.
‘I was just joking. We were discussing a charity dinner—’
Sergios closed a hand round her wrist and drew her out of the apartment as if he couldn’t wait to remove her from a source of dangerous contagion. His face hard as iron, he studied Jon, who was pale and taut. ‘Leave my wife alone,’ he instructed with chilling bite. ‘What’s mine stays mine. Try not to forget that.’
What’s mine stays mine. Bee could have been very sarcastic about that assurance had she not been outraged by Sergios’s intervention and sexist turn of phrase.
‘Sometimes you’re very dramatic,’ she commented lamely, recognising that quality in him for the first time and surprised by the discovery.
‘What were you doing in Townsend’s apartment alone with him?’ Sergios shot at her, visibly unrepentant.
‘None of your business.’
As the lift doors opened on the ground floor Sergios shot Bee an arrested look. ‘Explain yourself.’
‘Are we going to pick up Eleni?’ Bee enquired coldly instead, picturing Melita with her smug cat-got-the-cream smile. Nausea pooled in her tummy again and turned her skin clammy.
‘Eleni was released an hour ago. Karen phoned me and I told her to take Eleni home.’
‘Oh.’ Bee made no further comment, stabbed by guilt that she had forgotten the little girl was due to leave hospital that afternoon. She felt drained by the emotional storm of the past couple of hours. The man she loved had a mistress whom he regularly slept with and would not give up. Where did she go from there? Did she really want to lower herself to the level of arguing about Melita? Did she want to run the risk of exposing how deep her own feelings went for him?
Or did she do the sensible thing? Take it on the chin and move on? Obviously no more sharing of marital beds. That kind of intimacy was out of the question with Melita in the picture. But she had signed up to a long-term relationship for the sake of her mother and for the children. Every fibre of her being might be urging her to make some sort of grand gesture like walking out on her marriage, but too many innocent people would be hurt and damaged by her doing that. Even Sergios had said that she wasn’t a quitter and he had been right on that score. She gave her word and, my goodness, she stuck to it through thick and thin.
Even through Melita? Could she still stick to her word in such circumstances? Pain slivered through Bee and cut deep like a knife. They had roamed so far from their original agreement. Far too many tender feelings had got involved. Stepping back from that intimacy, learning to be detached again would be a huge challenge, she acknowledged wretchedly. Had she really once believed that she could treat Sergios like a rather demanding employer? Looking at Sergios’s beloved face now, she was no longer sure that she had the strength to stand by her promise and survive the sacrifices that that would demand.
How could she bear to turn her back on what she had believed they had and know that Melita was replacing her in every way that mattered? From now on it would be Melita he kissed awake in the morning, Melita he took to dine in cosy little restaurants where nobody recognised him, Melita he bought whopping big diamonds for. How could Bee live with knowing that he had only made love to her because she was there when more tempting sexual prospects were not? What had meant so much to her had evidently meant very little to him. A cry of anguish was building up inside Bee. She felt as though she were being ripped apart.
The limo came to a halt. White-faced, she got out without even looking to see where she was going and came to a sudden bemused halt once she realised that they had not alighted at the mansion that was their London home but outside an apartment building she had never seen before. ‘Where are we?’
‘I own an apartment here.’
‘Oh…do you?’ she queried drily, wondering if this was where he had come on their wedding night to make love with his Greek blonde. She was ready to bet that he had not had to nudge Melita towards the sexy lingerie. Gut instinct warned her that Melita already had that kind of angle covered, or uncovered, as regarded his preference, she thought bitterly. Had she seriously considered dying her hair blonde? Had she really been that pathetic? Where had her pride and her independence gone?
Love had decimated those traits, she decided painfully, standing, lost and sick to the soul, in the lift on the way up to the apartment she had not known he possessed. Love had made her hollow and weak inside. Love had made her want to cling and dye her hair and wear the fancy lingerie if that was what it took to hold him. But her brain told her that that was nonsense and that those were only superficial frills, not up to the challenge of keeping a doomed relationship afloat. And a relationship between plain, ordinary, sensible Bee Blake and rich and gorgeous Sergios Demonides had always been doomed, hadn’t it? A union between two such different people was unlikely to be a marriage that ran and ran against all the odds…unless you believed in miracles and wild dreams coming true. And Bee had so badly wanted to believe that she could have the miracle, the dream.
Virtually blind to her surroundings while that ferocity of emotion remained in control of her, Bee preceded Sergios into a spacious lounge that had that slightly bare, unlived in quality of a property not in daily use. ‘So this is where you and Melita—’
Sergios froze in front of her as though she had said a very bad word, his face clenching hard, sensual mouth compressing. ‘No, not here. My grandfather uses this place when he visits London—he likes his independence. It’s a company property.’
Bee nodded and her spine relaxed just a jot. She had conceived a loathing for Melita Thiarkis, everywhere the other woman had ever been with Sergios and everything to do with her that was excessive to say the least.
‘She’s never been here—she has her own apartment,’ Sergios breathed abruptly as if he were attuned to Bee’s every thought.
Never having had quite so many mean, malicious thoughts all at once, Bee seriously hoped that he was not that attuned. Her disconcerted face was hot, her complexion flushed to the hairline with embarrassment and the distress she was fighting to conceal. Suddenly unable to bear looking at him, she spun away and faked an interest in the view.
‘Whatever it takes I want to keep you,’ Sergios breathed with startling harshness. ‘I hope you appreciate the fact that I didn’t knock Townsend’s teeth down his throat the way I would’ve liked to
