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'Good.'
'How to damn with faint praise.'
She smiled voluptuously. 'Fantastic'
Fast-moving steps sounded somewhere above them. Carlo tensed. Then Marika's voice cried his name.
Carlo sprang out of bed, reached for his jeans and yanked open the door.
Jessica scrambled up but there was no clothing within her grasp. Carlo left the cabin. She heard the swift exchange of Greek, the sob in his sister's shaking voice.
'Lukas has had another attack...' Pale, every facial muscle savagely clenched, Carlo sent Jessica a fleeting, almost blank glance that told her he was already a thousand miles away from her in mind and body.
The honeymoon, she registered, was over.
CHAPTER TEN
JESSICA shivered in spite of the heat. Lukas had left careful instructions for his burial and he had chosen to come back to Greece to the sunbaked hillside where his own parents had been laid to rest. The funeral was small, strictly family but the Press were just beyond the graveyard, a sea of hungry wolves, restrained only by the strong police presence.
'It is time to go.' Marika briefly leant on Jessica's extended arm for support and then straightened again. 'I didn't know I would miss him like this,' she whispered, shaking her greying head. 'But all my life he has been there. For fifty years telling me what to do... I feel lost.'
She wasn't the only one who felt lost. Jessica felt deserted and superfluous to requirements. For days she had told herself not to be childish, not to be selfish, not to expect Carlo to find time for her when his every waking moment was filled with ceaseless demands for his attention. She had innocently expected to make herself useful but had learnt that anything she could do could inevitably be done far more efficiently by a member of his staff. Carlo hadn't just lost a father.. .Carlo had inherited a vast empire, quaking in the turmoil of Lukas's sudden death.
Carlo had also inherited the devastated and publicly inconsolable widow, Jessica thought grimly. Dear heaven, she tried to feel some sense of compassion for Sunny but she had noticed that Sunny invariably wept o
nly in Carlo's vicinity. It was hard to believe that she could be genuinely distressed by her husband's death but
if she wasn't, she was certainly putting on a very good show. And there was no doubt that Carlo was impressed by that display. His attitude to Sunny had warmed and softened.
Sunny drooped in unrelieved black beside the grave, a wispy little silk hanky dabbing behind her veil. Carlo hesitated on his way past in a phalanx of male relatives and then paused. Jessica stiffened and looked away, walking ahead with Marika. The cameras went off in a blaze. Jessica flinched.
'Ignore them, Mrs Philippides,' the security man flanking her said. 'You'll soon get used to it.'
But Jessica could not believe that she ever would. From the instant they had left Paradiso Cay she had understood why Lukas had bought an island. At every airport, in every public place, the Press surrounded them in a stifling surge.
'You're hot news,' he sighed as she was slotted into a limousine.
All she wanted to be was hot news to Carlo, who no longer even travelled in the same car with her, it seemed. Nor did he sleep in the same bed very often. He worked through the night, ate at extraordinary hours and never went anywhere with less than three executives tagging on his heels. When she tried to see him, she learnt that she was in the way, and if she hovered and he forgot she was there, she felt humiliated.
'I think I'll go to bed,' Marika mumbled when they reached the opulent house and surrounding estate outside Athens which had once been Lukas's permanent home.
Sunny had made it into Carlo's car. Jessica watched from the window as Sunny was helped out, the very picture of feminine fragility. Jessica's teeth gritted. Maybe I should practise sobbing and throwing hysterics! Childish, you're being childish, the little voice
said. She is his father's widow and he takes that tie too seriously to ignore her apparent distress.
Sunny was just an irritation, she told herself in exasperation. A symptom, not the source of the illness. Carlo had married Jessica to please Lukas and now Lukas was dead. She was bitterly aware that the only hold she seemed to have on Carlo was sexual and even that seemed to be on the wane. She had this sinking feeling that their relationship was running fast to its natural conclusion. 'I won't hold you a day after his death,' Carlo had said just days ago. How much strength could she take now from the casual assurance that he wasn't planning on an immediate divorce? Those words had been prompted by the heat of passion on their wedding night.
'Carlo...' She intercepted him in the echoing grandeur of the hall.
'What time do you want to eat?' Sunny talked over her as if she wasn't there.
'Seven.' Hooded dark eyes flicked to Jessica and lingered. 'Hello, stranger,’ he said softly.
She moved forward.
'Mr Philippides, the London office is on the
line '
