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‘And?’ His hands came down on her rigid shoulders.
He looked bemused. His strongly marked brows drawn together in a slight frown of incomprehension. Her spine stiffened until she thought it might splinter.
‘Big hips, humble background. No-account,’ she supplied, on a hiss of breath. ‘The sort of dumb-cluck who wouldn’t know how to fight you when you did what you meant to do.’
‘Pethi mou—’
‘Don’t!’ She wrenched away from him. Empty endearments she could do without! Fat tears scalded her face. With one swift movement he captured her waist and drew her back to him.
‘Irini made these insults?’
His eyes challenged her, as if he believed she was lying. Or perhaps as if he couldn’t believe his lover’s stupidity in showing her hand so early in the game?
‘Who else?’ Maddie ground out, frustrated at his pretence of not knowing what she was on about. ‘And for good measure she told me the rest of it! You’re madly in love with each other but can’t marry because she can’t give you the heir you need!’
She was almost yelling now, incensed by the hurt she’d been dealt. ‘So bingo! You’d get yourself a no-account wife, get her pregnant, and as soon as the child was born you’d take it and dump her. Goodbye, and thanks a bunch! And, hey! Know what? You’d be able to take the wife you really loved and wanted! So it’s no good you trying to pretend you want me for anything other than the baby!’
Suddenly the fight drained out of her. She felt limp and utterly wretched.
Her head drooped. His hands tightened about her waist as he moved her back to the lounger. ‘Sit. Before you fall down.’
Those strong, lean features might have been carved out of granite, Maddie registered as she did as she’d been told—sat, because she felt weak and empty and keeping upright suddenly seemed beyond her.
‘So when did this—conversation—take place?’ He sank down beside her. Much too close. She was far too aware of his body heat, the signature scent of him, all male, and faintly, cleanly lemony. It was sheer torture.
What did that matter now? Numbly, she considered his question. He was obviously intent on prising every last detail from her, and she really didn’t want to talk about it any more. Why didn’t he just face the fact that he’d been found out? Admit it and start negotiations—involving money, of course—to try and persuade her to hand her child over willingly?
Drained, Maddie passed a hand over her forehead. The skin felt tight. He was waiting, watching her intently. ‘The meet-the-bride party you threw for your friends, remember?’ She answered at last with listless resignation. Even thinking about that encounter turned her stomach, and talking about it with the man who was the co-instigator of all her humiliation and misery was a thousand times worse.
‘Maddie—’ Lean fingers cupped her chin, forcing her to meet his eyes. Shamefully, hers misted with tears. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
He wasn’t denying it, she registered with helpless misery. Had she wanted him to? Wanted him to force her to believe him so that she could go on living in a fool’s paradise for just a little longer?
Appalled by her weakness, she twisted away from him, hauled herself together and admitted tersely, ‘I wish I had! I’d been out on the terrace, hiding from those of the guests who looked at me as if I were some kind of strange peasant who’d wandered into a royal gala occasion by mistake! I was on my way back in, all fired-up. I was going to ask you if it was true. But I bumped into Amanda and she told me to cool it. She said Irini was a spiteful, malicious bitch and jealous. We’d only just got married, and she said if I went in there and caused a scene it would embarrass you in front of your classy guests and make you think I didn’t trust you.’
Her fingers were pleating the white organza of her floaty skirt and, her head lowered, she muttered, ‘I took her advice. And then it was too late.’
‘Why?’ Feeling shell-shocked Dimitri knew that Maddie’s well-being, the reassurance he must give her, was the only thing stopping him marching out of there, dragging Irini back by the scruff of her neck and forcing her to get down on her knees and beg his darling’s forgiveness for such monstrous lies.
‘None of this rubbish is true,’ he hastened to tell her, desperately trying to smother the fear that it might, as she’d said, be too late, that the damage done was irreparable. Those telling words too late echoed hollowly in his brain, and he took her restless hands in his.
‘Isn’t it?’ She answered his repudiation flatly, almost without interest, as if his denials were worthless, not worth listening to.
Her hands lay limply within his. She hadn’t the energy to drag them away, simply told him, ‘Your aunt lost no opportunity to remind me that I wasn’t fit to touch the ground you walked on. And between that and the way Irini took all your attention when she was around, and the way you’d insisted on a dead quiet wedding, as if you were ashamed of me, I lost all my self-confidence. It all seemed to add up—and that was really awful. So I couldn’t tell you what I knew, what Irini had said to me, because I wouldn’t be able to hide how very much you’d hurt me. I might not have your breeding, your social clout or your hefty bank balance. But I do have some pride!’
She gave a monumentally inelegant sniff, gathered herself and reminded him shakily, ‘That last morning I came down and you were speaking to Irini on the phone. You said you loved her. That you’d be with her in minutes. I knew the worst then. It wasn’t just a nasty niggle at the back of my mind. So I left. And how could I tell you why?’ she blurted, her eyes brimming. ‘Tell you how much I was hurting because I loved you to pieces and to you I was just a means to an end?’
By that admission she’d gone and betrayed herself, she recognised agonisingly. To make up for that too-telling slice of information, she blurted, ‘Then you forced me to come back to you with a lie! And went on about how many children we’d have. So, sucker-like, I swallowed it. I decided you’d put what you
felt for Irini behind you and settled for me because I could give you the family you wanted, and perhaps you were even getting just a bit fond of me.’
‘Just a bit—’ Dimitri began, astounded, hurt by her hurt.
She snapped his words off with an anguished, ‘Shut up! I knew just what a fool I’d been because you went to her when I’d pleaded with you to stay with me. You point-blank refused. You went to her. And stayed with her. For two whole days. When I needed you!’
With a heartfelt groan Dimitri ground out, ‘I will never forgive myself for that, chrysi mou! I can only plead ignorance of the facts!’ Sweeping aside any objection she might make, he lifted her in his arms and strode through the vast house as if burdened with no more than a feather, bellowing for the housekeeper, issuing to that startled personage instructions for chilled fruit juice to be brought to their suite.
‘I have much to explain—my case to plead,’ he imparted briskly as he closed the door to the master bedroom with an Italian-crafted-leather-shod foot. ‘And you, my sweetest delight, are overwrought when you must be calm,’ he stated firmly, as he tenderly laid her stunned-into-compliance form on the bed, arranged pillows behind her head and removed her shoes.
