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CHAPTER TWO
WITH deep reluctance Maddie approached the passenger door Dimitri was holding open. Even in the darkness there was no mistaking the grim, forbidding cast of his bold features.
She swallowed convulsively. It was the first time she’d been on the receiving end of his displeasure. The first time he’d shown his true colours. The rest—the smiles, the softness, the warmth and indulgence of the past three months—had been nothing but one huge act, she reminded herself firmly.
Feet dragging to a halt as she reached the open car door, she sucked in a deep breath. She wasn’t looking at him now. She could feel his icy rage. It penetrated her layers of clothing, prickled her skin.
‘I’m waiting.’ Then his voice softened. ‘I will take you to your parents first thing in the morning, I give my word. Until then it is best they relax in the belief that we are sorting our own problems out.’
‘Why? They’re not children in need of fairy tales!’
‘I will explain.’ His voice hardened with impatience. ‘But not here.’
The line of Maddie’s mouth grew stubborn. Used to having his every whim catered to immediately, Dimitri Kouvaris didn’t do waiting. Well tough. It was time he learned.
Ignoring him with some difficulty, she managed to get her mind back on track. She had two options. She could stick to her guns—walk on up to the cottage, rouse her parents, and ask them what the hell her soon to be ex-husband was talking about. How could he threaten to make them homeless? He was talking rubbish, surely?
Only he didn’t make idle threats, she acknowledged with an inner shudder. He had a reputation in business for ruthlessness. What he said, he meant, and pity any person who got in his way or tried to pull the wool over his eyes. She had never seen that side of him before, but it had been there, hadn’t it? Cleverly hidden, but there, in a marriage that had had one purpose only. To get an heir. That cold ruthlessness was out in the open now, she recognised, and resignedly plumped for the second option.
Her chin defiantly angled, Maddie slid into the passenger seat, her heart jolting as the door at her side closed with force. If there was the slightest chance that he could carry through with that threat then she owed it to her parents to fall in with his wishes.
For now. Only for now, she promised herself.
The drive to the nearby small market town was accomplished in tight silence. Unlike her journey with the taxi driver, Maddie had no need to give Dimitri directions through the tangle of narrow lanes. The Greek drove and navigated as he did everything else—exceptionally well—and he would have exact recall of the tortuous route between her home and the hotel he’d been using just over three months ago, when he’d embarked on his sneaky campaign to persuade her to marry him.
Unwilling to give headroom to the thought of how absurdly gullible and bird-brained she’d been back then, Maddie clamped her teeth together until her jaw ached, and made herself think of the present.
It was blistering her mind. His totally unexpected presence. His weird threats. If she, loving him with a depth that had shaken her, could take the sensible course, end their marriage and walk away then why couldn’t he? It would be so much easier for him, given that he had never loved her in the first place, had seen her only as a walking, fertile womb.
Her smooth brow furrowed as she tried to find an answer. She had genuinely believed that, knowing her decision to end their marriage, he would have shrugged those impressive shoulders and consigned her to history. A swift divorce—made simpler because of her firm intention not to ask for any financial settlement—followed smartly by a marriage to another such as she—a gullible little nobody from an ordinary, fairly simple but prolific family. The sort who wouldn’t know how to stand her ground against the mighty Kouvaris empire when she found herself in the divorce courts, her child given into his custody.
Her face flamed with a mixture of outraged pride and humiliation. She should have cottoned on—at least suspected his motives all those months ago. It had been there right under her nose if only her starstruck eyes had been able to see. His questions, which had given him the information that she came from undeniably fecund stock. Their—what had his snooty aunt called it?—their hole-and-corner wedding. And the lack of anything as romantic as a honeymoon. Not that she’d minded that. She had assured him that she understood perfectly when he’d pleaded that pressure of work meant he had to be in Athens, soppily saying that where he was was where she wanted to be. She’d been too blinded by love to read anything into any of it.
Her hands clenched, her fingernails cutting into her palms. Looking back, she just didn’t believe herself! How could she have thought, for one insane moment, that a man as knock-'em-dead gorgeous, charismatic, sophisticated, rotten rich and frighteningly clever would want to tie himself for life to an ordinary-looking, low-status nobody like her?
As he brought the car to a halt in front of the small town’s only hotel Maddie made herself a set-in-concrete promise. If her devious husband tried to make her change her mind, because he’d decided he didn’t want the delay of even a quickie divorce and then the tiresome chore of hunting down another sucker, with the tedious expenditure of all that seemingly effortless charm to get her to marry him, and had decided he’d be better off sticking to the brood mare he’d got—which, thinking about it, was the only motive possible for him being here at all—then she would resist all his attempts to her very last breath!
With scarcely controlled impatience Dimitri fisted the ignition key and exited the car, reaching the passenger side in a handful of power-driven strides.
He wrenched the car door open and ordered, ‘Come.’ He had to use every last ounce of self-control to stop himself from hauling her to her feet. In the space of twenty-four hours his wife had changed from a voluptuous, adoring wanton to an ice-cold stranger. And he didn’t know why—although he had strong and utterly distasteful suspicions. It was driving him insane. And no one, not even his wife, would be allowed to do that!
As if she sensed the stirrings of his volcanic anger, Maddie moved. Slowly swinging her feet to the ground, she exited the car and stood, facing the timber-framed façade of the hotel. The light from above the main entrance illuminated her. She was wearing jeans and a lightweight jacket, a leather bag clutched in one small hand, a mutinous twist to her mouth.
Dimitri cupped an unforgiving hand beneath her elbow and headed to the main door. If he bent his head he could tease the mutiny away, feel those lush lips tremble beneath his own, flower for him. The gateway to paradise. She liked sex, more than met his demands. But no way would he oblige—now, or in the foreseeable future. That would be part of her punishment!
No, the sex hadn’t been feigned. Everything else in their marriage had been, though. Starting with her wedding vows, uttered with her eye on the main chance. He was ninety per cent sure of it. Three months of her life in exchange for a settlement that would keep her in luxury for the rest of her days. Logically, it was the only scenario that remotely fitted in with what she had done—and, heaven knew, he’d racked his brain to try and find another, coming up with a big fat zero.
She would not do that to him!
He removed his hand from her arm as if even that connection was poisonous.
Maddie shivered as the heavy main door swung closed behind them and he strode away from her. She hadn’t wanted this confrontation; it had been forced on her. No wonder her nerves were going haywire, adrenalin pumping through her veins. He was rigid with anger, she recognised. And she could understand it.
He was a busy man, a driven man. Amanda had told her, in one of her long, chatty phone calls after Maddie had returned to England that first time, that Dimitri Kouvaris had pumped her for information. About her, about her family. Stupidly, the knowledge had excited her, made her feel almost special. How he would hate the waste of his time. Not that it had taken much of that, she recalled with a sickening lurch of her tummy. Five days later, after having gathered the necessary information from her unsuspecting friend, he had charmed her into a state of besotted adoration with very little effort.
No, he would view the three months of their marriage as an unforgivable waste of his time and effort. And it would have taken an effort on his part to treat a peasant as if she were a princess, she decided with a resurgent cynicism. As for the other—the sex—trying to get her pregnant at every opportunity with no result, while thinking of the time when he could get rid of the wife he didn’t love and marry the woman he did love, must have infuriated him.
He’d hidden it well. She had to give him that.
