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‘Calypso...’
Her name sounded thick on my tongue. I waited until she raised her gaze to mine.
‘Yes?’
‘Regardless of this...disagreement between us, you will have my gratitude for choosing to carry our son for ever.’
Her eyes widened in stunned surprise. ‘Um...you’re welcome,’ she murmured.
Once again her gaze swept away from mine—a small gesture that disturbed and confounded me. And then that defiant bolt of blue clashed with mine and absurd anticipation simmered in my gut.
‘He’s here now. Can we not put what has gone on in the past behind us and move on?’
‘Certainly we can. As soon as you tell me what I want to know I’ll take great strides to put it all behind me.’
Again that mutinous look took her over, sparking my own need to tangle with it. To stoke her fire until we both burned.
‘Are you prepared to do that, Calypso?’
For several moments she held my gaze. Breath stalled, I awaited an answer...one answer...to quell the questions teeming inside me. But then that unnerving serenity settled on her face again.
‘It’s not important—’
‘Not important? You leave my home under cover of a blatant falsehood, then you disappear for a year, during which time you bear my son, and you think your absence isn’t important?’
‘Careful, Axios, or I’ll be inclined to wonder whether you actually missed the wife you bothered with for less than a day before walking away.’
I sucked in a stunned breath. A year ago she’d warned me that she wouldn’t be biddable. Discovering she was innocent had clouded that warning. But this kitten had well and truly developed claws. Sharp ones. I was tempted to test them. Intellectually and...yes...physically.
Unbidden, heat throbbed deep in my groin, stirring desires I’d believed were long dead until one glimpse of my wayward wife from a jetty in Bora Bora had fiercely reawakened them.
That unholy union of sexual tension and unanswered questions propelled me to where she sat, cloaked in secrets that mocked me.
Her slight tensing when I crouched in front of her unsettled me further, despite the fact th
at I should’ve been satisfied to see that she wasn’t wholly indifferent to me.
‘You want to know about the inconvenience your absence caused, Calypso?’
She remained silent.
‘Some newspaper hack got wind that my wife wasn’t in Agistros, enjoying her first weeks of marital bliss. Nor was she with friends, as she’d led everyone to believe. To all intents and purposes she seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth.’
A delicate frown creased her brows. ‘Why would that be of interest to anyone? Especially when you intended to banish me to Agistros for the duration of our arrangement anyway?’
‘You’re my wife. Everything you do is news. And appearing to have deserted your marriage was definitely newsworthy.’
She blinked. ‘Appearing to have?’
‘I have an outstanding PR team who’ve had to work tirelessly to put a lid on this.’
There was no hint of remorse on her sun-kissed face. Instead she looked irritated. ‘If you’ve managed to somehow spin my absence to suit our narrative then there’s no problem, is there?’
I allowed myself a small smile, one her gaze clung to with wary eyes. ‘You would like that, wouldn’t you? To escape every unpleasant fall-out from your actions?’
‘You don’t have the first idea of what I want, Axios.’
My name on her lips sent a punch of heat through me. Thinking back, I couldn’t recollect her ever saying it before Bora Bora. Not when she’d spat fire at me, not when she’d confessed her untouched state, and not when she’d been in the complete grip of passion. Certainly not when she’d asked me to take her with me to Athens.
