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She hung up to find Zeph watching her. ‘What?’
‘Watching you wield power is sexy,’ he drawled, his arms reaching out.
She had time to step away. So why didn’t she?
Why did she remain standing, her senses leaping and somersaulting as he tugged her close? As his hands slid over her waist and boldly cupped her behind?
As she felt her husband’s hot, muscled body for the first time.
Not even at their wedding had he held her this close.
Because theirs had been a cold and short ceremony in a formidable building that had been Athens’ equivalent of city hall, with only his lawyers acting as witnesses.
It’d been over in under half an hour, after which he’d deposited her at his Kifisia home and promptly returned to the office and she’d been introduced by his butler to her new,separateapartment.
Every single reason for that remained real and alive, if temporarily shrouded by Zeph’s amnesia. And yet caution seemed to be just out of reach and temptation spiralling through her, urging her to wrap her arms around that trim waist, plaster herself closer to his sublime body.
She scrambled around for something to say to diffuse that treacherous feeling. ‘Thank you.’
‘No.Efharisto,’ he murmured instead.
‘What are you thanking me for?’
He shrugged, the movement sliding his torso against her front, turning the tips of her nipples diamond-hard. ‘Among other things? Coming to find me,’ he said.
There was no hint of humour in that statement, just a deeply solemn recognition in his hypnotic eyes. An unspoken acknowledgement of her actions.
‘Ten months is a long time. Others would’ve given up. Why didn’t you?’ he prodded.
Because I needed to know, unequivocally, one way or another before I grasped my freedom.
She chose a less volatile but truthful response. ‘Call it gut instinct. I needed proof, one way or another.’
Would he be this appreciative when the full truth came out? When he discovered that beneath all the reasons why she’d needed to find him was a fraction of selfishness for her own ends?
She swallowed and suppressed the pang that thought produced, instead reaching for the question that had been niggling at the back of her mind since this morning. ‘For a man who couldn’t remember his past, you seemed...accommodating of your situation. Did you...did you not want to know what happened to you?’
His eyes grew shadowed and for almost a minute she thought he wouldn’t answer. ‘My injuries weren’t life-threatening when I was found but neither was I in a state to go on a hunting spree. I was repeatedly reminded how close I’d come to dying. I had no other medical facility to compare to the one on Efemia so I accepted my slow nursing back to health.’
She frowned. ‘But...didn’t Petros or any of your rescuers make any effort to get to the bottom of who you were?’
His lips pursed, then a wry smile curved his lips. ‘I was reassured efforts were being made in the first few months. You were there. You saw how...laid-back they were. In hindsight I suspect there was no great desire for things to change once the initial efforts had come to nothing.’
‘You mean Petros? He and his family wanted to keep you to themselves?’ The words came out sharper than she’d intended and she couldn’t deny that the possibility that she might not have found him, ever, struck her a little too raw for comfort.
He shrugged, but the fleeting tightening of his lips said he took that a little more seriously than he wanted to admit. ‘Perhaps.’
Her shock grew. ‘And you were happy with that? It doesn’t—’
She stopped herself before she said something his brilliant mind cottoned onto. Something she wouldn’t be able to take back.
‘It doesn’t seem like the man you know?’ he finished.
Swallowing, she jerked out a nod. ‘That man...he would’ve stopped at nothing to discover who he was. What he’d left behind.’
Zeph glanced around him, then at the stunning view beyond the deck, before his gaze returned to her. ‘Maybe I always knew I would return. There seems an inevitability to all this.’
Her breath caught. ‘There is?’
