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So no, she wasn’t surprised that this man hadn’t touched her since he’d draped the millstone of his name around her neck and then estranged himself from her.
Now, however, she couldn’t discard the sensations of tiny fireworks he evoked with his touch as their palms slid together. As his strong fingers curled around hers, firm and masculine, to help her onto the lower deck. As midnight-blue eyes stared forcefully and blatantly into hers, ruthlessly excavating her every secret.
Reminding her that a different reality was setting in.
Zephyr. Zeph.
Her long-lost husband was back. And he’d lost his memory. Apparently.
God, she still couldn’t believe she’d found him.
Alive and well. Powerfully masculine and even more handsome...
And staring at her mouth as if...as if...
She sucked in a deep, composure-craving breath as the staff, lined up beside the pilot, and wearing looks of shock and muted elation, watched their employer step aboard the boat he’d disappeared off ten long months ago.
Alongside the shock, she also saw wide-eyed surprise. The same emotion unravelling through her at the transformation in the formidable, forbidding man she’d known for the last two years.
Because for his departure from the little hamlet he’d resided in since he went missing, Zeph hadn’t chosen a suit or even a pair of trousers and a button-down shirt. Instead, the multibillionaire who could shift fiscal landscapes as easily as a gardener turned soil had changed into a pair of khaki shorts and a white T-shirt.
For a man who she’d never seen dressed any way but formally—courtesy of the exclusive dozen bespoke tailors spread across three continents at his beck and call—it’d been a shock to see him in shorts, a T-shirt, andflip-flops. Imogen was sure the Zeph of old wouldn’t have known what flip-flops were if a pair had jumped out at him.
And even more shocking was the fact that... Immie liked this informal side of him.
More than liked.
She dragged her gaze from his mile-wide shoulders and the muscles—much thicker than the streamlined sleekness he’d sported before his disappearance—stretching beneath the thin cotton, past the strong throat and the wisps of silky hair peeking up from the neckline, to the lush brown locks ruffling in the slight breeze, and the way he casually wove his tanned fingers through them as he greeted his staff.
With a smile.
Good heavens. At this rate, she was sure she’d expire from astonishment before noon.
Titos, the pilot of theOphelia I, broke into excited Greek chatter, a suspicious sheen in his eyes that looked like tears as he pumped his boss’s hand in greeting.
Zeph responded in Greek before greeting his other staff, leaving awed, blinking staff in his wake.
When, after several minutes in conversation, the head steward herded them away—following her firm request that for now Zeph’s reappearance was to be kept confidential—her breath caught all over again when Zeph turned to her, the remnants of his smile still in place.
‘Is something the matter?’ he rasped.
And she realised she was gawping at him. ‘I...you’re smiling,’ she blurted before she could stop herself.
A shade of that smile disappeared. Immie bit her tongue as his eyes narrowed a second later.
‘You say that as if you’re surprised.’
She shivered at the cool query in that observation. Cleared her throat as she thought of how to respond. Hadn’t she read somewhere that volunteering unguarded information to amnesia patients could be detrimental?
‘Miss Callahan?’
She bristled. Then immediately felt irritated with herself for doing so. Wasn’t this what she ultimately wanted? Wasn’t this why she’d searched high and low and under every rock for this man, driven by a visceral instinct she couldn’t deny? Instinct that insisted that he was alive? So she could find him—despite the authorities and his board of directors urging her to have him declared dead—and draw a line one way or another under the past two years and reclaim her life? Her independence? To return to being Immie Callahan and not Imogen Diamandis, trophy wife of one of the wealthiest, most influential men on earth?
Yes, but his calling her by her maiden name was making a specific point. One she didn’t appreciate.
She raised her chin. ‘If you’re attempting to cast doubt on the fact that we’re married by using my maiden name, you’re wasting your time.’
‘I may not remember who I am, but I know not to take everything I’m told at face value.’
