The Scandalous Warehams. PENNY JORDAN
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obviously a fairly new baby in a car seat buggy combo drawn up to the table. Although the children were not all the same sex, the relationship between them reminded her of her own childhood. The little boy, serious-looking and obviously proud of his seniority, was keeping an older-brotherly eye on the little girl and the baby, whilst the little girl was leaning over the buggy, cooing at the baby. Over their heads the parents exchanged amused and tender smiles.
Hastily Lizzie reached for her champagne, to try and swallow back the huge lump of aching emotion forming in her throat. Not for herself—she and her sisters had experienced the kind of love she could see emanating from this family. No, her sadness and pain was for those other children—Ilios’s sons.
Before she could change her mind she asked Ilios, ‘Are you sure there isn’t some way that you and your cousin could mend the broken fences between you and get your relationship on a happier footing?’
‘If that’s a roundabout way of trying to tell me that you’re anxious to bring our marriage to an end as soon as possible, then—’
‘No, it isn’t that.’ Lizzie stopped him. ‘It’s the children—your children,’ she emphasized, when she saw Ilios look frowningly towards the table she had been studying.
Leaning across the table, she asked him quietly, ‘Have you thought about what might happen to them if anything were to happen to you? They’d have no one—no father, no mother, obviously, no family Ilios. No one in their lives to give them a sense of continuity and security and … and … They would have no one to tell them their history, no one to tell them about you. I know that financially they would be protected, but that isn’t enough. They’d be dreadfully alone.’
Ilios was looking down at his plate. She had infuriated him, Lizzie expected, and no doubt he was going to tell her that the future of his sons was none of her business.
When he did lift his head and look at her Lizzie found it impossible to gauge what he was thinking from his grim expression.
‘So you think that I should—what was the phrase you used?—“mend fences” with my cousin so that in the eventuality of my unexpected demise he will open his arms and his heart to my sons and become a second father to them?’
Put like that, what she had said did sound rather like something out of a sentimental film, Lizzie admitted.
‘Family is important.’ She insisted.
‘What if I were to do as you suggest and my sons ended up being humiliated and tormented by my cousin, just as I was myself? What if he abused the trust I placed in him for his own financial benefit?’
‘That’s what I meant about wondering if it was possible for you to mend fences with him,’ Lizzie defended herself. ‘Now, before it’s too late.’
‘I see. I become reconciled with my cousin, and you get a quick escape from a commitment and an agreement you’re obviously already wanting to renege on?’
‘No! I am prepared to stay married to you for as long as it takes.’
Ilios arched one eyebrow in a silent but unmistakably mocking query, and then asked her softly, ‘As long as what takes?’
Lizzie felt like stamping her foot. Ignoring her own feeling of self-consciousness, she told him fiercely, ‘You know perfectly well what I was trying to say. I am not attempting to renege on our agreement. If I did that you’d be within your moral rights to demand repayment of the money you gave me—money I need to ensure my family’s financial security. I know you’ve said that you don’t believe in love, but to deny your own sons the emotional protection they will need …’ She hesitated, and then decided to ignore her anxiety about angering him. If she was to be his children’s champion then she must do so without considering her own position. ‘Surely you can’t want them to suffer in their childhood as you did?’
Ilios looked at her in silence, whilst she held her breath—waiting for his response.
When it came, it was both unexpected and underhanded.
‘Obviously it isn’t only sexual lust for my body that champagne arouses in you, but a lust for plain speaking.’
‘What I said doesn’t have anything to do with me drinking champagne,’ she said vehemently.
‘No? Don’t the words in vino veritas mean anything to you?’
In wine there is truth. But it wasn’t the champagne that had loosened her inhibitions. It was seeing that small happy family. Only somehow Lizzie didn’t think that Ilios would believe her—no matter how much she tried to correct his interpretation of the situation.
Mend fences with his cousin? Ilios thought grimly of the way Tino had deliberately tormented him as a child—the way he had taunted him by pointing out that he had a mother, aunts and uncles and cousins, whilst Ilios’s own mother had hated him so much she had abandoned him. Of course Tino had had his own cross to bear. Their grandfather had never let him forget that his father had died a coward.
To their grandfather male descendants had simply been there to fulfil and continue the Manos destiny: to own Villa Manos, the land on which it stood, and continue their once proud history. Nothing and no one else mattered.
But Lizzie had had a point. No man was immortal, and if he should die before his sons were old enough to manage their own affairs there would be plenty of vultures waiting to pick at the vulnerable flesh of their inheritance.
He and Lizzie looked at life and humankind from opposite viewpoints. She believed passionately in the power of love, in parenthood and families. He did not. When called upon to do so she had put her siblings first, and every word she spoke about them showed that she would do anything and everything she could to safeguard and protect them. Just as she would her children, should she become a mother? Ilios frowned. That did not accord with his own beliefs about her sex. He could concede that Lizzie might be that one rare exception. But so what?
The trouble was there were beginning to be far too many so whats in his reactions to Lizzie Wareham, Ilios acknowledged, remembering that he had asked himself the same question when he had been forced to admit that he was sexually aware of her—sexually aware of her and aroused by her presence. He had no rational explanation for the way she made him think and feel, and trying to find one only served to increase his awareness of the effect she was having on him and his desire to crush it.
And yet, as much as he wanted to impose his will on his awareness of her, his body refused to accept it. Quite the opposite in fact. The ache that had been tormenting him flared from a dull presence to a sharp, predatory male clamour. Totally against what he had believed he knew about himself, her admission of desire for him had increased his own desire for her rather than destroy it. Increased it, enhanced it, and made him want her with a suddenly very driven intensity that he had never experienced before.
Ilios looked at Lizzie’s half-empty glass of champagne, and then at the bottle still in the ice bucket. Picking it up, he told her, ‘You’d better finish this, otherwise we’ll offend Spiros—and I don’t want to end up never being able to get a table here again.’
Lizzie shook her head.
‘I’ve already had one full glass,’ she reminded him.
‘And two might turn your thoughts to your uncontrollable lust for my body and a whole catalogue of things you’d like to do to it?’ he taunted her.
Before Lizzie could formulate a suitable crushing response he continued easily, as he filled her glass, ‘It seems to me that the best way to quench your sexual curiosity would be to satisfy it.’
What the hell had made him say that? Ilios challenged himself grimly. But of course he already knew the answer. Lizzie wasn’t the only one battling against a desire she didn’t want. Maybe what he’d suggested was the best way for them both to rid themselves of a need that neither of them wished to have.
What was happening? Was she hallucinating or was Ilios actually suggesting …? No, she must be