“Go on” Peter urged.
“I haven’t got anything prepared,” she said in sheer panic at the thought of taking this huge spotlight with not only a glittering crowd of stars watching her, but probably millions of television viewers around the world, as well.
“Speak from your heart. You can’t go wrong,” Peter assured her, giving her a gentle push forward.
Her feet somehow floated over to the podium. Her trembling hand managed to clutch the microphone. Her mind was in a frenzy, reciting, Speak from your heart, like a mantra.
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” she said as she tried to find the right words. The audience quietened down and finally other words came to her. “It’s a marvellous thing for an author to see her story come to life in such wonderful colour and movement, and for that I will always be grateful to Zack Freeman for his creative artistry. But most of all, I want to thank my husband, Peter Ramsey, who was the driving force behind making it happen. I haven’t told him this, but while I was writing The Mythical Horses of Mirrima, he was very much in my mind and I based the character of the warrior king on what I thought of him. I love this movie…”
She turned and smiled at Peter. “…and I love this man, more than I can ever tell him. He is the king of my heart and always will be.” Then she beamed at the audience, sending out a rainbow of love to everyone. “That’s all I have to say.”
The applause was deafening. She handed back the microphone and almost fled the stage with Peter hugging her tightly to his side. “And you’re the queen of mine,” he whispered in her ear as they made their way back to their seats.
She sighed, a blissful sigh of happiness.
Ever after, she thought.
She would have it with Peter.
They would both make it so.
The Greek Tycoon’s Unwilling Wife
By Kate Walker
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER ONE
THE villa looked just as she remembered it.
Or rather, Rebecca acknowledged to herself, it looked just as it had always appeared in her dreams. Because the truth was that she had actually seen so very little of it on that one day she had ever spent inside it.
The one day that should have been the start of her honeymoon.
The one day of her marriage.
They had arrived just as the sun was setting and so she had only had the briefest glimpse of the huge, elegant, white-painted building, the sweep of the bay behind it blue and crystal-clear. But it seemed that that had been enough to etch the image onto her mind with perfect clarity so that the memories that had surfaced in her sleep were far more detailed and accurate than she would ever have imagined she could describe when awake.
Clearly the eyes of happiness recorded things much better than vision that was blurred and distorted by tears. Because that was how she remembered her arrival at the Villa Aristea, and then, just a few short hours later, her departure from it. She had reached the tiny island in the heights of delirious happiness, and left it just a few short hours later in the very depths of despair.
She hadn’t even had time to unpack her case. Rebecca shivered in spite of the heat of the sun on her back as she recalled the way that Andreas had picked it up and flung it out of the door in a blazing, black rage. She had been so sure that he would have flung her out after it that she hadn’t stayed even to protest, but had fled in a rush, trying to convince herself that discretion was the better part of valour and that she would do better to wait until he’d calmed down before she tried to explain the truth. At least then she might have a hope that he would listen.
She’d waited. And waited. But it had seemed that Andreas would never, ever calm down at all.
Until now.
‘Is this the right place, kyria?’
Behind her, on the steep, curving road, the taxi driver stirred restlessly in the afternoon heat. He was clearly anxious to get back to the tiny village and into the shade once again.
‘Oh, yes,’ Rebecca assured him hastily, opening her bag and rooting in it awkwardly, hunting for her purse and thumbing through the unfamiliar notes she’d acquired in a rush at the very last minute, hunting for one that looked something like the amount on the meter. ‘Yes, this is the right place.’
It was impossible not to contrast the shambles and discomfort of her arrival today with the way she had first visited the Villa Aristea barely a year before. Then she had travelled in the greatest possible comfort, flying to Rhodes in Andreas’ private jet and then being ferried in a helicopter across the sea to this island that was little more than a dot in the ocean.