November Harlequin Presents 1(110)

‘Come on, Rebecca, do something!’

She spoke the words out loud, striving to push herself into action instead of standing there, foolishly, frozen to the spot. She seemed incapable of movement now that she was actually here.

She’d moved fast enough when she’d finally absorbed the phone message from Andreas’ PA. Just to know that her husband had had an accident had been bad enough. At the words ‘car crash’, her blood had run cold, making her shiver in shock as the terrible truth hit home.

A devastating crash. His car brakes had failed and he’d gone off the road, into a tree. He was lucky to still be alive. But he had escaped, though badly battered and bruised—and now he was asking for her.

Asking for her.

As they had done back home, those words now pushed Rebecca into action, taking her towards the door, her hand lifting to tug at the ornate bell pull that hung beside it, hearing the sound jangle loudly deep inside the house.

Andreas had been asking for her, the voice at the other end of the phone had said. Did she think she could come to Greece? Would it be possible for her to come to see him?

Becca hadn’t needed to think. There had been no doubt at all in her mind and she had given her answer even before she had time to consider whether it was wise or not. But the truth was she didn’t care.

Andreas had been in a crash, he was hurt—injured—and he was asking for her. She had barely put the phone down before she had dashed upstairs to start packing.

Of course, the journey to Greece had given her too much time to think. Time to go over and over and over the conversation in her head and find all sorts of possible things to worry about and fret over.

What had happened in the accident and how badly hurt was Andreas? Why did he want to speak to her when for almost a year he had kept his distance, maintaining a total silence, with no contact at all, apart from that single stiffly formal letter that she knew he had got his secretary to write and had simply scrawled his name at the bottom of?

But it had been enough to know that Andreas had asked for her. And there was no way she was going to turn her back on him.

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she barely noticed the big door swing open and jumped, startled, when a voice exclaimed in surprise.

‘Kyria Petrakos!’

It was Medora, the elderly housekeeper who Andreas had said was the closest he had ever had to a mother. Medora, who had been the one person she had spoken to on that terrible day she had spent at the villa, before Andreas had so unceremoniously thrown her out. The one person who had had a smile for her then and still had now, it seemed.

‘Welcome! Come in! The master will be so happy to see you.’

Would he? a little, niggling voice questioned in the back of Becca’s thoughts. Would Andreas truly be glad to see her? She had started out on this journey so determined and full of confidence, but somehow along the way all of that courage had seeped away.

What if it had all been a terrible mistake? If Andreas had not been asking for her at all but for someone else? Or what if…?

Her heart clenched at the thought of the possibility that Andreas had asked for her all right but that he had done so for reasons that were far from kind or even friendly. What if his motives were simply to add to the misery he had heaped on her a year ago?

‘Kyria Petrakos?’

Another voice, a male one this time—the voice from the telephone call—broke into her thoughts, making her turn, blinking hard in the shadowy hallway after the brilliance of the sun outside. A young man, tall, dark, was holding out his hand to her.

‘My name is Leander Gazonas. I work for Kyrie Petrakos. It was I who telephoned you.’

Leander’s handclasp was warm and firm, reassuringly so. It drove away some of the doubts and fears in Becca’s thoughts, and replaced them with new confidence and hope.

‘Thank you for getting in touch with me. I came as soon as I could.’

‘So would you like a drink—or a chance to freshen up? Medora will show you to your room.’

If a room had been put at her disposal then it seemed that, for the moment at least, Andreas was not just going to turn round and reject her again. But where was Andreas himself? How was he?

‘If it’s all right, I’d like to see my…’

The word died on her tongue and she found herself unable to actually say ‘my husband’ out loud.

‘I’d like to see Mr Petrakos, if that’s possible.’

If there was anything that brought home to her just how ambiguous her presence here was, it was this. The way that she was standing here, in the hallway of the home of the man who was, legally at least, her husband, waiting for an invitation to move into the house, while somewhere else in the building Andreas, the man she had promised to love, honour and cherish—and who had made the same vow to her—was…