The bittersweet memories—because some of them she could never deny had been so very sweet. She had been so idyllically happy when she had arrived at the villa. So happy that she had thought that her heart would burst from sheer joy.
But that had been before Andreas had taken that loving heart and ripped it into tiny pieces.
‘O opoios…’
There was no mistaking it this time. Andreas had murmured the words, rough and low, but he had spoken. His eyes remained closed but his head stirred restlessly against the pillows as he swallowed, ran his tongue over his dry lips.
‘O opoios…?’ he said again, his voice grating as if he hadn’t used it for a long time.
‘Andre…’
Becca’s voice matched his for hoarseness and lack of strength. She felt as if all the blood had drained from her body at the sound of that once so dearly loved voice that she hadn’t heard for a year.
‘Mr Petrakos…’
That brought his eyes open in a rush, huge and dark, turning her way, frowning as he tried to focus on her face.
What could she see in them? It certainly wasn’t welcome—but was it anger or rejection, or…?
‘Who—?’
He heaved himself up on the pillows, propped himself on one elbow as he stared into her face, and the cold glare from his deep-set black eyes warned her that she was in trouble.
‘So tell me,’ he said slowly and clearly in English, ‘just where the hell have you been?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘SO TELL me, just where the hell have you been?’
He’d spoken in English, Andreas realised, but he had no idea why. Somehow when he’d opened his mouth, the words had just come out in that language, and he hadn’t even really thought about it.
So what did that mean?
Ever since he’d come round from the coma into which he’d fallen after the accident, nothing had been clear in his thoughts at all. He hadn’t even been able to remember his own name or where he lived, and it had taken a couple of long, hellish weeks for anything that he was told to stick inside his battered brain.
He’d been thrown about the car quite violently, and he’d hit his head hard, they’d told him. He was lucky to be alive, so a few scrambled thoughts, some hazy memories were not unexpected. Hazy he could cope with, scrambled too. It was the blank, empty hole where most of his memory of the past year or so should be that was really disturbing him.
But the doctors had had an answer for that, too. It would come back, they had assured him. In its own time. He just needed to relax and wait.
The problem was that no one told him how long he had to wait. Or what the hell he did if it didn’t come back at all. The last thing he felt was relaxed.
And they never told him how to handle situations like this. Like waking up in his own room with a beautiful woman sitting in a chair, watching him.
A beautiful woman he remembered from before the gap in his mind.
She was of medium height, as much as he could tell, and with a neat, slenderly curved figure in a blue and green print dress under a short white cotton jacket. Her hair was almost as dark as his own, shaped in a neat, short feathery cut that framed the heart-shaped face, emphasising the high cheekbones and the rich curve of her soft mouth. But where the eyes that he saw in the mirror every day were black too, hers were a soft, washed-looking pale blue, the colour of the sea out in the bay on a cool, shadowy day.
‘You are Rebecca, aren’t you?’ he demanded again when the woman didn’t speak but simply stared at him with wide, stunned-looking eyes.
‘Yes, I’m—I’m Becca…Rebecca.’
The words were English and on the soft, hesitant voice the accent seemed to fit as well. So somehow he’d been right when he had spoken to her in English.
He didn’t even really know why English, only that it had felt so right.
And something to do with this woman whose face had been the first thing that he had focused on when he opened his eyes. The woman who, he had to admit, had sparked off the first moment of real, sharp, intense interest he had felt since the day he had come round after the accident to a world turned upside down. At least he was still aware of the appeal of a beautiful female face, he thought bitterly, the sharp twist of desire reminding him that, no matter what was wrong with his mind, he was still functioning as a man for the first time since regaining consciousness.
And the amazing thing was that he could remember her. So she belonged in his life from the time before his memory had been wiped away.
Becca—Rebecca Ainsworth. The woman he had met at a party in London and who had knocked him for six from the moment he had first set eyes on her.
And the woman he must still be having a passionate relationship with—Theos, but he hoped it was passionate!—or else why would she have turned up here like this?