‘It was just money…’
‘My money—the money I gave you. And you gave it to him…’
And then she thought she could see what was happening. In a sudden rush of understanding, she felt she knew just why he was so angry—what had got to him so badly. She had always known about the dark shadow over Andreas’ past. The fact that his mother had only married his father for the money he had, the lifestyle he could give her, and when Alexander Petrakos had lost much of his fortune through some rash and ill-advised stock-market gambling Alicia had taken off with his wealthier cousin, turning her back on her five-year-old son without a second thought.
Then later, when Andreas himself had rebuilt the Petrakos fortune so that it had more than doubled the original amount, Alicia had turned yet again and tried to come back to the son she had abandoned over twenty years before. As a result, Andreas had always been wary of being used in the same way as his father. The slightest suspicion that any woman in his life might be a gold-digger meant that she was dropped so fast she never had time to even try to change his mind.
So if Andreas thought—or even suspected—that she had married him for his money…
‘Andreas, don’t…’ she tried again. ‘It doesn’t have to be this way.’
There had to be a way that she could reach him. A way that they could talk this out. If she could just calm him down, make him see that things could be put right. And then she’d talk to Macy, get her to see that she couldn’t keep her promise. She had to tell Andreas—he was her husband.
‘Doesn’t it?’
‘No—not if you love me…’
A sharp pain in her fingers jolted Becca back to the present, where, staring down at her hand, she realised that she had been twisting the stretchy material of the swimming costume round and round until it had tightened about her fingers, digging into the skin.
But the tight physical pain was as nothing when compared to the one in her heart as she remembered Andreas’ reaction to her stumbling attempt to put things right, or at least bring about a truce between them.
‘Love!’ Andreas’ harsh bark of laughter had been cruel and totally without any humour in it. ‘Love? Who brought love into this?’
‘But you—I—you married me…’
‘Not for love!’ he flung the word in her face. ‘I don’t love anyone—least of all you! I doubt if I’m capable of the feeling. I married you for sex—for that and nothing else. No other woman has ever made me feel as hot as you do.’
It was as if some freezing iceberg had suddenly enclosed her so that she could see and hear but she was incapable of moving and, for now at least, the terrible cold had deadened all feeling so that she was numb right through to the soul. Even her heart hardly seemed to be beating at all.
‘S-sex?’
‘Yes—sex. That thing we just enjoyed upstairs.’
‘I didn’t enjoy it.’
‘Liar.’
She wouldn’t have enjoyed it, couldn’t have enjoyed it if she’d known that he had been using her as cold-bloodedly and cruelly as it now seemed. If their whole marriage had been based on a lie and not the real love she believed it to be.
‘You had no right…’ she began but her frozen tongue wouldn’t form the words. Her lips were so stiff they felt as if they were carved from wood.
‘No right to what?’
Andreas’ expression was carved from a similar block of ice as the one that seemed to enclose her. His jaw was taut and rigid, eyes freezing black pools.
‘To marry me if you felt that way. You have nothing to give me!’
‘Nothing!’
His laughter was so hard that it seemed to splinter in the air around her, making her wince away from the shattered fragments that threatened her face.
‘Take a look around you, agape mou.’
One long fingered hand waved in a gesture that took in the luxurious room, the beautiful pool out beyond the patio doors and the view of the sapphire-blue ocean beyond that again. ‘You call this nothing?’
Nothing without love.
‘Isn’t this enough?’
‘Quite frankly, no.’
Bitterness made her say it. Agony pushed it from her lips in a cold, tight voice that didn’t sound at all like her own.
‘I expected more from you.’
‘You expected…Well, you can expect all you like but you’ll get nothing else from me—nothing.’
‘You think I’ll stay for that?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think you’ll stay for anything. In fact, let’s make this easy for you—let me help you on your way.’