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 imagining it.
‘Is … is that an offer?' she managed to ask Ilios, in what she hoped was a voice that suggested she knew it wasn't.
Only she was left thoroughly bemused at his response.
‘If you want it to be.'
Did she? What was happening here? Was Ilios really implying that he wanted her? Physically? Sexually? In bed?
Lizzie refused to answer him. She simply didn't dare.
She didn't like the way Ilios was looking at her. And she certainly didn't like the way that look was making tiny rivulets of giddy excitement and longing rush through her body, like teenage fans rushing towards an idol, oblivious to reality or danger. Neither did she like the way she suddenly and overpoweringly wanted to look at Ilios's mouth and imagine … She could hardly breathe, barely think-at least not of anything that didn't involve her getting up close and personal with Ilios and discovering if that full bottom lip did mean what it was supposed to mean. What would happen were she to touch it with her fingertips, taste it with her tongue, explore it and … ?
In desperation Lizzie took what she hoped would be a cooling gulp of her champagne. She certainly needed something to dampen down the sensual heat that had taken hold of her. Ilios was still looking at her-looking at her as though he knew every word she was thinking and every thing she was feeling. No, she did not like that look and all it suggested at all. Lizzie drew in a shaky breath of air as her conscience prodded her. Well, all right, she did like it-but she didn't like the fact that she liked it.
The truth was, Lizzie realised ten minutes later, as Ilios held opened the car door for her, that much as she ached for the experience of having sex with Ilios, and eager as she was to explore and appreciate every bit of him, she was still female enough to want him to make the first move and show her that he wanted her as much as if not more than she wanted him. She needed to know his desire for her. She needed to feel that he wanted her so much that he could not deny that wanting. Only then would she truly be able to indulge her own desire for him. And of course that was not going to happen-was it?
But what if it did? Ilios could be right, and the best way for her to get over the longing that was tormenting her was for her to go to bed with him. Hot excitement kicked through her body. She was a woman, she reminded herself-she was twenty-seven years old, after all-not a teenager. She knew perfectly well what the situation was and she couldn't claim any different. Did she really want to go back home without experiencing what Ilios offered her just because she had panicked and wanted to be wooed? Wouldn't she, years from now, look back in regret, or even worse in yearning, for what she had not had? It was perfectly safe, after all, and so was she. It wasn't as though she was in love with Ilios and thought that somehow having sex with him-making love with him-was going to change him and cause him to fall head over heels in love with her.