“Still, it was not a decision to your liking.”
“I don't like having my decisions made for me.”
A faint smile curved over his mouth. “Are you suggesting that I am sometimes overbearing?”
Laurel laughed. “Why do I suspect you've heard that charge before?”
The wind lifted his dark hair and he brushed it back off his forehead. It was a boyish gesture, one that suited his quick smile.
“Ah, now I see how things are to be. You and Spiro will combine forces to keep me humble.”
“You? Humble?” She smiled. “Not unless that old man is more of a miracle worker than I am. Who is he, anyhow? I got the feeling he's more than someone who works for you.”
Damian leaned back, elbows on the wall, and smiled.
“What would you call a man who saves not only your life, but your soul?” A breeze blew a curl across her lips. He reached out and captured the strand, smoothing it gently with his fingers. “Spiro found me, on the streets of Athens. I was ten, and I'd been on my own. for two years.”
“But what happened to your mother?”
He shrugged. It was a careless gesture but it couldn't mask the pain in his words.
“I woke up one morning, and she was gone. She left me a note, and some money... It didn't matter. I had been living by my wits for a long time by then.”
“How?” Laurel said softly, while she tried to imagine what it must have been like to be ten, and wake up and find yourself alone in the world.
“Oh, it wasn't difficult. I was small, and quick. It was easy to swipe a handful of fruit or a couple of tomatoes from the outdoor markets, and a clever lad could always con the tourists out of a few drachma.” The wind tugged at her hair again, and he smoothed it back from her cheek and smiled. “I was quite an accomplished little pickpocket, until one winter day when Spiro came into my life.”
“You stole from him, and he caught you?”
Damian nodded. “He was old as Methuselah, even then, but strong as an olive tree. He gave me a choice. The policeâor I could go with him.” He smiled. “I went with him.”
“Damian, I'm lost here. Didn't you have a sister? Nicholasâthe boy who married my nieceâis your nephew, isn't he?”
“It's how his mother and I thought of each other, as brother and sister, but, in truth, we weren't related. You see, Spiro brought me here, to Actos, where he lived. The summer I was thirteen, an American coupleâGreeks, but generations removedâcame to the island, searching for their roots. Spiro decided I needed a better future than he could provide and, since I'd learned some English in Athens when I'd conned tourists, he convinced the Americans to take me to the States.”
“And they agreed?”
“They were good people and Spiro played on all their Greek loyalties. They took me home with them, to New York, and enrolled me in school. I studied hard, won a scholarship to Yale...” He shrugged. “I was lucky.”
“Lucky,” she said softly, thinking of the boy he'd been and the man he'd become.
“Luck, hard work...who knows where one begins and the other ends? The only certainty is that if it hadn't been for Spiro, I would be living a very different life.”
She smiled. “I'll have to remember to thank him.”
“Will you?” His dark, thick lashes drooped over his eyes, so that she couldn't quite see them. “If he'd left me on the streets, I'd never have stormed into your life and turned it upside down.”
“I know.”
The words, said so softly that they were little more than a whisper, hung in the air between them. Damian framed Laurel's face in his hands. Her eyes gave nothing away, but he could see the sudden, urgent beat of her pulse in the hollow of her throat.
“Mátya mou,”
he whispered.
“What does that mean?
Mátya mou
?”
Damian bent his head and brushed his mouth gently over hers. “It means, my dearest.”
She smiled tremulously. “I like the sound of the words. Would it be difficult, to learn Greek?”
“I'll teach you.” His thumb rubbed lightly over her bottom lip. “I'll do whatever makes you happy, if you tell me what's in your heart.”
A lie would have been self-protective, but how could she lie to this man, who had just opened himself to her?
“IâI can't,” she said. “I don't know what's in my heart, Damian. I only know that when I'm with you, I feelâI feel...”
His mouth dropped to hers in a deep, passionate kiss. For one time-wrenching moment, Laurel resisted. Then she sighed her husband's name, put her arms around his neck and kissed him back.
CHAPTER TEN
L
AUREL'S KISS almost undid him.
It was not so much the heated passion of it; it was the taste of surrender he drank from her lips.
She had been his, but only temporarily on that night in New York. Now, holding his wife in his arms on a windswept hill above the Aegean, Damian made a silent vow. This time, when he made love to her, she would be his forever.
Was he holding her too closely? Kissing her too hard? He knew he might be and he told himself to hold backâbut he couldn't, not when Laurel's mouth was so soft and giving beneath his, not when he could feel her heart racing, and he knew that her desire burned as brightly as his. Desire, and something more.
He couldn't think. All he could do was feel, and savor, and when she moaned softly and pressed herself against him, so that he could feel her body molded to his, he almost went out of his head with need.
“Damian,” she whispered. Her voice broke. “Damian, please...”
He thrust his hands into her hair, his thumbs tracing the delicate arch of her cheeks, and lifted her face to his. Her eyes were dark with desire; color stained her cheeks..
“Tell me,” he murmured, just as he had that first time, and he moved against her so that she caught her breath at the feel of him. “Say it,
o kalà mou.”
Laurel brushed her lips against his. “Make love to me,” she sighed, and he caught her up in his arms and carried her to a stone watchtower that was a part of the wall.
The tower was ancient, older, even, than the wall. A thousand years before, it had been a place from which warriors safeguarded the island against pirates. Now, as Damian lay his wife down gently on a floor mounded with clean, sweet-smelling hay, he knew that the battle that would be fought here today was one in which there would be no way to tell who was the conqueror and who the conquered.
He told himself to undress her slowly, despite the hunger that beat within him. But when she moved her hands down his chest, down and down until she cupped his straining arousal, the last semblance of his control slipped away.
“Now,” he said fiercely, and he tore away her sundress.
Beneath, she was all lace and silk, perfumed flesh and heat. He tried again to slow what was happening but Laurel wouldn't let him. She lifted her head, strained to kiss his mouth; she stroked his muscled shoulders and chest, drew her hand down his hard belly, and then her fingers slid under the waistband of his shorts. Damian groaned; his hands closed over hers and together, they stripped the shorts away.
At last, they lay skin against skin, heat against heat, alone together in the universe.
“Damian,” Laurel said brokenly, and he bent his head to hers and kissed her.
“Yes, sweetheart, yes,
o kaló mou.
”
And then he was inside her, thrusting into the heart of her, and in that last instant before she shattered in her husband's arms, Laurel, at last, admitted the truth to herself.
She was in love, completely in love, with Damian Skouras.
* * *
A long time later, in the white-hot blaze of midday, they made their way to the house.
SomeoneâEleni, probablyâhad closed the thin-slatted blinds at all the windows so that the foyer was shadowed and cool. Everything was silent, except for the soft drone of the fan blades rotating slowly overhead.
Laurel looked around warily. “Where's Eleni?”
“Why? Do you need something?” Damian pulled her close and kissed her, lingeringly, on the mouth. “Let me get whatever it is. I've no wish to share you with anyone else just now.”
“I don't need anything, Damian. I was just thinking...” She blushed. “If she sees us, she'll know that weâthat you and Iâ”
Damian smiled. Bits of hay were tangled in his wife's hair, and there was a glow to her skin that he knew came from the hours she'd spent in his arms.
“What will she know,
keerÃa mou,
except that we have made love?”
“What does that mean? Keerya moo?”
“It means that you are my wife.” He pressed a kiss into her hair. “And a husband may make love to his wife whenever he chooses.” He put his hand under her chin and gently lifted her face to his. “On Actos, in New York...any where at all, so long as she is willing. Do you agree?”
“Only if the same rules apply for the wife.”
Damian's eyes darkened. “Has no one ever told you that democracy was invented here, in these islands?”
Laurel smiled. “In that case...”
She rose on her toes, put her mouth to her husband's ear and whispered.
Damian laughed. “I couldn't have put it better myself,” he said, and he lifted her into his arms, carried her up the stairs and into his bedroom.
* * *
The days, and the nights, flew past. And each was a revelation.
Damian, the man who could do anything from saving a dying corporation to making an endless assault against a boulder, turned out to have a failing.
A grave one, Laurel said, with a solemnity she almost managed to pull off.
He didn't know how to play gin rummy.
He was, he assured her, an expert at baccarat and chemin de fer, and he admitted he'd even been known to win a dollar or two at a game of poker.
Laurel wasn't impressed. How could he have reached the age of forty without knowing how to play gin?
“Thirty-eight,” he said, with only a glint in his eye, and then he said, well, if she really wanted to teach him the game, he supposed he'd let her.
He lost six hands out of six.
“I don't know,” he said, with a sigh. “Gin just doesn't seem terribly interesting.”
“Well, we could try playing for points. I'll keep score, or I can show you... what's the matter?”
“Nothing. It's just... I don't know. Points, scoring... it seems dull.”
“Okay, how about playing for money?”
“A bet, you mean? Yes, that would be better.”
“A nickel a hand.”
Damian's brows lifted. “You call that interesting?”
“Maybe I should tell you that I'm the unofficial behind-the-runways-from-Milan-to-Paris gin rummy champion.”
“So? What's the matter? Afraid of losing your tide?”
Laurel blew her hair back out of her eyes. “Okay, killer, don't say I didn't warn you. We'll play big time. A dime a hand.”
Damian's smile was slow and sexy. “I've got a better idea. Why don't we play for an article of clothing a hand?”
Laurel's eyes narrowed. “You sure you never played gin before?”
“Never,” he said solemnly, and dealt out the cards.
Half an hour later, Laurel was down to a pair of jeans and a silk teddy. Her sandals, belt, shirt, even the ribbon she'd used to tie back her hair, lay on the white living-room carpet.
“No fair,” she grumbled. “You
have
played gin before.”
Damian gave her a heart-stopping smile and fanned out another winning hand. He leaned back against the cushions they'd tossed on the floor and folded his arms across his chest. “Well?”
Laurel smiled primly and took off an earring.
“Since when is an earring an article of clothing,
keerta mou?
An article of clothing for each losing hand, remember?”
Her heart gave a little kick. “You wouldn't really expect me toâ”
He reached out a lazy hand, drew his fingertip lightly over her breasts, then down to the waistband of her jeans. “Your game and your rules,” he said huskily. “Take something off, sweetheart.”
Laurel's eyes met his. She rose to her feet, undid the jeans and slid them off.
“Your turn is coming,” she said, “just you wait and see.”
He smiled and dealt the cards. It pleased her to see that his hands were unsteady. Surely he would lose now.
“Gin.”
Laurel ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, and Damian's eyes followed the gesture. Heat began pooling in her belly.
“Damian, you're not going to make me...”
Their eyes met again. She swallowed dryly, then got to her knees. Slowly she hooked a finger under one shoulder strap and slid it off. She slid off the second. There were three satin ties on the teddy, just between her breasts, and she reached for them.
Damian's breathing quickened, but his eyes never left hers.
“One,” she said softly. “Two. Three...”
With a throaty growl, he tumbled her to the carpet. And then, for a long, long time, the only sounds in the room were the sighs and whispers of love.
Â
* * *
He refused to believe that she could cook.
They discussed it, one afternoon, as Laurel sat in a field of daisies with Damian's head in her lap.
She reminded him, indignantly, of the bread he'd found rising in her kitchen. He reminded her, not very gallantly, that it had resembled a science experiment gone bad.
Laurel plucked a handful of daisies and scattered them over his chest.
“I'll have you know that I make the most terrific sourdough bread in the world.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you mean, âuh huh'? I do. Ask George. He loves my bread.”
“George,” Damian scoffed. “The man's besotted. He'd say it was great even if it tasted like wet cardboard.”
Laurel dumped more daisies over him. “He is not besotted with anyone but his own wife.”
Damian sat up, reached for her hand and laced his fingers through hers. There was something he had to tell her, something he should have told her sooner. It meant nothing to him, but she had the right to know.
“It's good, for a man to be besotted with his wife,” he said softly.
She smiled and brushed a daisy petal from his hair.
“Is it?”
“Did I ever tell you,” he asked, catching her hand and raising it to his mouth, “that I was married before?”
Laurel's teasing smile vanished. “No. No, you didn't.”
“Well, I was. For a grand total of three weeks.”
“What happened?” She tried another smile and hoped this one worked. “Don't tell me. The lady served you a slice of wet cardboard, called it sourdough bread and you sent her packing.”
“Nothing so simple. It turned out we had nothing in common. She wanted my name and my money, and I...”
“And you? What did you want?”
“Out,” he said, with a little laugh, “almost from the beginning. The marriage was a complete mistake. I think we both knew it.”
“Why did you marry her, then?” A chill crept into Laurel's heart, and she gave him a stiff smile. “Was she pregnant, too?”
She regretted the ugly words as soon as she'd said them, but it was too late to call them back. Damian sat up, his face cold and hard.
“No. She was not pregnant. Had she been, I can assure you, I would still be married to her.”
“Because it would have been your duty.” Laurel stood up and dusted the grass from her shorts. “Of course,” she said, and started briskly toward the house, “I almost forgot how noble you are, Damian. Sorry.”
“Theé mou
!” Angrily he clasped her shoulders and spun her around. “What is the matter with you, Laurel? Are you angry with me for having divorced a woman I did not love? Or for admitting that I would have done the right thing by her, if I'd had to?”
“I'm not angry with you at all.” Her smile was brittle. “I'm justâyou can't blame me for being curious. Damian. After all, I only just found out you have an ex-wife.”
“I told you, the relationship was meaningless. We met, we thought we were in love, we got married. By the time we realized what we'd done, it was too late.”
“Yes, well, that's what happens, when a person marries impetuously.”
“Dammit, don't give me that look!”
“What look? It's the only one I've gotâbut how would you know that?”
“Don't be a little fool!” Damian glared at her, his face dark with anger. “There is no comparison between this marriage and the other. I married you becauseâbecause...”
“Because I was pregnant.”
“Yes. No. I mean...” What did he mean? Of course he'd married her because she was pregnant; why deny it? What other reason could possibly have made him ask Laurel to be his wife?