herself asking, looking at all the boats bobbing on the water.
He shook his head. ‘A dinghy,’ he said. ‘I keep it moored at Kallistris.’
‘Kallistris?’
‘My island.’
Rosalie’s eyes widened. ‘Your island? You have an island? A whole island to yourself?’
He looked amused. ‘It’s a very small island,’ he said. ‘But it is my favourite place on earth.’
His expression changed and she lifted her eyes to his. There had been emotion in his voice—deep emotion.
‘Tell me about it,’ she heard herself say.
They resumed their stroll, walking along the edge of the quay on old cobbles, near the water lapping and slapping against the hulls of the moored yachts.
‘It’s reachable by helicopter and I go there whenever I can,’ Alexandros Lakaris was saying.
His voice warmed with fond affection—she could hear it. ‘There’s very little on it. Goats, mostly! And an old fisherman’s cottage by the beach, done up as a villa now. There’s a smallholding inland, where Panos and Maria live—they look after the place for me. It’s very peaceful.’
‘It sounds lovely,’ Rosalie said wistfully.
A whole island all to yourself, set in this azure sea, beneath this golden sun... A world, a universe away from the squalid back streets of the East End.
‘So, what would you like to do now?’ Alexandros Lakaris was asking her as they reached the far side of the quay. ‘Shall we go for a drive? And then back into Athens?’
She gave a nod. It was easier to let him make the decisions, easier to go with the flow.
Maybe it would be sensible to spend one more night here. To at least think over what he’s thrown at me.
Was it really as absurd as it sounded? When the alternative was so grim... When she’d had a brief, tantalising taste of the kind of luxurious life she could enjoy for months and months if she went with what he’d so extraordinarily suggested.
And at the end of those months she could go back to England with the divorce settlement he was promising her after he’d got the merger he wanted.
Into her head sprang visions of the kind of life she could lead if she did not have to go back to the bleak, exhausting slog she’d come from.
I could get out of London! Move to the country or a beautiful cathedral town! Or even the seaside. Make a completely new life for myself! A life of my own choosing.
The vision hovered in her head. So incredibly tempting...
They reached the car and he opened the passenger door for her. As he did so, he paused, frowning, as if something had just struck him.
‘Where is your luggage? All the clothes you bought?’
Rosalie’s face hardened as she got into her seat and he did likewise, gunning the powerful engine.
‘I left them,’ she said. ‘And I wish to God I didn’t have to wear this outfit either! I’ll be sending it back to him from London.’
She heard Alexandros Lakaris say something in Greek. She thought he must be swearing, so perhaps that was just as well.
‘I’ll have them fetched for you,’ he said, his face grim with displeasure as he moved off into the roadway. He turned to her. ‘Would it persuade you to keep them if you knew that in fact it was me who paid for them? I was going to charge them to your father, but in the circumstances...’
‘I can’t accept them from you either!’ Rosalie exclaimed hotly. ‘How could you think I would?’
‘If you accept my proposal, then of course you can,’ he replied. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘you’ll need many more.’ He glanced across at her and there was that glint in his eye again. It did things to her that it shouldn’t. ‘As my wife,’ he said, ‘you would be superbly dressed...’
She made a face, trying not to see herself let loose in yet more gorgeous designer departments. ‘Is that supposed to persuade me?’ she posed.
‘Will it?’ he countered.
She shook her head. ‘I mustn’t let it,’ she answered in a low voice, looking down at her lap. She gave a sigh, then looked at him straight, took a breath. ‘Mr Lakaris, if—’
He cut her off with a frown. ‘I think we have gone long beyond the stage of formal address,’ he said wryly. ‘My friends,’ he went on, ‘call me Xandros.’
‘Well, whatever I call you,’ she persisted, ‘I have to be absolutely sure that I’m not...not...letting you buy me things. Expensive clothes. Expensive hotel rooms. Expensive meals, come to that...’
He frowned. ‘You were happy enough to buy clothes when