A Passionate Marriage. Michelle Reid

salivated with desire for you even as he criticised. But it was not the same as being boxed and tagged a cheap little floozy at first horrified glance.

      Things had gone from bad to worse after that. And—yes, she reiterated as her gaze dipped back to the letter, it was time that one of them took the initiative and drew the final curtain across something that should never have been.

      In fact, Isobel had only one problem with the details Takis Konstantindou had mapped out in the letter. She could not see how she could spend several days in Athens because she could not leave her mother on her own for that long.

      ‘What time does her flight come in?’

      Leandros was sitting at his desk in his plush Athens office. In the two weeks he had been back here he had changed into a different person. Gone was the laid-back man of San Estéban and in his place sat a sharp-edged, hard-headed Greek tycoon.

      Was he happy with that? No, he was not happy to become this person again, but needs must when the devil drives, so they said. In this case the devil was the amount of importance other people placed on his time and knowledge. His desk was virtually groaning beneath the weight of paperwork that apparently needed his attention as a matter of urgency. He moved from important meeting to meeting with hardly a breath in between. His social life had gone from a lazy meal eaten in a restaurant on the San Estéban boulevard, to a constant round of social engagements that literally set his teeth on edge. If he lifted his eyes someone jumped to speak to him. If he closed those same eyes someone else would ensure that he opened them again. The wheels of power ground on and on for twenty-four hours of every day and the whole merry-go-round was made all the more intense because his younger brother Nikos was off limits while he prepared for his wedding day.

      On his father’s death Leandros had become the head of the Petronades family, therefore it was his duty to play host in his father’s stead. His mother was becoming more neurotic the closer it came to Nikos’s big day, and was likely to panic if she did not have an open line to her eldest son’s ear. If he complained she told him not to spoil this for her then reminded him that he had denied her the opportunity to stand proud and watch him make his own disastrous union. And because thoughts of marriage were already on his mind, he was hard put not to snap at her that maybe Nikos could take a leaf out of his own book and run away to marry secretly. At least the day would belong only to him and Carlotta. If there was anything about his own marriage he could still look back on with total pleasure, it was that moment when Isobel had smiled up at him as he placed the ring upon her finger and whispered, ‘I love you so much.’ He had not needed five hundred witnesses to help prove that vow to be true.

      His heart gave him a punishing twinge of regret for what he had once had and lost.

      ‘This evening.’ Takis Konstantindou pulled him back from where he had been in danger of visiting. ‘But she insisted on making her own arrangements,’ Takis informed him. ‘She will be staying at the Apollo near Piraeus.’

      Leandros frowned. ‘But that is a mediocre place with a low star rating. Why should she want to stay there when she could have had a suite at the Athenaeum?’

      Takis just shrugged his lack of an answer. ‘All I know is that she refused our invitation to make arrangements for her and reserved three rooms, not two, at the Apollo, one of which must have wheelchair access.’

      Wheelchair access? Leandros sat forward, his attention suddenly riveted. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her? Has she been hurt…is she ill?’

      ‘I don’t know if the special room is for her,’ Takis answered. ‘All I know is that she has reserved such a room.’

      ‘Then find out!’ he snapped. Suddenly the thought of his beautiful Isobel trapped in a wheelchair made him feel physically ill!

      He must even have gone pale because Takis was looking at him oddly. ‘It could change everything, do you not see that?’ His tycoon persona jumped to his rescue. ‘The whole structure on which we have based our proposals for a settlement may need to be revised to take into account a physical disability.’

      ‘I think you have adequately covered for any such eventuality, Leandros.’ The lawyer smiled cynically.

      ‘Adequate is not good enough.’ He was suddenly furious. ‘Adequate is not what I was aiming towards! I am no skinflint! I have no wish to play games with this! Isobel is my wife.’ Hearing that ‘is’ leaving his lips forced him to stop and take a breath. ‘I will leave my marriage with no sense of triumph at its failure, Takis,’ he informed the other man. ‘But I will hopefully leave it with the knowledge that I treated her fairly in the end.’

      Takis was looking surprised at his outburst. ‘I’m sorry, Leandros, I never meant to—’

      ‘I know what you meant,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘And I know what you think.’ Which was why that derisory comment about Isobel being adequately compensated had made him see red. He knew what his family thought about Isobel. He knew that they probably discussed her between themselves in that same derogatory way. He had even let them—if only by pretending it wasn’t happening. But they were wrong if they believed his failed marriage was down to Isobel, because it wasn’t. Not all of it anyway.

      Takis was wrong about him if he believed that he was filing for divorce because he no longer cared about Isobel. He might not want her back to run riot through his life again, but…‘Whatever anyone else thinks about my marriage to Isobel, she deserves and will get my full honour and respect at all times. Do you understand that?’

      ‘Of course.’ For a man who was twice his own age and also his godfather, Takis Konstantindou suddenly looked very much the wary employer as he gave a nod of his silvered head. ‘It never crossed my—’

      ‘Find out what you can before we meet with her,’ Leandros interrupted, glanced at his watch and was relieved to see he was due at a meeting elsewhere so could end this conversation.

      He stood up. Takis took his cue without further comment and went off to do his bidding. Leandros waited until the door closed behind him, then threw himself back down into his chair. He knew he was behaving irrationally. He understood why Takis no longer understood just where it was he was coming from. Only two weeks ago Leandros had called up his godfather and informed him he wanted to file for divorce. It had been a brief and unemotional conversation to which Takis had responded in the same brisk, lawyer-like way.

      But a few weeks ago, in his head, Isobel had been a witch and a hellion with barbs for teeth. Now, on the back of one small comment she was the young and vulnerable creature he had dragged by the scruff of her beautiful neck out of sensual heaven into the hell of Athenian society.

      On a thick oath he stood up again, paced around his desk. What was going on here? he asked himself. What was the matter with him? Did he have to come over all macho and feel suddenly protective because there was a chance that the Isobel he would meet tomorrow was going to be a shadow of the one he once knew?

      A wheelchair.

      Another oath escaped him. The phone on his desk began to ring. It was Diantha, gently reminding him that his mother would prefer him not to be late for dinner tonight. The tension eased out of his shoulders, her soft, slightly amused tone showing sympathy with his present plight where his mother was concerned. By the time the conversation ended he was feeling better—much more like his gritty, calm self.

      Yes, he confirmed. Diantha was good for him. She refocused his mind on those things that should matter, like the meeting he should be attending right now.

      ‘You’re asking for trouble dressed like that,’ Silvia Cunningham announced in her usual blunt manner.

      Isobel took a step back to view herself in the mirror. ‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’ All she saw was a perfectly acceptable brown tailored suit with a skirt that lightly hugged her hips and thighs to finish at a respectable length just below her slender knees. The plain-cut zip-up jacket stopped at her waist and beneath it she wore a staunchly conventional button-through cream blouse. Her hair was neat, caught up in a twist and held in place by a tortoiseshell