Without turning, she let go of Giannis’s hand and leaned back in her seat.
Stavros was back.
* * *
He believed her.
The realization stopped Stavros in his tracks. As powerful as the sun beating down on him, as simple as the feeling in his gut.
Just as she would never have gone to the media with her story, would never have dragged Giannis and him into a dirty scandal to facilitate a divorce.
She had been bluffing that day.
And he had fallen for it.
He had believed every lie Leah had ever told him, had spun his own theory of how she had led Calista astray, that, somehow, she had convinced his naive sister to try something dangerous...
But if Leah hadn’t been the one that had pushed Calista to it, then what had happened? That Leah had lived while Calista had died of a drug overdose that night, he had chalked it up to pure chance.
But it wasn’t.
Whatever choice she had made that night, his sister had made it of her own accord.
His head pounded with the questions it let loose; his entire world tilted.
Had he not really known Calista either?
“Come, Stavros,” Giannis beckoned him with a smile before he could disappear with his shifting thoughts.
Stavros looked up, zeroing in on Leah with a stinging hunger.
On her way to the other side of the table, she stilled without looking at him. Her fingers slipped on the serving spoon, the sound clanging in the patio.
Slowly, she moved her head and met his gaze. The impact of it rocked through him, the picture she presented ripping through the semblance of control he had fooled himself into achieving over the past four days.
An off-shoulder, black, cutoff blouse showed a strip of her back, indented by the line of her spine, an outlandish article of clothing if he had ever seen one, and yet it suited her to perfection, with the long, gray skirt that billowed around her legs.
A soft breeze pushed it against her legs, outlining the lean, toned length of them.
Heat thrummed in every pore, his arousal painfully instantaneous.
He wanted to see if she was just as silky everywhere, he wanted to see that glorious hair, right now piled atop her head and falling from it, spread against his pillows, he wanted to feel that mouth against every inch of him...
Leah affected him like no other woman ever did, or could. Whether it was because she was his wife or because she was inherently Leah—beautiful, demanding, lively—he wouldn’t know.
All he knew was that she was destroying every assumption he had made of her, inching toward her goal, once again, changing his life irrevocably.
But he couldn’t let her go, not until he knew the truth about Calista. Not until he knew everything there was to know about Leah.
Not until he had tasted that luscious mouth one more time.
Just this once, he would reach for what he wanted, he would take what he craved and damn his sense of duty.
* * *
The strangest expression glittered in Stavros’s eyes. Her gaze followed the corded length of his thighs as he chose the chair wedged against hers. The memory of how hard and welcoming he had been beneath her suffused her face with warmth. Hoping they would think it was the sun, she smiled pleasantly for Giannis’s benefit.
Giannis slowly got up from his chair, and both Stavros and she rose from theirs. Grabbing his walking stick, he waved them off. “It is time for me to rest. You both sit,” he said with such a teasing twinkle in his eyes that Leah sighed like a deflated balloon.
How would Giannis face it when Stavros finally set her free? Would Stavros tell him?
The moment Giannis was out of sight, she stood up too, the very joy she had found this morning evaporating under her own conflicting emotions.
His fingers clamping her wrist, Stavros looked up. “Stay, Leah...please.”
The edgy request warned her not to argue.
Increasingly aware of the high-pitched chirp of a bird in the olive groves, the rustle of leaves, and the painful thud of her own heart, she studied him under the guise of bravely facing him.
As always, he was dressed in formal clothes but the shirt was unbuttoned, and his hair looked like he had messed it up quite a bit.
From the arch of his eyebrows to the straight line of his nose, from the way his mouth tilted up on one side when he smiled to the blunt nails of his long fingers, he was painfully familiar to her now...a desperate longing awoke in her, to trace that austere face, to taste him in tenderness, to just once meet him as his equal without lies and fears.