The Good Greek Wife? (12 page)

At least that was what she told herself. So why was it suddenly so very hard to force her legs to walk away from the bedroom and take her towards the blue suite that she had already told Zarek was fully made up and ready for someone to sleep in? Why was she weakly tempted to do just what he seemed to have suspected might happen and crawl back to the closed door and…?

And what? Humiliate herself by begging to be let in? Reveal what a total fool she was where Zarek Michaelis was concerned and go to his bed, willing to take the little he might toss her way instead of holding out for the love she knew she needed? The love she deserved.

Even Argus had managed to sneak into Zarek's bedroom without risking rejection or coldness. And however jealous she might actually feel, she was not going to bring herself down to the level of the dog at his master's beck and call.

Marching into the blue room, she pulled off her clothes and dropped them on the floor. Then, naked because her nightclothes were in her original room, she slid into the bed, shivering faintly as the cool soft cotton chilled her skin.

It wasn't a cold night, she told herself. She would soon warm up. And she did, but even being warm and cosy in the soft, comfortable bed didn't mean that she could relax or that sleep came anywhere near as she lay restlessly awake, staring sightlessly into the darkness.

How was this possible? she couldn't help wondering. She had spent so many long nights lying awake until the early hours of the morning, feeling lost and alone and wishing, praying, that Zarek would come back from the depths of the dark sea that she had believed had swallowed him. If only he would be found alive, she had told herself, she would never complain again, never ask for more.

And now Zarek was back in her life. He was lying safe and sound just a few metres down the landing, probably fast asleep in the bed that he had said he had been dreaming about for so many months. Her every wish had come true and yet she felt so little of the happiness and the joy that she had told herself would lighten her heart if this night ever came.

The night she had dreamed of was here and yet she felt more lost and abandoned, more miserable and lonely than she had even been in all of the seven hundred and fifty other nights of Zarek's absence.

And the most terrible part of it was that deep in her heart she feared that there was far more—and worse—to come.

P
ENNY HAD NO IDEA WHAT
it was that woke her. She only knew that something had roused her from the shallow, restless sleep she eventually managed to find, startling her awake so that she sat bolt upright, shivering with a sense of shock.

‘What? Who?'

When the sound came again, a harsh, choking cry, she knew at once that it was coming from the master bedroom just down the landing. The room where Zarek was sleeping.

Zarek.

His name was enough to push her out of bed, have her flinging open the door, running down the hallway.

‘Zarek!'

The room was in darkness but the curtains had been left wide open and so the cold wash of moonlight lit up the bed where Zarek sprawled in a tangle of bedclothes. He was lying on his back, black hair wildly dishevelled against the fine white cotton, one arm flung up beside his head, the other stretched out across the bed. His bronzed chest was bare, the black hair that hazed it shadowy in the half-light, and the sheets were draped over the lower half of his powerful body, twisted and disturbed by his restless, fretful movements.

For a moment Penny froze in the doorway but as she watched
he stirred again, twisting from side to side and moaning in his sleep. It was all that she needed to push her forward, coming to the bed and dropping down onto the side of it. Reaching for his hands, she folded her own around them, stilling their agitated flailing as even in his sleep he felt her touch.

‘Zarek,' she said softly. ‘Darling—it's all right. I'm here.'

His deep, deep sigh seemed to come right from his soul, bringing tears to her eyes as she held on tight, willing him to know she was with him.

‘You're not alone.'

Something in her voice got through to him. The lush black crescents of his eyelashes fluttered slightly then lifted slowly, his dark, unfocused gaze looking up into her watchful eyes.

‘Penny? What…?'

His voice was rough and raw as if it came from a painfully sore throat.

‘You were having a dream—a nightmare. I heard you call out.'

Zarek frowned for a moment, then closed his eyes again on another deep sigh.

‘
Thee mou
, yes, I was—a dream…‘

‘Would it help to talk—can you tell me about it?'

She felt his shudder through the hands she held. Still keeping his eyes closed, he seemed to be reviewing the images his sleeping mind had projected, viewing them on the screen of his eyelids.

‘The boat…' he began uncertainly.

‘The
Troy
?'

But Zarek's response was a rough shake of his head.

‘The small boat—the one the pirates came in.'

He'd been back in the boat where the pirates had taken him at gunpoint, Zarek recalled. In the hot, stinking, confined
darkness of the small craft that pitched and tossed so violently on the waves that he feared that one of his captors' weapons might just fire by accident. All around him there had been panic and chaos, voices muttering savagely in a language he didn't understand, the wild arguments—obviously the debate over what they were going to do with him.

It had all been a form of wild confusion. He had no idea exactly in what order things had happened. He recalled the moment he had thought he saw an opening, the shouts getting louder, wilder. The explosive sound of a shot and the searing pain along his left temple. The icy cold that soaked into his clothes as he hit the water. And then the complete, the total blackness.

‘Zarek?'

A voice called him back to reality. And it took a moment to realise that it was a voice here, now, in the present, and not the voice he could have sworn he had heard in the darkness, when he had drifted between waking and unconsciousness, never knowing where he was or what was happening.

‘Penny?'

It was an effort to bring his mind back into focus. But the warm touch of her hands on his seemed like a lifeline to draw him back from the darkness. Slowly he opened his eyes, saw the pale shimmer of her skin in the moonlight.

‘Penny! You must be freezing…'

‘I'm O…'

But her protest was ruined by the small, uncontrolled shiver she gave. One that had him adjusting his position swiftly, pulling back the covers, flinging them open so that she could come into the bed beside him.

‘But I—I've nothing on.'

‘And neither have I. All the more reason for you to come and get warm. And it's not as if it's never happened before.'

Still she hesitated, and he thought she would actually refuse, but another involuntary shudder had her hurrying under the bedclothes, pulling them up around her. Her slender body was cold from the night air and she held herself stiff and straight, well away from him so they might have been miles apart rather than sharing the same bed. But in spite of that he knew a sense of relief. A real feeling of rightness that she should be there. The scent of her skin, her hair filled his nostrils, and the faint sound of her breathing helped him to relax.

‘Do you want to talk about it?' Penny said quietly. Her eyes were fixed on the ceiling above her, deliberately not looking at him.

He opened his mouth to say no, it was over, done, he was fine…and found that instead he actually wanted to tell her about it. For the first time he wanted to share with someone the dark places that his mind could take him. To let out the memories that haunted his nights, disturbed his sleep, even when he hadn't known who he was or where those images had come from.

If she had said anything, asked a question, made a comment, then he felt he would have dried up at once, unable to go on. But she simply lay there, silent and receptive, and as he talked to her he felt the slow but definite softening of her body, the easing of tight muscles, the adjustment of her position. In the end she had curved towards him, her face turned to his and so close on the pillows that he could feel the softness of her breath on his cheek.

‘I thought it was the end,' he said, and now he was the one staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide so that he didn't see the images of the black, black night, the empty, dark sea, even in his mind. But he felt the shiver that shook Penny's body and knew she was imagining it too.

‘When you come close to death, you start to think about
what really matters and what doesn't. I realised then that there was plenty in my life that I could let go of.'

Weird how a silence could be more encouraging than any words. How even just the slight hitch in the smoothness of her breathing could tell him she was still listening.

‘Ambition, wealth, success wouldn't have held much value then and there,' he said as if she had actually asked the question. ‘Even Odysseus Shipping could have crumbled and it would have just been a challenge to start all over again.'

Beside him in the darkness, Penny stirred and he almost felt her gaze on his shadowed face as she drew in another soft breath.

‘And what does matter?' she whispered.

She had broken the silence, and she was so near… He couldn't stay where he was and not touch her. Turning onto his side so that he was facing her, he reached out to pull her close, feeling her instinctive resistance, the tightening of every muscle.

‘Relax, just let me hold you. Nothing else—I swear.'

He could almost hear the battle in her mind. But in the same moments he felt again the softening of her body, the way she inched forward until she was fitted against his side, and he knew in that moment that nothing had ever before felt so right. Folding his arms round her, he rested his head against her hair and tried to answer her question.

‘Loyalty, trust…'

None of the words seemed right. None of them fitted.

‘At a time like that you wonder just who would care if you didn't come back. Who would be waiting when you come…home.'

Home. That word resonated so hard in his thoughts that it stopped his speech. He had to wait, to let it sink in, absorb it.

‘I felt alone,' he finally managed.

Beside him he heard Penny's breathing slow, deepen. The
warmth of the bed and the lateness of the hour were getting to her and he could sense her drifting. But just for a moment she stirred briefly, and he felt her eyelids flutter open against his throat.

‘I would have…' she managed before sleep claimed her and she drifted into silence.

Would have? Zarek echoed in his thoughts. Would have cared? Would have waited?

Would she still have been here if the legal problems in finalising the declaration of his death hadn't kept her on Ithaca?

Of course I would have cared!
The words she had flung at him earlier came back to him now, seemingly in response to the question, but not actually answering it in the end.
And not just ‘cared' in the past but still care now! I might not want to be married to you any more, but I sure as hell would never, ever have wished you
dead!'

And that was when he knew there was one thing he hadn't been able to tell her. One thing that perhaps he could never tell her.

In the pirates' boat and then again in the dark, dark hours in the water. When he had drifted in and out of consciousness, there had been one thought that had always been there. The thought of this woman—his wife—and the difference she had made to his life. When he had thought that it would be easier to give up and just drift, let go, the thought of the way they had parted had somehow kept him from going under, made him hold on.

He had thought of Penny even when he hadn't known who she was. With his memory scrambled, and nothing of his life, this island—not even Odysseus Shipping—anywhere in his thoughts, she had come to him in his dreams when he didn't even know her name. It was the need to find out who she was that had kept him hunting for the truth.

He had wanted to come back to her. He had thought that then he would find what he was searching for.

It seemed impossible that in all the time he had spent away, even when he hadn't known who he was, he had dreamed of coming home—wherever ‘home' might be. He had thought that when that happened his life would be changed. Complete. It would have the meaning that seemed so lacking while he was lost and wandering. He would finally know just who he was and where his place in life belonged.

‘Belonged—hah!'

His low laugh was a sound of harsh cynicism, dark and rough, and it echoed round the silent stillness of the room in the empty house.

Empty all but for the woman curled up next to him in the bed asleep. The woman who had turned his life upside down from the moment he had first set eyes on her and who seemed determined to drive him out of his mind before he was very much older.

He was already part way there as it was. Half out of his head with wanting her and yet not knowing whether their marriage had a chance of surviving. When he had first come back to himself after long months of not even knowing who he was or where he lived, she had been the first person he had set himself to find out about. The wife he had left behind and who had now spent two years without him.

But that was before everything had come back to him. And what he had finally recalled, when put together with what he had heard, had left him determined to wait and watch.

That was when he had heard her state openly that she wanted him declared dead so that she could move on with her life. And when she had realised that her husband was in the room…

‘Gammoto!'

Zarek's fist clenched tight as he recalled the way that Penny—that
his wife
—had looked at him in the moment that he had walked back into her life after two years' absence. Two years in which she hadn't known if he was alive or dead—and hadn't cared too much, if the way she had looked was anything to go by. Her whole face had frozen up, her eyes looking dead and emotionless, and she could barely get his name out when she spoke.

And since then she had played hot and cold depending on what suited her and the situation in which she found herself.

Or had she?

His hand twisted in the sheet that covered him, crushing the fine fabric ruinously as he recalled the way that the cool and distant woman who had offered him a sandwich and a coffee as if he had just come back home after a busy day at the office had suddenly turned into the passionate, fiery creature who had heated his bed and delighted his senses in the days, months, after their marriage. And then just as quickly turned back into the remote, unapproachable iceberg with the feeble excuse that she no longer knew him well enough.

And yet she was also the woman who had heard him cry out in the night and had come running so fast that she hadn't even stopped to put on any clothing.

He knew which woman he had wanted to come back to—but which was the real Penny? And had he ever seen her?

Dawn had barely broken but Zarek gave up any further pretence of trying to sleep. Moving carefully so as not to disturb the woman sleeping beside him, he slid out of bed and walked across to the window to stare out at the restless surface of the sea. The waves reflected his mood, looking edgy and agitated, swirling deep currents over the pebbled beach and lashing against the rocks on the shore.

This was where he belonged, where he lived. But home…?

A low plaintive whine broke into his angry thoughts and a cold black nose was pushed into the palm of his left hand where it hung at his side. Glancing down at the big black and white shape of Argus, Zarek smiled ruefully and ruffled the fur at the back of the big dog's neck.

‘Had enough of being inside, hmm?' he asked softly. ‘I know—you're desperate for a walk.'

And exercise might just help clear his own head. A run along the stony shore, drawing the ozone scented air into his lungs, pushing his body hard, driving himself until the sweat was dripping into his eyes, until he was too tired to think, too exhausted to care about the nagging ache that just lying with her—being with her anywhere—always created in his body.