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And he had laughed, but he had also liked that she was worried about him. He had confessed that it felt like a very long time since anyone had worried about him, and with prudent probing, she had gained a view of his childhood that she didn’t like and which he would probably dispute out of loyalty to his mother and father.
There was no doubt that his sister’s death had ripped the heart out of Ari’s family. Instead of cherishing the child who had survived, however, his parents had retired to separate corners to grieve for the child they had lost. Ari had been left very much to his own devices after he lost his twin, yet his involvement in that tragedy had damaged him as well. Even so, his parents had spent little subsequent time with their son and had sent him off to boarding school at eight years old. That detachment and distance had influenced Ari, making him too much of a loner who lacked understanding of normal relationships either in or outside the family circle.
On her family’s last night on the island, they had enjoyed a dinner together at the resort. Ari had emerged shell-shocked from the chattering closeness of her mother and stepfamily, with everybody talking at once and the children alternately playing and then squabbling. The relaxed and yet warm informality he had witnessed had surprised Ari, but, ultimately, charmed him.
Only the day before, she and Ari had flown to Corfu for a day of sightseeing that had ended with dinner on the beach and a late night at a fancy club. Cleo fingered the diamond platinum pendant Ari had casually handed her over the meal, touched the diamonds in her ears, glanced at the delicate watch on her wrist and smiled, dazed by the heat and a growing sense of security. Ari liked giving her stuff. He liked giving her stuff so much that it got embarrassing. She knew he would go out of his way to spoil Lucy as well.
Lucy. Briefly, her smile dipped. She missed that baby so much, and occasional bulletins from her caseworker didn’t replace actual bodily contact. Ari’s lawyer was working on their fostering application but had warned them to be patient because the authorities dealt slowly with such matters. She watched as a motorboat came to shore and Ari vaulted out into the shallow water. Clad only in swim shorts, he was stunning, tall, bronzed and muscular as he strode up onto the beach, dripping wet and gorgeous.
You watch me the way I watch you.
He had nailed that observation to perfection.
But then, Cleo conceded ruefully, she had watched Ari from the very first day she saw him. The attraction for her had been instant, visceral, while with Ari she had proved to be more of an acquired taste. Fortunately for her, hehadacquired that taste, but she didn’t kid herself that that was anything deeper than sexual chemistry. Yet, in comparison, she had become very conscious that she was in love with the man she had married. Indeed, she had probably taken the first crucial steps along that path that first evening together, when he had chosen to confide in her about his father’s second family. Now he was her obsession, she allowed, her mouth running dry and a zing of excitement curling between her thighs as he strode up the beach path with her firmly in his sights and a wolfish smile curving his sensual mouth.
‘Were you waiting for me?’ Ari intoned huskily.
‘Don’t you just wish?’ Cleo mocked, insanely conscious of his gaze welded to her lips and straying down to the full breasts moulded by the rather brief bikini she wore. ‘No, I was just reading and lazing—
‘You’re wet!’ she shrieked as he grabbed her.
‘You should’ve lied and said you were waiting for me thisonce!’ Ari complained. ‘You’re bad for my ego.’
‘You don’t need any more compliments,’ Cleo told him, running a small hand down over his washboard-flat abdomen and feeling him shiver in response, noting the thrust of the erection the shorts couldn’t hide. ‘Can we be seen from here?’
‘No,’ Ari confirmed, coming down over her with hungry sexual intent etched in every angle of his lean, darkly handsome features and his strong, muscular body. ‘I wouldn’t risk any other man seeing you naked,kardoula mou.’
Some minutes later, they were both naked and intent on each other. Cleo went up in sensual flames as he surged into her and sated the fierce craving he had lit inside her. In the aftermath, she lay limp in his arms, blissfully at peace and not a single shadow in her world, barring the absence of Lucy. She was incredibly happy, happier, she acknowledged, than she had ever known she even could be.
Ari ran a hand down over her spine, pure satisfaction engulfing him. He found the strangest sort of peace when he was with Cleo, rather as if she were the missing puzzle piece that made him whole or, at the very least, he adjusted, somehowmorethan he had been without her. She made him see the world and the people who surrounded him in a different light. Shewasn’tchanging him, though.
‘Tell me about your ex, Dominic,’ Ari murmured, startling Cleo, who had not expected that question. ‘You mentioned him in passing but never told me why you broke up.’
With a recollective wince of her generous mouth, Cleo explained about Dominic’s girlfriend and child showing up at her door.
‘What did he say when you confronted him?’ Ari prompted with interest.
‘I didn’t confront him. I just cut all contact with him, and I was moving on to work at another office, so I didn’t run into him again,’ Cleo confided, wondering what he was getting at and why in his estimation she would have put herself through such a humiliating confrontation.
‘Didn’t it occur to you thatshemight have been the liar?’ Ari pressed with a frown of bemusement as he stared down at her, his extraordinary eyes holding her full attention. ‘Easy enough to borrow a child to make such a visit on a rival and see her off.’
Cleo blinked rapidly. ‘I never thought of that... I have to admit that that suspicion never once crossed my mind—’
‘You didn’t doanythingto check out her contention that she was living with him?’ Ari stressed in wonderment, and he shook his tousled dark head slowly. ‘You just condemned him out of hand on her word. Maybe she was telling the truth, but maybe she wasn’t. Whichever, you should have checked it out, not simply assumed that he was guilty as charged. Please be a little more thorough in your approach if I ever get on your wrong side.’
Cleo swallowed hard, taken aback by his very different reading of the situation while seeing her own skewed reasoning process at the time. Her innate distrust of the opposite sex had fuelled her willingness to believe that Dominic had been lying to her and she had never given him the chance to defend himself, which really hadn’t been fair, she belatedly acknowledged.
Ari’s mobile phone rang as he was pulling on his shorts. It was his London lawyer, a stuffy old-fashioned sort of man, who tended to talk in a confidential murmur and preferred face-to-face meetings to phone consultations, but he was very wily and knowledgeable, which was why Ari retained his services.
‘I’ll be back in London tomorrow,’ Ari confirmed. ‘What sort of news?’
Regrettably, the sort of news that Oliver Matthews didn’t wish to discuss on the phone. Ari suppressed a groan and mastered his impatience as he agreed to see the lawyer the following afternoon.
‘Oliver’s being cagey as usual, which means that what he has to tell me is unlikely to be good.’ Ari sighed, his lean, dark face shadowing as Cleo asked him what was happening. ‘It can only relate to my sisters.Thee mou, surely one of them can’t be deceased as well—not at their age!’
Cleo closed a hand over the clenched fist that betrayed his tension. ‘I’m coming with you to see the lawyer,’ she said soothingly. ‘Don’t be such a pessimist.’
CHAPTER NINE
