The Greek's Unknown Bride

CHAPTER ONE

APOLLO VASILIS STARED out of the window at the ornamental lake set in lush grounds. Athens lay under a hazy smog in the distance, and the sea was a barely perceptible line on the horizon. But he noticed none of that. His arms were folded tightly across his chest and tension wound like a vice inside his body. A tension he’d been feeling for months now. Three months, to be precise.

There was a faint rhythmic beep-beep coming from behind him and suddenly it changed. Skipped a beat, and became slightly faster. Heart rate increasing. She was waking up. Finally.

He turned around. A woman lay on a raised bed. She was as pale as the sheets underneath her. Rose-gold hair spread around her head. There was a gauze dressing on her forehead, over her right eye.

There were bandages around one arm. A scratch down her left cheek. All in all, minor cuts and bruises. A miracle, considering the car that she’d been driving was at the bottom of a narrow ravine about one hundred metres deep, a charred mass of black twisted metal.

He moved closer to the bed. Her almost blonde lashes were so long they cast faint shadows on her cheeks. Her brows were darker, finely etched. He frowned. Her face looked...thinner. The bones of her cheeks were standing out more prominently than he seemed to remember.

But then...looking at this woman in any kind of forensic detail was not something he’d done lately.

Not since he’d looked at her as if he’d never seen a woman before. Four months ago, when they’d first met. When her naked body had filled his vision and made his blood roar so loudly it had deafened him.

He could still see her body now as if the image had been burned onto his brain. The small but perfectly formed breasts. Flat belly, gently curved hips. The cluster of tight reddish curls at the apex of her legs. Slender limbs. She’d looked so delicate and yet when he’d joined his body to hers, he’d felt the innate steely strength of her and it had been the most erotic experience of his life.

To Apollo’s surprise and consternation, a heat he hadn’t felt in months flooded his veins. He rejected it utterly. This woman had deceived him in the worst way possible.

He despised her.

At that same moment that her eyelids fluttered, the door opened and the doctor and a couple of nurses entered. The female doctor looked at Apollo. ‘I need to remind you not to expect too much at first. The extent of the injury to her head can only really be ascertained once she regains consciousness.’

Apollo nodded curtly, and watched as they tended to the machines around the bed. The doctor sat down beside the woman and took her hand. ‘My dear, can you hear me? Can you open your eyes for me?’

Apollo could see movement behind the delicate eyelids. For a second he found himself holding his breath as her eyelids fluttered again. As if, for a moment, he’d forgotten, and a small part of him actually cared if his wife woke up or not.

She could hear the voice coming from far away. It was like a buzzing bee, distracting her, tugging her away from the lovely cloak of darkness surrounding her in blissful silence and peace.

A pressure, on her hand. The voice. Louder now. She couldn’t make out words, just intonation. Mmm. Mmm!

She tried to swat away the pressure but it only got stronger. A brightness was pricking at her eyes, pushing away the darkness. Her head felt so thick...fuzzy. Heavy.

And then, as if a curtain had been pulled back, very clearly she heard a sharp voice. ‘Mrs Vasilis, it’s time to wake up.’

For a second she lamented leaving the peaceful darkness behind but she knew she had no choice but to follow the voice. She understood the words but they didn’t make much sense to her... Mrs...?

She opened her eyes and light exploded onto her retinas, making her shut them tightly again. She became aware that she was lying in a bed. She could sense the flurry of activity around her. And also, disturbingly, the fact that in that split second she’d noticed a tall dark shape looming at the end of the bed.

A shape that was familiar and made her heart pound for no reason she could understand.

‘Mrs Vasilis, can you try opening your eyes again? We’ve lowered the blinds to make it easier.’

Experimentally, she cracked her eyes open again and this time it didn’t hurt so much. The face of a woman she didn’t know came into focus. There were a couple of other women, also strangers. They all had dark hair and dark eyes. There was a humming noise and rhythmic beeping of machines. White everywhere. Antiseptic smell.

A word popped into her mind: hospital.

There was movement in her peripheral vision and she looked towards the end of the bed. The tall dark shape was a man. She knew him. ‘A-A...’ Her voice cracked like rust. She tried again. ‘Apollo?’

‘That’s good.’

She barely noticed the relief evident in the doctor’s voice as she took in the man at the end of the bed. He wore a dark long-sleeved top. Round neck. Soft material. Broad shoulders and chest. Powerful. But not overly muscular. Lean.

Short dark hair. Strong masculine features. Deep-set eyes. Green eyes. She knew this, even though she couldn’t see their colour properly from here. Strong jaw. Stubble. Firm mouth. Hot, on hers. A shiver went through her. She’d been kissed by this man.

She felt her hand being pressed. The doctor’s voice. ‘You know who this man is?’

It was hard for her to tear her gaze away from him, as if she was afraid he might disappear. She nodded. ‘Yes...we just met, the other night. At a function.’ He frowned slightly, but she barely noticed as heat crept into her cheeks, remembering seeing him for the first time. How he’d stopped her in her tracks with his breath-taking beauty and charisma, wearing a tuxedo that had been moulded to his powerful body like a second skin.

He’d looked bored. People had hovered around him but at a distance as if too intimidated to get close.

And then their eyes had met and... Bam! Her heart had somersaulted in her chest and she’d never been the same since...

Slowly it was sinking in that she was in a hospital. But what was she doing here? With a man she barely knew?

But you do know him. Intimately.

She felt it in her bones, like a deep knowing. But how did she know this if she’d only just met him? She tried to latch onto the question to find the answer but it skittered out of her grasp.

Confusion clouded her brain and for the first time she had a sense that something was very wrong. A tendril of fear...or panic...coiled in her belly. She looked at the doctor. ‘What’s happening? Why am I here?’

As she said the word I, she stopped. I. Nothing. Blank. A void. The fear grew. ‘Wait... I don’t know...who I am... Who am I?’

Then something popped into her head. The doctor had called her... ‘You said Mrs Vasilis...’

The doctor looked at her with an expression that was hard to decipher. ‘Because you are Mrs Vasilis. Sasha Vasilis.’

Sasha. It felt wrong. Not her. ‘I don’t think that’s my name.’

‘What is your name?’

Blank. Nothing. Frustration.

The doctor spoke again. Soothingly. ‘Sasha. Your name is Sasha and you are married to this man, Apollo Vasilis.’

She looked at the man again. He was definitely frowning now and he didn’t look particularly happy to be married to her. She shook her head briefly but it caused a sharp pain over her eye. She stopped. ‘But that can’t be possible, we just met.’

So, if you just met, how can you know him intimately? How can you be married?

A headache was forming, right between her eyes. A dull throb. As if sensing this, the doctor said briskly, ‘That’s enough for now, she needs to rest. We can come back later.’

A nurse stepped forward and did something to a drip beside the bed. Soon that comforting blackness was enveloping her in its warm embrace again and she eagerly shut out the growing panic and fear, and disturbing questions. And him, the most disturbing thing of all, and she wasn’t even sure why.

Two days later

‘We think your memory loss came from the traumatic experience of the crash. There’s no perceptible or obvious injury to your brain that we can see after the scans we did, but you can only remember meeting your husband for the first time and nothing else. Nothing from before or after. Sometimes the brain does this as a form of protection when an event occurs. We’ve no reason not to believe that in time your memory will return. It could come in small pieces, like a jigsaw coming together, or it could happen all at once.’

Or it might not happen at all?

She was too scared to voice that out loud.

‘Which is why...’ here the doctor looked expressively at Apollo Vasilis, who was a forbidding presence as he stood by the window with his arms folded ‘...you need to be monitored closely while you recuperate.’

The doctor looked back at Sasha, who still didn’t feel like a Sasha. ‘Don’t worry too much about trying to make your memory come back. You need to focus on recovering from your injuries. I’m sure everything will return to full functionality.’

Sasha wondered what her brain was protecting her from.

The doctor stood up. ‘You can go home now. We’ll keep in touch to monitor your progress and let us know as soon as you start to remember anything.’

That felt like a very dim and distant possibility. Her brain still felt as if it was just a dense mass of grey fog. Impossible to penetrate. And where was home? The doctor had told her she was English, so presumably she’d been born and brought up there.

When she’d enquired about family, her husband had told her that her parents were dead and she had no siblings. Just like that. Stark and unvarnished. She’d felt an ache in her chest near her heart but when she couldn’t put names or faces to her parents it was hard to feel profound grief.

The doctor left now and Sasha looked at Apollo Vasilis. Her husband. He looked as grim as he had when she’d regained consciousness. Wasn’t he pleased she’d survived the accident? He wore a three-piece suit today, steel grey, with a tie. He oozed urbane sophistication but Sasha sensed the tightly wound energy in his body. As if he was ready to cast off the trappings of civility to reveal a much more elemental man underneath.

Ironically, the one memory she did have, of the night they’d met, she remembered him smiling. Laughing even. His face transformed from breath-taking to devastatingly gorgeous. She remembered his voice. Deep and accented.

Except she’d been told that that night had been four months ago. And since then they’d been married. And she’d apparently moved to Greece from England. It was all too huge to absorb and Sasha found herself avoiding thinking about it too much.

‘Are you ready? The car is waiting outside.’

Was she ready? To leave here with a man who was little more than a stranger to her? In a foreign land she had no memory of coming to? But she nodded once, briefly, and stood up, her limbs still feeling a little weak.

Apollo picked up a bag. He’d brought her clothes to change into and they only compounded her sense of disorientation because she couldn’t imagine choosing clothes like this. Flared cream-coloured silk trousers with slits up each side, a matching silk singlet top and a cropped blazer jacket. Spindly high-heel sandals that made her feel even more wobbly.

He opened the door and stood back. Sasha locked her limbs and walked out of the room with as much grace as she could muster.

Apollo walked down the corridor beside his wife. She was walking slowly, as if she’d never worn high heels before, with all the grace of a spindly-legged foal. Which was bizarre because the only time he could recall ever seeing her in flat shoes had been when they’d met that first night.

She stumbled a little and he took her elbow to steady her. She glanced up at him, her cheeks a little pink. ‘Thank you.’

Her hair was down around her shoulders in soft natural waves that he knew she usually preferred to be straightened.

‘It’s nothing.’ He gritted his jaw at his body’s reaction to the feel of her arm under his hand, her slender body brushing against his ever so slightly. She wasn’t wearing the scent she usually did. He’d watched her take it out of the bag earlier and she’d tested it on her wrist, immediately scrunching up her nose. She’d looked at him. ‘This is my perfume?’

He’d nodded. Privately he’d always had the same reaction when he’d smelled it. To recoil. It was too overpowering. Sickly sweet. She’d put it back without spraying any.

But now all he could smell was her. Soap and something uniquely and mysteriously feminine. Her scent reminded him uncomfortably again of meeting her for the first time when he’d been blown away by her fresh-faced beauty. Her impact on him had been like a punch to his solar plexus, driving the breath out of his lungs.

And to this day he couldn’t figure it out. He’d seen plenty of women who were more beautiful than Sasha. Slept with them too. But something about her, from the moment he’d laid eyes on her, had got to him. Captivating him. As much as he hated to admit it.

She’d seduced him with her wide-eyed act of innocence, and had then trapped him with the oldest trick in the book. The burn of that transgression and the burn of his momentary weakness for her was like permanent bile in his gut.

His desire for her had dissipated as quickly as it had blown up, and he’d welcomed it, in light of her betrayal, but now it was back, as if to mock him for ever believing he’d had it under his control.

She was playing him all over again but this time he wouldn’t stand for it.

Sasha winced as Apollo’s fingers tightened almost painfully on her arm. She tried to pull away and he looked at her. ‘I’m okay now, you can let go.’

Instantly his expression blanked and he took his hand away, saying smoothly, ‘My car is here, just outside the door.’

Sasha saw a sleek silver SUV waiting for them, with a driver holding the open back door. It reinforced her sense of being in an alternate dimension where nothing made much sense.

She stepped out of the hospital and gulped in fresh air, hoping that might make her feel more grounded. The Greek sun was warm but the early summer air wasn’t too humid yet.

Sasha climbed into the car. Her shoes were pinching painfully after only walking a few feet. She couldn’t believe that she wore this kind of shoe on a regular basis.

Or... She slid a look at Apollo, as he got into the back of the car on the other side, maybe Apollo liked them and she wore them to please him?

That thought sent another shiver through her. The thought of pleasing him. Except, if the frosty vibes were anything to go by, he wasn’t pleased and she had no idea why.

The car pulled away from the hospital and Apollo exchanged a few words in Greek with the driver, who then put up the privacy partition. Sasha was so aware of him it was as if an outer layer of skin had been removed.

A hand rested on one thigh. Square, masculine. Long fingers. Blunt nails. His suit looked as if it had been made specifically to hug his muscles and emphasise his powerful physique. He looked at her and she didn’t have time to pretend she wasn’t ogling him.

‘Okay?’

She nodded. It was a civil question but the tension was palpable. Instead of asking a question she wasn’t sure she wanted the answer to, she asked, ‘Where are we going now?’

‘The villa. It’s not far from here.’

‘Have I lived there long?’

‘For the past three months, since we married.’

‘Where did we marry?’ It suddenly struck Sasha at that moment that, if not for the fact that this man had turned up to claim her after the accident, when apparently she’d been found wandering by the road in a disorientated state a day and night after being reported missing, he could be anyone.

He looked at her for such a long and assessing moment that she could feel heat creeping back into her cheeks but then he plucked a small sleek phone out of his pocket and tapped the screen and handed it to her. ‘We married in Athens in a civil ceremony.’

She looked at the screen of the phone. On it was a link to an official press release announcing their marriage with an accompanying picture. Sasha enlarged it. It was her. But it didn’t feel like her. She wore a knee-length floaty silk sleeveless dress, cut on the bias and slashed almost to the navel. Eye-wateringly high heels. Her hair was teased into big curls and she seemed to be wearing a lot of make-up. Gold jewellery. An enormous-looking diamond ring. She felt a rush of exposure and embarrassment when she looked at the picture. And then she looked down at her bare fingers. ‘Did I have rings?’

‘Yes. The doctors said you must have lost them in the accident.’

She looked at Apollo. ‘I hope they weren’t too valuable.’

He gave her a funny look. ‘Don’t worry, they were insured.’

Sasha looked back at the picture on the phone. She was clutching Apollo’s arm and beaming; however, her new husband looked anything but happy in the picture. The memory she had of him smiling had to be a figment of her imagination. A conjured-up image.

She skimmed the press release.

Apollo Vasilis, Greek construction tycoon, weds his English girlfriend Sasha Miller in a private civil ceremony.

The bare minimum of information. Sasha handed the phone back, feeling even more disorientated. A million questions buzzed in her head but she could feel a headache starting and the doctor had told her not to overdo things.

She looked out the window and saw glimpses of huge houses set in verdant grounds behind tall wrought-iron gates or massive walls. Clearly this was a wealthy area.