Deceptive Passion Read online

  Deceptive Passion by Sophie Weston

  The very last person Diana had expected to meet on a working holiday in Greece was her estranged husband! And Miles Tabard was everything she remembered — gorgeous, dynamic, sophisticated... But, since he'd walked out of her life two years ago, Diana had become a confident career-woman herself — and she had no intention of being seduced by his devastating charm a second time. The trouble was, Miles seemed determined to prove that the passion between them burned as strong as ever. So would history repeat itself, or could Diana really walk away...and would Miles let her?

  printed in Great Britain

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  All Rights Reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent

  purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain 1993 by Mills & Boon Limited

  © Sophie Weston 1993

  Australian copyright 1993

  Philippine copyright 1993

  This edition 1993

  ISBN 0 263 77968 8

  Set in Times Roman 10 on 111/2 pt.

  01-9304-54354 C

  CHAPTER ONE

  DIANA put her case down with a sigh. Athens airport at six o'clock in the morning contrived to be both bleak and busy. Everyone but herself seemed to have someone to meet them.

  Two years ago, she thought wryly, she would have been full of trepidation, arriving on her own. She would have been worried about finding the hired car and more than worried about driving in a foreign country to a destination she had never visited before. But that was two years ago. These days she could handle it all.

  She rapped sharply on the counter of the hire car kiosk to attract attention.

  `Yes?' said a bored clerk, emerging reluctantly.

  `Good morning,' said Diana pleasantly. You didn't, she had learned in these years on her own, go to war at once. It was something she had picked up from watching Max. `I believe you have a car for me.'

  `We're not open yet,' the clerk said, not listening.

  She stood a little straighter and said firmly, `A car to be ready on the arrival of the six o'clock plane from Hamburg. My name is Tabard. Mrs Tabard.'

  The clerk just managed not to shrug.

  `We open at eight.' He turned away.

  `Booked,' Diana said softly, having also learned from Max that quietness was more intimidating than the most determined ranting, 'by Count Galatas.'

  The clerk stopped dead. She saw with satisfaction that his shoulders twitched as if he'd taken an arrow between them. He turned back. She smiled at him.

  `Ah, yes,' he said. 'I have a note from the Count's office.'

  He disappeared briefly from view and reappeared with a set of car keys and a clipboard. He needed Mrs Tabard's signature, her passport, her driving licence and that was all. He shuffled the papers dextrously.

  Diana got out her American Express card only to find it waved away.

  `The car is to be charged to the Count's account with our head office,' the clerk said.

  He gave her an assessing look which Diana noted with some amusement. He wouldn't be used to visitors of the wealthy Galatas family arriving on tourist flights, she guessed. He was too well trained for it to show, however.

  `The car is a grey Citroen. It is in the car park. The Countess left a note—' he consulted his papers —which is in the glove compartment.'

  Diana stiffened. She had not expected a personal welcome. Still less had she expected a note from the Count's erratic sister. Susie Galatas was temperamental and unpredictable but she had shown a pretty consistent desire to avoid Diana in the past. Understandable in the circumstances, of course, Diana thought wryly, since Susie had never stopped wanting Miles Tabard.

  The clerk didn't appear to notice. He handed her papers back along with a keyring and a slip of paper with the registration number on it. 'The oil, water and tyres have been checked and the petrol tank is full. We ask that you return it in the same condition.' He gave her a sudden flashing smile. 'Have a wonderful holiday, Mrs Tabard. Welcome to Greece.'

  `Thank you,' murmured Diana, taken aback.

  She blinked. The magic of the name of the great, she thought, was something that she would never have believed without the experience of these last two years. She

  didn't really approve but there were times when it was useful. Times like now when she had come straight from a decaying eighteenth-century palace where she had worked non-stop through four strenuous, dusty days. A holiday would indeed be welcome.

  Not that she was likely to get one in Castle Galatas. The Count's secretary had been very clear: since they were old acquaintances, the Count would be grateful if Mrs Tabard would give him a preliminary estimate for some proposed renovations. Since they were old acquaintances, he hoped she would also be able to enjoy the hospitality of the castle for a few days' break as well. Which meant, as Diana well knew, that he expected the bill to reflect that old acquaintanceship. No matter that he and his sister had disapproved of her marriage to their childhood friend and had never taken much trouble to hide their coolness.

  So she gave him a slightly rueful smile which made the clerk blink in his turn. He found himself summoning a porter to take Mrs Tabard's single suitcase and guide her to the rental car.

  `That one,' he said to his colleague when they were out of sight, 'will give Susanna Galatas a run for her money if anyone can.'

  The girl who had just joined him looked after Diana Tabard's trim figure critically.

  But the Countess is very beautiful,' she observed. `And rich. And she has wonderful clothes.'

  `But that one,' said her mentor wisely, 'has eyes a man could drown in.'

  If Diana had heard him—or understood him—she would have been astonished. She thought of herself as very ordinary. Even these days when she knew she was more elegantly turned out than she used to be. It had been a matter of pride not to fall apart when Miles left.

  So she had spent a lot of time and as much money as she safely could on her appearance. On the whole she was pleased with the result. But she would never have believed that anyone thought her a worthy rival to the glamorous Countess Galatas.

  She tipped the porter and slid in behind the wheel of the car. It was new and spotless. Another tribute to the status of the brother and sister Galatas, thought Diana. She had driven enough hired cars these last two years to know that they normally showed the signs of a tough existence. This one, however, started smoothly at the first turn of the key and the engine was a whisper.

  Diana grinned as she went up through the tight new gears. Normally the gears were soapy and the engine chugged. If she had needed any proof of the power of the Galatas family name here it was. She hoped, she thought suddenly, that she was never on the wrong side of it.

  She hoped she was doing the right thing by coming here at all. She gave an odd, superstitious shiver. Only one way to find out!

  She let out the clutch on a long breath and moved gently forward into the dangerous fu
ture.

  The note in the glove compartment had proved to be a map. Susie had drawn it herself evidently. Diana turned it round several times and couldn't make head or tail of it. Perhaps the Countess had decided that the best way to avoid her brother's unwanted guest was to get her lost in southern Greece, Diana thought wryly. That would be very like her in Diana's experience. Miles, of course, would never hear a word against her.

  Diana had cast the map aside and hoped devoutly that she knew where she was going as well as she thought she did.

  Soon enough she got used to the car and found the large, clearly signposted road to Corinth. Ignoring Susie's instructions, Diana drove steadily south. Her eyes concentrated on the road. Her tired mind wandered.

  She had never come to the castle with Miles. They had meant to; even planned to that last year. But with the coming of autumn, when the schedule in the kitchen said, `Chris and Susie: Greece', she and Miles were in different continents. By that time they were no longer communicating except through solicitors. No longer, thought Diana painfully, even trying to pretend they had a marriage.

  The sun was getting high. She extracted sunglasses one-handed from her bag and pushed them up her small nose. The glare of the metalled road was blinding. She nearly missed the turning off the main highway. She braked sharply and swung off on to the side road she remembered from poring over the Greek road maps Miles had left behind. Soon she was passing as many mule-drawn carts as lorries.

  Miles, she remembered, always said the road to the Galatas castle was the last prehistoric route in Europe. So it must get tougher than this. Diana's mouth thinned. Miles had, nevertheless, negotiated whatever hazards the road presented without mishap from the day he got his driving licence. She wasn't going to do any less.

  She quelled the treacherous flicker of trepidation. If Miles could do it, she could. It was the principle that had got her through the last two years.

  Later, towards mid-morning, she looked at the petrol gauge. These last two years had taught her that on a road you didn't know you filled up whenever you could. She had never thought of that before. And Miles, of course, had never explained why he was putting petrol into a half-full tank. He had never explained why he was

  doing anything: he just did it. Silently, competently and, in the end, with a sizzling impatience that had kept Diana's nerves on the stretch for months, waiting for the final explosion.

  The garage came into view. She drove into it and got out, stretching. The sun was like a physical presence at her shoulder after the greyness of Hamburg and London. She explained to the proprietor what she wanted in her few words of careful Greek and sat at a table in the shade with a coffee while her instructions were carried out by a teenage boy in overalls.

  Diana closed her eyes, tilting her chair back until her head rested against the wall behind her. Miles, of course, had spoken fluent Greek. Well, he had been practically brought up by old Count Galatas after his parents split up. He and the old man's two grandchildren had more or less run wild at the castle in the school holidays from what she had gathered.

  Diana took off her dark glasses. Maybe that was when Miles had got his taste for danger. She remembered one story of Miles and Chris diving off the castle battlements into the sea. The old Count had made them apologise to the fishermen who had pulled them out—and who, Diana thought, the boys must have frightened into heart attacks. And he made them chop wood as a penance. Nothing much there to deter a repeat performance, Diana had said drily.

  Miles had been surprised.

  `Repeat? Why should we? We'd proved we could do it. It's boring to repeat things. They become a habit. Where's the fun in a habit?'

  Marriage, of course, had all too rapidly become a habit for Miles; one with no fun in it at all.

  In a way, thought Diana, she'd almost expected it. The brilliance, the restlessness, the sharp sense of him

  always being on the edge of danger—they had all made him seem very strange and somehow intimidating. Even when they were first married and she was so in love with him that she could tell when he walked into a room with a hundred people between them, she had never felt quite at ease with him. Not as a wife should with her husband, Diana thought now.

  There was a murmur at her elbow. She turned. It was the garage proprietor bearing a wooden tray with a glass of water, a smaller glass of some clear liquid and a dish of olives and little gobbets of fat bacon. He put it down and gestured, smiling.

  Diana guessed what it was. She raised the glass to her lips and the smell of aniseed hit her like a blow. Ouzo.

  Memory struck too, like a snake. Miles drank it every evening. A greeting to the night, he had said, laughing. Diana didn't like the taste much so she didn't usually join him. But later, when they kissed, it would still be there: the hint of aromatic heat and herbs that spoke of another country and all the foreign unguessable things in Miles's nature.

  He could have been standing there with his lop-sided mocking smile. She could not have been less shocked if she had turned and found him beside her.

  `This has got to stop,' Diana said to herself firmly.

  She threw the spirit down her throat quickly. Her eyes filled with tears—due, she assured herself, entirely to the strength of the ouzo. She finished the water, thanked the proprietor and paid her bill.

  She was not going to spend the rest of this, her first journey alone in Greece, with Miles as an invisible, mocking companion, she told herself. She had survived his departure. She was not going to fall apart now. She would put him out of her mind.

  It should be a reasonably straight route from now on. Diana set off again, with determined confidence.

  That confidence was hard won. She'd had none at all when she first met the Galatas family. It had been clear right from the start that any of Miles's friends who'd thought he might yet marry had had Susie Galatas picked out as the only candidate. He had been escorting her everywhere she wanted to go for fifteen years, and her brother was his best friend. And she was gorgeous. It would have been the ideal match—especially as Susie was wildly in love with him

  Or so they said. Susie herself denied it, of course. And Miles was very fond of her. Even after they were married he dropped everything whenever Susie rang, wanting to see him. It had been one of the first signs that all was not well with the marriage.

  So why me in the first place? Diana bit her lip unhappily.

  It always came back to that. It always had done, right from the first. She had never quite believed it. Miles was brilliant; to a modest history undergraduate he seemed utterly inaccessible.

  At thirty-six, he was the youngest professor by ten years in the university. All his female students were in love with him. He wasn't classically good-looking but he had the proud, intense air of a visionary—and, it must be admitted, the body of an athlete, Diana thought wryly. They had had reason enough for their crushes, those devoted students of his.

  Only she hadn't had a crush on him. She wasn't in his class and she had known him only by reputation. She had been overwhelmed with shyness when they were introduced. And after that first stammering exchange she had never expected to see him again.

  Miles had decided otherwise. He chased her relentlessly. Everyone noticed—most of them before Diana did. Even her elderly tutor had warned her uncomfortably—and at the time inexplicably—about the dangers of relationships between sophisticated older men and innocent young girls. And she had been, thought Diana, horribly innocent.

  She sighed, taking the car round a steeply sloped double bend with her new-won competence. Was it her innocence that had intrigued Miles? Had he always, in the private core of himself that he guarded from her, been secretly laughing at her naïve wonder?

  Because, for Diana, Miles had been a revelation. She had not even attempted to disguise it. It had amused him, she remembered that. In fact he was usually amused; amused, sure of himself, passionate in a way that Diana had never even dreamed of. Even now she blushed if she strayed into too expli
cit memories of the passion between them. And in the end he had been passionate in his unrelenting hostility, too.

  Diana's heart began to beat hard as she remembered those last terrible weeks. He had behaved as if she had betrayed him somehow. As if she had trapped him into marriage; as if she had set out to deceive him.

  In the end she'd decided that he must suddenly have realised that the image he'd had of her when they married—whatever it was—was wrong and blamed her for it. It was the only reasonable explanation. But it still didn't answer the question which still haunted her after all these months, the beginning and the end of the whole thing: why, in the first place, why me?

  The road forked. Without hesitation, Diana curved to the left. She had heard Miles talk about this road often enough. The steering-wheel was hot. Beyond the purring

  engine there was the heavy silence of the Mediterranean noon. Diana leaned forward.

  Slowly, as the car breasted the hill, the sea came into sight—a glimmer of silver between two heat-hazed hills ahead. The road became stones and then sand. It climbed and dipped and the sea, glimpsed between outcrops of rock, came closer. It was the colour of ink at the horizon, paling to silver at the edge of the rocks where it furled along the shore below. In the distance she could hear the rise and fall of the tide against the rocks.

  Diana sighed. Absolute peace, just as the Count's secretary had promised. No wonder Miles had loved it.

  She stopped the thought abruptly. Miles again. She would not be invaded like this. She set her mouth angrily. She was never going to see him again and she had to get used to it.

  The last she heard he was on the other side of the world, lecturing in Sydney. And for the next fortnight at least she was going to be here in Greece on a working holiday, to all intents and purposes alone. There would be the servants, of course. But Christos Galatas, or rather his shrewd secretary, had negotiated an undisturbed holiday as part of the package.