The Greek's Marriage Bargain. Sharon Kendrick
with had been a glossy pop-star. A woman with fame at her fingertips and a world who couldn’t get enough of her. Sexy Lexi the press used to call her and they hadn’t been wrong. Everyone had told him she was the last woman he should have married. That a woman like her was ill suited to a man with such fiercely traditional Greek values. Even when she had abandoned her singing career and tried to play the good wife with varying degrees of success, people had still regarded her with suspicion and subsequent events seemed to have proved them right.
Yet the Lexi who stood before him now was a low-key version of the woman who had turned heads whenever she’d walked down the street. The shiny red hair—her trademark look—had gone. She still wore it long, but now it was back to its natural colour; it hung over one shoulder in a thick plait of strawberry-blonde. Gone were the contact lenses she was always losing and, instead, her silvery-green eyes were accentuated by a pair of dark-rimmed spectacles. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her wearing glasses before and they made her look oddly serious and surprisingly sexy. The only jewellery she wore was a pair of silver earrings—heavy twists of metal which caught the light as she moved.
In faded jeans and a plain cotton shirt, her transformation couldn’t have been more dramatic and it was hard to reconcile this new sober image with the glittering woman he’d married. But with Lexi, what you saw wasn’t necessarily what you got. Of every woman he’d ever known—and there had been quite a few—she had depths like no other. Hidden, mercurial depths which had captivated him from the start.
‘You’ve changed,’ he said slowly.
She answered his scrutiny with a shrug, even though she could feel the inevitable sting of wounded pride. Because she had seen that look in his eyes and had known exactly what it meant. She had been judged and found wanting and even if it shouldn’t hurt, it did.
If she’d known he was coming she would have put on some make-up and changed out of her old jeans. She might have disagreed with such a plan on principle, but what woman wouldn’t have made an effort if she’d known she was about to come face-to-face with one of the most desirable men in the world?
‘Most people change, Xenon,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the few certainties in life.’ But she thought that, as usual, he had managed to buck the trend, because everything about him seemed exactly the same. The same thick black hair, which could never quite be tamed, no matter how expensive his barber. The same effortless elegance—easy when you had a body of muscular perfection which radiated easy power. He always wore a suit when he was in England and today was no different. His only concession to the warm summer day had been to ditch his tie and loosen the top two buttons of his shirt, but that made him look disturbingly accessible. And he wasn’t, she reminded herself. He definitely wasn’t.
She fixed him with an inquisitive look, knowing that she needed to get rid of him and as quickly as possible. ‘So are you going to tell me why you’re here?’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s my lucky day and you have got those divorce papers. Or are you still stalling?’
Xenon tensed, her flippant tone reminding him of the essential differences between them. Keep reminding yourself of those, he thought grimly. ‘I prefer to think of it as giving time for the dust to settle rather than stalling. You know my views on divorce, Lex,’ he said. ‘Half the problems in this world can be laid at the door of broken marriages.’
‘But when two people can’t live together—what’s the alternative?’ she questioned. ‘A life of misery with two people trapped in a relationship which has become a nightmare? Surely the world has moved on from that?’
He ignored that. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me to sit down?’ His gaze flickered around the cluttered room. ‘To offer me some coffee and show me a little hospitality? Black mark for you, Lex. Have you forgotten all the things you learnt as my wife? Was all my tuition wasted?’
It was a dig at her background. She knew that. He was attacking her where she was at her most vulnerable—a position from which she could never fight back. But today she wasn’t going to take the bait because nobody could help where they came from. The only thing which mattered was the person they had become. And she had become a person who was no longer dazzled by the Greek billionaire’s arrogance or impeccable background.
‘I certainly haven’t forgotten your high-handedness and sense of privilege,’ she said coolly. ‘But since you’re clearly not going anywhere, we might as well do this with a degree of civility. Even if we both know it’s only a veneer.’
‘Oh, Lex,’ he murmured. ‘What a cynic you have become.’
‘I learnt from the very best,’ she retorted, leaving him standing in the middle of her sitting room as she went out into the kitchen to make coffee.
Her fingers were trembling as she boiled the kettle and spooned coffee into a pot. Why had he turned up now, when she’d just about got her life back on track? When she’d seen—if not exactly a light at the end of the tunnel—at least some hint that the world didn’t have to stay black and miserable for ever.
It hadn’t been easy, going from being a famous pop-star to wife of a global magnate—and then back to relative obscurity again. Sometimes her life seemed to have had more transitions than a quick-change artist. The failure of her marriage had been almost unbearably painful at times, but she had come through it. She had survived.
But now it all came rushing back. The pain and the fear. The look on Xenon’s face when he’d finally arrived at the hospital with eyes like stone, when she’d lost her baby. The second pregnancy she had failed to carry. When she’d discovered just how unbearably painful a late miscarriage could be. The memory was so overwhelming that for a moment Lexi had to lean over the sink, sucking in several deep breaths of air until she’d composed herself enough to go back into the sitting room.
She set the tray down. He was sitting in a chair which seemed too small for him and his brooding figure seemed to dominate the room.
‘So,’ she said, handing him a cup. But she didn’t sit down and join him. She didn’t want to do anything remotely intimate because that was fraught with danger. She perched her bottom on the window sill, thinking that looking down on him from a height might give her something of a psychological advantage.
‘So,’ he echoed. Pushing aside a pile of brochures which were piled up on the coffee table, he put his cup down and looked around. ‘This is a bit of a fall from grace, isn’t it?’
She knew it was stupid to react but, even so, Lexi couldn’t stop herself from bristling with indignation. ‘This is my home and I love it,’ she said. ‘At least I can close the door at the end of the day and know that I’ll find peace inside.’
‘But it is small. Surprisingly small.’ He fixed his gaze on two goldfish which were swimming round and round in a bowl. Goldfish? Since when did his wife start keeping fish? He frowned. ‘I realise that no alimony has been finalised—’
‘And I’ve told you that I don’t need your money!’
‘Which is clearly not true if you’re having to live like this.’
‘I like living like this!’
‘Do you? Yet you walked away from a life where you had homes all over the world—beautiful homes?’
‘They were your homes, Xenon, not mine.’
‘And now they tell me you are working as a jewellery designer?’
‘They?’ Lexi raised her eyebrows. ‘No need to ask how you found that out. I suppose you hired some private investigator to spy on me.’
‘I don’t consider finding out a few basic facts about my wife to be “spying”,’ he answered. ‘I’m just intrigued by the life you’ve chosen. You earned a fortune when you were with the band. What’s happened to all the money?’
She sucked in a breath, tempted to tell him to mind his own business. Because it wasn’t his business and he had no right delving into it. But Lexi knew how persistent he could be. How he liked the