Deception and Desire Read Online Free Page B

certainly had Ari’s family – close-knit and almost claustrophobic in the way the unit was constructed, with Ari’s mother, the matriarch, ruling them all with a rod of iron – but it was Ari she wanted. It was for him, after all, that she had moved to a foreign land, a different culture. It was him she loved, him she wanted to be with.
    And then she had found out it wasn’t just ‘the boys’ that Ari was seeing when he stayed late in Kerkira. There was a woman too. Her name was Melina. And Maggie did not know what she was going to do about her.
    She stood for a moment with her head bowed. The knowledge that Ari had a lover was a constant weight on her heart; even when she was not actually thinking about it it was still there, an ache that refused to go away.
    Perhaps, she thought sometimes, she should confront him with it – tell him straight out that she knew. If this had been England, if Ari had been English, she felt quite certain she would have done just that. But it wasn’t England, it was Corfu, and Ari wasn’t English; in spite of having been educated and trained in England he was Corfiote through and through. It was four years now since she had first met him, almost three since he had married her and brought her home to Corfu, yet sometimes his foreignness made her feel she scarcely knew him at all.
    In spite of the temperature in the room, still pleasantly warm from the heat of the day, Maggie shivered. They had warned her, of course, everyone who knew anything about mixed marriages and a great many who knew nothing besides. They had pointed out the difficulties of the culture divide, drawn attention to the pitifully high failure-rate of marriages that tried to bridge it. She would be terribly homesick, they said. She would hate being part of a family unit so tight that they lived, if not all in the same house, then next door and next door and next door again, brothers and uncles and cousins, and all ruled over by the matriarch who would expect to have the last word on every aspect of family life, from the upbringing of the children to the menus for the traditional shared Sunday meals. And leaving all that aside, looking just at the man, he would be different to any man she had ever known, the way he thought and spoke and acted determined by a heritage that was totally, absolutely foreign to her. Oh yes, they had tried their hardest to dissuade her, those prophets of doom. And her mother had been the most gloomy of all.
    â€˜I’m sure it all seems very romantic, darling. Ari is incredibly handsome and Corfu is a beautiful island – so long as you keep away from the dreadful touristy places. But what will happen when the gilt comes off the gingerbread? And it will … it will!’
    She had said it all in that infuriatingly high-handed way of hers, her light and musical tone concealing her strong desire to domineer. It was as if she was so certain she was right that she simply could not believe that anyone, least of all one of her daughters, would go against her wishes. Maggie sometimes thought that if it had not been for her mother’s opposition she might not have rushed into marriage with Ari quite so speedily.
    The fact that she had gone against all advice, however, was one of the reasons she was so reluctant to admit defeat now, or, indeed, do or say anything that might bring matters to crisis point. She had married Ari and come to Corfu determined to make it work; her fierce pride refused to allow her even to consider the possibility of admitting that the prophets of doom had been right and she had been wrong.
    Maggie shivered again. She went through into the bedroom, dominated by the bed, with its headboard of dark wood and coverlet of woven cotton, which she shared with Ari, and fetched a light silk wrap, slipping it on over the swimsuit she practically lived in at this time of year. From the mirror in the heavy old wardrobe her reflection looked back