Hot Nights with a Greek
The Greek’s Forced Bride
Michelle Reid
Powerful Greek, Unworldly Wife
Sarah Morgan
The Diakos Baby Scandal
Natalie Rivers

www.millsandboon.co.uk

The Greek’s Forced Bride

About the Author

MICHELLE REID grew up on the southern edges of Manchester, the youngest in a family of five lively children. But now she lives in the beautiful county of Cheshire, with her busy executive husband and two grown-up daughters. She loves reading, the ballet, and playing tennis when she gets the chance. She hates cooking, cleaning, and despises ironing! Sleep she can do without, and produces some of her best written work during the early hours of the morning.

CHAPTER ONE

LOUNGING in his chair at the head of the boardroom table, Leo Christakis, thirty-four-year old human dynamo and absolute head of the Christakis business empire, held the room in a state of near-rigid tension by the sheer power of his silence.

No one dared to move. All dossiers resting on the long polished table top remained firmly closed. Except for the folder flung open in front of Leo. And as five minutes edged with agonising slowness towards ten, even the act of breathing in and out became a difficult exercise and not one of those present had the nerve to utter so much as a sound.

For Leo’s outwardly relaxed posture was dangerously deceptive, as was the gentle way he was tapping his neatly clipped fingernails on the polished surface as he continued to read. And anyone—anyone daring to think that the sensual shape of his mouth was relaxed in a smile needed a quick lesson in the difference between a smile and a sneer.

Leo knew the damn difference. He also knew that the nasty stuff was about to hit the fan. For someone around here had pulled a fast one with company money and what made him really angry was that the fiddle was so badly put together anyone with a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic could spot it a mile away. Leo did not employ incompetents. Therefore the list of employees who might just dare to believe they could get away with ripping him off like this could be shortlisted to one.

Rico, his vain and shallow, gut-selfish stepbrother, and the only person employed by this company to earn his place in it by favour alone.

Family, in other words.

Damn, Leo cursed within the depths of his own angry thinking. What the hell gave Rico the idea he could get away with this? It was well known throughout this global organisation that each branch was hit regularly by random internal audits for the specific purpose of deterring anyone from trying a stunt like this. It was the only way a multinational the size of this one could hope to maintain control!

The arrogant fool. Was it not enough that he was paid a handsome salary for doing almost nothing around here? Where did he get off believing he could dip his greedy fingers in the pot for more?

‘Where is he?’ Leo demanded, bringing half a dozen heads shooting up at the sudden sound of his voice.

‘In his office,’ Juno, his London based PA quickly responded. ‘He was informed about this meeting, Leo,’ the younger man added in case Leo was living with the mistaken belief that Rico had not been told to attend.

Leo did not doubt it, just as he did not doubt that everyone sitting around this table believed that Rico was about to receive his just desserts. His stepbrother was a freeloader. It went without saying that the people who worked hard for their living did not like freeloaders. And all it took was for him to lift his dark head with its hard, chiselled bone structure, which would have been stunningly perfect if it weren’t for the bump in the middle of his slender nose—put there by a football boot when he was in his teens—and scan with his rich, dark velvet brown eyes half a dozen carefully guarded expressions to have that last thought confirmed.

Theos. There was little hope of him managing to pull off a cover-up with so many people in the know and silently baying for Rico’s blood, he concluded as he hid his eyes again beneath the thick curl of his eyelashes.

Did he want to cover up for Rico? The question flicked at the muscle that lined his defined jawbone because Leo knew the answer was yes, he did prefer to affect a cover-up than to deal with the alternative.

A thief in the family.

Fresh anger surged. With it came a grim flick of one hand to shut the folder before he rose to his feet, long legs thrusting him up to his full and intimidating six feet four inches immaculately encased in a smooth dark pinstripe suit.

Juno also jumped up. ‘I will go and—’

‘No, you will not,’ Leo said in tightly accented English. ‘I will go and get him myself.’

Everyone else shifted tensely as Juno sank down in his seat again. If Leo had been in the mood to notice, he would have seen the wave of swift, telling glances that shifted around the table, but he was in no frame of mind to want to notice anything else as he stepped around his chair and strode out through the door without bothering to spare anyone another glance.

Just as he didn’t bother to look sideways as he strode across the plush hushed executive foyer belonging to the Christakis London offices. If he had happened to glance to the side, then he would have seen the lift doors were about to open—but he didn’t.

He was too busy cursing the sudden heart attack that took his beloved father from him two years ago, leaving him with the miserable task of babysitting the two most irritating people it had been his misfortune to know—his high-strung Italian stepmother, Angelina, and her precious son, Rico Giannetti.

Ah, someone save me from smooth, handsome playboys and hypersensitive stepmothers anxiously besotted with their beautiful sons, he thought heavily. Family loyalty was the pits, and the day that Rico’s ever-looming marriage took place and he took his life and his gullible new wife back to his native Milan to live with Angelina, could not come soon enough for Leo.

If he could get Rico out of this mess without compromising his own reputation and standing in this company that was, or Rico would not be going anywhere but a prison cell.

A sigh hurt his chest as Leo chose to suppress it, the knowledge that he was already looking for a way out for Rico scraping the sides of his pride in contempt.

What was Natasha going to do if she found out she was about to marry a thief?

Though why the hell his stepbrother had chosen to marry Miss Cool and Prim Natasha Moyles was a mystery to Leo. She was not the nubile celebrity stick-like variety of female Rico usually turned on for. In fact, she lived inside a pretty much perfect long-legged and curvy hourglass shape she ruined by hiding it with her lousy dress sense. She was also cold and polite and irritatingly standoffish—around Leo anyway.

So why Natasha had fallen in love with a life-wasting playboy like Rico was just another puzzle Leo could not work out. The attraction of opposites? Did the cool and prim disguise fall apart around Rico?

Perhaps she became a bodice-ripping sex goddess in the bedroom, because she sure had the potential to be a raging sex goddess with her soft feminine features and her wide-spaced, too-blue eyes and that lush, sexy mouth she could not disguise, which just begged to be kissed out of its—

Theos, Leo cursed yet again as something familiarly hot gave a tug low down in his gut to remind how Natasha Moyles’s mouth could affect him—while behind him the object of his thoughts walked out of the lift only to pull to a shuddering halt when she caught sight of his instantly recognisable, tall, dark suited shape striding into the corridor across the other side of the foyer.

Natasha’s heart did a funny little squirm in her chest and for a moment she actually considered giving in to the sudden urge to leap back into the lift and come back to see Rico later when his stepbrother wasn’t about.

She did not like Leo Christakis. He had an uncomfortable way of always making her feel tense and edgy with his hard-nosed, worldly arrogance and his soft, smooth sarcasms that always managed to make such accurate swipes at just about every insecurity she possessed.

Did he think she never noticed the sardonic little smile he always wore on his mouth whenever he was given an opportunity to run his eyes over her? Did he think it was great fun to make her freeze with agonising self-consciousness because she knew he was mocking the way she preferred to hide her curves rather than put them on show like the other women that circled his wonderful self?

Not that it mattered what Leo Christakis thought about her, Natasha then told herself quickly, while refusing to acknowledge the way her eyes continued to cling to him, or that one of her hands was nervously slotting a loose golden strand of hair back to her neatly pinned knot and the other hand clutched her little black purse to the front of her pale blue suit as if the purse acted like a piece of body armour meant to keep him at bay.

She wasn’t here to see him. He was just the arrogant, self-important, overbearing stepbrother of the man she was supposed to be marrying in six weeks. And unless Rico had some very good answers to the accusations she was about to fire at him, then there wasn’t going to be a wedding!

Natasha felt herself go pale as she recalled the scene some kind person had relayed to her mobile phone this morning. Why did some people take pleasure in sending another person images of their fiancé locked in the arms of another woman? Did they think that because she was attached to the pop-music industry she couldn’t possibly have feelings to wound?

Well, look at me now, Natasha thought bleakly as she dragged her eyes away from Leo to stare at the way her trembling fingers were gripping her purse. I’m not just wounded, I’m dying! Or her love for Rico was dying, she revised bleakly. Because this was it, the final straw, the last time she was going to turn blind eyes and deaf ears to the rumours about his cheating on her.

It was time for a showdown.

Pale lips pressed together now, eyes fixed on the expanse of grey carpet spread out in front of her, Natasha set herself walking across the foyer and into the corridor that led the way to Rico’s office in the now-forgotten wake of Leo Christakis.

The door was shut tight into its housing. Leo didn’t bother to knock on it before he twisted the handles and threw it open wide, then took a long step forwards, ready to give Rico Giannetti hell—only to find himself freezing at the sight that met his flashing dark gaze.

For the next few numbing seconds Leo actually found himself wondering if he was dreaming what he was seeing. It was so difficult to believe that even Rico could be this crass! For standing there in front of his desk was his handsome stepbrother with his trousers pooled round his ankles and a pair of slender female legs wrapped around his waist. The very air in the room seethed with gasps as Rico’s tight and tanned backside thrust forwards and backwards while soft groans emitted from the naked and not-so-prim female spread out on the top of the desk.

Clothes were scattered all over the place. The smell of sex was strong and thick. The very floor beneath Leo’s feet vibrated to Rico’s urgent gyrations.

‘What the hell—?’ Leo raked out in a blistering explosion of grinding disgust at the precise moment that an entirely separate sound hit him from behind and had him wheeling about.

He found himself staring into the shock-frozen face of Rico’s fiancée. Confusion locked onto his hard golden features because he had believed the blonde ranging about on the desk must be her!

‘Natasha?’ he ground out in a surprise-driven rasp.

But Natasha didn’t hear him. She was too busy seeing her worst nightmare confirmed by the two people who were beginning to realise they were no longer alone. As she watched as if from a strange place somewhere way off in the distance she saw Rico’s handsome dark head lift up and turn. Sickness clawed at the walls of her stomach as his heavy-lidded, passion-glazed eyes connected with hers.

Then the woman moved, dragging Natasha’s gaze sideways as a blonde head with a pair of blue eyes lifted up to peer around Rico’s blocking frame. The two women looked at each other—that was all—just looked.

‘Who the—?’ Leo spun back the other way to discover that the two lovers were now aware of their presence.

The woman was trying to untangle herself, levering herself up on an elbow as she pushed at Rico’s bared chest with a slender hand. Shifting his eyes to her, Leo felt true hell arrive as the full horror of what they were witnessing slammed like a truck into his face.

Cindy, Natasha’s sister. Two blondes with blue eyes and an age gap that made Cindy seem still just a kid.

His stomach revolted. He swung back to Natasha, but Natasha was no longer standing behind him. Her tense long-legged curvy shape in its stiff pale blue suit was already halfway back down the corridor, making as fast as she could for the lift.

Anger on her behalf roaring up inside him, Leo twisted back to the two guilty lovers. The serious questions Rico should be answering suddenly flew right out of his head. ‘You are finished with me, Rico,’ he raked out at the younger man. ‘Get your clothes on and get the hell out of my building before I have you thrown out—and take the slut with you!’

Then he walked out, pulling the door shut behind him before taking off after Natasha at a run and feeling an odd sense of disorientating empowerment now that Rico had given him just cause to kick him right out of his life.

The lift doors closed before he got there. Cursing through his clenched teeth, Leo turned and headed for the stairs. One flight down and the single lift up to the top floor became three lifts, which fed the whole building. Glancing up to note that Natasha was going down to the basement just before he strode inside another lift, he hit the button that would take him to the same place.

His insides were shaking. All of him was pumped up and pulsing because—Theos, sex did that to you. Even when what you’d seen sickened and disgusted, it still had a nasty way of playing its song in your blood.

Striding out of the lift, Leo paused to look around the basement car park. Natasha’s Mini stood out like a shiny red stain in a murky world of fashionable silver and black. He saw her then. She was leaning heavily on the car and her shoulders were heaving. He thought she was weeping but as he approached her he realised that she was being violently sick.

‘It’s OK….’ he muttered for some stupid reason because nothing could be less OK, and he placed his hands on her shoulders.

‘Don’t touch me!’ She jerked away from him.

Offence hit Leo full on his chiselled chin. ‘I am not Rico!’ he raked back in sheer reaction. ‘Just as you are not your slut of a sister—!’

She turned and slapped him hard on the face.

The stinging slap rang around the basement as Leo rocked back on his heels in surprise. Natasha was quivering all over, nothing going on inside her burning brain but the remains of that searing surge of violence that had made her turn and lash out. She had never done anything like it before, not in her entire life!

Then she was suddenly having to reel away and double up to retch again, while sobbing and shaking and clutching at the car’s bodywork with fingernails that scraped the shiny red paint.

Rico with Cindy—how could he?

How could she?

A pair of long fingered hands dared to take hold of her shoulders again. She didn’t pull away, but just sagged like a quivering sack into his grasp as the final dregs of her stomach contents landed only inches away from her low-heeled black shoes. By the time it was over she could barely stand upright.

Grim lips pressed together, Leo continued to hold her while she found a tissue in her jacket pocket and used it to wipe her mouth. Beneath the grip of his fingers he could feel her trembling. Her head was bowed, exposing the long, slender whiteness of her nape. That hot sensation flicked at his insides again and he looked away from her, flashing an angry look around the car park like a man being hunted by an invisible quarry and wondering what the hell he was going to do next.

She was not his problem, one part of his brain tried telling him. He had a meeting to chair and a serious financial discrepancy to deal with, plus a dozen or so other points of business to get through before he flew back to Athens this evening and…

A man suddenly appeared from the lurking shadows where the security offices were situated in a corner of the basement. It was Rasmus, his security chief, eyeing them curiously. Leo dismissed him with a frowning shake of his dark head that sent the other man melting back into the shadows again.

His next thought was to coax Natasha back into the lift and take her up to his own office suite to recover. But he could not guarantee that he could get her in there without someone—Rico or her sister—seeing them and starting up another ugly scene.

‘OK now?’ he dared to question once her trembling started to ease a little.

She managed a single nod. ‘Yes. Thank you,’ she whispered.

‘This is not a moment for polite manners, Natasha,’ he responded impatiently.

Natasha jerked away from him, hating him like poison for being here and witnessing her complete downfall like this. Receiving picture evidence that Rico was cheating on her was one thing, but to actually see him doing it with her own sister was absolutely something else.

Just thinking about it had fresh nausea trying to take a grip on her stomach. Working desperately to control it, Natasha fumbled in her bag for her car keys, then turned to unlock the Mini so she could reach inside it for the bottle of water she always kept in there. She wanted to dive into the car and just drive away from it all, but she knew she didn’t have it in her yet to drive herself anywhere. She was still too shaken up, too sick and dizzy with horror and shock.

As she straightened up again she had to step around the mess she had ejected onto the ground. He didn’t move a single inch so she brushed against him in an effort to gain herself some space. It was like brushing against barbed wire, she likened as a hot-rod prickle scraped down through her body and forced her to wilt backwards with a tremor of flayed senses against the side of the car.

Keeping her eyes lowered and away from Leo, she twisted the cap off the bottle of water and put it to her unsteady lips so she could take a couple of careful sips. Her heart was pounding in her head and her throat felt so thick it struggled to swallow. And he continued to stand there like some looming dark shadow, killing her ability to think and making her feel the insignificance of her own diminutive five feet six inches next to his overpowering height.

But that was the great and gloriously important Leo Christakis, she mused dismally—a big, tough, overpowering entity with a repertoire in sardonic looks and blunt comments that could shrivel a lesser person to pulp, and a brain that functioned for only one thing—making money. Even as she stood here refusing to look at him she could feel him fighting the urge to glance at his watch, because he must have more important things to do with his time than to stand here wasting it on her.

‘I’ll be all r-right in a minute,’ she managed. ‘You can go back to work now.’

She’d said that as if she believed work was the only thing he lived for, Leo picked up. His chiselled chin jutted. Natasha Moyles always had a unique way of antagonising him with her polite, withdrawn manner or her swift, cool glances that dismissed him as if he were nothing worthy of her regard. She’d been doing it to him from the first time they were introduced at his stepbrother’s London apartment.

Leo thrust his clenched hands into his trouser pockets, pushing back the flaps of his dark pinstripe jacket to reveal the pristine white front to his handmade shirt. She shifted jerkily as if the action threatened her somehow and he was suddenly made acutely aware of his own long, muscled torso and taut, bronzed skin. Even the layer of hair that covered his chest prickled.

‘Take some more sips at the water and stop trying to outguess what I might be thinking,’ he advised coolly, not liking these sensations that kept on attacking him.

‘I wasn’t trying to—’

‘You were,’ he interrupted, adding curtly, ‘You might dislike me intensely, Natasha, but allow me a bit more sensitivity than to desert you here after what you have just witnessed.’

But he did not possess quite enough sensitivity to hold back from reminding her of it! Natasha noted as the whole sickening horror of what she had seen sucked her right back in. Her inner world began to sway dizzily, the groan she must have uttered bringing his fingers back up to clasp her arms. She wanted to shrug him off, but she found that she couldn’t. She needed his support because she had a horrible feeling that without it she was going to sink into a great dark hole in the ground.

An eerie-sounding beep suddenly echoed through the car park. It was the executive lift being called back up the building to pick up new passengers. Leo bit out a curse at the same time that Natasha’s head shot up to stare at him, her wide, blue eyes clashing full on with his dark brown eyes. For a long moment neither of them moved as they stood trapped by a strange kind of energy that shimmered its way through Natasha’s body right down to her toes.

Theos, she’s beautiful, Leo heard himself think.

She made a sudden dive towards her open car door. Moving like lightning, Leo managed to get there before her, one set of fingers closing around her slender wrist to hold her back while he closed the car door, then took the keys from her hand.

‘W-what—?’

Her stammered half-question was cut short by a man used to making snap decisions. Leo turned and all but frogmarched her across the basement to where his own low sleek black car was parked.

‘I can drive myself!’ she protested when she realised what he was doing.

‘No, you cannot.’

‘But—’

‘That could be Rico about to walk out of the lift,’ he turned on her forcefully. ‘So make your mind up, Natasha, which one of us would you prefer to be with right now!’

So very brutal in its delivery. Natasha’s mind flooded yet again with what she had witnessed upstairs and she turned into a block of ice.

Opening the car door, Leo propelled her inside. She went without protest, accidentally dropping the water bottle as she did. Jaw set like a vice now, Leo closed the door as, like a man born with special mental powers, Rasmus reappeared not far away. Leo tossed her keys at him and didn’t need to issue instructions. His security chief just slunk away again, knowing exactly what was expected of him.

Ignoring the fallen water bottle, Leo strode around the car and got in behind the wheel. She was huddled in the passenger seat, staring down at her two hands where they knotted together on the top of her little black purse and she was shivering like crazy now as the classic reaction to shock well and truly set in.

Pinning his lips together, Leo switched on the engine and thrust it into gear, then sent the car flying towards the exit on an ear-shattering screech of tires. They hit daylight and the early afternoon traffic in a seething atmosphere of emotional stress. A minute later his in-car telephone system burst into life, the screen on his dashboard flashing up Rico’s name. A choice phrase locked in the back of his throat and he flicked a switch on the steering wheel that shut the phone down.

Ten seconds later and Natasha’s phone started to ring inside her bag.

‘Ignore it,’ he gritted.

‘Do you think I am stupid?’ she choked out.

Then they both sat there in thick, throbbing silence, listening to her phone ring until her voicemail took over the call. Her phone kept on ringing repeatedly as they travelled across London with the two of them sitting there like waxwork dummies waiting for her voicemail to keep doing its thing while anger pumped adrenalin into Leo’s bloodstream making his fingers grip the steering wheel too tight.

Neither spoke a word to each other. He didn’t know what to say if it did not include a string of obscenities that would probably make this woman blanch.

Natasha, on the other hand, had closed herself off inside a cold little world filled with reruns of what she had witnessed. She knew that her sister’s behaviour was out of control, but she’d never thought Cindy would sink so low as to…

She had to swallow to stop the bile from rising again as she replayed the moment when Cindy had seen her standing in the door. She saw the look of triumph hit her sister’s face followed by the oh-so-familiar pout of defiance that revealed the truth as to why she was doing that with Rico.

Cindy didn’t really want him. She did not even like him that much, but she could not stand the thought that Natasha had anything she hadn’t first tried out for herself.

Selfish to the last drop of blood, Natasha thought painfully. Spoiled by two parents who liked to believe their youngest daughter was the most gifted creature living on this earth. She was prettier than Natasha, more outward-going than Natasha. Funnier and livelier and so much more talented than Natasha ever could or wanted to be.

Blessed, their parents called it, because Cindy could sing like a bird and she was the latest pop discovery promising to set the UK alight. After a short stint on a national TV singing competition, Cindy’s was the face that everyone recognised while Natasha stood in the background like a shadow. The quiet one, the invisible one whose job it was to make sure everything ran smoothly in her talented sister’s wonderful life.

Why had she allowed it to happen? she asked herself now when it all felt so ugly. Why had she agreed to put her own life on hold and be drawn into playing babysitter to a self-seeking, spoiled brat who’d always resented having an older sister to share anything with?

Because she’d known their ageing parents couldn’t cope with Cindy. Because from the moment that Cindy’s singing talents had been discovered she’d realised that someone had to attempt to keep her from going right off the egotistic rails.

And, face it, Natasha. At first you were excited about being part of Cindy’s fabulous life.

Cindy, of course, resented her being there. Riding on her coat-tails, she’d called it. Natasha was unaware that she’d said it out loud until Leo flicked a gruff-toned, ‘Did you say something?’

‘No,’ she mumbled—but it was exactly what she’d let herself become: a pathetic hanger-on riding on the coat-tails of her sister’s glorious popularity.

Meeting Rico had been like rediscovering that she was a real person in her own right. She’d stupidly let herself believe he had actually fallen in love with her in her own right and not just because of whom she was attached to.

What a joke, she thought now. What a sick, rotten joke.

Rico with Cindy…

Hurt tears scalded the back of her throat.

Rico doing with Cindy what he had always held back from doing with her…

‘Oh,’ a thick whimper escaped.

‘OK?’ the man beside her shot out.

Of course I’m not OK! Natasha wanted to screech at him. I’ve just witnessed my fiancé bonking the brains out of my sister!

‘Yes,’ she breathed out.

Leo brought his teeth together with a steel-edged slice. He flashed her a quick glance to find that she was still sitting there with her head dipped and her slender white fingers knotted together on top of her bag.

Had Rico ever taken this woman across his desk the way he’d been having her sister?

As if she could hear what he was thinking, her chin lifted upwards in an oddly proud gesture, her blue eyes staring directly in front. She possessed the flawless profile of a chaste Madonna, Leo found himself thinking. But when he dropped his eyes to her mouth, he was reminded that it was no chaste Madonna’s mouth. It was a soft, very lush, very sexy mouth with a short, vulnerable upper lip and a fuller lower lip that just begged to be—

That sudden burn grabbed hold of him right where it shouldn’t—residue from what had happened to him as he’d travelled down in the lift, he stubbornly informed himself.

But it wasn’t, and he knew it. He had been fighting a hot sexual curiosity about Natasha Moyles from the first time he’d met her at her and Rico’s betrothal party. Her sister had been there, claiming centre stage and wowing everyone with her shimmering star quality, wearing a flimsy flesh-coloured dress exclusively designed for her to show off her stem-like figure and her big hairstyle that floated all around her exquisite face, accentuating her sparkling baby-blue eyes.

This sister had worn classic black. It had shocked him at the time because it was supposed to be Natasha’s party yet she’d chosen to wear the colour of mourning. He remembered remarking on it to her at the time.

One of his shoulders gave a small shrug. Maybe he should not have made the comment. Maybe he should have kept his sardonic opinion to himself, because if he had done it to get a rise out of her, then he’d certainly got one—of buttoned-lipped, cold-eyed ice.

They’d exchanged barely a civil word since then.

So, she’d taken an instant dislike to him, Leo acknowledged with a grimace that wavered towards wry. Natasha didn’t like tall, dark Greeks with a blunt, outspoken manner. He didn’t like loud pop-chicks with stick figures and big hair.

He preferred his woman with more softness and shape.

Rico didn’t.

Natasha had both.

Leo frowned as he drove them across the river. So what the hell had Rico been doing with Natasha, then? Had the stupid fool started out by playing a game with one sister to get him access to the other one, only to find he’d got himself embroiled too deep? Natasha wasn’t the type you messed around with. She just would not understand. Had his bone-selfish stepbrother discovered a conscience somewhere between hitting on Natasha and asking her to marry him within a few weeks?

If so, the bad conscience had not stretched far enough to make him leave the other sister alone, he mused grimly as he shot them through a set of lights on amber and spun the car into a screeching left turn.

‘Where are you going?’ Natasha burst out sharply.

‘My place,’ he answered.

‘But I don’t want—’

‘You prefer it if I drop you off at your apartment?’ Leo flicked at her. ‘You prefer to sit nice and neat on a chair with the bag on your lap waiting for them to appear and beg you to forgive?’

His English was failing, Leo noticed—but not enough to mask the sarcasm from his voice that managed to shock even him.

‘No,’ she quivered out.

‘Because they will appear,’ he persisted nonetheless. ‘She needs you to keep her life running smoothly while she struts about playing the pop-chick with angst. And Rico needs you to keep his mama happy because Angelina likes you, and she sees you as her precious boy’s saviour from a life of wild women and booze.’

Was that it? Had Rico been using her to appease his old-fashioned mother who’d taken a liking to her on sight? Natasha felt hot tears fill her eyes as she replayed the relieved smile Angelina had sent her when they’d happened to bump into her at a restaurant one night. ‘Such a nice girl,’ Angelina had said later.

Was that the moment when Rico decided that it might be a good idea to make her his wife? He’d asked her to marry him only a few days later. Like a fully paid-up idiot, she had jumped at the chance. They’d barely shared a proper kiss by then!

And no wonder. She wasn’t Rico’s type, she was his mother’s type. Cindy was Rico’s type.

Her heart hurt as she stared out of the car window. Beside her, Leo felt the truth hit him hard in the gut.

He had his answer as to what had made Rico want to marry this sister while lusting after the other one. He was keeping his mother happy because Angelina had been making stern warning noises about his lifestyle and Rico saw his loving mama as his main artery source to the Christakis coffers—next to Leo himself, of course.

Which made Natasha Rico’s love stooge as much as Leo was his family stooge. From the day eight years ago when his father had brought Angelina home as his new bride with her eighteen-year-old son in tow, Leo’s life had become round after round of making Rico feel part of the family because Angelina was so hypersensitive to the differences between the two sons. And his father would do anything to keep Angelina happy and content. When Lukas died so suddenly, Leo continued to keep Angelina, via Rico, happy because she’d been so clearly in love with his father and naturally devastated by his death.

Well, not any longer, he vowed heavily. It was time for both Angelina and Rico to take control of their own lives. He was sick and tired of sorting out their problems.

And that included the money Rico had stolen from him, Leo determined, a black frown bringing his eyebrows together across the top of his nose because he’d allowed himself to forget the reason he’d gone into Rico’s office in the first place.

Natasha was yet another of Rico’s problems, he recognised, winging another swift, frowning glance her way. She was sitting there with her face turned the colour of parchment, looking as if she might be going to throw up in his car.

What, this woman? he then cruelly mocked. This ultra-composed creature would rather choke on her own bile than to allow herself to do anything so crass as to throw up on his Moroccan tan leather.

Which then brought back the question—what had such a dignified thing seen in a shallow piece of manhood like Rico?

Fresh anger tried to rip a hole in his chest.

‘Think about it,’ he gritted, wishing he could keep his mouth shut, but finding out he could not. ‘They are more suited to each other than you and Rico. He famously likes them like your sister—surely you must have known that, heard some of his history with women? He’s been playing the high-rolling playboy right across fashionable Europe for long enough. Did you never stop to ask yourself what it was he actually saw in you that made you stand out from the flock?’

The hurt tears gathered all the stronger at his ruthless barrage. Feeling as if she’d just been knocked over by a bus then kicked for daring to let it happen, ‘I thought he loved me,’ Natasha managed to push out.

‘Which is why he was enjoying your sister over his desk when he should have been attending my board meeting, defending himself.’

‘Defending?’ she picked up.

Leo didn’t answer. Clamping his lips together, he climbed out of the car, annoyed with himself for wanting to beat her up for Rico’s sins. Rounding the car bonnet, he opened her door, then reached in to take hold of one of her wrists so he could tug her out, even though he knew she didn’t want to get out. Her phone started ringing again, distracting her long enough for him to get her into his house.

He pulled her into the living room and pushed her down into a chair then strode off to the drinks cabinet to pour her a stiff drink.

His hands were trembling, he noticed, and frowned as he splashed neat brandy into a glass. When he walked back to Natasha, he saw that she was sitting on the edge of the chair, all neat and prim with the bag on her lap as he’d predicted she would do.

Fresh anger ripped at him. ‘Here.’ He handed her the glass. ‘Drink that, it might help to loosen you up a bit.’

What happened next came without any warning at all that he was about to receive his just desserts when Natasha shot to her feet and launched the full contents of the glass at his face.

‘W-who do you think you are, Mr Christakis, to dare to think you can be this horrid to me?’ she fired up. ‘Listening to you, anyone would be f-forgiven for thinking that it had been you who’d been betrayed back there! Or is that it?’ she then shot out. ‘Are you being this downright nasty to me because you wished it had been you doing that with my sister instead of Rico—is that what your foul temper is about?’

Standing there with brandy dripping down his hard golden cheekbones, Leo Christakis, the dynamic and cut-throat head of one of the biggest companies in the world, heard himself utter…

‘No. I wished it had been you with me.’

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE thick, thrumming silence that followed that mind-numbing declaration, Natasha stared up at Leo’s liquor-drenched face—and wished that the brandy were still in the glass so she could toss it at him again!

‘H-how dare you?’ she shook out in tremulous indignation, eyes like sparkling blue diamonds darkening to sultry sapphires as the tears filled them up. ‘Don’t you think I’ve been h-humiliated enough without you poking fun at me as if it’s all been just a jolly good joke?’

‘No joke,’ Leo heard himself utter, then grimaced at the full, raw truth in his answer. There was definitely no joke to find anywhere in the way he had been quietly lusting after Natasha for weeks.

No, the real joke here was in hearing himself actually admit to it.

Turning his back on her, Leo dug a hand into his jacket pocket to retrieve the never-used handkerchief his various housekeepers always insisted on placing in his suits. Wiping the brandy from his face, he flicked a glance at the way Natasha was standing there in her neat blue suit and her sensible heeled shoes but with her very expressive eyes now blackened by shock.

‘You have a strange idea about men, Natasha, if you believe that the scraped-back hair and the buttoned-up clothes stop them from being curious about what it is you are attempting to hide.’

She blinked at him.

Leo laughed—oddly.

‘We don’t all go for anorexic pop-stars barely out of the schoolroom,’ he explained helpfully. ‘Some men even like a challenge in a woman instead of seeing it all hanging out and handed to us on a plate.’

His gaze dropped to the rounded shape of her breasts where they heaved up and down inside her jacket. It was pure self-defence that made her pull in her chest. His eyes darkened as he flicked them back to her face and Natasha knew then what it was he was talking about.

‘You want to unwrap yourself and fulfil my curiosity?’ he invited. ‘I didn’t think so.’ He smiled at her drop-jaw gasp.

‘Why are you doing this—s-saying these things to me?’ she whispered in genuine bafflement. ‘Do you think that because you witnessed what I witnessed it gives you the right to speak to me as if I am a slut?’

‘You would not know how to play the slut if your life depended on it,’ Leo grimly mocked. ‘It is a major part of your fascination to me that with a sister like yours, you are like you are.’

Natasha just continued to stare at him, trying to work out what it was she must have done to deserve any of this. ‘Well, you are being loathsome,’ she murmured finally. ‘And there is nothing in the least bit fascinating about being that, Mr Christakis.’

Her bag had fallen to the floor when she’d jumped to her feet. Natasha bent to recover it, then with as much dignity as she could muster, she turned to leave.

‘You’re right,’ he responded.

‘I know I am.’ She nodded, taking a shaky step towards the door, and heard him suck in his breath.

‘All right,’ he growled. ‘I’m sorry. OK?’

For mocking her situation just to get the clever quips in?

Straightening her trembling shoulders, ‘I didn’t ask you to bring me here,’ Natasha pushed out in a thick voice. ‘I have never asked you to do anything for me. So my sister is a slut. Your stepbrother is a slut. Other than that you and I have nothing in common or to say to each other.’

With that she took another couple of steps towards the door, just wanting to get out of here as quickly as she could do now and willing her legs to continue to hold her up while she made her escape.

Her mobile phone started ringing.

It was like chaos arriving to further agitate havoc because yet another telephone started ringing somewhere else in the house and Natasha’s feet pulled her to a confused standstill, the sound of those two phones ringing shrilly in her head.

Behind her he wasn’t moving a muscle. Was he—was Leo Christakis really as attracted to her as he’d just made out? Her jangling brain flipped out.

Then a knock sounded on the door and the handle was turning. Like a switch that kept on flicking her brain from one thing to another, Natasha envisaged Rico about to walk in the room and her feet were taking a stumbling step back. Maybe she swayed, she didn’t know, but a pair of hands arrived to clasp her upper arms and the next thing she knew she was being turned around and pressed against Leo Christakis’s shirt front.

‘Steady,’ his low voice murmured.

Natasha felt the sound resonate across the tips of her breasts and she quivered.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr Christakis,’ a female voice exclaimed in surprise. ‘I heard you come in and assumed you were alone.’

‘As you see, Agnes, I am not,’ Leo responded.

Blunt as always. His half-Greek housekeeper was used to it, though her eyes flicked curiously to his stepbrother’s fiancée standing here held against his chest. When Agnes looked back at his face, not a single hint showed in her expression to say that what she was seeing was a shock.

‘Mr Rico keeps ringing, demanding to speak to Miss Moyles,’ the housekeeper informed him.

Natasha quivered again. This time he soothed the quiver by tracking a hand down the length of her spine and settling it in the curvy hollow of her lower back. ‘We are not here,’ Leo instructed. ‘And no one gets into this house.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The housekeeper left the room again, leaving a silence behind along with a tension that grabbed a tight hold on Natasha’s chest. Just totally unable to understand what it was she was feeling any more, she took a shaky step away from him, confused heat warming her cheeks.

‘Sh-she’s going to think w-we—’

‘Agnes is not paid to think,’ Leo cut in arrogantly and moved off to pour another brandy while Natasha sank weakly back down into the chair.

‘Here, take this…’ Coming to squat down in front of her, he handed her another glass. ‘Only this time try drinking it instead of throwing it at me,’ he suggested. ‘It is supposed to be better for you that way.’

His dry attempt at humour made Natasha flick him a brief guilty glance. ‘I’m sorry I did that. I don’t even know why I did.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ Leo’s smile was sardonic. ‘I am used to having my face slapped in car parks and drinks thrown at me. Loathsome guys expect it.’

He added a grimace.

Natasha lowered her eyes to watch his mouth take on that grimacing tilt. It was only as she watched it settle back into a straight line again that she realised it was actually a quite beautifully shaped mouth, slender and firm but—nice.

And his eyes were nice, too, she noticed when, as if drawn by a magnet, she looked back at them. The rich, dark brown colour was framed by the most gorgeous thick, curling black eyelashes that managed to add an unexpected appeal to his face she would never have allowed him before. That pronounced bump in the middle of his nose saved his face from being a bit too perfect. A strong face, she decided, hard hewn and chiselled yet very good-looking—if you didn’t count the inbuilt cynicism that was there without her actually knowing how it was there.

OK, so he was a lot older than her. Older than Rico by eight years, which made him older than her by a very big ten. And those extra years showed in the blunt opinions he had no problem tossing at people—her especially.

But as for his looks, they weren’t old. His skin was a warm honey colour that lay smooth against the bones in his face. No age lines, no smile lines, not even any frown lines, though he did a lot of frowning—around her anyway.

Unaware that she was taking short sips at the brandy as she studied him, Natasha let her eyes track the width of his muscled shoulders trapped inside the smooth fit of his jacket, then let them absorb the fact that his torso was very long and lean and tight. When standing up, he was taller than Rico by several inches and his dark hair was shorter, cut to suit the stronger shape of his face.

She was asking for trouble, Leo thought severely as he watched that lush, pink, generous mouth adopt a musing pout while she looked him over as if he were a prime piece of meat laid out on a butcher’s slab.

‘How old are you, Natasha?’ he asked curiously. ‘Twenty-six—twenty-seven?’

Her spine went stiff. ‘I’m twenty-four!’ she iced out. ‘And that is just one more insult you’ve hit me with!’

‘And you’re counting.’ His eyes narrowed.

‘Yes!’ she heaved out.

With her blue eyes flashing indignation at him she looked pretty damn fantastic, Leo observed as he knelt there, trying to decide what to do next.

He could leap on her and kiss her—strangely enough she seemed to need him to do that. Or he could gently remove the glass she was crushing between her slender fingers, ease her down on her knees in front of him, then encourage her to just get it over with and use his shoulder to have a good weep.

Something twisted inside him—not sexual this time, but an ache of a different kind. Did she know how badly she was trembling? Did she know her slender white throat had to work like crazy each time to swallow some of the brandy and that her hair was threatening to fall free from its knot?

‘I th-think I w-want to go home now,’ she mumbled distractedly.

To the apartment she shared with her sister? ‘Drink the rest of your brandy first,’ Leo advised quietly.

Natasha glanced down at the glass she was holding so tightly between her fingers, then just stared at it as if she was shocked to find it there. As she lifted it to her mouth Leo watched her soft lips take on the warm bloom of brandy and the ache inside him shifted back to a sexual ache.

The doorbell rang.

Rico called her name out.

Natasha’s head shot up, the brandy glass falling from her fingers to land with a thunk on the carpet, sending brandy fumes wafting up.

‘Natasha—’ Leo reached out to her, thinking she was going to keel over into a faint.

But once again Natasha Moyles surprised him. He did not need to pull her to her knees because she arrived there right between his spread thighs with her arms going up and over his shoulders to cling to his neck, those vulnerable blue eyes staring up at him with a helpless mix of pleading and dismay.

‘Don’t let him in,’ she begged tensely.

‘I won’t,’ Leo promised.

‘I h-hate him. I never want to see him again.’

‘I will not let him in,’ he repeated gently.

But Rico called out her name again hoarse with emotion and Leo felt her fingernails dig into the back of his neck while the two of them listened to his housekeeper make some stern response.

‘My heart’s beating so fast I can’t breathe properly,’ Natasha whispered breathlessly.

A spark of challenge lit Leo’s eyes. He should have contained it—he knew that even as he murmured the challenging, ‘I can make it beat faster.’

If he’d said it to distract her attention away from Rico, it certainly worked when her mouth parted on a surprised little gasp. Leo raised a ruefully mocking eyebrow, feeling the buzz, the loin heating, sex-charging, challenging buzz.

And he leant in and claimed her mouth.

It was like falling into an electrified pit, Natasha likened dizzily as not a single part or inch of her missed out on the high-voltage rush. She’d never experienced anything like it. He crushed her lips to keep them parted, then slid his tongue into her mouth. The sheer shock feel of that alien wet contact stroking across her own tongue made her shiver with pleasure, then stiffen in shock. He did it again and this time she whimpered.

Leo murmured something, then slid his arms around her so he could draw her closer to him and deepen the kiss. The next few seconds went by in a fevered hot rush. She felt plastered against his muscled torso. She could hear Rico shouting. Something hard and ridged was pushing against her front. The wildly disturbing recognition of what that something was sent her deaf to everything else as her own senses bloomed with an excited sparkle in response.

It was crazy, she tried telling herself. She didn’t even like Leo Christakis yet here she was drowning in the full on power of his heated kiss! In all of her life she had never kissed anyone like this—never felt even remotely like this! It was like throwing herself against a rock only to discover that the rock had magical powers. His hand skated the length of her spine to her waist, then pressed her even closer, at the same time that he increased the pressure on her mouth, sending her neck arching backwards as he used his tongue to create a warm, thick chain reaction that poured through her entire body like silk.

Natasha heard herself groan something. He muttered a very low, sensual rasp in response. Then Rico called out to her again, harsh and angry enough to pierce into her foggy consciousness, and she wrenched her mouth free.

Trembling and panting with her heart pounding wildly, she stared up at this man while her mind fed her an image of the way Rico had been enjoying Cindy across his desk.

As if her sister knew what she was thinking, her phone began to ring in her purse.

The scald of betrayal burned her up on the inside.

‘For God’s sake, Natasha, let me talk to you!’ Rico’s rasping voice ground out.

Revenge lit her up.

Leo saw it happen and knew exactly where it was coming from. Sanity returned to him with a gut-crushing whoosh. She was going to offer herself to him, but did he want her like this, bruised and heartbroken and throbbing with a desire for revenge on Rico, who could easily charge in here and catch them?

As they had walked into Rico’s office and caught him.

Natasha leant away from Leo and began unbuttoning her jacket with shakily fumbling, feverish fingers.

Leo released a sigh. ‘You don’t want to do this, Natasha,’ he said heavily.

‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want,’ she shook out.

The two pieces of fabric were wrenched apart to reveal a white top made of some stretchy fabric that crossed over and moulded the thrusting fullness of her two tight breasts.

Leo looked down at them, then up into her fever-bright eyes, and wanted to bite out a filthy black curse. As she wrenched the jacket off altogether, he reached out to try and stop her, only to freeze when he read the helpless plea that had etched itself on her paper-white face.

If he turned her down now, the rejection was going to shatter her.

Her smooth white throat moved as she swallowed, those kiss-warmed lips parting so she could whisper out a husky little, ‘Please…’

And he was lost, Leo knew it. Even as she took the initiative away from him by winding her arms around his neck again, he knew he was not going to stop this. Lifting his hands up to mould her ribcage, he stroked them down the tight white fabric to the sexy indentation of her waist in an exploring act that rolled back the denials still beating an urgent tattoo in his head.

Her mouth was a hungry invite. Leo raked his hands back up her body again and this time covered the full perfect globes of her breasts. She fell apart on a series of gasps and quivers that sent her body into an acute sensual arch, fingernails digging into his neck again, hair suddenly tumbling free in a glorious roll of fine silken waves down her back. She was amazing, a stunningly complicated mix of prim, straight-lace and pure untrammelled passion with her lily-white skin and her lush parted mouth, and her breasts two sensational mounds that filled his hands and…

The front door slammed.

Rico had gone.

If Natasha recognised what the sound meant she did not make a response. Her eyes still burned into him with the fevered invitation she was offering.

Time to make a decision, Leo accepted grimly. Continue this or put a stop to it?

Then her fingernails dug deeper to pull his mouth back down onto hers and the decision was made for him.

Natasha felt his surrender and took it with a leap of triumph that bordered on the mad. She became aware of the power of his erection pressing against her again, instinct made her move against it. He muttered a low, throaty response and he was suddenly tightening his hold of her and drawing her to her feet. Next he was swinging her up into his arms and carrying her, the kiss still a seething hot fuse that frazzled her brain and had her heart pounding to the beat of his footsteps echoing on oak flooring as he headed across the hall and began climbing the stairs.

It was the moment that Natasha saw a small chink of sanity. Her head went back, rending the kiss apart as she opened her eyes to look deep into Leo Christakis’s heavily lidded dark eyes before she glanced around her as if she’d been woken up suddenly from a dream.

It was only then that she realised that the hallway was empty. No one was there. No Rico witnessing his betrayed fiancée being carried to bed by her soon-to-be new lover. No housekeeper containing her disapproval and shock.

‘Changed your mind now you don’t have a witness?’ Leo’s hard voice swung her eyes back to him again.

He’d gone still on one of the stairs and the look of cold cynicism was back, lashing his skin to the bones in his face.

‘No,’ Natasha breathed, and she discovered that she meant it. She wanted to do this. She wanted to be carried to bed and made love to by a man who genuinely wanted her—she wanted to lose every single old-fashioned and disgustingly outmoded inhibition she possessed!

‘Please,’ she breathed softly as she leant in to brush a kiss across the hard line of his mouth. ‘Make love to me, Leo.’

There was another moment of hesitation, a glimpse of fury in the depths of his eyes. Then he was moving again, allowing her to breathe again though she had not been aware of holding her breath. He finished the climb up the stairs and carried her into a sultry summer-warmed bedroom with pale walls and big dark pieces of furniture. A red Persian rug covered most of the polished oak floor.

Then he really shocked her by dumping her unceremoniously on the top of a huge soft bed.

As Natasha lay there blinking up at him Leo stood looking down at her, his expression as hard and cynical as hell. ‘Stay there and pull yourself together,’ was all he uttered before he turned around to walk back to the door.

‘Why?’ Natasha shook out.

‘I will not play substitute to any man,’ the cold brute answered.

Natasha sat up. ‘Y-you said you wanted me.’

‘Strange—’ he turned, his kiss-heated mouth taking on a scornful twist ‘—but seeing you getting off on the possibility of Rico witnessing us together was a real turn off for me.’

Natasha sat up with a jolt. ‘I was not getting off on it—!’

‘Liar,’ he lashed back, then really startled her by striding back to the bed to come and lean over her—close enough to make her blink warily because she just didn’t know what was going to come next.

‘To keep things clear between us, Natasha,’ he murmured silkily, ‘if you loved what we were doing downstairs so much you forgot all about Rico, then ask yourself what that tells me about Miss Betrayed and Broken-hearted, hmm—?’

It was as good as a cold, hard slap in the face. Natasha just stared up at him because the worst thing of all was that he had only told it how it was! She had been thinking about Rico when she’d invited what she had downstairs. And she had no excuse for the way she had begged him to bring her up here!

But had he behaved any better? ‘You cruel, h-hateful swine,’ she breathed, and pulled up her knees so she could bury her face.

Leo agreed. He was behaving like an absolute beast feeding her all the blame for whatever had erupted in both of them downstairs. It was still erupting inside him, he admitted as he turned away again and strode back to the door, wishing that he had stayed in Athens this morning instead of…

Telephones started ringing again, piercing through the high-octane atmosphere—his phone in his jacket pocket and another phone ringing somewhere else in the house. Retrieving his mobile, Leo glared at the display screen, expecting it to show Rico’s name.

But it was Juno, his PA. Leo sanctioned the connection. ‘This had better be important,’ he warned as he stepped out of the bedroom and pulled the door shut.

Natasha lifted her head at the sound of the door snapping into its housing. He’d gone. He’d left her sitting here in a huddle on his bed and just walked away from her—because he could.

On a sudden pummelling punch of self-hatred she scrambled up off the bed, hurt beyond sense that yet another man had humiliated her in the space of one horrible day.

Oh, she had to get out of here! Natasha almost screeched that need at herself as she looked around the floor for her shoes and couldn’t find them. Then she remembered the vague echo of them falling off her feet and hitting the floor when Leo had picked her up. Her hair fell forward, tumbling in long waves around her face as if to taunt how she’d been so wrapped up in what she’d been doing with him that she hadn’t even noticed before now how her hair had sprung free of its restraints!

Like herself. She shuddered, turning like a drunk not knowing where she was going and heading for the door. She made it out onto the landing and even found her way back down the stairs without coming face to face with anyone else. The door to the living room still hung wide-open and the wretched tears almost broke free when she saw the way her jacket lay in a pale blue swish of fabric on the floor by the chair she had been sitting on before she…

Swallowing, she hurried forward to snatch up the offending garment, pulling it on and fastening it up while she scrambled her feet into her shoes.

He arrived in the doorway, lounging there and filling it with his lean, dark, overbearing presence and…

Her phone started to ring in her purse.

With what tiny bit of control she had left, Natasha bent down to scoop up the purse, then dragged the phone out with trembling fingers and just slammed the wafer-thin piece of shiny black plastic forcefully down on the floor.

It stopped ringing.

The sudden rush of silence throbbed like the beat of a drum in her head, and the tears were really threatening now like hot, sharp shards of flaming glass hitting the backs of her eyes and her throat. She spun towards the door to find Leo was still there, blocking her only exit.

Her mouth began to work, fighting—fighting the tears. ‘Please,’ she pushed out at him on a thick broken whisper. ‘I need you to move out of my way so I can leave.’

Silence. He said nothing. He did not attempt to move. His eyes were half hooded, his lips straight and tight. And there was just enough narrow-eyed insolence in the way he was casually standing there with his arms folded across his front like that to make Natasha realise that something about him had altered dramatically.

‘W-what—?’ she shook out.

Leo wondered how she would react if he accused her of being a play-acting little thief?

‘I am just curious,’ he posed very levelly. ‘Leave here for where?’

But inside he didn’t feel level in any other way. Inside he was feeling so conned he didn’t know how he was managing to hold it all in!

Rico’s little accomplice—who would have thought it? Apparently Miss Cool and Prim was not so prim when it came to letting her greedy, grasping, slender fingers scoop up the cash Rico had stolen from him!

‘To find Rico, perhaps?’ he suggested when she didn’t say anything.

‘No!’ She even managed to shudder. ‘H-home,’ she said, ‘to my apartment.’

‘You don’t have your keys.’

‘I’ll get the janitor to let me in.’

‘Or your loving sister,’ Leo provided. ‘I predict she is already there, waiting to pounce on you the moment that you arrive.’

Was the other sister in on the scam, too?

And look at this one, he thought as he shuttered his eyes that bit more before running them down her front. She was back to being buttoned up to the throat as if the passionate interlude they’d just shared had never taken place—if you didn’t count the flowing hair and the flush on her cheeks and the kiss-swollen bloom on her lips that he had put there.

‘What does it matter to you if she is?’ Natasha asked. ‘This was never your problem,’ she informed him stiffly. ‘You should not have become involved. I don’t even know why you did or why you had to bring me here at all!’

‘You needed a safe place to recover,’ Leo said dryly.

‘Safe?’ Natasha choked out. ‘You’d barely dragged me through your front door before you were coming on to me!’

His careless shrug shot Natasha into movement, wanting, needing to get away from the insufferable devil so badly now she was prepared to risk the feeble strength in her shaky legs to walk towards him—aware of the way his eyes followed her every footstep—aware that at any second now she was going to fall down in a screaming hot puddle of tears on the floor.

And still he did not move out of her way so she could get out of here, so the closer she came to him, the more her senses went wild, fluttering in protest in case he dared to touch her again—and at the same time fizzing with excitement in the hope that he did!

I don’t know myself any more, Natasha thought helplessly. ‘Move,’ she demanded, resorting to a bit of his own blunt way of speech.

The slight tug his mouth gave was an acknowledgement of it, but he didn’t shift. ‘You cannot leave,’ he coolly informed her.

Was he mad? ‘Of course I can go.’ Shoulders tense, Natasha tried to push him out of her way by placing her hands on his chest. It didn’t happen. It was like trying to move a fully grown tree, and in the end Leo caught up her fingers to lift them away from his chest.

‘When I said you cannot leave, Natasha, I meant it,’ he informed her very seriously. ‘At least not until the police arrive to take you away, that is…’

CHAPTER THREE

NATASHA froze for a second. Then, ‘The police?’ she edged out blankly.

‘The Fraud Squad, to be more accurate,’ Leo confirmed.

‘Fraud…?’

His mouth gave a twitch at the way she kept on echoing him. ‘As in swindler and charlatan,’ he provided, driving his gaze down her body as if to say the crime was that she looked the way she did yet could turn on so hotly the way she had.

Natasha quivered, her cheeks turning pink with shamed embarrassment. ‘I don’t usually…’

‘Turn on for a man just to pull the wool over his eyes…?’

Untangling her fingers from his, she fell back a couple of steps and really looked at him, catching on at last that he was leading somewhere with this that she was not going to like.

‘Since I don’t have a single clue what it is you’re trying to get at, I think you had better explain,’ Natasha prompted finally.

‘Does that mean you do want to go to bed with me and it is not a sham act?’

Natasha tensed, lips parting then closing again, because the true answer to that taunt was just not going to happen. ‘I was in shock when I—’

‘In a state of fright, more like,’ he interrupted, ‘as to what Rico had done to all your plans, with his crass bit on the desk today.’

‘Plans for what?’ Lifting a hand into her hair, she pushed the tumbling mass back from her angrily bewildered face. ‘I was planning to marry him—well, there’s one plan gone down the tubes,’ she choked out. ‘And as you’ve just kindly pointed out to me, I caught him having sex with my own sister—so there’s my pride gone the same way along with any love for my sister!’ The hand dropped to fold along with the other hand tight across her front. ‘Then I surrendered to some mad desire to be wanted by anybody and you happened to be in the right place at the right time,’ she pushed on, ‘but that was just another plan sent off down the tubes when you changed your mind about w-wanting me!’

‘And now your carefully creamed nest egg is about to go the same way,’ Leo added without a hint of sympathy. ‘So I would say that you are having a very bad day, today, Natasha. A very bad day indeed.’

‘Nest egg?’ Natasha picked up. ‘What is it you are talking about now?’

Wearing that smile on his lips that she didn’t like, Leo levered himself away from the doorframe and moved away, leaving her to turn and watch as he headed for the drinks cabinet.

He needed something strong, Leo decided as he poured neat whisky into a glass. He took a good slug, then turned back to look at her, ‘I have just been talking to my PA,’ he enlightened. ‘Juno has been very busy investigating where Rico stashed the money he stole from me and has managed to trace it to an offshore bank account in your name, so lose the bemused expression, Natasha. I’m on to you….’

Nothing happened. She didn’t gasp, she didn’t faint, she didn’t jump in with a flood of denials or excuses aimed to defend what it was he was talking about now. Instead, Leo stood there and watched while something cold struck into him because there it was, the dawning of honesty taking over her lying, cheating, paling face.

That mouth was still a killer though, he observed—and slammed the glass down, suddenly blisteringly angry with himself for being so easily duped by her challengingly prim disguise!

‘I think you had better sit down before you fall down,’ he advised her flatly.

And she did, which only helped to feed his anger all the more. The flowing-haired witch dropped like a stone into the nearest chair, then covered her guilty face with her light-fingered thieving hands!

Rico had stolen the money, Natasha was busily replaying over and over. He’d placed stolen money in an offshore bank account in her name! One of her hands twisted down to cover her mouth as the nausea returned with a vengeance. In the dragging silence blanketing the space separating them she could feel Leo Christakis’s ice-cold anger and blistering contempt beating over her in waves.

If he’d made this declaration yesterday, she would not have believed him. But now, with everything else she’d been forced to look at today, Natasha didn’t even see a chink of a question glimmering in the nightmare her mind had become as to whether there had been some kind of mistake.

Everything about Rico had been a lie from start to finish. The way he’d used his looks and his charm and his fabulous blinding-white smile to lure her to him, the way he’d poured soft words of love over her too-susceptible head and refused to make love to her because he wanted to protect her innocence, while all the time he’d been cynically planning to turn her into a thief!

Pulling her fingers away from her mouth, ‘I’ll give you the money back just as soon as I can access it,’ she promised.

‘Sure you will,’ Leo confirmed. ‘Once you have recovered your composure, we will go and see to it straight away.’

That brought her face up, whiter than white now so her eyes stood out bluer than blue. ‘But you don’t understand. I can’t touch it yet.’

‘Don’t play the broken doll with me next, Natasha,’ Leo bit out impatiently. ‘It won’t alter the fact that you are going to give me my money back now—today.’

‘But I can’t!’ Anxiety shot her quivering to her feet. ‘I can’t touch it until the day before I was supposed to be marrying Rico! He said it was a tax loophole he’d discovered—that you had told him about! He said we had to lock the money up under my name in an offshore account until end of business the day before we marry, then transfer it to another account in our m-married name!’

Leo suddenly exploded spectacularly. ‘I do not appreciate you trying to involve my name in your filthy scam!’ he bit out at her furiously, ‘and telling me stupid lies about access to the money is not going to get you out of trouble, Miss Moyles! So cough up the cash or watch me call the damn police!’

In a state of nerve-numbing terror, Natasha backed away as he took two long strides towards her with a murderous expression clamped to his face. The backs of her legs hit the chair she’d just vacated and she toppled back into it. He came to stand over her as he’d done in the bedroom, only this time Natasha put up her hands in an instinctive need to keep him at bay.

Watching her cower in front of him sent Leo into an even bigger rage. ‘I don’t hit women,’ he rasped, then turned on his heel and walked away—right out of the room.

The police—he’s going to call the police! Out of her mind with fear now, Natasha scrambled upright and chased after him, terrified of going anywhere near him but even more terrified of what would happen if she didn’t stop him from carrying out his threat! He’d crossed the hall and entered a room opposite, which turned out to be a book-lined study.

Coming to a jerky halt in the doorway, she stared as he strode up to the desk and picked up the phone.

Panic sent her heart into overdrive. ‘Leo, please…’ The pleading quaver in her voice made him go still, wide shoulders taut. ‘You have got to believe me,’ she begged him. ‘I didn’t know the money was stolen! Rico conned me into banking it for him as much as he conned you out of it in the first place!’

The last part didn’t go down too well because he began stabbing numbers into the telephone with a grim resolve that sent Natasha flying across the room to grab hold of his arm.

Warm, hard muscles bunched beneath her clutching fingers, anger and rejection pouring into his muscular frame. ‘He s-said it was to ensure our f-future,’ she rushed on unsteadily, ‘He said it was a bequeath to him from your father you had been holding in trust! He s-said you…’

‘Wanted to see the back of him so badly I was prepared to break the law to do it?’ Leo suggested when her scramble of words dried up.

‘Something like that,’ Natasha admitted. Then—Oh, dear God, what had she let Rico do to her? ‘Now you are telling me he lied, which means he lied to me about absolutely everything and I—’

The phone went down. Leo turned on her so suddenly Natasha was given no chance to react before she found herself trapped in his arms. His mouth arrived. It took hers with an angry heat that offered nothing but punishment yet she responded—responded to him like a crazy person, clinging and kissing him back as if she’d die if she didn’t! When he pulled away again she was limp with shock at her own dizzying loss of control!

‘Take my advice,’ he rasped. ‘Keep with the seduction theme; it works on me a whole lot better than the innocent pleading does.’

Then his fingers gripped her arms like pincers, which he used to thrust her right away from him, and he was reestablishing his connection with the phone.

Natasha’s heart lodged like a throbbing lump of fear in her throat. ‘Please,’ she begged him, yet again having to swallow to be able to speak at all. ‘I did not know that Rico had stolen your money, Leo! I can give you back every penny in six weeks if you’ll only wait, but, please—please don’t ring the police—think of the effect it will have on Rico’s mother if you have him arrested! She will—’

‘You love the bastard,’ Leo bit out roughly. Cutting into what she had been trying to say and making Natasha blink.

‘At first, y-yes,’ she admitted it. ‘He flattered me and…’ she swallowed again ‘… and I know it sounds pathetic but I fell for it because…’

Oh, because she’d been a blind fool! She knew it—probably everyone knew it!

‘Because things were becoming really bad between me and Cindy and I think I was unconsciously searching for a way out.’

Rico had provided it. It was easier to believe she’d fallen in love with him than to admit to herself that she was so unhappy with her life that she’d grabbed the first opportunity handed to her to get out of it without having to cause ructions within her family. It had been so easy to turn blind eyes to what Rico was really like.

She was a coward, in other words, unwilling to take control of her own life without a nice acceptable prop with which to lean upon as she did.

‘I’d already realised Rico wasn’t w-what I wanted,’ she forced herself to go on. ‘I was on my way to tell him so today when we—when we caught him with Cindy. It was—’

‘Juno…’

Natasha blinked as Leo’s voice cut right through what she had been trying to tell him.

‘Put a stop on your investigation of Miss Moyles,’ he instructed. ‘There has been a—mistake. Have my plane for Athens put on standby and add Miss Moyles’s name to the passenger list.’

The phone went down. Natasha tugged in a tense breath. ‘Why did you say that?’

‘Why do you think?’ He turned a hard look on her. ‘I want my money back and since you’ve just told me it will be six weeks before you can give it back to me, I am not letting you out of my sight until you do.’

‘But I don’t want to go to Athens!’ Natasha shrilled out. ‘I don’t want to go anywhere with you!’

‘In your present situation that was not the cleverest thing you could say to me right now, Natasha,’ Leo said dryly.

‘W-what did you mean by that?’

‘Sex,’ Leo drawled as if that one shocking word were the answer to everything. ‘It is your only bargaining chip, so telling me you don’t want me is not going to get you out of this sticky situation, is it?’

A sudden dawning as to where he was going with this shot Natasha’s trembling shoulders back, sending her loosened hair flying around her face. ‘I am not paying you back with sex!’ she protested.

‘I should think not,’ the cold devil answered. ‘No woman, no matter how appealingly she presents herself to me, is worth a cool two million to bed.’

‘No…’ Yet again Natasha found herself sinking into a thick morass of confusion, the intended insult floating right over her as this new revelation struck a blow to her head. ‘F-Five hundred thousand pounds,’ she insisted through lips so paper dry now it stung to move them. ‘Rico opened the account w-with…’

Her voice trailed away when she saw the expression of mocking contempt that carved itself into this man’s face. ‘Four separate instalments of five hundred thousand adds up to a cool two million—your arithmetic is letting you down,’ Leo spelled out the full ugly truth for her.

‘Are you sure?’ she breathed.

‘Grow up, Natasha,’ Leo derided the question. ‘You are dealing with a real man now, not the weak excuse for a man you fell in love with—’

‘I don’t love him!’

‘So here is the deal.’ He kept going as if she hadn’t made that denial. ‘Wherever I go from now on, you will come with me. And to make the pill sweeter for me to take, you will also share my bed as I wait out the six long weeks until you can access my money, when you will then hand it back to me before you get the hell out of my life!’

Real skin-crawling panic had to erupt some time because Natasha had been struggling for so long to keep it in. But now the wild need to get away from this ruthless man and the whole situation sent her spinning around and racing out of the room and back across the hall.

Once again she found herself searching for her bag.

‘Going somewhere?’ that cruel voice mocked her—again.

‘Yes.’ She dived on the offending article that kept getting away from her without her knowing it had. ‘I’m going to find Rico. He’s the only person who can tell you the truth.’

‘You think I would believe anything he said to me?’

Swinging around, Natasha almost threw her bag at him! ‘I will give you back—every single penny of your rotten two million pounds if it kills me trying!’ she choked out.

‘Euros…’

Leo’s smooth drawl sent her still with her blue eyes relaying her next complete daze as to what he was talking about!

‘The money will have been converted into Euros,’ he pointed out helpfully, then he named the new figure in Euros, freezing Natasha where she stood. ‘Of course it means the same when converted back into pounds sterling so long as the exchange rate remains sound, but…’ His shrug said the rest for him—that the figure was growing and growing by the minute in the present financial climate. ‘And then there is the interest I will charge you for the—loan.’

‘I hate you,’ was all she could manage to whisper.

‘Fortunate for you, then, that you fall apart so excitingly when I kiss you.’

‘I need to speak to Rico,’ Natasha insisted.

‘Still hoping the two of you can escape from this?’

‘No!’ She shot up her chin, eyes flashing, hair fascinatingly wild around her tense face. ‘I need him to tell you the truth even if you do refuse to believe it!’

Leo observed her from an outwardly calm exterior that did not reflect what was crawling around his insides. He was blisteringly angry—with himself more than anyone because he would have been willing to swear that the prim, cool and dignified Natasha Moyles he’d believed he knew had been the genuine article.

No sign of her now, he observed.

‘You will have to catch him first,’ he told her dryly. ‘Juno tells me that Rico has already left the country. He hitched a ride on a friend’s private plane out of London airport. He was quicker than you were at realising what was going to come out of his fevered love fest today, you see. A one-minute telephone conversation with Juno after he left here and he knew he’d been sussed. He’s left you to carry the can for him, Natasha.’ He spelled it out for her in case she had not worked that out for herself.

Feeling as if the whole weight of the world had just dropped onto her shoulders, ‘Then you might as well shop me to the Fraud Squad,’ she murmured helplessly.

Leo grimaced. ‘That is still one way for me to go, certainly,’ he agreed, and watched the telling little flinch that she gave up. ‘However, you do still have the other way to pull this around, Miss Moyles…’She even flinched at the formal Miss Moyles now. ‘You could still try utilising the only asset you have as far as I am concerned and make me an offer I won’t want to refuse?’

He was talking sex again. Natasha went icy. ‘The money is peanuts to you, isn’t it?’

He offered a shrug. ‘The difference between the two of us being that I am wealthy enough to call it peanuts, whereas you are not.’

That was so very true that Natasha did not even bother to argue the point. Instead she made herself look at him. ‘So you want me to pay the money back with—favours—’ for the life of her she could not bring herself to call it sex ‘—and in return you will promise me you will not take this to the police?’

Leo smiled at the careful omission of the word sex and for once the smile actually hit the dark of his eyes. ‘You do the prim stuff exceptionally well, Natasha,’ he informed her lazily as he began to walk towards her, putting just about every defence mechanism she possessed on stinging alert. ‘Shame that your hair is floating around your face like a siren’s promise and your lips are still pumped up and hot from my kisses, because it forces me to remember the real you.’

Fighting not to flinch when he reached out to touch her, ‘I want your promise that if I do what you w-want me to do, you won’t go to the police,’ she insisted.

His fingers were drifting up her arms. ‘You do know you don’t have anything left to bargain with, don’t you?’

Pressing her lips together, Natasha nodded, her heart pounding in her chest when his fingers reached her shoulders and gripped. ‘I’m relying on your sense of honour.’

‘You believe I have one?’ He sounded genuinely curious.

She nodded again. ‘Yes,’ she delivered on a stifled breath. She had to believe it because it was the only way she was going to cope with all of this.

He drifted those light caressing fingers along her shoulders until they reached her smooth skin at her nape, making her jump as a long thumb arrived beneath her chin to tilt up her face. His warm, whisky-scented breath had her lips parting like traitors because they knew what was coming next.

‘Then you have my promise,’ he said softly.

It was the most soul-shrivelling thing Natasha had ever experienced when she fell into that deal-sealing kiss.

Then her mobile phone started ringing, shocking them apart with Natasha turning to stare down at the phone in surprise because she thought she’d killed it when she’d thrown it to the floor.

Leo went to pick it up, since she didn’t seem able to move a single muscle, stepping around her and reminding her of a big, sleek giant cat, the way he moved with such loose-limbed grace. Without asking her permission, he sanctioned the call and put her phone to his ear.

It was some fashion designer wanting to know why Cindy had not turned up for a fitting. ‘Natasha Moyles is no longer responsible for her sister’s movements,’ Leo announced before cutting the connection.

Natasha stared up at him in disbelief. ‘What did you say that for?’

He turned a mocking look on her. ‘Because it is the truth?’ She went to take her phone back. He snatched it out of her way, then slid it into his jacket pocket. ‘Think about it,’ he insisted. ‘You cannot continue play your sister’s doormat while you are in Athens with me.’

And just like that he brought the scene in Rico’s office pouring back in. Rico hadn’t only involved her in his thieving scam, but he’d been treating her like his doormat, too! Natasha turned away, despising herself for being so gullible—despising Rico for making her see herself like this! And then there was Cindy, her loving sister Cindy playing the selfish, spoiled brat who took anything she felt like because she always had done and been allowed to get away with it!

Then another thought arrived, one that hit her like a brick in the chest. Cindy didn’t even need Natasha to keep her life running smoothly because arrangements were already in place to hand her singing career over to a professional agency. One of those big, flashy firms with the kind of high profile Cindy had loved the moment its name was mentioned to her. From as early as next week, Natasha would no longer be responsible for Cindy at all, in effect, to free her up to concentrate on her wedding preparations and her move to Milan!

And she’d just found the reason why Cindy had been doing that with Rico. Cindy was about to get everything she’d always wanted—a high-profile management team that was going to fast-track her career and more significantly her absolute freedom from the restraints the sister she resented imposed.

She lifted a hand up to cover her mouth. Her fingers were trembling and she felt cold through to the bone.

‘What now?’ Leo Christakis shot at her.

She just shook her head because she couldn’t speak. Cindy being Cindy, she just could not let Natasha walk off into the sunset with her handsome Italian without going all out to spoil it. I’ve had your man, Natasha. Now you can trip off and marry him. She could hear Cindy’s voice trilling those words even though they had not yet been said!

Cindy’s little swansong. Her wonderful farewell.

‘She set me up,’ she managed to whisper. ‘She knew I was going to meet Rico today so she made sure she got to his office before I did and set me up to witness her doing—that with him.’

‘Why would your own sister want to set you up for a scene like that?’

‘Because I’m not her real sister.’ Natasha slid her fingers away from her mouth. ‘I was adopted…’ By two people who’d believed their chances of having a child of their own had long passed them by. Five years later and their real daughter had arrived in their arms like a precious gift from heaven. Everyone had adored Cindy—Natasha had adored her!

A firm hand arrived on her arm to guide her down into the chair again, then disappeared to collect a second brandy. ‘Here,’ he murmured, ‘take this…’

Natasha frowned down at the glass, then shook her head. ‘No.’ She felt too sick to drink anything. ‘Take it away.’

Leo put the glass down, but remained squatting in front of her as he’d done once before. Strong thighs spread, forearms resting on his knees. His suit, she saw as if for the first time, was made of some fabulously smooth fabric, expensive and creaseless—like the man himself.

And his mouth might look grim, but it was still a mouth she could taste; she felt as if she already knew it far more intimately than any other man’s mouth—and that included Rico.

‘Stop looking at me as if you care what’s happening inside my head!’ she snapped at the way he was squatting there studying her as if he were really concerned!

He had the grace to offer an acknowledging grimace and climbed back to his full height. So did Natasha, making herself do it, feeling cold—frozen right through, because it had also just hit her that she was on her own now. No sister. No fiancé. Not even a pair of loving parents to turn to because, although they’d loved her in their own way, they had never loved her in the way they loved Cindy. Cindy was always going to come first with them.

‘So what is it you want me to do?’ she murmured finally in a voice that sounded as cold as she felt.

Leo threw her a frowning dark look. ‘I told you what I want.’

‘Sex.’ This time she managed to name it.

‘Don’t knock it, Natasha,’ Leo drawled. ‘The fact that we find we desire each other is about to keep you out of a whole lot of trouble.’

He turned away then, leaving her to stare at his long, broad back. He was so hard she had to wonder who it was that had made him like that.

Then she remembered Rico telling her that Leo had been married once. From what Rico had said, his wife had been an exquisite black-haired, black-eyed pure Latin sex bomb who used to turn men on with a single look. The marriage had lasted a short year before Leo had grown tired of hauling her out of other men’s beds and he’d kicked her out of his life for good.

But he must have really loved her to last a whole year with a faithless woman like that. Had his ex-wife mangled up his feelings so badly she’d turned him into the ruthless cynic she was looking at now?

As if he could tell what she was thinking he glanced round at her, catching the expression on her face. Their eyes maintained contact for a few nerve-trapping seconds as something very close to understanding stirred between them, as if he knew what she was thinking and his steady regard was acknowledging it.

‘OK, let’s go.’ Just that quickly he switched from seeming almost human to the man willing to use her for sex until he could get his precious money back. ‘Take it or leave it, Natasha,’ he cut into the thrumming thick nub of her silence— there because she was finding the switch much harder to make. ‘But make your mind up, because we have a flight to catch.’

A flight to catch. A life to get on with while she put her own on hold—again.

Natasha answered with a curt nod of her head.

It was all he required to have him reach out and pull her back into his arms. The heat flared between them. She uttered a helpless protest as his mouth arrived to claim hers. And worst thing of all was how the whole heady, hot pleasure of it caught hold of her as fast as it took him to make that sensual stroking movement with his tongue along the centre of hers. By the time he drew back, she was barely focusing. Her lips felt swollen and thick—but deep inside, in the core element where the real Natasha lay hidden, she still felt as cold as death.

Leo thought about just saying to hell with it and taking her back upstairs to bed and forgetting about the rest of this. She had no idea—none whatsoever—what that hopeless look on her face teamed with the buttoned-up suit was doing to him.

He turned away from temptation, frowning at his own bewildering inclinations. How had he gone from being a tough business-focused tycoon to a guy with his brains fixed on sex?

More than his brains, he was forced to acknowledge when he had to stand still for a moment and work hard to bring much more demanding body parts under control.

Then she moved, swinging him back round to look at her, and he knew then exactly why he was putting this woman before his cool business sense. She had been driving him quietly crazy for weeks now, though he had refused to look at the reason why until Rico had ruined his chances with her.

Rico’s loss, his gain. Natasha Moyles was going to come so alive with his tutelage she was not going to be able to hide anything from him. And he was going to enjoy every minute of making that exposure take place. Then once their six weeks were over he would get his money back and walk away so he could get on with his life without having her as a distraction that constantly crept into his head.

Maybe it was worth the cool two million to achieve it.

‘I need to speak to m-my parents…’

‘You can ring them—from Athens. Hit them with a situation they cannot argue with.’

‘That wouldn’t be—’

‘You prefer to relay the full ugly details to their faces?’ he cut in on her. ‘You prefer to explain to them that you and Rico have been caught thieving and that their other daughter is a man-thieving tramp?’

The tough words were back. The sigh that wrenched from Natasha was loaded down with defeat. ‘I will need to get my passport from the apartment,’ was all she said.

‘Then let’s go and get it.’ Leo held out his hand to her in an invitation that was demanding yet another surrender—one that sizzled in the short stillness that followed it.

A step on the road to ruin, Natasha recognised bleakly as she lifted her hand and settled her palm against his. His long tanned fingers closed around her slender cold fingers, she felt his warmth strike through her icy skin and his strength convey itself to her as he turned and trailed her behind him into the hallway, then out of the house.

CHAPTER FOUR

OUTSIDE the afternoon sunlight was soft on Natasha’s face. The short journey to her apartment was achieved in silence. The first thing she saw when they arrived there was Cindy’s silver sports car and her aching heart withered, then sank.

Leo must have recognised the car, too, because, ‘I’m coming in with you,’ he insisted grimly.

It had not been a request. And anyway Natasha was glad she was not going to have to face Cindy on her own.

Feeling dread crawling across her flesh, she walked into the foyer with Leo at her side. The janitor looked up and smiled. It was all she could do to smile politely back by return.

‘I’ve mislaid my keys,’ she told him. ‘Do you think I could borrow the spare?’

‘Your sister is home, Miss Moyles,’ the janitor informed her. ‘I can call up and she will let you—’

‘No.’ It was Leo who put in the curt interruption. The janitor looked up at him and it didn’t take a second for him to recognise that he was in the presence of a superior power. ‘We will take the spare key, if you please.’

And the key changed hands without another word uttered.

In the lift, Natasha began to feel sick again. She didn’t want this confrontation. She would have preferred not to look into Cindy’s face ever again.

‘Do you want me to go in for you?’

The dark timbre of his voice made her draw in a breath before she straightened her shoulders, pressed her tense lips together and shook her head. The moment she stepped into the hi-tech, ultra-trendy living room, her sister jumped up from one of the black leather chairs.

Cindy’s eyes were red as if she’d been crying and her hair was all over the place. ‘Where have you been?’ she shrilled at Natasha. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you! Why didn’t you answer your damn phone?’

‘Where I’ve been isn’t any of your business,’ Natasha said quietly.

Cindy’s fingers coiled into fists. ‘Of course it’s my business. I employ you! When I say jump you’re paid to jump! When I say—’

‘Get what you came for, agape mou,’ a deep voice quietly intruded.

Leo’s dark, looming presence appeared in the doorway. Cindy just froze where she stood, her baby-blue eyes standing out as hot embarrassment flooded up her neck and into her face. ‘M-Mr Christakis,’ she stammered out uncomfortably.

Ah, respect for an elder, Natasha noted, smiling thinly as she walked across the room to open the concealed wall safe where she kept her personal papers.

‘I didn’t expect you to come here….’

Nor had Cindy expected Leo Christakis to catch her with Rico, thought Natasha, and that was why she was embarrassed to see him again.

Leo said nothing, and Natasha winced at the dismissive contempt she could feel emanating from that suffocating silence. Cindy just wasn’t used to being looked at like that. She wasn’t used to being ignored. Embarrassment and respect changed to a sulky pout and flashing insolence, which she turned on Natasha.

‘I don’t know what you think you are doing in my safe, Natasha, but you—’

‘Be quiet, you little tramp,’ Leo said.

Cindy flushed to the roots of her hair. ‘You can’t speak to me like that!’

Natasha turned in time to watch the way Leo looked her sister over as if she were a piece of trash before diverting his steady gaze to her. ‘Got what you need?’ he asked gently.

Gentle almost crucified her, though she was way beyond the point of being able to work out why. Fighting the never-far-away-tears, she nodded and made her shaking legs take her back across the room towards him.

Cindy sent her a frightened look. ‘You aren’t leaving,’ she shot out. ‘You can’t leave. That idiot Rico panicked and phoned the parents looking for you—now they’re on their way here!’

Natasha ignored her, her concentration glued to the door Leo was presently filling up. I just need to get away from her, she told herself. I just need to…

‘You’re such a blind, silly, stupid thing, Natasha!’ Cindy went back on the attack. ‘Do you think I’m the only woman Rico has had while he’s been engaged to you? Did you really believe that someone like him was going to fall in love with someone like you—?’

Natasha hid her eyes and just kept on walking.

‘What are you but the right kind of stuffed-blouse type his silly mother likes? I did you a favour today. You could have married him still blind to what he’s really like! It was time someone opened your eyes to reality. You should be thanking me for doing it!’

Natasha had reached Leo. ‘Anything else before we get out of here?’ he asked.

‘S-some clothes and—things,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t you dare ignore me!’ Cindy screeched. ‘The parents will be here in a minute. I want you to tell them that this was all your own fault! I’ve got a gig tonight and I just can’t perform with all of this angst going on. And you need to get busy with some damage control because you won’t like it if I have to do it myself!’

Leo stepped to one side to let Natasha pass by him. The moment she closed her bedroom door, he reacted, stepping right up to Cindy. ‘Now listen to me, you spoiled little tart,’ he said. ‘One false word from you about what took place today and you’re finished. I will see to it.’

Cindy’s head shot up, scorn pouring out of her bright baby blue eyes. ‘You don’t have the power—’

‘Oh, yes, I do,’ Leo said. ‘Money talks. Jumped-up little starlets like you come off a conveyer belt. Give me half an hour with a telephone and I can ruin you so quickly you won’t see oblivion until you find yourself sunk in it up to your scrawny neck. Pending records deals can be withdrawn. Gigs cancelled. Careers murdered by a few words fed into the right ears.’

Cindy went white.

‘I see that you get my drift.’ Leo nodded. ‘You are not looking into the eyes of a devoted fan now, sweet face, you’re looking into the eyes of a very powerful man who can see right through the shiny packaging to the ugly person that lurks beneath.’

‘Natasha won’t let you do anything to h-hurt me,’ Cindy whispered.

‘Yes, she will,’ Natasha said. She was standing just inside the door with a hastily packed bag at her feet.

As Cindy looked at her Natasha twisted something out of her fingers, sending it spiralling through the air. It landed with a clink on the pale wood floor at Cindy’s feet. Looking down, even Leo went still when he saw what it was.

Her ring—her shiny diamond engagement ring. ‘That’s just something else of mine you haven’t tried,’ she explained. ‘Why don’t you put it on and see if it fits you as well as my fiancé did?’

Cindy’s appalled face was a picture. ‘I didn’t want him, and I don’t want—that!’

‘Well, what’s new there?’ Natasha laughed, though where the laugh came from she did not have a single clue. ‘When have you ever wanted anything once you’ve possessed it?’

Pandemonium broke out then as their parents arrived, rushing in through the flat door Leo must have left on the latch.

They looked straight at Cindy. They had barely registered that Natasha was even there.

Cindy burst into a flood of tears.

‘Oh, my poor baby,’ Natasha heard her mother cry out. ‘What did that Rico do to you?’

Natasha began to feel very sick again. She stared at the way her two parents had gathered comfortingly around Cindy and felt as if she were standing alone somewhere in outer space.

Then her gaze shifted to Leo standing on the periphery of it all with his steady dark eyes fixed on her painfully expressive face. ‘Can we leave now?’ she whispered.

‘Of course.’

And he was stooping to pick her bag up. As he straightened again his hand made a proprietary curl of her arm and Natasha heard Cindy quaver, ‘He’s been stalking m-me for weeks, Mummy. I went to see him to tell him to stop it or I would tell Natasha. The next thing I knew he…’

Leo closed the door on the rest. Neither said a single word to each other as they walked out of the apartment and headed for the lift. All the way down to the foyer they kept their silence, all the way out to his car. He drove them away in that same tense silence until Leo clearly could not stand it any longer and flicked a button on his steering wheel to activate his phone.

Natasha recognised the name ‘Juno’, then nothing as he proceeded to share a terse conversation in Greek.

She kept her eyes fixed on the side window and just let his deep, firm, yet strangely melodious voice wash over her as they drove out of the city and into lush green, rural England. The ugliness of her situation was crawling round her insides, the spin of once-loved faces turning into strangers as they flipped like a rolling film through her head. She didn’t know them and, she realised painfully, they did not really know her—or care.

‘Do you think they’ve noticed that you are no longer there yet?’

Realising Leo had finished his telephone conversation and had now turned his attention on her, Natasha lifted a shoulder in an empty shrug. Had they even noticed she was there in the first place? Pressing her pale lips together she said nothing.

A minute later they were turning in through a pair of gates leading to a private airport where, she presumed, Leo must keep his company jet. It took no time at all to get through the official stuff. All the way through it she stood quietly at his side.

So this is it, Natasha told herself as they walked towards a sleek white jet with its famous Christakis logo shining Ionian blue on its side. I’m going to fly off into the sunset to become this man’s sole possession.

She almost—almost managed a dry little smile.

‘What?’ Leo just never missed anything—not even the smallest flicker of a smile.

‘Nothing,’ she murmured.

‘Forget about Rico and your family,’ he said harshly. ‘You are better off without them. I am the only one you need to think about now.’

‘Of course,’ Natasha mocked. ‘I’m about to become a very rich man’s sexual doormat, which has to be quite a hike up from being my family’s wimpish doormat and Rico Giannetti’s thieving one.’

Leo said nothing, but she could sense his exasperation as he placed his hand on the small of her back to urge her up the flight steps.

The plane’s interior gave Natasha an insight into a whole new way of travelling. Breaking free from his touch, she took a couple of steps away from him, then stopped, tension springing along her nerve-ends when she heard the cabin door hiss as someone sealed it into its housing and the low murmur of Leo’s voice speaking to someone, though she did not turn around to find out who it was.

This wasn’t right. None of it was right, a sensible voice in her head tried to tell her. She should not be on this plane or tripping off to Athens with Leo Christakis—she should be staying in England and fighting to clear her name!

‘Here, let me take your jacket.’ He arrived right behind her again, making her whole body jerk to attention when his hands landed lightly on her shoulders.

‘I would rather keep it on,’ she insisted tautly.

‘No, you would not.’ Sliding his fingers beneath the jacket collar, he followed it around her slender white throat until he located the top button holding her jacket fastened. ‘You will be more comfortable without it.’ He twisted the button free.

‘Then I can do it.’ Snapping up her hands, Natasha grabbed his wrists with the intention of pulling his hands away. He didn’t let her.

‘My pleasure,’ he murmured smoothly as the next button gave.

Her two breasts thrust forward, driving a shaken gasp from her throat. ‘I wish you would go and f-find someone else to torment,’ she breathed out sharply when his knuckles grazed her nipples on their way to locate the next button, and felt her stomach muscles contract as he brushed across them, too.

He just laughed, low and huskily. ‘When did you find the time to stick your hair up again?’

‘At the flat,’ she mumbled, then went as taut as piano wire when the last button gave way to his working fingers.

‘You’re too skittish,’ he chided.

‘And you’re too sure of yourself!’ Natasha flicked out.

‘That’s me,’ he admitted casually, moving his hands down her sleeves to locate her handbag still clutched in one tense set of fingers. He gently prised it free to toss it aside.

Why the loss of her purse should make her feel even more exposed and under threat, Natasha did not have a clue, but by the time he’d eased the jacket from her shoulders she was more than ready to dissolve into panic. And the worst part about it was that she could not even say for sure any more what it was she was panicking about—Leo and his relentless determination to keep her balanced on the edge of reason, or herself because her senses persisted in responding to him even when her head told them to stop!

His hands arrived at the curve of her slender ribcage over the stretchy white fabric that moulded her so honestly it felt as if he were touching her skin. Natasha closed her eyes and prayed for deliverance when he eased her back against him and she felt his heat and his hard masculine contours.

‘Leo, please…’ It came out somewhere between a protest and a breathless plea.

It made no difference. He lowered his mouth and brushed his lips across the exposed skin at her nape and for Natasha it was like stepping off a cliff, she fell that easily. She murmured a pathetic little stifled groan and her head tipped downwards, inviting the gentle bite of his teeth. As he began kissing his way round her neck, she rolled it sideways on a slow and pleasurable, sensual stretch to give him greater access. She so loved what he was making her feel.

‘Mmm, you feel good, like warm, living silk to touch,’ he murmured. ‘You have a beautiful body, Natasha,’ he added huskily, gliding his hands upwards until he cupped her breasts and gently pressed his palms against their tightly budded peaks. ‘I need you to turn your head and kiss me, agape mou,’ he told her huskily.

And she did. She moved on a restless sigh of surrender when he reached for her hands and lifted them upwards, then clasped them around the back of his neck. The sheer sensual stretch of her body felt unbelievably erotic. She whispered something—even she didn’t know what it was—then she was giving in and twisting her head and going in search of his waiting mouth.

Leo gave it to her in a hot, deep, stabbing delivery. Her fingers curled into the black silk of his hair. It was shocking. She didn’t know herself like this, all soft and pliable and terribly needy.

‘We are cleared for take-off, Mr Christakis,’ a disembodied voice suddenly announced.

Leo drew his head back and the whole wild episode just went up in a single puff of smoke. Natasha opened her eyes and found that she couldn’t focus. Passion coins of heat burned her cheeks. She became aware of her hands still clinging to his head and slid them away from him, her still-parted mouth closing with a soft burning crush of her warm lips.

‘You are quite a bundle of delightful surprises,’ she heard Leo mock. ‘Once unbuttoned you just let it all flood out.’

And the real horror of it was that he was, oh, so right! Each time he touched her it was the same as losing touch with her common sense and dignity. Acknowledging that had Natasha breaking free of him to wrap her arms tightly around her body, then she just stood there, shaking and fighting to get a grip on herself.

An engine purred into life.

‘Take a seat, strap yourself in, relax,’ his hatefully sardonic tone invited, and he was stepping around her to stride down the cabin.

Watching him go, Natasha thought she glimpsed a flick of irritation in the way that he moved and kind of understood it. To a man like Leo Christakis the deal had been done, so to have her continue to play it coy annoyed him. From the little she’d heard about his private life, he liked his women with the experience and sophistication to know how to respond positively to his seduction routine, not blow hot then tense and skittish each time he attempted to act naturally with her.

The gap in their ages suddenly loomed. The fact that there was nothing natural at all in the two of them being together picked at her nerves as she chose a seat at random and sat down.

The plane slid into movement. Natasha watched Leo remove his suit jacket to reveal wide, muscled shoulders hugging the white fabric of his shirt. He draped the jacket over the back of the chair in front of the desk, then folded his long body into the seat placed at an angle to her, those muscled shoulders flexed as he locked in his seat belt, then reached out to pull a large stack of papers towards him and sat back to read.

Dragging her eyes away from him, she hunted down her seat belt with the intention of fastening it, but she spied her discarded jacket lying on the seat opposite and on sheer impulse she snatched it up and put it back on, buttoning it shut all the way up to her throat, though she had no idea what, by doing it, she was hoping to prove.

Unless it had something to do with the tight bubble of anger she could feel simmering away inside at the way he was lounging there already steeped in paperwork and putting on a good impression that he had already forgotten she was here, which hit too closely at the way her family had behaved at the apartment.

Ten minutes later they were in the air and his laptop computer was open, his voice that same melodic drone in her ears. A gentle-voiced stewardess appeared at Natasha’s side to ask her if she would like something to eat and drink. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat anything right now, but she asked if it was possible for her to have a cup of tea, and the stewardess smiled an, ‘of course,’ and went away to see to it.

Leo swivelled around in his chair.

He looked at her, narrowing his eyes on the buttoned-up jacket. A new rush of stinging awareness spun through the air.

‘It will have to stay off at some point,’ he murmured slowly.

Natasha pushed her chin up and just glared.

It was a challenge that made his dark eyes spark and sent Natasha breathless. Then he was forced to turn his attention back to his satellite link, leaving her feeling hot and skittish for a different reason.

For the next three hours he worked at the desk and she sat sipping her tea or reading one of the magazines the stewardess had kindly brought for her. Throughout the journey Leo kept on swinging his chair around to look at her, waiting until she felt compelled to look back at him, then holding her gaze with disturbing dark promises of what lay ahead. Once he even got up and came to lean over her, capturing her mouth with a deep, probing kiss. As he drew away again the top button to her jacket sprang open.

He did it to challenge her challenge, Natasha knew that, but her body still tightened and her breasts tingled and peaked. The next time he turned his chair to look at her the button was neatly fastened again and she refused point blank this time to lift her head up from the magazine.

They arrived in Athens to oven heat and humid darkness. It was a real culture shock to witness how their passage through the usual formalities was so carefully smoothed. And Leo felt different, like a remote tall, dark stranger walking at her side. His expression was so much harder and there was a clipped formality in the way he spoke to anyone. A quiet coolness if he was obliged to speak to her.

Natasha put his changed mood down to the way people constantly stopped to stare at them. When she saw the cavalcade of three heavy black limousines waiting to sweep them away from the airport, it really came down hard on her to realise just how much power and importance Leo Christakis carried here in his own capital city to warrant such an escort.

‘Quite a show,’ she murmured as she sat beside him in the rear of the car surrounded by plush dark leather while the other two cars crouched close to their front and rear bumpers. Seated in the front passenger seat of this car and shut away behind a plate of thick, tinted glass sat a man Leo had introduced to her as, ‘Rasmus, my security chief’. It was only as he made the introduction that Natasha realised how often she’d seen the other man lurking on the shadowy periphery of wherever Leo was.

‘Money and power make their own enemies,’ he responded as if all of this was an accepted part of his life.

‘You mean, you always have to live like this?’

‘Here in Athens, and in other major cities.’ He nodded.

It was no wonder then that he was so cynical about anyone he came into contact with, it dawned on her. He flies everywhere in his private jet aeroplane, he drives around in private limousines and he has the kind of bank balance most people could not conjure up even in their wildest dreams. And he has so much power at his fingertips he probably genuinely believes he exists on a higher plane than most other beings.

‘I never saw it in London,’ she said after a moment, remembering that while he’d been in London he had driven himself.

He turned his head to look at her, dark eyes glowing through the dimness of the car’s interior. ‘It was there. You just did not bother to look for it.’

Maybe she didn’t, but… ‘It can’t have been as obvious there,’ Natasha insisted. ‘I was used to some measure of security when Cindy was performing but never anything like this—and none at all with Rico.’ She then added with a frown, ‘Though that seems odd now when I think about who Rico is and—’

He moved, it was barely a shift of his body but it brought Natasha’s face around to catch the flash to hit his eyes.

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘Don’t ever compare me with him,’ he iced out.

Her blue eyes widened. ‘But I wasn’t—’

‘You were about to,’ he cut in. ‘I am Leo Christakis, and this is my life you are entering into with all its restrictions and privileges. Rico was nothing.’ He flicked a long-fingered hand as if swatting his stepbrother away. ‘Merely a freeloader who liked to ride on my coat-tails—’

Natasha went perfectly pale. ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered.

‘Why not when it is the truth?’ he declared with no idea how he had just devastated her by using the same withering words to describe Rico as her sister had used to describe her. ‘His name is Rico Giannetti, though he prefers to think of himself as a Christakis, but he has no Christakis blood to back it up and no Christakis money to call his own,’ he laid out with contempt. ‘He held an office in every Christakis building because it was good for his image to appear as if he was worthy of his place there, but he never worked in it—not in the true meaning of the word anyway.’ The cynical bite to his voice sent Natasha even paler as his implication hit home. ‘He drew a salary he did little to earn and spent it on whatever took his fancy while robbing me blind behind my back as I picked up the real tabs on his extravagant tastes,’ he continued on. ‘He is a hard-drinking, hard-playing liar to himself and to everyone connected to him, including you, his betrayed, play-acting betrothed.’

Shaken by his contemptuous barrage, ‘Ex-betrothed,’ Natasha husked out unsteadily.

‘Ex-everything as far as you are concerned,’ he pronounced. ‘From this day on he is out of the picture and I am the only man that matters to you.’

He had demanded that she put her family out of her head, now he was insisting she put Rico out of her head. ‘Yes, sir,’ she snapped out impulsively, wishing she could put him out of her head, too!

A black frown scored his hard features at her mocking tone. ‘I thought a few home truths at this point will help to keep this relationship honest.’

‘Honest?’ Natasha almost hyperventilated on the breath she took. ‘What you’re really doing here is letting me know that you expect to control even my thoughts!’

Impatience hit his eyes. ‘I do not expect that—’

‘You do expect that!’

Leo raked out an angry sigh. ‘I will not have Rico’s name thrown in my face by you every five minutes!’

Natasha swung round on him in full choking fury. ‘I did not throw his name at you—you battered me with it!’

‘That was not my intention,’ he returned stiffly.

Twisting on the seat, she glared at the glazed partition. ‘You’re no better than Rico, just different than Rico in the way you treat people—women!’ she shook out with a withering glance across the width of the seat. ‘Since we are driving along here like a presidential cavalcade, your loathsome arrogance is one fault I will let you have, but your—’

‘Loathsome—again?’ he mocked lazily.

It blew the lid off what was left of her temper. ‘And utterly, pathetically jealous of Rico!’

Silence clattered down all around them with the same effect as crashing cymbals hitting the crescendo note and making Natasha’s heart begin to race. She could not believe she had just said that. Daring another glance at Leo, she could see him looking back at her like a man-eating shark about to go on the attack, and now she couldn’t even breathe because the tension between them was sucking what was left of the oxygen out of the luxury confines of the car.

He reacted with a lightning strike. For such a big man he moved with a lithe, silent stealth and the next thing she knew she was being hauled through the space separating them to land in an inelegant sprawl of body and limbs across his lap. Their eyes clashed, his glittering with golden sparks of anger she hadn’t seen in them before. Hers were too wide and too blue and—scared of what was suddenly fizzing in her blood.

She had to lick her suddenly very dry lips just to manage a husky, ‘I didn’t really m-mean—’

Then came the kiss—the hot and passionate ambush that silenced her attempt to retract what she’d said, and flung her instead into fight with lips and tongues and hands that did not know how to stay still. His breath seared her mouth and a set of long fingers was clamped to the rounded shape of her hip, her own fingers applying digging pressure to whatever part of his anatomy they could reach as their mouths strained and fought. The motion of the car and the fact that they were even in one became lost in the uneven fight. She wriggled against him. His hand maintained its controlling clamp. She felt her fingernails clawing at his nape and the rock-solid moulding of his chest so firmly imprinted against his shirt.

He loved it. She caught his tense hiss of pleasure in her mouth and felt a tight, pleasurable shudder attack his front, the powerful surge of his response making itself felt against the thigh he held pressed into his lap. Then his hand was sliding beneath her skirt and stroking the pale skin at the top of her thigh where her stockings did not reach. If he stroked any higher, he was going to discover that she was wearing a thong and she increased her struggle to get free before he reached there, lost the fight, and a quiver of agonising embarrassment sent her kiss-fighting mouth very still.

‘Well, what do we have here?’ he paused to murmur slowly, long fingers stroking over a smoothly rounded, satin-skinned buttock and crippling Natasha’s ability to breathe. ‘The prim disguise is really beginning to wear very thin the more I dig beneath it.’

‘Shut up,’ she choked, eyes squeezed tight shut now. She was never going to wear a thong ever again, she vowed hectically.

He removed his hand and her eyes shot open because she needed to know what he was going to do next, and found herself staring into his mockingly smiling face. The anger had gone and his lazily, sensual male confidence was firmly back in place.

‘Any more hidden treasures left for me to discover?’ He arched a sleek, dark, quizzing eyebrow.

‘No,’ Natasha mumbled, which made him release a dark, husky laugh that shimmered right through her as potently as everything else about him did.

Then he wasn’t smiling. ‘OK, so I am jealous of Rico where you are concerned.’ He really shocked her by admitting it. ‘So take my advice and don’t bring him into our bed or I will not be responsible for the way I react.’

Before she could respond to that totally unexpected back-down, he was lowering his head again and crushing her mouth. How long this kiss went on Natasha had no idea, because she just lost herself in the warm, slow, heady promise it was offering.

The car began to slow.

Both felt the change in speed but it was Leo who broke away and with a sigh lifted her from him to place her back on the seat. Lounging back into the corner of the car, he then watched the way she concentrated on trying to tidy herself, shaky fingers checking buttons and pulling her skirt into place across her knees.

‘Miss Prim.’ He laughed softly.

Lifting her fingers to smooth her hair, Natasha said nothing, a troubled frown toying with her brow now because she just could not understand how she could fall victim to his kisses as thoroughly as she did.

‘It’s called sexual attraction, pethi mou,’ Leo explained, reading her thoughts as if he owned them now.

Her profile held Leo’s attention as it turned a gentle pink. If he did not know otherwise, he would swear that Natasha Moyles was an absolute novice when it came to sexual foreplay. She ran from cold to hot to shy and dignified. She was not coquettish. She did not flirt or invite. She appeared to have no idea what she did to him yet she was so acutely receptive to anything that he did to her.

And she made him ache just to sit here looking at her. It was not an unpleasant condition; in fact, it had been so many years since he’d felt this sexually switched on to a woman, he’d believed he had lost the capacity to feel anything quite this intense.

Gianna had done that to him, scraped him dry of so many feelings and turned him into an emotional cynic. But his ex-wife was not someone he wanted to be thinking of right now, he told himself as he focused his attention back on this woman who was keeping his senses on edge just by sitting here next to him.

‘We have arrived,’ he murmured, using the information like yet another sexual promise to taunt her with, then watched her slender spine grow tense as she glanced beyond the car’s tinted glass to catch sight of the twin iron gates that guarded the entrance to his property.

Natasha stared at the gates as they slid apart to their approach. All three cars swept smoothly through them, then two cars veered off to the left almost immediately while theirs made a direct line for the front of his white-painted, three-storey villa.

Rasmus was out of the car and opening Leo’s door the moment the car pulled to a stop at the bottom of the curving front steps. Leo climbed out, ruefully aware that his legs didn’t feel like holding him up. Desire was a gnawing, debilitating ache once it buried its teeth in you, he mused ruefully as he turned to watch his driver open the other passenger door so the object of his desire could step out of the car.

She gazed across the top of the car up at his villa with its modern curving frontage built to follow the shape of the white marbled steps. Light spilled out of curving-glass windows offset in three tiers framed by white terrace rails.

‘I live at the top,’ he said. ‘The guest suites cover the middle floor. My staff have the run of the ground floor… what do you think?’

‘Very ocean-going liner,’ Natasha murmured.

Leo smiled. ‘That was the idea.’

Rasmus shifted his bulk beside him then, reminding Leo that he was there. Leo glanced at him, that was all, and both Rasmus and the driver climbed back in the car and firmly shut the doors. Then the car moved away, leaving Leo and Natasha facing each other across its now-empty space. It was hot and it was dark but the light from the building lit up the two of them and the exotic scent of summer jasmine hung heavy in the air.

Natasha watched as Leo ran his eyes over her suit and the bag she once again clutched to her front. He didn’t even need to say what he was thinking any more, he just smiled and she knew exactly what was going through his head. He was letting her know how much he was looking forward to stripping her of everything she liked to hide behind.

And the worst part about it was that her insides feathered soft rushes of excitement across intimate muscles in expectant response.

When he held out his hand in a silent command that she go to him, Natasha found herself closing the gap between them as if pulled across it by strings.

CHAPTER FIVE

NO MAN had a right to be as overwhelmingly masculine as Leo did, Natasha thought as the feathering sensation increased as she walked. With his superior height, the undeniable power locked into his long, muscled body and that bump on his nose, which announced without apology that there was a real tough guy hiding inside his expensively sleek billionaire’s clothes.

He turned towards the house as she reached him, the outstretched hand becoming a strong, muscled arm he placed across her back, long fingers curling lightly against her ribcage just below the thrust of her breasts.

Antagonism at his confident manner began dancing through her bloodstream—fed by a fizzing sense of anticipation that held her breath tight in her lungs. Walking beside him made Natasha feel very small suddenly, fragile, so intensely aware of each curve, each small nuance of her own body that it was as close as she’d ever come to experiencing the truly erogenous side of desire.

Inside, the villa was a spectacular example of modern architecture, but Natasha didn’t see it. She was too busy absorbing the tingling sensations created by each step she took as they walked towards a waiting lift.

Once she stepped into it she would be lost and she knew it.

So that first step into the lift’s confines felt the same to her as stepping off the edge of a cliff. The doors closed behind them. She watched one of Leo’s hands reach out to touch a button that sent the lift gliding smoothly up. He still kept her close to him, and she kept her eyes carefully lowered, unwilling to let him see what was going on inside her head. The lift doors slid open giving them access into a vast reception hallway filled with soft light.

The very last thing Natasha wanted to see was another human being standing there waiting to greet them. It interfered with the vibrations passing between the two of them and brought her sinking back to a saner sense of self.

‘Kalispera, Bernice,’ Leo greeted smoothly, his hand arriving at Natasha’s elbow to steady her shocked little backwards step.

‘Good evening, kirios—thespinis,’ the stocky, dark housekeeper turned to greet Natasha in heavy, accented English. ‘You have the pleasant flight?’

‘I—yes, thank you,’ Natasha murmured politely, surprised that she seemed to be expected, then blushing when she realised just what that meant.

Bernice turned back to Leo. ‘Kiria Christakis has been ringing,’ she informed him.

‘Kiria Angelina?’ Leo questioned.

‘Okhi…’ Bernice switched languages, leaving Natasha to surmise that her ex-future mother-in-law had left a long message to relay her shock and distress, going by the urgency of Bernice’s tone.

‘My apologies, agape mou, but I need a few minutes to deal with this.’ Leo turned to Natasha. ‘Bernice will show you where you can freshen up.’

His expression was grim and impatient. And despite his apology he did not hang around long enough for Natasha to answer before he was turning to stride across the foyer, leaving her staring after him.

‘Leo…?’ Calling his name brought him to an abrupt standstill.

‘Yes?’ He did not turn around.

Natasha was tensely aware of Bernice standing beside her. ‘W-will you tell your stepmother for me, please, that I am truly sorry ab-about the way that—things have worked out?’

His silent hesitation lasted longer than Natasha’s instincts wanted to allow for. Beside her, Bernice shifted slightly and lowered her head to stare down at the floor.

‘I l-like Angelina,’ she rushed on, wondering if she’d made some terrible faux pas in Greek family custom by speaking out about personal matters in front of the paid staff. ‘None of what happened was her fault and I know she m-must be disappointed and upset.’

Still, he hesitated, and this time Natasha felt that hesitation prickle right down to her toes.

Then he gave a curt nod. ‘I will pass on your message.’ He strode on, leaving her standing there feeling…

‘This way, thespinis…’

Feeling what? she asked herself helplessly as Bernice claimed her attention, indicating that she follow her into a wide, softly lit hallway that led off the foyer.

Bernice showed her into beautiful bedroom suite with yet more soft light spilling over a huge divan bed made up with crisp white linen. Dragging her eyes away from it, Natasha stared instead at a spectacular curving wall of glass back-dropped by an endless satin dark sky.

Bernice was talking to her in her stilted English, telling her where the bathroom was and that her luggage would arrive very soon.

Luggage, Natasha thought as the housekeeper finally left her alone. Did one hastily packed canvas holdall classify as luggage?

Dear God, how did I get to be standing here in a virtual stranger’s bedroom, waiting for my luggage? she then mocked herself, and wasn’t surprised when her gaze slid back to that huge divan bed, then flicked quickly away again before her imagination could conjure up an image of what they were going to be doing there soon.

Heart thumping too heavily in her chest, Natasha sent her restless eyes on a scan of the remainder of her spacious surroundings, which bore no resemblance at all to Leo’s very traditional Victorian London home. Here, cool white dominated with bold splashes of colour in the bright modern abstracts hanging from the walls and the jewel-blue cover she’d spied draped across the end of the bed.

Needing to do something—anything—to occupy her attention if she didn’t want to suffer a mad panic attack, she walked over to the curved wall of glass with the intention of checking out the view beyond it, but the glass took her by surprise when it started to open, parting in the middle with a smooth silent glide—activated, she guessed, by her body moving in line with a hidden sensor.

Stepping out of air-controlled coolness into stifling heat caught her breath for a second, then she was dropping her purse onto the nearest surface, which happened to be one of the several white rattan tables and chairs spread around out there, and she was being drawn across the floor’s varnished wood surface towards the twinkle of lights she could see beyond the white terrace railing, while still trying to push back the nervous flutters attacking her insides along with the deep sinking knowledge that she really should not be doing this.

A city of lights suddenly lay spread out beneath her, looking so glitteringly spectacular Natasha momentarily forgot her worries as she caught her breath once more. She’d been aware that they’d climbed up out of the city on the journey here from the airport, but she had not realised they’d climbed as high as this.

‘Welcome to Athens,’ a smooth, dark, warm velvet voice murmured lightly from somewhere behind her.

She hadn’t heard him come into the bedroom, and now tension locked her slender shoulders as she listened to his footsteps bring him towards her.

‘So, what do you think?’

His hands slid around her waist to draw her against him. ‘Fabulous,’ she offered, trying hard to sound calm when they both knew she wasn’t by the way she grew taut at his closeness. ‘Is—is that the Acropolis I can see lit up over there?’

A slender hand pointed out across the city. When she lowered it again, she found it caught by one of his.

‘With the told quarters of Monastiraki and the Plaka below it,’ he confirmed, taking her hand and laying it against her fluttering stomach, then keeping it there with the warm clasp of his. ‘Over there you can see Zappeion Megaron lit up, which stands in our National Gardens, and that way—’ he pointed with his other hand ‘—Syntagma Square…’

The whole thing turned a bit surreal from then on as Natasha stood listening to his quietly melodic voice describing the night view of Athens as if there were no sexual undercurrents busily at work. But those undercurrents were at work, like the tingling warmth of his body heat and the power of his masculine physicality as he pressed her back against him. She felt wrapped in him, trapped, surrounded and overwhelmed by a pulse-chasing vibration of intimacy that danced along her nerve-ends and fought with her need to breathe.

‘It is very dark with no moon tonight but can you see the Aegean in the distance lit by the lights from the port of Piraeus.’ She had to fight with herself to keep tuned into what he was saying. ‘After Bernice has served our dinner I will show you the view from the other terrace, but first I would like you to explain to me, pethi mou, what has changed in the last five minutes to scare you into the shakes?’

‘Leo…’ Impulsive, she seized the moment. ‘I can’t go through with this. I thought I could but I can’t.’ Slipping her hand out from beneath his, she turned to face him, ‘I need you to understand that this…’

Her words dried up when she found herself staring at his white-shirted front. He’d taken off his jacket and his tie had gone, the top couple of buttons on his shirt tugged open to reveal a bronzed V of warm skin and a deeply unsettling hint of curling black chest hair.

The air snagged in her chest, the important words—this will be my first time—lost in the new struggle she had with herself as her senses clamoured inside her like hungry beasts. She wanted him. She did not understand why or how she had become this attracted or so susceptible to him but it was there, dragging down on her stomach muscles and coiling around never before awakened erogenous zones.

‘We have a deal, Natasha,’ his level voice reminded her.

A deal. Pressing her trembling lips together, she nodded. ‘I know and I’m s-sorry but—’ Oh, God. She had to look away from him so she could finish. ‘This is too m-much, too quickly and I…’

‘And you believe I am about show my lack of finesse by jumping all over you and carrying you off to bed?’

‘Yes—n-no.’ His sardonic tone locked a frown to her brow.

‘Then what do you expect will happen next?’

‘Do you have to sound so casual about it?’ she snapped out, taking a step back so her lower spine hit the terrace rail. Discomforted and disturbed by the whole situation, she wrapped her arms across her front. ‘You might prefer to believe that I do this kind of thing on a regular basis, but I don’t.’

‘Ah,’ he drawled. ‘But you think that I do.’

‘No!’ she denied, flashing a glare up at him, then wished she hadn’t when she saw the cynically amused cut to his mouth. ‘I don’t think that.’

‘Good. Thank you,’ he added dryly.

‘I don’t know enough about you to know how you run your private life!’

‘Just as I know little about your private life,’ he pointed out. ‘So we will agree to agree that neither of us is without sexual experience and therefore can be sophisticated enough to acknowledge that we desire each other—with or without the deal we have struck.’

‘But I haven’t,’ she mumbled.

‘Haven’t—what?’ he sighed out.

Too embarrassed to look at him, cheeks flushed, Natasha stared at her feet. ‘Any sexual experience.’

There was one of those short, sharp silences, in which Natasha sucked on her lower lip. Then Leo released another sigh and this one kept on going until it had wrung itself out.

‘Enough, Natasha,’ he censured wearily. ‘I did not come out of the womb a week ago so let’s leave the play-acting behind us from now on.’

‘I’m not play-acting!’ Her head shot up on the force of her insistence. All she saw was the flashing glint of his impatience as he reached out and pulled her towards him. Her own arms unfolded so she could use her hands to push him away again, but by then his mouth was on hers, hot, hard and angrily determined. Her fists flailing uselessly, he drew her into his arms and once again she was feeling the full powerful length of him against her body. Without even knowing it happened she went from fighting to clinging to his shoulders as her parted mouth absorbed the full passionate onslaught of his kiss.

There was no in-between, no pause to decide whether or not she wanted to give in to him, it just happened, making an absolute mockery of her agitation and her protests because Leo was right, and she did want him—badly.

This badly, Natasha extended helplessly as he deepened the kiss with that oh-so-clever stroke of his tongue, and she felt her body responding by stretching and arching in sensuous invitation up against the hardening heat of his.

And she knew she was lost even before he put his hands to her hips and tugged her into even closer contact with what was happening to him. When he suddenly pulled his head back, she released a protesting whimper—it shocked even Natasha at the depth of throaty protest it contained.

He said something terse, his eyes so incredibly dark now they held her hypnotised. ‘You want me,’ he rasped softly. ‘Stop playing games with me.’

Before she could answer or even try to form an answer, he was claiming her mouth again and deepening the whole wildly hot episode with a kiss that sealed his declaration like a brand burned into her skin. Her arms clung and he held her tightly against him—nothing, she realised dizzily, was now going to stop this.

And she didn’t want it to stop. She wanted to lose herself in his power and his fierce sensuality and the heat of the body she was now touching with greedily restless fingers. She felt the thumping pound of his heartbeat and each pleasurable flinch of his taut muscles as her fingers ran over them. His shirt was in her way—he knew it was in her way and, with a growl of frustration, he stepped back from her, caught hold of her hand and led her back inside.

The bed stood out like a glaring statement of intent. He stopped beside it, then turned to look at her, catching her uncertain blue stare and leaning in to kiss it away before stepping back again. If there was a chink of sanity left to be had out of this second break in contact, it was lost again by a man blessed with all the right moves to keep a woman mesmerised by him.

He began removing his shirt, his fingers slowly working buttons free to reveal, inch by tantalising inch, his long, bronzed torso with his black haze of body hair and beautifully formed, rippling muscles, which Natasha’s concentration became solely fixed on. She had never been so absorbed by anything. Sexual tension stung in the air, quickening her frail breathing as he began to pull the shirt free from the waistband of his trousers. When the shirt came off altogether, she felt bathed in the heady thrill of his clean male scent. He was so intensely masculine, so magnificently built—she just couldn’t hold back from reaching out to place her hands on him.

And he let her. He let her explore him as if she was on some magical mystery journey into the unknown, his arms, the glossy skin covering his shoulders, the springy black hair covering his chest. As her hands drifted over him, her tongue snaked out to taste her upper lip, but she knew that really it wanted to taste him.

Leo reached up and gently popped the top button of her jacket and she gasped as if it was some major development, her eyes flicking up to catch his wry smile sent to remind her that this undressing part was a two-way thing. He leant in to kiss her parted lips as he popped the next button, and the whole battle they’d been waging with her jacket took on a power of its own as she just stood there and let him pop buttons between slow, deep, sensuous kisses, until there were no buttons left to pop.

He discarded her jacket in the same way he had discarded it once already that day, without letting up on his slow seduction by making her shiver as he trailed his fingers up her bare arms and over her shoulders, then down the full length of her back, making her arch towards him, making her whisper out a sigh of pleasure, making her eyes drift shut in response. Then he just peeled her stretchy white top up her body and right over her head. Cool air hit her skin and the shock of it made her open her eyes again. He was looking down at her breasts cupped in plain white satin, the fullness of their creamy slopes pushing against the bra’s balcony edge. When the bra clasp sprang open and he trailed that flimsy garment away, her hands leapt up to cover her bared breasts. Leo caught her wrists and pulled them away again, his ebony eyelashes low over the intense glow in his eyes now as he watched her nipples form into pink, tight, tingling peaks.

Nothing prepared her for the shot of pleasure she experienced when he drew her against him and her breasts met with his hair-roughened chest.

No turning back now, Natasha told herself hazily as the wriggle of doubts faded away to let in the rich, drugging beauty of being deeply kissed. She felt her skirt give, felt it slither on its smooth satin lining down her legs to pool at her feet. Her bra was gone. The thong was nothing. The fine denier stocking clung to her slender white thighs. Her hair came loose next, unfurling down her naked back like an unbelievably sexy caress.

Leo had all but unwrapped her and she’d never felt so exquisitely aware of herself as a desirable woman. When he drew back from her, she reached for him to pull his mouth back to hers. He murmured something—a soft curse, she suspected—then picked her up and placed her down on the bed. Natasha held on to him by linking her hands around his neck to make sure that the kiss did not break. She wanted him—all of him.

‘Greedy,’ he murmured softly against her mouth as he stretched out beside her, and she was! Greedy and hungry and caught in the sexual spell he’d been weaving around her for most of the day.

Then one of his hands cupped the fullness of her breast and her breath stalled in her throat as he left her mouth to capture the tightly presented peak. Sensation made her writhe as he sucked gently, her fingers clawing into the thick silk of his hair with the intention of pulling him away—only it didn’t happen because his teeth lightly grazed her, and soon she was groaning and clinging as the smooth, sharp feel of his tongue and his teeth and his measured suck drew pleasure on the edge of tight, stinging pain downward until it centred between her thighs.

Maybe he knew, maybe she groaned again, but his mouth was suddenly hot and urgently covering hers. And she could feel the hunger in him, the urgent intent of his desire demanding the same from her and getting it when he kissed her so deeply she felt immersed in its power.

Then he was leaving her, snaking upright and trailing the thong away as he did so. Eyes hooded again, dark features severe now, he removed her stockings, then straightened up to unzip his trousers and heel off his shoes while running his eyes over her possessively.

‘You’re beautiful,’ he murmured huskily. ‘Tell me you want me.’

There was no denying it when she couldn’t take her eyes off him, no pretending that she was a victim here when her body responded wildly to the sight of his naked power.

‘I want you,’ she whispered.

It was Natasha who reached for him when he came down beside her again. It was she that turned to press the full length of her eager body into his.

Then he was taking control again, pushing her gently onto her back and rolling half across her. What came next was a lesson in slow seduction. He laid hot, delicate kisses across her mouth, touched her with gentle fingers, caressed her breasts and her slender ribcage, stroking feather-light fingertips over her skin to the indentation of her waist and across the rounded curves of her hips. It was an exploration of the most intense, stimulating agony; her flesh came alive as she moved and breathed and arched to his bidding. When he finally let his hand probe the warm, moist centre between her thighs, she was lost, writhing like a demented thing, clinging to his head and begging for his kiss. And he was hot, he was tense, he was clever with those deft fingers. The new shock sensation of what he was doing to her dropped her like a stone into a whirlpool of hot, rushing uproar.

‘Leo,’ she groaned out.

Saying his name was like giving him permission to turn up the heat. He appeared above her, big and dark—fierce with burning eyes and sexual tension striking across his lean cheeks. He recaptured her mouth with a burning urgency, shuddering when her fingers clawed into his nape. And still, he kept up the unremitting caresses with his fingers, driving her on while each desperate breath she managed to take made the roughness of his chest rasp torturously against the tight, stinging tips of her breasts.

She could feel the powerful nudge of his erection against her. Her tongue quivered with knowledge against his. A flimsy, rippling spasm was trying to catch hold of her and she whimpered because she couldn’t quite seize it.

Leo muttered something thick in his throat, then rose above her like some mighty warrior, so powerfully, darkly, passionately Greek that if she had not felt the pounding thunder of his heartbeat when she sent her hands sliding up the wall of his chest, Natasha could have convinced herself that he just wasn’t real.

He eased between her parted thighs with the firm, nude tautness of his narrow hips and the rounded tip of his desire made that first probing push against her flesh. Feeling him there, understanding what was coming and so naïvely eager to receive it, Natasha threw her head back onto the bed, ready, wanting this so very badly she was breathless, riddled by needs so new to her that they held her on the very edge of screaming-pitch.

So the sudden, fierce thrust of his invasion followed by a sharp, burning pain that ripped through her body had her clenching her muscles on a cry of protest.

Leo froze. Her eyes shot to his face. She found herself staring into passion-soaked, burning brown eyes turned black with shock. ‘You were a virgin. You—’

Natasha closed her eyes and refused to say anything, while his deriding denial that this would be her first time replayed its cruel taunt across her tense body, and the muscles inside her that were already contracting around him.

‘Natasha—’

‘No!’ she cried out. ‘Don’t talk about it!’

He seemed shocked by her agonised outburst. ‘But you—’

‘Please get off me,’ she squeezed out in desperation and pushed at his shoulders with her tightly clenched fists. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘Because you are new to this…’ His voice had roughened, the hand he used to gently push her hair away from her face trembling against her hot skin.

But he made no attempt to withdraw from her, his big shoulders bunched and glossed with a fine layer of perspiration, forearms braced on either side of her, and his face was so grave now Natasha knew what was coming before he said it.

‘I’m sorry, agape mou…’

‘Just get off!’ She didn’t want his apology. Balling her hands into fists, she pushed at his shoulders, writhing beneath him in an effort to get free, only to flatten out again on a shivering quiver of shock when her inner muscles leapt on his intrusion with an excited clamour that made her eyes widen.

Reading her expression with an ease that pushed a hot flush through her body, ‘You are not hurting any more,’ he husked out, and lowered his head to adorn her face with soft, light, coaxing kisses—her eyes, her nose, her temples, her delicate ear lobes—that made her quiver and squirm and in the end dig fingers into his bunched shoulders and send her mouth on a restless search for his.

‘Oh, kiss me properly!’ she ended up begging.

Her helpless plea was all it took to tip a carefully contained, sexually aroused man over the edge. On a very explicit curse, he moulded her mouth to his. A second later and Natasha was lost—flung into a strange new world filled with sensation, piling in on top of sensation, unaware that the whole wild beauty of it was being carefully built upon by a master lover until she felt the first rippling spasm wash through her. She knew that he felt it, too, because he whispered something hot against her cheek, slid his powerful arms beneath her so he could hold her close, then angled his mouth to hers and began to thrust really deep, increasing the pace while maintaining a ferocious grip on his own thundering needs.

The grinding drag of fierce pleasure began to flow through her body. Natasha whimpered helplessly against his mouth. Knotting his fingers into her hair, he muttered tensely, ‘Let go, agape mou.’

And like a fledgling bird being encouraged to fly, Natasha just opened her sensory wings and dropped off the edge of the world into an acutely bright, scintillating dive straight into the frenzied path of an emotional storm. A moment later she felt him shudder as he made the same mind-shredding leap, while urging her on and on until two became one in a wildly delirious, spiralling spin.

It was as if afterwards didn’t exist for Natasha; pure shock dropped her like a rock through a deep, dark hole into an exhausted sleep.

Maybe she did it because she did not want to face what she’d done, Leo mused sombrely as he sat sprawled in a chair by the bed, watching her—watching this woman he’d just bedded like some raving sex maniac while giving himself every excuse he could come up with to help him to justify his behavior.

A virgin.

His conscience gave him a stark, piercing pinch.

And the guilty truth of it was, he could still feel the sense of stinging, hot pleasurable pressure he’d experienced when the barrier gave. A muscle low down in his abdomen gave a tug in direct response to the memory and he lifted the glass of whisky he held and grimly took a large sip.

The prim persona had been no lie.

She even slept the sleep of an innocent, he observed as he ran his eyes over her. No hint of sensual abandon in the modest curve of her body outlined against the white sheet.

Another slug at the whisky and he was studying her face next. Perfect, beautiful, softened by slumber and washed pale by the strain of the day she’d been put through when she should look…

He took another pull of the whisky, and as he lifted the glass to his mouth, her eyelids fluttered upwards and her sleep-darkened blue eyes looked directly at him.

The nagging tug on his loins became a pulsing burn that made him feel like a sinner.

He lowered the glass, and half hiding his eyes, watched her catch her breath, then freeze for a second before he said sombrely, ‘We will get married.’

Natasha almost jolted right out of her skin. ‘Are you mad?’ she gasped, pulling the covering sheet tightly up against her chin. ‘We have a deal—’

‘You were a virgin.’

As she dragged herself into a sitting position her hair tumbled forwards in a shining, loose tangle of waves around her face and she pushed it out of her way impatiently. ‘What the heck difference should that make to anything?’

‘It means everything,’ Leo insisted. ‘Therefore we will be married as soon as I can arrange it. I am honour-bound to offer you this.’

‘Stuff your honour.’ Heaving in a deep breath, Natasha climbed out of the bed on the other side from where he was sitting, trailing the sheet around her as she went. ‘Having just escaped one sleazy marriage by the skin of my teeth, I am not going to fall into another one!’

‘It will not be a sleazy marriage.’

‘Everything about you and your terrible family is sleazy!’ she turned on him angrily. ‘You’re all so obsessed with the value of money, you’ve lost touch with what’s really valuable in life! Well, I haven’t.’ Tossing her chin up, eyes like blue glass on fire with contempt, she drew the sheet around her. ‘We made a deal in which I give you sex for six weeks until I can give you back your precious money. Show a bit of your so-called honour by keeping to that deal!’

With that she turned and strode off to the bathroom, needing to escape—needing some respite from Leo Christakis and his long, sexy body stretched out in that chair by the bed. So he’d pulled a robe on—what difference did that make? She could still see him naked, still visualise every honed muscle and bone, each single inch of his taut, bronzed flesh! And she could still feel the power of his kisses and the weight of him on top of her and the…

‘You were innocent,’ he fed after her.

Was he talking about her sexual innocence or her being innocent of all of the other rotten charges he had laid against her? Did she care? No.

‘Stick to your first impression of me,’ she flung at him over her shoulder. ‘Your instincts were working better then!’

On that scathing slice, she slammed into the bathroom.

Leo grimaced into his glass. His first impression of Natasha Moyles had been deadly accurate, he acknowledged. It was only the stuff with Rico that had fouled up that impression.

He heard the shower running. He visualised her dropping the sheet and walking that smooth, curvy body into his custom-built wet room. The vision pushed him to his feet with the grim intention of giving into his nagging desires and going in there to join her. This war they were having was not over yet and would not be over until he won it.

Then something red caught the corner of his eye and he glanced down at the bed.

‘Theos,’ he breathed as his insides flipped into a near-crippling squirm in recognition.

Proof that he had just taken his first virgin was staring him in the face like a splash of outrage.

Leo flexed his taut shoulders, glanced over at the closed door to the bathroom, then back at the bed. ‘Damn,’ he cursed, trying to visualise what she was going to feel like when she saw the evidence of her lost virginity, and added a few more oaths in much more satisfying Greek.

Instead of going to join her, he discarded his robe to snatch up his trousers and shirt and pulled them back on. He had no idea where Bernice kept the fresh bedlinen, but he was going to have to find out for himself because the hell if he was going to ask…

CHAPTER SIX

WRAPPED in a spare bathrobe she’d found hanging behind the door, Natasha tugged in a deep breath, then opened the bathroom door and stepped out. Her heart was thumping. It had taken her ages to build up enough courage to leave the sanctuary of the bathroom and her muscles ached, she was so locked on the defensive, ready for her first glimpse of Leo sprawled in the chair by the bed.

It took a few moments for her to realise that she’d agonised over nothing because he wasn’t even in the room. And the bed had been straightened so perfectly it looked as if it had never been used. Even her clothes had been picked up and neatly draped over the chair he had been sitting in.

Had Bernice come in here and tidied up after them? The very idea pushed a flush of mortified heat into her cheeks. Natasha dragged her eyes away from the bed and began scanning the room for her holdall, while wishing that someone had bothered to tell her that she was going to feel like this—all tense and edgy and horribly uncertain as to what happened after you jumped into bed with a man you hardly knew!

Then the bedroom door flew open and she spun to face it with a jerk. Half expecting to find Bernice or one of the maids walking in, she was really thrown into a wild flutter when it was Leo standing there.

He was dressed and she definitely wasn’t. The way his eyes moved over her turned the flush of mortification into something else.

He swung the door shut behind him, then began striding towards her like some mighty warlord coming to claim his woman for a second round of mind-blowing sex and making her more uptight the closer he came. How could he wear that relaxed smile on his face as if everything in his world was absolutely perfect? Had he never felt awkward or nervous or just plain shy about anything?

Not this man, she concluded with a deep inner quiver when he pulled to a stop right in front of her. He gave off the kind of masculine vitality that made her fingers clutch the collar of the bathrobe close to her throat.

‘Your hair is wet,’ he observed, lifting a hand up to stroke it across the slicked back top of her head.

‘Your state-of-the-art wet room has a w-will of its own,’ she answered, still feeling the tingling shock she’d experienced when jets of water had hit her from every angle the moment she’d touched the start button in there.

‘I’ll find you a hairdryer,’ he murmured as he moved his hand to stroke the hectic burn in her cheek. ‘But in truth, I think you look adorable just as you are and if I thought you could take more of me right now I would be picking you up and taking you back to bed.’

Natasha shook his hand away. ‘I wouldn’t let you.’

‘Maybe,’ he goaded softly, ‘you would find yourself with little choice?’

Natasha’s startled gaze clashed with his smiling dark eyes. ‘You would make me, you mean?’

‘Seduce you into changing your mind, beautiful one,’ he corrected, then lowered his head to steal a kiss.

And it wasn’t just a quick steal. He let his lips linger long enough to extract a response from her before he drew back again.

‘Fortunately for you, right now I am starving for real food,’ he mocked her smitten expression. ‘Find yourself something comfortable to put on while I shower, then we will go and eat.’

With that he strode into the bathroom. Arrogant—arrogant—arrogant! Natasha thought as she wiped the taste of his mouth from her lips.

Thoroughly out of sorts with herself for being so susceptible to him, she hunted down her holdall and used up some of her irritation by hauling it up onto the bed and yanking open the zip. For the next few seconds she just stood looking down into the bag with absolutely no clue whatsoever as to what the heck she had packed inside it. She only had this very vague memory of grabbing clothes at random, then dropping them into the bag. Tense fingers clutching the gaping robe to her throat again, she let the other hand rummage inside the bag and pulled out an old pair of jeans and a pale green T-shirt.

Great, she thought as she discarded those two unappealing garments onto the bed. A pair of ordinary briefs—not a thong, thank goodness—appeared next, and she tossed those onto the bed, too. She found another suit styled like the pale blue suit she’d been wearing all day, only this one was in a dull cream colour that made her frown because she could not imagine herself buying it, never mind wearing such an awful shade against her fair skin. Yet she must have bought it or it wouldn’t be here.

Or perhaps this new Natasha—the one clutching a robe to her throat after losing her virginity to an arrogant Greek—had developed different tastes. She certainly felt different, kind of aching and alive in intimate places and so aware of her own body it started to tingle even as she thought about it.

No make-up, she discovered. She’d forgotten to pack her make-up bag or even a brush or comb. A couple of boring skirts appeared from the bag, followed by a couple of really boring tops. Frowning now with an itchy sense of dissatisfaction that irritated her all the more simply because she was feeling it, she finally unearthed a floaty black skirt made of the kind of fabric that didn’t crease when she pulled it free of the bag. A black silk crocheted top appeared next, which was going to have to go with the skirt whether she liked it or not since she did not seem to have anything else like it in the bag.

Only one spare pair of shoes—and no spare bra! she discovered. Sighing heavily, she turned towards the chair where her other clothes were neatly folded, and was about to walk over there to recover her white bra—when Leo strode out of the bathroom.

It was as if she’d been thrown into an instant freeze the way she stood there between the bed and the chair, pinned to the polished wood floor while her busy mind full of what to wear came to a sudden halt.

Other than for the towel he had slung low around his lean waist, he was naked. Beads of water clung to the dark hairs on his chest. Her heart began to race as her eyes dropped lower, over the taut golden brown muscles encasing his stomach that shone warm and glossy and sinewy tight. The towel covered him from narrow hips and long powerful thighs to his knees, and the strength she could see structuring his calf muscles held her totally, utterly breath-shot as she felt the undiluted wash of what true desire really meant suffuse heat into each fine layer of her skin.

Oh, dear God, I want him badly, she acknowledged as those legs came to a sudden standstill and brought her eyes fluttering up to clash with his. It was like being suffocated, she likened dizzily, because she knew by the way he narrowed his eyes that he was reading her responses to him.

‘I’ve forgotten to pack any m-make-up.’ The words jumped from her in a panic-stricken leap.

He continued to stand there for a few more seconds just studying her, then he started walking again. ‘You will not need make-up for dinner here alone with me,’ he responded evenly.

Natasha pulled her eyes away from him to glance at the scramble of clothes she’d thrown onto the bed. ‘I don’t even have anything here fit to wear for dinner,’ she said, trying desperately to sound as calm as he had when calm was the last thing she was feeling.

He came to a stop beside her. ‘Wear the cream thing,’ he suggested with only the vaguest hint of distaste showing in his voice.

It was enough. Natasha shook her head. ‘I hate it.’

Beginning to frown now, he turned to look down at her. ‘Natasha, what—’

‘W-what are you going to wear?’ she heard herself blurt out, then grabbed in a tense breath because—in all her life she had never asked a man such a gauche, stupid question! And his frown was darkening by the second. She could actually feel him mulling over what to say next! She wanted to call back her silly question. She wished she weren’t even here!

She turned to face him. ‘Listen Leo, I…’

Then it came—his shockingly unexpected answer to her problem: he dropped the towel from around his waist. ‘Let’s wear nothing,’ he said.

The sheer outrageousness of the gesture completely robbed Natasha of speech. Heat flowed through her body, soaking her groin like hot pins and needles before spreading everywhere else. She tried to breathe. She tried to swallow. She tried to stop staring at him but she couldn’t. She tried to back off when he reached across the gap between them, but her legs had turned to liquid and were refusing to move.

He reached for the hand she was using to clutch the bathrobe to her throat and gently prized her fingers free.

‘Leo, no…’ She mouthed the husky protest with her heart clattering wildly against her ribs because she knew what was coming next.

‘Leo—yes,’ he interpreted softly.

Two seconds later the bathrobe fell to the floor at her feet and his hands were taking its place. Freshly showered skin met with freshly showered skin and her naked breasts swelled and peaked. Her shaken gasp was captured by the sensual crush of his mouth and her troubled world tilted right out of kilter as the whole sexual merry-go-round spun off again. She didn’t even want to stop it, she just threw herself into the dizzying pleasure of the kiss with her hands clutching at his solid biceps and her hips swaying closer to the burgeoning evidence of his desire and its formidable promise. Within seconds she was a quivering mass of nerve-endings, moving against him and kissing him back, her heart racing, her breathing reduced to fevered little tugs at oxygen filled with his intoxicating clean scent.

The sound of the bedroom door being thrown open with enough force to send it slamming back into something solid almost blew the top off her head. She flicked her eyes open. Leo was already lifting up his head. Way too dazed to think for herself, Natasha watched him shift the burning darkness of his eyes away from her to look towards the bedroom door, then copied him to look in that direction, too.

A woman stood there. A tall, reed-slender, staggeringly beautiful woman, wearing a dramatically short and slinky red satin dress. Her flashing black eyes were fixed on Leo, her exquisite face turning perfectly white.

‘Gianna,’ he greeted smoothly. ‘Nice of you to drop in, but, as you can see, we are busy….’

As cool as that, he turned Natasha into a block of ice as his wife—his ex-wife—threw herself into a rage of shrill spitting Greek. Leo said absolutely nothing while the tirade poured out. His heart wasn’t thundering. His breathing was steady. He just stood holding Natasha close as if trying to shield her nakedness with his own naked length, and let the other woman screech herself out.

It was awful. Natasha wished she could just sink into a hole in the ground. It was so humiliatingly obvious that Gianna felt she had a right to yell at Leo like this or why would she do it? Likening this situation to the one she’d witnessed between Cindy and Rico made her shiver in shame.

Feeling her shiver, Leo flicked a glance at her, then frowned as with a smooth grace he bent and scooped up the robe she had been wearing and draped it around her shoulders. ‘Shut up now, Gianna,’ he commanded grimly. ‘You sound like a shrieking cat.’

To Natasha’s surprise the shouting stopped. ‘You were supposed to be at Boschetto’s tonight,’ Gianna switched to condemning English. ‘I waited and waited for you to arrive and I felt the fool when you did not turn up!’

‘I made no arrangement to meet up with you,’ Leo said, bending a second time to pick up his towel, which wrapped back around his hips. ‘So if you made a fool of yourself, you did it of your own volition.’

‘You were expected—’

‘Not by you,’ Leo stated. ‘Here, let me help you…’

Trying to push her arms into the robe sleeves, Natasha found Leo taking over the task, but, ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she breathed tautly, and pushed his hands away.

She couldn’t look at him—did not want to look at his ex-wife. Embarrassment was crawling around her insides and she felt so humiliated she was trembling with it.

Speaking earned Natasha Gianna’s attention; she felt the other woman scythe a skin-peeling look over her. ‘So you like them short and fat now?’ she said to Leo.

Fat? Natasha burned up inside with indignation, huddling her size-ten figure into the all-encompassing bathrobe.

‘Much better than a rake-thin whore with a sluttish heart,’ Leo responded, reaching out to stroke one of his hands down Natasha’s burning cheek as if in an apology for his witch of an ex-wife’s insult. ‘Now behave, Gianna, or I will have Rasmus throw you out of here. In fact,’ he then drawled curiously, ‘I will be very interested to hear how you got in here at all?’

Daring a glance at the other woman, Natasha saw that she was standing there with her slender arms folded across her slender ribs. She had to be six feet tall and the way she’d been poured into that red satin dress said everything there was to say about the differences between the two of them.

No wonder she still claimed super-model status, she concluded, flicking her eyes up to Gianna’s fabulous bone-structure to see that her almond-shaped, Latin black eyes were gleaming defiance at Leo, her lush red mouth set in a provoking pout.

Leo released a soft, very cynical laugh as if he understood exactly what the look was conveying.

‘So, who is she?’ Gianna flicked another snide look at Natasha. ‘Yet another attempt you make to find a substitute for me?’

Natasha flinched. Leo drew her back into his arms again and ignored her when she tried to pull back. ‘Never in a thousand years could anyone substitute you, my sweet-tongued angel,’ he mocked dryly. Then he looked down at Natasha and, with the silken tone of a man about to rock her world off its axis, ‘In the form of a heartfelt apology to you, agape mou,’ he murmured soft to Natasha, ‘I must introduce you to Gianna, my ex-wife.’

‘I am your ex-nothing!’ Gianna erupted.

‘Gianna.’ He spoke right across the shrill protest. ‘Nothing in this world has ever given me greater pleasure than to introduce you to Natasha, my very beautiful future wife.’

As a cool, slick way of dropping a bombshell, it was truly impressive. Staring up at his totally implacable face, Natasha almost fell backwards in shock.

The beautiful Gianna turned deathly white. ‘No,’ she whispered.

‘You wish,’ Leo responded.

‘But you love me!’ Gianna cried out in pained anguish.

‘Once upon a time you were worth loving, Gianna. Now…?’ He gave a shrug that said the rest, then apparently committed the ultimate sin in Gianna’s eyes and leant down to capture Natasha’s shock-parted lips with a kiss.

Without any warning it was about to happen, fresh pandemonium broke out with a keening wail that spliced up the atmosphere, then Gianna was coming at Natasha like a woman with murder in mind. Natasha jumped like a terrified rabbit. Leo spat out a curse and stepped right in front of her, taking the brunt of Gianna’s fury upon himself.

It was horrible, the whole thing. Natasha could only stand there behind him, shocked into shaking while Leo contained his ex-wife’s wrists to stop her long nails from clawing his face.

Then he bit out a terse, ‘Excuse us…’ to Natasha, and he was manhandling the screaming woman out of the bedroom.

The door thudded shut in his wake. Natasha found that her legs couldn’t hold her up a moment longer and she sank in a whooshing loss of energy down onto the edge of the bed.

Beyond the door, Rasmus was just stepping out of the lift. Leo sent him a glancing blow of a look and his security chief paled. ‘I’m sorry, Leo,’ he jerked out. ‘I don’t know—’

‘Get her out of here,’ Leo gritted. ‘Take her home and sober her up.’

Gianna had stopped fighting and screeching now and was sobbing into his chest and clinging instead. Disgust flayed Leo’s insides when it took the controlled strength of both men to transfer her from himself to Rasmus and get her into the lift.

‘I don’t know how she got in here,’ Rasmus said helplessly.

‘But you will do,’ Leo lanced out. ‘Then see to it that whoever it was on your staff she laid in return for the favour is gone from here,’ he instructed, then stabbed the button that shut the lift doors.

Alone in the hallway, he spun round in a full circle, then grabbed the back of his neck. Anger was pumping away inside him, contempt—repugnance. Having taken a telephone call from Gianna when he first arrived here, he’d told her that she had to get the hell off his back!

Her barging in here had been deliberate. Even the angry shrieking had been a put-up job. And the fact that she would not think twice about seducing one of his staff to get what she wanted was just another side to her twisted personality that filled him with disgust!

‘Theos,’ he muttered, long legs driving him through the apartment and pulling him to a halt outside the closed bedroom door, the knowledge that he’d lost the towel again having no effect on him at all.

He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Gianna’s nicely timed interruption had been a set-up, just as he knew the comparison Natasha had drawn from the moment it all kicked off.

Rico with her sister.

A curse ripped from him, followed by another. He paced out the width of the hall trying to clamp down on the anger still erupting inside him because—how the hell did he explain a sex-obsessed feline like Gianna, who only functioned this side of sane while she knew that he was always going to be around to help pick her up when she fell apart?

You didn’t explain it. It was too damn complicated, he recognised as he took in a grim breath of air, then threw open the bedroom door.

Natasha was back in the blue suit, and she was stuffing her things back into her bag.

‘Don’t you pull a hysterical scene on me,’ he rasped, closing the door with a barely controlled thud.

His voice sent a quiver down Natasha’s tense spinal cord. ‘I’m not hysterical,’ she responded quietly.

‘Then what do you call the way you are packing that bag?’

The searing thrust of his anger shocked even Leo as Natasha swung round to stare at him. Miss Cold and Prim was back with a vengeance, Leo saw, and she was stirring him up like…

She saw it happen, and lifted a pair of frosty blue eyes to his. ‘Is that response due to her by any chance?’ And her voice dripped disdain.

Hell, Leo cursed. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, not sure exactly what it was he was apologising for—the snarling way he had spoken to her or his uncontrolled…

She spun her back to him again. Snapping his lips together, he strode over to the bank of glossy white wardrobes and tugged open one of the doors. A second later he was pulling a pair of jeans up his legs.

‘She’s mad,’ he muttered.

‘Enter the beautiful mad wife—exit the short, fat other woman.’ Natasha pushed a pair of shoes into the bag. ‘Ex-wife,’ he corrected, tugging his zip up. ‘Try telling her that.’

‘I do tell her—constantly. As you saw for yourself, she does not listen—and you are not going anywhere, Natasha, so you can stop packing that bag.’

Straightening up, Natasha meant to spear him with another crushing look, only to find herself lose touch with what they were saying when she saw him standing there with his long legs encased in faded denim and looking like a whole new kind of man. Her heart gave a telling stuttering thud. Her breathing faltered. He was so blatantly, beautifully masculine it took a fight to drag her covetous mind back on track.

‘S-so you thought you might as well make her listen by hitting her with that lie about a future wife?’

A frown darkened his lean features and made the bump on his nose stand out. ‘It was not a lie, Natasha,’ he declared like a warning.

‘Oh, yes, it was,’ she countered that. ‘I wouldn’t marry you if my life depended on it.’

‘You mean, you are here merely to use me for sex?’

The sardonic quip was out before Leo could stop it.

‘Substitute!’ she tossed right back at him like the hot sting from a whip. ‘And not even that again,’ she added, yanking her eyes away from him altogether and zipping up the hastily packed bag with enough violence to threaten the teeth on the zip.

Easing his shoulders back against the wardrobe door, Leo folded his arms across his hair-roughened chest. ‘So I was a tacky one-night substitute, then,’ he prodded.

‘Very tacky.’ Pressing her lips together, she nodded in confirmation, then parted her lips to add bitterly, ‘God save me from the super-rich class. Everything they do is so tacky it constantly makes me want to be sick.’

‘Was that aimed at me, Gianna or Rico?’

‘All three,’ she said, frowning as she sent her eyes hunting the room for her purse. She couldn’t see it anywhere and she couldn’t recall when she had last had it in her hand.

‘Lost something valuable?’ his hatefully smooth voice questioned. ‘Like your virginity, perhaps?’

It was as good as a hard slap in the face. Natasha tugged in a hot breath. ‘I’ve just remembered why I dislike you so much.’

His wide shoulders gave a deeply bronzed shrug against the white wardrobe. He looked like some brooding dark male model posing for one of the big fashion magazines, Natasha thought, feebly aware that her eyes refused to stay away from him for more than ten seconds before they dragged themselves back again because he was so bone-tinglingly good to look at. Sexuality oozed out of every exposed manly pore and those jeans should be X-rated. How had she ever thought that he was nothing to look at next to Rico? If Rico dared to stride in here right now and stand next to this man, Natasha knew she wouldn’t even see him. Leo won hands down in each single aspect of his dominant masculine make-up—even the bump in his nose yelled sexually exciting unreconstructed male at her!

Oh, what’s happening to me? On that helplessly bewildered inward groan, she yanked her eyes away from him—yet again—and made them search the room for her purse! In less than a day it felt as if everything she’d ever held firm about herself had been corkscrewed out of her then mixed around violently before being shoved back inside her to form this entirely new perspective on everything!

And the way he was standing there looking at her with his eyes thoughtfully narrowed just wasn’t right, either—as if he was considering striding over here and showing her the tough way in which this new order of things worked.

A sensation Natasha just did not want to feel spread itself right down her front. Tense upper lip quivering—she just had to get out of here.

‘Have you seen my purse?’

‘What do you need it for?’

Straightening her tense shoulders, she said, ‘I’m ready to leave now.’

‘By what form of transport?’

‘Taxi!’ she spat out.

‘You have the Euros to pay for a taxi?’ her cool tormentor quizzed. ‘And a mobile phone handy to call one up? Do you speak any Greek, agape mou? Do you even know this address so you can tell the taxi driver where to come to collect you?’

He was deliberately beating her up with blunt logic. ‘Y-you have my mobile phone,’ she reminded him, hating that revealing quiver in her voice.

He responded to that with yet another of those irritatingly expressive shrugs against the glossy white wardrobe door. ‘I must have mislaid it, as you have your purse.’

Deciding the only way to deal with the infuriatingly impossible brute was to ignore him, Natasha started hunting the bedroom.

While Leo watched her do it, his narrowed gaze ran over the way she looked all neat and tidy in every which way she could be—except for the wet hair which lay in a heavy silk pelt down her back. A man could not find a bigger contrast between Natasha’s cool dignity and Gianna’s reckless abandon, Leo observed grimly. Where Gianna clung to him like a weeping vine, this aggravating woman was preparing to walk out on him!

‘Tell me, Natasha,’ he asked grimly, ‘why are you so eager to leave when only ten minutes ago you were ready to fall back into bed with me?’

‘Your wife got in here somehow,’ she muttered, checking beneath one of the cushions on the chair to see if her purse had slid behind it.

‘Ex-wife—and…?’

‘Maybe her claim on you has some justification,’ Natasha said with a shrug.

‘Like…?’ he prompted, and there was no hint whatsoever left of the provoking mockery with which he had started this conversation. He was deadly curious to hear where she was going with this.

‘The way you run your life is your own business.’ Chickening out at the last second from stating outright the real question that was beating a hole in her head, she gave up on the chair and tossed the cushion back onto it.

But—did he still sleep with his ex-wife when he felt like it? Did Gianna have a genuine right to her grievances when she’d barged in on them as she had? If so, then it made him no better than Rico in the way that he treated women!

Tacky, as she’d already said. She returned to her search with his brooding silence twitching at her nerve-ends as she moved about the room.

‘I do not have a relationship with my ex-wife,’ he spoke finally. ‘I do not sleep with her and I have no wish to sleep with her, though Gianna prefers to tell herself I will change my mind if she pushes long and hard enough… In case you did not notice,’ he continued as Natasha turned to look him, ‘Gianna is not quite—stable.’

It was the polite way to call it, but Natasha could see by the flick of a muscle at the corner of his mouth that he was holding back from voicing his real thoughts about Gianna’s mental health. And what did she do? She stood here eating up every single word like some lovelorn teenager in need of his reassurance.

‘In some ways I still feel responsible for her because she was my wife and I did care for her once—until she pressed the self-destruct button on our marriage for reasons not up for discussion here.’ And the tough way he said that warned her not to try to push him on it. ‘I apologise that she barged in here and embarrassed you,’ he expressed curtly. ‘I apologise that she found a way to enter this property at all!’ A fresh burst of anger straightened him away from the wardrobe. ‘But that’s it—that is as far as I am prepared to go to make you feel better about the situation, Natasha. So stop behaving like a tragic bride on her wedding night and take the damn jacket off before I take it off!’

‘W-what—?’ Not quite making the cross-over from his grim explanation about Gianna to the sudden attack on herself, Natasha blinked at him.

Which seemed to infuriate him all the more. ‘While you stand here playing the poor, abused victim, you seem to have conveniently forgotten about the money you stole from me!’

The money.

Natasha tensed up, then froze as if he’d reached out and hit her. Leo smothered a filthy curse because her hesitation told him that she had forgotten all about the money. Though the curse was aimed at himself for reminding her about it when he would have preferred it to remain forgotten about! Now she was looking so pale and appalled he grimly wondered if she was going to pass out on him.

A tensely gritted sigh had him striding over to her. Lips pinned together, he reached out and began unbuttoning her jacket with tight movements that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the other times he had taken it upon himself to do this.

She didn’t even put up a fight, but just stood there like a waxen dummy and let him strip the garment from her body, which only helped to infuriate him all the more! With the muscles across his shoulders bunching, he tossed the jacket aside, then turned to walk back across the room to the wardrobes. Hunting out a white T-shirt, he dragged it on over his head.

When he turned back to Natasha, he found her still standing where he’d left her, giving a good impression of a perfectly pale ghost.

Theos, he thought, wondering why seeing her looking so beaten was making his senses nag the hell out of him to just go over there and apologise yet again—for being such a brute.

‘Dinner,’ he said, taking another option, keeping up the tough tone of voice because—well, she was a cheating thief even if he wanted to forget that she was!

At last she moved—or her pale lips did. ‘I’m not hungry—’

‘You are eating,’ he stated. ‘You have had nothing since you threw up in my London basement.’

And reminding her of that was Leo Christakis well and truly back as the blunt-speaking insensitive brute, Natasha noted.

Even in the T-shirt and chinos.

And his feet bare…

She felt like crying again, though why the sight of his long, bronzed bare feet moving him so gracefully across the room to the door made her want to do that Natasha did not have a clue, but suddenly she just wanted to sit in a huddle in a very dark corner somewhere and…

He pulled the bedroom door open, then stood there pointedly waiting for her to join him. Head lowered, she went because there was no point in continuing to argue with him when all he had to do was to mention the money to devastate her every line of defence.

Hard, tough, unforgivably ruthless, she reminded herself, wondering how she had allowed herself to forget those things about him while she had been giving him free use of her body—as a part of their deal.

She didn’t look at him as she walked past him and out into the hallway. She kept her head lowered when he stepped in front of her to lead the way through the apartment and into a room lit by flickering candle-light and another glass wall. Bernice was there, arranging the last pieces of cutlery on a white linen tablecloth intimately set for two. Candles flickered. Beyond the table stood the night view of Athens, making the most romantic backdrop any woman could wish for.

Any romantically hopeful woman, that was.

Friction stung the atmosphere and the housekeeper smiled and said something in Greek to Leo. He replied in the same language as he held out a chair for Natasha to use. After that there was no privacy to speak of anything personal because a maid arrived to serve them. Natasha had a feeling Leo had arranged it that way so he didn’t get into yet another dogfight with her, but the tension between them made it almost impossible to swallow anything, though she did try to eat. When she couldn’t manage to swallow another beautifully presented morsel, she stared at the view beyond the glass window, or down at the leftover food on her plate, or at the crisp white wine he had poured into the glass she was fingering without drinking—anywhere so long as it wasn’t at him.

Then he shattered it. Without any hint at all that one swift glance from his eyes had sent the maid disappearing out of the room, Leo suddenly leant forwards and stretched a hand out across the table and brazenly cupped her left breast.

‘I knew it,’ he husked. ‘You are wearing no bra, you provoking witch.’

Pleasure senses went into overdrive. Natasha shot like a sizzling firework rocket to her feet. He rose up more slowly, face taut, his dark eyes flickering gold in the candle-light.

‘Don’t ever touch me like that without my permission again,’ she shook out in a pressured whisper, then she turned to stumble around her chair and made a blind dash out of the room.

The lift stood there with its doors conveniently open. Natasha did not even have to think about it as she dashed inside and sent the lift sweeping down to the ground floor. Outside in the garden the thick, humid air was filled with the scent of oranges. Soft lighting drew her down winding pathways between carefully nurtured shrubs and beneath the orange laden trees. She didn’t know where she was heading for, all she did know was that she needed to find that dark corner she could huddle in so she could finally—finally give in to the tears she’d held back too long.

She found it in the shape of a bench almost hidden beneath the dipping branches of a tree close to the high stuccoed wall that surrounded the whole property. Dropping down onto the bench, she pulled her knees up to her chin, leant her forehead on them, then let go and wept. She wept over everything. She just trawled it all out and took a good look at everything from the moment she’d opened the message on her mobile telephone that morning to the moment Leo had touched her breast across the dinner table—and she wept and she wept and she wept.

Leo leant against a trunk of the tree and listened. Inside he had never felt so bad in his life. The way he had been treating her all day had been nothing short of unforgivable. The way he’d made love to her when he’d known she should have been doing this instead was going to live on his conscience for a long time to come.

But the way he had reached across the dinner table and touched her just now was, without question, the lowest point to which he had stooped.

And listening to her weep her soul into shreds was his deserved punishment. Except that he couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer and, with a sigh, he levered away from the tree trunk and went to sit down beside her, then lifted her onto his lap.

She tried to fight him for a second or two, but he just murmured, ‘Shh, sorry,’ and held her close until she stopped fighting him and let the tears flow again.

When it was finally over and she quietened, he stood up with her in his arms and took her back inside. He did it without saying a single word, ignoring the dozen or so security cameras he knew would have been trained on them from the moment Natasha ran outside.

She was asleep, he realised when he lay her down on the bed. With the care of a man dealing with something fragile, he slipped off her shoes and her skirt, then covered her with the sheets.

Straightening up again, he continued to stand there for a few seconds looking down at her, then he turned and walked out of the bedroom and into his custom-built office.

A minute later, ‘Juno,’ he greeted. ‘My apologies for the lateness of the hour, but I have something I need you to do….’

CHAPTER SEVEN

NATASHA drifted awake to soft daylight seeping in through the wall of curved glass and to instant recall that sent her head twisting round on her pillow to check out the other side of the bed.

The sudden pound her heart had taken up settled back to its normal pace when she discovered that she was alone, the only sign that she had shared the bed at all through the night revealed by the indent she could see in the other pillow and the way Leo had thrown back the sheets when he’d climbed out.

Then the whispering suggestion of a sound beyond the bedroom door told her what it was that had awoken her in the first place, and she was up, rolling off the bed and running for the bathroom, only becoming aware as she did so that she was still wearing the white top she’d spent most of the day yesterday in.

So he’d shown a bit of rare sensitivity by not stripping her naked, she acknowledged with absolutely no thought of gratitude stirring in her blood. Leo had taken her to pieces yesterday brick by brutal brick, so one small glimpse of humanity in him because he’d put her limp self to bed and had the grace to leave her with some dignity in place did not make her feel any better about him.

She stepped into the wet room, with her hair safely wrapped away inside a fluffy white towel, frowned and at the range of keypads and dials, trying to work out how she could take a shower without having to endure a thorough dousing at the same time. Leo Christakis was one of life’s takers, she decided. He saw an opportunity and went for it. He’d wanted her so he just moved in on her like a bulldozer and scooped her up.

Water jets suddenly hit her from all angles, making mockery of the buttons she’d pushed to stop them from doing it. A gasping breath shot from her as the jets stung her flesh. The sensation was so acute it made her look down at her body, half expecting to see that it had altered physically somehow, but all she saw was her normal curvy shape with its pale skin, full breasts and rounded hips with a soft cluster of dusky curls shaping the junction with her thighs.

But she had changed inside where it really mattered, Natasha accepted. She’d become a woman in a single day. One stripped of her silly daydreams about love and romance, then made to face cold reality—that you didn’t need love or romance to fall headlong into pleasures of the flesh.

You didn’t need anything but the desire to reach out and take it when it was right there in front of you to take.

Rico was like that. So was her sister, Cindy. They saw, they desired, so they took. It was there to take, so why not? Now she might as well accept that she’d joined the ranks of takers because she could stand here letting the shower jets inflict their torture on her and try to convince herself that she’d been blackmailed and bullied into Leo’s bed, but it was never going to be the truth.

She’d wanted, she’d let him see it, Leo had taken, now it was done. What a fabulous introduction to the reality of life.

Bernice was walking in from the terrace when Natasha came out of the bathroom back in the bathrobe once again. Feeling a hot wave of shyness wash over her, Natasha felt like diving back into the bathroom and hiding there until the housekeeper had gone but it was already too late.

Bernice had seen her. ‘Kalemera, thespinis,’ the housekeeper greeted with a smile. ‘It is a beautiful day to eat breakfast outside, is it not?’

‘Perfect.’ Natasha managed a return smile, ‘Thank you, Bernice,’ she added politely.

Walking towards the wall of glass as Bernice left the room, she pushed her hands into the deep pockets of her robe and stepped out into a crystal-clear morning bathed in sunlight and the inviting aroma of hot coffee and toast. By the sudden growl her stomach gave she was hungry, Natasha realised, which shouldn’t surprise her when she’d barely eaten anything the day—

Her mind and her feet pulled to a sudden standstill. For some crazy reason she just had not expected to find Leo out here seated at the table set for breakfast. However, there he sat, calmly reading a newspaper with a cup of hot coffee hovering close to his mouth.

Her soft gasp of surprise brought his eyes up from the newspaper, his heavy eyelashes folding back from liquid-dark irises that swamped her in heated awareness as they stroked up the length of her from bare toes to the tangling tumble of her unbrushed hair.

‘Kalemera,’ he murmured softly, and he rose to his feet.

It was like being hit head on by all the things she had not allowed herself to think about since she’d woken up this morning—the man in the flesh. Even though he was wearing a conventional business suit a warm tug of remembered intimacy made itself felt between her thighs. She found her eyes doing much the same thing as his eyes had done, feathering up the length of his long legs encased in smooth-as-silk iron-grey fabric, then his torso covered by a pale blue shirt and dark tie. By the time she reached his clean-shaven face with its too-compellingly, strong golden features, she was blushing and annoyed enough by it to push up her chin.

‘Good morning,’ she returned in cool English.

A half-smile clipped at the corners of his mouth. ‘You slept well, I trust?’

He met her challenge with mockery.

‘Yes, thank you.’ Natasha kept with cool.

Pulling her eyes off him, she dug her hands deeper into her robe pockets, curled them into tense fists, then made herself walk towards the table and slip into the chair opposite him, expecting Leo to return to his seat, but he didn’t.

‘Bernice was unsure what you preferred to eat for breakfast so she has provided a selection.’ A long, lean hand indicated another table standing to one side of the terrace, which was spread with covered dishes. ‘Tell me what you would like and I’ll get it for you.’

Glancing at it, then away again, ‘Thank you, I’m fine with just toast.’

‘Juice?’ he offered.

A small hesitation, then she nodded. ‘Please.’

He went to pour the juice from the jug set on the other table. You couldn’t get a more pleasantly generated scene of calm domesticity if you tried, Natasha noted—though there was nothing domesticated in the way her eyes had to follow him or the way they soaked in every inch of his powerful lean frame like greedy traitors.

Looking away quickly when he turned around, she pretended an interest in the daytime view of Athens glistening in a hazy sunlight. Then one of his hands appeared in front of her to set down the glass of juice. Ice chinked against freshly squeezed oranges. He did not move away and another of those hesitations erupted between them sending out vibrating signals Natasha just did not want to read. And he was standing so close she could smell the clean, tangy scent of him, could feel the sheer masculine force of his sexuality that to her buzzing mind was barely leashed.

Then he brought his other hand around her to settle a rack of toast next to the glass of juice.

‘Thank you,’ she murmured.

‘My pleasure,’ he drawled—and he moved away to return to his seat, leaving Natasha to pull in a breath she had not been aware she had been holding on to.

He picked up his coffee cup and his newspaper.

Tugging her hands out of her pockets, she picked up the glass and sipped the juice. The sun beat down on the gardens below them while the overhang from the roof suspended above the terrace kept them in much pleasanter shade.

She was about to help herself to a slice of toast when she saw her mobile telephone lying on the table and her fingers stilled in midair.

‘Bernice found it in my jacket pocket. I had forgotten I had it.’ He might give the appearance of being engrossed in his newspaper, but he clearly was not.

Having to work to stop yet another polite thank-you from developing, Natasha pressed her lips together and nodded, then picked the phone up, her fingers stroking the shiny black casing for a few seconds before she flipped the phone open and looked at the screen.

It filled up with voice and text messages from Rico or Cindy. Aware that Leo was watching her, aware of the silence thickening between the two of them, she began to delete each message in turn, gaining a cold kind of pleasure from watching each one disappear from the screen. As the final one disappeared she flipped the phone shut and placed it back on the table before reaching for the slice of toast.

‘I need to shop for some clothes,’ she said coolly.

Leo said nothing, though Natasha could feel his desire to say something about the way she had wiped her phone clean. Had he read her messages? Had he expected to find a volley of instructions from Rico instructing her on how to sneak away from here so she could hole up with him somewhere until the six weeks were up and they could get at their stolen stash?

What Leo did do was to reach inside his jacket pocket and come out with a soft leather wallet. ‘I will arrange an account for you with my bank,’ he said evenly, ‘but for now…’

A thick wad of paper money landed on the table next to her phone. Cringing inside, Natasha just stared at it.

‘Buy anything you want,’ he invited casually. ‘Rasmus will drive you into Athens—’

‘I don’t need a driver,’ she whispered tautly. ‘I can find my way to the shops by myself.’

‘Rasmus will not be there merely to play chauffeur,’ his smooth voice returned. ‘He will escort you wherever you go while you are here.’

‘For what purpose?’ Natasha forced herself to look at him—forced herself to keep silent about the phone and the hateful money he’d tossed down next to it. ‘To guard me in case I decide to run out on you? Well, I won’t run,’ she stated stiffly. ‘I don’t want to be thrown into jail if I get caught.’

‘In that case think of Rasmus as protection,’ he suggested.

‘Which I need because…?’

The attractive black arc of his eyebrows lifted upwards. ‘Because it is a necessary evil in this day and age?’ he offered. ‘For you perhaps.’

‘You are an intimate part of me now, which means you must learn to take the bad with the good.’

So where was the good in being his woman? she wondered furiously. ‘People would have to know I’m with you to make a bodyguard necessary for me.’

‘But they will know—from tonight,’ he countered, calmly folding his newspaper on that earth-rocking announcement. ‘We will be dining out with some friends of mine. So while you are shopping buy a dress—something befitting a blacktie event. Something—pretty.’

Pretty? ‘I don’t do pretty.’ Reaching for the pot of marmalade, Natasha began spreading it liberally on the toast.

‘Something—colourful, then to—complement your figure.’

‘I am not—’ the knife worked faster ‘—going to dress up like some floozy just to help you prove a point to your awful ex-wife!’

‘Why? Don’t you believe you have the power to compete?’

The challenge hit Natasha blindside, and she felt her breath stick in her throat.

‘It seems to me, Natasha, that you’re too easily intimidated by conceited bullies like your selfish sister and my ex-wife,’ he went on grimly. ‘Woman like them can pick a shrinking violet like you out from a hundred feet away as an easy target. But what really gets to me is that you let them. Grow up, agape mou

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.