“You are due to receive your monthly allowance tomorrow.”

Although he had not bothered to identify himself, there was no mistakng the deep, commanding tones of Leiandros’s voice.

It was a voice that haunted her dreams, erotic dreams that woke her in the middle of the night, sweating and shaking.

“I won’t be sanctioning that deposit, or any other, until you come to Greece.” No explanation, just an ultimatum.

“The Greek Tycoon’s Ultimatum

is a compelling, sensual story.

A romance you won’t forget.”

—bestselling author Lori Foster

They’re the men who have everything—except a bride…

Wealth, power, charm—

what else could a handsome tycoon need? In THE GREEK TYCOONS miniseries you have already met some gorgeous Greek multimillionaires who are in need of wives.

Now it’s the turn of talented Presents® author Lucy Monroe, with her sensual and compelling romance The Greek Tycoon’s Ultimatum

This tycoon has met his match, and he’s decided he has to have her…whatever that takes!

Coming next moth:

The Greek Tycoon’s Wife

by Kim Lawrence

#2360

The Greek Tycoon’s Ultimatum
Lucy Monroe

MILLS & BOON

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To my mother, Shirley Ann… The beauty of your character and strength of your spirit in the face of adversity is a constant source of inspiration for me.

Thank you for believing in my dream.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

“THE coldhearted bitch.”

Flinching as the words flew venomously from her sister-in-law’s lips, Savannah Marie Kiriakis forced her gaze to remain fixed on the emerald-green grass in front of her.

The traditional Greek Orthodox graveside service was over and everyone had paid their final respects, everyone but her. Poised on the edge of the grave, a single white rose in her hand, she tried coming to terms with this—the final end to her marriage.

Relief warred with guilt inside her, forcing out the pain of Iona’s verbal attack.

Relief that her own torment was over. No one would ever again threaten to take her children. And guilt that this should be her reaction to the death of another human being, particularly Dion—a man she had married in good faith and youthful stupidity six years ago.

“What right has she to be here?” Iona continued when her first insult was not only ignored by Savannah, but also by the other mourners.

Dion’s younger sister had a flair for the dramatic.

Unbidden, Savannah’s gaze sought the reaction of Leiandros Kiriakis to his cousin’s outburst. His dark eyes were not set on Iona, but focused on Savannah with a look of such contempt if she’d been a weaker person, she would have been tempted to jump into the grave with her dead husband.

She could not turn away, though her heart and emotions were screaming inside for her to do just that. Leiandros’s contempt might be justified, but it hurt in a way that Dion’s frequent infidelities and bouts of violent temper had not.

The smell of fresh earth mixed with the floral offerings covering the now closed casket assailed her nostrils and she managed to shift her gaze to her husband’s grave.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered soundlessly before dropping the rose she carried onto the casket and stepping back.

“A touching gesture, if an empty one.” More words meant to wound, but these delivered directly to her with the sharp precision of a stiletto aimed at her heart.

It took every bit of Savannah’s inner fortitude to turn and face Leiandros after the way he had looked at her a moment ago. “Is it an empty gesture for a wife to say her final goodbye?” she asked as she lifted her head to make eye contact.

And wished she hadn’t. Eyes so dark, they were almost black, blazed with a scorn she knew she had earned, but nevertheless grieved. Of all the Kiriakis clan, this man was the only one with legitimate reason to despise her. Because he had firsthand knowledge of the fact she had not loved Dion, not passionately and with her whole heart as a man like her husband had needed to be loved.

“Yes empty. You said goodbye to Dion three years ago.”

She shook her head in instinctive denial. Leiandros was mistaken. She would never have risked saying goodbye to Dion before fleeing Greece with her two small daughters in tow. Her only hope of escape had been to board the international flight for America before Dion realized she was gone.

By the time he had tracked her down, she had filed for a legal separation, thus preventing him from spiriting their children from the country. She had also filed a restraining order, citing her healing bruises and cracked ribs as evidence that she was not safe in Dion’s company.

The Kiriakis clan knew nothing of this. Even Leiandros, head of the Kiriakis Empire and thus the family, was ignorant of the reasons for the final break in Dion and Savannah’s marriage.

Leiandros’s sculpted face hardened. “That’s right. You never did say a final goodbye. You wouldn’t give Dion his freedom and you wouldn’t live with him. You were the kind of wife nightmares are made of.”

Each word pierced her heart and her sense of self as a woman, but she refused to bow in shame under the weight of his ugly judgments. “I would have given Dion a divorce at any time over the last three years.” He had been the one to threaten to take their daughters if she made good on her intention to file for permanent dissolution of their marriage.

Leiandros’s face tightened with derision and she felt the familiar pain his scorn caused. His opinion of her had been cast in stone the night they met.

She’d been nervous attending a party given by a man she didn’t know, a man Dion had raved about and stressed she had to impress in order to be accepted into the Kiriakis family. If that pressure had not been enough to make her tremble with anxiety, the fact that Dion had abandoned her in a crowd of strangers speaking a language she did not understand was.

Attempting to be unobtrusive, she hovered near a wall by the door to the terrace, away from the other guests.

“Kalispera. Pos se lene? Me lene Leiandros,” A deep, male voice speaking in Greek penetrated her isolation.

She looked up to see the most devastatingly attractive man she’d ever encountered. His lazy smile all but stole her breath right out of her chest. She stared at him, mesmerized by a rush of inexplicable feelings toward him, unhindered by societal conventions or even unfamiliarity.

Feeling horribly guilty for such a reaction to a man who was not her husband, she blushed and dropped her gaze. Using the only Greek phrase she knew, she told him she could not understand his language. “Then katalaveno.”

He placed a finger under her chin and forced her head up so she had no choice but to look in his eyes. His smile had turned vaguely predatory. “Dance with me,” he said in perfect English.

She was shaking her head, trying to force her frozen vocal chords to utter the word no even as he put a possessive arm around her waist and pulled her out onto the terrace. He then drew her into his arms, his hold anything but conventional. She struggled while their bodies swayed to the seductive chords of the Greek music.

He pressed her closer. “Relax. I’m not going to eat you.”

“But I shouldn’t be dancing with you,” she told him.

His hold grew even more possessive. “Why? Are you here with a boyfriend?”

“No, but—”

Demanding lips drowned her explanation that she was with her husband, not a boyfriend. Her struggles to get free increased, but the heat of his body and the feel of his hands caressing her back and her nape were already seducing her good intentions.

And to her everlasting shame she felt her body melt in helpless response. The kiss drew emotions from her Dion had never tapped into. She wanted it to go on forever, but even under the influence of a wholly alien passion, she knew she had to break away from the seduction of his lips.

The hand on her back moved to her front and cupped her breast as if he had every right to do so. The fact that he was touching her so intimately was not nearly so appalling as her body’s reaction to it. Her breasts seemed to swell within the confines of her lacy bra while their tips grew hard and aching. She’d never felt this way with Dion.

The thought was enough to send her tearing from Leiandros, her sense of honor in tatters while her body actually vibrated with the need to be back in his arms. “I’m married,” she gasped.

His eyes flared with the light of battle and she stood paralyzed for a solid minute, their gazes locked, their breathing erratic.

“Leiandros. I see you’ve met my wife.”

And Leiandros, whose body was turned away from Dion so her husband could not see his expression had glared at her with a hate filled condemnation that had not diminished in six years.

“Do not fool yourself into believing that since my cousin is not here to defend himself, your behavior can be dismissed with lies.”

Leiandros’s voice brought her back to the present, to a woman no longer capable of any kind of response to a man. For a moment she grieved the memory of those awesome feelings she had not experienced since and knew she would never experience again. Dion had seen to that.

Leiandros’s six-foot-four-inch frame towered over her own five feet, eight inches, making her feel small and vulnerable to his masculinity and the anger exuding off of him. She took an involuntary step backward and finding refuge in silence, she merely inclined her head before turning in order to leave.

“Do not walk away from me, Savannah. You won’t find me as easy to manage as my cousin.”

The implied threat in his tone halted her, but she did not turn around. “I do not need to manage you, Leiandros Kiriakis. After today, all necessity for communication between myself and your family will be at an end.” Her voice came out in an unfamiliar husky drawl when she had meant to sound firm.

“In that, you are mistaken, Savannah.” His ominous tone sent shivers skating along her nerve endings.

She whirled to face him, taking in the stunning lines of his masculine features, the way the sun glinted off his jet-black hair and the aura of power surrounding him even as she tried to read the expression in his enigmatic gaze.

“What do you mean?” Had Dion betrayed her in the end?

Leiandros’s sensual lips thinned. “That is something we will have to discuss at a later date. My wife’s graveside service begins in a few minutes. Be content with the knowledge that as sole trustee for your daughters’ inheritance, you and I must of necessity talk occasionally.”

Pain assailed her—a sympathetic pain for the grief this strong and arrogant man must be feeling at the death of his wife in the same car accident as his cousin.

“I’m sorry. I won’t keep you.”

His eyes narrowed. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I have no place there.”

“Iona thought you had no place here, yet you came.”

Because of the phone call. She never would have come if Dion had not made that call the night before his accident.

“Regardless of what the Kiriakis clan would like to be true, I married Dion. I owed my presence here to his memory.” Both the memory of the Dion who had courted her and the man who had called that one last time.

“Then do you not owe me your attendance at Petra’s service as a member of my family?”

“Why in the world would you want me there?” she asked, unable to hide her complete bewilderment.

“You claim your place in my family. It is time you paid the dues accompanied by that status.”

Humorless laughter fought to break free of the constriction in her throat. Paid her dues? Hadn’t she done that for six long years? Hadn’t she paid dearly for the privilege of wearing the Kiriakis name?

Leiandros watched emotions chase across Savannah’s usually expressionless face. She hadn’t been that way the first time they met. Then, she had seemed achingly vulnerable and sweet. So sweet she allowed another man to kiss her, to touch her while married to his cousin, he reminded himself.

Although she avoided eye contact with him on the few occasions they met after that, she’d still had an appealing vibrancy and beauty which made him understand why Dion stayed with her even after she had shown herself unworthy of her husband’s respect and love. At least for the first year, but the one time Leiandros had seen her the second year she lived in Athens, she had changed beyond recognition.

Her green eyes had dulled to the point of lifelessness. Had guilt over her lovers done that? Her demeanor had completely lacked emotion—except when she looked at her daughter. Then a love Leiandros had envied—and hated himself for doing so—had suffused her face and brought life back to her green eyes. No wonder Dion ran wild with his friends. His wife had reserved all her emotion for the daughter she bore as the result of a liaison with one of her lovers.

Leiandros had chided Dion for showing so little interest in fatherhood after Eva’s birth. Dion had cried when he told Leiandros that his wife had claimed the baby was not his. If Leiandros had ever doubted Savannah’s culpability in their shared kiss the night they met, he doubted no longer.

Remembering that encounter, his body tensed with anger. “Perhaps you are right. You have no place at my wife’s funeral. One display of false grief within our family is enough.”

Her eyes widened with what he could have sworn was fear before she took yet another step away from him. “I’m sorry Petra died, Leiandros.”

The apparent sincerity in her soft voice almost touched him, but he refused to be taken in by her act a second time. She was no more the vulnerable innocent than he was a gullible fool. “I think you will be, Savannah.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her voice quavering in a way that annoyed him while she brushed a lock of wheat-colored hair away from her face.

What did she think he was going to do? Hit her? The thought was so ridiculous, he dismissed it out of hand. She had reason to be concerned, if not afraid. He did have plans for her, but they had to wait. “Never mind. I have to go.”

She nodded. “Goodbye, Leiandros.”

He inclined his head, refusing to utter a farewell he did not mean. After he expressed his respect for Petra with a year of mourning, Savannah would be seeing him again.

Then she would be made to pay for all that she had cost his family…all she had cost him.

CHAPTER TWO

SAVANNAH could hear the happy chatter of her daughters playing in their bedroom as she settled into the creaking desk chair in the small, cluttered study of her home in Atlanta, Georgia.

She stared at the letter from Leiandros Kiriakis, feeling as if it were a black moccasin ready to strike. In it he requested her presence in Greece for a discussion regarding her financial future. Worse, he had demanded Eva and Nyssa’s presence as well.

He would be freezing Savannah’s monthly allowance until such a discussion occurred.

Panic shivered along her consciousness.

After the trial of attending Dion’s funeral a year ago, she had promised herself she would never have to see anyone Kiriakis again. Okay, if not never, then at least for a very long time.

The girls would have to be introduced to their Greek family someday, but not before they were old enough to deal with the emotional upheaval and possible rejection of doing so. In other words, not until they were confident, mature adults.

She wished. She knew that wasn’t realistic. Not after the revelations Dion had made in that final phone call, but she had intended to put the trip off for a while. Like until she had a secure job and her Aunt Beatrice no longer needed her.

Her mouth firming with purpose, she decided Leiandros would have to have his discussion with her over the phone. There was no earthly reason for her to fly all the way to Greece merely to talk about money.

Savannah’s confidence in Leiandros’s reasonability was severely tested ten minutes later when his secretary informed her he would not take Savannah’s call.

“When would you like to fly out, Mrs. Kiriakis?” the efficient voice at the other end of the line enquired.

“I don’t wish to fly out at all,” Savannah replied, her southern drawl more pronounced than usual, the only indicator the conversation was upsetting her. “Please inform your boss that I would prefer to have this conversation by telephone and will await a call at his convenience.”

She rang off, her hands shaking, her body going into fight or flight mode at the very thought of confronting Leiandros Kiriakis again in the flesh.

The phone rang ten minutes later.

Expecting Leiandros’s secretary, Savannah picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

“You are due to receive your monthly allowance tomorrow.” Although he had not bothered to identify himself, there was no mistaking the deep, commanding tones of Leiandros’s voice.

It was a voice that haunted her dreams, erotic dreams that woke her in the middle of the night sweating and shaking. She could control her conscious mind, stifling all thoughts of the powerful, arrogant businessman, but her subconscious had a will of its own. And the dreams did nothing but torment her, as she knew without question she would never again experience those feelings outside the subconscious realm.

“Hello, Leiandros.”

He didn’t bother to return the greeting. “I won’t be sanctioning that deposit, or any other until you come to Greece.” No explanation, just an ultimatum.

The exorbitant prices Brenthaven charged for her aunt’s care and the expense of attending university had prevented Savannah from accumulating more than a few weeks of living expenses in her savings. She needed the deposit to make her monthly payment to Brenthaven, not to mention to buy mundane items like food and gas.

“Surely any discussion we need to engage in can be handled via the phone.”

“No.” Again, no explanation. No compromise.

She rubbed her eyes, glad that he could not see the gesture that betrayed both physical weariness and emotional weakness. “Leiandros—”

“Contact my secretary for travel arrangements.”

The phone clicked quietly in her ear and she pulled it away to stare at it. He’d hung up on her. She said a word that should never pass a lady’s lips and slammed the phone back into its cradle. Shocked rigid by her own unaccustomed display of temper, she stood motionless for almost a full minute before spinning on her heel to leave the now stifling study.

She’d reached the door and opened it when the phone rang again. This time it wasn’t Leiandros or his secretary. It was the doctor in charge of Aunt Beatrice.

Savannah’s beloved aunt had had another stroke.

Savannah tucked her daughters into bed, telling them their favorite rendition of the Cinderella tale for their bedtime story before ensconcing herself in the study to make the dreaded call to Leiandros.

She pulled up her household budget spreadsheet on the computer and ran the numbers one more time. Nothing had miraculously changed. She needed the monthly allowance. Even if she could manage to land a full-time job the very next day, starting wages in spite of a degree in business were not going to be enough to cover their household expenses and the increased cost of Aunt Beatrice’s medical care.

Savannah picked up the phone and dialed Leiandros’s office.

His secretary answered on the first ring. The conversation was short. Savannah agreed to fly out the following week, but she refused to bring her daughters. The secretary hung up after promising to call back within the hour with an itinerary.

Savannah was making herself a cup of hot tea in the kitchen when the phone rang only minutes later.

A sense of impending doom sent goose bumps rushing down her arms and up the backs of her thighs. She just knew the secretary wasn’t calling back with travel plans already.

After taking a steadying breath, she picked up the phone. “Yes, Leiandros?”

If she’d hoped to disconcert him, she was disappointed as there wasn’t even a second’s pause before he started talking.

“Eva and Nyssa must accompany you.”

“No.”

“Why not?” he demanded, his Greek accent pronounced.

Because the thought of taking her daughters back to Greece terrified her. “Eva has almost two weeks left of school.”

“Then come in two weeks.”

“I prefer to come now.” She needed the money now, not in two weeks. “Besides, I see no reason to disrupt the girls’ schedule for what will amount to an exhausting, but short trip.”

“Not even to introduce them to their grandparents?”

Fear put a metallic taste in her mouth. “Their grandparents want nothing to do with them. Helena made that clear when Eva was born.”

She’d taken one look at Savannah’s blue-eyed and blond-haired baby and decreed the child could not possibly be a Kiriakis. Eva’s eyes had darkened to green by the time she was a year old and her baby fine hair had been replaced by a thick mane of mahogany waves by the time she was four.

It was too bad Helena had refused point-blank to even come to see Nyssa. Savannah’s youngest had been born with the black hair and velvet brown eyes of her father.

Unmistakably a Kiriakis.

“People change. Their son is gone. Is it so strange Helena and Sandros should wish to know his off-spring?”

Savannah sucked in much needed oxygen and marshaled her thoughts. “Do they now acknowledge Eva and Nyssa as Dion’s?”

“They will when they meet them.”

No doubt. Both her daughters had enough physical characteristics of the Kiriakis clan that once seen their parentage could not be challenged, but that did not mean she was ready to introduce them to their family in Greece.

“How can you be so sure?” she asked, wondering how he knew of her daughters’ physical resemblance to their relatives.

“I have seen pictures. There can be no question Eva and Nyssa are Kiriakises.” The words sounded like an accusation.

“Dion’s pictures, you mean?”

She’d sent him frequent updates on the girls’ progress along with photos, hoping that one day he would show some inclination to acknowledge them. She’d felt her own lack of family and mourned her inability to know her own father and did not want the same grief visited on her daughters.

“Yes. I supervised the disposal of his effects from his Athens apartment.” Again Leiandros’s voice was laced with censure, as if she should have done the job herself.

After three years of separation and living independent lives on two different continents, she hadn’t even considered such a thing. “I see.”

“Do you?” he asked, his voice silky with unnamed menace and that awful sense of dread washed over her again.

“Have Helena and Sandros expressed a desire to meet them?”

“I have decided the time has come.”

And as the head of the Kiriakis clan, he expected the rest of the family to go along with whatever decision he made.

“No.”

“How can you be so selfish?” Condemnation weighted each word with bruising force.

“Selfish?” she asked, feeling anger roiling in her stomach, making it churn. “You call it selfish for a mother to wish to protect her children from the rejection of people that are supposed to love them, people that should have loved them since birth, but decided for their own obscure reasons not to?”

She knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. For six years, Savannah had believed Dion’s family had hated her because she was not the suitable Greek bride they had chosen for him to wed and therefore rejected her children. His phone call the night before he died effectively obliterated that theory.

Along with other stunning revelations, her dear husband had admitted that he’d been poisoning their minds with his insane jealousy, accusing her of infidelity, from almost the very start of their marriage. Helena and Sandros had what they believed to be legitimate reasons to question the parentage of Savannah’s daughters, but that didn’t make her any more willing to expose Eva and Nyssa to possible rejection and pain.

“Sandros and Helena will accept the girls with open arms.”

“Who do you think you are. God?”

Funny, she could actually sense the fury sizzling through the phone lines. He was not used to being questioned. He’d been in charge of the huge Kiriakis financial empire since his father’s unexpected death when Leiandros was twenty. At thirty-two, his arrogance and sense of personal power were as ingrained and natural to him as making his next million.

“Do not be blasphemous. It is unbecoming in a woman.”

She almost laughed out loud at how stilted he sounded, like someone’s maiden aunt giving lessons in etiquette. “I’m not trying to be offensive,” she replied, “I simply want to protect my daughters’ best interests.”

“If you expect those interests to include further financial support from the Kiriakis family, you will bring them to Greece.”

Savannah tried to draw in a breath, but it seemed to get stuck somewhere between her windpipe and her lungs. The edges of her vision turned black and she wondered with a sense of detachment if she were going to faint. Leiandros didn’t know it, but he was forcing her to choose between the elderly aunt who had raised her and the safety of her daughters’ emotions along with her own sanity.

It was her second worse nightmare. The first had already happened. She’d married Dion Kiriakis.

“Savannah!”

Someone was shouting in her ear. Her hand instinctively tightened on the phone and the room came slowly back into focus.

“Leiandros?” Was that thready voice hers?

How pathetic she must sound to the self-assured man on the other end of the line, but then she doubted anyone had ever forced him to do anything he did not want to.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she admitted. The last of her emotional reserves seemed to have dissipated with his overt threat.

“Savannah, I’m not going to let anyone hurt Eva and Nyssa.” His voice reverberated against her ear with conviction and assurance.

But would he let them hurt her? “How can you prevent it?”

“You will have to trust me.”

“I don’t trust people named Kiriakis.” Her words came in the flat monotone she couldn’t seem to shake.

“You don’t have a choice.”

Leiandros hung up the phone, satisfied.

The opening gambit had gone to him. It would only be a matter of time before he captured her.

Savannah and her daughters would be flying to Greece the day after Eva’s school let out for the summer. Savannah had agreed only after extracting a promise from him not to instigate any meeting between Eva, Nyssa and their grandparents before she had an opportunity to speak to Helena and Sandros.

How could she now show such concern for her daughters’ emotional well-being when her lies about their parentage had denied them the love of their family since birth?

No doubt, her arguments were an attempt at manipulation. Perhaps she intended to try to use the girls as bargaining chips for a larger allowance. While her current stipend was substantial, it would hardly support the designer clad, jet setting lifestyle she had experienced while living with Dion.

He put through a call to his secretary. “Arrange for my jet to land in Atlanta to transport Savannah Kiriakis and her children to Athens two weeks from today.”

He cut the connection after giving his secretary other necessary details.

Savannah had balked at flying on his jet, but after he told her the plane had a bedroom the girls could use to sleep in comfort, she had agreed. If she’d remained insistent he would have given in to her. The first step in his plan was the most important: getting Savannah and the girls to Greece.

Savannah had to be on the chessboard in order to engage her in the game.

He would not allow an ocean and two continents to prevent him from exacting full payment from her for all that she had cost his family, all that she had cost him.

Savannah had committed the gravest of all sins against his family, that of withholding her children, using lies and manipulation to cheat Dion out of his fatherhood and Helena and Sandros out of their rightful role as doting grandparents.

That would end in two weeks time.

When he had first met Savannah, he had been drawn to her apparent innocence, to the impression of untouched sensuality she had exuded. So drawn he had kissed her without knowing her name or anything else about her.

She had struggled at first, but within seconds had gone up in flames. Her response had been more exciting than any other sexual experience he’d ever had. Then, she’d yanked herself from his arms and told him she was married. His first, primitive instinct had been to tell her she had married the wrong man. And then her husband had arrived. His cousin.

Leiandros’s body still remembered the feel of hers. His mouth still hungered for her taste. His sex still ached for the release denied him that night. No matter how he tried to forget the forbidden desire for his cousin’s wife, she was always there, in his dreams, in his mind.

Even knowing she was a scheming, heartless witch, he wanted her. Now, he would have her. She would replace what he had lost and in the process, he would sate his body’s urge to possess her.

CHAPTER THREE

SAVANNAH carried a sleeping Nyssa toward customs, following Leiandros’s personal flight attendant who led an equally worn-out, but barely awake, Eva by the hand. Exhaustion dragged at Savannah and she looked forward to a shower with almost religious fervor.

She could have taken one on the plane, but had not wanted to wake Eva and Nyssa any sooner than she had to. Wound up by the excitement of flying in an airplane, they had not made proper use of the plane’s bedroom until an hour before landing.

When they reached customs, she was given VIP treatment and rushed through, an example of Leiandros’s power and far reaching influence. It increased the sense of a trap closing around her she’d had since stepping onto his private jet.

As she stepped into the main terminal, she forced her weary eyes to focus on the scene around her. The new airport was all modern glass and streamlined walkways, but still incredibly crowded. She sighed and shifted her grip on Nyssa. Her arms felt like two strands of pasta cooked al dente.

Even as her gaze swept the crowded terminal, she felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Turning her head slightly to the right, she met the dark, inscrutable gaze of Leiandros Kiriakis himself and she stopped. Not voluntarily. Her legs simply quit working.

She hadn’t expected to see him until the next day.

The flight attendant paused beside her, forcing the stream of air passengers to break and flow around them. “Mrs. Kiriakis? Is something wrong?”

Savannah could not make her lips form words. Her entire being was caught up in this first sight of Leiandros Kiriakis in a year. His black hair had been cut to lie close to the sculpted lines of his head. His sensual lips set in a grim line, his eyes betrayed nothing. He made no move to come toward them, but seemed content to wait, towering with unconscious arrogance above the sea of humanity that welled around him.

Taking a tighter hold on her sleeping daughter, she stepped forward only to bump into another passenger. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

The woman she’d bumped ignored Savannah and scurried away toward the luggage carousel.

A large man who looked like a Greek Sumo wrestler barreled into her from behind. Stumbling, she feared she would lose her hold on Nyssa when two strong hands gripped her upper arms and steadied her. How had he gotten to her so quickly?

“You’re dead on your feet, Savannah. Let me take the child.” Leiandros moved one hand from her arm to Nyssa’s back.

Without conscious volition, Savannah yanked herself and her daughter out of touching distance from Leiandros. “No. I can carry her, but thank you,” she tacked on belatedly.

His eyes narrowed.

“Mama…” Eva’s tentative interruption saved Savannah from whatever Leiandros had planned to say.

Savannah turned her attention gratefully to her daughter. “Yes, sweet pea?”

“I’m tired. May I go to bed now?”

“It will be a little while before we reach your bed, but you can sleep in the car. The seats are big enough for a little girl like you to treat them like a bed,” Leiandros said.

“I’m five,” Eva announced.

His mouth quirked. “If you are five, you must be Eva. I am Leiandros Kiriakis.”

Eva’s head tipped back and she measured him with a drowsy but direct look. “Kiriakis is my name, too.”

He squatted down until his face was almost level with that of Savannah’s serious little daughter. He matched Eva’s grave expression. His mouth curved into a devastating smile. “So it is. That is because we are family.”

Eva tugged her hand away from the flight attendant’s and sidled next to Savannah, taking a grip on the loose fabric of her crushed silk trousers. “Is he my family, Mama?”

Leiandros’s eyes blasted Savannah with sulfuric fury briefly as he straightened to stand at his full impressive six feet four inches. He seemed to be daring her to deny the link to her daughter, which she had no intention of doing.

She hadn’t been the one to deny her daughters’ family ties. “Yes, darling, your father was his cousin.”

“Does he look like my father?” Eva asked.

Leiandros speared Savannah with another look of censure.

“You’ve seen pictures, what do you think?” Savannah replied, letting her daughter draw her own conclusions.

She felt Eva’s head shift against her thigh as the little girl nodded her head. “But maybe he’s bigger.”

Eva put her hand on Nyssa’s small leg dangling over Savannah’s arm. “This is Nyssa. She’s four.”

He acknowledged the introduction with a devastating smile.

“Now that we are acquainted, it is time we left. Felix will take care of the luggage,” he said, indicating a short, stocky man standing several paces away near another very muscular man, only a couple of inches shorter than Leiandros.

Leiandros led them outside and Savannah blessed the lightweight nature of her crushed silk pantsuit when the hot Greek air blasted her as they stepped out of the air-conditioned environs of the recently completed airport. While the heat wasn’t so very different from Georgia, the sun’s impact felt stronger.

As they approached a black limousine with darkly tinted windows, the chauffeur opened the back door while another man stood sentry on the driver’s side. He and the man with Felix were no doubt part of Leiandros’s security team.

Savannah motioned Eva to climb in first. She did, taking Leiandros at his word and making herself comfortable for sleep on the far side of the seat, leaving enough space for Savannah to lay Nyssa’s dozing form down as well. Another wave of exhaustion rolled over her and Savannah wished she could join Nyssa in her peaceful slumber. Within fifteen minutes of leaving the airport, Eva had done so.

“Sleep if you wish. I will not be offended,” Leiandros offered. “The trip is a long one from the airport.”

Savannah swallowed a yawn. “I didn’t think it was that far from the city.”

“It is not, but there is road construction.” He shrugged. “It will take us at least two hours to reach the villa.”

She’d been relaxing against the seat, preparing to take him up on his advice to pass the time sleeping when he made that comment. She sat straight up and twisted her body until she could look him full in the face.

“What villa? I thought we were staying at a hotel.”

“You are family. You will stay with family.”

There was that word again, but Savannah had had enough experience her first time around in Greece with the dutiful ties of the Kiriakis family not to trust them.

“You promised me the girls would not have to see their grandparents until we discussed it,” she accused him in a fierce whisper, not wanting to wake her daughters to hear this particular argument. “I insist you take us to a hotel.”

“No.”

“No? No! How dare you do this? You promised.” She settled back against the seat with her arms crossed. “I knew I couldn’t trust a Kiriakis.”

That seemed to get him, because his hands curled into fists at his side and his face looked hewn from rock.

“You will not be staying with Helena and Sandros.”

“You said we’d be staying with family, at the villa.” As the words left her lips, an awful thought occurred to her. “You want us to stay at your villa on Evia Island? With you?”

His brows rose in sardonic challenge. “My mother is also staying at the villa. She will be sufficient chaperone.”

“Chaperone? I don’t need a chaperone. I need privacy. I need to stay in a hotel.”

“Relax, Savannah. There is no reason to shout about it. With two active children, you will find the villa much more comfortable than a hotel, I promise you.”

In that respect, she had no doubt he was right, but it wasn’t her daughters she was worried about at the moment. It was herself. She shuddered inwardly at the prospect of sharing living space with Leiandros.

“I suppose you still keep an apartment in Athens and spend most of your time there,” she said hopefully.

“Yes.”

She couldn’t quite stifle her sigh of relief.

“Of course, I’ve arranged to work from the villa for the next few days so I can spend time with my family.”

Savannah’s throat went tight in reaction to the threat in his voice, despite the innocence of the sentiments expressed.

“How long did you plan our visit to last?” It was something he’d refused to discuss on the phone.

If she’d been in her right mind, instead of riddled with worry over her aunt, Savannah would have forced the issue.

Leiandros looked at her as if trying to read her mind. “We’ll discuss that tomorrow.”

“I’d rather discuss it now.” She kept her expression purposefully blank.

“Very well.” He shrugged again, his face wearing a strangely watchful air. “Permanently.”

“Permanently?”

The grim line of his mouth went even more taut. “Yes. You’ve spent enough time running from your family. It’s time you came home, Savannah.”

Home? She wanted to shriek at him and pound her fists, but even with rage coursing through her veins like molten lava, she held onto her temper. She’d learned that lesson much too well to forget it, even with the current provocation.

She’d lost her control once with a Kiriakis male and opened herself to physical reprisal from her husband. She still had nightmares about her last meeting with Dion, the feeling of bruising male fists landing against her unprotected flesh.

“America is my home,” she said, spacing the words evenly, keeping her voice flat.

“It was your home before you married a Kiriakis, yes. But now Greece is your home, specifically my villa.”

“Your villa? You expect me to live in your villa permanently?” She was in a waking nightmare.

He reached out and opened the minifridge, pulling out a bottle of water, handing it to her before taking one for himself. “Yes.”

She stared at the cold plastic bottle in her hand, wondering for a second how it had gotten there. “I can’t.”

He didn’t bother to argue with her. In fact, he didn’t answer her at all. Instead, he pulled a buzzing cell phone from his pocket and answered it.

Savannah slowly regained consciousness, uncertain what had wakened her, and shifted in the cocooned warmth of her make shift bed. She burrowed her face into the pillow, which felt strangely hard against her cheek. Unsated exhaustion tugged at her, tempting her back into an unconscious state.

Her bed moved and the blanket pressed against her back in a soft caress. “Wake up pethi mou, we have almost arrived.”

Her eyes flew open. For the space of several seconds she couldn’t even breathe. The blanket caressing her back was in fact a large, male hand and her firm pillow, a muscular chest. Frozen into immobility by shock, she further discovered that her arms were wrapped tightly around his torso.

The subtle fragrance of fresh, clean male and expensive aftershave teased her senses. Familiar and yet unknown. She blinked, trying to focus, but her vision was clouded by crisp white silk and her mind could not quite come to grips with the first intimacy shared with a man in well over four years.

And not just any man.

She was wrapped up like an early Christmas present in the arms of Leiandros Kiriakis.

Reality so closely matched the dreams that had tormented her subconscious for seven long years that she spent several precious seconds trying to determine if she were still asleep.

“Eva, how come Mama is hugging that man?” Nyssa’s voice unlocked Savannah’s frozen limbs.

She was definitely awake. Her daughters had never played a role in the dreams she had had about Leiandros. Yanking her arms from their snug nest in his suit coat, she launched herself from Leiandros with such a violent movement she bounced against the opposite door and nearly fell off the seat.

He reached out to steady her and she recoiled violently from the possible touch. “I’m fine,” she all but snarled, her usual polite reserve a forgotten ideal.

“He’s our family,” Eva said, as if that explained everything. She had that much in common with her uncle.

Savannah couldn’t help but wonder if he had thought the familial claim justified the intimacy of their position as well.

“Mama?” Nyssa asked, her brown Kiriakis eyes wide with curiosity.

Savannah settled herself more firmly on the large limousine seat. Not caring what Leiandros thought of the action, she scooted as close to the door as she could get without sitting on the armrest. “Yes, sugar?”

“Why did you hug the big man?”

“I wasn’t hugging him.” She turned and glared at Leiandros. This situation was all his fault. “I was asleep.”

“Oh.” Nyssa turned her interested gaze to Leiandros and stared at him in silence for several seconds before turning back to her mother. “Were you sitting in his lap to sleep?”

The heat of embarrassment crawled over Savannah’s skin like ants on a picnic blanket. She couldn’t look at Leiandros. She had no idea how she’d ended up sleeping with her body plastered against his and feared finding out she had been the instigator.

The last thing she remembered was letting her head rest against the back of the seat. She’d closed her eyes in weariness as she tired of waiting for him to finish the latest of his numerous business calls on the cell.

She’d obviously fallen asleep. That she could understand. She’d been nearly comatose from exhaustion before the plane had landed. The last two weeks had been peppered with sleepless nights and emotionally draining days visiting her aunt.

Even so, she found it difficult to believe she’d allowed herself to get that close to a man, asleep or not. Her subconscious mind might crave Leiandros Kiriakis, but her conscious mind rejected even the hint of intimacy with any man.

The evidence, however, was irrefutable. Her skin still tingled from where she had touched him.

Before she got a chance to form a reply to Nyssa’s question that wouldn’t betray the rawness of her nerves, her daughter smiled at Leiandros. “Sometimes I sit on my mama’s lap for sleeping, but she says I’m getting too heavy. Isn’t she too big for your lap?”

Savannah wanted to groan out loud at her daughter’s logic. Nyssa’s nap had clearly been long enough to rejuvenate her mind as well as her spirits. Savannah wished she had been so lucky. Her mind felt too sluggish to deal with the current situation. Unbelievably, her traitorous body craved return to the warm, muscular resting place of Leiandros’s chest.

“I’d say she’s just right.” His low, sensual tone caressed Savannah’s insides, making them tighten and interrupting her chaotic thoughts.

Awareness of his masculinity bombarded her. Along with something else, something elemental that left her feeling hot and strangely edgy. Impossible. She had spent the last four years believing she would never again experience sexual desire and here she was as jittery as a mare being bred for the first time. Wanting it, but terrified at the same time.

“Where are we?” she asked in a desperate bid to change the direction her thoughts were taking.

“Very near Villa Kalosorisma. We have just crossed the bridge to Evia Island.” His eyes told her he knew exactly why she’d asked the question and found the knowledge amusing.

The car slid to a halt and seconds later, the door next to Savannah opened. The chauffeur helped first Eva, then Nyssa from the car. By the time Savannah swung her legs around to climb out, Leiandros had exited from the other side and come around to take her hand in his.

He pulled her from the sleek chauffeured car, the heat of his hand branding her as intimately as if he’d kissed her. She tried to ignore the sensation and swiftly stepped away from him.

The girls stood a few yards away, staring at the villa’s front with identical expressions of surprised awe. Savannah identified with the feeling.

She had never been to Villa Kalosorisma. Dion had kept her separated from the rest of his family as much as possible, even his parents and sister. He’d told her at the time it was his way of protecting her from their disapproval until they came to accept the marriage. She now knew differently. He’d been afraid of having his ugly lies about her morality revealed. She still cringed at what a gullible idiot she had been then.

The pristine whiteness of the villa’s stucco exterior dazzled her eyes, contrasting beautifully with the red tile roof. Three levels of terraces outlined by arches fronted the mansion. Surrounded by immaculate gardens and green trees, through which she could see glimpses of sparkling blue sea, Villa Kalosorisma simply took her breath away.

“It’s a real pretty hotel,” Nyssa announced.

“It’s not a hotel,” Savannah felt impelled to say.

“This is my home.” Leiandros had come to stand behind Savannah without her realizing it.

She once again stepped away, impatient to put distance between herself and his disturbing presence. She’d almost grown accustomed to the anxiety a man’s nearness caused in her, but that anxiety mixed with unmistakable sexual awareness was a cocktail mix guaranteed to corrupt her sanity.

“I thought we were staying in a hotel, Mama.” Eva said.

“In Greece family is everything. It would be considered a grave insult were I not to offer my home to you all and equally offensive if your mama refused to accept it.” Leiandros’s words seemed laced with warning and Savannah turned her head to see him more clearly.

Was he trying to intimidate her and if so, why? She’d already agreed to stay at his villa and in fact felt a small measure of gratitude that she hadn’t been forced to play this scene with Helena and Sandros. She would have refused any invitation extended by them regardless of the offense taken.

The very thought of being forced to accept her in-law’s hospitality was enough to make her feel slightly nauseous.

“Our house is lots smaller because we’ve just got a mommy and me and Eva. You must have an awful lot of kids. You’re house is like Cinderella’s castle.” Typically, Nyssa had spoken again while Eva silently watched the adults, letting her serious green gaze flicker between them and the big white villa.

Bitterness and pain reflected briefly in his dark chocolate eyes. “I have no children.”

“Oh. Don’t you like kids?” Nyssa asked before Savannah thought to caution her daughter to silence.

This time the pain was more pronounced and even slipped into his voice as he answered. “I like children very much.”

Had he and Petra planned to have them right away? It must have been a horrible shock to lose her so soon after marriage. Leiandros and Petra had only been married about a year when Dion crashed his car with Petra in it, killing them both instantly. Knowing it was ridiculous, Savannah still felt guilty by association. It had been her estranged husband responsible for the crash.

Eva stepped forward and laid her little hand on Leiandros’s forearm. “It’s okay. Someday, you’ll have some. Mama says you’ve got to believe in your dreams for them to come true.”

He squatted down in front of Eva and reached out to brush her cheek. “Thank you, pethi mou. You and your sister staying at the villa will be like having children of my own.”

In a wholly uncharacteristic move, Eva let her small fingers trail down Leiandros’s face to his chin, her green eyes full of both compassion and a wistfulness that surprised Savannah. “I’ll play checkers with you if you like. Daddies do that with their little girls sometimes.”

“You can help Mom tuck us in at night, too,” Nyssa added, not willing to be outdone by her sister.

Savannah watched the entire scene with a sense of unreality intensified by her tiredness. Her daughters had spent very little time around men, which usually made even the more gregarious Nyssa timid with them. And yet, here was Savannah’s extremely cautious eldest daughter reaching out to touch Leiandros.

Even more shocking than her daughter’s response to Leiandros were his words. Did he truly want her and the girls to move to Greece to fill a void that had opened in his life since his young wife’s death?

She’d never considered Leiandros Kiriakis vulnerable in any way. The man spent his time running a multibillion dollar corporation. He couldn’t seriously need the company of two small girls to complete his life.

Savannah curled her hands around the oversized woven bag she carried. It felt like a link to sanity, its casual American styling a reminder of the life she’d made for herself and her daughters. A life far removed from that of privileged wealth exemplified by Villa Kalosorisma.

A life she and her daughters would return to.

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