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About the Authors

In the past, CATHERINE SPENCER has been an English teacher which was the springboard for her writing career. Heathcliff, Rochester, Romeo and Rhett were all responsible for her love of brooding heroes! Catherine has had the lucky honour of being a Romance Writers of America RITA® finalist and has been a guest speaker at both international and local conferences and was the only Canadian chosen to appear on the television special, Harlequin goes Prime Time.

SHARON KENDRICK started story-telling at the age of eleven and has never stopped. She likes to write fast-paced, feel-good romances with heroes who are so sexy they’ll make your toes curl! She lives in the beautiful city of Winchester – where she can see the cathedral from her window (when standing on tip-toe!). She has two children, Celia and Patrick and her passions include music, books, cooking and eating – and drifting into daydreams while working out new plots.

LUCY GORDON cut her writing teeth on magazine journalism, interviewing many of the world’s most interesting men, including Warren Beatty and Roger Moore. Several years ago, while staying Venice, she met a Venetian who proposed in two days. They have been married ever since. Naturally this has affected her writing, where romantic Italian men tend to feature strongly. Two of her books have won a Romance Writers of America RITA® Award. You can visit her website at www.lucy-gordon.com

With Love from Athens

The Greek Millionaire’s Secret Child

Catherine Spencer

Constantine’s Defiant Mistress

Sharon Kendrick

The Greek Tycoon’s Achilles Heel

Lucy Gordon

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90732-7

WITH LOVE FROM ATHENS

The Greek Millionaire’s Secret Child © 2009 Catherine Spencer Books Limited. Constantine’s Defiant Mistress © 2009 Sharon Kendrick The Greek Tycoon’s Achilles Heel © 2010 Lucy Gordon

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Cover

About the Authors

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

The Greek Millionaire’s Secret Child

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 FOURTEEN

Constantine’s Defiant Mistress

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 FOURTEEN

EPILOGUE

The Greek Tycoon’s Achilles Heel

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

About the Publisher

The Greek Millionaire’s Secret Child

Catherine Spencer

CHAPTER ONE

EMILY singled him out immediately, not because his father had described him so well that she couldn’t miss him, but because even though he stood well back from everyone else, he dominated the throng waiting to meet passengers newly arrived at Athens’s Venizelos Airport. At more than six feet of lean, toned masculinity blessed with the face of a fallen angel, he could hardly help it. One look at him was enough to tell her he was the kind of man other men envied, and women fought over.

As if on cue, his gaze locked with hers. Locked and lingered a small eternity, long enough for her insides to roll over in fascinated trepidation. Every instinct of self-preservation told her he was bad news; that she’d live to rue the day she met him. Then he nodded, as though he knew exactly the effect he’d had on her, and cutting a swath through the crowd, strode forward.

Given her first unobstructed view, she noted how his jeans emphasized his narrow hips and long legs, the way his black leather bomber jacket rode smoothly over his powerful shoulders, and the startling contrast of his throat rising strong and tanned against the open collar of his white shirt. As he drew closer, she saw, too, that his mouth and his jaw, the latter firm and faintly dusted with new beard shadow, betrayed the stubbornness his father had spoken of.

When he reached them, he asked in a voice as sinfully seductive as the rest of him, “So you beat the odds and made it back in one piece. How was the flight?”

“Long,” Pavlos replied, sounding every bit as worn and weary as he surely must feel. Not even painkillers and the luxury of first-class air travel had been enough to cushion his discomfort. “Very long. But as you can see, I have my guardian angel at my side.” He reached over his shoulder, groped for her hand and squeezed it affectionately. “Emily, my dear, I am pleased to introduce my son, Nikolaos. And this, Niko, is my nurse, Emily Tyler. What I would have done without her, I cannot imagine.”

Again, Nikolaos Leonidas’s gaze lingered, touring the length of her in insolent appraisal. Behind his chiseled good looks lurked a certain arrogance. He was not a man to be crossed, she thought. “Yiasu, Emily Tyler,” he said.

Even though her sweater and slacks pretty much covered all of her, she felt naked under that sweeping regard. His eyes were the problem, she thought dizzily. Not brown like his father’s, as she’d expected, but a deep green reminiscent of fine jade, they added an arresting final touch to a face already possessed of more than its rightful share of dark beauty.

Swallowing, she managed an answering, “Yiasu.”

“You speak a little Greek?”

“A very little,” she said. “I just exhausted my entire vocabulary.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The comment might have stung if he hadn’t tempered it with a smile that assaulted her with such charm, it was all she could do not to buckle at the knees. For heaven’s sake, what was the matter with her? She was twenty-seven, and if not exactly the most sexually experienced woman in the world, hardly in the first flush of innocent youth, either. She knew well enough that appearances counted for little. It was the person inside that mattered, and from everything she’d been told, Niko Leonidas fell sadly short in that respect.

His manner as he turned his attention again to Pavlos did nothing to persuade her otherwise. He made no effort to embrace his father, to reassure him with a touch to the shoulder or hand that the old man could count on his son for whatever support he might need during his convalescence. Instead he commandeered a porter to take care of the loaded luggage cart one of the flight attendants had brought, and with a terse, “Well, since we seem to have exhausted the formalities, let’s get out of here,” marched toward the exit, leaving Emily to follow with Pavlos.

Only when they arrived at the waiting Mercedes did he betray a hint of compassion. “Don’t,” he ordered, when she went to help her patient out of the wheelchair and with surprising tenderness, scooped his father into his arms, laid him carefully on the car’s roomy back seat and draped a blanket over his legs. “You didn’t have to do that,” Pavlos snapped, trying unsuccessfully to mask a grimace of pain.

Noticing, Niko said, “Apparently I did. Or would you have preferred I stand idly by and watch you fall on your face?”

“I would prefer to be standing on my own two feet without needing assistance of any kind.”

“Then you should have taken better care of yourself when you were away—or else had the good sense to stay home in the first place, instead of deciding you had to see Alaska before you die.”

Emily was tempted to kick the man, hard, but made do with a glare. “Accidents happen, Mr. Leonidas.”

“Especially to globe-trotting eighty-six-year-old men.”

“It was hardly his fault that the cruise ship ran aground, nor was he the only passenger on board who was injured. All things considered, and given his age, your father’s done amazingly well. In time, and with adequate follow-up physical therapy, he should make a reasonably good recovery.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I guess you’re going to have to step up to the plate and start acting like a proper son.”

He favored her with a slow blink made all the more disturbing by the sweep of his lashes, which were indecently long and silky. “Nurse and family counselor all rolled into one,” he drawled. “How lucky is that?”

“Well, you did ask.”

“And you told me.” He tipped the porter, left him to return the airport’s borrowed wheelchair, then slammed closed the car trunk and opened the front passenger door with a flourish. “Climb in. We can continue this conversation later.”

As she might have expected, he drove with flair and expertise. Within half an hour of leaving the airport, they were cruising the leafy green streets of Vouliagmeni, the exclusive Athens suburb overlooking the Saronic Gulf on the east coast of the Attic Peninsula, which Pavlos had described to her so vividly. Soon after, at the end of a quiet road running parallel to the beach, Niko steered the car through a pair of ornate wrought-iron gates, which opened at the touch of a remote control button on the dash.

Emily had gathered Pavlos was a man of considerable wealth, but was hardly prepared for the rather frightening opulence confronting her as the Mercedes wound its way up a long curving driveway, and she caught her first sight of…what? His house? Villa? Mansion?

Set in spacious, exquisitely landscaped grounds and screened from local traffic by a stand of pines, the place defied such mundane description. Stucco walls, blindingly white, rose in elegant proportions to a tiled roof as blue as she’d always imagined the skies to be in Athens, even though, this late September afternoon, an approaching storm left them gray and threatening. Long windows opened to wide terraces shaded by pergolas draped in flowering vines. A huge fountain splashed in a central forecourt, peacocks preened and screeched on the lawns, and from somewhere on the seaward side of the property, a dog barked.

She had little time to marvel, though, because barely had the car come to a stop outside a set of double front doors than they opened, and a man in his late fifties or early sixties appeared with a wheelchair light years removed from the spartan model offered by the airport.

The devoted butler, Georgios, she presumed. Pavlos had spoken of him often and with great fondness. Behind him came a younger man, little more than a boy really, who went about unloading the luggage while Niko and the butler lifted Pavlos from the car to the chair. By the time they were done, he was gray in the face and the grooves paralleling his mouth carved more deeply than usual.

Even Niko seemed concerned. “What can you do for him?” he muttered, cornering Emily near the front entrance as Georgios whisked his employer away down a wide, marble-floored hall.

“Give him something to manage the pain, and let him rest,” she said. “The journey was very hard on him.”

“He doesn’t look to me as if he was fit to travel in the first place.”

“He wasn’t. Given his age and the severity of his osteoporosis, he really ought to have remained in the hospital another week, but he insisted on coming home, and when your father makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.” Niko scowled and shucked off his jacket. “Shall I send for his doctor?”

“In the morning, yes. He’ll need more medication than what I was able to bring with us. But I have enough to see him through tonight.” Struggling to preserve a professional front despite the fact that Niko stood close enough for the warmth of his body to reach out and touch hers, she sidled past him and took her travel bag from the pile of luggage accumulating inside the front door. “If you’d show me to his room, I really should attend to him now.”

He stepped away and led her to the back of the villa, to a large, sun-filled apartment on the main floor. Consisting of a sitting room and bedroom, both with French doors that opened onto a low-walled patio, it overlooked the gardens and sea. Still in the wheelchair, stationed next to the window in the sitting room, Pavlos leaned forward, drinking in the view which, even swathed in floating mist as the storm closed in, held him transfixed.

“He had this part of the house converted into his private suite a few years ago when the stairs proved too much for him,” Niko said in a low voice.

Glancing through to the bedroom, Emily asked, “And the hospital bed?”

“I had it brought in yesterday. He’ll probably give me hell for removing the one he’s used to, but this one seemed more practical, at least for now.”

“You did the right thing. He’ll be more comfortable in it, even if he won’t be spending much time there except at night.”

“Why not?”

“The more mobile he is, the better his chances of eventually walking again, although…”

Picking up on the reservation in her voice, Niko pounced on it. “Although what? You said earlier you expect him to make a reasonable recovery. Are you changing your mind now?”

“No, but…” Again, she hesitated, bound by patient confidentiality, yet aware that as his son, Niko had the right to some information, especially if her withholding it might have an adverse effect on Pavlos’s future wellbeing. “How much do you know about your father’s general health?”

“Only what he chooses to tell me, which isn’t very much.”

She should have guessed he’d say that. There’s no need to contact my son, Pavlos had decreed, when the hospital had insisted on listing his next of kin. He minds his business, and I mind mine.

Niko pinned her in that unnerving green stare. “What aren’t you telling me, Emily? Is he dying?”

“Aren’t we all, to one extent or another?”

“Don’t play mind games with me. I asked you a straightforward question. I’d like a straightforward answer.”

“Okay. His age is against him. Although he’d never admit it, he’s very frail. It wouldn’t take much for him to suffer a relapse.”

“I can pretty much figure that out for myself, so what else are you holding back?”

Pavlos spared her having to reply. “What the devil are the pair of you whispering about?” he inquired irascibly.

Casting Niko an apologetic glance, she said, “Your son was just explaining that you might not care for the new bed he ordered. He’s afraid you’ll think he was interfering.”

“He was. I broke my hip, not my brain. I’ll decide what I do and don’t need.”

“Not as long as I’m in charge.”

“Don’t boss me around, girl. I won’t put up with it.”

“Yes, you will,” she said equably. “That’s why you hired me.”

“I can fire you just as easily, and have you on a flight back to Vancouver as early as tomorrow.”

Recognizing the empty threat for what it really was, she hid a smile. Exhaustion and pain had taken their toll, but by morning he’d be in a better frame of mind. “Yes, sir, Mr. Leonidas,” she returned smartly, and swung the wheelchair toward the bedroom. “Until then, let me do my job.”

Niko had seized the first opportunity to vacate the premises, she noticed, and could have slapped herself for the pang of disappointment that sprouted despite her best efforts to quell it. The faithful Georgios, however, remained on the scene, anxious and willing to help wherever he could. Even so, by the time Pavlos had managed a light meal and was settled comfortably for the night, darkness had fallen.

Damaris, the housekeeper, showed Emily upstairs to the suite prepared for her. Decorated in subtle shades of ivory and slate-blue, it reminded her of her bedroom at home, although the furnishings here were far grander than anything she could afford. Marble floors, a Savonnerie rug and fine antiques polished to a soft gleam exemplified wealth, good taste and comfort.

A lady’s writing desk occupied the space between double French doors leading to a balcony. In front of a small blue-tiled fireplace was a fainting couch, its brocade upholstery worn to satin softness, its once-vibrant colors faded by time. A glass-shaded lamp spilled mellow light, and a vase of lilies on a table filled the room with fragrance.

Most inviting of all, though, was the four-poster bed, dressed in finest linens. Almost ten thousand kilometers, and over sixteen hours of travel with its inevitable delays, plus the added stress of her patient’s condition, had made serous inroads on her energy, and she wanted nothing more than to lay her head against those snowy-white pillows, pull the soft coverlet over her body and sleep through to morning.

A quick glance around showed that her luggage had been unpacked, her toiletries arranged in the bathroom and her robe and nightshirt laid out on the bench in front of the vanity. But so, to her dismay, was a change of underwear, and a freshly ironed cotton dress, one of the few she’d brought with her, hung in the dressing room connecting bathroom and bedroom. And if they weren’t indication enough that the early night she craved was not to be, Damaris’s parting remark drove home the point in no uncertain terms.

“I have drawn a bath for you, Despinis Tyler. Dinner will be served in the garden room at nine.”

Clearly daily protocol in the Leonidas residence was as elegantly formal as the villa itself, and the sandwich in her room, which Emily had been about to request, clearly wasn’t on the menu.

The main floor was deserted when she made her way downstairs just a few minutes past nine, but the faint sound of music and a sliver of golden light spilling from an open door halfway down the central hall indicated where she might find the garden room.

What she didn’t expect when she stepped over the threshold was to find that she wouldn’t be dining alone.

A round glass-topped table, tastefully set for two, stood in the middle of the floor. A silver ice bucket and two cut-crystal champagne flutes glinted in the almost ethereal glow of dozens, if not hundreds, of miniature white lights laced among the potted shrubs lining the perimeter of the area.

And the final touch? Niko Leonidas, disgracefully gorgeous in pale gray trousers and matching shirt, which together probably cost more than six months’ mortgage payments on her town house, leaned against an ornately carved credenza.

She was sadly out of her element, and surely looked it. She supposed she should be grateful her dinner companion wasn’t decked out in black tie.

“I wasn’t aware you were joining me for dinner,” she blurted out, the inner turmoil she thought she’d conquered raging all over again at the sight of him.

He plucked an open bottle of champagne from the ice bucket, filled the crystal flutes and handed one to her. “I wasn’t aware I needed an invitation to sit at my father’s table.”

“I’m not suggesting you do. You have every right—”

“How kind of you to say so.”

He’d perfected the art of withering pleasantries, she decided, desperately trying to rein in her swimming senses. The smile accompanying his reply hovered somewhere between derision and scorn, and left her feeling as gauche as she no doubt sounded. “I didn’t mean to be rude, Mr. Leonidas,” she said, her discomfiture increasing in direct proportion to his suave assurance. “I’m surprised, that’s all. I assumed you’d left the house. I understand you have your own place in downtown Athens.”

“I do—and we Greeks, by the way, aren’t big on honorifics. Call me Niko. Everyone else does.”

She didn’t care what everyone else did. Finding herself alone with him left her barely able to string two words together without putting her foot in her mouth. Resort to calling him Niko, and she’d probably manage to stuff the other one in next to it.

“At a loss for words, Emily?” he inquired, evil laughter shimmering in his beautiful green eyes. “Or is it the prospect of sharing a meal with me that has you so perturbed?”

“I’m not perturbed,” she said with as much dignity as she could bring to bear. “Just curious about why you’d choose to be here, instead of in your own home. From all accounts, you and Pavlos don’t usually spend much time together.”

“Nevertheless, I am his son, and the last I heard, my choosing to spend an evening under his roof doesn’t amount to trespassing. Indeed, given the present circumstances, I consider it my duty to make myself more available. Do you have a problem with that?”

Hardly about to admit that she found him a distraction she wasn’t sure she could handle, she said, “Not at all, as long as you don’t interfere with my reasons for being here.”

“And exactly what are those reasons?”

She stared at him. His eyes weren’t glimmering with laughter now; they were as cold and hard as bottle-green glass. “What kind of question is that? You know why I’m here.”

“I know that my father has become extremely dependent on you. I know, too, that he’s a very vulnerable old man who happens also to be very rich.”

She sucked in an outraged breath at the implication in his words. “Are you suggesting I’m after his money?”

“Are you?”

“Certainly not,” she snapped. “But that’s why you’re hanging around here, isn’t it? Not because you’re worried about your father, but to keep an eye on me and make sure I don’t get my hooks into him or his bank account.”

“Not quite. I’m ‘hanging around’ as you so delicately put it, to look out for my father because, in his present condition, he’s in no shape to look out for himself. If you find my concern offensive—”

“I do!”

“Then that’s a pity,” he replied, with a singular lack of remorse. “But try looking at it from my point of view. My father arrives home with a very beautiful woman who happens to be a complete stranger and whom he appears to trust with his life. Not only that, she’s come from half a world away and signed on to see him through what promises to be a long and arduous convalescence, even though there’s no shortage of nurses here in Athens well qualified to undertake the job. So tell me this: if our situation was reversed, wouldn’t you be a little suspicious?”

“No,” she shot back heatedly. “Before I leaped to unwarranted conclusions or cast aspersions on her professional integrity, I’d ask to see the stranger’s references, and if they didn’t satisfy me, I’d contact her previous employers directly to verify that she’s everything she purports to be.”

“Well, no need to foam at the mouth, sweet thing. Your point is well taken and that being the case, I’m prepared to shelve my suspicions and propose we call a truce and enjoy this very fine champagne I filched from my father’s cellar. It’d be a shame to waste it.”

She plunked her glass on the table so abruptly that its contents surged over the rim with an indignation that almost matched her own. “If you think I’m about to share a drink with you, let alone a meal, think again! I’d rather starve.”

She spun on her heel, bent on making as rapid an exit as possible, but had taken no more than two or three steps toward the door before he caught up with her and slammed it closed with the flat of his hand. “I regret that, in looking out for my father’s best interests, I have offended you,” he said smoothly. “Trust me, I take no pleasure in having done so.”

“Really?” She flung him a glare designed to strip paint off a wall. “You could have fooled me. I’m not used to being treated like a petty criminal.”

He shrugged. “If I’ve insulted you, I apologize, but better I err on the side of caution.”

“Meaning what, exactly?”

“That my father’s been targeted before by people interested only in taking advantage of him.”

“He might not be quite so susceptible to outsiders if he felt more secure in his relationship with you.”

“Possibly not, but ours has never been a typical father-son relationship.”

“So I’ve been given to understand, but I suggest the time’s come for you to bury your differences and stop butting heads. He needs to know you care.”

“I wouldn’t be here now, if I didn’t care.”

“Would it kill you to tell him that?”

He gave a snort of subdued laughter. “No, but the shock of hearing me say so might kill him.”

What was it about the two of them, that they held each other at such a distance, she wondered. “Do either of you have the first idea of the pain that comes from waiting until it’s too late to say ‘I love you?’ Because I do. More often than I care to remember, I’ve witnessed the grief and regret that tears families apart because time ran out on them before they said the things that needed to be said.”

He paced to the windows at the other end of the aptly named garden room whose exotic flowering plants set in Chinese jardinieres must give it the feel of high summer even in the depths of winter. “We’re not other people,” he said.

“You’re not immortal, either.” She hesitated, conflicted once again by how much she could say, then decided to plunge in and disclose what she knew, because she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she didn’t. “Look, Niko, he’ll probably have my head for telling you this, but your father’s not just battling a broken hip. His heart’s not in very good shape, either.”

“I’m not surprised. That’s what comes from years of smoking and hard living, but nothing his doctor said was enough to make him change his ways. He’s a stubborn old goat.”

That much she knew to be true. Pavlos had discharged himself from Vancouver General against medical advice, and insisted on flying back to Greece even crippled as he was, because he refused to put up with the nursing staff’s constant monitoring. They don’t let a man breathe, he’d complained, when Emily tried to talk him into postponing the journey. I’ll be carried out feetfirst if I let them keep me here any longer.

“Well, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Niko. Where this family’s concerned, you’re both pretty pigheaded.”

He swung around and surveyed her across the width of the room; another long, searching gaze so thorough that a quiver shafted through her. He probed too deeply beneath the surface. Saw things she wasn’t ready to acknowledge to herself. “Perhaps before you start leaping to unwarranted conclusions,” he purred, advancing toward her with the lethal grace of a hunter preparing to move in for the kill, “you should hear my side of the story.”

“You’re not my patient, your father is,” she said, backing away and almost hyperventilating at the determined gleam in his eye.

“But isn’t modern medicine all about the holistic approach—curing the spirit in order to heal the body, and such? And isn’t that exactly what you’ve been advocating ever since you walked into this room?”

“I suppose so, yes.”

“How do you expect to do that, if you have only half the equation to work with? More to the point, what do you stand to lose by letting me fill in the blanks?”

My soul, and everything I am, she thought, filled with the terrible foreboding that unless she extricated herself now from the web of attraction threatening to engulf her, destiny in the shape of Nikolaos Leonidas would take control of her life, and never give it back again. Yet to scurry away like a frightened rabbit was as alien to her nature as taking advantage of Pavlos. So she stood her ground, pushed the irrational presentiment out of her thoughts and said with deceptive calm, “Absolutely nothing.”

“Really?” He leaned toward her, dropped his voice another half octave and latched his fingers around her wrist. “Then why are you so afraid?”

She swallowed and ran her tongue over her dry lips. “I’m not,” she said.

CHAPTER TWO

SHE was lying. The evidence was there in her hunted gaze, in her racing pulse, so easily and unobtrusively detected when he took her wrist. And he intended to find out why, because for all that he thought he’d remain unmoved by whatever he discovered when he went to meet their flight, the sight of the old man, so brittle and somehow diminished, had hit him with the force of a hammer blow to the heart. They spent little time together, had long ago agreed to disagree and shared nothing in common. But Pavlos was still his father, and Niko would be damned before he’d let some hot little foreign number take him to the cleaners.

Oh, she’d been full of righteous indignation at his suggestion that she wasn’t quite the selfless angel of mercy she presented herself to be. He’d hardly expected otherwise. But he’d also seen how indispensable she’d made herself to Pavlos; how successfully she’d wormed her way into his affections. His father had never been a demonstrative man, at least not that Niko could remember. Which had made the way he’d clung to Emily’s hand at the airport all the more telling.

If his assessment of her was correct, redirecting her attention would be simple enough. After all, a millionaire in his vigorous prime was surely preferable to one in his dotage. And if he was wrong…well, a harmless flirtation would hurt no one. Of course, when his father figured out what he was up to, he wouldn’t like it, but when was the last time he’d approved of anything Niko did?

“You’re very quiet suddenly,” she said, interrupting the flow of his thoughts.

He looked deep into her dark blue eyes. “Because I’m beginning to think I’ve judged you too hastily,” he answered, doing his utmost to sound convincingly repentant. “But I’m not entirely without conscience. Therefore, if one of us must leave, let me be the one to go.”

Ignoring her whimper of protest, he released her, opened the door to leave the room and found himself face-to-face with Damaris. He could not have orchestrated a better exit. Timing, as he well knew in his line of work, was everything. “Kali oreksi, Emily,” he said, standing back to allow Damaris to carry in a platter loaded with olives, calamari, dolmades, tzatziki and pita bread. “Enjoy your meal.”

He was over the threshold before she burst out, “Oh, don’t be so ridiculous!”

Suppressing a smile, he swung around. “There is a problem?”

“If having enough food to feed an army is a problem, then yes.”

He shrugged. “What can I say? Greeks love to eat.”

“Well, I can’t possibly do justice to all this, and since I have no wish to offend your father’s housekeeper when she’s obviously gone to a great deal of trouble…”

“Yes, Emily?”

She grimaced, as if her next words gave her indigestion. “You might as well stay and help me eat it.”

He stroked his jaw and made a show of weighing his options. “It would be a pity to let it go to waste,” he eventually conceded, “especially as this is but the first of several courses.”

For a moment, he thought he’d overplayed his hand. Skewering him with a glance that would have stopped the gods of Olympus in their tracks, she waited until Damaris mopped up her spilled drink, then took a seat at the table and said, “Try not to gloat, Niko. It’s so unattractive.”

He wasn’t accustomed to female criticism. The women he associated with were so anxious to please, they’d have swallowed their own tongues before issuing such a blunt assessment of his shortcomings. That she suffered no such hesitation appealed to him in ways she couldn’t begin to imagine. He devoted his entire life to challenging unfavorable odds. And took enormous pleasure in defeating them.

Collecting the wine bottle as he passed, he joined her and topped up their flutes. Nothing like dim lights and good champagne to set the scene for seduction. Raising his glass, he said, “Here’s to getting to know one another all over again.”

She responded with the merest tilt of one shoulder, took a dainty sip, then helped herself to a little tzatziki and bread.

“Have more,” he urged, pushing the tray of mezedes closer.

She selected an olive, but ignored her champagne.

“You don’t care for Greek food?”

“I’m not very familiar with it.”

“There are no Greek restaurants in Vancouver?”

“Hundreds, and I’m told they’re very good. I just don’t eat out very often.”

“Why is that? And please don’t tell me you lack opportunity. Suitors must be lined up at your door, wanting to wine and dine you.”

“I’m afraid not. Shift work tends to put a crimp in a nurse’s social life.”

Right. And you’re such a dedicated professional that you never take a night off!

He shook his head in feigned mystification. “What’s wrong with Canadian men, to be so easily discouraged? Are they all eunuchs?”

She almost choked on her olive. “Not as far as I know,” she spluttered. “But then, I haven’t bothered to ask.”

“What about your colleagues? As I understand it, hospitals are a hotbed of romance between doctors and nurses.”

“The idea that all nurses end up marrying doctors is a myth,” she informed him starchily. “For a start, half the doctors these days are women, and even if they weren’t, finding a husband isn’t particularly high on my list of priorities.”

“Why not? Don’t most women want to settle down and have children? Or are you telling me you’re the exception?”

“No.” She nibbled a sliver of pita bread. “I’d love to get married and have children someday, but only if the right man comes along. I’m not willing to settle for just anyone.”

“Define ‘the right man,’” he said—a shade too abruptly, if her response was anything to go by.

She dropped her bread and stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

“By what standards do you judge a prospective husband?”

She reached for her glass and took a sip while she considered the question. “He has to be decent and honorable,” she finally declared.

“Tall, dark and handsome, too?”

“Not necessarily.” She gave another delicate shrug, just enough to cause her dress to shift gently over her rather lovely breasts.

He wished he didn’t find it so alluring. “Rich and successful, then?”

“Gainfully employed, certainly. If we had children, I’d want to be a stay-at-home mom.”

“If you had to choose just one quality in this ideal man, what would it be?”

“The capacity to love,” she said dreamily, her blue eyes soft, her sweet mouth curved in a smile. Outside, the wind tore at the palm trees with unusual strength for September. “I’d want love more than anything else, because a marriage without it is no marriage at all.”

Annoyed to find his thoughts drifting dangerously far from their set course, he said flatly, “I disagree. I’d never let my heart get the better of my head.”

“Why not? Don’t you believe in love?”

“I might have once, very briefly, many years ago, but then she died of a blood clot to the brain. I was three months old at the time.”

“You mean your mother?” She clapped a distressed hand to her cheek. Her eyes glistened suspiciously. “Oh, Niko, how very sad for you. I’m so sorry.”

He wanted neither her sympathy nor her pity, and crushed both with brutal efficiency. “Don’t be. It’s not as if she was around long enough for me to miss her.”

The way she cringed at his answer left him ashamed. “She gave you life,” she said.

“And lost hers doing it, something I’ve been paying for ever since.”

“Why? Her death wasn’t your fault.”

“According to my father, it was.” Her glass remained almost untouched, but his was empty. Needing something to deaden a pain he seldom allowed to surface, he refilled it so hurriedly, the wine foamed up to the brim. “She was forty-one, and giving birth at her age to an infant weighing a strapping five kilos put her in her grave.”

“A lot of women wait until their forties to have children.”

“They don’t all die because of it.”

“True. But that’s still no reason for you to think Pavlos holds you responsible for the tragedy that befell her. After all, she gave him a son and that’s not a legacy any man takes lightly.”

“You might be a hell of a fine nurse, Emily Tyler, but you’re no spin doctor.”

Puzzled, she said, “What do you mean?”

“That nothing you can say changes the fact that my father didn’t care if he never had a child. All he ever wanted was my mother, and as far as he’s concerned, I took her away from him.”

“Then he should have seen to it he didn’t get her pregnant in the first place—or are you to blame for that, as well?”

“After twenty-one years of marriage without any sign of a baby, he probably didn’t think precautions were necessary. Finish your wine, woman. I don’t care to drink alone. It’s a nasty habit to fall into.”

She took another cautious sip. “I still can’t believe that, once his initial grief subsided, having you didn’t bring Pavlos some measure of comfort.”

“Then you obviously don’t know much about dysfunctional families. My father and I have never liked one another. He has always resented me, not just because I cost him his one true love, but because I remained wilfully unimpressed by his wealth and social status.”

“I’d have thought he’d find that commendable.”

“Don’t let misplaced pity for the poor motherless baby cloud your judgment, my dear,” Niko said wryly. “I rebelled every step of the way as a child, took great pleasure in embarrassing him by getting into trouble as a teenager and flat-out refused to be bought by his millions when I finally grew up. I was not a ‘nice’ boy, and I’m not a ‘nice’ man.”

“That much, at least, I do believe,” she shot back, leveling a scornful glance his way. “The only part I question is that you ever grew up. You strike me more as someone with a bad case of defiantly delayed adolescence.”

This wasn’t playing out the way he’d intended. She was supposed to be all willing, female compliance by now, ready to fall into his arms, if not his bed, not beating him at his own game. And his glass was empty again, damn it! “When you’ve walked in my shoes,” he replied caustically, “feel free to criticize. Until then—”

“But I have,” she interrupted. “Walked in your shoes, I mean. Except mine were twice as hard to wear. Because, you see, I lost both my parents in a car accident when I was nine, and unlike you, I remember them enough to miss them very deeply. I remember what it was like to be loved unconditionally, then have that love snatched away in the blink of an eye. I remember the sound of their voices and their laughter—the scent of my mother’s perfume and my father’s Cuban cigars. And I know very well how it feels to be tolerated by relatives who make no secret of the fact that they’ve been saddled with a child they never wanted.”

Flushed and more animated than Niko had yet seen her, she stopped to draw an irate breath before continuing, “I also learned what it’s like to have to work for every cent, and to think twice before frittering away a dollar.” She eyed his shirt and watch disdainfully. “You, on the other hand, obviously wouldn’t know the meaning of deprivation if it jumped up and bit you in the face, and I don’t for a moment buy the idea that your father never wanted you. So all in all, I’d say I come out the uncontested winner in this spontaneous pity party.”

He let a beat of silence hang heavy in the air before he spoke again, then, “It’s not often someone spells out my many shortcomings so succinctly,” he said, “but you’ve managed to do it admirably. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about myself before I slither behind the wheel of my car and disappear into the night?”

“Yes,” she said. “Eat something. You’ve had too much to drink and are in no condition to drive. In fact, you should be spending the night here.”

“Why, Emily, is that an invitation?”

“No,” she said crushingly. “It’s an order, and should you be foolish enough to decide otherwise, I’ll kick you where it’ll hurt the most.”

She probably weighed no more than fifty-four kilos to his eighty-five, but what she lacked in size, she more than made up for in spirit. He had no doubt that, given her knowledge of male anatomy, she was more than capable of inflicting serious injury. Which should have deterred him. Instead the thought of fending her off left him so suddenly and painfully aroused that, for the first time, he questioned the wisdom of his plan of attack. She was the one supposed to be at his mercy, not the other way around, but so far, she remained utterly indifferent to his charms. He, on the other hand, was anything but impervious to hers.

Damaris came back just then to serve spinach-stuffed breast of chicken and ziti, a welcome diversion, which allowed him to wrestle his wayward hormones into submission and redirect his energy into more productive channels. “Why did you allow my father to coerce you into letting him travel, when he’s clearly not up to it?” he inquired casually, once they were alone again.

“I did my best to dissuade him,” Emily said. “We all did. But the only thing he cared about was coming home to Greece, and nothing anyone said could convince him to wait. I think it’s because he was afraid.”

“Of dying?”

“No. Of not dying in Greece.”

That Niko could well believe. Pavlos had always been fanatically patriotic. “So you volunteered to see him safely home?”

“It was more that he chose me. We got to know one another quite well during his hospital stay.”

An hour ago, he’d have rated that little morsel of information as yet another sign of her ulterior motives. Now, he didn’t have quite the same enthusiasm for the task. Emily the woman was proving a lot more intriguing than Emily the fortune hunter.

To buy himself enough time to reestablish his priorities, he switched to another subject. “What happened to you after your parents were killed?”

“I was sent to live with my father’s sister. He was thirty-six when he died, and Aunt Alicia was eleven years older. She and Uncle Warren didn’t have children, but they were the only family I had left, so they were more or less stuck with me. It wasn’t a happy arrangement on either side.”

“They mistreated you?”

“Not in the way you probably mean, but they never let me forget they’d done ‘the right thing’ by taking me in and would, I think, have found a reason to refuse if they hadn’t been afraid it would reflect badly on them. Of course, the insurance settlement I brought with me sweetened the deal by defraying the cost of putting a roof over my head and keeping me fed and clothed for the next nine years.”

“What happened then?”

“The summer I graduated high school, I applied to the faculty of nursing, was accepted and moved into a dorm on the university campus at the end of August. I never went ‘home’ again.”

“But at least there was enough insurance settlement left to pay your tuition fees and other expenses.”

She shook her head. “I scraped by on scholarships and student loans.”

Caught in a swell of indignation he never saw coming, he stared at her. Whatever else his father’s sins, he’d never tampered with Niko’s inheritance from his mother. “Are you telling me they spent money on themselves, when it should have been held in trust for your education?”

“No, they were scrupulously honest.” She started to add something else, then seemed to think better of it and made do with, “The settlement just wasn’t very large to begin with, that’s all.”

Something about that answer didn’t sit right, either. Wasn’t the whole point of insurance to provide adequate recompense to beneficiaries, especially minors? But although the subject bore investigation, he decided now was not the time to pursue it and asked instead, “Do you keep in touch with your aunt and uncle?”

“A card at Christmas about covers it.”

“So they have no idea you’re here now?”

“No one has,” she said. “My arrangement with Pavlos was strictly between the two of us. If my employer knew what I’d done, I’d probably be fired.”

Which wouldn’t matter one iota, if Niko’s first impression of her was correct and she’d set her sights on a much more rewarding prize. What she earned in a year as a nurse wouldn’t amount to pocket change if she married his father.

Wondering if she had any idea how potentially damaging her revelation was, he said, “Then why take the risk?”

“Because your father was alone in a foreign country without friends or family to look after him when he was released.”

“He had a son. If you’d thought to contact me, I could have been there within twenty-four hours.”

“Maybe,” she said gently, “he didn’t want to bother you.”

“So he bothered a perfect stranger instead, even though doing so might end up costing her her job. Tell me, Emily, how do you propose to explain your absence from the hospital?”

“I won’t have to. I took a three-month leave of absence and scheduled it to coincide with his discharge.”

“A noble gesture on your part, giving up your holiday to look after my father.”

“Well, why not? I had nothing else planned.”

Except setting aside an hour a day to polish your halo! Struggling to hide his skepticism, Niko said, “All work and no play hardly seems fair. We’ll have to see what we can do to change that.”

A sudden gust of wind rattled the French doors, making her jump. “Just being here is change enough. If the weather ever clears up, I’m sure Pavlos won’t begrudge me the odd day off to see the sights.”

“Count on both,” he said, recognizing opportunity when it presented itself. “And on my making myself available to act as tour guide.”

“That’s nice of you, Niko.”

No, it’s not, he could have told her. Because whatever her motives, his were anything but pure. And because he’d meant it when he said he wasn’t a nice man.

They passed the remainder of the meal in idle conversation, interrupted only by intermittent bursts of rain at the windows, but before coffee was served, she’d run out of things to say and was wilting visibly. Even he, unscrupulous bastard though he undoubtedly was, felt sorry for her. The long transatlantic flight would have been tiring enough, without the added strain of looking after his father. So when she set aside her napkin and begged to be excused, he made no attempt to stop her, but left the table himself and walked her to the foot of the stairs.

“Good night,” she murmured.

“Kali nikhta,” he returned. “Sleep well.”

She was perhaps halfway to the upper landing when a brilliant flash of lightning arrowed through the night. Almost immediately, the electricity failed and plunged the house into darkness.

He heard her startled exclamation and the click of her high heel hitting the edge of the marble step as she stumbled to a halt. “Stay put,” he ordered, well aware how treacherous the staircase could be to the unwary. Once, when he was still a boy, a new housemaid had slipped and broken her arm—and that had been in broad daylight. But he’d grown up in the villa; could quite literally have found his way blindfolded anywhere within its walls, and was at Emily’s side before she, too, missed her footing.

Just as he reached her, a second bolt of lightning ripped through the night, bleaching her face of color, turning her hair to silver and her eyes into pools as huge and dark as those found in undersea caverns. “What happened?” she whispered, clutching the bannister with one hand as she teetered on the edge of the stair.

Instinctively he pulled her close with an arm around her shoulders. They felt slender, almost childlike to the touch, but the rest of her, pinned warm and sweet against him, was unmistakably all woman. “The lights went out,” he said, resorting to the absurdly obvious in an attempt to deflect her attention from the fact that his body had responded to hers with elemental, albeit untimely vigor.

She choked on a laugh. “I pretty much figured that out for myself.”

“I expect a power pole was struck.”

“Oh,” she said faintly, aware as she had to be of her effect on him. Blatant arousal was difficult to hide at such close quarters. “Does it happen often?”

Were they talking about the same thing, he wondered, as his mind fought a losing battle with his nether regions. “No, especially not at this time of year.”

“I ought to make sure your father’s all right.”

“No need,” he said, hearing footsteps and noticing the shadow of candle flames flickering over the walls at the rear of the downstairs hall. “Georgios is already on the job. But if it’ll ease your mind any, I’ll see you as far as your suite, then go check on him myself. Do you know which one you’re in?”

“Only that it’s blue and cream, with some gorgeous antique furniture, including a four-poster bed.”

He nodded, recognizing her description, and keeping one arm looped around her waist, steered her the rest of the way up the stairs, turned right along the landing and felt his way along the wall on his left until he made contact with her door. Pushing it wide, he directed her inside.

The logs in the fireplace had burned down, but enough of a glow remained to fill the room with dim orange light. Enough that when she looked at him, their gazes locked, held prisoner by the sexual awareness, which had simmered between them from the moment they’d first set eyes on each other.

He hadn’t meant to kiss her this early in the game, had planned a much more subtle attack, but when she turned within the circle of his arms and lifted her face to his, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to tighten his hold until she was once again pressed against him. The most natural thing in the world to bend his head and find her mouth with his.

CHAPTER THREE

EMILY had been kissed before, many times, but always with some part of her brain able to rate the experience objectively: too slobbery, too bland, too aggressive, too many teeth, too much heavy breathing, not enough tenderness. More often than not, kissing, she’d concluded, was a vastly overrated prelude to romance. Until Niko Leonidas came on the scene, that was, and felled her with a single blow.

Except “blow” was no more the right word to define his effect on her than “kiss” adequately described his action. What he did with his mouth transcended the ordinary and surpassed the divine. Cool and firm, it yet seared her with its heat. Though undemanding, it somehow stripped her of everything—her independence, her focus, her moral compass, even her sense of survival.

Apart from one rash, distinctly forgettable experience, she’d chosen to remain celibate because sex for its own sake held no appeal, and she’d never come close to being in love. But she’d have let him take her there on the floor, if only he’d asked. Would have let him hike up the skirt of her dress and touch her as no other man ever had. For as long as his kiss held her in its spell, she would have let him have his way with her however he wished.

Obviously he did not wish for a fraction of what she was willing to give. Because releasing her, he stepped back and said, rather hoarsely to be sure, “I’ll go look in on my father and see about getting some candles up here.”

Weak as water, she clutched the back of a nearby chair and nodded. She couldn’t have spoken if her life depended on it. Although he’d put a respectable distance between them, she remained trapped in his aura. Her body still hummed. Her breasts ached. Moisture, warm and heavy, seeped between her thighs.

When he turned away, she wanted to cry out that she didn’t need candles, she only needed him. But the words remained dammed in her throat and he was gone before she could free them. Dazed, she lowered herself to the chair and waited for him to return.

A brass carriage clock on the mantelpiece marked the passing minutes. Gradually its measured pace restored her racing pulse to near-normal and brought a sort of order to her scattered thoughts. What kind of madness had possessed her, that she’d been ready to give herself to someone she’d known less than a day? He spelled nothing but trouble.

I won’t let him in when he comes back, she resolved. I’m out of my league with such a man and don’t need the heartbreak an affair with him would bring.

But when a discreet tap at her door signaled his return, all logic fled. Heat shot through her, giving rise to a single exquisite throb of anticipation that electrified her. She couldn’t get to him fast enough.

Pulling open the door, she began, “I was beginning to think you’d abandoned—!” then lapsed into mortified silence at the sight of Georgios standing there, a lighted silver candelabra in one hand, and a battery operated lantern in the other.

“Niko asked me to bring these, thespinis,” he informed her politely, “and to tell you that Kirie Pavlos is sleeping soundly.”

Rallying her pride, she stood back to let him pass into the room, and mumbled, “Thank you.”

“Parakalo.” He placed the candelabra on the dresser and handed her the lantern. “I am also to tell you that he has been called away.”

“At this hour of the night?” She made no attempt to hide her disbelief.

He nodded. “Ne, thespinis. He received an urgent phone call and will most likely be gone for several days.”

Oh, the louse! The cowardly, unmitigated rat! Swallowing the anger and humiliation threatening to choke her, she said scathingly, “It must have been some emergency to drag him out in the middle of a storm like this.”

Georgios stopped on his way to the door and shrugged. “I cannot say. He did not explain the reasons.”

“Never mind. It’s not important.” He wasn’t important. She was there to look after the father, not chase after the son.

“Thank you for the candles and flashlight, Georgios. Good night.”

“Kalispera, thespinis. Sleep well.”

Surprisingly she did, and awoke the next day to clear skies and sunshine. Last night’s storm was as much a part of the past as last night’s kiss.

Pavlos was already up and dressed when she went downstairs. He sat on the veranda outside his sitting room, gazing out at the garden. A small empty coffee cup and a phone sat on a table at his side. A pair of binoculars rested on his lap.

Catching sight of her, he pressed a finger to his lips, and gestured for her to join him. “Look,” he whispered, pointing to a pair of fairly large birds. Pretty, with bluish-gray heads, pearly-pink breasts and brown wings mottled with black, they pecked at the ground some distance away. “Do you know what they are?”

“Pigeons?” she ventured.

He grunted disdainfully. “Turtle doves, girl! Timid and scarce, these days, but they come to my garden because they know they’re safe. And those over there at the feeder are golden orioles. Didn’t know I was a bird fancier, did you?”

“No,” she said, noting the spark in his dark eyes and his improved color. “But I do know you look much better this morning. You must have had a good night.”

“Nothing like being on his home turf to cure a man of whatever ails him. Not that that son of mine would agree. Where do you suppose he is, by the way? I thought he might at least stay over, my first night back.”

“No. He was called away on some sort of emergency.”

“Gone already, eh?” He squared his shoulders, and lifted his chin, a formidable old warrior not about to admit to weakness of any kind. “Off on another harebrained escapade, I suppose. Doesn’t surprise me. Never really expected he’d stick around. Ah well, good riddance, I say. You had breakfast yet, girl?”

“No,” she said, aching for him. He could protest all he liked, but she saw past his proud facade to the lonely parent underneath. “I wanted to see how you were doing, first.”

“I’m hungry. Now that you’re here, we’ll eat together.” He picked up the phone, pressed a button and spoke briefly with whoever answered. Shortly after, Georgios wheeled in a drop-leaf table set for breakfast for two, and equipped with everything required for what she soon realized was the almost sacred ritual of making coffee. It was prepared with great ceremony over an open flame, in a little copper pot called a briki, and immediately served in thick white demitasses with a glass of cold water on the side.

“No Greek worthy of the name would dream of starting the day without a flitzani of good kafes,” Pavlos declared.

Possibly not, and she had to admit the aroma was heavenly, but the strong beverage with its layer of foam and residue of grounds took some getting used to. She found the fruit and yogurt salad topped with almonds and drizzled with honey and a sprinkling of cinnamon much more enjoyable.

In the days that followed, she also found out that Pavlos had little faith in doctors, rated physiotherapists as next to useless and had no qualms about saying so to their faces. He could be fractious as a child when forced to suffer through the regimen of exercises prescribed to strengthen his hip, and sweet as peach pie if he thought Emily was working too hard.

While he napped in the afternoons, she swam in the pool, walked along the beach or explored the neighborhood, taking particular pleasure in the shops. In the evenings, she played gin rummy or poker with him, even though he cheated at both.

One morning, she was wheeling him along the terrace after his physiotherapy session when he asked, “Do you miss home?”

She looked out at the flowers in brilliant bloom, at the peacocks strutting across the lawns, the blue arc of the sky and the stunning turquoise sea. Soon the rainy season would come to Vancouver, its chilly southeasterly gales stripping the trees of leaves. People would be scurrying about under a forest of umbrellas where, just few weeks before, they’d been lying on the beaches taking in the last of summer’s sunshine. “No,” she said. “I’m happy to be here.”

“Good. Then you have no excuse for wanting to leave early.”

She thought not, either, until the beginning of her second week there, when Niko reappeared as suddenly as he’d left.

“So this is where you’re hiding,” he said, coming upon her as she sat reading in a wicker love seat on the patio—except they called it a veranda in Greece. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

Though startled, she managed to hang on to her composure enough to meet his glance coolly and reply with commendable indifference, “Why? What do you want?”

Uninvited, he sat down beside her on the sun-warmed cushions. “To ask you to have dinner with me tonight.”

The nerve of him! “I don’t think so,” she said, projecting what she hoped was an air of cool amusement. “You’re likely to take off at the last minute and leave me to foot the bill.”

“The way I did the other night, you mean?” He grimaced. “Look, I’m sorry about that but—”

“Forget it, Niko. I have.”

“No, you haven’t. I haven’t, either, and nor do I want to. Spend the evening with me, and I’ll try to explain myself.”

“Whatever makes you think I’m interested in anything you have to say?”

“Because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t be so ticked off with me. Come on, Emily,” he wheedled, inching closer. “Be fair, and at least hear me out before you decide I’m not worth your time.”

“I usually play cards with Pavlos in the evening.”

“Then we’ll make it a late dinner. How is my father, by the way? I stopped by his suite before I came to find you, but he was sleeping.”

“He still tires easily, but he’s better since he started physiotherapy.”

“I’m glad he’s on the mend.” He glanced at her from beneath his outrageous lashes, stroked his finger down her arm and left a trail of shimmering sensation in its wake. “So what do you say, sweet thing? Do we have a date?”

Resisting him was like trying to trap mist between her hands. “If that’s what it takes for you to leave me to read in peace now, I suppose we do. But I won’t be free much before ten, after your father’s settled for the night.”

He edged closer still, a long, lean specimen of masculine grace, handsome as sin, dangerous as hell, and kissed her cheek. “I can wait that long,” he said, “but I’m not saying it will be easy.”

He took her to a restaurant on the water, about a fifteen-minute drive from the villa. She’d pinned up her hair in a sleek chignon, and wore a black dress she’d bought on sale in a boutique just a few days earlier, and high-heeled black sandals. Simple but beautifully cut, the dress had a narrow draped skirt, strapless bodice, and a shawl lushly embroidered with silver thread. Her only accessory was a pair of dangling vintage silver earrings studded with crystals.

All in all, a good choice, she decided, glancing at her surroundings. Unlike the bougainvillea-draped tavernas she’d seen in the neighborhood, with their paper tablecloths and simple, sometimes crudely constructed furniture, this place gave new meaning to the term stylish sophistication. Crisp linens, a single perfect gardenia at every place setting, deep, comfortable leather chairs, a small dance floor and soft music combined to create an ambience at once elegant and romantic.

They were shown to a window table overlooking a yacht basin. Tall masts rose black and slender against the night sky. Beyond the breakwater, moonlight carved an icy path across the sea to the horizon, but inside the room, candles cast a warm glow over the stark white walls.

Once they’d been served drinks and he’d chosen their meal—noting no prices were listed on the menu, she’d left him to decide what to order—Niko leaned back in his chair and remarked, “You look very lovely tonight, Emily. More like a fashion model than a nurse.”

“Thank you. You look rather nice yourself.”

Which had to be, she thought, mentally rolling her eyes, the understatement of the century. The superb fit of his charcoal-gray suit spoke of Italian tailoring at its best, and never mind the gorgeous body inside it.

He inclined his head and smiled. “I like your earrings.”

“They were my mother’s. She loved jewelry and pretty clothes.” She touched her fingertip to one crystal pendant, memories of her mother, all dressed up for an evening out, as clear in her mind as if they’d taken place just yesterday. “I still have all her things—her dinner gowns and shoes and beaded handbags.”

“Do you use them?”

“Not often. I don’t have occasion to.”

His gaze scoured her face, meandered down her throat to her shoulders, and it took all her self-control not to shrink into the concealing folds of her shawl. “What a waste,” he murmured. “A woman as beautiful as you should always wear beautiful things.”

“My mother was the beauty, not I.”

“You think?”

“I know,” she said, nodding thanks to the waiter as he presented a tray of appetizers. Mezedes, she’d learned, were as integral to the evening meal as the main course itself. “And my father was incredibly handsome. They made such a glamorous couple.”

“Tell me about them,” he said, resting his elbow on the arm of his chair, wineglass in hand. “What were they like—beyond their good looks, that is?”

“Crazy about one another. Happy.”

“Socialites?”

“I suppose they were,” she admitted, remembering the many times she’d watched, entranced, as her mother prepared for a gala evening on the town.

“What else?”

She stared out at the yachts rocking gently at their moorings. “They wrung every drop of enjoyment from life. They’d dance in the sitting room after dinner, go swimming at midnight in English Bay, dress up in fabulous costumes for Hallowe’en, decorate the biggest tree they could find at Christmas. They were on everyone’s guest list, and everyone wanted to be on theirs. And they died much too soon.”

Detecting the sadness infecting her memories, he framed his next question in quiet sympathy. “How did it happen?”

“They were on their way home from a party, driving along a road infamous for its hairpin bends. It was raining heavily, the visibility was poor. They were involved in a head-on collision and killed instantly.”

Again, his voice grazed her with compassion. “Ah, Emily, I’m sorry.”

Aware her emotions swam dangerously close to the surface, she gave herself a mental shake, sat a little straighter in her seat and firmly changed the subject. “Thank you, but it all happened a long time ago, and we’re here to talk about you, not me. So tell me, Niko, exactly what frightened you off after that impulsive kiss last week? And please don’t say you were too busy checking the main fuse box to find the cause of the power failure, because Georgios already told me you left after receiving a phone call. Had you forgotten you had a previous date, or was I so inept compared to the other women you know that you couldn’t wait to escape me?”

“Neither,” he said. “I had to go to work.”

“You work?”

“Well, yes, Emily,” he said, laughing. “Don’t most men my age?”

“Yes, but you don’t seem the corporate type.”

“I’m not.”

“And it was the middle of the night.”

“Right, again.”

“So?”

“So I had to prepare to leave Athens at first light, the next day.”

“To go where?”

“Overseas.”

“How tactfully vague. You’ll be telling me next you’re involved in smuggling.”

“Sometimes I am.”

It was neither the answer she was expecting nor one she wanted to hear. Tired of his stonewalling, she threw down her napkin, pushed back her chair and stood up. “If this is your idea of explaining yourself, I’ve had enough.”

“Okay,” he said, grabbing her hand before she could bolt, “I delivered some urgently needed supplies to a medical outpost in Africa.”

Abruptly she sat down again, her annoyance fading as the implication of his reply hit home. “Are you talking about Doctors Without Borders?”

“In this particular case, yes.”

Their waiter came back just then to whisk away the remains of the mezedes and deliver their main course. A dozen questions crowding her mind, she waited impatiently as he made a big production of serving grilled calamari and prawns on a bed of rice. “How did you get there?” she asked, when they were alone again.

“I flew,” Niko said.

“Well, I didn’t think you walked!”

His mouth twitched with amusement at her acerbic response. “I happen to own a small fleet of aircraft. It comes in handy on occasion.”

“Are you telling me you piloted your own plane?”

“In a word, yes.”

“Going into places like that can be dangerous, Niko.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps, but someone has to do it.”

She stared at him, her every preconceived notion of what he was all about undergoing a drastic change. “Where did you learn to fly?”

“After finishing my National Service, I spent five years as a Career Officer with the HAF—Hellenic Air Force. That’s when I first became involved in rescue missions. It irked my father no end, of course, that I chose the military over seconding myself to him and his empire.”

“Is that why you did it?”

“Not entirely. I loved the freedom of flying. And providing humanitarian aid wherever it’s needed struck me as a more worthwhile undertaking than amassing more wealth. How’s your calamari, Emily?”

“Delicious,” she said, though in truth she’d hardly tasted it. What she was learning about him was far more interesting. “You said a while ago that you own a fleet of aircraft, which I assume means you have more than one.”

“Ten in total, and a staff of fifteen. We’re a private outfit, on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and go wherever we’re needed, providing whatever kind of help is required. Last month, we joined forces with the Red Cross after an earthquake in northern Turkey left hundreds homeless. The month before, Oxfam International called on us.”

“Well, if you care so little for money, how are you able to afford all that? Does Pavlos support you?”

“You ought to know better than to ask such a question,” he scoffed. “Even if he’d offered, I’d have starved before I took a single euro from him. And for the record, I never said I didn’t care about money. It’s a very useful commodity. I just don’t care about his.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“I inherited a sizable fortune from my mother which, to give credit where it’s due, Pavlos invested for me. By the time I had access to it at twenty-one, it had grown to the point that I could do pretty much anything I wanted, without having to rely on sponsors. And I chose to use it benefiting those most in need of help.” He glanced up and caught her staring. Again. “Why do you keep looking so surprised?”

“Because you told me last week that you’re not a nice man, and I believed you. Now I realize nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Don’t get carried away, Emily,” he warned. “Just because I’m not immune to human suffering doesn’t make me a saint.”

“But you are, I begin to think, a very good man.”

Irritably he pushed aside his plate, most of the food untouched. “The wine must have gone to your head. Let’s dance, before you say something you live to regret.”

She’d have refused if he’d been in any mood to take no for an answer—and if the prospect of finding herself once more in his arms hadn’t been more temptation than she could withstand. “All right,” she said, and followed him onto the dance floor.

Weaving a path through the others already swaying to the music, he waited for her to catch up with him and extended his hands in invitation. “Come here, sweet thing,” he said, and she went.

Whatever resentment she’d harbored toward him had melted away, and left her completely vulnerable to him, all over again. Who could blame her, when the plain fact of the matter was that with a single touch, a glance from those dark green bedroom eyes, he could make a woman forget everything she’d ever learned about self-preservation? That he also turned out to be so thoroughly decent merely added to his appeal and made him that much more irresistible.

CHAPTER FOUR

IT FELT good to hold a woman whose curves hadn’t been ravaged by malnutrition. Whose bones, though delicate and fine, were not so brittle that he was afraid they’d break at his touch. Whose breasts hadn’t withered from bearing too many children she hadn’t been able to nourish properly. Who didn’t shrink in fear when a man touched her. Who smelled of flowers, not poverty.

“Stop it,” he said, inhaling the sweet fragrance of her hair.

“Stop what?”

“Thinking. I can hear your brain working overtime.”

“Well, I can’t help wondering—”

He pulled her closer, enough for her warmth to melt the block of ice he carried inside, and make him whole again. Whenever he returned from a particularly harrowing assignment, a woman’s soothing voice and generous, vital body always helped erase the hopeless misery he never got used to witnessing; the wasted lives, the terror, the shocking evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. “Don’t wonder, Emily,” he said, glad she’d left her shawl at the table, and loving the ivory smoothness of her skin above the top of her strapless dress. “Don’t ask any more questions. Forget everything and just be with me in the moment.”

“Not easy to do, Niko. You’re not who I thought you were.”

Sliding his hand down her spine to cup her hip, he pressed her closer still. “I know,” he said.

He was worse. Much worse. Not at all the high-minded hero she was painting him to be, but a man on a mission that was far from laudable where she was concerned. Blatantly deceiving her as to his true motives for dating her, at the same time that he used her to assuage his personal torment.

She stirred in his arms and lifted her face so that her cheek rested against his. The whisper of silk against those parts of her he couldn’t see or feel inflamed him. “I’m sorry I jumped to all the wrong conclusions about you.”

“You didn’t,” he muttered, fire racing through his belly. “I’m every bit as bad as you first assumed.”

“I don’t believe you.”

They weren’t dancing anymore. Hadn’t been for some time. While other couples dipped and glided around them in a slow foxtrot, they stood in the middle of the floor, bodies welded so close together that even if she weren’t a nurse well acquainted with male anatomy, she had to know the state he was in.

“What I don’t understand,” she continued, so intent on her thoughts that nothing he said or did seemed able to derail them, “is how you can show such compassion toward strangers, and spare so little for your father.”

“I didn’t bring you here to talk about my father.”

Her hips nudged against him, a fleeting touch that stoked his arousal to disastrous heights. “And I wouldn’t be here at all, were it not for him.”

“Thanks for the reminder,” he ground out, dancing her back to their table sedately enough for his rampant flesh to subside. “With that in mind, I’d better get you home if you’re to be on the job bright and early in the morning.”

“Actually I usually don’t start work until nine. Pavlos prefers to have Georgios help him bathe and dress, and I join him for breakfast after that.”

He picked up her shawl and flung it around her shoulders. The less he could see of her, the better. “Even so, it’s growing late.”

She nodded sympathetically. “And you’re tired.”

“Among other things,” he replied ambiguously, gesturing to the waiter for the bill.

Outside, the temperature still hovered around twenty degrees Celsius, warm enough for the top to remain down on the BMW. “Rather than having to drive all the way back to Athens after you drop me off, why don’t you stay at your father’s house tonight?” she suggested, pulling the shawl more snugly around her as he started along the shore road to the villa.

“No,” he said, surprising himself because, at the start of the evening, he’d planned to do exactly that. Had had every intention of seducing her; of using her soft loveliness to erase the heart-rending images he’d brought back with him from Africa and, at the same time, prove his original theory that she would sell herself to the highest bidder. After all, she now knew he had money to burn.

But much though he still desired her, he’d lost his taste for using her. And if she was as duplicitous as he’d first suspected, he was no longer sure he wanted to know.

It was well after one o’clock in the morning. Within its walls, the villa lay smothered in the thick silence of a household at sleep. Except for Emily, who should have been exhausted, but was instead wide-awake and so disappointed she could have cried.

Pacing to the French windows in her suite, she stepped out on the balcony and promptly wished she hadn’t. The classical marble statuary in the garden, gleaming white under the moon, was too reminiscent of Niko’s stern profile as he’d driven her home; the cool whisper of night air on her skin, too much a reminder of his lips brushing her cheek as he kissed her good-night.

What had happened, that the evening was covered with stardust promise one moment, and over the next? They’d been so close, so attuned to one another when they were dancing. She’d known how aroused he was, had felt an answering tug of desire for him.

She’d thought, when he announced they should leave the restaurant, that after the way he’d held her, he’d at least end the evening on a high note with a kiss to rival the one from the week before. She’d wanted him to, quite desperately in fact, and why not? He’d redeemed himself so completely in her eyes, she was willing to fan the spark of attraction between them and let it take them to the next level. But rather than setting her on fire as she’d hoped, he’d brought her straight back to the villa and walked her to his father’s front door.

“Thank you for a lovely evening,” she’d said woodenly, hardly able to contain her disappointment.

“My pleasure,” he’d replied. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

Then he’d bestowed that pale imitation of a kiss on her cheek, muttered, “Good night,” and raced back to his idling car as if he was afraid, if he lingered, she might drag him into the shrubbery and insist he ravish her.

What a contradiction in terms he was, she decided, turning back into her room. On the one hand, he was all cool suspicion laced with lethal charm and passion when it suited him, and on the other side of the personality coin, a reluctant hero and considerate escort more concerned about keeping her out past her bedtime than catering to his own base needs. Either that, or he took masochistic pleasure in keeping the women he dated off balance. And if that was the case, she was better off without him. One temperamental Leonidas at a time was enough.

“Out on the town till all hours of the night with that no-good son of mine, were you?” Pavlos inquired, glaring at her across the breakfast table when she joined him the next morning. “What if I’d needed you?”

“If you had, Georgios knew how to reach me.”

“That’s beside the point.”

“And exactly what point are you making, Pavlos? That I’m under house arrest and not allowed to leave the premises without your permission?”

Ignoring her sarcasm, he said baldly, “You’re asking for trouble, getting involved with Niko. Women are nothing but toys to him, created solely for his entertainment and pleasure. He’ll play with you for as long as you amuse him, then drop you for the next one who catches his fancy. He’ll break your heart without a second thought and leave you to pick up the pieces, just like all the others who came before you.”

Not about to admit she’d pretty much reached the same conclusion herself, she said, “I’m a grown woman. I know how to take care of myself.”

He scowled. “Not with a man like him, you don’t. He’s bad news, no matter how you look at it. Take my advice, girl. Stay away from him.”

A shadow fell across the floor. “Talking about me again, old man?” Niko stepped through the open French doors.

No custom-tailored Italian suit this morning, she noted, but blue jeans again, and a short-sleeved blue shirt revealing strong, tanned forearms. Not that the packaging counted for much. It was the man inside and his sexy, hypnotic voice that set her heart to palpitating.

Annoyed that he so easily snagged her in his spell, Emily averted her gaze, but his father continued to look him straight in the eye and said, “Know anyone else who fits the description?”

“Can’t think of a soul,” Niko replied evenly.

“There you have it then.” Pavlos thumped his coffee cup down on the table. “Why are you here anyway?”

“To have a word with Emily, and to see how you’re coming along.”

“You needn’t have bothered.”

“Obviously not. You’re as cantankerous as ever, which I take to be a very good sign that you’re recovering nicely.”

“And Emily doesn’t want to see you.”

“Why don’t you let her tell me that for herself? Or does the fact that you’re paying her to be your nurse entitle you to act as her mouthpiece, as well?”

“Just stop it, both of you!” Emily cut in. “Pavlos, finish your toast and stop behaving badly. Niko, the physiotherapist should be here soon, and I’ll be free to talk to you then.”

He shook his head. “Afraid I can’t wait that long. I have a meeting in the city—”

“Then don’t let us keep you,” his father growled, snapping open the morning paper and feigning great interest in the headlines. “And whatever you do, don’t hurry back.”

Niko’s face closed, and spinning on his heel, he strode off down the hall. But not before Emily caught the flicker of pain in his eyes that he couldn’t quite disguise.

“That,” she told Pavlos, “was both cruel and unnecessary.”

“Then chase after him and kiss him better.”

“An excellent suggestion,” she said, pushing away from the table. “Thank you for thinking of it.”

Niko had already reached his car when she yanked open the villa’s front door. “Niko, wait,” she called, running across the forecourt.

He turned at the sound of her voice, but made no move toward her. “If you’re here to apologize for my father, save your breath,” he informed her curtly. “I’m used to him.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said. “Look, I don’t know why he’s in such a foul mood this morning, but for what it’s worth, I want you to know that I don’t let other people dictate whom I should or should not associate with.”

“In this case, you might be better off if you did,” he said, once again turning to get into the car. “After all, he’s known me all my life which makes him some sort of expert on what I’m all about.”

Stepping closer, she stopped him with a hand on his arm. Although his skin felt warm, the flesh beneath was unresponsive as stone to her touch. Undeterred, she said, “Perhaps I’d have believed that yesterday at this time, but I know better now and it’ll take more than your father’s say-so to convince me otherwise. So if you’re using the scene back there in the house as an excuse to end our friendship, it’s not going to happen. Now, what did you want to talk to me about?”

He regarded her broodingly a moment. “Your time off,” he eventually admitted.

“Why do you want to know?”

“Why do you think, Emily? I want to see more of you.”

Again, the tell-tale lurch of her heart warned her how susceptible to him she was. “Then why the mixed messages last night, Niko?” she asked, deciding to lay her misgivings to rest once and for all. “Do you blow hot and cold with all the women you date, or have you singled me out for special attention?”

He didn’t bother to dissemble. Was, indeed, shockingly, hilariously blunt in his reply. “In case you didn’t notice, my dear, last night when we were dancing, I was sporting an erection that would have done a stallion proud. That ought to have told you something.”

Smothering a burst of laughter, she said with equal candor, “At the time, I thought it did. But after hustling me outside, you either decided I wasn’t quite your type after all, or else you lost your nerve.”

A flush of indignation stained his finely chiseled cheekbones. “I neither lost my nerve, nor anything else.”

“Then why the hasty brush-off?”

“There’s a time and a place for everything, Emily, especially seduction. I’m not the sex-in-the-backseat-of- the-car type of guy—which isn’t to say I didn’t want to take you to bed. But you’d given no indication you’d have welcomed such an overture. Just the opposite, in fact. You never stopped talking.”

“If you’d bothered to ask,” she said, “I could have told you we weren’t as far apart in our thinking as you seem to suppose. I just did a better job of hiding it.”

He blinked. “Are you sure you know what you’re saying?”

“Very sure. I realized the moment I set eyes on you that the chemistry between us could easily become explosive.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve left me at a loss for words,” he said, almost stumbling over his reply, “and I have a sneaking suspicion it won’t be the last.”

“Well, don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying I’m ready to jump into bed with you, but…”

“But you won’t turn me down if I ask you out again?”

“I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

He slid his arm around her waist and pulled her to him. “When’s the next time you have a few hours off?”

“Later this afternoon, from about three until seven.”

“I’ll pick you up at three-thirty. Wear something casual—slacks and a light sweater in case you get cold, and bring a camera if you have one. Today, we play at being tourists in the city.”

Then he kissed her. Hard and sweet. On the mouth. And made it last long enough that when he finally released her, she had to clutch the top of the car door to keep herself upright.

She’d read the travel brochures and thought she knew what to expect of Athens. Traffic congestion and noise and smog. Ancient, crumbling ruins sitting cheek by jowl with towering new apartment buildings. And overshadowing them all, the Acropolis and the Parthenon. But brochures didn’t come close to preparing her for the real thing.

Niko showed up not in the BMW but on a candy-apple-red motor scooter. Helping her onto the passenger seat, he plunked a bright red helmet on her head, fastened the strap, then climbed aboard himself and said, “Hang on tight.”

On that note, they were off, zooming through the outskirts of the city, weaving in and out of traffic, zipping up steep hills, along narrow streets and through tiny squares, until suddenly the famous landmarks were everywhere she looked. She should have been terrified at the speed with which they traveled. With anyone else, she undoubtedly would have been. But seated behind him, her front sandwiched against his spine, her arms wrapped around his waist, she felt fearless, confident.

She loved the wind in her face, the aromas drifting from the tavernas, the energy buzzing in the air. Loved the feel of him, all sleek muscle beneath his short-sleeved shirt, and the scent of his sun-kissed skin.

Finally he parked and locked the scooter, then led her through a pedestrian avenue lined with restaurants and cafés, and along a marble path to the top of the Acropolis. Up close, the sheer size and majesty of the Parthenon overwhelmed her. “I can’t believe I’m really here, and seeing it for myself,” she breathed. “It’s amazing, Niko. Magnificent! And the view…!”

She lapsed into silence, at a loss for words. Athens lay at her feet, a sprawling mass of concrete occasionally interspersed with the green of pine-covered hills.

“Gives a pretty good idea of the layout of the city,” Niko agreed, “but if ever my father decides he can get through an evening without you, we’ll come back another time, at sunset. Enjoying a bottle of wine and watching the lights come on is equally impressive.”

“What surprises me is that it’s not nearly as crowded as I thought it would be.”

“Because most tourists have gone home and left Athens to those of us who choose to live here. The smart ones, though, know that October is one of the best times to visit.”

They spent an idyllic few hours wandering among the ruins, stopping on the way down the hill for iced coffee at a sidewalk café, and visiting a beautiful little church tucked in a quiet square. But although everything she saw left Emily awestruck, it was what Niko brought to the afternoon that left the most indelible impression.

His lazy smile caressed her, hinting at untold pleasures to come. His voice reciting the history of the temples held her mesmerized. The way he took every opportunity to touch her—holding her hand to guide her over the uneven ground as if she were the most delicate, precious thing in the world to him, or looping an intimate arm around her shoulders as he pointed out some distant landmark—filled her with shimmering happiness.

With a casual endearment, a glance, he inspired in her an unsuspected passion and yearning. The blood seethed in her veins. She had never felt more alive; never known such an uprush of emotion.

Too soon it was six o’clock and time to head back to Vouliagmeni. The setting sun slanted across the lawns and the front door stood open when they arrived at the villa. “Are you coming in?” she asked, as he propped the scooter on its kickstand and swung her to the ground.

He shook his head. “No, karthula. Why spoil a perfect afternoon?”

“I wish it didn’t have to be like that,” she said, removing her helmet.

He took it from her, slung it over the handlebars and cupped her face between his hands. “It is what it is, Emily, and what it’s always been.”

“Well, I find it very sad. It’s not—”

He silenced her with a lingering kiss that emptied her mind of everything but the heady delight of his mouth on hers. “Oh,” she breathed, when at last it ended.

He lifted his head and stared past her, then, “I think we should try that again,” he murmured, and drawing her to him, kissed her a second time at even greater length.

An exclamation—most likely an expletive, judging by its irate tone—shattered the moment, and spinning around, Emily found Pavlos leaning on his walker, silhouetted in the open doorway.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Niko said cheerfully, releasing her. “Caught in the act by my disapproving patera. I’d better make myself scarce before he comes after me with a shotgun. I’ll call you, Emily. Soon.”

A moment later, he was gone, disappearing down the long driveway in a candy-apple-red blur of speed, and taking with him all the joy the afternoon had brought. Because she knew without a shadow of doubt that the reason he’d kissed her a second time had nothing to do with her. He’d done it for the pure pleasure of stirring his father to anger.

Unbidden, and decidedly unwelcome, Pavlos’s earlier warning came back to haunt her. Women are nothing but toys to him, created solely for his entertainment. He’ll break your heart and leave you to pick up the pieces, just like all the others who came before you….

CHAPTER FIVE

PAVLOS wore such an unmistakable told-you-so expression that Emily knew she looked as let down as she felt. Shuffling along beside her as she stalked into the house, he crowed, “Lived down to my expectations, didn’t he?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Pavlos,” she informed him curtly, rallying her pride. “I had a fabulous afternoon.”

“And I ran a marathon while you were gone!” He elbowed her in the ribs. “Admit it, Emily. He disappointed you.”

“If you must know, you both disappoint me. Father and son—grown men at that—taking potshots at each other isn’t my idea of adult entertainment. Have you had dinner?”

“No. I waited for you.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Ah, girl! Don’t let him do this to you. He’s not worth it.”

The edge of compassion softening his tone caused serious inroads on her composure, and that he happened also to be right didn’t make the advice any easier to swallow. “He’s not ‘doing’ anything,” she insisted. Except play fast and loose with her emotions, which she wasn’t about to admit to his father.

That night when he was preparing for bed, Pavlos slipped on the marble tiles in his bathroom and split his forehead open on the edge of the sink. Striving to maintain calm in the face of chaos—Georgios panicked at the sight of blood, was sure his beloved master was dying and blamed himself for the accident—Emily directed him to call for an ambulance while she attended to Pavlos who lay sprawled on the floor. Although somewhat disoriented, he swore irritably and smacked her hand away when she tried to prevent him from struggling to his feet.

Leaning against the tub, he scoffed, “I’m not dead yet, woman! It’ll take more than a cracked skull to finish me off.”

“It’s not your head I’m worried about, it’s your hip,” she said, applying a folded facecloth to the superficial cut on his brow. In fact, the sink had broken his fall and that he was able to sit on the floor without showing much evidence of pain was a good sign, but she wanted more scientific proof that he was as fine as he claimed.

The paramedics arrived shortly after and transferred him to the hospital for X-rays. Fortunately he’d incurred no further damage to his hip, required only a couple of sutures to his cut and vetoed any recommendation that he stay there overnight. “I didn’t bring you all this way to look after me so you could turn the job over to someone else,” he reminded Emily.

By the next morning, he sported a black eye but was otherwise his usual self. “No reason to,” he snapped, when she suggested letting his son know what had happened.

But, “He has a right to be kept informed,” she insisted, and left a brief message on Niko’s voice mail.

He didn’t acknowledge it until three days later when he again showed up unannounced as they were finishing lunch. “Very colorful,” he remarked, inspecting Pavlos’s black eye which by then had taken on a distinctly greenish hue. “Tell me, old man, do you plan to make a habit of abusing your body?”

“Accidents happen,” his father shot back. “You’re living proof of that.”

Emily winced, appalled by the stunning cruelty of his reply, but realized that although he’d rather die than admit it, Pavlos was hurt that Niko hadn’t bothered to stop by sooner.

“We all have our crosses to bear, Patero,” Niko said scornfully. “Yours isn’t any heavier than mine.”

“Don’t call me patero. You’re no more a son to me than a dog on the street.”

After their last confrontation, Emily had made up her mind she was never again getting caught in the middle when these two went at each other, but the insults flying back and forth were more than she could tolerate. “How do you the pair of you live with yourselves?” she asked sharply.

“By having as little to do with each other as possible,” Niko said, addressing her directly for the first time since he’d entered the room. “Yiasu, Emily. How have you been?”

“Very well, thank you. The same can’t be said of your father, but I guess that didn’t much matter to you, seeing that you waited three days to visit him after his accident.”

“Don’t waste your breath appealing to his sense of decency,” Pavlos advised her. “He doesn’t have one.”

Niko regarded him with weary disdain. “Unlike you in your prime, my career involves more than sitting behind a desk while my minions do all the work. I was away on assignment and didn’t get back to Athens until this morning.”

“Racing off on another mercy mission to save the world, were you?” Pavlos sneered.

“As to thialo, yarro!”

“You hear that, Emily?” Pavlos flung her an injured glare. “He told me to go to hell!”

Emily glanced from one to the other. At the father, his iron-gray hair still thick and his eyes piercingly alive, but his once-powerful body decaying, its bones so brittle it was a miracle they hadn’t crumbled when he fell. At the son, a modern-day Adonis, tall, strong and indomitable. And both so proud, they’d have walked barefoot through fire rather than admit they cared about each other.

“I can’t imagine why he bothered,” she said witheringly. “The way I see it, he’s already there, and so are you.”

On that note, she left them. They might be determined to tear one another apart, but she’d be damned if she’d stay around to pick up the pieces.

Exiting through the French doors, she marched along the terrace and around the side of the villa to the lodge behind the garages. The widowed gardener, Theo, and his son, Mihalis, whom she’d met the day she arrived, lived there. Snoozing on the step outside the back door was their dog, Zephyr, a big friendly creature of indeterminate breed who, when she approached, wriggled over to make room for her to sit beside him and planted his head on her lap.

Niko found her there a few minutes later. “Is there space down there for me, too?”

“No,” she said. “I prefer civilized company and you don’t qualify.”

“But the dog does?”

“Definitely. I’ll take him over you any day of the week.”

He shoved his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and regarded her moodily. “For what it’s worth, Emily, I take no pleasure in constantly doing battle with my father.”

“Then why don’t you put an end to it?”

“What would you have me do? Stand by and let him use me as a verbal punching bag?”

“If that’s what it takes…”

“Sorry, karthula, I’m not the subservient type. And I’m not here now to carry on with you where I left off with him.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“To ask if you’ll have dinner with me again.”

“What for? So you can flaunt me in your father’s face, the way you did the other day?”

Ignoring Zephyr’s warning growl, he hunkered down on the few inches of sun-warmed step beside her. “Would you believe because I can’t stay away from you, though heaven knows I wish I could?”

“Why? Because you blame me for your father’s accident?”

“Don’t be absurd,” he said. “Of course I don’t.”

“Perhaps you should. I’m supposed to be nursing him back to health, not exposing him to further injury. It’s a miracle he didn’t do more damage to himself when he fell.”

“The point is, he didn’t, and I knew it within hours of the accident.”

“How is that possible if, as you claim, you arrived back in town only this morning?”

“This might come as a surprise, Emily, but I’m not completely heartless. I admit I’m away more often than I’m here, but I maintain regular contact with Georgios or Damaris, and know practically to the minute if a problem arises. Judging from their glowing reports, not only are you a dedicated and skilled professional who’s taking excellent care of Pavlos, but you’re earmarked for sainthood when you die—which, I hasten to add, I hope won’t be anytime soon.”

“If you care enough about him to phone them for an update on how he’s doing, would it hurt you to tell him so?”

“Why would I bother when he makes it patently clear it’s not something he wants to hear?”

“He might surprise you.”

“You’re the only one to surprise me, Emily, and I can’t say I’m enjoying the experience. I’ve got enough on my mind, without that.”

At his gloomy tone, she ventured a glance at him. Noticed the grim set of his mouth, the frown puckering his brow and felt an unwelcome stab of sympathy. “You ran into problems when you were away?”

“Nothing unusual about that,” he said, shrugging. “My business is all about solving problems, as long as they’re other people’s. But I learned a long time ago that the only way to deal effectively with them is to draw a firm line between my work and my personal life, the latter of which I make a point of keeping complication free.” He paused, sketched a groove in the dust with the toe of his shoe as if to illustrate his point and laced his fingers through hers. “But somehow, you’ve become just that, Emily. A complication. One I can’t ignore.”

“I don’t see how.”

“I know you don’t. That’s half the trouble.”

“Try explaining it, then.”

“I can’t,” he said morosely. “That’s the other half.”

She sighed, exasperated, and pulled her fingers free. “I’m not a big fan of riddles, Niko, and you don’t appear exactly overjoyed to be involved with me, so let me put us both out of our misery. Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want to have dinner with you again.”

Bathing her in a molten-green gaze, he inched closer. Slid his hand around her nape. “Liar,” he murmured, the tip of his tongue dallying insolently with the outer curve of her ear.

The last time a man had tried that, she’d barely managed to suppress a revolted Eeuw! before she shoved him away. What was so different about Niko Leonidas, that his every touch, every glance, left her panting for more?

“Just because I refuse to let you play games with me doesn’t make me a liar,” she insisted weakly, almost paralyzed by the throb of tension unwinding inside her to affect body parts she was beginning to wish she didn’t have.

“It doesn’t make you any easier to resist, either.”

“Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.”

For a long moment, he stared at her as if trying to fathom the solution to a dilemma only he could resolve. Then with a shrug that plainly said, Ah, to hell with it, he rose to his feet with indolent grace. “I guess we have,” he replied, and sauntered away.

“Good riddance!” she muttered, crushing the wave of disappointment threatening to engulf her. “Other women might trip over themselves in their eagerness to fall in with your every whim and wish, but I’m made of sterner stuff.”

She repeated her little mantra several times during the rest of the afternoon, because it was all that stood between her and the urge to call him and say she’d changed her mind about spending the evening with him. To make quite sure she didn’t weaken at the last minute, she went for a long walk on the beach, and ate dinner at a taverna. Upon her return to the villa, she played checkers with Pavlos for an hour, then pleading a headache, escaped to her suite.

Night had long since fallen, and closing the door behind her, she surveyed her sanctuary with a mixture of relief and pleasure. Damaris had turned back the bedcovers and made a fire against the chill of mid-October. Flames danced in the hearth and cast burnished-gold reflections over the polished antique furniture. The pleasant scent of burning olive wood filled the air.

Yes, she’d definitely made the right decision, Emily thought, tossing her sweater on the foot of the bed and kicking off her shoes. Although she couldn’t deny the magnetic attraction between her and Niko, she couldn’t ignore her feminine intuition, either. From the start, it had warned her that giving in to her attraction to him would invite nothing but trouble. If she didn’t step back now, she’d find herself hopelessly, helplessly entangled with a man so far out of her league that she’d be guaranteed nothing but misery. After all, he’d made it graphically clear that his interest in her was purely sexual, and realistically, what else could she expect? He had no room in his life for a serious relationship, and even if he had, her future lay half a world away.

Warding off the unavoidable but depressing truth of the matter, she went into the bathroom and while the whirlpool tub filled, stripped off the rest of her clothes, pinned up her hair and lit a scented candle. Solitude was preferable to heartache any day of the week, she told herself bracingly, as she sank up to her chin in the hot water and let the air jets massage the day’s tension into oblivion.

With the candle finally burned down to nothing, she dried herself with a towel from the heated rack, applied a generous dollop of body lotion to her water-wrinkled skin and pulled on a clean nightshirt. Then feeling limp as cooked spaghetti and so relaxed it was all she could do to stand upright, she tottered back to her bedroom.

Surprisingly the fire still burned brightly as if it had recently been replenished. And her shoes stood neatly aligned next to the armchair which, she noticed in appalled disbelief, was occupied. By Niko.

“I was beginning to think you’d drowned,” he remarked conversationally.

Horribly aware that she wore nothing but a nightshirt whose hem came only midway down her thighs, she tried ineffectually to tug it lower. A huge mistake because, when she let it go, it sprang up with alarming vigor and revealed heaven only knew what of her anatomy. “Don’t look!” she squeaked, shock rendering her incapable of a more quelling response.

“If you insist,” he said, and very politely turned his head aside.

“How did you get in here?”

“Through the door, Emily. It seemed the most logical route to take.”

If she had an ounce of backbone, she’d have matched his sarcasm and told him to leave the same way, but curiosity got the better of her. “Why?”

“I decided I owe you an explanation. Again!”

Wishing the sight of him didn’t fill her with such desperate yearning that she was practically melting inside, she said, “You don’t owe me anything, Niko. And you have no business being in my room.”

“But I’m here regardless, and I’m staying until I’ve had my say.”

“It seems to me we’ve been through this routine before and it got us precisely nowhere.”

“Please, Emily.”

She gave a long suffering sigh. “Then make it quick. I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”

He slewed an audacious glance at her bare legs. “Could you put on something a little less revealing first? I’m only human, and staring at the fire doesn’t quite cut it compared to looking at you.”

Annoyed at the burst of pleasure his words aroused, she stomped back into the bathroom, grabbed the full length robe hanging on the door and dived into it.

“That’s better,” he said, vacating the armchair when she returned with only her hands, feet and head open to his inspection. “Why don’t you sit here?”

“No, thanks,” she informed him starchily. “I don’t anticipate this taking very long.”

He’d convinced himself this would be easy. All he had to do was reiterate his initial reservations, explain he’d put them to rest and no longer had ulterior motives for pursuing her. But the sight of her when she first came out of the bathroom had wiped his mind clean of anything but the raging desire to touch her all over. To lift that absurd scrap of a nightgown and bury his mouth at the cluster of soft, silver-blond curls she’d so briefly and tantalizingly revealed in her attempt at modesty.

“I’m waiting, Niko,” she reminded him, sounding like his high school math teacher.

Would that she looked like her, too—moustache and all! “I want to start afresh with you,” he said.

“I’m not sure I understand what that means.”

He swallowed, grasping for the words that persisted in eluding him. “We got off on the wrong foot, Emily. You’re my father’s nurse, and I’m his son….”

“To the best of my knowledge, the status quo hasn’t changed. I’m still his nurse. You’re still his son.”

How could he do it? How cut to the chase and say bluntly, Despite pretending I no longer believed it, I remained convinced you were out to take him for all he’s worth and decided my only choice was to seduce you, but have now decided I was wrong, and expect her to understand? He wouldn’t, if their situation were reversed.

“But something else has changed,” he said instead.

“What?”

He took a deep breath and plunged in, laundering the truth in a way that made him cringe inside. “Can we just say I’m tired of playing games and leave it at that? I’m not interested in using you to score points off my father, or for any other reason. I want to be close to you not because it’ll annoy him to see us together, but because I like you for yourself. So I guess the only questions still to be answered are, do you want the same thing, or have I misread the signs and the attraction I thought existed between us is just a figment of my imagination?”

“It’s not a figment of your imagination,” she admitted, “but I don’t understand why you’d pursue it when you said just this afternoon that I was a complication you didn’t need.”

“Overanalyzing is second nature to me. It’s saved my skin more often than I care to count. But in this case, I took it too far.”

She shifted from one foot to the other, clearly weighing his words. “Maybe not,” she said judiciously. “Maybe you simply realized there was no future in a relationship with me.”

“Never counting on the future is another by-product of my job. The only certainty is the here and now.”

He took a step toward her, then another, until he was close enough to inhale the scent of her skin. She’d pinned up her hair, but tendrils had escaped to curl damply against her neck. The robe was at least two sizes too large and gaped at the front, drawing his gaze to the faint swell of her cleavage just visible above the top of her nightshirt.

The urge to kiss her, to hold her, nearly blinded him. “What do you say, Emily?” he asked hoarsely. “Will you take a chance on it with me?”

CHAPTER SIX

THE persistent voice of caution warned her not to fall for his line of reasoning. What was he offering her, after all, but the pleasure of the moment?

On the other hand, what had she gained in the past by pinning all her hopes on a better tomorrow? A degree in nursing, a crippling mortgage on her town house, a secondhand car and a short-lived, disappointing relationship with a medical student. Even her circle of friends had dwindled as more and more of them exchanged the single life for marriage and babies. Not that they completely abandoned her, but their interests no longer coincided as they once had. Her schedule revolved around shift work and case histories; theirs, around spouses and midnight feedings.

“Emily?” Niko’s voice flowed over her, sliding inside the bathrobe supposedly shielding her from his potent appeal, to caress every hidden inch of skin, every minute pore.

Why was she holding out for a future that might never dawn, when the man who epitomized her every waking fantasy was offering her the chance to fulfill them? Giving in to her heart instead of her head, she lifted her gaze to meet his and whispered, “Why don’t you stop talking and just kiss me?”

He groaned and reached for her. Cupped her face between his hands and swept his lips over her eyelids, her cheekbones, her jaw. And finally, when she was quivering all over with anticipation, he buried his mouth against hers. Not as he had before, with calculated finesse, but in scalding, desperate greed.

For the first time in her life, her natural caution deserted her, annihilated by a yearning so painful, she was filled with the consuming need to satisfy it at any price. Barely aware that she’d anchored her arms around his waist, she tilted her hips so that they nudged boldly against him exactly where he was most evidently aroused. His hard, unabashed virility inflamed her, scorching any remnant of doubt to ashes.

Somehow, her robe fell undone and he was touching her, his clever seeking fingers tracing a path from her collarbone and inside her sleeveless nightshirt to shape the curve of her breast. But she wanted more and tried to tell him so, angling herself so that her nipple surged against his palm, and pleading with him not to stop.

But stop he did. “Not here,” he ground out, a sheen of sweat glistening on his brow. “Not in my father’s house.”

“But I can’t leave,” she whimpered. “What if he needs me and I’m not here?”

“Emily, I need you. I need you now.”

Without a twinge of shame, she lifted the hem of her nightshirt and guided his hand between her legs. “You think I don’t need you just as badly?”

Chest heaving, he molded his hand against her and pressed, flexing his fingers just so. The ensuing jolt of sensation ricocheted through her body and almost brought her to her knees. Gasping, she sank against him.

Steering her backward, he lowered her to the bed and touched her again, teasing the pivotal nub of flesh at her core that marked the dividing line between cool reason and clamoring ecstasy. And when she tipped over the edge in explosive release, he smothered her high- pitched cry with his mouth and stroked her until the spasms racking her body faded to an echo.

How many languid minutes ticked by before he pushed himself upright and, in a belated attempt to restore her modesty, covered her limbs with the bathrobe? Not nearly enough, and she clung to him. “Stay,” she begged.

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

“Don’t you want me, Niko?”

“So badly I can taste it. But not with my father’s shadow hanging over us.”

“Then how…when…?”

“Tell him you’re taking the weekend off. We’ll go away to someplace where we can be completely alone.”

“What if he won’t agree?”

“He doesn’t own you, karthula,” he said. Then, searching her face, asked, “Or does he?”

“Of course not, but he is my patient and he is paying me to look after him. And whether or not you accept it, he isn’t as far along the road to recovery as he’d have you believe. To expect Georgios to assume responsibility for him would be unprofessional and negligent on my part.”

“All it takes to solve that problem is a phone call to a private nursing agency for someone to replace you. We’re talking three days at the most. He can manage without you for that short a time.”

“I suppose,” she acknowledged dubiously, not because she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend the weekend with him, but because she knew she’d have to fight Pavlos to get it.

A muscle twitched in Niko’s jaw. “You know, Emily, if I’m asking too much—”

“You’re not!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She pressed her lips together and nodded. For pity’s sake, when had she turned into such a wimp? She’d been in Greece over three weeks and more or less at Pavlos’s beck and call the entire time. It wasn’t unreasonable for her to ask for a break. “I’ll work something out, I promise.”

He brushed a last kiss over her mouth. “Let me know when it’s arranged.”

In the hectic two days that followed, she alternated between euphoria and bouts of horror at how shamelessly she’d offered herself to Niko. How would she ever face him again? But her yearning outweighed her chagrin and overriding Pavlos’s objections, she booked the weekend off.

“A bikini and lots of sunscreen,” Niko said, when she called to tell him she’d be ready to leave on Friday evening at six and asked what she should pack.

“What else?”

She could almost hear his shrug. “Something warm for the evenings, maybe, although the weather’s supposed to be good. Shorts, a couple of tops. Not enough to fill a suitcase, by any means. Just throw a few things in a carryall.”

“In other words, travel light and keep it casual.”

“That about covers it, yes.”

Much he knew, she thought, scurrying out to shop late Thursday afternoon while Pavlos napped. The clothes she’d brought with her to Greece were, for the most part, serviceable and basic. She hadn’t come on vacation, she’d come to work, and in her profession that meant easily laundered cotton slacks and tunic tops, and comfortable, soft-soled shoes. She certainly didn’t have anything designed for a romantic weekend with the sexiest man on the planet.

After dinner that night, she laid out her purchases, setting aside the dark red velour jogging suit and white socks and runners for traveling, but stuffing racy new lingerie, sheer nightgown, sandals and silk caftan, as well as shampoo, toothbrush, cosmetics and all the other items he’d specified, into a canvas tote designed to hold far less. He had said they’d be completely alone, but clearly didn’t understand that it wasn’t looking the part for strangers that she cared about, it was looking her best for him.

Although Pavlos had allowed a nurse from an agency to fill in for her while she was gone, he’d made it plain he was doing so under duress. To drive home the point, he sulked all Friday morning and ignored Emily all afternoon.

The one thing he hadn’t done was inquire where she was going, or with whom, although from his dire mutterings, he’d obviously concluded it somehow involved Niko. So with her replacement up to speed on her duties, and rather than starting the weekend on a sour note with a confrontation, Emily collected her bag and slipped out of the villa a few minutes before six, to wait for Niko at the foot of the driveway.

Right on time, he drew up in the BMW. “You made it,” he greeted her, slinging his arm around her shoulders in a brief hug.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“Let’s just say I wouldn’t have been surprised if my father had thrown himself on the floor and started foaming at the mouth when you tried to leave. And the fact that you’re lurking here, hidden from view by anyone in the villa, tells me you pretty much feared the same.”

“If I admit you’re right, can we agree that the subject of your father is off-limits for the duration of the weekend?”

“Gladly.” He tossed her bag in the trunk and held open the passenger door. “Hop in, Emily. I want to get underway while we still have some daylight left.”

“Underway,” she discovered was not aboard an aircraft as she’d half expected, but a fifty-two-foot sloop moored at a private yacht club in Glyfada, a twenty-five minute drive north of Vouliagmeni. Sleek and elegant, with a dark blue hull and the name Alcyone painted in gold across her transom, she was, Niko told Emily, built for speed. But without any wind to fill her sails and sunset no more than a crimson memory on the horizon, he was forced to steer her under diesel power to the tiny island of Fleves, just off the east coast of the Attic peninsula.

It was a short trip only, but what made it magical for Emily was the rising moon, which laid down a path of silver to mark their passage, and the luminescence sparkling in their wake like a handful of tiny diamonds. Niko, in blue jeans and a lightweight cream sweater wasn’t too hard to take, either.

After they’d dropped anchor, he set a lantern over the companionway in the center cockpit, told her to stay put and disappeared below, returning a few minutes later with a bottle of chilled white wine, crystal glasses and a small tray of appetizers. “I’d toast you in champagne,” he said, taking a seat across from her and pouring the wine, “but it doesn’t travel well in a sailboat.”

“I don’t need champagne,” she assured him. “I’m happy just to be here with you.”

He tipped the rim of his glass against hers. “Then here’s to us, karthula.”

The wine dancing over her tongue, crisp and cold, lent her courage. “You’ve called me that before. What does it mean?”

“Sweetheart.” He raised one dark brow questioningly. “Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, and shivered with pleasure inside her cozy velour jogging suit.

Noticing, he gestured below deck. “Dinner’s in the oven and should be ready soon, but we can sit in the cabin where it’s warmer, if you like.”

“I’d rather not,” she said, shying away from the closed intimacy it presented. Now that the rush and excitement of getting away was over and it was at last just the two of them, she was gripped with an almost paralyzing shyness. “It’s so peaceful and quiet on deck.”

“But you’re on edge. Why is that, Emily? Are you wishing you hadn’t agreed to spend the weekend with me?”

“Not exactly. I’m just a little…uncomfortable.”

He scrutinized her in silence a moment, tracking the conflicting emotions flitting over her face. At last, he said, “About us being here now, or about the other night?”

She blushed so fiercely, it was a miracle her hair didn’t catch fire. “Do we have to talk about the other night?”

“Apparently we do,” he said.

She fiddled with her glass, twirling it so that the lantern light glimmered over its surface. From the safety of distance, she’d been able to put her conduct on Wednesday down to a temporary madness he’d inspired. But now, with no means of escaping his probing gaze, how she’d responded to him left her feeling only shamefully wanton and pitifully desperate.

What had possessed her to behave so completely out of character? Professionally she was ICU Nurse Tyler, capable, skilled and always in control. Socially, she was good friend Emily, affable, dependable—but again, always in control.

She did not rush headlong into affairs, she did not beg a man to make love to her and she most certainly did not brazenly invite him to explore her private parts. That she had done all three with Niko made her cringe. Yet, here she was, because embarrassed or not, she couldn’t stay away from him. And that meant facing up to what had transpired between them.

“You must know how very difficult it was for me to leave you as I did,” he said softly, divining so exactly the source of her discomfort that she wondered if she’d actually voiced her thoughts aloud. “I won’t pretend I’m not eager to pick up where we left off, but only if you feel the same. We take this at your pace, Emily, or not at all.”

She glanced around, at the velvet moonlit night; at the dark hulk of the island rising to her left. She listened to the silence, broken only by the gentle wash of the sea against the boat’s hull. Finally she dared to look at the man staring at her so intently. “It’s what I want, too,” she admitted. “I’m just a little out of my element. This is all very new to me, Niko.”

His posture changed from indolent relaxation to sudden vigilance. “Are you trying to tell me you’re a virgin?”

She choked on her wine. “No.”

“No, that’s not what you’re trying to tell me, or no, you’re not a virgin?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to tell you. I was referring to the setting—the boat, the glamour, the exotic location. As for whether or not I’m a virgin, does it really matter?”

“Yes, it does,” he said soberly. “Not because I’ll judge you one way or the other, but because if I’m your first lover, I want to know beforehand.” He leaned across and touched her hand. “So?”

Another blush raced up her neck to stain her face, though she hoped it didn’t show in the dim light. “I’m not.”

Picking up on her discomfiture anyway, he burst out laughing. “Don’t look so mortified,” he said. “I’m not, either.”

“But it was only once, and not exactly…a howling success. Contrary to the impression I might have given you the other night, I’m not very good at…well…this.”

“I see,” he said, making a visible effort to keep a straight face. “Well, now that you’ve got that off your chest, what do you say we have dinner and let the rest of the evening take care of itself?”

“I’d like to freshen up first.” In reality, she’d like to put her head down the toilet and flush, or better yet, jump over the side of the boat and never resurface.

“Sure,” he said easily. “I’ll be a couple of minutes getting everything ready, so take your time. Our stuff’s in the aft cabin, which has its own bathroom.”

It had its own built-in king-size bed, too. Dressed in navy-blue linens, with a wide ledge and window at the head, and brass wall lamps on either side, it set the stage for seduction and sent a tremor of terrified anticipation fluttering in Emily’s stomach.

Would she disappoint him? she wondered, unpacking her clothes and laying out her toiletries on the vanity in the bathroom. Make an even bigger fool of herself this time than she had before? Was she being too reckless, too naive, in straying so far out of her usual comfort zone? Or had she finally found the one man in the world who made all the risks of falling in love worthwhile?

Soft lights and music greeted her when she returned to the main cabin. The air was fragrant with the scent of oregano and rosemary. Navy-blue place mats and napkins, crystal, brushed stainless steel cutlery and white bone china graced the table. In the galley, on the counter above the refrigerator, were a basket of bread and a bowl containing olives, and chunks of tomato, cucumber and feta cheese drizzled with olive oil.

Long legs braced against the barely perceptible rise and fall of the boat, Niko stood beside the oven, arranging skewers of roasted lamb, eggplant and peppers over rice. “Not exactly a gourmet spread,” he remarked, carrying the platter to the table. “Just plain, simple picnic fare.”

“I’d hardly call it plain or simple,” she said, thinking of the plastic forks and paper plates, which marked the picnics she usually attended. “How do you keep your dishes and glassware from breaking when you’re under sail?”

“I had the boat custom built with cabinetry designed to keep everything safely in place. I’ll show you later, if you’re interested.”

“Interested? Intrigued is more like it. At the risk of repeating myself, you’re not at all the playboy I took you to be when I first met you.”

Green eyes filled with amusement, he said, “You’re an expert on playboys, are you?”

“No, but I’m willing to bet they don’t put their lives on the line to help people in distress, and they don’t cook.”

“Don’t let the meal fool you. I had it prepared at a local taverna. All I had to do was heat up the main course, which pretty much sums up my talents in the kitchen.”

He brought the bread and salad to the table, poured more wine and clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s to us again, karthula. Dig in before everything gets cold.”

The food was delicious; conversation easy and uncomplicated as they discovered more about each other. They both enjoyed reading and agreed they could live without television as long as they had a supply of good books at hand, although he preferred nonfiction whereas she devoured novels. And neither could live without a daily newspaper.

Niko was an avid scuba diver and had explored a number of wrecks off the Egyptian coast. The best Emily could manage was snorkeling in a protected lagoon and admitted to being nervous if she was too far away from the shore.

He’d seen parts of the world tourists never visited. She stayed on the safe and beaten track: other parts of Canada, Hawaii, the British Virgin Islands.

When they’d finished eating, she helped him clear the table. Dried the dishes he washed. Stacked the wineglasses in the cunning little rack designed to hold them. And loved the domesticity of it all. A man, a woman, a nest…

As ten o’clock inched toward eleven, he suggested they finish their wine on deck. The moon rode high by then, splashing the boat with cool light, but he took a blanket from a locker and wrapped them both in its fleecy warmth.

“I dream about places like this when I’m away,” he said, pulling her into the curve of his arm. “It’s what keeps me sane.”

“What is it about your work that made you choose it? The thrill, the danger?”

“In part, yes. I’d never find satisfaction playing the corporate mogul sitting behind a mile-wide desk and counting my millions, despite my father’s trying to buy my allegiance with more money than I could spend in a century of profligate living. To him, money’s the ultimate weapon for bringing a man to heel, and it infuriated him that, in leaving me my own fortune, my mother stripped him of that power over me. It’s the one thing she did that he resented.”

“But there’s another reason you decided on such an unconventional career?”

He shifted slightly, as if he suddenly found the luxuriously padded seat in the cockpit uncomfortable. “This isn’t something I’d tell to just anyone, but yes, there’s another reason. Using her money to help people in need eases my conscience at having killed her.”

Aghast to think he’d carried such a heavy burden of guilt all his life, Emily burst out, “I know I’ve said this before, but her death was an unforeseen tragedy, Niko, and you’re too intelligent a man to go on blaming yourself for something that wasn’t your fault. That Pavlos let you grow up believing otherwise—”

“I thought we’d agreed not to talk about my father.”

“We did, but you’re the one who mentioned him first.”

“Well, now I want to forget him, so let’s talk about your parents instead, and satisfy my curiosity on a point that’s puzzled me ever since you first mentioned it. You said they were killed in a car accident, so how is it that you were left with virtually no financial security? Usually in such cases, there’s a substantial settlement, especially when a minor is left orphaned.”

If she’d pressured him into confronting his own demons, his question very neatly forced her to address her own. “There was no settlement from the accident,” she said. “At least, not in my favor.”

“Why the devil not?”

She closed her eyes, as if that might make the facts more palatable. It didn’t. It never had. “My father was at fault. He was speeding and he was drunk. Sadly he and my mother weren’t the only victims. Four other people died as a result of his actions, and two more were left with crippling injuries. Because of the ensuing lawsuits, I was left with nothing but my mother’s personal effects and a small insurance policy she’d taken out when I was born. And you already know how that was spent.”

“They had nothing else of value? No stock portfolio or real estate?”

She shook her head. “We never owned a house, or even an apartment. Home was a top floor suite in a posh residential hotel overlooking English Bay in Vancouver. A place where they could entertain their socialite friends and host glamorous parties.”

Niko muttered under his breath and she didn’t have to understand Greek to know he swore. “So they could afford that, but never thought to provide for their only child’s future?”

“They lived for the moment. Every day was an adventure, and money was meant to be spent. And why not? My father was hugely successful in the stock market.”

“A pity he wasn’t as committed to setting some aside for his daughter’s future as he was to spending it on himself.”

“He and my mother adored me,” she flared. “They made me feel treasured and wanted. I led a charmed life, filled with warmth and laughter and love. You can’t put a price on that.”

“They were spoiled children playing at being adults,” he countered harshly. “Even if they’d left you a fortune, it could never make up for what their fecklessness ended up costing you.”

“Stop it!” she cried, not sure what angered her more: that he dared to criticize her family, or that he was right. “Just shut up!”

Throwing off the blanket, she climbed onto the side deck and went to stand at the bow of the boat. It was the most distance she could put between them.

He came up behind her. Put his arms around her. “Hey,” he said. “Listen to me.”

“No. You’ve said enough.”

“Not quite. Not until I tell you I’m sorry.”

“What is it about ‘shut up’ that you don’t understand? I’m not interested in your apology.”

“And I’m not very good at taking orders. Also, I’m the last person qualified to comment on flawed relationships.” He nuzzled the side of her neck, his jaw scraping lightly, erotically against her skin. “Forgive me?”

She wanted to refuse. To end things with him while she still could, and save herself more heartache down the road. Because that annoying voice of caution was whispering in her head again, warning her that this was just another in a long list of differences. They disagreed on too many critical issues ever to remain in harmony for very long. He didn’t care about family. Didn’t believe in love. Wasn’t interested in marriage or commitment.

But the starch of her resistance was softening, leaving her body pliant to his touch, her heart susceptible to his seduction. A lot of men said the same things he had—until the right woman came along and changed their minds. Why couldn’t she be the one to change his?

“Emily? Please say something. I know I’ve made you angry, hurt you, but please don’t shut me out.”

“Yes, I’m angry,” she admitted miserably, “because you had no right trying to strip me of my illusions. And I’m hurt, because you succeeded.” She spun around, dazzled by tears. “I’ve spent the last eighteen years wilfully ignoring the truth about the parents I so badly wanted to preserve as perfect in my memory. Thanks to you, I won’t be able to do that anymore.”

He swore again, so softly it turned into an endearment, and buried her face at his shoulder. She started to cry in earnest then, for lost dreams and fate’s cruel indifference to human pain.

“Let me make it better, angel,” Niko murmured, stringing kisses over her hair. “Let me love you as you deserve to be loved.”

And because she wanted him more than she wanted to stay safe, she lifted her tearstained face to his and surrendered. “Yes,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE lover’s grand romantic gesture—sweeping her into his arms and carrying her to bed—didn’t work on a sailboat. Slender though she was, the companionway just wasn’t big enough for them both at the same time. The best he could do was precede her into the main cabin and guide her as she backed down the four steps leading below deck.

Not exactly a hardship, he decided, steadying her with a hand on either side of her hips as she descended. She wasn’t very tall, a little over one and a half meters, and weighed no more than about forty-six kilos, but as her slim, elegant legs crossed his line of vision, the prospect of laying them bare to his renewed inspection left him hard and aching.

Unfortunately, by the time he’d led her into the aft sleeping quarters, her eyes were enormous in her pale face, she was trembling and hyperventilating. Some men might have interpreted that as an eagerness that matched their own, but he’d seen too many refugees huddled in war zones with bombs exploding around them, to be so easily taken in.

Virgin or not, and for all that she’d seemed willing enough when he’d asked her to let him make love to her, now that the moment lay at hand, she was afraid. And in his book, that meant ignoring the raging demands of his libido, because the day had yet to dawn that he satisfied his own needs at the expense of a woman’s.

Instead he flicked on the wall lamps, and slipped a CD into the built-in sound system. With the soothing sound of a Chopin nocturne filling the silence, he drew her down to sit beside him on the edge of the bed and wiped away the remains of her tears. “You are so incredibly beautiful,” he told her.

She managed a shaky laugh. “I doubt it. I never learned to cry daintily. But thank you for saying so. Most men hate it when a woman resorts to tears.”

“I’m not most men,” he said, running his fingers idly through her hair. It reminded him of cool satin. So did her skin when, grazing his knuckles along her jaw to her throat, he extended his slow exploration. “And you very definitely are not most women.”

He touched her mouth next, teasing her lips with his thumb. Not until they parted of their own volition did he lean forward and kiss them softly.

Her eyes fell shut as if the weight of her lashes was too much to bear. She sighed. And when she did, all her pent-up tension escaped, leaving her flexible as a willow against him.

Still he did not try to rush her, but cupped his hand around her nape and touched his mouth to hers again. She tasted of wine and innocence, and only when the subtle flavor of desire entered the mix did he deepen the kiss.

Gradually she grew bolder. Her hands crept under his sweater and up his bare chest, deft and sure. She murmured, little inarticulate pleadings that said the fear was gone and she was ready. More than ready. Her hunger matched his.

Suppressing the urgency threatening his control, he undressed her at leisure, discarding her shoes and socks first, then her jogging suit. A practical outfit and attractive enough in its way, it did not merit lingering attention. But underneath, she wore peach-colored lace; a bra so delicate and fine, her nipples glowed pink through the fabric, and panties so minuscule they defied gravity.

Clinging provocatively to her body, they were so blatantly designed to stir a man to passion that he had to turn away from the sight before he embarrassed himself. Had to rip down the zippered fly of his jeans or suffer permanent injury from their confinement. Kicking them off, he yanked his sweater over his head, flung it across the cabin, and sent his briefs sailing after it.

Misunderstanding his abrupt change of pace, she stroked a tentative hand down his back and whispered, “Are you angry? Did I do something wrong?”

“You’re the nurse here,” he ground out roughly, spinning around so that there was no way she could miss the state he was in. “Does it look to you as if you did something wrong?”

She blinked. And blushed.

If he hadn’t been such a seething mass of sexual hunger that the functioning part of his brain was concerned only with how soon he could satisfy it, he’d have told her how her shy modesty charmed him. But his stamina was nearing its limits and wanting his dwindling endurance to be focused on bringing her pleasure, he drew back the bedcovers and pulled her down to lie next to him.

Willing his obdurate flesh to patience, he undid the clasp of her bra. Slid the outrageous panties down her legs. And when at last she lay naked before him, feasted his eyes on her. Dazzled by her blond perfection, her delicate symmetry of form, and perhaps most of all by the sultry heat in her eyes, he shaped her every curve and hollow with his hands, and followed them with his mouth.

She undulated on the mattress, offering herself to him without reserve. Clutching his shoulders in swift bursts of tactile delight when he found her most sensitive spots. Arching, taut as a high-tension wire, as he brought her to the brink of orgasm. And collapsing in a puddle of heat as she surrendered to it.

That she was so responsive to his seduction gratified him, but it inflamed him, as well. He wasn’t made of stone, and knew he couldn’t go on indefinitely denying himself the same pleasure he afforded her.

She knew it, too, and reaching down, she closed her hand around him. With another of her engaging little sighs, she traced her fingers over his erection, glorying in its strength, cherishing its vulnerability. Did so with such reverence that she somehow managed to touch him elsewhere, in places he kept separate from other people. In his heart, in his soul.

The emotional onslaught, as singular as it was powerful, blinded him to the encroaching danger. Responsibility, finesse, all the vital prerequisites by which he defined his sexual liaisons, deserted him. He was consumed with the overwhelming need to possess and be possessed. Seeming to sense the latter, she angled her body closer and cradled him snugly between her smooth, beautiful thighs.

Her daring lured him past all caution. The blood pulsed through his loins. He could feel her damp warmth beckoning him, knew of his own near-capitulation, and with only nanoseconds to spare, he dragged himself back from the brink of insanity and sheathed himself in a condom. Then and only then did he bury himself fully within her.

Tilting her hips, she rose up to meet him, caught in his relentless rhythm, absorbing his every urgent thrust. She was sleek, hot, tight. Irresistible. She took his body hostage. Held him fast within her and rendered him mindless to everything but the rampant, inexorable surge of passion rising to a climax that threatened to destroy him.

It caught her in its fury, too. He felt her contract around him. Was dimly conscious of her muffled cries, her nails raking down his back, and then the tide crashed over him. Stripped him of power and tumbled him into helpless submission. With a groan dragged up from the depths of his soul, he flooded free.

Spent, but aware he must be crushing her with his weight, he fought to regain his breath, to regulate his racing heart. Finally, with a mighty effort, he rolled onto his side and took her with him. Glancing down, he found her watching him, her eyes soft, her lovely face flushed. A world removed from the trembling creature she’d been half an hour before.

Curious as to the reason, he said, “You were nervous when I first brought you down here, weren’t you?”

“I still am.”

It wasn’t the answer he expected, but remembering her comment about her previous experience, he thought he knew what prompted it. “If you’re thinking you disappointed me as a partner, karthula, be assured I could not ask for better.”

“It’s not that at all,” she said. “Before we made love, I was afraid I’d end up liking you too much. Now I’m afraid because I know I was right.”

Her admission splintered his heart a little, as if she’d driven a needle into it and caused a tiny wound. He was not accustomed to such quiet honesty from his partners. “Is that such a bad thing?” he asked her.

“Not necessarily bad. I knew making love with you meant taking a risk. I just didn’t realize how big a risk.”

Then don’t think of it as making love, he wanted to tell her. Be like the other women I take to bed, and see it as enjoyable sex. But she was so aglow that he couldn’t bring himself to disillusion her. Which, in itself, gave rise to another troubling stab to his hitherto impregnable heart. She brought out a protective tenderness in him that he found as frightening as it was unacceptable.

Reading his thoughts with daunting insight, she said, “Don’t worry, Niko. I’m not so naive that I think this weekend is the prelude to a long-term relationship. I’m not expecting it to end with a proposal of marriage or a ring.”

Why not?

The question so nearly escaped him that he had to bite his tongue to contain it. “I’m in no position to offer either, even if I wanted to,” he said, when he recovered himself. “My career doesn’t lend itself to that sort of commitment, and I doubt there are many women who’d put up with a husband who’s away more often than he’s at home.”

“Exactly. Realistically, neither of us is in the market for anything but a casual fling. I’m just not very good at ‘casual.’”

“There’s nothing wrong with liking the person you’re in bed with, Emily, and if I haven’t already made it clear, let me say now that I like you very much. I wouldn’t have asked you to come away with me if I didn’t.”

Her smile turned into a thinly disguised yawn. “That’s good,” she said. “I’ll sleep much better knowing that, but I need to brush my teeth first.”

“Of course. I’ll use the head—bathroom in nautical terms, in case you’re wondering—in the forward cabin.”

She slithered off the bed and disappeared, a too-fleeting vision of slender, lamplit femininity that stirred him to fresh arousal. But he had his own rituals to attend to, not the least of which was making sure the anchor was well set for the night. Nothing like having a sailboat run aground to ruin the romantic ambience.

When he rejoined her in the bed some fifteen minutes later, she lay on her side facing away from him and was sound asleep. Just as well, really. She made it too easy for him to forget the rules he’d long ago set for himself. To those he rescued—the orphans, the widows, the elderly—he gave everything of himself because they didn’t trespass into his personal life. Those he associated with the rest of the time he’d learned to keep at a safe distance.

Even though he wasn’t touching her, he lay close enough that the heat of his body coiled around her. She knew that if she turned, if she made the slightest overture, he’d take her in his arms and they’d make love again. And she couldn’t do it. She was too terrified of his power over her. Terrified that as the pleasure he gave her built to an unbearable peak, she might utter the three words guaranteed to put an end to what she had rightly termed a fling.

He might like her very much, but that was light years removed from his wanting to hear her say “I love you.” Not that she did love him. In fact, she knew very well that she did not. Could not. Because anyone with half a brain knew that blissful, incredible sex didn’t equal love.

Men have a one-track mind, she once overheard an embittered nursing colleague say. They want a woman between the sheets, and they achieve it by making you feel as if they don’t want to be anywhere else but with you—until the next day or the next week, when they move on to someone else, and you’re left feeling slightly shopworn and incredibly stupid. The only way to gain the upper hand is either to fool them into thinking you don’t care if you never see them again, or else swear off sex altogether.

Apart from her one dismal experience with the third-year medical resident whose ego had surpassed anything else he had to offer, Emily had subscribed to the latter. She would not risk her self-respect or her reputation for the sake of a tawdry one-night stand. What was best, she’d decided in what she now recognized as pathetic naiveté on her part, was to settle for nothing less than complete commitment before leaping into intimacy with a man. But that prudent argument was before Niko Leonidas swept into her life, and swept out all her preconceived notions of what was best.

Sharing the same bed with him now, and so graphically conscious of him that her skin vibrated with awareness, she forced herself to remain completely still as she waited for his breathing to settle into the deep, even rhythm that signaled sleep.

Seconds passed. Spun into long, painful minutes. Nothing broke the silence but the whisper of the sea and the equally subdued sound of his breathing. He was a very quiet sleeper, unlike his father who snored lustily when he nodded off.

Cautiously she shifted her foot; tucked her hand beneath her pillow. And waited for a sign that he was as wide-awake as she was. He did not stir. Convinced it was now safe to do so, she stopped pretending, opened her eyes and admitted to the moon-splashed night the awful truth.

She was in love with him. She had been for days. She’d committed the ultimate folly and laid on the line everything she had to give, in exchange for what she’d always known could never be more than a passing affair. And now she was paying the price.

The painful enormity of what she’d allowed to happen overwhelmed her. Tears seeped onto her pillow and silent sobs shook her body. All at once she was a child again, left with a heart full of love and no one to give it to. She wanted Niko to look at her as her father used to look at her mother, as if she was the most beautiful, fascinating creature ever to grace the earth. She wanted the magic and passion and permanence they’d known. She wanted it all, and she wanted it with Niko.

In short, she wanted what he couldn’t give her.

“Emily?” His voice swam softly out of the gloom. “Are you asleep?”

“No,” she muttered thickly, “but I thought you were.”

She heard the rustle of the bed linen, felt his hand glide over her silky nightgown and come to rest at her hip. “Anything but,” he said, his voice sinking to a husky growl. “I’m lying here thinking about you…and wanting you again.”

He inched the hem of her gown up past her knees. Past her waist. His hand ventured, warm and possessive, between her thighs. “Emily?” he said again.

Any woman with an ounce of self-preservation to her name would have slapped his hand away, but not Emily Anne Tyler. No, she melted at his touch. Rolled onto her back, let her legs fall slackly apart and advertised the fact that she was more than willing to accommodate him. Well, why not, some distant part of her brain rationalized. At this point, she had nothing left to lose and might as well hoard as many precious memories as possible of this brief enchanted interlude.

He kissed the side of her neck. Murmured in her ear all the words men were supposed to murmur to a woman they planned to seduce. Words calculated to break down her resistance, to make her compliant to his every wish. Eventually he lowered himself on top of her and, pulling her legs up around his waist, eased himself smoothly inside her. As if, she thought, struggling to retain a grip on reality, God had designed them specifically for each other.

He loved her slowly this time, transporting her in leisurely increments of sensual delight until she could hold back no longer, then supporting himself on his forearms to watch her as she climaxed. When he came, she watched him, too. Saw the grim line of his mouth as he fought a battle he hadn’t a hope of winning. Saw how, at the last moment, he closed his eyes and groaned as his body shuddered in helpless surrender. The unguarded honesty of it all made her cry again.

“What is it?” he asked, clearly appalled. “Did I hurt you? Tell me, mana mou.”

“No,” she said, because confessing the truth—that with every touch, every word, every glance, he made her love him all the more—wasn’t an option. “Making love again was so beautiful, that’s all.”

A weak excuse, but thankfully he accepted it. Cradling her so that her head rested on his shoulder and his arm kept her close, he said, “It was magnificent. It will be the next time, too.”

She was able to fall asleep on that promise, comforted by the steady beat of his heart beneath her hand and lulled by the gentle rise and fall of the sea beneath the boat.

They didn’t wake up until almost nine o’clock. After a simple breakfast of yogurt and fruit, they took their coffee up on deck. Although summer’s intense heat was long past, it was still a shorts-and-tank-top kind of day.

“By noon,” he told Emily, pulling her into the curve of his arm, “you’ll be lying on the foredeck, stripped down to your bikini.”

“Mmm.” She lifted her face to the sun. “Lolling in a bikini on a sailboat in October. Not too tough to take, I have to admit.”

“Happy you decided to come away with me?”

“Who wouldn’t be? It’s lovely here.”

Right answer, but it didn’t quite ring true. Something was bothering her. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” she said, and promptly changed the subject. “Will the water be too cold for swimming, do you think?”

“We can find out later, if you like, but it’s a bit too early yet. Emily, is there something—?”

“Early! Heavens, Niko, it’s after ten already. Do you always sleep in so late?”

“Only when I’m away on the boat. It’s my one, sure outlet of escape from the everyday routine.” He didn’t add that the constant danger inherent in his work, the risks involved, took a toll. He left that part of his life behind the second he cast off from the yacht club and took to the sea.

“Burn-out, you mean? I know what that’s like. It’s one reason I agreed to come to Greece and nurse Pavlos back to health. I needed a change of scene.”

“And the other reason?”

She chewed her lip thoughtfully. “I’d grown very fond of him during the time he was hospitalized. In a way, we’d become more like father and daughter than nurse and patient, and I didn’t feel I could abandon him.”

“More like grandfather and granddaughter, surely?”

“When you don’t have any other family, you don’t quibble about little things like that.”

A month ago, he’d have taken that remark and found any number of hidden messages in it. Now, he took it at face value.

“Even after all these years, you still miss your parents, don’t you?”

“Yes. Very much.”

“And I made it worse with my comments last night,” he muttered, cursing himself. “I tarnished your perfect memories of them.”

“Not really, because nobody’s perfect, not even my parents, for all that I tried so hard to idealize them. The truth is, I’ve sometimes thought it was as well they died young and together. They wouldn’t have dealt well with old age or being alone. And I would never have filled the emptiness left behind if only one of them had been killed in the accident.”

She captivated him with her honesty, which was pretty ironic considering his first impression of her had been that she wasn’t to be trusted. “They might not have been perfect, Emily, but they came close to it when they made you. I’m sure they loved you very much.”

“Oh, they loved me,” she said, moving away from him and gazing mistily at the blue horizon, “but they never really needed me. If you must know, that’s why I decided to become a nurse. I wanted to be needed. You don’t, though, do you?”

Her question threw him. “Why else do you think I put my life on the line to help other people?”

“Because they’re strangers who invade your professional life for just a little while. But your personal life…well, that’s different. It’s off-limits. A person only has to look at your relationship with your father, to see that.”

She saw too much, and he wouldn’t sink so low as to deny it. “Having him join the party isn’t my idea of a good time, Emily.”

She made a face. “My fault. I’m the one who mentioned him.”

“Then I suggest we make a concerted effort to get rid of him. What do you say we take the dinghy ashore and go for a walk on the island?”

“I’d love to,” she said with alacrity. “Let me get my camera.”

Her relief was palpable. Because she didn’t want his father hanging around, either, Niko wondered, or because she wanted to put distance between the two of them?

He shouldn’t have cared, one way or the other. Annoyingly he did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A GREAT suggestion, Emily concluded, watching as Niko tilted the outboard engine clear of the water and the bottom of the dinghy scraped onto the narrow strip of gravelly beach edging the island. Luxuriously comfortable though it might be, the yacht’s big drawback was that it offered no means of escape when the conversation got out of hand. And it had, dangerously so, straying close to disastrous when she foolishly brought up the business of wanting to be needed. Another few minutes and her feelings for Niko, which she was so desperately trying to suppress, would have spilled out.

Hiding behind her camera gave her the chance to regroup. She took pictures of flowers enjoying a riotous last bloom before winter: wild geraniums and gaudy poppies; daisies and ice plant in shades of mauve and white. She snapped the yacht riding peacefully at anchor in the sheltered bay. And when he least expected it, she captured images of Niko; of his dazzling smile, his chiseled profile, his lashes lowered to half-mast as he squinted against the brightness of the sparkling sea.

The atmosphere on the island was different, she realized. Freer, less soberly intense. Here, she could breathe and not have to worry about keeping up her guard. If necessary, she could put distance between her and Niko. Contrarily, because she could, she felt no need to do so.

Sensing her change of mood, he matched it with a lighthearted teasing of his own. “If you didn’t have a camera slung around your wrist, you’d be up to your neck in trouble,” he growled with mock ferocity, grabbing her before she could escape after she’d caught him unaware at the water’s edge and splashed him.

That kind of trouble she could handle. “I wish I could say I’m sorry, and mean it,” she returned cheekily, and splashed him again.

Suddenly his laughter faded and twining her hands in his, he regarded her searchingly. “I wish I could take you away for a month, instead of a weekend,” he said. “Being around you is good for me, Emily. You remind me that there’s more to living than burying myself in work. I’m a happy man when I’m with you.”

Her spirit soared at that. Could he possibly be falling for her, too?

Well, why not? Wasn’t she forever telling her patients and their families that they should never give up hope? And hadn’t she seen for herself, time and time again, that miracles did happen? Why couldn’t one come her way for a change?

“Keep looking at me like that,” he went on, his voice lowering to a thrilling purr, “and I won’t be held liable for what I might do, which would be a mistake on two counts. This beach isn’t designed for comfortable seduction, and even if it were, I didn’t bring a contraceptive with me.”

Flirting shamelessly, she glanced up at him in her best imitation of a siren bent on luring him to destruction. “Then why don’t we go back to the yacht?”

His eyes darkened, turned a deep forest-green. “Race you to the dinghy, angel.”

Love in the afternoon was different, she discovered. Sunlight pouring through the window above the bed and casting dancing reflections of the sea on the cabin ceiling brought an openness to intimacy that, at first, dismayed her because it left her with no place to hide.

He soon put paid to that nonsense. He examined her all over, from the soles of her feet to the top of her head. He found the tiny scar on her bottom where she’d fallen on broken glass at the beach when she was little, and he kissed it as if it were new and still hurting.

He paid attention to every inch of her, sometimes with his hands, sometimes with his mouth and tongue, pausing every now and then to murmur, “Do you like it when I do this?”

Like? She’d never before felt such slow, rolling awareness of herself as a woman. He made her quiver with anticipation. He brought her body to electrifying life and made it yearn and ache and throb. He made her scream softly and beg for more.

Until him, she’d never climaxed. With him, she came so quickly and with such fury that she couldn’t catch her breath.

His touch sent her flying so high, she could almost touch the heavens, and he knew it because he watched her the entire time. Knew to the second when she hovered on the brink, and tipped her over the edge into a glorious, sparkling free-fall she wished might never end.

Then, when she was dazed with exhausted pleasure and sure she didn’t have the strength to lift a finger, let alone peak again, he buried himself in her hot, sleek folds and taught her otherwise. Caught in his urgent, driving rhythm, she swooped and soared with him again to a magnificent crashing finale.

At two in the afternoon or thereabouts, they put together a snack of fruit and cheese and ate it in the shade of the canvas bimini in the cockpit. They drank a little wine, and they talked, mostly about Niko as it turned out, which inevitably meant Pavlos crept back into the conversation, too.

“Was he cruel to you?” Emily asked, when Niko spoke briefly of his unhappy childhood.

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” he said. “Far from it. I never lacked for a thing. Clothes, toys, tutors, whatever I needed, he provided. When it came to my later education, there was no limit to how far he’d go to make sure I had the best. He sent me to the most prestigious boarding school in Europe—more than one in fact, since I managed to get myself kicked out of several.”

“Then why the estrangement?”

“He didn’t understand that there was more to being a father than spending money.”

“Or else he didn’t understand that you were crying out for his love.”

“It was never about love with him. It was about power. And from his point of view, money and power are one and the same. Which is another bone of contention between us because to me, money’s merely the means to an end. If I end up without any, I’ll find a way to make more, but I’ll never let it rule my life the way it rules his.”

“Why do you think he sets such store by it?”

“Probably because he grew up without any. He was the by-product of an affair between a housemaid and the son of her millionaire employer who abandoned her when he learned she was pregnant. If you asked him what his most driving ambition had been when he was a boy, I guarantee he’d say it was to end up one of the wealthiest men in Greece, able to pick and choose his friends, his associates and, eventually, his wife.”

“He appears to have succeeded.”

Niko inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, but it took him years. He didn’t marry my mother until he was thirty-one which, back then, was considered pretty old. She was just twenty, and the only daughter of one of his biggest business rivals.”

“Is that why he married her—to score points over her father?”

“No,” he said. “He really loved her. I have to give him credit for that much.”

“What a shame he could never see you as her most lasting legacy to him.”

“I was too much the rebel, refusing to toe the Leonidas line, determined to go my own way and to hell with anyone who tried to stop me.”

He’d never been so open with her before. Was it the lazy afternoon heat or their lovemaking that made it easier for him to share his life story with her now? Whatever the reason, Emily was hungry to know everything about him and prepared to listen for as long as he was willing to talk. “Did he want you to go to university?”

“In the worst way, and was pretty convinced he could make it happen since I wouldn’t have any money of my own until I turned twenty-one. He saw a business degree as the next logical step to my joining his empire. But I got out from under his control when I joined the air force, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. After I left the service, I spent a year in England with a former UN pilot who taught me everything he knew about mercy missions, and introduced me to the finer points of the English language. After that, I came back to Greece, took over my inheritance and set up my own operation.”

“And the rest, as they say, is history?”

He stood up and stretched. “Ne—and pretty dull at that, if you ask me, not to mention a criminal waste of a beautiful afternoon. What do you say to a swim?”

He was finished baring his soul and, for now at least, she realized she’d gain nothing by pressing for more. “Okay, if you’re sure the water’s warm enough.”

“Only one way to find out, Emily,” he said, dragging her to her feet. “You coming in of your own free will, or do I throw you in?”

“At least let me change into my bikini.”

“What for?” He dropped his shorts and briefs, pulled off his T-shirt and climbed onto the swim grid in all his beautiful naked glory. “Nothing like going au naturel, as they say in polite society, especially as neither of us has anything to show that the other hasn’t already seen.”

“Once a rebel, always a rebel,” she muttered self-consciously as she peeled off her clothes.

He favored her with a lascivious grin. “I hardly expected a nurse to be so modest, my dear. Even your bottom’s blushing.”

There was only one response to that remark and she wasted no time delivering it. Bracing both hands against his chest, she shoved him into the water. He landed with a mighty splash and she followed suit before he had the chance to climb back on board and exact his revenge.

After the first chilling shock, the sea was deliciously refreshing. Heaven had never seemed so close, Emily decided, floating on her back with her hair streaming out behind her and the big blue bowl of the sky arcing overhead.

Niko, whom she’d last seen swimming in a powerful crawl toward the mouth of the bay, suddenly bobbed to the surface next to her. “You look like a mermaid,” he said. “A particularly delectable mermaid.”

And he looked like a sea god, she thought, her heart turning over at the sight of his broad, tanned shoulders, his brilliant smile and the thick lashes spiking in clumps around his remarkable green eyes. Small wonder she’d fallen in love with him. What woman in her right mind could resist him?

They climbed back on board and lay down on the foredeck to dry in the sun’s benign warmth. He’d swum farther than he intended, a strenuous workout that left him pleasantly tired and happy just to lie next to her, his limbs touching hers, his fingers brushing lightly against her arm. Not moving, not speaking, just looking into her dark blue eyes and letting utter contentment sweep over him.

Was he falling in love?

He couldn’t be. It was completely out of the question. A misguided romantic fantasy brought on by brain fatigue or some other disorder of the mind, because he absolutely refused to entertain the possibility that it might have something to do with his heart. Yet if it was so impossible, why did he suddenly hate the man who’d taken her virginity? She belonged to no one but him, and should have waited until he found her.

“What dark thoughts are chasing through your mind?” she murmured drowsily, peering at him from half-closed eyes.

The unpalatable truth rose in his throat, bitter as bile. Scowling, he said, “I have a confession to make. More than one, in fact.”

“Oh?” A shadow flitted over her face. “Such as?”

“For a start, I’m jealous of my predecessor.”

Clearly at a loss, she said, “What are you talking about?”

“I’m jealous of whoever it was that you slept with before you met me.”

“I see.” She pushed herself up on one elbow, propped her head on her hand and regarded him thoughtfully. “Should I be flattered?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never found myself in this kind of situation before.”

And that, he thought, was the whole problem in a nutshell.

Before he met her, sex had been all about mutual pleasure with no strings attached. He never lied to his willing partners, never made promises he couldn’t keep, was never intentionally cruel. But sometimes he hurt them anyway because they wanted more than he could give.

Until now. Until Emily, when his initial plan had somehow gone terribly wrong and he found himself in danger of wanting to give much more than he could ever afford.

“That doesn’t sit well with you, does it?” she said.

“No. I prefer to stick to the rules.”

“What rules?”

“Those I’ve set for myself.”

“And you’re breaking them with me?”

“Yes,” he said grimly, uncertain whether it was self-preservation or self-destruction that drove him to bare his soul so brutally. “When I first started seeing you, all I ever intended was to act as a decoy.”

“A decoy?”

He heard the wariness in her voice edging closer to outright dismay, and wished he’d kept his mouth shut. But palming her off with half-truths left him feeling dirty and unworthy of her. And even if it didn’t, he’d said too much to stop now. “Yes,” he said. “To keep you away from my father. There being no fool like an old fool, I decided to step in and save him from himself—and you—by diverting your attention from an ailing old man to one who could better please you.”

Dazed, she glanced away and focused her attention on the boat, appearing fascinated by its sleek lines, gleaming fiberglass deck and oiled teak. “So this weekend is all about proving a point?”

“No. That’s the trouble. Now it’s about you and me, and feelings I never bargained for. I tried to tell you this the other night, but I lost my nerve.”

She wasn’t listening. Instead she was scrambling to her feet and swinging her head wildly from side to side, a wounded creature desperate to escape her tormentor.

Springing to her side, he trapped her in his arms. She lashed out at him, catching him a glancing blow on the jaw. “Let me go!” she spat. “Don’t ever touch me again!”

“You’re not hearing me, Emily,” he told her urgently. “Everything’s different now.”

“Sure it is.” She was sobbing. The sound drove splinters through his heart. “You’ve finally shown your true colors.”

“No, Emily. I made a stupid mistake.”

“So you decided to make it up to me by giving me a weekend to remember? How tedious you must have found it, pretending you wanted to have sex with me.”

“I wasn’t pretending! For God’s sake, Emily, you of all people know a man can’t pretend.”

“So how did you manage? By closing your eyes and imagining I was someone else?”

He crushed her to him, shocked. “Never. It was always you. Only you, right from the start. I just didn’t realize it at the time.”

“And here I thought we’d put to rest that whole ludicrous notion that I was some sort of fortune hunter out to fleece your poor father.” She wasn’t crying now. She was encased in ice.

“We have,” he protested. “You are what you’ve always been, as beautiful on the inside as you are on the surface.”

“I don’t feel beautiful,” she said tonelessly. “I feel stupid and pathetic, because I let myself fall in love with you.”

“Then I guess we’re both stupid and pathetic, because that’s what I’m trying to say. I’m falling in love with you, too, and the damnable thing is, I don’t know what the hell to do about it.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “You get over it. We both do.”

The look on his face told her it wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. “Why should we?” he whispered against her mouth.

But the damage was done and nothing he said or did could put things right again. “Because there’s no future in it for either of us.” She pulled away just far enough to look him in the eye, then added pointedly, “Is there?”

“If you’re asking me to predict what might happen tomorrow, I can’t, Emily. All any of us ever has is today. Can’t you let that be enough?”

Temporary bliss, in exchange for long-term misery? Not a chance! She was in enough pain already, and prolonging the inevitable would merely increase the agony. “No. I made up my mind long before I met you that relationships heading nowhere are a waste of time.”

“I could change your mind, if you’d let me.”

She was terribly afraid that he could, and knew she had to get away from him before he succeeded. He was kissing her eyes, her hair, her throat. Stroking his hands down her arms and up her bare back with killing tenderness. Sabotaging her with caresses when words failed to get him what he wanted, and already her resistance was dissolving under the attack.

“I don’t want to be here with you anymore,” she said, clinging to her vanishing resolve with the desperation of a drowning woman. “Take me back to the mainland.”

“I will,” he murmured. “Tomorrow.”

“Tonight.”

“Ohi…no.” He lifted her off her feet and set her down in the cockpit. Traced his lips over her cheek and brought his mouth to hers and kissed her softly.

He made her legs shake, her insides quiver. He made her heart yearn. “Please,” she whimpered helplessly.

“Give me one last night, my Emily.”

“I can’t.”

He touched her fleetingly between the legs. “Tell me why not, when I know you want me as much as I want you.”

She shuddered, caught in the clenching grip of rising passion. “Tell me why I’m inexplicably drawn to a man who isn’t at all my kind of man,” she countered.

“And what kind of man is that?”

“The kind who’s not afraid of love. Who’s happy with a nine-to-five job and a mortgage,” she said, grasping at a truth she’d refused to acknowledge until now. “The safe kind who doesn’t need to flirt with danger all the time in order to find fulfillment.”

“Then you’re right. I’m definitely not your kind of man.”

But he pulled her closer, and the way her body tilted to meet his, welcoming the questing nudge of his erection, proclaimed otherwise. As if she’d finally found what she’d always been looking for. As if he was exactly her kind of man.

She was lost, and she knew it. The irrepressible pulse of his flesh against hers enthralled her. Lured her into forgetting how he had deceived and used her. Nothing mattered except to know again the pleasure only he could give. If, the next day or the next week, he reneged on his protestations of love, at least she’d have this weekend to remember him by.

The hunger, rapacious, insatiable, spiraled to unbearable heights. Casting aside all pretense at dignity, she sprawled on the cockpit cushions. At once, he was on top of her. Thrusting inside her, hot, heavy, demanding.

Perfectly attuned, they rose and sank together, pausing at just the right moment to drown in each other’s gaze. There was no need for words to justify a decision that went against everything they’d just said to each other. They had come together because they could not stay apart. It was as simple as that.

CHAPTER NINE

WHEN they finally stirred and she mentioned that she’d like to freshen up, Niko ran a critical hand over his jaw, said he could use a shower and shave himself and told her not to rush. “We have all the time in the world,” he said. “We’ll have mezedes and wine and watch the moon rise, then eat dinner when the mood takes us.”

So she indulged herself in a leisurely bath, and shampooed the saltwater out of her hair. After toweling herself dry, she massaged lotion into her sun-kissed skin, spritzed a little cologne at her elbows and behind her knees and put on the silk caftan, glad she’d had the good sense to smuggle it aboard. He’d said he was in love with her, but she sensed he’d made the admission reluctantly, and pinned little hope on his feeling the same way in the morning. If so, and if this turned out to be their last night together, she intended it to be one neither of them would soon forget.

Nor did they, but not for the reasons she’d supposed. The very second she joined him in the main cabin, she knew their plans had changed. He’d showered—his damp hair attested to that—but he hadn’t shaved. There was no sign of the appetizers he’d mentioned, no tempting aromas drifting from the oven, no wine chilling. All that lay on the table was his cell phone, and one look at his face told her it had been the bearer of bad news. “Something’s happened,” she said, a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Yes. I’m afraid we have to head back right away.”

“Is it Pavlos?”

He shook his head. “I just got word from my director of operations that we’ve lost contact with one of our pilots in north Africa. He was scheduled to pick up an injured Red Cross worker from a refugee camp. He never showed up.”

“What can you do about it?”

He stared at her as if she wasn’t in command of all her faculties. “Go find him. What did you think—that I’d sit back and leave him stranded in the desert?”

“No, of course not.” She swallowed, stung by his brusque tone. “Is there any way that I can help?”

“Change into something warmer, for a start. That thing you’ve got on won’t do. Quite a stiff onshore breeze has sprung up. It’ll be a chilly trip back to the mainland.”

She must have looked as forlorn as she felt because when he spoke again, his voice softened. “I know you’re disappointed, Emily. I am, too. This isn’t how I’d foreseen the evening playing out. But when situations like this come up, I’m afraid everything else has to go on hold. A man’s life could be at stake.”

“I understand,” she said. And she did. Completely. But what about his life? How safe would he be, rushing off to the rescue without knowing the danger he might be facing? “Will it be risky, your going looking for him?”

“It’s possible, but so what? Risks come with the job. You get used to it.”

You, maybe, but not me, she thought, the harsh reality of his vocation hitting home with a vengeance for the first time and filling her with apprehension. “How will you know where to start looking for him?”

“If he’s turned on his epurb—electronic positioning beacon, that is—it’ll lead me straight to him. If not, I’m familiar with the area, I know where he was headed and his coordinates before he lost contact.”

“What if you still don’t find him?”

“That’s not an option,” he said flatly. “He’s just a kid of twenty-three, the eldest of four children and the only son of a widow. It’s my job to locate him and bring him home to his family. They need him.”

“But what if—?”

He silenced her with a swift, hard kiss. “No ‘what ifs.’ It’s not the first time I’ve had to do this, and it won’t be the last. I’ll be back before you know it—by tomorrow night at the latest, but we really need to get going now if I’m to be ready to set out at first light in the morning.”

Set out to where? Some vast arid region miles from civilization? Some rebel stronghold where human life didn’t count for a thing? “Then I’d better get organized,” she said, and turned away before he saw the desolation in her eyes.

“At least my father will be glad to have you back earlier than expected.”

“I suppose.”

He came up behind her and wound his arms around her waist. “Did I mention how lovely you look, Emily?” he said softly against her hair.

On the outside, maybe. But inside, she was falling apart.

The nurse who’d replaced her was so happy to be relieved of her job, she practically flew out of the villa before Emily stepped in. “Is impossible!” she screeched, indignation fracturing her English almost past recognition. “He die, then me niazi! I do not care. One day more, I break his neck. Adio. Please not call me again. Apokliete!”

“Have a nice night,” Emily said wearily, as the front door slammed shut in her face.

Pavlos didn’t even pretend to hide his glee when she appeared at breakfast the next morning. “Didn’t take you long to come to your senses, did it, girl?” he crowed.

“Try to behave yourself for a change, Pavlos,” she snapped. “I’m in no mood for your shenanigans.”

He smirked into his coffee cup. “That bad, was it? Could have told you it would be.”

“For your information, I had a wonderful time. The only reason I came back early is that your son has gone searching for a young pilot lost somewhere over the Sahara.”

His derision faded into something approaching concern, but he covered it quickly. “Damned fool! Serve him right if he got himself killed.”

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear you say that.”

“Why not?” he retorted. “Ignoring the facts isn’t going to change them. Wherever the latest hotbed of unrest shows up, you can bet he’ll be there, and one of these days he’ll push his luck too far.”

Ill-timed though it might be, the truth of his answer could not be denied, and how she got through the rest of the day she didn’t know. The minutes dragged, the hours lasted a small eternity. Morning became afternoon, then evening and, all too soon, night. Every time the phone rang, her heart plummeted. And sank lower still when the call brought no news of Niko.

“Better get used to this if you plan on sticking with him,” Pavlos advised her, as the dinner hour came and went without any word.

“The same way you have?” she shot back. “You talk a good line, Pavlos, but you’re as worried about him as I am.”

“Not me,” he huffed, but there was no real conviction in his tone and his gaze wandered to the clock on the wall every bit as often as hers did. “Where did you say he’d gone?”

“North Africa—the desert—I’m not sure exactly.”

“Hmm.” He drummed his arthritic old fingers on the edge of the table. “That’s a lot of ground for one man to cover.”

She closed her eyes. Fear beat a tattoo in her blood.

“Go to bed, Emily,” Pavlos said with uncommon gentleness. “I’ll wait up and let you know if we hear anything.”

As if she could sleep! “I’m not tired. You should rest, though.”

But neither made any move. Anxiety thick as molasses held them paralyzed.

Just after eleven o’clock, the phone shrieked into the silence one last time. Hands shaking, she grabbed it on the first ring. “Niko?”

She heard his smile. “Who else were you expecting at this hour?”

“No one…you…but it grew so late and you hadn’t called—”

“You’re going to have to learn to believe what I tell you, Emily,” he said. “I promised I’d be back today, and I am.”

“Yes.” Giddy with relief, she reached for Pavlos’s hand and squeezed it. “Where are you now?”

“At the office. I’ll be heading home as soon as I’ve filed my report.”

“And the man you went to find?”

“Had a fire in his control panel that knocked out his communications system. He made an emergency landing on a deserted Second World War airstrip. There are dozens of them, hundreds even, all over the Sahara. The one he chose lay nearly two hundred kilometers from where he was supposed to be, but his epurb was still working and led me straight to him.”

“And he’s okay?”

“He’s fine, though I wish I could say the same for the aircraft. But the good news is, we picked up the man he was supposed to bring back and got him to a hospital, albeit twenty-four hours later than expected.”

“You’ve put in a long day and must be exhausted.”

“Nothing an early night won’t fix. I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“I can’t wait,” she said. “I missed you.”

“Same here, karthula.” His yawn echoed down the line. “I’d come over now, but—”

“Don’t even think about it. Go home and catch up on your sleep.”

“Will do. Kali nikhta, my sweet Emily.”

“Kali nikhta,” she replied. “Good night.”

In the days following, she should have been completely happy. Although he vetoed any suggestion that he should terminate her employment, Pavlos was on the road to recovery and didn’t need her as he once had. Accepting that she and his son were an item, he compromised by letting her take the weekends off.

She lived for the sheer heaven of those two days and nights. Niko’s spacious penthouse in Kolonaki was their retreat. The living and dining rooms and en suite guest room opened onto a terrace. A small library and starkly modern kitchen comprised the rest of the main floor, with a gorgeous master suite upstairs. The decor was as spare and elegant as he himself, lacking any of the usual personal touches like photographs, but the huge collection of books and CDs told her much about his tastes and hinted at a man content with his own company.

He did his best to please her during their time together; to make it seem they were like any other couple in love. Working around his erratic schedule, they explored the countryside, going by scooter if the weather allowed but, with the cooler temperatures of November, more often by car.

They hiked in the pine-covered hills behind the town, took a picnic hamper and sailed down the coast of the Attic peninsula. Sometimes, they drove to out-of-the-way villages where they sampled wonderful local dishes in quaint, unpretentious tavernas whose walls were lined with wine barrels. Other times, they went into Athens and dined in fine style on the best the city had to offer. They danced cheek to cheek in the Grande Bretagne Hotel; made passionate love in his king-size bed.

If he had to break a date—and he did, often—he sent her flowers, or texted messages to her in the night so that she found them on waking. In return, she tried to keep her anxiety under control when he was away, but never knew a moment’s real peace until he returned. She couldn’t sleep and walked the floor half the night. She couldn’t eat because anxiety robbed her of her appetite. Noticing, Pavlos never missed the chance to tell her she was making the biggest mistake of her life.

She learned to live with all of it because the alternative—to put an end to it—was unthinkable.

Once, when Niko discovered he’d left his cell phone on his desk at work and had to go back to get it, he took her with him and showed her around the private airfield that served as his base of operations. The flat-roofed office building had only four rooms but was equipped with the latest in electronic equipment. Probably the aircraft sitting on the tarmac were, too, but when Emily first saw them, what struck her most forcibly was how flimsy they seemed.

“Are they what you use to fly overseas?” she asked, trying to mask her dismay.

Discerning it anyway, Niko laughed and said, “Were you expecting hot air balloons, my darling?”

“No, but these things are so small and…old-fashioned.”

“Old-Fashioned?” He regarded her in mock horror over the top of his aviator sunglasses.

“Well, yes. They’ve each got two sets of those spider-leg propellor things stuck on the front.”

“I know,” he said dryly. “They’re what get them off the ground and keep them in the air.”

“But why wouldn’t you use jets? Surely they’re faster?”

“Faster, but not nearly as versatile or fuel-efficient. Twin-engine piston aircraft like these don’t require nearly as long a runway as a jet, can land just about anywhere and fly at a much lower altitude.” He eyed her mischievously. “Would you like me to take you up in one and show you what it can do?”

“No, thanks,” she said hurriedly. “I’ll take your word for it.”

As they were leaving, they ran into Dinos Melettis, Niko’s second-in-command. “Bring her to dinner,” he insisted, after the introductions were made. “Come today. We have nothing on the board until later in the week, which makes it a good night to relax with friends, and Toula would love to meet the lady in your life. Toula,” he added to Emily in an aside, “is my wife.”

They accepted the invitation and had a delightful evening. “Never before has Niko brought a ladyfriend to our home,” Toula confided to Emily in her careful English. “He is very enamored of you, I think.”

The way he pressed his knee against hers under cover of the table and muttered between courses that he couldn’t wait to get her alone again, Emily thought so, too. Yet for all that the passion between them burned brighter by the day, not once in all those weeks did they talk about the future. To do so would have shattered a present made forever uncertain by the demands of his job.

Although Emily did her best to live with that, what she couldn’t get over, what terrified her, was the nature of the work that took him away from her, and the fact he always assigned himself to the most dangerous missions.

When she dared to ask him why, he said, “Because I have the most experience and the least to lose.”

“But what about Vassili?” she pressed, referring to another colleague they’d bumped into one day at a kafenion in Athens. “You told me he’s one of the most skilled pilots you’ve ever come across.”

“He also has a wife and two-year-old son at home,” Niko replied.

His answer and all it implied chilled her to the bone.

One Sunday evening in mid November, they stood on the terrace outside his penthouse, sipping cognac and admiring the night view of Athens spread out below. But even though Niko appeared perfectly relaxed and content, a shimmering tension emanated from him, one Emily now recognized all too well, and she braced herself for what she knew was coming.

He didn’t leave her in suspense very long. “I’m off again tomorrow,” he said, as deceptively casual as if he were planning to play golf, but then added guardedly, “I might be gone a bit longer than usual.”

In other words, this undertaking was riskier than most. “How much longer?”

“Three days, possibly four, but you can count on my being home by the weekend.”

“Where to this time?”

“Africa again.”

A typically ambiguous reply. He never elaborated about his exact itinerary, was always deliberately vague about why he had to go. Delivering food and clothing to an orphanage…survival kits to a village cut off by a landslide…a medivac rescue…supplies to a field hospital, he’d say offhandedly when she questioned him, then quickly change the subject.

But she knew it was never as straightforward or simple as he made it sound. If it were, he wouldn’t come back looking so drawn. He wouldn’t wake up bathed in sweat from a nightmare he refused to talk about. He wouldn’t reach for her in the night as if she was all that stood between him and an abyss of utter despair.

“Where in Africa?” she persisted now.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters.”

He hesitated and she hung on tenterhooks, waiting for his answer. When he told her, it was so much worse than anything she’d let herself contemplate, was such a hellhole of violence, devastation and peril, that she felt sick to her stomach.

She knew how she was supposed to respond. Calmly. With acceptance. And she couldn’t do it. Not this time. Instead she started to cry.

“Ah, Emily,” he murmured and held her close. “Don’t do this. We still have tonight.”

But she’d broken the rules and commited the cardinal sin of wanting tomorrow, and tonight was no longer enough.

Her tears caught him off guard. Angry with himself for distressing her, and with her, too, because she’d known from the first the career he’d chosen for himself, he said, “This is why, until now, I’ve avoided serious involvement with a woman. When I take off on assignment, my attention has to focus on people whose lives, for one reason or another, are in jeopardy. Worrying about you is a distraction I neither need nor can afford.”

“I know.” She swiped at her tears and attempted a valiant smile. “I’m being selfish and unreasonable. Sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I’m not usually so emotional.”

She hadn’t been during the early days of their affair, he had to admit. Lately, though, the smallest thing seemed to upset her. Just last week, he’d gone to pick her up at the villa and found her all teary-eyed over a bird that had flown into a window and broken its neck. He wasn’t very happy about the poor thing’s untimely end, either, but she knew every bit as well as he did that death was part of life and didn’t differentiate between old and young, guilty or innocent.

“If this is harder than you thought it would be and want out,” he said now, “just say so. I’ll understand.”

She closed her eyes against another bright gleam of tears and shook her head. “More than anything else, I want you.”

“Even with all the baggage I bring with me?”

“Even then.”

He wanted her, too. Enough that he’d willfully overstepped the limitations he’d imposed on his personal life prior to knowing her. And at that moment, with her body haloed in the nimbus of light from the city, and her beautiful face upturned to his in vulnerable despair, he had never wanted her more. “Then come with me now,” he whispered, drawing her inside and up the spiral staircase to the bedroom. “Let’s not waste the few hours remaining before I have to leave you.”

That night, unlike some when his desire for her overrode any attempt at finesse, he loved her at leisure. Caring only about pleasing her and driving the demons of fear from her mind, he kissed her all over. He seduced her with his hands, with his tongue. He hoarded the scent and texture of her skin. He watched the slow, hot flush of passion steal over her, tasted the honeyed warmth between her thighs. He commited to memory the tight rosy buds of her nipples and the little cry she made when she came.

When at last he entered her, he did so slowly. Wished he could remain forever locked within her tight, silken warmth. And when his body betrayed him, as it always did, he surrendered all that he was or ever wanted to be. “S’agapo, chrisi mou kardhia,” he groaned. “I love you, Emily.”

He awoke just after dawn, left the bed quietly and in order not to disturb her, took his clothes and went to the guest bathroom to shower and prepare for the day ahead. When he was done, he returned to the master suite and stood a moment, watching her sleep.

Early sunlight caught the sweep of her eyelashes. Cast a pearly shadow along the line of her collarbone. Her hair fell in captivating disorder over the pillow. Her arm reached across to his side of the bed as if seeking him.

He wanted to touch her. Put his mouth on hers and whisper her name. And knew he could not, because doing so would make it impossible for him to leave her.

Turning away, he picked up his bag and quietly let himself out of the penthouse.

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