Greek Affairs: To Take a Bride: The Markonos Bride / The Greek Tycoon's Reluctant Bride / Greek Doctor, Cinderella Bride

Her teeth buried themselves in her bottom lip when it suddenly occurred to her that it wasn’t even coming light yet. Could she have got her timing all wrong? Putting her foot back on the ground, she squinted at her watch but it was too dark to read the tiny silver face.

A sigh shook her. She really should turn back.

But she didn’t want to turn back.

She did not want to be alone in that hotel bedroom tormenting herself with things she had no right to feel any more! Being out here was different because while she was using up energy she wasn’t thinking. She wasn’t scared for her safety—not on this tiny island where the people were more honest and upright and true than a monastery of monks!

But standing on a rough-hewn hillside while it was still dark was beginning to feel just a bit spooky. If anyone happened to catch her skulking around they were going to think that she was a bit spooky too.

A soft giggle broke from her. It was crazy to do it but she suddenly saw the humour of it, the total juvenile silliness of being out here at all!

Then something warm touched her shoulder and she let out an ear-piercing shriek. It was a bat—a bat! she told herself, spinning around to check out that theory, only to have the breath fly from her body when she found she was staring at the tall, dark figure of a man dressed in ghostly grey.

CHAPTER FOUR

ONE of her hands shot up to press against her chest where her heart was hammering. ‘Andreas!’ she gasped out. ‘You scared the life out of me!’ ‘My apologies,’ he said.

He was standing barely two feet away from her but how he’d managed to get that close without her hearing him was enough to send cold shivers chasing up and down Louisa’s spine.

‘What are you doing out here?’ he demanded. ‘Are you out of your mind, Louisa, to be walking about on your own at three-thirty in the morning?'

Three-thirty? ‘I thought it was four-thirty,’ she mumbled, dragging her hand away from her pounding chest to take another look at her watch. She still couldn’t read the tiny silver face but a sinking feeling inside was telling her she must have reset it to the wrong time as she’d flown in to Athens yesterday.

‘Does an hour make a difference? It is still dark out here!'

‘It does to the dawn,’ she murmured faintly. ‘I wanted to watch the sun come up.'

The way he pulled in a deep breath told her he did not think that an adequate excuse. But she’d always loved to watch the sun rise and set in Greece; surely he must remember that?

‘So what’s your reason for being out here?’ Looking up, she all but threw the question at him. Then another thought hit her. ‘You haven’t been following me, have you?'

‘Oh, yes,’ he ground out. ‘I spent the night camped outside your window, waiting for the moment you would decide to do something as stupid as this.'

His sarcasm hit the spot it was meant to. Stuffing her hands into the baggy pockets of her white cotton trousers, Louisa snapped her lips together and glared down at her sandaled feet. The raw tension flitting between them was suffocating, the rumbling tumble of emotions put there because of that totally uncalled for, totally unwarranted—

‘I was running,’ he pushed out.

Running, she repeated to herself and at last took notice of what he was wearing, resentful blue eyes shifting from her feet to his. His running shoes were old and scuffed. Grey cotton jogging bottoms covered his long, powerful legs, with telling sweat marks darkening the fabric in certain places, especially around the tightly packed bowl of his hips, where—

Mouth paper-dry, she dragged her gaze upwards. He was still panting a little from his run up the hill and she felt the full visual impact of his hard male torso trapped inside a damp grey T-shirt that clung so tightly it could pass for skin.

‘On the beach,’ he added, and she missed his new husky tone as her eyes clung to the moisture glossing his strong brown throat. Her tongue snaked out. There was a sudden tense movement of his muscular breastplate which dragged her eyes down to it.

‘I was on the way back to the villa when I saw you stumble ahead of me on the path—Stop looking at me like that, agape mou,’ he said abruptly. ‘It is dangerous …'

Startled, she flicked her eyes back to his. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even being sardonic. Every nerveend in her body grew stretched and tense. Tugging in a breath, she felt a flush of colour rush into her cheeks and wanted to drag her eyes away from him but she couldn’t because this warm, dark, very physical man was the whole reason she’d made the impulsive decision to walk out at this ridiculous time of the night! She had not been able to lie in that bed without thinking about him being there with her.

Dear God, she thought helplessly. What a confession to make.

‘I’ll go back …’ Jerking into movement, she sidestepped around him.

‘I will walk with you.’

‘I don’t want you to.’

‘It was not a request, yineka mou,’ he said coolly. ‘I am not your wife!’ she flicked out. ‘What are you, then?’

The heck if she knew, Louisa thought angrily. Not his wife, not free and single.

Pinning her lips together, she refused to answer and just took off down the slope, walking quickly—carelessly—because she needed to get as far away from him as she could before she did something really stupid and told him what was—

The hand closing around one of her wrists pulled her to an abrupt standstill. ‘Don’t be more foolish than you have been already,’ Andreas said harshly. ‘This path is treacherous.'

Panicked—spooked beyond any sight of reason because she knew what was going to happen next and that it was her own crazy weakness that was driving it—Louisa tried to wrench her captured wrist free. When he refused to let go of it she made the big mistake of swinging round to glare at him. Her troubled little world tilted as she took in his full six feet three inches of lean, sleek, muscular height. The eyes, the hair, the fabulous bone structure, the gorgeous, gorgeous sensual mouth. His hair was damp—spiked, like the eyelashes that framed his glinting dark eyes and the few curls of hair she could see clustered around the V-neck of his shirt. Trickles of sweat were still trailing down each taut cheek and the strong column of his neck and her tongue moistened with a desire to reacquaint herself with its clean, salty taste.

‘Please,’ she begged in a low, husky groan as the breath came and went from her body, the darkness surrounding her beginning to thicken with a new sultry heat.

‘Louisa …’ he breathed tensely. ‘Don’t do this.’

He knew what was happening to her. The glitter in his eyes and the taut set of his mouth told her so and she choked out a small whimper because she knew it was already too late. She should not have looked at him. She should not have let him see what was tormenting her! Knowledge brought intimacy and intimacy brought a complete collapse of all that was sensible and sane the way it had with that kiss they’d fallen into at the hotel.

‘I have to go …’ She tried to pull free again, desperation making her voice shake.

He muttered something in Greek then pulled her towards him. She felt the full burning heat of him as she made impact with his chest. She looked up, was instantly trapped by dark eyes swirling with an angry glint. She watched his damp brown throat move up and down as he swallowed before his tense lips parted so he could speak.

But she didn’t want him to speak. She didn’t want him to say anything. She just wanted to—

On another choking groan she gave in to what was driving her and reached up to hook a hand around his neck so she could bring his mouth down onto hers because that was what she wanted him to do with that sensual mouth!

Sensation flashed across her senses. It had been bad enough the first time when they’d kissed in the hotel car park; this time she just did not have a single ounce of control. She wanted him. She’d always wanted Andreas! He was a cross she had to bear because he was her first love, her only love—who really knew what made her this vulnerable to him?

Who knew what made her cling to and kiss him with a wild, hot, begging urgency that drove her tongue between his lips and sent her eager body arching into the hardness of his? All she did know was that it took only seconds for the whole thing to make the giant leap back through five years to a place in time when this explosive kind of passion had been normal to them.

The clean, damp smell of him permeated all around her. It was so exciting she just couldn’t keep still. When his hands made a compulsive slide down her body she dragged her mouth away so she could lick that warm, salty gloss from his throat and heard him hiss out something very rude.

Then he sent his hands thrusting up beneath her T-shirt, stroking her smooth naked back, and pressed her even closer. His heart was thundering, the bowl of his hips filling with that potent force that made her cling all the more desperately to him. She could not get close enough, could not taste enough of him.

With a fevered whisper of, ‘I want you,’ she went back to his mouth.

He took the kiss over and lost them both in the pleasure of it, the hungry stab of their tongues growing greedier and more demanding as the whole thing rushed on. Maybe the darkness helped, the feeling that they were alone in the world as they stood there on the side of the hill.

Then it was gone.

Andreas was the one to stop it. He was the one to push her away from him yet again. He was the one to spin his back to her while all Louisa could do was to stand there gasping and trembling with shock at the loss.

‘If you want sex that badly, then I am more than happy to provide it,’ he rasped out, twisting back to catch her pained flinch. ‘But not here on a dusty track, rutting like a pair of goats.'

‘Why not?’ Louisa challenged shrilly. ‘It was pretty close to how it happened the first time between us. You did not seem so picky then!'