His Love-Child: The Greek Tycoon's Love-Child / The Spaniard's Love-Child / The Millionaire's Love-Child

Willow dropped the bottle in the sink at the sound of the deep masculine voice and spun around. Her lips parted but no sound came out. Walking towards her was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Tall and casually dressed in softly pleated cream trousers and a blue buttoned-down shirt, he was big and bronzed and radiated energy like an electrical storm. Straight black hair was cut in a well-groomed, if slightly long, style that gave him a raffish air.

He was every teenage romantic fantasy rolled into one. The slow, intimate curl of his lips as he smiled made her heart race out of control and her stomach flutter in the most alarming way. For a moment time stood still and she was completely disorientated.

She had read about the thunderbolt of love at first sight, but had doubted it existed. Then her eyes met his and she saw her own reflection in the dark liquid depths and knew that it was true. Her eyes widened and a frisson shivered through her body as she thought he saw through to her soul, so intense was the connection.

She heard him speak but her breath locked in her throat and she was incapable of making a response. She simply stared, excitement sizzling through her. She had never felt like this in her life before; it had to be love, she thought impulsively. What else could it be? Later, much later, she would realise her mistake…

When the woman turned around Theo was shocked. Brilliant blue eyes blazed into his but the eyes were ringed with thick black kohl and even thicker mascara. Garish blue eye-shadow coated her heavy lids and her mouth was a gash of red. Her face, heavily covered in make-up, was a complete contrast to her pale skin tone.

Her shoulders were bare and as pale as her legs. His gaze dropped lower to the soft curve of pert breasts, which were blatantly displayed by her metallic silver bra, and lower still to her flat stomach and the indentation of her navel, which the apology for a skirt she wore could not hide. Then he saw the jewel in her belly button and he gulped. Bad make-up aside, the woman was sex on legs.

‘A beautiful girl like you should not be hiding in the kitchen,’ he said, stopping a foot away. ‘I am Theo Kadros, Anna’s brother, and you are…?’ He paused and held out his hand. He noticed that her eyes were even more incredibly blue close up and he thought they could not possibly be real. But right at that moment he didn’t care; it was her body that was driving him crazy. As the pause lengthened she simply stared at him and he added, ‘Are you staying here now?’ Maybe she was the new student. ‘Or have I conjured you up in my imagination, a legendary Mycenaean beauty,’ he teased, ‘and you can’t speak?’ He smiled, her fabulous eyes widened and she blinked.

‘My name is Willow, and, yes, I am staying here,’ said a cool polite voice. A slender elegant white hand was formally held out to his. He took it and her touch electrified him.

‘Your name suits you,’ he drawled throatily, his dark eyes sweeping down her shapely body. His iron-clad rule not to get involved with Anna’s house mates flew right out of the window. ‘So will you dance with me, Willow?’

‘I don’t think I can,’ she said, her voice soft and low. ‘Not the way they are in there.’ And she tilted her head towards the door, her long, silken hair gliding over one shoulder with the gesture.

‘Then let me teach you my way,’ Theo murmured, and he didn’t just mean dance. Beneath the ton of make-up her features were even, her nose small and straight, her lips full and luscious. In fact she was quite stunningly beautiful, he thought. He wanted her with a hunger that was turning him inside out. The fact that she appeared to have no dress sense faded into insignificance. His body had taken over his mind and he didn’t give a damn.

He held her in his arms, ignoring the frenzied antics of the other dancers, and she flowed against him as if she were made for him. He buried his head in her glorious hair and it smelt of fresh apples. She had a unique personal scent like no perfume he had ever known. Their conversation was limited because of the noise of the music, but he did discover she was studying English. He made her laugh with his stories and sigh with the subtle caress of his hands against her slender body. Finally, when he asked her to share a drink with him somewhere a little quieter, her hand trustingly in his, she followed where he led.

Opening his eyes, Theo stretched all six feet four of his bronzed body, a contented sigh escaping him. He felt great, better than great—magnificent, and it was all down to the lovely Willow. Immediately he became aroused again. She was his dream woman, and she had fulfilled his every fantasy. He licked his lips. He could still taste her on his tongue, feel the perfect rose-tipped nipples filling his mouth, and the exquisite length of her long legs wrapped around his hard body. The amazing tightness of her sheathing him. Her keening little cries when they’d climaxed together, and her eager, if somewhat surprised, response when he had led her slowly into ever more erotic ways of making love. If she had not been so wildly responsive he might have thought she had never had a man before.

Yes, breaking up with Dianne was the best thing he had ever done. Willow was much more to his liking. A perfect replacement. He rolled onto his side, reaching for her, and then he realised the bed was empty. She was probably in the bathroom. At one point last night she had briefly left him and had returned with her face washed clean of make-up. Theo had been stunned by her natural beauty and had taken her all over again.

Thinking about it now, he threw back the sheet, swung his long legs off the bed, and stood up, his magnificent body fully aroused. Then he remembered—she wouldn’t be in the bathroom. He felt almost like a teenager again, a broad, anticipatory grin illuminating his handsome face.

As the light of dawn had filtered into the bedroom, Willow had eagerly agreed to his suggestion to spend the weekend with him, but not under the curious eyes of his sister. He had agreed and let her slip back to her own room to get ready, arranging to meet her downstairs at nine. Theo was sure the rest of the house mates would still be asleep after the party and they could slip away unnoticed.

Although the thought of sharing a shower with Willow held great appeal, the thought of the days, and nights, ahead held even more. He cast a reminiscent smile back at the rumpled bed, saw the blood stain and froze…

Oh, hell! She couldn’t possibly have been a virgin? No. He shook his dark head dismissing the notion. It wasn’t possible, not dressed the way she had been last night. Or the fact that she had fallen into bed with him within an hour of their meeting. Anyway, Anna had told him that the new girl was doing a postgraduate course so she had to be at least twenty-two. There must be another explanation for it. He glanced around the room, and only then did he register the time: eleven o’clock. Oh, hell! He cursed again; he had overslept for the first time in years. Jet lag had obviously caught up with him—that and his energetic lovemaking with Willow most of the night.

Dashing into the shower, he told himself not to panic. After the marvellous night they had shared she would still be waiting for him downstairs, he was sure. Theo’s head was full of plans to introduce the beautiful Willow to all the finer things in life, himself included. He would be her style guru and take her to the best beauticians and dress her in designer gowns so she could truly fulfil her magnificent potential.

Five minutes later, dressed in denim jeans and a black polo shirt, he strolled confidently into the kitchen. Anna and her two friends, Maggie and Jo, sat at the table. A fourth, blonde girl whom Theo had never met before was also seated. She must be a hanger-on from the party, he assumed.

‘Hello, Theo. Sleep well?’ Anna greeted him. ‘Sit down and I’ll get you a coffee—you look as if you need it.’

Doing as she said, he joined them at the scrubbed pine table and listened in to their post-mortem on the night before. Finally, after drinking a second cup of Anna’s strong brew, he asked the question that was uppermost in his mind, hopefully without raising his sister’s suspicions. ‘So where is your new tenant? I think she said her name was Willow. Tall with black hair. I met her in the kitchen last night.’

All four girls started to laugh and the blonde answered. ‘I’m the new tenant, Emma. You must mean The Mole, and she’s gone.’

Disappointment hit him like a punch in the stomach, and he wanted to yell, Gone where? But, hiding his shock at the information, Theo queried lightly, ‘The Mole? Why do you call her that?’ Willow had lied to him. She was not the new student in the house, and she had obviously left without saying a word to him. He told himself not to worry—after all, Anna and her friends knew who she was. With a bit of careful questioning it should not be too hard to find out where Willow was and get her back, and he wanted her back.

‘She and I attended the same convent boarding-school together. It was popular with families in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Mole was Willow’s nickname,’ Emma answered. ‘Think Wind in the Willows and with a name like Willow and all that black hair, it was obvious. She was much smaller then and had her head buried in a book all the time, so the name sort of stuck, I suppose. She was four or five years behind me, and never had much to say. I don’t really know her all that well. We tried our best to get her involved last night but without much luck; she vanished about midnight to her room.’

Theo stilled. Not her room, his. The mention of a convent school made him feel decidedly queasy. But Theo did not betray what he was thinking. ‘She didn’t look much like a mole to me, with a jewel in her belly and a skirt that barely covered her buttocks,’ he drawled sardonically.

The laughter erupted again and this time Anna answered. ‘Well, it was a Tarts and Vicars party, not that you would notice, Theo.’

‘A Tarts and Vicars…’ he repeated, his darkly handsome face creasing in a frown. ‘You mean you deliberately dressed up like tarts?’ he asked angrily, amazed that his own sister could be so dumb. Surely she knew what kind of signal scanty clothes sent out to the male sex.

‘Yes.’ Anna grinned at him. ‘But that doesn’t mean we are. So you can get your older-brother disapproving scowl off your face.’

The trouble was, Theo realised belatedly, he had reacted with just such a baseless foundation last night when he had seen the lovely Willow, and he wasn’t proud of the fact.

‘As for The Mole… Willow Blain,’ Emma amended when he shot her a dark glance, ‘I did my best to get her involved and lent her a stick-on belly-button gem and some of my clothes so she would blend in, but—’ she glanced down at her own body, and then flirtatiously back at Theo ‘—as you can see I’m quite small and I could not believe how tall Willow had grown in the years since we last met.’

Theo’s memory summoned up all too vividly Willow’s tall, lithe body. The brilliant blue eyes and skin as smooth as silk, and his body immediately reacted with shocking enthusiasm. But his incisive brain also reminded him of the face scrubbed free of make-up, and the stained bed, and just as quickly his heated response was quenched. Anger and confusion raged though him, the latter emotion not one he was familiar with. When he could trust his voice he asked abruptly, ‘So Willow is not at university with you?’ He rose to his feet. Theo suddenly had a horrible premonition he was not going to like what he was about to hear.

‘Good heavens, no,’ Emma said with a giggle. ‘She was only here because my father has known Mrs Blain for years; she is employed by the diplomatic corps and is in India at the moment. Anyway, my dad asked if we could put Willow up for the night, because her mother did not like the idea of her being on her own in a London hotel, especially as it was her eighteenth birthday. She only left school yesterday and she had to catch a flight out of Heathrow this morning to join her mother.’

‘Why are you so interested, Theo?’ Anna asked, her brown eyes, full of merriment, resting on his face. ‘Surely you didn’t fancy her? Especially when the lovely Dianne has been on the telephone countless times already this morning. I think Willow took the first call before she left and I have fielded the rest. You’d better ring Dianne back; she was beginning to sound frantic.’

Not half as frantic as Theo felt. His stomach churned and he was savagely angry with the four grinning girls, but even more so with himself. Theo could not believe he had been so arrogantly self-centred and had seduced a beautiful, innocent young girl into his bed without a second thought. How could he have been so blind not to have seen that, beneath the appalling make-up and clothes, Willow was barely eighteen.

‘Theo,’ Anna prompted, ‘are you going to ring Dianne?’

‘No. We split up, and if she calls tell her I am out.’ Glad of the excuse and sick to his stomach, Theo stormed out of the kitchen, and the house.

CHAPTER TWO

SEATED at the circular dining table in a conference room of an exclusive London hotel, Willow wished she could just get up and walk out. Unfortunately her publishing company had insisted she attend. Her third novel, A Class Act Murder, had been nominated for the Crime Writer’s Prize, and Willow stood a good chance of winning.

More importantly, an appointment had been arranged at five this evening for Willow to meet American producer, Ben Carlavitch, to discuss the proposal of buying the film rights to the book. If by some miracle Willow won the prize it would ensure she got a much better deal.

Three days ago, Willow had been thrilled when Louise, her editor, had informed her about meeting Carlavitch. It had meant staying in London overnight, but excitedly she had agreed. However, Willow was now beginning to wish she hadn’t bothered.

She glanced around the room full of intense literary people, and felt hopelessly out of place. She had left school at eighteen and had become a writer more by accident than design. She loved reading, especially crime novels, and at the age of twenty she had decided to try to write one. Now, seven years and three books later, she found herself, much against her better judgement, in the spotlight.

The award winner was to be announced after lunch, and Willow wished it were over and done with. She felt pretty certain that she had no hope of winning; the other five nominees were all well-established crime writers.

But two hours later Willow walked out of the conference room in a daze. She had won. Her acceptance speech was a blur. She had immediately called her son, Stephen, on her editor’s mobile and told him the news before being swamped with people wishing to congratulate her.

She still felt weak at the knees with excitement and was grateful for the steadying hand of her editor on her arm as they approached the lift.

‘We have to meet our MD and company lawyer in Reception, and then across town to meet Carlavitch. He is really enthusiastic about your book,’ Louise said, grinning happily. ‘Especially after you winning the award, the publicity will boost our bargaining power immensely. You have it made, Willow. Carlavitch is leaving for Los Angeles later tonight, so we have to make the most of this opportunity, and hopefully secure the deal.’

‘What is going on?’ Theo Kadros asked the hotel manager as a reporter and cameramen he recognised from the national press hurriedly crossed the foyer. ‘You know the company policy: no reporters are allowed to hassle the celebrity guests,’ he said curtly.

Theo, as the owner of a multinational company that dealt with property worldwide, including a string of exclusive hotels, had arrived in London this morning on business. As always he was in the process of making a quick inspection of the hotel lobby. Experience had taught him that the unheralded visit gave him a much better idea of how his hotels were being run.

The manager’s smile slipped a little. ‘Strictly speaking the person in question was not a celebrity when she booked in; no one had ever heard of her. We are hosting the Crime Writer’s Prize ceremony lunch, and all the excitement is because the author J. W. Paxton has been announced the winner.’

‘Good choice. I read his latest book and thought it was excellent. However, I would hardly have thought the ceremony warranted attention by the national press. It must be a slow news day,’ Theo responded.