The Greek Demands His Heir

She had only been with him a little over an hour, Grace acknowledged in dismay. I’m a slut, I’m a slut, she reflected in mortification. Maybe sometimes sluts have more fun, said another voice inside her head and she almost laughed, registering that she was on a kind of mindless adrenalin high as if she had just reached the top of a ski run. She looked up at him, her gaze skimming over the already familiar lines of his breathtakingly handsome face and her tummy turning over even as heat leapt through her lower body in a disturbing wave of reaction. ‘Go where?’

‘Back to my yacht,’ Leo advanced, urging her to her feet while carefully avoiding the scrutiny of his bodyguards. Making out with an audience was not cool and he had never done it before. What was he? A hot-under-the-collar kid? A dark flush had scored his strong cheekbones.

‘You’re here on a yacht?’ Grace frowned, surprised by the news.

‘I’ve been cruising the Med for the past week.’ Leo walked her down the stairs, but not before one of the men seated at the table across the way cleared their path. When she turned her head she saw the other two falling into step behind them. One of them was talking into one of those security earpieces she had only previously seen worn in films and the men backed into the dancers to impose a barrier around her and Leo and ensure their smooth passage across the crowded dance floor.

‘Are those men bouncers?’ she asked.

‘My security team.’

‘Why do you need a security team?’ Grace enquired nervously.

‘Protection. I’ve had a security presence in my life since childhood,’ Leo confided evenly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world. ‘My mother and her sister were Greek heiresses. Sadly, my aunt was kidnapped and held for ransom as a teenager.’

‘Good grief,’ Grace whispered in the comparative quiet of the club foyer. ‘Was she freed? I mean, did she come home again?’

‘Yes, she came home but she never fully recovered from her ordeal,’ Leo replied grimly.

Grace stiffened, registering that something pretty horrible had happened to his aunt while she was being held and she suppressed a shiver.

‘It makes more sense to guard against such risks,’ Leo declared in a lighter tone as a car drew up by the kerb and one of his guards hastened to open the door for them.

Grace was nonplussed, out of her depth and feeling it. He had to be very rich to feel the need to take such precautions. She was with a man who inhabited a totally different world from her own and she breathed in slow and deep while she wondered if she had made a rather foolish decision.

‘This is a little unnerving for me,’ Grace admitted abruptly, watching one man climb in the front with the driver while the others climbed into the second car behind them.

‘Ignore them...I do,’ Leo asserted, recognising that she was not impressed like most women but instead ill at ease with the trappings of his lifestyle.

On the drive to the marina, her breath feathered in her throat while Leo chatted easily about his recent travels and stroked the back of her hand with a lazy forefinger. The car stopped and the passenger door sprang open. In her high heels, his hand cupping her elbow to steady her, she walked a few steps and stopped dead when Leo stepped into a motorboat and extended his hand to her.

‘I... I... Where’s your boat?’ Grace demanded uneasily.

‘There...’

Grace followed his gesture and further out in the bay saw a ship’s silhouette etched against the moonlit sky. ‘It looks like the Titanic!’ she gasped because it was huge.

‘An unfortunate comparison. I can assure you that HellenicLady is seaworthy and safe.’ Leo stepped back onto the marina and bent down to scoop her up into his arms before stepping back into the launch with her.

He had acted so fast Grace hadn’t had a moment to do more than utter a startled squeak of protest. Then he set her down again, settling her into a padded seat by his side. The speedboat was racing across the sea before she could even catch her breath. A night on a yacht, she thought ruefully. Well, that might be fun, she conceded, and fun had been in very short supply since she’d arrived in Marmaris as Jenna’s pretty much unwelcome guest.

‘OK?’ Leo prompted as the launch reached the yacht.

‘I’m fine.’ Grace swallowed back her worries and allowed him to guide her up a gangway.

Leo didn’t know what had come over him. He wasn’t the caveman type but as soon as he had seen her anxious expression he had panicked, deeply unaccustomed at the idea that she might be changing her mind, and he had snatched her off the marina and got her into the launch as fast as he could. Grace Donovan brought out something in him that he didn’t like, something very basic and elemental and essentially...unnerving. Possibly once he figured out what that mystery something was he would feel better about it.

A man in a peaked cap greeted Leo, and Grace didn’t know where to look because she was embarrassed, convinced that their plans for what remained of the night had to be obvious. Leo wafted her away up another staircase and down a corridor. He spread open the heavy carved doors and invited her to precede him.

Her sea-glass eyes widened to their fullest extent, stunned appreciation etched on her lovely face as she slowly executed a circle to take in the full effect of the gorgeous bedroom. Huge windows looked out on the starry sky and the dark rippling water so far below. Leo hit a button and blinds buzzed into place to seal them into privacy. Blinking, she turned, eyes skating hastily over the opulent bed with its perfectly draped oyster silk spread. There were paintings on the walls, honest-to-goodness oil paintings, at least one of which looked sufficiently classic and imposing enough to be an Old Master.

‘Would you like a drink? Something to eat?’ Leo enquired, wondering why he had brought her to the master suite when he usually took his lovers to one of the guest cabins for the night. He had always been a very private man.

‘No, thanks. I’m sorry, I’m a bit out of my depth with all this,’ Grace confessed, hands shifting to shyly indicate the unbelievable luxury of her surroundings.

And yet she looked as if she belonged, Leo thought suddenly, her hair a river of fire across her shoulders, framing her astonishingly vivid little face, light green eyes flickering with uncertainty against a pallor that only made her freckles stand out. She truly was a beauty in a very natural way that was entirely new to a male much more accustomed to women groomed to a high standard of artificial perfection.

‘It’s only money.’

‘Only someone with pots of it would say that,’ Grace quipped, straightening her slim shoulders. ‘We’re from very different backgrounds, Leo.’

‘There are no barriers here.’ Leo stalked closer, surprisingly light and quiet on his feet for so large a male. He reached for her hand and drew her towards him. ‘I wasn’t exaggerating when I told you how much I wanted you, meli mou.’

‘What did you call me?’

‘Melimou?’ His mouth quirked as he brushed a stray red strand of hair back off her cheekbone. Her hair felt like silk against his fingers and she was much smaller than his women usually were, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder in spite of her fantastically high heels. Her diminutive stature gave him the oddest protective feeling. ‘It’s Greek for “my honey”.’

‘I’m more tart than sweet,’ Grace warned him.

‘Sugar cloys,’ Leo husked and he wondered if that was the very basic truth that explained his reaction to her. She was independent and outspoken and he had never met anyone quite like her before.

He stroked a finger across the pulse flickering madly at her collarbone and her breath tripped in her throat. ‘You keep touching me...’

His eyes glowed potent gold. ‘I can’t keep my hands off you. Is it a problem?’

Grace’s lashes screened her eyes. She wasn’t used to being touched and he did it with such ease and spontaneity. Her mother had been physically demonstrative, when she had been sober, and their brief time at the commune in Wales had been almost happy. But, after her mother’s death, her uncle’s family had been much more reserved and Grace had received little physical affection from them. ‘No, not a problem,’ she said in a low voice, thinking she had better watch herself with him because somehow he was getting under her skin in a way she had not foreseen.

‘Thee mou, it is as well because I’m not sure I could stop.’ Leo slid off his jacket and tossed it on a nearby chair, a lean brown hand tugging roughly at the knot on his silk tie and casting it aside.

I’m only with him to have sex, to lose my virginity and gain a little experience, Grace reminded herself doggedly. No other feelings should enter the equation. If she kept it simple and straightforward, she wouldn’t get hurt as her mother had been hurt, putting her future in a man’s hands and learning her mistake too late. She had only been a little girl when she had first found out about her father’s betrayal but the memory of her mother’s pain had lingered.

‘Hey...’ Leo turned her head back to him to stare down into her haunted eyes. ‘Where did you go just now? Bad memories?’

Grace reddened with chagrin. ‘Something like that...’

‘Another man?’ Leo gritted, appalled by the rage that flooded him at the idea that she might be thinking of a lost lover while she was with him.

‘Not that it’s any of your business, but no,’ Grace countered succinctly, lifting her chin. ‘I don’t allow men to screw with my mind.’

‘Only your body?’ Leo breathed, reaching for both her hands to tug her to him.

Her copper lashes lowered and she glanced up at him from beneath their spiralling cover. ‘Only my body. I hope that’s a deal?’

‘We’re talking too much,’ Leo gritted, on fire from that provocative upward glance of hers, scarcely able to credit that she was warning him off wanting anything more than sex. Wasn’t that his line? Hadn’t that always been his line? It made him feel curiously insecure, not a sensation he enjoyed.

His mouth enveloped hers again and the piercingly sweet thrust of his tongue made her shudder, heat surging up from her pelvis, sending fingers of flame to make her nipples tingle and swell.

‘I’m going to undress you very, very slowly...’ Leo asserted, ‘revealing only one tiny piece of you at a time.’