Greek Bachelors: Paying The Price: What the Greek's Money Can't Buy / What the Greek Can't Resist / What The Greek Wants Most

‘No, I wasn’t, but I might as well have been.’ Because her junkie mother had been no use to herself, never mind the child she’d given birth to. The remembered pain bruised her insides and unshed tears burned the backs of her eyes. She blinked rapidly to stop them falling but a furtive glance showed Sakis had noticed the crack in her composure.

The plane lifted off the ground and shot into the starlit sky.

Sakis’s gaze remained on her for long minutes. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’ he asked gently.

Brianna’s heart hammered harder. ‘No.’ She’d already said too much, revealed far more than was wise. Deliberately unclenching her fists, she prayed he would let the matter rest.

The jet started to level out. Snatching his phone from the table, Sakis nodded and unbuckled his seatbelt. ‘Regardless of your protests, you need to sleep.’ He held out his hand to her. The look on his face told her nothing but her acquiescence would please him.

Immensely relieved that he wasn’t probing into her past any longer, she thought it wise to stifle further protest. Unbuckling her seatbelt, she placed her hand in his and stood. ‘If I do, then so do you.’

His smile was unexpected. And breath-stealing. Heat churned within her belly, sending an arrow of need straight between her thighs.

‘We’ve dovetailed right back to the very point I was trying to make. I have every intention of getting some sleep. Even super-humans like me deserve some down time.’

A smile tugged at her lips. ‘That’s a relief. You were beginning to show us mere mortals up.’

His smile turned into an outright laugh, his face transforming into such a spectacular vision of gorgeousness that her breath caught. Then her whole body threatened to spontaneously combust when his hand settled at her waist. With a firm nudge, he guided her back down the aisle.

‘No one in their right mind would call you a mere mortal, Moneypenny. You’ve proved beyond any doubt that you’re the real thing—an exceptionally gifted individual with a core of integrity that most ambitious people lose by the time they reach your age.’

At the door to her cabin, she turned to face him, her heart hammering hard enough to make her head hurt a little. ‘I think what you’ve done since the tanker crashed shows you’re willing to go above and beyond what most people would do in the same circumstances. That is integrity.’

His gaze dropped to her lips, lingered there in a way that turned her body furnace hot. ‘Hmm, is this the start of an exclusive mutual admiration society?’

The breath she’d never quite managed to recapture fractured even further. When his eyes dropped lower, her nipples tightened, stung into life by green fire that lurked in those depths. Reaching behind her, she grasped the doorknob, desperate for something to cling to.

‘I’m just trying to point out that I’m nothing special, Mr Pantelides. I just try to be very good at my job.’

His gaze recaptured hers. ‘I beg to differ. I think you’re very special.’ He stepped closer and his scent filled her nostrils. ‘It’s also obvious no one has told you that enough.’ The hand that still rested at her waist slid away to cover the hand she’d gripped on the door. Using the pressure of hers, he turned the knob. ‘When this is all over, I’ll make a point to show you just how special you are.’

The door gave way behind her and she swayed backward, barely managing to catch herself before she stumbled. ‘You...don’t have to. Really, you don’t.’

His smile was a touch strained and he braced his hands on the doorjamb as if forcibly stopping himself from entering the room. ‘You say you’re not special and yet you refuse even the promise of a reward where most people would be making a list.’

‘I work for one of the most forward-thinking men in one of the best organisations in the world. That’s reward enough.’

‘Careful, there; you’re in danger of swelling my ego to unthinkable proportions.’

‘Is that a bad thing?’ She wasn’t sure where the need for banter came from but her breath caught when his sensual lips curved in a dangerously sexy smile.

‘At a time when everything around me seems to be falling apart, it could be a lethal thing.’ His gaze shot to the bed and his smile slipped a fraction, in proportion to the escalating strain on his face. ‘Time for you to hit the sack. Kalispera, Brianna,’ he murmured softly before, stepping back abruptly, he strode to his own door.

At the click of his door shutting, Brianna stumbled forward and sagged onto the bed, her knees turned to water.

She glanced down at her shaking hands as reality hit her square in the face.

Sakis Pantelides found her attractive. She wasn’t naïve enough to mistake the look in his eyes, nor was she going to waste time contemplating the why. It was there, like a ticking time bomb between them, one she needed to diffuse before the unthinkable happened.

Brianna could only hope that, once they were back on familiar ground, things would return to normal.

They had to. Because, frankly, she was terrified of what she would let happen if they didn’t.

* * *

Sakis stood under the cold shower and cursed fluidly. Theos. I seemed as if he’d spent the last forty-eight hours cursing in one form or the other. Right now, he cursed the rigid erection that seemed determined to defy the frigid temperature.

He wanted to have sex with Brianna Moneypenny. Wanted to shut off the shower, stride next door, strip the clothes off her body and drive into her with a grinding force that defied rhyme or reason.

He slapped his palm against the soaked tile and cursed some more. Gritting his teeth, his hand dropped to grip his erection. A single stroke made him groan out loud. Another stroke, and his knees threatened to buckle.

With an angry grunt, he dropped his hand and turned the shower off. He was damned if he was going to fondle himself like an over-eager teenager. Things were fraught for sure. That and the fact that he hadn’t had sex in months was messing with his mental faculties, making him contemplate paths he would never otherwise have done. For God’s sake, sex had no place in his immediate to-do list.

What he needed to do was focus on getting the threat of a takeover annihilated and the situation at Pointe Noire brought under control.

Once they were back on familiar ground, things would return to normal.

He ruthlessly silenced the voice that mocked him not to be so sure...

* * *

Three hours later, Brianna sat wide awake in her luxurious cabin bed, staring through a porthole at the pitch-black night that rested on a bed of white clouds. She’d left her tablet in one of the two briefcases she’d seen the stewardess stow in Sakis’s cabin. Short of knocking on his door and asking for it, she had nothing to do but sit here, her thoughts jumbling into a mass of anxiety at what awaited her in London.

She had no doubt Sakis would trounce the takeover bid into smithereens—he was too skilled a businessman not to have anticipated such a move. And he was too calculating not to have the answers at his fingertips.

All the same, Greg had proved, much to her shock and disbelief, that he was just as ruthless—and without a single ounce of integrity—and she shuddered at the chaos he could bring to Sakis should he be given the opportunity.

Her shoulder tingled as her tattoo burned. Raising her hand, she slid her fingers under her light T-shirt and touched the slightly raised words etched into her skin.

Greg had succeeded in taking away her livelihood once; had come terrifyingly close to destroying her soul.

There was no way she could rest until she made sure he wasn’t a threat to Sakis and to her. Not that he had any reason to seek her out. No, she was the gullible scapegoat he’d led to the slaughter—then walked away from scot-free. The last thing he’d expect was for her to have risen from the ashes of the fire he’d thrown her in.

That was how she wanted things to stay. Once upon a time, she’d harboured feelings of revenge and retribution; how could she not, when she’d been stuck in an six-by-eight dark space, racked alternatively with fear and deep bitterness? But those feelings had burned themselves out.

Now she just wanted to be Brianna Moneypenny, executive assistant to Sakis Pantelides, the most dynamically sexy, astoundingly intelligent man she knew.

A man she’d come disastrously close to kissing more than once in the last forty-eight hours...

No. Her fingers pressed down harder over the tattoo, letting the pain of each word restore her equilibrium.

Nothing had changed.

Nothing could change.

* * *

The board members were gathered in the large, grey mosaic-tiled conference room on the fiftieth floor of Pantelides Towers, the iconic, futuristically designed building poised on the edge of the River Thames.