Hot Nights with a Greek: The Greek's Forced Bride / Powerful Greek, Unworldly Wife / The Diakos Baby Scandal

‘Maybe her claim on you has some justification,’ Natasha said with a shrug.

‘Like…?’ he prompted, and there was no hint whatsoever left of the provoking mockery with which he had started this conversation. He was deadly curious to hear where she was going with this.

‘The way you run your life is your own business.’ Chickening out at the last second from stating outright the real question that was beating a hole in her head, she gave up on the chair and tossed the cushion back onto it.

But—did he still sleep with his ex-wife when he felt like it? Did Gianna have a genuine right to her grievances when she’d barged in on them as she had? If so, then it made him no better than Rico in the way that he treated women!

Tacky, as she’d already said. She returned to her search with his brooding silence twitching at her nerve-ends as she moved about the room.

‘I do not have a relationship with my ex-wife,’ he spoke finally. ‘I do not sleep with her and I have no wish to sleep with her, though Gianna prefers to tell herself I will change my mind if she pushes long and hard enough… In case you did not notice,’ he continued as Natasha turned to look him, ‘Gianna is not quite—stable.’

It was the polite way to call it, but Natasha could see by the flick of a muscle at the corner of his mouth that he was holding back from voicing his real thoughts about Gianna’s mental health. And what did she do? She stood here eating up every single word like some lovelorn teenager in need of his reassurance.

‘In some ways I still feel responsible for her because she was my wife and I did care for her once—until she pressed the self-destruct button on our marriage for reasons not up for discussion here.’ And the tough way he said that warned her not to try to push him on it. ‘I apologise that she barged in here and embarrassed you,’ he expressed curtly. ‘I apologise that she found a way to enter this property at all!’ A fresh burst of anger straightened him away from the wardrobe. ‘But that’s it—that is as far as I am prepared to go to make you feel better about the situation, Natasha. So stop behaving like a tragic bride on her wedding night and take the damn jacket off before I take it off!’

‘W-what—?’ Not quite making the cross-over from his grim explanation about Gianna to the sudden attack on herself, Natasha blinked at him.

Which seemed to infuriate him all the more. ‘While you stand here playing the poor, abused victim, you seem to have conveniently forgotten about the money you stole from me!’

The money.

Natasha tensed up, then froze as if he’d reached out and hit her. Leo smothered a filthy curse because her hesitation told him that she had forgotten all about the money. Though the curse was aimed at himself for reminding her about it when he would have preferred it to remain forgotten about! Now she was looking so pale and appalled he grimly wondered if she was going to pass out on him.

A tensely gritted sigh had him striding over to her. Lips pinned together, he reached out and began unbuttoning her jacket with tight movements that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the other times he had taken it upon himself to do this.

She didn’t even put up a fight, but just stood there like a waxen dummy and let him strip the garment from her body, which only helped to infuriate him all the more! With the muscles across his shoulders bunching, he tossed the jacket aside, then turned to walk back across the room to the wardrobes. Hunting out a white T-shirt, he dragged it on over his head.

When he turned back to Natasha, he found her still standing where he’d left her, giving a good impression of a perfectly pale ghost.

Theos, he thought, wondering why seeing her looking so beaten was making his senses nag the hell out of him to just go over there and apologise yet again—for being such a brute.

‘Dinner,’ he said, taking another option, keeping up the tough tone of voice because—well, she was a cheating thief even if he wanted to forget that she was!

At last she moved—or her pale lips did. ‘I’m not hungry—’

‘You are eating,’ he stated. ‘You have had nothing since you threw up in my London basement.’

And reminding her of that was Leo Christakis well and truly back as the blunt-speaking insensitive brute, Natasha noted.

Even in the T-shirt and chinos.

And his feet bare…

She felt like crying again, though why the sight of his long, bronzed bare feet moving him so gracefully across the room to the door made her want to do that Natasha did not have a clue, but suddenly she just wanted to sit in a huddle in a very dark corner somewhere and…

He pulled the bedroom door open, then stood there pointedly waiting for her to join him. Head lowered, she went because there was no point in continuing to argue with him when all he had to do was to mention the money to devastate her every line of defence.

Hard, tough, unforgivably ruthless, she reminded herself, wondering how she had allowed herself to forget those things about him while she had been giving him free use of her body—as a part of their deal.

She didn’t look at him as she walked past him and out into the hallway. She kept her head lowered when he stepped in front of her to lead the way through the apartment and into a room lit by flickering candle-light and another glass wall. Bernice was there, arranging the last pieces of cutlery on a white linen tablecloth intimately set for two. Candles flickered. Beyond the table stood the night view of Athens, making the most romantic backdrop any woman could wish for.

Any romantically hopeful woman, that was.

Friction stung the atmosphere and the housekeeper smiled and said something in Greek to Leo. He replied in the same language as he held out a chair for Natasha to use. After that there was no privacy to speak of anything personal because a maid arrived to serve them. Natasha had a feeling Leo had arranged it that way so he didn’t get into yet another dogfight with her, but the tension between them made it almost impossible to swallow anything, though she did try to eat. When she couldn’t manage to swallow another beautifully presented morsel, she stared at the view beyond the glass window, or down at the leftover food on her plate, or at the crisp white wine he had poured into the glass she was fingering without drinking—anywhere so long as it wasn’t at him.

Then he shattered it. Without any hint at all that one swift glance from his eyes had sent the maid disappearing out of the room, Leo suddenly leant forwards and stretched a hand out across the table and brazenly cupped her left breast.

‘I knew it,’ he husked. ‘You are wearing no bra, you provoking witch.’

Pleasure senses went into overdrive. Natasha shot like a sizzling firework rocket to her feet. He rose up more slowly, face taut, his dark eyes flickering gold in the candle-light.

‘Don’t ever touch me like that without my permission again,’ she shook out in a pressured whisper, then she turned to stumble around her chair and made a blind dash out of the room.

The lift stood there with its doors conveniently open. Natasha did not even have to think about it as she dashed inside and sent the lift sweeping down to the ground floor. Outside in the garden the thick, humid air was filled with the scent of oranges. Soft lighting drew her down winding pathways between carefully nurtured shrubs and beneath the orange laden trees. She didn’t know where she was heading for, all she did know was that she needed to find that dark corner she could huddle in so she could finally—finally give in to the tears she’d held back too long.

She found it in the shape of a bench almost hidden beneath the dipping branches of a tree close to the high stuccoed wall that surrounded the whole property. Dropping down onto the bench, she pulled her knees up to her chin, leant her forehead on them, then let go and wept. She wept over everything. She just trawled it all out and took a good look at everything from the moment she’d opened the message on her mobile telephone that morning to the moment Leo had touched her breast across the dinner table—and she wept and she wept and she wept.

Leo leant against a trunk of the tree and listened. Inside he had never felt so bad in his life. The way he had been treating her all day had been nothing short of unforgivable. The way he’d made love to her when he’d known she should have been doing this instead was going to live on his conscience for a long time to come.

But the way he had reached across the dinner table and touched her just now was, without question, the lowest point to which he had stooped.

And listening to her weep her soul into shreds was his deserved punishment. Except that he couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer and, with a sigh, he levered away from the tree trunk and went to sit down beside her, then lifted her onto his lap.

She tried to fight him for a second or two, but he just murmured, ‘Shh, sorry,’ and held her close until she stopped fighting him and let the tears flow again.

When it was finally over and she quietened, he stood up with her in his arms and took her back inside. He did it without saying a single word, ignoring the dozen or so security cameras he knew would have been trained on them from the moment Natasha ran outside.

She was asleep, he realised when he lay her down on the bed. With the care of a man dealing with something fragile, he slipped off her shoes and her skirt, then covered her with the sheets.

Straightening up again, he continued to stand there for a few seconds looking down at her, then he turned and walked out of the bedroom and into his custom-built office.

A minute later, ‘Juno,’ he greeted. ‘My apologies for the lateness of the hour, but I have something I need you to do….’

CHAPTER SEVEN

NATASHA drifted awake to soft daylight seeping in through the wall of curved glass and to instant recall that sent her head twisting round on her pillow to check out the other side of the bed.

The sudden pound her heart had taken up settled back to its normal pace when she discovered that she was alone, the only sign that she had shared the bed at all through the night revealed by the indent she could see in the other pillow and the way Leo had thrown back the sheets when he’d climbed out.

Then the whispering suggestion of a sound beyond the bedroom door told her what it was that had awoken her in the first place, and she was up, rolling off the bed and running for the bathroom, only becoming aware as she did so that she was still wearing the white top she’d spent most of the day yesterday in.

So he’d shown a bit of rare sensitivity by not stripping her naked, she acknowledged with absolutely no thought of gratitude stirring in her blood. Leo had taken her to pieces yesterday brick by brutal brick, so one small glimpse of humanity in him because he’d put her limp self to bed and had the grace to leave her with some dignity in place did not make her feel any better about him.

She stepped into the wet room, with her hair safely wrapped away inside a fluffy white towel, frowned and at the range of keypads and dials, trying to work out how she could take a shower without having to endure a thorough dousing at the same time. Leo Christakis was one of life’s takers, she decided. He saw an opportunity and went for it. He’d wanted her so he just moved in on her like a bulldozer and scooped her up.

Water jets suddenly hit her from all angles, making mockery of the buttons she’d pushed to stop them from doing it. A gasping breath shot from her as the jets stung her flesh. The sensation was so acute it made her look down at her body, half expecting to see that it had altered physically somehow, but all she saw was her normal curvy shape with its pale skin, full breasts and rounded hips with a soft cluster of dusky curls shaping the junction with her thighs.

But she had changed inside where it really mattered, Natasha accepted. She’d become a woman in a single day. One stripped of her silly daydreams about love and romance, then made to face cold reality—that you didn’t need love or romance to fall headlong into pleasures of the flesh.