Satisfaction: The Greek Tycoon's Baby Bargain

His black eyes glittered with enticing question. In her heart, Rebecca knew that he wasn’t being straightforward with her; she suspected he had an address book crammed with the numbers of beautiful and willing women no matter how many cities he visited. But she had held out for so long against her feelings for him and in that moment she felt defenceless against the full onslaught of his charm.

‘Just dinner?’ she verified breathlessly.

‘If that is what you want,’ Xandros returned, his smile careless.

It hadn’t been ‘just’ dinner, of course. For how could you not let a man like Xandros kiss you at the end of it when you had been longing for him to kiss you since the first time you’d set eyes on him? And then? Her battle had been with herself rather than with him. Her sense of what was right and proper vying with her heart and her body’s desires.

She had lost the battle. Of course she had ended up in bed with him. He was a powerful, virile man who would not be satisfied with a chaste kiss at the end of a first date—and for the first time in her life, neither was she.

Rebecca had never felt so physically vulnerable beneath a man’s caresses as she was to Xandros. She hated herself for her easy capitulation that night and yet she couldn’t stop herself. Her hungry body’s need overrode everything else—ruthlessly quelling the voice in her head which demanded to know whether he would respect her after this.

And to Xandros, her only spoken objection was a practical one. ‘No one from work must know,’ she told him urgently as his hand began its inevitable and longed-for journey up her inner thigh.

‘Why should they?’ he breathed, peeling off her panties with a low moan of delight.

‘Because … oh … oh … Xandros! Because people …’ She closed her eyes, and swallowed. ‘They talk,’ she whispered eventually.

‘Then we won’t give them anything to talk about,’ he assured her silkily, his fingers working ruthlessly against her hotly aroused flesh, feeling it yield to him. ‘No one will know a thing. We will keep it secret, ne? Our little secret …’

But weren’t secrets wrong? Wasn’t that making it sound as if he wanted to keep her hidden away—like something furtive, to be ashamed of? Rebecca tried to pull away, but the lure of his embrace was too strong to resist, the gentle caress of his fingertips too tremblingly intense. ‘Xandros?’ she tried, one last time.

‘Ochi,’ he negated fiercely. ‘Say nothing! Do nothing but stay here in my arms when you know that this is what we both want!’ And he kissed her into willing submission.

Yet even at the height of her very first orgasm, Rebecca was aware of a sharp twist of pain in her heart. That her surrender could be her emotional undoing, and that she risked losing everything—the most important thing being her heart. Her life and her future was one in which a man like Xandros would have no place—and yet, having tasted all the pleasures that he gave her, the thought of any future without him already seemed bleak and empty.

If she had known all that right from the beginning, then why hadn’t she stopped? Why give into something which you knew instinctively was doomed on so many levels?

Because human nature wasn’t like that. It made you reach out and grab at the unreachable.

The mists of memory cleared as Rebecca blinked around at her luxurious surroundings. She bent down to pick up one of the shoes she had discarded while she had been stripping off for her hard-bodied Greek lover and sighed. It was pointless going back over what had happened. She could do nothing to change the past—what she could work on was the present.

But the present brought her scant comfort.

She was here, in Xandros’s penthouse suite—about to go out for a meal which she knew that neither of them really wanted. And after that he was off to New York, and she didn’t know when she was going to see him again. So how was she going to play it? Did she have enough acting ability to convince him that she didn’t really care, either way—or would he see right through her?

‘Rebecca?’

The silken, accented Greek voice filtered through the air. By concentrating on finishing fastening her shoes, Rebecca was able to compose herself before straightening up to look at him. His black eyes were set like dark jewels in the backdrop of his gleaming olive skin and her heart turned over with love and longing. If only he didn’t look so heartbreakingly gorgeous. Reaching into her handbag, she took out a hairbrush and began to make great sweeping strokes through hair all tousled from love-making. ‘Yes, Xandros?’ she questioned calmly.

He liked to watch her brush her hair. The first time she had loosened it for him he had told her that it was the colour of Greek honey—which was darker and richer than any honey in the world. ‘The car is waiting downstairs, agape mou.’ His eyes narrowed at her in question. ‘You still want to go and eat?’

What would he say if she told him the truth—that what she really wanted was to know how he felt about her? Whether he was tiring of her—or whether it was a figment of her over-active imagination. But some bone-deep instinct told her that a man like Xandros would ultimately despise a woman who wanted that kind of reassurance. To an independent man that might smack of neediness—and everyone knew how unattractive that was.

‘Eat? I thought you’d never ask,’ she said lightly, turning her head so that her newly brushed hair swung in a scented curtain around her still-flushed cheeks. She even managed to give him a faintly mocking look in return. ‘Somehow I’ve worked up quite an appetite—though can’t for the life of me work out why!’

Xandros gave a barely perceptible nod as he picked up her coat and held it open for her, watching the naturally sinuous movement of her body as she wriggled into it. Her response had held just the right amount of cool distance and yet her apparent composure was strong enough to fan the flames of his desire once more. He found himself wanting to pull her back into his arms again and a nerve flickered at his temple.

This was going to be harder to finish than he had anticipated.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a2fc19e0-703f-5335-b7bd-ed71c3e305db)

NEXT morning Rebecca awoke to the sound of a shower splashing nearby and Xandros singing something rather tunelessly in Greek. He sounded happy, she thought wistfully—and why wouldn’t he be? She opened her eyes and stared at the chandelier which glittered above the vast bed like a canopy of diamonds.

Over dinner last night, he had described the elegant new apartment block he was building, which incorporated a ‘sky-garden’ at its summit which would bring lush grasses and fragrant shrubs to the defiantly urban part of the city in which it was set. He wanted it to be the first of many—to bring greenery to grey places. He wanted a world which did not push nature out. His deep voice had been passionate and dreamy and Rebecca had found herself swept up by it—torn between admiration and envy. It had been as if he was describing a paradise she would never be part of.

She heard the gushing of the water stop and after a few minutes he walked into the bedroom—completely naked—towelling at his ebony hair with a small towel.

His hard body glowed, the broad shoulders tapering down into narrow hips and then long, hair-roughened legs. He was a man utterly at ease with his nudity—but then who wouldn’t be with a physique like that? He swam every day, no matter where he was in the world. He had told her that it was one thing he had brought with him from his native Greece—the desire to feel the water on his skin and the delicious freedom which came with it.

He looked at her lying amidst the rumpled sheets and his mouth softened briefly into a smile. ‘Kherete,’ he said softly.

‘Hello,’ she murmured back, astonished at how she could still feel almost shy when he looked at her like that—despite the fact that he knew her body more thoroughly than any other man had ever done. ‘I feel so lazy I can’t move.’

‘Seeing you lying there like that makes me want to stay.’

Easy to say. ‘But you can’t.’

‘No.’ He slid on a pair of dark boxers which felt silky next to his skin. ‘Unfortunately I can’t. As soon as I get off the plane, stateside, I have a long list of meetings to attend.’ He looked up and shrugged but his black eyes gleamed with anticipation. ‘There is a big deal nearing completion, new plans to draw up.’

‘And no doubt a stack of invitations to glittering parties from just about every New York society hostess worth her salt.’ She hadn’t meant to say it, but somehow the words seemed to tumble out of their own accord.

There was the fraction of a pause, the faintest elevation of jet-dark brows. ‘That, too,’ he agreed.

Rebecca knew that she was stepping into unfamiliar territory. That Xandros, more than most men, compartmentalised his life—and she was firmly fixed in the English section. But surely showing interest wouldn’t necessarily be interpreted as possessive jealousy? Didn’t dating him give her the rights to know something about his life? ‘And do you go to them?’

‘To parties?’ He shrugged as he reached into the closet for a pure silk shirt in a buttery ivory colour and, slipping it on over his broad shoulders, began to button it. ‘Sometimes—like most people—when I’m not too busy. Why wouldn’t I?’ He pulled on a pair of dark trousers. ‘And what about you, Rebecca—what do you do when your Greek lover is not in town?’

Was it significant that he was asking her this now—when he had never really been interested before? Or was he simply being dutiful and turning the question back on her? Pride made her want to embellish a life which would surely sound very ordinary when judged by his standards. Imagine how he would react if she told him that she spent a lot of her free time thinking about him! Even the supermarket was an unsafe zone, for she often found herself scouring the shelves for the brand of olive oil she knew that his family firm produced back in Greece. Up until now, she’d never found it.

‘Oh, this and that.’ She pushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. ‘I go out to the cinema—sometimes the theatre—’

‘With your girlfriends, of course?’ he cut in, his fingers pausing in the act of zipping up his trousers.

Something in his dismissive tone offended her. Who did he think he was? He offered her nothing, nor promised her anything—did he think she just crawled into a dark box and stayed there when he was out of the country, like some caged animal eagerly panting for his return?

‘Not always. Obviously, I have friends of both sexes.’

Brilliant black eyes were fixed on her and he shot the word out as if it were a bullet. ‘Men?’

There was a pause. Did he imagine these were the Dark Ages? ‘Of course.’

‘Men that you go out with?’

Rebecca sat up in bed, her hair now tumbling down all over her bare breasts. ‘Not go out with!’ she protested. She wanted to say, Not like I go out with you—but that would have sounded false. They didn’t exactly go out, did they? They just got together for some very agreeable sex whenever he happened to be in town. That he bought her dinner or occasionally took her to a show was neither here nor there. ‘Just men whose company I occasionally enjoy. You know.’

His eyes narrowed, fiercely intelligent, hard and, in that one moment, displaying a flash of something which looked almost like cruelty.

‘No, I don’t know. You are not making any sense to me, agape mou. In my experience men and women who go out together have only one real item on their agenda. For that is how nature intended it.’