The Greek's Secret Passion

Of course she had. She had posted them all the way down the road; she always did. Her heart had begun to thunder and she wasn’t such a self-deluding fool as to deny that part of the reason was excitement. But it would be madness if he came. Sheer and utter madness.

‘I sent an invitation to all my neighbours,’ she said wildly. ‘Because it’ll probably be noisy, and late.’

‘Well, then.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘You want to pacify your neighbours, of which I am one? Then pacify me, Molly.’

‘Dimitri,’ she appealed, steeling herself against the sensual undercurrent in his tone, wondering if that had been deliberate or just part of the whole irresistible package he presented. ‘You can’t seriously want to come?’

‘Oh, but I can,’ he demurred. ‘It will be good for me to mix a little while I’m here, don’t you think? And besides—’ he gave a slow, curving smile ‘—I like parties.’

She bet he liked them!

‘Well, of course I can’t uninvite you now,’ she observed slowly. She raised her face to his with a defiant tilt to her chin, in a gesture which told him quite clearly that she could cope with his presence. She certainly wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of being barred! ‘So if you insist on coming, then I guess I can’t stop you.’

When she lifted her face like that, she was almost begging to be kissed and the desire to do so almost took his breath away. What would she do if he kissed her? he wondered. ‘You could stop me if you wanted to,’ he taunted softly. ‘You just don’t want to. Do you, Molly?’

Not if she was going to show him that she didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘Oh, it’ll be interesting to see your predatory instincts at work with my friends,’ she said sweetly. She made a great pantomime of looking at her watch. ‘Now I really do have things to do—shall I show you out?’

Without waiting for an answer, she marched out of the kitchen towards the hall, and, reluctantly, Dimitri began to follow her. He was being dismissed! It was behaviour that he simply would not have tolerated from another woman and he felt the dull, hot ache of frustration as she opened the door. Then allowed himself to think of the tantalising inevitability of what was going to happen between them.

He glittered her a smile.

The kiss could wait.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_274388d0-6764-578f-a905-dac515cff91d)

BUT after Dimitri had gone, Molly did something she had not allowed herself to do for years. She ran upstairs, to the clutter of the junk room which lay at the very top of the house. Here there were books and documents and certificates: things you told yourself you might need one day, but rarely did—yet things you didn’t dare throw away, just in case.

The old leather box was dusty, packed with shells, an old charm-bracelet, a lucky four-leaf clover sel-lotaped to a piece of card. In here was a sentimental record of the years, and, right at the bottom, a photograph.

She pulled it out and looked at it. Her and Dimitri, frozen in time, their arms tight around each other, carefree smiles on their young faces. The only photo she had.

Visual images had the power to drag you right back, to take you to a place which you had kept firmly out of bounds, and as Molly stared in Dimitri’s heartbreakingly beautiful young face she stepped right back into the past.

A holiday job on the Greek island of Pondiki had seemed like heaven to an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl in the long vacation before she went to university. One minute she was hurling her blazer across the room, the next she was stepping out onto the blistering tarmac of Pondiki’s tiny runway on a high summer’s day. Grown up and free—with a suitcase full of cotton dresses and bikinis and not a care in the world.

There were just three hotels on the island and at that time it was off the beaten tourist-track. Most people opted for the bigger, livelier Greek destinations, and only discerning travellers and students had discovered the unspoilt beauty of the mouse-shaped paradise, with its lemon groves and pine trees and the towering Mount Urlin which dominated it.

Molly was a waitress in one of the tavernas and she worked lunchtimes and evenings. Afternoons, she was free. The work was undemanding—though she developed strong arms from carrying trays of beer and wine—and she was given her own small, shuttered room which overlooked the main square, which at night was lit by rainbow-coloured lights. When she lay in bed, after the busy shift had ended, she could hear the sound of the waves lapping on the soft white sands and sometimes she thought she had died and gone to heaven.

She made friends with the daughter of the owner—a Greek girl named Elena who was as keen to learn English as Molly was to learn Greek.

It wasn’t easy. Greek was a difficult language.

‘You should get one of the boys to teach you,’ ventured Elena shyly.

Molly wrinkled her nose. ‘I’m not into boys,’ she said.

It was true; she wasn’t. She had no interest in the youths whose dark eyes followed her as she walked across the sunlit square in a cotton dress, with a straw sunhat to protect the blonde hair which seemed to fascinate them.

And then she met Dimitri and suddenly everything changed.

She and Elena had borrowed a scooter and ridden round to the opposite side of the island, where Pondiki’s most exclusive hotel lay sheltered in splendid isolation, and they had just sputtered to a halt when they heard an angry shout, and as Molly had turned around her heart had turned over.

She fell in love with him right there and then, it was as simple as that. She didn’t know why or how she knew it, she just did.

It wasn’t just because he seemed like a man, and not a boy—though he was only a few months older than her. Nor because his dark good looks made him look like some kind of diabolical angel. Nor the fact that his hard brown torso was bare and he wore just faded denims which clung to the narrow jut of his hips and his long, muscular legs.

It was something in his eyes. Something indefinable in the look he directed at her. It was a look which her upbringing should have made her rebel against. A swift, assessing look. Almost judgemental. But it made her feel as if she had come home—as if she had spent all her life seeking just that look.

Except that, for now, it was a very angry look.

And it was only afterwards that she discovered he made every English girl who visited Pondiki feel the same way, but by then it was too late. If only someone had told her—yet if they had, would she have listened?

‘Who is that?’ she whispered.

‘It is Dimitri,’ whispered Elena, as if indeed it really were the devil himself.

‘Dimitri who?’

But Elena shook her head, because he was striding towards them. He completely ignored Molly and let out a torrent of furious Greek which was directed solely at Elena.

Molly listened uncomprehendingly for a moment or two. ‘What’s the problem?’

Dimitri stopped speaking and turned to look at her, his heart beating fast, and it was more than his usual instinctive and hot-blooded reaction to a beautiful blonde. She was English. He had heard about her, of course, but he had been too busy helping his father to go looking for himself, and this was the first time he had seen her.

He was Greek through and through and he loved beautiful women. He took and enjoyed what was on offer, but it lasted only as long as his interest—which was never long.

Yet there was something indefinably different about this woman. A goddess of a woman, her icy-blue eyes almost on a level with his own, with a beauty he found almost overwhelming. But he saw the returning spark of interest in her eyes and this normal state of play was enough to allow his naturally arrogant masculine superiority to reassert itself.

‘Are you crazy?’ he hissed, in English, from between clenched white teeth.

As an opening gambit, she had heard better, but Molly didn’t care. She had never seen anyone like this before—with his flashing black eyes and his perfect body and an air of strength and devil-may-careness that you simply didn’t get with Englishmen.

‘Sometimes.’ She smiled at him, and cocked an eyebrow. ‘Aren’t you?’ she said gravely. ‘Crazy is good.’

He was expecting a tongue-tied and stumbling answer—not a cool retort in a voice as confident as his own.

There was a moment’s pause—a heartbeat and a lifetime of a pause—before he began to laugh, and it sounded as delicious as the sprinkle of fresh water on sun-baked stone.

But then his eyes grew serious.

‘You are not wearing helmets,’ he growled. ‘These roads are not like your English roads.’

‘You can say that again,’ murmured Molly. She thought of the fumes and the bad-tempered drivers back home, and compared them to Pondiki’s clean and silent beauty.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘You will both come with me,’ he ordered abruptly. ‘And you will wear helmets back.’

It was ironic that if anyone else had spoken to her like that, then Molly would probably have refused, on principle. But now that she had found him, she didn’t want to lose sight of him and, quite honestly, if he had told her that she was going to be put in handcuffs for the return journey, then she couldn’t have seen herself uttering a word of objection.