Greek Affairs in his Bed: Sleeping with a Stranger\Blackmailed into the Greek Tycoon’s Bed\Bedded by the Greek Billionaire (38 page)

It was a memory that went straight to his loins, hardening him in an instant, and the hard kick of sensuality that gave him had his fingers tightening over the curved back of the chesterfield as he fought for control.

It didn’t help that from this position he could see how the green silk shirt that Jessica still wore was only roughly buttoned up, as if she had dressed in a rush and not totally successfully. The way that a button had been shoved into the wrong hole pulled the blouse open at the neck, and lower, exposing the creamy flesh of her breasts and making it clear that right now they were unconstrained by any bra. The lacy garment must have been discarded somewhere. Perhaps in the other room, where he had tossed it in the heat of their lovemaking.

‘Ochi!’

Shaking his head fiercely, he dragged himself back from the edge of the mental cliff he was on before he tumbled headlong into the heated waters of the sensual waves that foamed beneath it, losing his rational control altogether. This was not what he wanted. He was going to wake Jessica, deliver the news that she was not wanted here, that there was no home for her at the Manor House and that she should pack her bags and be on her way. And he didn’t give a damn if she had anywhere to go or not.

As if sensing his presence, Jessica sighed again and shifted slightly on the settee. The movement sent a waft of the intensely personal perfume of her skin upwards towards where he leaned
on the back of the chesterfield. Inhaling it put his senses on to instant red alert, his blood heating and pounding through his veins so fast that it made his head swim.

Not wanted
. The words in his own thoughts hit him like a hard slap in the face. Not
wanted
. Who the hell was he trying to kid?
Not wanted
was the furthest thing from the truth about this situation. The real truth was that he wanted Jessica like hell. He always had done, right from the moment that he had seen her as a teenager when she had come to the stables where he had taken a temporary, lowly job in order to find out as much as he could about the man he had just learned was in fact his father. He had wanted her then and he had had to fight against showing her just how he felt about her. Those moments when she had thrown herself into his arms, soft and willing and wearing only the scraps of white lace underwear, had been hell on earth as he had resisted the hunger he felt for her.

But there had been reasons then why he could not give in to the burn of desire. Reasons that now no longer existed. If he still wanted Jessica, then he could have her.

If he still wanted—Hah!

His harsh laugh cracked in the air, making the woman on the chesterfield stir again in her sleep. Of course he still wanted her. He had wanted nothing else from the moment that he had walked into the room filled with middle-aged mourners and seen her there, vibrant and glowing in all the true beauty of the woman she had become. He had known then that having Manorfield alone was not enough. It would never be enough. He wanted the estate and he had worked and planned for years to make it his. But, deep in his heart, and in the most basic, most essentially male parts of his make-up, he knew that that would never be enough.

He would never be satisfied until he had the lady of the manor in his bed as well. And kept her there until he had had his fill.
Until he had appeased the frustration and hunger of the first time they had met—and all the years in between.

‘Who?’ Jessica stirred uneasily, struggling up from the clinging depths of sleep as some sound reached through the stillness of her mind and started to tug her awake. ‘Angelos?’

‘Right here,
agape mou
.’

The drawled words with their cynical edge jolted her out of any last remaining drowsiness and into full and wary wakefulness. Her eyes snapped open, looking straight up into his watchful gaze, dark as a starless sky at midnight.

‘You came back!’

‘This is my house. Where else would I go?’

As a reminder of their different positions in the world and her recently totally changed status, it was like a slap in the face. She needed to sit up properly, as she suddenly felt too vulnerable lying there while he leaned against the back of the chesterfield, big and dark and dangerously overwhelming. His black eyes might be hooded and faintly shadowed from lack of sleep, his strong jaw line darkened by the night’s growth of beard, but he was still the most lethally overwhelming man she had ever met. Looming over her like this, he was just too big, too strong—too everything for her peace of mind.

But her limbs had stiffened from lying in tortured positions on the settee and she had to struggle to make them move in the way she wanted. And all the time Angelos simply watched her with that distant, hidden look in his dark eyes. The steadiness of his gaze seemed to focus like a laser on the sensitive skin of her face, burning deep below the surface as if he was probing her thoughts, as well as her appearance.

Unnerved by the close scrutiny, she shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, plagued with pins and needles as the blood rushed back through her body. Knowing she desperately needed to attend to the way she looked, to tame the tangled mane
of her hair that fell so messily around her face, she smoothed her hands over it, catching painfully on several knots, then tried to straighten her crumpled clothing.

Tugging her shirt down simply made matters worse because it was only then that she realised the way that some of the buttons she had fastened in such haste last night had been pushed into the wrong holes. The garment was badly bunched up at the front, the hem hanging messily uneven around her waist and the neckline gaping widely. But she couldn’t bring herself to try to make the adjustments it needed. For one thing, doing so would mean she had to unbutton her blouse before she could refasten it properly, exposing even more of herself to Angelos’s dark scrutiny. Especially as the movement of her breasts and the rub of the material of her blouse against her nipples had just brought home to her the memory of the way she hadn’t bothered to dress fully in her haste to go after Angelos last night.

And then there was the other, more disturbing fact that she didn’t actually have the strength to drag her gaze away from the almost hypnotic power of his eyes but stood, transfixed, like a rabbit facing the gleaming gaze of a sleek black hunting cat.

‘Back to Greece?’

She didn’t dare to admit that at one point in the long night she had feared he might actually do just that. That he might have walked out of her life for good and that she would never see him again. But that had been in the darkest hours before the slow dawn, when she had sat alone in the still silent house, facing up to the way that her life had changed so dramatically over the past few days and wondering just where she would go from here.

‘And leave you in possession of the Manor House?’ Angelos queried and, to her shock, there was actually a faint note of humour on the question, a hint of laughter in his voice. ‘I think not. You cannot get rid of me that easily,
kyria
.’

‘The idea never entered my head!’ Jessica snapped, knowing
deep in her heart that it was true. She had been thinking more of his return, of the moment that he would walk back through that door, and the fact that she would have to face him all over again. That image had overridden every other consideration and it had been all she had been able to focus on in her thoughts.

‘I’ll admit that I was surprised to find you still here,’ he said now, disconcerting her yet again. Had he thought that she would have packed and gone while he had been out? That she would have fled into the night without looking back?

OK, if she was honest, she’d actually considered it once or twice. But the knowledge that she had to see him one more time, if only to explain to him that he had totally misinterpreted her reaction earlier, had kept her where she was, sitting on the edge of her seat, with her hands clenched into tight fists in her lap, or pacing to and from the window, hoping for a sign that the damn man was returning.

‘I could answer that in the same way as you just did.’ Irritation flared fiercely inside her giving the words a snap she hadn’t intended. ‘Where else would I go? As you’ve pointed out, this is your house now and I’m not welcome here. But, believe me, if there was anywhere else I could go, I’d be out of here like a shot—you wouldn’t see me for dust! I would have gone yesterday if I could have done, but then things …’

She faltered, lost her train of thought as a rush of memory made her head spin shockingly.

She’d actually
forgotten
about Chris and the appalling way that he’d treated her. She’d forgotten about his lies and his betrayal—the other woman he’d been seeing all the time he was supposed to have been engaged to her. Yesterday she’d been shattered, devastated, unable to think straight, and yet somehow during the night something—some
one
—had pushed all those thoughts and concerns from her head and replaced them with others.

With thoughts and concerns about
him
.

Dazedly, she shook her head, unable to believe her own thoughts. What was happening to her? Just a few short days ago she had believed that she loved Chris enough to marry him—to be with him for the rest of her life. Oh, she’d known it was a quiet sort of love, a friends into lovers, built on mutual respect sort of love—but she had believed it was love. And now, today …

‘No?’ Angelos questioned, interpreting her shake of the head in a very different way from the one she had meant. ‘No, you won’t be going now or no, you won’t be staying?’

‘I wouldn’t be staying if I had any choice. I know you want me out of here—out of your life. I know …’

The sentence died on her lips as this time it was Angelos who shook his dark head with such total determination, such purpose that it stopped her dead in shock.

‘If you think that, then you know nothing. Did last night not tell you anything? Did you not realise what it meant?’

‘Oh, I know what it meant …’

Agitated fingers went to her hair again, tugging at the tangled strands, then she tried to straighten her blouse once more, pulling it towards her waistband and fighting to tuck it in. But each time she got one uneven edge straight, another would pull lose until eventually she gave up again with an exasperated exclamation of frustration.

‘It meant that you wanted me. That—to put it bluntly, because blunt is the only thing that you seem to understand—you wanted to get into my pants. That you wanted sex with me and that was all.’

‘No …’ Angelos inserted, dark and low, but, suddenly finding that her tongue was freed from the restraints that the shocks of the past few days had imposed on it, Jessica ignored the interjection and carried on right over it.

‘So in my book that makes you only after one thing—just like every other man—just like Chris—’

‘No!’

It was a roar of fury, breaking over her head like an icy black wave, cutting off her tirade, stopping it dead. Or that was the impression that she gave, Jessica acknowledged. She wasn’t going to let Angelos see that she had really choked to a halt on the recollection that he wasn’t just like Chris at all. At least Angelos had truly wanted her, even if only sexually. Chris had been lying through his teeth all the way along. He had never wanted her at all, not even in his bed.

‘Don’t you dare say that I am like the snake you were engaged to. Don’t even think of comparing me to him. I am nothing like …’

‘Nothing like? … Nothing like?’

The acid burn of pain that was eating away at her heart put a black cynicism into her tone, one that expressed her total scepticism better than any words could ever do.

‘So are you trying to claim that if we had … if I had let you … if we had slept together last night, that it would been more than just a one-night stand? That when I woke up in the morning, you would have still been there? That you wouldn’t have just had your fun and hightailed it out of there …’

‘Yes!’

The force of the single word, the vehemence with which it was spoken, together with something fiercely intent in Angelos’s face, stopped her mid-sentence once again, only able to stare at him in confusion and disbelief.

‘Yes,’ Angelos repeated even more emphatically this time. ‘And no. Yes to the fact that I would still be here in the morning. No, I would not have left before you woke. No, I would not have—high …’

Unexpectedly, his normally near-perfect English let him down and the little failure suddenly made him seem so much more human, so much more fallible, somehow giving a surprising
edge to his words, making her listen to them even more closely and actually allow them to sink into her mind.

‘Hightailed …’ she supplied faintly, not wanting to distract him, knowing a sudden desperate need to know exactly what he was going to say next. She found that she was holding her breath tight and forced herself to let it go, expelling it in a soft sigh that she didn’t care if he heard.

‘I would not have “got into your pants” …’ His grimace of distaste at the expression said more than his words about the way he felt about her accusation. ‘And then left in the morning.’

‘You wouldn’t?’

‘I would not.’

And he meant it. Fierce pride drew his shoulders straight, brought his head up. It blazed in the depths of his eyes, was stamped into the rigid set of his jaw. He was insulted—outraged—that she would even suggest it. And because of that Jessica suddenly found that she was shaking in apprehension, trembling all over as she waited to hear what he would say next.

‘And why not?’

‘Why not? Because I want more than one night with you—because what we have between us will not burn itself out in just a few short hours.’

‘It—it won’t?’

The trembling was getting worse now. From feeling that he had walked out on her for good, she had veered to the belief that he didn’t want her anywhere near him and from there to thinking that he wanted her out. Now he was saying that he still wanted her—and wanted her far more, for far longer than she had ever dreamed.

‘Oh, Jessica …’

Angelos’s tone was almost gentle in its mockery and he took a step forward, closer to her. Lifting a hand, he let the backs of his fingers trail down the side of her face, from her temple, over her cheekbone to the fine line of her jaw and then along to trace
the shape of her quivering mouth. And she saw how his eyes darkened and deepened as he watched her shiver of response.