Greek Affairs in his Bed: Sleeping with a Stranger\Blackmailed into the Greek Tycoon’s Bed\Bedded by the Greek Billionaire (45 page)

‘I didn’t see you fighting me off when I took you in that bed last night.’

Angelos’s angry gesture took in the wide king-sized bed where she had spent every night held in his arms, her limbs entwined with his. The memory stabbed at her, making her want
to fold her arms around her body, to protect herself from the pain. Instead she lashed out again in self-defence.

‘Just because you can make me want you doesn’t mean you can make me care!’ she flung at him as he moved towards the door. ‘You’ve brought me as low as you wanted—so I hope you’re satisfied. All that I want to know now is—have you achieved all you set out to do? Have you had enough?’

‘Enough?’ Angelos echoed the word, his voice dark with the cynical contempt that flared deep in his eyes. Long fingers grasped the door handle, pulling it open as he spoke. ‘Have I had enough? The answer to that, my dear Princess, is no—never. Where you are concerned, nothing will ever be enough. But for tonight, yes. Tonight I’ve had as much as I can take.’

It was a deliberate exit line, that much was obvious. He was determined to go—to get out of here as fast as he could. And Jessica didn’t have the strength, mental or physical, to try to call him back.

She didn’t dare, she acknowledged as the door slammed to behind him. If he stayed she would only say something that would give herself away completely. If he had said anything more, pushed any harder, then she would have been unable to hide from him just how much he had really taken from her.

And that he had succeeded far better than he had ever dreamed.

But the one thing she must never let him know was the way that he had also taken her heart. If he was to realise that, then his triumph would be darker and deadlier than ever.

I
T
took Jessica just five minutes to reconsider.

At first she paced up and down the room, fighting back bitter tears, struggling to find a way to handle the pain that Angelos’s callous words had inflicted on her. If she could have found a way off the island, she would have packed her bag and left. But the fact that there was only the helicopter that would take her anywhere, and that was at Angelos’s command, totally under his control, forced her to stay where she was. It was when she realised that her actions were so like the ones when Angelos had walked out on her that night at Manorfield, that she suddenly came to a halt, new found resolution flooding through her.

That night she had known what she must do. She had told herself that she would face Angelos, that she could no longer play the coward and hide behind the beliefs she had let shield her from reality seven years before. Then she had let Marty treat her like a child, putting her to bed while Angelos faced the full impact of what had happened.

She couldn’t do that now. She was not a child any more. And she couldn’t hide behind Marty’s protection.

She had to go to Angelos and face him as an adult. Admit that she had been wrong—so very wrong—in the way that she had
behaved. Only then could she go into the future knowing she had done her best to put things right.

Flinging aside the white robe, she grabbed the turquoise silk dress and pulled it on. It was hardly the thing for a hunt through the house, but at least it gave her a little extra self confidence that she would need when she found Angelos. If she could find Angelos.

In the end it didn’t take her as long as she had feared. Looking out of the bedroom window, she saw his dark figure down below her on the beach, hands pushed deep into his pockets, shoulders hunched as he stood at the edge of the sea, staring out at the far horizon. There was something about his stance that reminded her of the last words he had flung at her.

But for tonight, yes
, he’d said.
Tonight I’ve had as much as I can take
.

… as much as I can take
. Not as much of
you
as I can take.

It wasn’t much, but it was all that she had to go on.

The beach was growing dark when she made her way down there. In the shadow of the cliff, she could hardly see a thing and for a moment she hesitated, unsure of quite where he might be now.

‘Angelos …’ Her voice was weak, strained, the sound of his name breaking in the middle.

At first there was no response, just the still silence broken only by the faint lapping of the waves. But then she heard his response from further down the beach.

‘I’m here.’

There was no welcome in the words, but then she had hardly expected one. But at least they were not openly aggressive. And he hadn’t told her to get the hell out of there, which was what she had most expected.

‘What do you want?’

He was still standing at the edge of the shore, his shoes kicked off and the sea water lapping at his bare feet. But he didn’t seem to give a damn about the damage that the salt water was inflicting
on the fine material of his trousers and his dark eyes were fixed on her face. In the shadows she could barely read their expression so she couldn’t tell if there was anything there to encourage her to go on or not.

She had her chance. She had to take it.

Swallowing hard, she forced the words out.

‘I’ve come to apologise—really apologise for everything that happened between you and Marty. You say you lost your father but the truth is that I lost him for you. If he’d asked me again then I’d have told him the truth. But he didn’t. He just said that you had left, spitting vengeance and vowing never to return. He said we were never to talk about it again, so we didn’t.’

Angelos was so still that he might have been part of the cliff behind him, at one with the sand and the sea, but in the moonlight she caught the faint grimace that twisted his sensual mouth.

‘He was right about the spitting vengeance—and the vow never to return,’ he admitted. ‘I meant every word of that at the time. I was only twenty-three, hot-headed and arrogant as hell. I truly believed that I would never, ever want to be in contact with him again. But I always kept a close watch on what was happening at Manorfield and a few years down the line I reconsidered. That was when I started bailing Marty out. I hoped that this time, when he saw how I could help him, that I could support him, that maybe this time he’d listen.’

Angelos’s dark eyes closed briefly and he dashed the back of his hand across them, bringing it away glistening faintly. Jessica’s heart twisted agonizingly inside her, the pain made all the worse by knowing that if she tried to comfort him he would only reject her.

‘I never thought that he would die of a heart attack before I could ever get to talk to him.’

Perhaps because of the darkness that hid the details of his expression from her, she could hear the pain of loss in his voice as never before.

‘You kept an eye on Manorfield and so you knew everything that was going on.’

Jessica had almost forgotten about the letters she had found but now she had to know the truth about absolutely everything. Deep inside she knew a desperate wish that she had been wrong, that she’d misread the dates when she’d looked at them. But Angelos’s reaction earlier had taken that hope away. And with a terrible creeping sense of dread she suddenly felt that she knew what it meant.

‘You were watching Manorfield and you knew what was going on. You knew about me—and about Chris. And you paid him a lot of money before you even came to England. What did you pay for, Angelos? What did you buy from him?’

‘Your freedom.’ It was cold, stark, irrefutable. ‘I paid him to break off your engagement—to leave you free.’

‘Free for you?’

She couldn’t believe how bitter the words were in her mouth. They burned like acid on her tongue.

‘You wanted it all—Marty, Manorfield
and me
and you set out to ensure you got it all. How you must have hated me. But of course I understand. I destroyed your chance with your father and …’

‘No—it was not like that.’ Angelos shook his dark head violently. ‘Never like that!’

‘You paid Chris to break off our engagement. You bought him off. There was never any other woman.’

‘Oh, but there was. I knew all about that and I used it to get him to agree. He wasn’t good enough for you, Jessica. He only wanted what he could get from you because you were the heiress to Manorfield. He was going to marry you and then walk out once you’d paid off all his debts with the settlement Marty was going to give you.’

‘Unlike you, who didn’t even trouble to marry me to get what
you wanted! And you saw it as the perfect way to get your revenge. You wanted Chris out of the way so that I was free—free for you to move in on me.’

‘No.’ Angelos kicked out at the lapping water as he flung the single word at her but she was hurting too much to be able to understand his dark anger.

‘Why not? I can see how things were. I took your father away from you—you must have hated me for that.’

‘Hated …’

Angelos’s laughter was hard, brittle, seeming to shatter the air around them so that Jessica almost expected to see the word fall in tiny splinters of ice into the sea.

‘Dear God, but I wish I could have hated you—it would have been so much easier.’

‘Easier?’

Was she hearing things? Had the pain in her heart made her start to imagine what Angelos might say?

‘Easier than what?’

The look he turned on her reminded her of nothing so much as the one a wild animal in a corner might turn on the pursuers that had it trapped. It was savagely furious, defiant … and desperately lost.

And suddenly she knew instinctively that she had to press him on this. That this was the only chance she had to find out what was really going through his mind.

‘Easier than
what
, Angelos?’

‘Than
love, damn you
!’ It was almost torn from him. A sound of desperation, an admission of defeat. ‘Than bloody well loving you. Loving you so much that I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t act rationally, couldn’t make any decisions …’

Once again he shook his head in despair at his own behaviour.

‘That was the thing that was hard. Hating you would have made things so much easier. I thought I hated you when I came
back to Manorfield. That I wanted revenge for the way you’d taken my father from me—but I was wrong. So wrong.’

Jessica’s throat had tightened painfully. She felt as if someone was twisting their hands around it, cutting off her ability to speak—to breathe. She didn’t dare to say a word, to risk interrupting him and perhaps stopping the flow of what he was saying. She desperately needed to know just what he
was
saying and the possible repercussions it might have for her.

‘What I wanted was you. It always had been—always will. I let my need for my father get in the way the first time—and because you were so very young. But I thought I had time …’

Angelos’s voice cracked on the words and once more he dashed an angry, revealing hand over his eyes.

‘Marty’s death showed me that we can never be sure of how much time we have with anyone. That was why I had to come to Manorfield. At first I thought it would be enough to call in Marty’s debts from here—to know that I owned Manorfield and that you were out … But I had to go to Marty’s funeral and as soon as I saw you I was lost. I’ve never been able to get you out of my head. I’d always wanted you and I still did.’

Jessica had to speak now. She had to know …

‘So you didn’t pay off Chris for revenge?’

She knew that Angelos had understood the importance of the question because of the way he suddenly stilled as she asked it. The way that his deep, dark eyes went straight to hers and held them.

‘Revenge—no. I knew what he was up to and I couldn’t let him get away with it. I couldn’t stand by and let him treat the woman I love—’

‘Loved?’

She had to force herself to say it. She needed to know the full truth. Without it, she felt that her heart would stop beating, her brain cease to function. She needed to know if he was talking about the past—or—please, God—the present.

‘The woman you once loved—or …’

The words tangled up in her throat as Angelos moved forward at last, stunning her by reaching out to take her hand, hold it close to his chest.

‘The woman I loved—still love now and always will love,
kardia mou
. Jessica, you have my heart—my soul—all that is good in me. Damn it …’

He broke off on a raw, self-deprecating laugh that tore at something in Jessica’s own heart. Instinctively, she reached out a hand towards him, wanting to touch him, soothe him, assure him … but she hadn’t completed the action before he started again and she froze, leaving her hand halfway between them like an incomplete lifeline, waiting to be finished.

‘You even have all the worst of me. I love you and I can never stop loving you. You have everything—all that I am. And, to prove it …’

He was reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket, but now Jessica had to stop him. Now she had to complete the gesture, moving forward to put her hand over his, stop his action. With her fingers resting where they were, just above his heart, she could feel the frantic race of his pulse that told the truth of what he was saying, with no words being needed.

‘No, Angelos—don’t—not until I’ve told you …’

Once again his stillness told her that he recognised the importance of the moment. That and the burning darkness of his eyes that were fixed on hers in the moonlight, reading what she was about to say in the strength and the calmness of her gaze. But she still needed to say it because, along with a faint lightening of the shadows in his eyes, there was also a touch of something raw, something uncertain, something desperately vulnerable as he opened himself up to her in all the strength of his feelings.

‘I don’t need any proof, Angelos. Not from you. Not when I can
see what is in your heart—and when I know what is in mine. I love you too, my darling. I love you with all that is in my heart, all that …’

She got no further because Angelos reached for her, pulled her to him, brought their mouths together in a long, hungry, searing,
loving
kiss that made words superfluous because it said everything and left nothing at all unsaid about the way they felt for each other.

It was a long, long time before either of them could bear to move apart, and even when they did their foreheads still rested against each other, their hands still linked, keeping them together.

‘I still have something to give you,’ Angelos managed, his voice husky and raw.

‘You’ve given me everything,’ Jessica could only whisper. ‘What more could I want when I have you?’

But what he put into her free hand made her stare in blank bewilderment and confusion, unable to believe what she saw.

‘Angelos … these are the deeds to Manorfield and all that’s in it. What …?’

‘It’s yours, my love. Manorfield is yours.’

‘But you love the place almost as much as I do …’

Jessica broke off as Angelos laid a gentle finger across her mouth to silence her.

‘I thought I did, but I realised that I loved you more. And it was being at Manorfield
with you
that I wanted. If you weren’t there, then the place wasn’t a home …’

His voice deepened, became rich with a sincerity of love that brought tears to her eyes. ‘Without you, nowhere was a home. These past few days, coming back to you on the island, I’ve learned where my true home is—and it’s with you, wherever you are. In your arms I know I’ve come home. So today I came to a decision. I was going to give you Manorfield, so that you knew you always had a home, no matter what—and then …’

‘Then …’ Jessica prompted softly when he hesitated, looking
deep into her eyes, and his grip on her hand tightened, revealing the strength of feelings he was keeping inside.

‘Then I was going to ask you—to marry me. To share my life and my home, wherever I was, for however long we live. So tell me,
agape mou
—if I asked you that—I
am asking
you what your answer would be.’