Читать книгу The Greek's Virgin Bride - Julia James - Страница 8

NIKOS pushed the sleeve of his suit jacket back and glanced at the slim gold watch circling his lean wrist. What had Old Man Coustakis called him here for? He’d been cooling his heels on the shaded terrace for over ten minutes—and ten minutes was a long time for a man as busy as Nikos Vassilis. He did not like waiting patiently—he was a man in a hurry. Always had been.

The manservant approached again, from the large double doors leading into the opulent drawing room beyond, and deferentially asked him if he would like another drink. Curtly, Nikos shook his head, and asked—again—when Mr Coustakis would be ready to see him. The manservant replied that he would enquire, and padded off silently.

Irritated, Nikos turned and stared out over the gardens spread below. They were highly ornate, clearly designed to impress, not to provide a pleasant place to stroll around. Nikos had a sudden vision of a small boy trying to play out there and finding nothing but expensive specimen plants, and fussy paths and over-planted borders. His mouth tightened unconsciously. If he were to become a father he would need a decent place to raise his family…

His mind sheered away. The reality of what he was about to do—marry Yiorgos Coustakis’s plain, pampered granddaughter, a female he’d never met—was starting to hit him. Could he really go through with it? Even to get hold of Coustakis Industries?

He shook the doubts from his mind. Of course he would go through with it! Anyway, it wasn’t as if he were signing his life away. Old Man Coustakis would not live for ever. In half a dozen years he would probably be dead, and then Nikos and the unknown granddaughter could come to some sort of civilised divorce, go their separate ways, and that would be that.

And what about your son? What will he think about your ‘civilised divorce’?

He pushed that thought from his mind as well. Who knew? Maybe the granddaughter would turn out to be barren, as well as plain as sin.

A footfall behind him made him turn.

And freeze.

Nikos’s eyes narrowed as he saw the unfamiliar woman step onto the wide sweeping terrace where he stood. The cloud of dark bronze hair rustled on her shoulders, making him take notice of her long, slender neck. Then, as if a brief glance were tribute enough for that particular feature, his eyes clamped back to her face.

Theos, but she was a stunner! Her skin was paler than a Greek’s, but still tanned. She had a short, delicate nose, sculpted cheeks, and a wide, generous mouth. Her eyes were like rich chestnut, the lashes ridiculously long and smoky.

He felt his body kick with pleasure at looking at her. As of their own volition, his eyes wandered downwards again, past that slender neck framed by that glorious hair, down over full, swelling breasts, superbly moulded by the tight-fitting jacket she wore, nipping in to a deliciously spannable waist, and then ripening outwards to softly rounded hips, before descending down long, long legs.

He frowned. She was wearing trousers. The sight offended him. With legs that long she should be wearing a short, tight skirt that hugged those splendid thighs and clung lovingly to the lush, rounded bottom he felt sure a woman like that must have…

Who the hell was she?

His brain interrupted his body’s visceral contemplation of the female’s physical attributes. What was a woman this lush, this drop-dead gorgeous, this damn sexy, doing here in Yiorgos Coustakis’s house?

The answer came like a blow to the gut. There was only one reason a woman who looked like this would be swanning around Old Man Coustakis’s private residence, and that was because she was a private guest. Very private.

All of Athens knew that Yiorgos Coustakis liked to keep a stable of women. He was renowned for it, even from long before his wife became an invalid.

And they’d always been young women—even as he’d got older.

Even now, apparently.

Distaste filled Nikos’s mouth. OK, so maybe the old man was still up for it, even at his age, but the idea of the man of seventy-eight keeping a woman who couldn’t be more than twenty-five, if that, as his mistress was repugnant in the extreme.

Andrea blinked, momentarily blinded by the bright light after the dim shade of the interior of the huge house she had been deposited at barely five minutes ago by the lush limo that had met her at the airport.

Then, as her vision cleared, she saw someone was already on the terrace. She took in an impression of height, and darkness. Black hair, a sleek, powerful-looking business suit, an immaculately knotted tie—and a face that made her stop dead.

The skin tone was Mediterranean; there was no doubt about that. But what struck her incongruously was the pair of piercing steel-grey eyes that blazed at her. She felt her stomach lurch, and blinked again. She went on staring, taking in, once she could drag her eyes away from those penetrating grey ones, a strong, straight nose, high cheekbones and a wide, firm mouth.

She shook her head slightly, as if to make sure the man she was staring at was really there.

Suddenly Andrea saw the man’s expression change. Harden with disapproval. And something more than disapproval. Disdain. Something flared inside her—and it was nothing to do with the unmistakable frisson that had sizzled through her like a jolt of electricity in the face of the blatant appraisal this startlingly breath-catching man had just subjected her to. She would have been blind not to have registered the look of outright sexual attraction in the man’s face when he’d first set eyes on her a handful of seconds ago. She was used to that reaction in men. For the most part it was annoying more than anything, and over the years she had learnt to dress down, concealing the ripeness of her figure beneath loose, baggy clothes, confining her glowing hair into a subdued plait, and seldom bothering with make-up. Besides—a familiar shaft of bitterness stabbed at her—she knew all too well that any initial sexual attraction men showed in her would not last—not when they saw the rest of her…

She pulled her mind away, washing out bitterness with an even more familiar upsurge of raw, desperate gratitude—to her mother, to fate, to any providential power, to everyone who had helped her along her faltering way in the long, painful years until she had emerged to take her place as a functioning adult in the world. Considering what the alternatives might have been, she had no cause for bitterness—none at all.

And if she felt bitter about the man who was her father’s father—well, that was not on her own behalf, only her mother’s. For her mother’s sake only she was here, now, standing on this terrace, over a thousand miles from home—being looked at disdainfully by a man she could not drag her eyes from.

It had been a hard decision to make. It had been her friends Tony and Linda who had helped her make it.

‘But why is he doing this?’ she’d asked them, for the dozenth time. ‘He’s up to something and I don’t know what—and that worries me!’

‘Maybe he just wants to get to know you, Andy,’ said Linda peaceably. ‘Maybe he’s old, and ill, and wants to make up for how he treated you.’

‘Oh, so that’s why I’ve been getting letters just about ordering me to go and dance attendance on him! And not a dickey-bird about Mum, either! No, if he’d really wanted to make up he’d have written more politely—and to Mum, not me.’

‘If you want my advice I think you should go out there,’ said Linda’s husband, Tony. ‘Like Linda said, he might be after a reconciliation, but even if he isn’t, suppose he wants to use you for his own nefarious ends in some way? That, you know, puts you in a strong position. Have you thought of that?’

Andrea frowned.

Tony went on. ‘Look, if he does want you for something, then if he doesn’t want you to refuse he’s going to have to do something you want.’

‘Like what?’ Andrea snorted. ‘He doesn’t have a thing I want!’

‘He’s got money, Andy,’ Tony said quietly. ‘Shed-loads of it.’

Andrea’s eyes narrowed to angry slits. ‘He can choke on it for all I care! I don’t want a penny from him!’

‘But what about your mum, Andy?’ said Tony, even more quietly.

Andrea stilled. Tony pressed on, leaning forward. ‘What if he forked out enough for her to clear her debts—and move to Spain?’

Andrea’s breath seemed tight in her chest. As tight as her mother’s breath was, day in, day out. Instantly in her mind she heard her mother’s dry, asthmatic cough, saw her pause by the sink, breathing slowly and painfully, her frail body hunched.

‘I can’t,’ she answered faintly. ‘I can’t take that man’s money!’

‘Think it through,’ urged Tony. ‘You wouldn’t be taking his money for yourself, but for your mum. He owes her—you’ve always said that and it’s true! She’s raised you single-handed with nothing from him except insults and abuse! He lives in the lap of luxury, worth hundreds of millions, and his granddaughter lives in a council flat. Do it for her, Andy.’

And that, in the end, had been the decider. Though every fibre of her being wanted never, ever to have anything to do with the man who had treated her mother so callously, the moment Tony had said ‘Spain’ a vista had opened up in Andrea’s mind so wonderful she knew she could not refuse. If she could just get her grandfather to buy her mother a small apartment somewhere it was warm and dry all year round…

It was for that very reason that Andrea was now standing on the terrace of her grandfather’s palatial property in Athens.

She would get her mother the dues owed her.

She gave a smile as she looked again at the impressive man who stood before her. A small, tight, defiant—dismissive—smile. So, he knew who she was, did he, Mr Mega-Cool? He looked so sleek, screaming ‘money’ in his superbly tailored suit, with his immaculately cut dark hair, the gleam of gold at his wrist as he paused in the action of checking his watch—oh, he must be one of her grandfather’s entourage. No doubt. One of his business associates, partners—whatever rich men called each other in their gilded world where the price of electricity was an irrelevance and there was never green mould on the bathroom walls…

So much, she thought with self-mocking acknowledgement, for the shopping spree she’d been on with Linda and Tony in that ultra-posh London department store, courtesy of its gold store card! She’d thought the outrageously priced trouser suit she’d bought, shouting its designer label, would do the trick—fool anyone who saw her that the last thing she could possibly be was a common-as-muck London girl off a housing estate! And Linda had even done her hair and make-up that morning, before she’d set out for the airport, making her look svelte and expensive to go with the fantastic new outfit she’d travelled in. Obviously she need not have bothered!

The man looking at her so disdainfully out of those cold steel-grey eyes knew perfectly well what she was—who she was. Yiorgos Coustakis’s cheap-and-nasty bastard granddaughter!

Her chin went up. Well, what did she care? She had her own opinions of Yiorgos Coustakis—and they were not generous. So if this man standing here on her grandfather’s mile-long terrace, looking down his strong, straight nose at her, his mouth tight with disdain, thought she wasn’t fit for a palatial place like this, what was it to her? Zilch. Just as Yiorgos Coustakis was nothing to her—nothing except the price of some small, modest reparation to the woman he had treated like dirt…

Her eyes hardened. Nikos saw their expression change, saw the derisive smile, the insolent tilt of the woman’s chin. Clearly the female was shameless about her trade! The distaste he felt about Old Man Coustakis keeping a mistress at his age filtered into distaste for the woman herself. It checked the stirring of his own body, busy responding the way nature liked it to do when in the presence of a sexually alluring female.

So when the woman strolled towards him, the smile on her face unable to compensate for the hardness in her eyes, he responded in kind.

Andrea saw the withdrawal in his eyes, and suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, she felt a chill emanate from him. Suddenly he wasn’t just a breath-catchingly, heart-stoppingly handsome man, looking a million dollars, tall and lean—he was an icily formidable, hard-eyed, patrician-born captain of industry who looked on the rest of humanity as his inferior minions…

Well, tough! She tilted her head, almost coquettishly, letting her glorious hair riot over her shoulders. An intense desire to annoy him came over her.

‘Hi,’ she breathed huskily. ‘We haven’t met, have we? I’d remember, I know!’ She let a gleam of appreciation enter her glowing eyes. That would annoy him even more; she instinctively knew.

She held her hand out. It was looking beautiful—Linda had given her a manicure the night before, smoothing the work-roughened skin and putting on nail extensions and a rich nail-varnish whose colour matched her hair.

Nikos ignored the hand. A revulsion against touching flesh that had caressed, for money, a rich old man, filled him. It didn’t matter that half his body was registering renewed arousal at the sound of that breathy voice, the heady fragrance of her body as she approached him. He subdued it ruthlessly.

Besides, it had just registered with him that the woman was English. That would account for the auburn colouring. Presumably, he found himself thinking, for a woman of her profession hair that colour would command a premium in lands where dark hair was the norm.

The man’s rejection of her outstretched hand made Andrea falter. She let her hand fall to her side. But still, despite the shut-out, she refused to be intimidated. After all, if she failed at the first test—being sneered at by a complete stranger for being the bastard Coustakis granddaughter—then she would be doomed to fail in her mission. Intimidation was, she knew from the painfully extracted reminiscences of her mother’s abrupt expulsion from Greece twenty-four years ago, the forte of the man who had summoned her here like a servant. She must not, above all, be intimidated by Yiorgos Coustakis as her mother had been. She must stand up to him—give him as good as she got. Tony’s words echoed in her mind—if he had summoned her here, he wanted something. And that made her position powerful.

She had to remember that. Must remember that.

She was in enemy territory. Confidence was everything.

So now, in the face of the obvious disdain of this stunning stranger, she refused to be cowed. Instead, she gave that derisive little smile again, deliberately tossed her head and, shooting him a mocking glance, strolled right past him to take in the view over the grounds. She leant her palms on the stone balustrade, taking some of the weight off her legs. They were aching slightly, probably tension more than anything, because she’d been sitting down most of the day—first in the luxurious airline seat and then in the luxurious chauffeur-driven car. Still, she must do her exercises tonight—right after she’d phoned Tony, as they’d arranged.

Her mind raced, thinking about all the safety nets that she and Tony had planned out. The man behind her was totally forgotten. However good-looking he was—however scornful of the Coustakis bastard granddaughter—he was not important. What was important was going through, for the thousandth time, everything she and Tony had done to make sure that her grandfather could not outmanoeuvre her. Had they left any holes? Left anything uncovered?

Working on the premise that Yiorgos Coustakis was totally ruthless in getting what he wanted, she and Tony had planned elaborate measures to make sure that Andrea always had an escape route if she needed one. The first was to ensure that every evening of her stay in Greece she would phone Tony on the mobile he had lent her. If he did not hear from her by eleven p.m., he was to alert the British consul in Athens and tell them a British citizen was being forcibly held against her will. And if that did not do the trick—her mouth tightened—then Tony’s second phone call would be to a popular British tabloid, spilling the whole story of how the granddaughter of one of the richest men in Europe came to be living on a council estate. Yiorgos Coustakis might be immune to bad publicity, but she wondered whether his shareholders would be as sanguine about the stink she could raise if she wanted…

And then, if her grandfather still didn’t want to let her go, she had left her passport, together with seven hundred euros, plus her return ticket, in a secure locker at Athens airport—the key to which was in her make-up bag. She had also, not trusting her grandfather an inch, purchased a second, open-dated ticket to London while she was still at Heathrow, which she had not yet collected from the airline. She had paid for that one herself.

Andrea smiled grimly as she stared out over the ornate, fussily designed gardens. Though she hadn’t been able to afford to buy the full-price ticket from her own meagre funds, she had come up with a brilliant idea for how to pay for it. The day that she and Tony and Linda had gone into the West End to buy her outfit, they had also visited the store’s jewellery department. The balance from the five thousand pounds after buying the trouser suit and accessories had purchased a very nice pearl necklace—so nice that they had immediately taken it to another jewellery shop and sold it for cash. With the money they had bought the airline ticket, a wad of traveller’s cheques, and split the rest into a combination of sterling, US dollars and euros. That, surely, she thought, her eyes quite unseeing of the view in front of her, should be enough to ensure that she could simply leave whenever she wanted.

Behind her, Nikos Vassilis had stiffened. The woman had simply walked past him as if he were no one! And that derisive little smile and mocking look of hers sent a shaft of anger through him! No woman did that to him! Certainly not one who stooped to earn her living in such a way. He stared after her, eyes narrowing.

Then a discreet cough a little way to his side caught his attention, as it was designed to do. The manservant was back, murmuring politely that Mr Coustakis would see him now, if he would care to come this way.

With a last, ireful glance at the woman now leaning carelessly on the balustrade, totally ignoring him, her hair a glorious sunset cloud around her shoulders, Nikos stalked off into the house.