Читать книгу Modern Romance July 2015 Books 1-4 - Кэтти Уильямс, Maisey Yates, Cathy Williams - Страница 15

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE ROOM WAS very quiet for what seemed like a long time and, when she spoke, Jessica’s words seemed to splinter the peace. She turned onto her side and stared into the face of the man beside her.

‘How did you get that scar?’

Loukas stirred and stretched. Completely comfortable in his nakedness, he raised his arms and extended his powerful legs in a movement which should have distracted her, but nothing could have distracted her right then. All Jessica could see was the livid mark zigzagging over his flesh.

‘How?’ she whispered again, when still he didn’t answer.

His face became shuttered as he drifted a fingertip over her nipple and watched it wrinkle and harden. ‘As a topic for pillow talk,’ he drawled, ‘it’s not exactly up there with telling me how much you enjoyed your orgasm.’

Jessica didn’t react. He made what had happened sound so clinical. But maybe for him it was. Did legions of women purr the morning afterwards and tell the dark and charismatic Greek how much they had enjoyed their orgasm? She scooped back her hair and peered at him. ‘Was it in Paris?’ she persisted.

‘Was what in Paris?’ He stopped stroking.

‘You told me that you were...captured there.’ She hesitated. His face was still shuttered, but she persisted. ‘Was it back then?’

Loukas lay back, pillowing his ruffled head on his folded arms as the chandelier glittered fractured light on their bare skin. He sensed she wouldn’t give up until she had an answer and something told him he was going to find it harder to silence Jess than he would the average lover. ‘No, it wasn’t then,’ he said dismissively.

‘So...when?’

He turned his head to look at her and frowned. ‘Does it matter?’

‘Of course it matters.’ She gave a barely perceptible sigh. ‘What is it with you, Loukas? You never talk about your past, and you never did. I was with you for months and ended up knowing almost nothing about you.’

He gave the flicker of a smile. ‘You knew plenty.’

‘I’m not talking about the way your body works.’

He gave a short laugh. She had grown up in a land of milk and honey, in a world light years away from his. He thought about the big house with the tennis court and the bright green lawns which swept down to the sea. About privilege and belonging and all the things he’d never had. ‘What difference does it make to know about my past?’

‘It might make me feel as if I wasn’t in bed with a stranger,’ she said quietly.

It wasn’t the first time the accusation had been levelled at him, but, when Jess said it, it felt different. Come to think of it—everything about Jess felt different. ‘I thought the anonymity aspect appealed to you,’ he drawled. ‘You certainly seemed turned on when you had your back to me earlier. For a minute I thought you might be pretending I was someone else.’

‘Don’t try to change the subject.’

‘I’ll do anything I please. Just because I’ve made love to you doesn’t give you the right to censor my speech, or to demand answers.’

She bit her lip. ‘Is it such an awful story, then?’

‘Yes.’ He said the word without planning and it was like an overfilled balloon being popped by the prick of a needle. Like a bruise beneath your fingernail which only a white-hot lance would relieve. ‘Yes,’ he repeated. ‘Awful gets pretty close to it.’

‘Won’t you tell me?’

His instinct was to distract her—either by making love to her again, or by heading off to take a shower. Because she wanted to talk about the old Loukas, and he had spent a long time forging a new Loukas, a man as hard as the diamonds which were at the core of his fortune and a success beyond his wildest dreams.

He had uncovered secrets he would have preferred to have left alone, and had hidden them away deep inside himself. But secrets left their mark, he was discovering—a dirty mark which left a stain if you didn’t expose it to the sunshine and the air. He looked into Jess’s cool features, but for once her face was showing the emotions she usually kept contained. He could see the concern shadowing her eyes. He could hear an anxious softness in her voice, and something made him start talking. ‘How much do you know?’

She shrugged. ‘Not a lot. That you were an only child and your mother brought you up in Athens, and that you never knew who your father was.’

Loukas twisted his mouth into a grim smile. How easily a whole life could be condensed into a single sentence—black and white, without a single shade of grey in between. ‘Did I tell you that we were poor?’

‘Not in so many words, but I...’ Her words tailed off.

‘You what, Jess?’ he said silkily. ‘You guessed?’

She nodded.

‘How?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Oh, but it does. I’m interested.’

Reluctantly, she shrugged. ‘You just always seemed so...oh, I don’t know...restless, I guess. Like a shark moving through the water. Like you were always looking for something.’

It startled him how accurate her words were and Loukas nodded. Because she was right. He had been looking for something—he just hadn’t known what it was. And then, when he’d found it...

‘We were dirt poor, my mother and I,’ he said, wanting to ram home the fundamental differences between them. To shock her. To convince her—and him—that all they shared was a rare electricity in between the sheets. ‘Sometimes I used to hang around at the backs of restaurants to see what food they were throwing away at the end of a day’s trade, and I’d take it home...’ Take it home and hang around outside until his mother had finished with whoever she was currently entertaining. He remembered the different men who had stumbled out, some of them trying to cuff him on the mouth, while others had pressed a few coins into his hand. But Loukas had never kept those coins. He’d put them in the poor box at the nearby church...unwilling to accept money which was tainted, no matter how hungry he’d been. ‘Although I took what jobs I could, just as soon as I was old enough—running errands, sweeping restaurants, polishing cars— anything, really.’

‘And your mother?’ she questioned hesitantly. ‘Did she work?’

‘She didn’t have time to work,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was too busy devoting herself to whoever her current love interest was. She always had to have a man around and a child like me was only ever going to get in the way. So for the most part, I was left to my own devices.’

‘Oh, Loukas,’ she breathed.

‘I lived from hand to mouth,’ he continued grimly. ‘I worked at the ferry port in Piraeus as soon as I was old enough, until I’d saved up enough money to take myself off to a new life. I didn’t go back to Greece for a long, long time. I did my own tour of Europe, only it was nothing like the ones you see advertised in the glossy brochures. I lived in the shadows of Paris. I learnt to box in the Ukraine, and for a while I won amateur fights all over the continent, until Dimitri Makarov asked me to be his bodyguard.’

‘And that was when you met me,’ she said slowly.

Loukas nodded slowly. Yes. That was when he’d met his fairy-tale princess, with her white skin and her blue eyes and the cutest little bottom he’d ever seen. Her coolness had fascinated him; she’d been restrained and cautious—nothing like his mother or all the women he’d subsequently been intimate with. She hadn’t been predatory or coquettish. In fact she’d fought against an attraction which had been almost palpable. And hadn’t the fact that his princess had presented him with her virginity been like a master stroke in capturing his heart as well as his body, culminating in that proud proposal of marriage which had been thrown back in his face? He gave a bitter laugh. What a fool he had been.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a note of finality. ‘That was when I met you.’

‘And did you ever...?’ She drew in a deep breath and he saw the rise of her tiny breasts. ‘Did you ever see your mother again?’

Loukas flinched, because it didn’t matter what hurt and what pain she had caused him—she was still his mother.

‘Only once,’ he said flatly. ‘I’d been sending her money for years, but I couldn’t face returning. And then, when she was dying I went back to find her living in a...hovel.’ His voice tailed off, before taking on a bitter note. ‘In thrall to her latest boyfriend—a vulture who was systematically bleeding her dry of her dignity, as well as all the money I’d sent her. I remember how weak she was when she took my hand and told me that she loved this particular loser. And even though she’d been a notoriously bad picker of men all her life—this one was in a class of his own. He had neglected to give her any pain relief—he’d been too busy spending her money at the casino.’

‘Was that when you got the scar?’ she said slowly.

Loukas nodded, realising how alien this must all sound to someone like her. ‘Neh,’ he drawled, the flicker of anger not far from the surface. He remembered being young and fit and prepared to fight fairly, but his mother’s lover had not. He hadn’t seen the glint of steel as the knife had come flashing down out of nowhere, and at first he hadn’t even registered the strange, digging sensation in his flesh, which had heralded the eruption of blood. Loukas’s voice shook with rage. ‘The only good thing that came out of it was that he was arrested and jailed and no longer able to steal money from my mother. But by then it was too late anyway.’

‘What do you mean?’ she whispered.

‘She died later that week, just as I was being discharged from hospital,’ he said, his face twisted with pain. ‘I found all her paperwork and I understood at last why she had never wanted to talk about my father.’ He met the question in her eyes. ‘Like I said, she was a bad picker of men and that my father was abusive to her came as no real surprise. But the most interesting thing was that I discovered I had a twin brother.’

She tipped her head back, her eyes huge. ‘A twin brother?’

He nodded. ‘Alek had been brought up by my father—a very different kind of upbringing from mine. I had him tracked down and I met him in Paris.’ It had been that meeting which had made Loukas decide to lay all of his ghosts to rest. To make him want to move on and live his life in a different way. And hadn’t Jess been the most persistent ghost of them all—the one who had hovered on the periphery of his mind like some pale and interesting beauty?

‘How...’ her voice trembled ‘...how can you possibly have discovered that you have a twin? Why didn’t your mother ever tell you?’

‘Because my father was powerful,’ he said. ‘And she was running away from him. She couldn’t physically—or financially—take two tiny babies, so she chose to leave Alek.’

‘How? How did she choose?’

He shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter how. She knew she could never go back and so she decided to cut out that part of her life completely. To pretend it had never happened.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘And if I’m being objective, I think I can almost understand why. Far better to cut her losses and run, than to face up to the fact that she’d left her other son with a cruel tyrant.’

‘Oh, Loukas.’

She reached her hand towards his face as if to stroke his cheek but he caught her wrist in an iron-hard grip of his own. Turning her palm upwards, he ran his tongue slowly over the salty flesh, his eyes never leaving her face.

‘I don’t want your pity, Jess,’ he said softly. ‘That’s not the reason I told you.’

She trembled beneath the lick of his tongue. ‘Why did you tell me?’

He thought about it. It was more a question of why he had kept it hidden before but now he could see that he had been ashamed. Ashamed of the circumstances which had forged him. So hungry for his cool and classy Englishwoman that he had cultured a deliberate elusiveness, so that she would accept him for his present, and not his past.

But she had not accepted him at all. He had still not been good enough and maybe for someone like her, he never would be.

He didn’t answer her question, but fixed her with a steady gaze. He remembered the way she’d breathlessly whispered that she loved him and how, for a short while, he had believed her. But words were easy, weren’t they? His mother used to profess love, then leave him alone and frightened while she went out with her latest man. ‘Why did you turn down my proposal?’ he said suddenly.

She bit her lip and looked down at the rumpled sheets. ‘Because...because I thought you were doing it to be chivalrous. To save me from my father’s anger.’

‘First time in my life I’ve ever been called chivalrous,’ he said sardonically. ‘But I don’t think you’re being entirely honest, are you, Jess? Maybe you did it to protect your fortune from a man who had nothing—who might want to marry you for all the wrong reasons?’ he said, and the faint flush of colour to her cheeks told him everything he wanted to know.

‘Well, there was that too,’ she admitted haltingly, lifting her eyes to his as if she should be applauded for her honesty.

Loukas gave a bitter laugh. She had looked on him as someone with an eye for the main chance—able to provide her with sex, but best kept at arm’s length when it came to permanency, or commitment.

And wasn’t it crazy that even now it still hurt to realise that?

He didn’t handle pain well. Physical pain was no problem, but emotional pain he found unendurable and he’d learnt that there was only one way to guarantee immunity. Don’t get involved. Don’t let anyone close enough to inflict it. It was a simple but effective rule as long as you stuck to it. And with Jess he’d been stupid enough to take his eye off the ball for a while.

‘But you know something?’ he questioned. ‘You did me a kind of favour, in a way. I realised that marriage was completely wrong for someone like me.’

‘Is that why you’ve never settled down with anyone else? Why you still live in luxury hotels, instead of having a real home?’

‘Neh.’ He gave a soft, cynical laugh. ‘I’ve grown used to my life. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

‘And children? What about them?’

‘What about them? Why the hell would I want to bring children in the world, just to screw them up? I know what that’s like and so does my twin brother.’

‘Right,’ she said uncertainly.

He thought he could see a flicker of darkness in her eyes—as if his words were hurting her. As if she wanted to reach out and stroke his pain away. And he didn’t need that. He didn’t need her sympathy, or understanding. He didn’t want her looking at him as if he were a puzzle she could solve, because he was fine just the way he was. He didn’t want her making him feel stuff, because life was so much easier when you didn’t. There were a million things he didn’t want from her and only one thing he did.

He pulled her closer, so that he could feel the warm softness of her skin. Her face was turned up to his and her lips were eagerly parted, and for a while he just teased her. He brushed his mouth over hers—back and forth—until she made a sound halfway between frustration and desire. Sliding her hand around the back of his neck, she pulled him down towards her and he felt a heady rush of sexual power as she clung to him.

This, he thought, just before he kissed her—this was all he wanted from Jessica Cartwright.