Читать книгу The Greek Tycoon's Convenient Wife - Sharon Kendrick - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

THE party was in a big, old house whose garden spilled down to the river—and clearly no expense had been spared. It was already in full swing when they arrived, as waitresses wearing very little bobbed around with trays of exotic-looking cocktails. Fairy lights were threaded into the branches of the trees, giant torches flared on either side of a specially constructed walkway, and there was a huge marquee with loud music blasting from it.

‘I’m surprised the neighbours haven’t complained about the noise,’ said Alice as they stood at the edge of the marquee’s black and white dance floor and watched people dancing around with varying degrees of skill.

‘That’s because they’ve invited all the neighbours!’ giggled Kirsty. ‘Oh, look—there’s Giles—won’t be a minute, I must say hello!’

Alice could have screamed as she watched Kirsty wiggling her silver bottom before being swallowed up by the crowd. She might have objected to the way that her friend had been fawning over Kyros all the way over here, but the last thing she wanted was to be left alone with him.

Yet she wasn’t alone, she reminded herself—there must be over a hundred people here with more arriving by the minute—and what could possibly happen in full view of everyone, if she didn’t want it to?

‘Some party,’ murmured Kyros, looking around.

‘Yes.’ Alice saw someone she’d been at school with, and waved. ‘The couple holding it are both bankers—they’ve just bought this house and this is their housewarming. Let’s go and find them,’ she suggested.

He turned then, a flicker of irritation flaring in the depths of the ebony eyes. ‘But I don’t want to find anyone.’

‘Don’t you think that’s a little rude, Kyros?’

‘Not really.’ His mouth curved into a half-smile—the kind that usually warned people that it was pointless to waste their time arguing with him. ‘Look around—see for yourself. People are drinking enough to ensure they have headaches by midnight and the more adventurous have already started dancing. In other words, Alice, everyone is doing their own thing. No one knows me—and why should they want to?’

Alice grabbed a vicious-looking purple cocktail from a passing tray and drank a potent mouthful. ‘Oh, please don’t be disingenuous, Kyros. Despite the fact that you’re woefully underdressed compared to everyone else, every woman in the garden noticed you walking in and every man is watching you out of the corner of their eyes to see what you’ll do next. Or rather, where’re you’ll strike.’

‘Strike?’ he echoed.

‘Like a predator,’ she said, before she had time to think about the wisdom of her words.

‘Then let me put their minds at rest,’ he said softly, cupping her elbow within the palm of his hand. ‘I am not interested in any of the women here—except the one whose perfume is invading my senses. Is it rose?’ he questioned.

‘Jasmine,’ she said automatically as the cocktail fizzed its way round her bloodstream.

‘Ah, jasmine. Sweet and intoxicating.’ Just like her. His thumb began to idly stroke at the satin texture of her skin and he felt it prickle into goose-bumps beneath his touch. ‘What I want is a few uninterrupted moments alone with you—catching up as ex-lovers do. To see what the world has done to us both in the intervening years.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘Then don’t think,’ he drawled dismissively. ‘You’re curious. I’m curious.’ The pad of his thumb now traced a featherlight line down to her wrist where he could feel the thready flicker of her pulse and see the dark blue tracery of veins beneath the fair skin. ‘Very curious.’

Had he deliberately couched his words to sound like a sexual invitation? Probably. She wanted to tell him to stop touching her—just as she wanted to tell him to stop dipping his voice like that, so that it resembled rich, creamy chocolate which was gliding sweetly over her skin. But no words came—all that came was a terrible awareness of the aching emptiness inside her.

But maybe in a way, he was right. Maybe she needed to fill in the yawning gaps of her imagination with a few facts because he must have left scores of broken-hearted women behind. Women just like her. And wouldn’t it be good for her to hear that? To understand that what she had shared with him had not been unique or special. It might be painful—but if she could see their relationship as it really was, rather than what she had wanted it to be, then mightn’t that help take Kyros off the pedestal where he stubbornly seemed to stay, no matter how fervent her efforts to remove him?

‘Okay. Why not?’ she questioned carelessly, but quickly moved away from the temptation of his touch before beginning to walk away from the marquee.

The garden was long and they stopped by a quiet, shaded spot near to where the dark river water lapped against the bank—far away enough not to be bothered by stray guests or the insistent music, but Alice found that she was trembling, even though the summer air was thick and warm and scented with flowers.

He gestured to a bench which curled all the way round the trunk of a tree. ‘Let’s sit here.’

Though hard, the seat was oddly intimate and Alice was uncomfortably aware of how close his thigh lay to hers—and how she had to keep surreptitiously tugging at the hem of her satin dress to stop her stocking tops from showing.

‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ he said lazily. ‘I have no objection to looking at your legs.’

‘Well, I do,’ she said, when he plucked the cocktail glass from her suddenly boneless fingers and put it on the grass nearby.

‘You don’t need that,’ he said flatly.

‘Says who?’

His mouth curved into a mocking smile. ‘I do.’

The gesture was both autocratic and yet thrilling—and Alice was appalled at herself for thinking so. Was it because he was Greek that he seemed so utterly masculine and in total command of the situation? That he could get away with the kind of domination she wouldn’t dream of tolerating from any other man—or was it simply because he was Kyros?

‘As high-handed as ever, I see,’ she observed.

‘Ah, but women like a man to take control.’ In the fading light, his eyes gleamed. ‘You always did,’ he added deliberately.

Especially in bed. The unspoken words seemed to filter their way through the gathering gloom towards her, pulling her back to a time of erotic awakening at Kyros’s hands.

When they’d met she had been a virgin—something which had delighted him. A woman’s virtue was the most precious gift that she could give to a man, he had assured her as he had removed the underwear from her trembling body with the dexterity of a man who had done so many times before.

With a passion which had dazed her, he had taught her everything he knew—and it seemed that his knowledge on this particular subject was encyclopaedic. Kyros was an expert in the art of love-making, ‘Because it is an art, agape mou,’ she recalled him murmuring as he had pulled her down onto his lap. How jealous she had been of all the women who had come before her—the women he had practised his art on. And what of the ones who had followed—what of those?

She wasn’t going to go there. They weren’t here to talk about intimacy—because that would only highlight unwanted emotions like envy and regret. Once again, she smoothed the hem of her dress.

‘I thought we’d already decided it was a little late in the day for fake modesty?’ he murmured.

‘Fake modesty will go once you ditch the caveman comments,’ she said, and he laughed. ‘So let’s have this catch-up you’re so keen on, Kyros. What exactly are you doing these days? Where are you living?’

‘On Kalfera. Where else?’

Alice had only ever seen photos of the stunning island where he and his twin brother had grown up and to her unworldly eyes it had looked like some kind of faraway paradise—with its sapphire seas and blazing white sands. Kyros had always spoken of returning there, but somehow she had thought that it might feel claustrophobic after London. She had thought that he might want to be free of its bitter memories. For hadn’t he once told her—on the one and only time she’d ever seen him slightly drunk—of the mother who had walked out on him and his twin brother when they were barely four years old?

And she remembered tentatively bringing up the subject another time—and the way he had shot her down in flames, telling her never to mention it again.

She watched him now—the shadows which caressed his sculpted cheekbones. ‘I thought you might find island life too small and insular—after all the freedom you enjoyed while you were studying.’

‘I choose to live on an island—that doesn’t mean I’m marooned on it,’ he said sarcastically. ‘I can move between the mainland and rest of Europe whenever it suits me.’

‘And how often is that?’

‘That depends. I have business interests which I’m growing, but Kalfera is where I most like to be. Life is very simple there—with a peace like nowhere else on earth. There’s nowhere like it,’ he finished softly, but then narrowed his eyes, shuttering them against further intrusion. So she still had that inquisitive way with her—and he had not brought her down here to this secluded spot for Alice to be interrogating him about his choice of home!

‘But that is enough about my unsophisticated life on a little Greek island,’ he murmured, leaning back against the tree trunk so that he could study the slim swell of her breasts. ‘I want to hear all about you.’

It occurred to Alice that he had actually told her very little about himself, other than where he was living. Had he made a success of the family business, she wondered—because hadn’t the company been struggling at some point? she recalled. Her eyes flicked over his jeans and T-shirt—not exactly the outfit of a rich man. Was it struggling still—and did that explain his reluctance to talk about it?

‘Oh, I’ve done okay,’ she said quietly. She didn’t want to boast—particularly if Kyros hadn’t made the dizzy and expected rise to the top—but neither did she want to play down her achievements. Even if her love life hadn’t been a success, at least Alice’s job was the one constant area she could be relatively proud of. ‘Enough to be able to support myself, anyway—and to own my own apartment.’

How long would it take to drive there? he wondered idly. In time for bed? ‘Doing what?’

‘I’m in marketing.’ She thought she saw his mouth curve and stupidly found herself rushing to her own defence! ‘It may sound a little dull, but it’s anything but—especially in the company I’ve joined. We sell health-care products—alternative therapy stuff—which is big business now. When I started out, things were on a downward spin—but we rethought our marketing strategies and it coincided with a change in people’s thinking, and…’ she shrugged, suddenly aware of the gleam in his black eyes ‘…now it’s on the upturn.’

‘Ah, Alice—how passionately you speak of this business. So you have become a career woman?’ he observed mockingly.

‘You make it sound like a fault.’

‘Do I? That is too strong an assessment—though nobody can deny that it is different for a woman. That if she puts her heart into her career, it leaves little room for anything else,’ he mused, glancing down at her bare fingers. ‘Particularly a family.’

Don’t take it personally, she told herself, but the taste of regret made her bite her lip. Just because you’ve never settled down and had children doesn’t mean you’re any kind of failure, she told herself firmly. ‘There’s still plenty of time for that,’ she returned, horribly aware that she might now be sounding even more defensive.

‘You think that women can have it all?’ he questioned.

‘I think men would like them to believe they can’t—but that they owe it to themselves to try.’

‘So you have become the arch-feminist in your silk stockings and suspenders,’ he observed drily, aware of the sudden kick of lust.

Now his black gaze was sliding down over her body, making her skin tingle with a growing kind of awareness. ‘I don’t remember you being quite so outrageously old-fashioned—even in the past,’ she returned. ‘Did you turn the clock back by a century when you returned to Kalfera?’

He stretched out his long legs in front of him and he saw her shift a little, as if her own position was uncomfortable. Was it? Well, it was pretty uncomfortable for him—but maybe that was because the inexorable build-up of desire was pulling tight across the heavy denim of his jeans. Would she notice? he wondered. What would she do if he put her hand there? Would she stroke him and then unzip him and take him into her mouth as she had done so many times in the past?

‘So have you missed me, agape mou?’ he murmured, cursing himself against the now exquisitely painful ache.

It was a long time since she had heard that particular term of affection—it was one of the first and few Greek phrases she had learned and now it took her by surprise. But more crucially, it took her back to a time and a place which she had sectioned off as being too dangerous—rather as you might wire-fence a crater you’d found lurking at the bottom of your garden.

Forgetting Kyros had been something she’d taught herself to do after he’d gone. It hadn’t been easy—but time had helped and so had practice. Yet seeing him here like this hurtled her back to a forgotten time and suddenly she found she had no defence against the flood of memories which washed over her.

They had met during her first month at college—at a party thrown to welcome the ‘freshers’. She had been eighteen and bright and eager to learn about anything life could throw at her and Kyros had been the pin-up Greek who was just starting his final year. Everyone had known Kyros—and he had been more exotic than anyone she’d ever met in the small town where she’d grown up.

His glowing olive skin, black hair and hard tall body were the dream package. And so too were his arrogance and unashamedly macho attitude. At a time when Englishmen had been trying to get in touch with their feelings, Kyros had been their dark antithesis and women had clustered around him like flies.

Alice remembered feeling slightly appalled at how obvious some of those women could be and he was rumoured to have slept with at least three of them. But she hadn’t paid him any attention—not because of some kind of sophisticated game-plan, because she hadn’t had the experience to play games. No, she had simply looked at him and decided that he was way out of her league, her experience, her world—everything, really.

Years later she would understand that men like Kyros were natural predators—that they liked the chase and they liked the new. It had been her freshness and innocence and her lack of interest in him which had drawn him to her—just as nature had programmed her to respond to his alpha qualities.

Physical attraction was one thing but Alice had fallen in love with him because, well, because he was Kyros and she couldn’t not have loved him. And for a time he had loved her too—or so he’d said. But love had not prevented him from walking away from her as clinically as he had. Leaving with a regretful shrug, which had done nothing to dull the pain of his words.

But you must have known I would return to take over the family business, agape mou. In time I shall no doubt marry a beautiful Greek girl who will produce at least five children—most of whom will be sons! And they in turn will take over the business from me one day. That is the way these things work.

No, she had not known at all—or rather, had not allowed herself. She had wanted their relationship to endure and she had cried—but at least she had stopped short of begging him not to go.

And once Alice had seen that his mind was made up, she had forced herself to allow herself a glimpse of her own future. And despite her heartache, she had allowed herself the first faint flare of hope. Soon she would have a degree with which to launch her career. She might no longer have Kyros, she had reasoned—but out there lay travel and fun and excitement for her to sample.

That her life had not materialised according to her dreams was nobody’s fault—let alone Kyros’s.

The memories cleared and Alice saw his ebony eyes gleaming in the moonlight as the music from the party drifted down the garden towards them. She swallowed. What had his question been? The one which had set off all those bitter-sweet thoughts about the past? Had she missed him? he had asked—with all the sensitivity of a steamroller. How could a man be so dense? In the beginning, she had missed him with the agony of someone who’d had one of their limbs cut off!

But worse than missing him had been the realisation that never again would she meet a man who came anywhere close to Kyros Pavlidis and the way he made her feel. She remembered understanding that with a painful kind of clarity and she had been proved absolutely right.

She would never tell him that, of course—his ego did not need such a boost—but neither could she deny having missed him at all, for surely it was impossible to tell an outright lie of that magnitude? It would make her sound like a fraud.

But she could choose how to tell him, for she was no longer a young, impressionable girl rocked by the urgent power of first love.

‘It was inevitable that I should miss you to some extent,’ she said. ‘We’d been an item for nearly a year. It went from full time to nothing.’ Still warmed by the cocktail, she even managed a fairly convincing smile. ‘I suppose what I found odd was the abruptness of it all. You never wrote, or phoned. You disappeared completely from my life. I never saw you or heard from you again.’ So that sometimes it had seemed like some strange and glorious dream.

His mouth curved into a hard, mocking line. ‘It was better that way,’ he said. ‘If we’d stayed friends…’ What? He might have been tempted to come back and to take her to bed and lose himself in her body over and over again? He had wanted—no, needed—to make a clean break with her. To forget his blonde lover—with her long legs and her emerald eyes.

But he had never forgotten her, he realised that now. Nor got her completely out of his system. He had buried his hunger for Alice—and he was only just discovering how deeply. And now? Just like a seed which had lain dormant all these years and been suddenly fed light and air and water, his desire for her was fizzing over like a warm glass of champagne, given life by the sight of her sitting like some goddess in the moonlight, her hair a silvery fall down her back.

‘We could never have stayed friends, Alice,’ he said harshly. ‘Ex-lovers don’t make good friends.’

‘No,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘I guess you’re right.’

Her green eyes were unreadable in the dim light. He had expected—what? That she, of all people—having tasted the pleasures of his body—would respond to him as other women did? That she would be pouting and sending out silent signals that she wanted him? But Alice had not done that.

It was true that she was dressed like a siren—but she had not followed that up with any suggestiveness. And hadn’t that always been part of her attraction to him? Her cool blonde beauty hiding the rampant sensual fire beneath?

So what was he going to do about it? He was going to do what he always did—take what he wanted, and then walk away.

Reaching out his hand, he splayed his fingers over the base of her throat—just below the necklet of fake gemstones. He could feel her pulse skittering beneath the delicate skin, could see the way that her lips parted instinctively. In the fading light her eyes darkened.

‘Kyros…’

He pulled her into his arms and stared down at her, his features tense and black eyes bright with sexual hunger as they roved over her face. Alice knew in that moment that he was going to kiss her and that it would have been easier to have floated down to the end of the garden than to have resisted him. He knew that and she knew that. ‘You bastard,’ she whispered.

His laugh was soft as he trickled a careless finger over the pert bud of her satin-covered nipple and it tightened in response. ‘But you like that. You like your hard, tough, Greek macho man, don’t you, my beauty? It turns you on. It always did.’

‘Kyros—’ But any protest was lost then for he was crushing his lips down on hers and she was kissing him back as if her life depended on it.

Her fingers fluttered up as they sought the broad shoulders, pressing against the hard muscle and wanting to tear away the T-shirt and to touch the silk of the olive skin beneath. She sucked in a breath—his breath—and moaned his name into his mouth.

With an angry kind of curse he pulled her down from the bench onto a soft patch of grass and pressed his body hard into hers. He felt so…so…hard. But that was okay, Alice thought weakly—because at least it was honest. She didn’t want softness—she didn’t want anything that masqueraded as love. This was what her hungry body craved—this virile man who was kissing her more passionately than any other man could.

Locking her arms tight around him, she kissed him back with a wantonness which felt as if it had been building up since last time he had kissed her all those years ago.

‘Alice!’ He let out a groan as she wriggled beneath him—the touch of her so shockingly and instantly familiar, but this time tempered with the spice of absence. His mouth at her throat, he nudged his thigh insistently against hers and they opened for him immediately and Kyros groaned with a kind of stunned disbelief. Her desire was simple and straightforward. She would play no games. She never had. Her sexual appetite had been more than a match for his—had he somehow thought that time might change that?

Heart pounding like a piston in his chest, he skated his hand down the front of her dress—the siren call of her body urging him on as he rucked up the slippery fabric of her dress, stroking his hand along the cool silk of her thigh until it alighted on her panties, and then he slipped his finger inside her.

At that she gasped, her eyes snapping open, and even in the shadow of the evening he could see they were dense and black with desire just as he could feel her barely contained shiver of delight.

‘Kyros! Stop it. We…we can’t—’

His hand stilled. Alice—refusing him?

‘We can’t…stay here.’

In the moonlight he smiled as he moved against her heated flesh. ‘No?’

Alice groaned—her hungry body calling out to her—but some last shred of sanity made her shake her head. Because how the hell would it look if someone found them locked in an intimate embrace? Did she think so little of herself that she could allow such an easy seduction? ‘No,’ she moaned. ‘There are people at the other end of the garden.’

In the darkness, his mouth curved into a hard smile. That did not sound like a refusal—more like a delaying tactic. He eased back from her a little, recognising the need to quieten down his aroused body or there was the very real fear that he would be unable to walk.

He stood up, and held his hand out to her. ‘Get up,’ he demanded unevenly. ‘We’re going back to your house.’

Alice steadied her ragged breathing. ‘But…what will people think?’

‘I don’t care what people think, Alice.’

Warning bells went off in her head at his arrogant statement, reminding her that she was risking getting hurt all over again.

‘Well, I do,’ she said.

‘Not enough to stop me,’ he taunted softly, his hands now cupping her silky bottom and bringing her hard up against the cradle of his desire. ‘Is it enough to stop you, Alice?’

Say no. Say it’s wrong. Too soon. That any respect he may have had for you will be destroyed by this illadvised passion. Say no!

‘No,’ she admitted tremblingly as she imagined him deep inside her.

He caught her fingers in his and began moving purposefully down the garden. Alice could hear chatter and music, the tinkling of crockery on china, and little shrieks of laughter as they passed. How perfectly normal it all sounded, she thought—with a sudden pang. While she was sneaking away like a thief in the night with a man who had already hurt her.

Was she crazy? Yes, very probably. But by now they had slipped unnoticed out of the side gate and she found herself wondering whether he made a habit of this as he led her confidently through the streets—as if she were the stranger in her home town.

They walked in a breathless kind of silence and when they reached her parents’ house, he tipped her face up. ‘Is your friend due to sleep over here tonight?’

She shook her head.

‘Good.’

How clinical he was, she thought—and how well thought out his line of questioning as he took all the known factors into account, a bit like some hot-shot lawyer. But Alice could guess at his overriding concern. That he didn’t want to wait and didn’t want to be disturbed. The tautness in his hard body was as tight as a stretched bow and the crackling tension between them was almost palpable.

He drifted his fingertips along her cheek—as if he was using the power of touch to dissolve any last, lingering doubts. And, oh, didn’t it work a treat? But Alice was past caring whether the gesture had been cynically manipulative or not. To be honest, she was past caring about anything except how much she ached to be in his arms and his bed once more.

‘K-Kyros,’ she said shakily, her tongue snaking out to moisten her parchment-dry lips.

‘Let’s get inside,’ he said roughly.