Savage Seduction

They walked into the village, past the restaurant where she’d seen him yesterday.

He saw the inquisitive rise of her eyebrows. ‘There is little enough privacy in the village,’ he explained. ‘But even less there.’

‘Oh? And why’s that?’

He smiled down at her. ‘My family owns it.’

So—he was in the restaurant business with his family. And he didn’t want her to meet them! Some little English girl he was ashamed to be seen with. She began to pull her hand away, but he wouldn’t let her, instead stopped still on the dusty track and turned her to face him.

‘What’s wrong?’

Peculiarly, it was too important to her to lie about. ‘Of course, if you don’t want me to meet your family—’

‘Agape mou,’ he laughed softly, ‘there is a way that a man can behave with a woman which in Greece would have his family drawing up a wedding list.’

Her heart sounded very loud in her ears. ‘And what way’s that?’

‘Never taking his eyes off her. Not wanting to eat. Not wanting to do anything other than kiss her and make love to her. I’ve seen it happen to other men before; but never to me. The way I intend to behave with you tonight, Jade,’ he finished with quiet emphasis. ‘And I would prefer not to have an audience.’

The darkness was falling and it camouflaged her soft rise in colour, the sharp little intake of breath. It had sounded as if… As if what? As if he was falling in love with her? As she was with him? Oh, stop it, stop it, she thought shakily. ‘But surely,’ she questioned, ‘all the restaurants will be crowded tonight—it’s the height of the season.’

‘Wait and see,’ he promised.

In a dream she walked with him to the outside of the village, to a white building which looked out over the blue and green fragrant hills, the stars be- ginning to glimmer in the indigo velvet of the sky.

A waiter led them to a terrace, where rose- coloured candles burned incandescently on each table against the ever-darkening night. This res- taurant was obviously much more upmarket than the others in the village, thought Jade as Constantine held her chair out for her, because crisp white tablecloths matched the beautifully pleated damask napkins.

There was wine already chilling in the ice-bucket, and Jade accepted a glass, together with the leather- bound menu, her eyes wide with confusion.

‘Where is everyone?’ she whispered. ‘Why are we the only customers?’

He smiled, his teeth showing very white in the olive darkness of his face. ‘Because, as I told you, I wanted privacy.’

‘But how—?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘The proprietor owes me a favour,’ he said implacably, and Jade once again got an overwhelming feeling of a toughness ema- nating from the man who sat opposite her.

She sipped at her drink nervously. ‘You mean- that we’ve got the whole restaurant to ourselves? As a favour to you?’

He gave a little nod. ‘I do.

‘It must have been a very big favour.’ In Jade’s world, people just didn’t do things like that. But this was, after all, Greece. Many parts of it a still very fundamental world, with values light-years away from the superficial mores of life in the highly developed west, or even from life in its capital, Athens. Without knowing why, goosebumps chilled her arms, even though the night air was warm and soft on her skin.

‘Some day I’ll tell you,’ he smiled, and handed her one of the menus.

‘Some day’…?

Did his words imply that they had some sort of future together?

Jade tried very hard to concentrate on the choice of food—grilled fish and meat mainly—and to stop reading things into what he was saying.

Constantine spoke in rapid Greek to the waiter, of which she understood not one word—bar his name, Kris, and moments later they were brought a dish containing the tiny hors-d’oeuvres known as mezes.

‘So—’ He popped a green olive into his mouth

and chewed it. ‘Tell me what such a beautiful woman is doing holidaying on her own?’

Jade looked at him suspiciously, scared that he was making fun of her. ‘Very funny,’ she said.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘What?’

‘I’m not beautiful,’ she told him, her green eyes glittering with a challenge that dared him to lie to her.

He drew his brows together. ‘On the contrary. I’m being deadly serious. You are tall enough to model and you are extremely slender, almost too slender—I can see that I may need to feed you up. But truly, you are beautiful,’ he stated. ‘Quite as- tonishingly so.’

Beautiful? Her? Jade was sensible enough to know her good points and her bad points, but no one had ever called her beautiful before, and in common with others who had had a fragmented childhood her body image was poor. True, she was tall, but she’d always considered herself a bit of a beanpole, and yes, she found it almost impossible to put on weight—which was beneficial in a society so obsessed by thinness. But her mouth was much too wide for conventional beauty, and her narrow slanting eyes did not have the classic wide-eyed appeal which men were said to find attractive. Plus, in England—given the nature of the sexist men she worked with—she tended to sublimate her feminin- ity with her hair scraped back into a sensible plait, and clothes which were designed to be functional but nothing more than that. She supposed that on this holiday she had allowed herself to relax the normal severity with which she dressed. But beautiful? Did he say that to all the girls? she wondered.

However, even this sobering thought couldn’t abate her delight, and Jade found herself smiling at Constantine like an idiot. This was ridiculous- one compliment and she was like putty in his hands!

‘So,’ he continued. ‘Tell me why you’re here on your own?’

‘I needed a break,’ she said honestly.

‘A break from what?’

Jade twirled the stem of her glass round and round between her fingers, watching the conden- sation trickle slowly down the side.

Tricky. She wondered just how much to tell him.

True, Constantine was a Greek, whose family owned a tiny taverna on a small Greek island—he might not even have heard of the Daily View. But what if he had?

After she’d won the Young Journalist compe- tition launched by the Daily View, they had offered her a job as reporter—a job she had accepted with eager gratitude, given the cut-throat world of jour- nalism. Then she’d been proud to tell people that she worked on Britain’s best-selling tabloid news- paper. But that was before she’d discovered what most people actually thought of the Daily View.

They despised it.

Time and time again, when she had explained who she worked for, she had seen an expression of scorn come into the faces of people who viewed tabloid writers as total drunks with no morals. So, in the end, she had stopped telling them. It made for an easier life.

She stared into Constantine’s dark eyes and made her decision. This was one evening out of her lifetime, she reasoned; an evening scented with magic which would soon become nothing more than a distant memory. This was total fantasy, so why taint it with the bitter taste of reality?

She saw that he was waiting for her answer and gave a little shrug. ‘I just wanted a break,’ she said carefully.

‘A break from something in particular?’ he probed. ‘A man perhaps?’

Now he really had got the wrong end of the stick! ’Heavens, no!’ she exclaimed fervently, unaware of the small smile he gave to this. ‘Nothing like that! I meant a break from city life.’

He sipped at his drink and surveyed her curi- ously. ‘You’re very young?’

‘I’m twenty,’ she answered, and then, more ten- tatively, because it suddenly seemed terribly im- portant, ‘And you?’

‘Thirty.’ There was a glimmer of a smile. Had he guessed what she’d been thinking? ‘That is a good gap, yes? Ten years?’ He stared across the table at her moonwashed hair, raising his glass to his lips. ’So tell me—what do you think of my island?’

‘You don’t actually happen to own it, do you?’ she joked.

‘You must forgive me yet another possessive Greek statement,’ he said implacably.

‘I love your island,’ she said simply. ‘I’ve never relaxed so much in my life. I’ve spent my whole time being thoroughly lazy, swimming every day’

‘I know.’

She looked into his eyes. ‘How can you know?’

‘Because I’ve watched you. Looking like a mermaid with that yellow hair, those mysterious green eyes, that secretive smile.’

‘You were—watching me?’ she asked, appalled at the way her heart galloped into action.

He nodded. ‘I was your guardian angel. Like today. Didn’t you know?’

Jade shook her head. ‘No.’ Thank heavens she hadn’t gone topless!

‘And do you mind?’

‘I don’t know really. Isn’t it a loss of the privacy you were so keen to preserve this evening?’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps. But I couldn’t stay away,’ he said simply, as though this excused everything, then popped another olive into his mouth and smiled. ‘Let’s order.’

Jade was relieved to have something relatively ordinary to do to keep her attention from the lunatic thoughts which were buzzing around her head. For Constantine seemed to possess some powerful quality she’d never encountered in a man before. Something which touched and matched some deep, dark longing inside her, offering her a glimpse of a passionate side to her nature she hadn’t dreamed existed.

And she already suspected—no, she knew, that this—relationship, if you could call it that, threat- ened to get out of control very quickly. And she knew what out of control meant. Shocking though it was, she wanted this arrogant and handsome man she’d only just met to make love to her. She wanted to taste the pleasures that she instinctively knew that only he could offer her. But no one in their right mind would allow such a wish to become reality. After all, what possible future could a London- based journalist have with a restaurant proprietor who lived on a distant Greek island?

None.

Jade forced herself to apply her attention towards the food, which was surprisingly good and simple. They ate Greek salad, scarlet with tomatoes and white with feta cheese and black with olives, with strong olive oil drizzled all over it. ‘And what do you do in England?’ he pursued.

‘Oh, it’s just a boring old typing job,’ she said vaguely. True, although she knew she was being economical with the truth—but what if he had the rest of the world’s prejudices about tabloid journalists? The evening would be ruined before it had even got started. She dipped some bread into the olive oil, then ate it. ‘And how about you? Are you a waiter at your family’s restaurant?’

He paused with the fork halfway to his mouth, and the corners of his mouth twitched before he laid it down on his plate. ‘Sometimes,’ he said. ‘And I help them—balance the books—as the English say.’

She looked around her and breathed in the scented air. ‘It must be a heavenly place to live,’ she told him.

‘Oh, it is,’ he agreed gravely. ‘Indeed, it is.’

And after that the evening seemed to get better and better.

‘You have brothers and sisters?’ he asked.

Jade took a large swallow of wine. ‘No. And you?’

Something indefinable came into his eyes as he shook his head. ‘Just a brother. And a—’ He hesitated, momentarily. ‘Step-sister. But I like big families. And you?’

It was something she had never, ever considered until this moment. Children were somewhere off in a hazy, rosy future which she’d somehow never im- agined happening, not to her. She had never given much thought to children, but tonight she was, and she had the strongest suspicion that he was, too. She remembered their eyes meeting over the head of the tousle-haired toddler, of that spark which had flown between the two of them; a spark born out of mutual need and understanding. But what on earth was she admitting to? That she wanted to stay here and have his children? To live on a Greek island with one of its inhabitants? She, who had always been so ambitious, so determined to succeed?

Yes, yes, yes!

‘What’s the matter?’ He interrupted her silence. ’You don’t approve of big families?’

As the truth dawned on her, it felt like coming home. ‘Oh, no—I absolutely love them!’

He smiled, his eyes gently sweeping over her shining eyes, her dazzling smile. ‘I’m glad,’ he said softly.

Never had a meal seemed to take so long; Jade had no appetite for it. She remembered having odd dates where the meal had assumed the greatest im- portance because the man she was out with had seemed so dull. And yet tonight—delicious as the barbouni smelt, and however sweet and succulent its flesh, she couldn’t wait to be away from here, to be some place alone with Constantine, to taste the delights of his lips, discover the safety of his arms.

At last they were away and walking back down the dusty road, until they reached her cottage. He hadn’t tried to kiss her, not once, and when they stood outside her door Jade turned to him in confusion.

He nodded as he read her eyes. ‘Not tonight, agape mou.’ And then he said something in Greek softly beneath his breath.

‘What did you just say?’

He gave a soft laugh. ‘Epikindhinos. It means dangerous. Just like you. There is danger in the witchy slant of your eyes, in the pale waterfall of your hair. And the dangers that lie within those dark red lips, and all the secret places of your body—ah! They are too manifold even to dare to imagine!’

Jade found herself laughing at his extravagance; somehow he had turned the tension into humour, and she found herself admiring him for it. The first man who hadn’t tried to leap on her on a first date. Typical that it should be the only one she’d ever wanted to!

He picked up her hand and carried it to his lips, placed a fleeting kiss there. ‘We shall spend the day together tomorrow.’

‘Doing what?’

There was a fleetingly ruthless smile. ‘Doing our best not to make love. Being—circumspect. That is what we must do. And now, my golden-haired angel—go and sleep. Dream of me until I arrive tomorrow morning.’

Not surprisingly, she did dream of him, and wonderful dreams they were, too—but the reality of the real man who arrived the following morning at eight o’clock far outshone the dream version.

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