Hot Nights with a Greek

‘Don’t you dare ignore me!’ Cindy screeched. ‘The parents will be here in a minute. I want you to tell them that this was all your own fault! I’ve got a gig tonight and I just can’t perform with all of this angst going on. And you need to get busy with some damage control because you won’t like it if I have to do it myself!’

Leo stepped to one side to let Natasha pass by him. The moment she closed her bedroom door, he reacted, stepping right up to Cindy. ‘Now listen to me, you spoiled little tart,’ he said. ‘One false word from you about what took place today and you’re finished. I will see to it.’

Cindy’s head shot up, scorn pouring out of her bright baby blue eyes. ‘You don’t have the power—’

‘Oh, yes, I do,’ Leo said. ‘Money talks. Jumped-up little starlets like you come off a conveyer belt. Give me half an hour with a telephone and I can ruin you so quickly you won’t see oblivion until you find yourself sunk in it up to your scrawny neck. Pending records deals can be withdrawn. Gigs cancelled. Careers murdered by a few words fed into the right ears.’

Cindy went white.

‘I see that you get my drift.’ Leo nodded. ‘You are not looking into the eyes of a devoted fan now, sweet face, you’re looking into the eyes of a very powerful man who can see right through the shiny packaging to the ugly person that lurks beneath.’

‘Natasha won’t let you do anything to h-hurt me,’ Cindy whispered.

‘Yes, she will,’ Natasha said. She was standing just inside the door with a hastily packed bag at her feet.

As Cindy looked at her Natasha twisted something out of her fingers, sending it spiralling through the air. It landed with a clink on the pale wood floor at Cindy’s feet. Looking down, even Leo went still when he saw what it was.

Her ring—her shiny diamond engagement ring. ‘That’s just something else of mine you haven’t tried,’ she explained. ‘Why don’t you put it on and see if it fits you as well as my fiancé did?’

Cindy’s appalled face was a picture. ‘I didn’t want him, and I don’t want—that!’

‘Well, what’s new there?’ Natasha laughed, though where the laugh came from she did not have a single clue. ‘When have you ever wanted anything once you’ve possessed it?’

Pandemonium broke out then as their parents arrived, rushing in through the flat door Leo must have left on the latch.

They looked straight at Cindy. They had barely registered that Natasha was even there.

Cindy burst into a flood of tears.

‘Oh, my poor baby,’ Natasha heard her mother cry out. ‘What did that Rico do to you?’

Natasha began to feel very sick again. She stared at the way her two parents had gathered comfortingly around Cindy and felt as if she were standing alone somewhere in outer space.

Then her gaze shifted to Leo standing on the periphery of it all with his steady dark eyes fixed on her painfully expressive face. ‘Can we leave now?’ she whispered.

‘Of course.’

And he was stooping to pick her bag up. As he straightened again his hand made a proprietary curl of her arm and Natasha heard Cindy quaver, ‘He’s been stalking m-me for weeks, Mummy. I went to see him to tell him to stop it or I would tell Natasha. The next thing I knew he…’

Leo closed the door on the rest. Neither said a single word to each other as they walked out of the apartment and headed for the lift. All the way down to the foyer they kept their silence, all the way out to his car. He drove them away in that same tense silence until Leo clearly could not stand it any longer and flicked a button on his steering wheel to activate his phone.

Natasha recognised the name ‘Juno’, then nothing as he proceeded to share a terse conversation in Greek.

She kept her eyes fixed on the side window and just let his deep, firm, yet strangely melodious voice wash over her as they drove out of the city and into lush green, rural England. The ugliness of her situation was crawling round her insides, the spin of once-loved faces turning into strangers as they flipped like a rolling film through her head. She didn’t know them and, she realised painfully, they did not really know her—or care.

‘Do you think they’ve noticed that you are no longer there yet?’

Realising Leo had finished his telephone conversation and had now turned his attention on her, Natasha lifted a shoulder in an empty shrug. Had they even noticed she was there in the first place? Pressing her pale lips together she said nothing.

A minute later they were turning in through a pair of gates leading to a private airport where, she presumed, Leo must keep his company jet. It took no time at all to get through the official stuff. All the way through it she stood quietly at his side.

So this is it, Natasha told herself as they walked towards a sleek white jet with its famous Christakis logo shining Ionian blue on its side. I’m going to fly off into the sunset to become this man’s sole possession.

She almost—almost managed a dry little smile.

‘What?’ Leo just never missed anything—not even the smallest flicker of a smile.

‘Nothing,’ she murmured.

‘Forget about Rico and your family,’ he said harshly. ‘You are better off without them. I am the only one you need to think about now.’

‘Of course,’ Natasha mocked. ‘I’m about to become a very rich man’s sexual doormat, which has to be quite a hike up from being my family’s wimpish doormat and Rico Giannetti’s thieving one.’

Leo said nothing, but she could sense his exasperation as he placed his hand on the small of her back to urge her up the flight steps.

The plane’s interior gave Natasha an insight into a whole new way of travelling. Breaking free from his touch, she took a couple of steps away from him, then stopped, tension springing along her nerve-ends when she heard the cabin door hiss as someone sealed it into its housing and the low murmur of Leo’s voice speaking to someone, though she did not turn around to find out who it was.

This wasn’t right. None of it was right, a sensible voice in her head tried to tell her. She should not be on this plane or tripping off to Athens with Leo Christakis—she should be staying in England and fighting to clear her name!

‘Here, let me take your jacket.’ He arrived right behind her again, making her whole body jerk to attention when his hands landed lightly on her shoulders.

‘I would rather keep it on,’ she insisted tautly.

‘No, you would not.’ Sliding his fingers beneath the jacket collar, he followed it around her slender white throat until he located the top button holding her jacket fastened. ‘You will be more comfortable without it.’ He twisted the button free.

‘Then I can do it.’ Snapping up her hands, Natasha grabbed his wrists with the intention of pulling his hands away. He didn’t let her.

‘My pleasure,’ he murmured smoothly as the next button gave.

Her two breasts thrust forward, driving a shaken gasp from her throat. ‘I wish you would go and f-find someone else to torment,’ she breathed out sharply when his knuckles grazed her nipples on their way to locate the next button, and felt her stomach muscles contract as he brushed across them, too.

He just laughed, low and huskily. ‘When did you find the time to stick your hair up again?’

‘At the flat,’ she mumbled, then went as taut as piano wire when the last button gave way to his working fingers.

‘You’re too skittish,’ he chided.

‘And you’re too sure of yourself!’ Natasha flicked out.

‘That’s me,’ he admitted casually, moving his hands down her sleeves to locate her handbag still clutched in one tense set of fingers. He gently prised it free to toss it aside.

Why the loss of her purse should make her feel even more exposed and under threat, Natasha did not have a clue, but by the time he’d eased the jacket from her shoulders she was more than ready to dissolve into panic. And the worst part about it was that she could not even say for sure any more what it was she was panicking about—Leo and his relentless determination to keep her balanced on the edge of reason, or herself because her senses persisted in responding to him even when her head told them to stop!

His hands arrived at the curve of her slender ribcage over the stretchy white fabric that moulded her so honestly it felt as if he were touching her skin. Natasha closed her eyes and prayed for deliverance when he eased her back against him and she felt his heat and his hard masculine contours.

‘Leo, please…’ It came out somewhere between a protest and a breathless plea.

It made no difference. He lowered his mouth and brushed his lips across the exposed skin at her nape and for Natasha it was like stepping off a cliff, she fell that easily. She murmured a pathetic little stifled groan and her head tipped downwards, inviting the gentle bite of his teeth. As he began kissing his way round her neck, she rolled it sideways on a slow and pleasurable, sensual stretch to give him greater access. She so loved what he was making her feel.

‘Mmm, you feel good, like warm, living silk to touch,’ he murmured. ‘You have a beautiful body, Natasha,’ he added huskily, gliding his hands upwards until he cupped her breasts and gently pressed his palms against their tightly budded peaks. ‘I need you to turn your head and kiss me, agape mou,’ he told her huskily.

And she did. She moved on a restless sigh of surrender when he reached for her hands and lifted them upwards, then clasped them around the back of his neck. The sheer sensual stretch of her body felt unbelievably erotic. She whispered something—even she didn’t know what it was—then she was giving in and twisting her head and going in search of his waiting mouth.

Leo gave it to her in a hot, deep, stabbing delivery. Her fingers curled into the black silk of his hair. It was shocking. She didn’t know herself like this, all soft and pliable and terribly needy.

‘We are cleared for take-off, Mr Christakis,’ a disembodied voice suddenly announced.

Leo drew his head back and the whole wild episode just went up in a single puff of smoke. Natasha opened her eyes and found that she couldn’t focus. Passion coins of heat burned her cheeks. She became aware of her hands still clinging to his head and slid them away from him, her still-parted mouth closing with a soft burning crush of her warm lips.

‘You are quite a bundle of delightful surprises,’ she heard Leo mock. ‘Once unbuttoned you just let it all flood out.’

And the real horror of it was that he was, oh, so right! Each time he touched her it was the same as losing touch with her common sense and dignity. Acknowledging that had Natasha breaking free of him to wrap her arms tightly around her body, then she just stood there, shaking and fighting to get a grip on herself.

An engine purred into life.

‘Take a seat, strap yourself in, relax,’ his hatefully sardonic tone invited, and he was stepping around her to stride down the cabin.

Watching him go, Natasha thought she glimpsed a flick of irritation in the way that he moved and kind of understood it. To a man like Leo Christakis the deal had been done, so to have her continue to play it coy annoyed him. From the little she’d heard about his private life, he liked his women with the experience and sophistication to know how to respond positively to his seduction routine, not blow hot then tense and skittish each time he attempted to act naturally with her.

The gap in their ages suddenly loomed. The fact that there was nothing natural at all in the two of them being together picked at her nerves as she chose a seat at random and sat down.

The plane slid into movement. Natasha watched Leo remove his suit jacket to reveal wide, muscled shoulders hugging the white fabric of his shirt. He draped the jacket over the back of the chair in front of the desk, then folded his long body into the seat placed at an angle to her, those muscled shoulders flexed as he locked in his seat belt, then reached out to pull a large stack of papers towards him and sat back to read.

Dragging her eyes away from him, she hunted down her seat belt with the intention of fastening it, but she spied her discarded jacket lying on the seat opposite and on sheer impulse she snatched it up and put it back on, buttoning it shut all the way up to her throat, though she had no idea what, by doing it, she was hoping to prove.

Unless it had something to do with the tight bubble of anger she could feel simmering away inside at the way he was lounging there already steeped in paperwork and putting on a good impression that he had already forgotten she was here, which hit too closely at the way her family had behaved at the apartment.

Ten minutes later they were in the air and his laptop computer was open, his voice that same melodic drone in her ears. A gentle-voiced stewardess appeared at Natasha’s side to ask her if she would like something to eat and drink. She knew she wouldn’t be able to eat anything right now, but she asked if it was possible for her to have a cup of tea, and the stewardess smiled an, ‘of course,’ and went away to see to it.

Leo swivelled around in his chair.

He looked at her, narrowing his eyes on the buttoned-up jacket. A new rush of stinging awareness spun through the air.

‘It will have to stay off at some point,’ he murmured slowly.

Natasha pushed her chin up and just glared.

It was a challenge that made his dark eyes spark and sent Natasha breathless. Then he was forced to turn his attention back to his satellite link, leaving her feeling hot and skittish for a different reason.

For the next three hours he worked at the desk and she sat sipping her tea or reading one of the magazines the stewardess had kindly brought for her. Throughout the journey Leo kept on swinging his chair around to look at her, waiting until she felt compelled to look back at him, then holding her gaze with disturbing dark promises of what lay ahead. Once he even got up and came to lean over her, capturing her mouth with a deep, probing kiss. As he drew away again the top button to her jacket sprang open.

He did it to challenge her challenge, Natasha knew that, but her body still tightened and her breasts tingled and peaked. The next time he turned his chair to look at her the button was neatly fastened again and she refused point blank this time to lift her head up from the magazine.

They arrived in Athens to oven heat and humid darkness. It was a real culture shock to witness how their passage through the usual formalities was so carefully smoothed. And Leo felt different, like a remote tall, dark stranger walking at her side. His expression was so much harder and there was a clipped formality in the way he spoke to anyone. A quiet coolness if he was obliged to speak to her.

Natasha put his changed mood down to the way people constantly stopped to stare at them. When she saw the cavalcade of three heavy black limousines waiting to sweep them away from the airport, it really came down hard on her to realise just how much power and importance Leo Christakis carried here in his own capital city to warrant such an escort.

‘Quite a show,’ she murmured as she sat beside him in the rear of the car surrounded by plush dark leather while the other two cars crouched close to their front and rear bumpers. Seated in the front passenger seat of this car and shut away behind a plate of thick, tinted glass sat a man Leo had introduced to her as, ‘Rasmus, my security chief’. It was only as he made the introduction that Natasha realised how often she’d seen the other man lurking on the shadowy periphery of wherever Leo was.

‘Money and power make their own enemies,’ he responded as if all of this was an accepted part of his life.

‘You mean, you always have to live like this?’

‘Here in Athens, and in other major cities.’ He nodded.

It was no wonder then that he was so cynical about anyone he came into contact with, it dawned on her. He flies everywhere in his private jet aeroplane, he drives around in private limousines and he has the kind of bank balance most people could not conjure up even in their wildest dreams. And he has so much power at his fingertips he probably genuinely believes he exists on a higher plane than most other beings.

‘I never saw it in London,’ she said after a moment, remembering that while he’d been in London he had driven himself.

He turned his head to look at her, dark eyes glowing through the dimness of the car’s interior. ‘It was there. You just did not bother to look for it.’

Maybe she didn’t, but… ‘It can’t have been as obvious there,’ Natasha insisted. ‘I was used to some measure of security when Cindy was performing but never anything like this—and none at all with Rico.’ She then added with a frown, ‘Though that seems odd now when I think about who Rico is and—’

He moved, it was barely a shift of his body but it brought Natasha’s face around to catch the flash to hit his eyes.

‘What?’ she demanded.

‘Don’t ever compare me with him,’ he iced out.

Her blue eyes widened. ‘But I wasn’t—’

‘You were about to,’ he cut in. ‘I am Leo Christakis, and this is my life you are entering into with all its restrictions and privileges. Rico was nothing.’ He flicked a long-fingered hand as if swatting his stepbrother away. ‘Merely a freeloader who liked to ride on my coat-tails—’

Natasha went perfectly pale. ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered.

‘Why not when it is the truth?’ he declared with no idea how he had just devastated her by using the same withering words to describe Rico as her sister had used to describe her. ‘His name is Rico Giannetti, though he prefers to think of himself as a Christakis, but he has no Christakis blood to back it up and no Christakis money to call his own,’ he laid out with contempt. ‘He held an office in every Christakis building because it was good for his image to appear as if he was worthy of his place there, but he never worked in it—not in the true meaning of the word anyway.’ The cynical bite to his voice sent Natasha even paler as his implication hit home. ‘He drew a salary he did little to earn and spent it on whatever took his fancy while robbing me blind behind my back as I picked up the real tabs on his extravagant tastes,’ he continued on. ‘He is a hard-drinking, hard-playing liar to himself and to everyone connected to him, including you, his betrayed, play-acting betrothed.’

Shaken by his contemptuous barrage, ‘Ex-betrothed,’ Natasha husked out unsteadily.

‘Ex-everything as far as you are concerned,’ he pronounced. ‘From this day on he is out of the picture and I am the only man that matters to you.’

He had demanded that she put her family out of her head, now he was insisting she put Rico out of her head. ‘Yes, sir,’ she snapped out impulsively, wishing she could put him out of her head, too!

A black frown scored his hard features at her mocking tone. ‘I thought a few home truths at this point will help to keep this relationship honest.’

‘Honest?’ Natasha almost hyperventilated on the breath she took. ‘What you’re really doing here is letting me know that you expect to control even my thoughts!’

Impatience hit his eyes. ‘I do not expect that—’

‘You do expect that!’

Leo raked out an angry sigh. ‘I will not have Rico’s name thrown in my face by you every five minutes!’

Natasha swung round on him in full choking fury. ‘I did not throw his name at you—you battered me with it!’

‘That was not my intention,’ he returned stiffly.

Twisting on the seat, she glared at the glazed partition. ‘You’re no better than Rico, just different than Rico in the way you treat people—women!’ she shook out with a withering glance across the width of the seat. ‘Since we are driving along here like a presidential cavalcade, your loathsome arrogance is one fault I will let you have, but your—’

‘Loathsome—again?’ he mocked lazily.

It blew the lid off what was left of her temper. ‘And utterly, pathetically jealous of Rico!’

Silence clattered down all around them with the same effect as crashing cymbals hitting the crescendo note and making Natasha’s heart begin to race. She could not believe she had just said that. Daring another glance at Leo, she could see him looking back at her like a man-eating shark about to go on the attack, and now she couldn’t even breathe because the tension between them was sucking what was left of the oxygen out of the luxury confines of the car.

He reacted with a lightning strike. For such a big man he moved with a lithe, silent stealth and the next thing she knew she was being hauled through the space separating them to land in an inelegant sprawl of body and limbs across his lap. Their eyes clashed, his glittering with golden sparks of anger she hadn’t seen in them before. Hers were too wide and too blue and—scared of what was suddenly fizzing in her blood.

She had to lick her suddenly very dry lips just to manage a husky, ‘I didn’t really m-mean—’

Then came the kiss—the hot and passionate ambush that silenced her attempt to retract what she’d said, and flung her instead into fight with lips and tongues and hands that did not know how to stay still. His breath seared her mouth and a set of long fingers was clamped to the rounded shape of her hip, her own fingers applying digging pressure to whatever part of his anatomy they could reach as their mouths strained and fought. The motion of the car and the fact that they were even in one became lost in the uneven fight. She wriggled against him. His hand maintained its controlling clamp. She felt her fingernails clawing at his nape and the rock-solid moulding of his chest so firmly imprinted against his shirt.

He loved it. She caught his tense hiss of pleasure in her mouth and felt a tight, pleasurable shudder attack his front, the powerful surge of his response making itself felt against the thigh he held pressed into his lap. Then his hand was sliding beneath her skirt and stroking the pale skin at the top of her thigh where her stockings did not reach. If he stroked any higher, he was going to discover that she was wearing a thong and she increased her struggle to get free before he reached there, lost the fight, and a quiver of agonising embarrassment sent her kiss-fighting mouth very still.

‘Well, what do we have here?’ he paused to murmur slowly, long fingers stroking over a smoothly rounded, satin-skinned buttock and crippling Natasha’s ability to breathe. ‘The prim disguise is really beginning to wear very thin the more I dig beneath it.’

‘Shut up,’ she choked, eyes squeezed tight shut now. She was never going to wear a thong ever again, she vowed hectically.

He removed his hand and her eyes shot open because she needed to know what he was going to do next, and found herself staring into his mockingly smiling face. The anger had gone and his lazily, sensual male confidence was firmly back in place.

‘Any more hidden treasures left for me to discover?’ He arched a sleek, dark, quizzing eyebrow.

‘No,’ Natasha mumbled, which made him release a dark, husky laugh that shimmered right through her as potently as everything else about him did.

Then he wasn’t smiling. ‘OK, so I am jealous of Rico where you are concerned.’ He really shocked her by admitting it. ‘So take my advice and don’t bring him into our bed or I will not be responsible for the way I react.’

Before she could respond to that totally unexpected back-down, he was lowering his head again and crushing her mouth. How long this kiss went on Natasha had no idea, because she just lost herself in the warm, slow, heady promise it was offering.

The car began to slow.

Both felt the change in speed but it was Leo who broke away and with a sigh lifted her from him to place her back on the seat. Lounging back into the corner of the car, he then watched the way she concentrated on trying to tidy herself, shaky fingers checking buttons and pulling her skirt into place across her knees.

‘Miss Prim.’ He laughed softly.

Lifting her fingers to smooth her hair, Natasha said nothing, a troubled frown toying with her brow now because she just could not understand how she could fall victim to his kisses as thoroughly as she did.