His scent was alien, yet alluring.
Leah breathed in a lungful before she could stop, a feverish shiver taking hold of her limbs that had nothing to do with her wet dress.
“Stavros, I—”
Long fingers crawled up her nape into her scalp, tilted her up, while the other hand clasped her jaw loosely.
He studied her every feature with such thorough appraisal that her insides turned into gooey pulp.
No one had even touched her in so long...it had to be why she could feel his touch like a brand on her skin...why such heat was pooling under her skin and rushing to the fore.
Why she wanted to sink into his rough touch more than she wanted to breathe...
Until she realized what he was doing.
He was checking if her pupils were dilated, wondering if she was high.
She stared into his glittering gaze, noted the concrete set of his jaw. Saw a shadow of something in his face that hurled the words past her throat. “I’m not high, Stavros.” It came out as a whisper, an entreaty, and Leah recoiled at that pleading tone.
When he didn’t relent, she grabbed his wrists. Every cell in her rose to attention as the whorls of hair there tickled her palm, as a shot of electricity sparked in the air.
“I remember the last time you said those words...” He sounded as if he was far away, in another place, another time.
Leah jerked his hand away, the heat from his body potent in its draw. Her skin tingled, every muscle in her rearing to get closer to him to soak up that deceptive warmth. She would freeze to death before she sought anything from him. “I’m telling the truth, Stavros.”
I have never touched drugs, she wanted to scream, like she had the night when Calista had died. But he hadn’t even acknowledged her teary words.
His teeth bared in an entirely cold smile. “Ditching your security detail, lying to Mrs. Kovlakis, appearing on Dmitri’s yacht of all places—which is infamous for its wild parties, and knocking back drinks, forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”
How unfailingly polite he was... He had done that before too, even as he had ruined her life.
You can either marry me or you can go to jail, Leah. The choice is yours.
“It got your attention, didn’t it?” she said, realizing too late she had given herself away. Not that she had meant to keep it a secret.
CHAPTER TWO
“WHAT?”
Stavros loosened his grip on Leah, struggling to get himself under control, struggling to get his neurons to fire again.
Guilt roiled through him, a heavy pulsing weight in his gut, something he had managed to subdue into a dull ache. But one look at Leah was enough to unman him again.
He took a step back as a sharp scent combined with the scent of her skin teased him softly, the cold from her arms clinging to his fingertips.
Frowning, he muttered a curse.
For the first time in his adult life, he lost the razor-sharp concentration that had made him a force to be reckoned with in the business circles of Athens. For several seconds.
“What did you say?”
She glared at him. “You, Stavros. You were the prize in this tacky show. If you had returned a single phone call, if you had read even one of my numerous emails to you... So, of course, I had to lower myself to your standards, didn’t I?”
“My standards?” He was beginning to sound like an idiot and yet, it seemed his brain’s higher functions had fractured.
An ominous thud started somewhere in the regions of his heart. His gaze swept over her with a swift greed he had no chance of curbing. The gold silk dress was almost the color of her skin that had a golden tone that no amount of spray tan could manufacture.
The result was that the dress moved sinuously against those high breasts, dipped at her waist, painting an erotic picture of almost nudity that had knocked him for sixes when he had first spied her at the bar.
Any traces of the curvy, awkwardly brazen girl he had married were gone. Instead, the woman who stood there—the delicate contours of her face rendering her infinitely fragile, her body bordering on scrawny, which made her breasts stand out even more—was a complete stranger.
“This is what you expect of me, isn’t it? So I delivered. And here you are, in front of me, for the first time in five years as if I had conjured you with a spell.”
A spell, as preposterous as it sounded, could be the only thing that could explain how dumbfounded he was.
Her long brown hair was plastered to her scalp and sprayed her face with drops of water when she rubbed it roughly. And every move was touched with an elegant sensuality that, he knew, was more innate than manufactured.
He had handled her so roughly just now, blinded by fury and fear. And any time he felt that unbalanced, his temper took a nasty dive, as his sister used to call it. “You look like... What the hell have you done to yourself?” he said, his control snapping.
She didn’t even flinch, although he saw her lashes flicker down for a second. Her oval face was so thin and fine-boned that her light brown eyes were like dark, murky pools in it. Her arms were thin, too, but at least there was muscle tone to it.
Her hand curving over her hip, her tarty dress clinging to her wet skin, her teeth chattering in her mouth, she thrust one bony hip out in a seductive little moment. “What? You don’t like my utterly fabulous and thin body? Your prison sentence has had at least one perk, Stavros. I lost so much weight that even the models parading through the fashion house keep asking me for tips. I can’t count the number of times Marco has asked me to do a shoot, told me I would be a natural...”
It was the utterly uncaring, blind privilege in her words that broke the haze from Stavros’s eyes. She was manipulating him, working herself under his skin like she always did, and yet he could do nothing to stop her.
From the moment he had laid eyes on her, Leah had been nothing but a spoilt, selfish, pleasure-seeking brat who didn’t know the value of what she had or the people she hurt around her.
So she looked different. It didn’t mean anything except that she had another bow in her arsenal for causing trouble. The first thing he needed to do was to get that...body covered up.
He grabbed her wrist, realized how fragile she was, and loosened his grip. Dragged her with him to Dmitri’s bedroom.
“Wow.” Her unconcerned exclamation boiled his blood anew.
He stilled on the way to the wardrobe, her stretched out body on Dmitri’s vast bed sending the most insane urge to pull her off it.
Cristos, something was wrong with him.
For several seconds, he stared blindly at the rows of neatly arranged Savile Row shirts. Wondered what he was doing in there.
“Dmitri does know how to party and live in style, doesn’t he?”
With a curse, he grabbed a shirt and threw it at her just as she pulled herself up. Her legs, long and toned, with black leather strips from her three-inch sandals winding round and round to her calves, glimmered against the dark red of Dmitri’s sheets.
“Let me get this straight. You dressed like a ten-pound hooker, got drunk and plastered yourself over that boy to get my attention? And it has nothing to do with the fact that a normal, alcohol-and drug-free life was getting to you?”
The shirt he threw came flying back at him, missing him narrowly. He turned and stilled.
The goose bumps on her skin stood out, her eyes huge in her oval face.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for a year. If you had the decency to speak to me, I wouldn’t have had to do anything so drastic. It’s the first time I’ve touched alcohol in five years. Not surprisingly, I’m not driven to drink anymore.”
For all his self-discipline over the last few years, he couldn’t stop looking. He couldn’t stop devouring every small bit about her like he couldn’t stop breathing.
Her nipples pebbled against the flimsy dress, her breasts, unsupported by a bra, heaving with her harsh breathing.
She looked like a red-blooded man’s wet dream, and he was in no way impervious to the effect.
No!
This was Leah, a chain of duty and reminder of his failure around his neck. He had absolutely no interest in her except to keep her safe.
With ruthless will that had directed that he marry the woman responsible for his sister’s death, he cut that line of thought.
“Meaning I drove you to drink?” When she remained resolutely mute, he took another clearing breath. He couldn’t get this riled up over her. “Good for you. But I’m sure some habits are harder to kick than others. Like finding a scapegoat to hide your weaknesses behind.”
She flinched. He saw her swallow and turn away.
Hated the vicious satisfaction her pale face gave him. This was why he had avoided seeing her for so long.
With her mere presence, Leah reduced him to a hurtful, raging bastard with no control, ripped off any semblance of closure he deluded himself into achieving.
“I didn’t make a spectacle to discuss my shortcomings with you.” Said in that flippant voice that he had heard so many times.
But her whole body shook with the breath she dragged in. Curved like a bow, her pink mouth looked inviting. Like it was made for mindless kissing.
He studied it with rising fascination, the relentless drag of guilt and anger he felt in her presence dulled by something new, something far more dangerous.
He pushed a hand through his hair, wondering what was getting into him. “You have my attention now, Leah. Tell me, what is that you want?”