“I don’t trust you.” His voice was low against her ear.
She shivered from his nearness. “I don’t care.”
Stergios’s grasp tightened. “Stay away from Dimos.”
“With pleasure,” she said in a hiss and forced herself to look into his dark eyes. “Now let go of me.”
Jodie saw the turbulent emotions chasing across his face before he abruptly released her. She was uncomfortably aware how her skin tingled from his touch. “I have no interest in Dimos,” she continued. “I didn’t seduce him back then and I’m not pursuing him now.”
“Why should I believe you? You’re a liar.”
Her anger flashed wildly. Yes, she had lied in the past, but it had been a stupid and instinctual attempt to protect Stergios that night. She had made a sacrifice for him and he couldn’t see it, couldn’t appreciate it. The hurt and the injustice of it all rolled inside her. “And if I wanted to seduce Dimos, there is nothing you could do about it,” she slung at him.
“I’m warning you, Jodie.” His voice was low and menacing.
She pressed her lips together. Why did she say that? Why was she provoking Stergios? She knew better but she was unable to stop. “I could have had him in my bed like that.” She gave a satisfying snap with her fingers. “I certainly wouldn’t have picked a cold wall in a dark wine cellar.”
They stared at each other, instantly trapped in the inconvenient memories. She shifted, her spine aching as she remembered the rough brick against her back. Jodie swallowed as she recalled how she had laved her tongue against Stergios’s warm skin. She felt her cheeks flush as the echoes of their mingled gasps and incoherent words reverberated in her mind.
She couldn’t think about that. Not now, not here, not ever. “I could have contacted Dimos any time over the years,” she declared in a rush. “And he would have dropped everything for the chance to have sex with me.”
Stergios sneered with disgust. “So you know the power you have over him.”
She did now, not when she had been eighteen. “I know the power I have over all men,” she said loftily. “Dimos is more susceptible than most.”
“And why do you think that is?”
No doubt he saw it as her fault. “I haven’t encouraged him at all, but warn me off again,” she said in a growl as she glared at him, “and all bets are off.”
Stergios braced his legs as if he was preparing for battle. “You dare to threaten me?”
“There is very little I wouldn’t dare,” she told him boldly as her legs shook. “I am here to be with my father. If you block that in any way, I will do everything in my power to stop the Antoniou-Volakis merger.”
His expression went blank. There was no anger or repulsion. It was like a mask and that unsettled Jodie more than his cold fury.
“It wouldn’t take much.” She knew she had to stop talking and yet she pursed her lips and made a show of looking around the party. “All I have to do is crook my finger and Dimos will—”
“You have always been a destructive force.” His voice was just a rasp. “But I won’t allow you to destroy this family.”
“I don’t care about the Antonious.” The family was simply an obstacle to her goal. She had to play nice with them if she wanted even a tenuous bond with her father.
Stergios set his hands on his lean hips. “You need to leave and never return.”
Jodie regretted saying anything to Stergios. He could prevent her from getting what she wanted. She wished she had planned a better strategy to meet with her father. She had been too impulsive, too impatient and too scared of getting rejected again. But she couldn’t show her uncertainty or Stergios would use it against her. She lifted her chin and met his gaze. “That is out of your control.”
His smile chilled her to the bone. “It’s foolish of you to think that.”
Dread trickled down Jodie’s spine. It was foolish for her to go toe to toe with Stergios. He was a dangerous animal who lashed out if he felt threatened or cornered. “I have every right to be here.”
“And I have a right—a duty—to protect my family at all cost.”
She’d always known that. It was one of his traits she had admired and it used to hurt that his protection hadn’t included her. “According to Dimos, I am family.”
Stergios’s eyes narrowed into slits. “I have never considered you family.”
Those words would have slayed her when she was fifteen but now they slid right off her. “It’s easier for you to think that, isn’t it?” Jodie leaned closer, refusing to show how his words, his presence, had shaken her. “Helps you sleep better at night.”
The mask fell away and exposed Stergios’s wrath. A ruddy color seeped beneath his golden skin. His eyes glittered as he hunched his shoulders, ready to pounce. Jodie’s chest seized as she watched his upper lip curl, pulling tightly at his scar.
“After all—” her voice trembled “—the great and virtuous Stergios Antoniou is supposed to be trustworthy and do what is right. He strives for excellence and discipline. Why, he would never have sex with a virgin without marrying her.”
His jaw clenched and she knew his restraint was slipping. She had just made her most dangerous enemy very angry. She knew she should retreat and hide—no, she should beg for mercy, but the words kept spilling from her mouth.
“He would never have sex with his eighteen-year-old stepsister, right? And then walk away without a backward glance.” The rejection had swamped her that night but she didn’t stumble over the words now. “Discard her and throw her to the wolves.”
She saw the pure hate glowing from his eyes and she wanted to recoil. Did he hate her for reminding him of his moment of weakness? Or was it something more? Did he hate her because she continued to show him what kind of man he truly was?
“But I know the real Stergios Antoniou,” she confessed, driven to finish what she’d started. “I saw it that night four years ago. You’re like every other man I’ve met. Threaten me all you want, stepbrother dear, but I’ll take my chances.”
Copyright © 2016 by Susanna Carr
Now, read on for a tantalizing excerpt of Tara Pammi’s new release,
THE DRAKON BABY BARGAIN
The second book in her The Drakon Royals trilogy!
When Princess Eleni is offered a convenient marriage by Drakon’s biggest investor, Gabriel Marquez, she strikes her own deal—she’ll get a child of her own, he’ll get a mother for his daughter. Except neither had predicted the fire that rages between them…
Read on to get a glimpse of
THE DRAKON BABY BARGAIN
CHAPTER ONE
ONE KISS…
Eleni Drakos stood at the outer fringes of the black-and-white-tiled ballroom and peered through her elaborate mask.
One kiss from any man who’d look at her with warmth and desire, a man who could make her forget that a chasm of cutting loneliness was all that stretched ahead in her life.
One kiss because it was her thirtieth birthday and she was quite sick of her stagnant life, of pretending that the sight of her sister-in-law with her swollen belly didn’t send a shaft of ache through her, or that she didn’t crave a family of her own.
She’d lived her entire life within the rules her father, King Theos, had set, ensuring that her brothers, Andreas and Nikandros, had everything they had ever needed.
What she hadn’t foreseen was that in the end, she would be alone. Just as she had been all these years.
She walked aimlessly at the fringes of the vast oval-shaped ballroom, the cut-crystal chandeliers making the resplendently dressed men and women glitter. She wasn’t the only one hiding her identity behind the mask. The masquerade ball was an annual tradition of the House of Drakos and yet, with her father Theos’s dementia becoming worse, it had not been held in four years.
But because the conservative traditionalists were balking at Andreas’s continued absence after their father’s death, and they feared that Nikandros and Gabriel Marquez’s partnership was a risk to Drakon’s economy, Eleni had suggested that they hold the ball again as a way of pacifying them.
And then she’d put the ball together in three weeks.
Scanning the stunningly dressed women and tuxedoed men who were dancing to a slow waltz, satisfaction filled her veins. Her fingers tingled to look through her fabled to-do list and check it off.
The black-and-white mask she’d bought on her trip to Paris last week went particularly well with the dark red lipstick. Piled high in a chignon, wispy tendrils of her usually unruly hair kissed her jaw.
Strapless and snug around her chest, her black-and-red silk ball gown accentuated an hourglass figure no amount of careful dieting could reduce, dipping at her waist and flaring into a full flounce.
The four-inch stilettos she had pushed her feet into boosted her five-two height, flashing her toned leg through the thigh-high slit. She’d been stunned when she’d looked at her reflection in the gold-filigree full-length mirror.
She’d always be plain compared to her half brothers, the Princes of Drakon; the media frequently reminded her by calling her the Plain Princess, but in that moment, she’d thought she had almost looked beautiful.