the greek tycoon's blackmailed mistress(25)

‘There’s no hope for you in the wanton stakes,’ Aristandros husked. ‘You’re still blushing.’

‘Of course I’m going to blush if you’re planning to offer a running commentary!’

‘So, take my breath away, moli mou.’

And she did, kneeling down gracefully at his feet to deploy her slim hands and her full, sensual mouth to the task she had set herself. She used her knowledge of the male physique and her infinitely more intimate awareness of what he liked to pleasure him. Ella was always a high achiever at anything she set out to do. Ripples of helpless response began shuddering through his powerful frame. He withstood her provocative attention for a very short time. His breathing audibly fractured, and then suddenly he was pulling her up and backing her down on the bed with scant ceremony.

‘You excite the hell out of me!’ he groaned, coming down on top of her and ravaging her luscious pink mouth until her senses swam.

He made love to her with mind-blowing power. Afterwards she lay shell-shocked with the intensity of the pleasure in his arms, her willowy body magically indolent and peaceful after her explosive release. He smoothed her hair gently back off her warm face. She kissed a smooth, muscular shoulder, catching the faint scent of cologne mingled with his own male scent, and drank in the smell of him like an addict. Right and wrong, she registered, no longer seemed so well-defined.

On some level she couldn’t hold back what she was feeling any longer, and wasn’t even sure that there was a point in such restraint while she lived with him and Callie. Sexually she found him irresistible, but his hold on her went much deeper than that. She was possessive of him and she cared about him as she had never yet cared for any other man. Yet he wasn’t the young man she had fallen in love with any more. Those seven years apart had altered him. He was harder, more cynical and self-contained, and willing to go to any lengths to get what he wanted. Was it terribly wrong of her to feel special because he had gone to such extremes to get her back into his life again? And what was he doing to her once-firm moral compass?

In the early hours of the following morning she wakened and frowned at the familiar little cramping pains low in her stomach. A moment later she got out of bed and went into the bathroom to check out her suspicions. No, as she had thought, she wasn’t pregnant, and it was time to start her contraceptive pill. The necessities taken care of, she returned to bed.

Aristandros was still fast asleep in a careless sprawl which took up more than his fair share of the bed, outsized though it was. With his jet-dark lashes almost long enough to hit his hard cheekbones, blue-black stubble outlining his angular jaw and sculpted mouth, and with his classic, aquiline profile relaxed, he looked gorgeous. Her insides chilled at the thought of how he might have reacted to an inconvenient pregnancy. He liked to control everything, and she couldn’t have allowed him to exert control or influence in that field. She was grateful that the situation hadn’t arisen.

‘Hmm…’ He shifted position and found her, a hand splaying across her stomach and then rising to cup a small, firm breast with a drowsy sound of masculine contentment. ‘Ella…’

‘I’m not pregnant!’ Ella just blurted it out, keen to get the news out, mortified by the idea that he was secretly dreading the possibility that she might have conceived.

Spiky black lashes lifted on startled dark-golden eyes. He was as instantly awake as if she had doused him with a bucket of cold water. ‘Are you sure?’

‘One hundred percent,’ she declared.

His lean, strong face clenched. ‘I would have taken care of you. You needn’t have worried on that score.’

‘We have enough problems without that particular one.’

‘You still don’t want children?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Just not children with me?’ His expression sardonic, Aristandros released her and vaulted out of bed.

‘I need a shower.’

Ella was bewildered by his behaviour. ‘I assumed you would regard a pregnancy as a disaster and that you’d ask me to have a termination. You did tell me you didn’t want a child.’

A bronzed vision of pagan masculinity, he surveyed her with brooding force from the bathroom doorway, and shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘Then I thought about it and I reckoned I could live with it. Callie would probably enjoy having a playmate,’ he murmured lazily. ‘I wouldn’t have suggested a termination. The main reason my father divorced my mother was that she tried to have me aborted—he stopped her on the way to the clinic. That kind of knowledge gives you a different take on an accidental pregnancy.’

Shocked by the content of that entire speech, Ella nodded slowly. ‘I suppose it would.’

She tried to get her thoughts in order. Every time she thought she had Ari pigeon-holed, he confounded her expectations again. Think of him casually commenting that Callie would enjoy a playmate, admitting that, at the very least, he was uncomfortable with the idea of terminating a pregnancy that was merely inconvenient! I reckoned I could live with it—he could live with her having his baby. Well, she was still relieved that she wasn’t about to face that challenge. He would have needed to be a good deal more enthusiastic and they would have had to have discussed the idea in advance before she could have allowed herself to regret the fact that she hadn’t conceived.

Swallowing hard, she got back into bed. She had on several occasions in recent years gone through the experience of feeling broody, when the very sight of a baby or tiny clothes brought a lump to her throat and a powerful craving, but she would never have admitted anything so personal to him. Indeed her longing to see and hold her biological daughter had almost broken her heart for eighteen months. But, now fully aware of how incredibly lucky she was to have a loving healthy child like Callie in her life, she expected nothing more from Mother Nature.



Ella prowled round the modern building housing the doctor’s surgery and emergency facilities which Aristandros had funded on the outskirts of town. It was a rural doctor’s dream, but apparently two doctors had already come and gone, bored with the lack of a social life on a small island and the inconvenience of having to step on a ferry to visit friends and family. Currently the position was vacant. Having checked out the patient numbers, Ella reckoned there was really only enough work for a part-time doctor, and she very much would have liked to put her name forward.

‘We would be honoured to have you here,’ the town mayor, Yannis Mitropoulos, assured her, having intercepted her and offered her a tour after she had been seen peering wistfully through a window.

‘Unfortunately, I’m not looking for a job at present,’ Ella advanced uncomfortably.

Had she been, she was convinced she would have been in harness within five minutes of accepting the job. Aristandros had devoted two days to showing her round the island, and had introduced her to many of the locals. But he had not, offered her an inspection of the unoccupied state-of-the-art medical building he had built, or admitted that Lykos lacked a doctor’s services. Ella had only found out those facts for herself when she’d taken Callie into town. Whilst enjoying cold drinks at the taverna overlooking the picturesque harbour, she had found herself slowly and steadily being surrounded by hopeful people in search of off-the-cuff medical advice. Aristandros, however, appeared to have no conscience about keeping the only doctor on the island confined to home, hearth and bedroom.

In spite of that truth, over the past three weeks Ella had settled happily into life on Lykos. Aristandros had twice flown off on business trips without her, and she had been dismayed by the discovery that she missed him when he was out of reach. He was, however, surprisingly sexy and amazingly addictive during late-night phone conversations, she conceded with a covert smile.

She had come to terms with the fact that she loved him, and that she probably loved him a great deal more than she had seven years ago, which struck her as especially ironic when he had behaved so badly this time round. Back then she had expected perfection, a soulmate who shared her every thought and conviction and made no awkward demands of her. Now her expectations were rather more human-sized and, in any case, she knew that she and Aristandros were diametrically opposed by the simple fact that she was a modern female and he was very old-style macho male. Although she felt that Aristandros was being totally selfish and unreasonable in refusing to allow her to pursue her medical vocation, she was beginning to suspect that his being the centre of her world, the only other person she really had to think about besides Callie, was something he prized above everything else in their relationship. He was as possessive as she was, and seemingly unwilling to share her.

Ella had managed to adopt two homeless dogs since her arrival on Lykos. One, Whistler, a fluffy mongrel of indeterminate breed, had been injured by a fish hook and brought to her for attention for there was no vet on the island either. Ella had dealt with the little animal’s lacerations and had offered to keep her while she healed. The second dog had arrived on the slender strength of the assurance that ‘everybody knows the English are mad about dogs’. Bunny, inappropriately named by Callie, was a boisterous Great Dane pup with paws the size of dinner plates, and he was accused of having sneaked off the ferry unattended. Both dogs were brilliant with Callie.