Theseus Discovers His Heir

by Michelle Smart

  ‘Yes.’ He folded his arms across his chest and without even considering his words said, ‘I’m taking you out for dinner tonight.’

  If there had been fear in her eyes before, all that rang out of them now was confusion. ‘Why?’

  ‘You need a break. You haven’t seen anything of my island.’

  ‘I’m here to work—not sightsee.’

  ‘You’ll burn out if you don’t take a break.’ He needed a break too, time away from the palace and the reams of courtiers if only for a few hours.

  He knew next to nothing of this woman who had once been a beacon of light for him on a long, cold night.

  An evening out would do them both good.

  Her brows furrowed. ‘I thought Agon was closed on Sundays.’

  He fixed her with the stare his brother Talos used to such great effect. ‘Let me worry about finding somewhere to go. You need a break from this office. I want you ready for a night out by seven o’clock—and no arguments or I’ll have you taken to the dungeons.’

  Her eyes widened in surprise before she let out a bark of laughter.

  He felt his own bubble of mirth rise up too, but smothered it. ‘Seven o’clock,’ he said, his voice brooking no argument.

  ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ she said matter-of-factly, as if that clinched it. As if that would let her off the hook.

  On impulse, he leaned down to place his face before hers, taking in the ringing blue-grey eyes. He caught a hint of a light, feminine scent and inhaled.

  ‘Dress casually. And if suitable clothing is an issue I would suggest not wearing anything at all.’

  Her cheeks turned so red they nearly matched the colour of her hair.

  Pulling back, feeling lighter than he’d felt in years, he sauntered through to his office, pausing at the threshold to add, ‘If you’re not finished by five o’clock Nikos will escort you out of here. The office door will be locked until the morning. See you at seven.’

  He walked into his apartment, his pulse thundering in his ears, and closed the door behind him.

  What the hell was he playing at? A night out was one thing—but suggesting she go naked? That was inviting trouble. It was the kind of comment Theo would have made.

  For five years his physical desires had been dormant. Being around beautiful women was a regular occurrence in his life, but not one of them had tempted him. None of them made him feel as if his veins had been injected with red-hot treacle the way being with Jo did.

  None of them had propelled him to make an impulsive offer of a date. Well, give an order for a date.

  No, not a date. Merely an evening away from the confines of the palace for them both.

  Now his senses were straining to remember what she had looked like naked, but their night together was still a blur; a ghost that couldn’t be seen.

  Something told him it would be best for that memory to remain a ghost.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A LOUD KNOCK on her apartment door announced Theseus’s arrival.

  Jo took a deep breath through her nose and pulled open the door, her heart thundering erratically.

  And there he stood.

  Tonight he’d forsaken the business attire he usually wore and donned a pair of slim-fitting dark blue jeans that hugged his long, muscular thighs, a light grey shirt unbuttoned at the neck and a fitted brown leather jacket that showed off the breadth of his chest to perfection.

  All of that, coupled with his deep olive features and thick dark hair... He looked sexy. And dangerous. So dangerous she should close the door in his face and plead a headache.

  He looked...

  He looked like Theo.

  He stepped over the threshold and stood before her, gazing down with a slow shake of his head. The look in his eyes threatened to send her pulses racing out of her skin.

  She tried to swallow but her throat had dried up. Only once had she seen that look. Five years ago.

  She’d thought he was beautiful. She hadn’t been stupid; had known she’d had no chance with him. He’d been as unobtainable as the film stars she’d loved to watch so much. Even then he’d been a man surrounded by a legion of admirers, men and women who all hung on to his every word and laughed at his every joke. Men like him didn’t notice girls like her apart from to make fun of them.

  The last thing she’d expected—the very last thing—was for him to stand up for her. To protect her. That one action had turned her crush into something more, making her heart swell and attach itself to him.

  Even then she hadn’t been naïve enough to think her adoration would be reciprocated. The world didn’t work like that. Gorgeous, fit Greeks didn’t fall for plump, shy English girls. He could befriend her, but desire her? Impossible.

  And then he’d turned up at the chalet she’d shared with her friends, bottle of gin in hand, hair in disarray and wildness in his eyes...

  That look in his eyes when he’d first kissed her... That same look was in his eyes now. It was a look that pierced her skin and made her recall for the thousandth time their one night together.

  That night...

  Losing her virginity to a drunk, melancholic man had been something she could never have expected, but it was something she would never regret, and not just because that one time had created Toby.

  Theseus had needed her that night. That hadn’t been a lie. He’d lain on the bed with the back of his head resting against her breasts, swigging from the bottle of gin. She’d run her fingers through his hair and listened to him talk.

  He’d told her about his brothers and their fierce competitiveness, the penknives they’d each been given at the age of ten by their grandfather and how they would spend hours finding inanimate objects to throw them at as target practice, how the loser would be subjected to knuckle-rubs.

  And then—she had never figured out how or why—the atmosphere had changed and he’d stopped talking. His eyes had gazed into hers with an expression she had never seen before but which had acted like a magnet, pulling her to him.

  The stars might not have shone and fireworks might not have exploded but she hadn’t needed them to. For a few precious moments she had belonged to him and he had belonged to her.

  For one solitary night she had been needed and loved and wanted, and it had filled her romantic heart with hope and tenderness.

  She couldn’t bear to think it had all been a lie.

  She’d stood in the shower an hour ago with anticipation thrumming through her and had known she had to tell him about Toby. She could not in all good conscience keep it from him any longer.

  Theseus was arrogant, and often curt, but he was also generous and thoughtful. He was a powerful man, but she’d seen no sign of him abusing that power. He wasn’t Theo, but there had been a couple of times when she’d sworn she’d glimpsed the man she’d fallen in love with five years before.

  She would wait until the biography was complete. It meant everything to him. For all his talk about disavowing love, she knew he loved his grandfather just as he’d loved his grandmother.

  A few more days—that was all it would take. Two days at the most. Then her job would be done and she could turn his life upside down with the truth.

  All she had to do was smother the awful feeling of deception she carried everywhere.

  She felt such guilt. Every minute with him was clouded by her total awareness of him and the knowledge that she was hiding something so monumental. She’d thought her heart might jump out of her ribcage earlier, when he had almost caught her looking at another picture Toby had drawn which Jonathan had scanned and emailed over to her.

  And now her heart was beating just as frantically, but with a hugely different rhythm. Flames licked through her veins at the look in Theseus’s eyes. It was as if he wanted nothing more tha
n to eat her whole. As if her knee-length mint crêpe dress with its flared sleeves and her flat black sandals made up the sexiest outfit he’d ever seen on a woman.

  The nervous excitement that had built in her stomach almost skipped up and out of her throat when he dived a hand around her neck and gathered her hair in a bunch.

  Without breaking stride, he kicked the door shut behind him, moved his other hand to her cheek and brought his mouth down on hers.

  If a body could spontaneously combust, then Jo’s did. The lit flames became a blaze—a dark, fiery ache which deepened in her pelvis as his lips moved over hers, firm but gentle, seductive but checked. Firmly controlled. His tongue darted out, prising her lips apart so it could slide slowly inside and dance against her own. His fingers were making gentle kneading motions against her cheek.

  Everything was pushed out of her mind, clearing it to only him; his hot, lightly coffee-scented breath, his warm strong fingers, the heat unfurling from him and moving through her aching body. Sensation threaded everywhere...right through to the soles of her feet and the delicate skin of her eyelids.

  She gripped his jacket, then reached up to wind her arms around his neck, the tips of her fingers skimming the smooth skin and rubbing against the soft bristles running up from his nape.

  Deepening the kiss, he dropped his hand from her cheek to snake it around her waist, breaching that final physical distance between them so she stood flush against him, lost to everything but the rush of his deeply sensuous assault.

  And then he jerked away and the kiss was broken.

  Ramming his hands into his jeans pockets, he closed his eyes and swore. ‘I apologise,’ he said, his jaw clenched, his breathing heavy. ‘I never meant for that to happen.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ she said quietly. She looked away, not wanting him to see the enormous dollop of guilt she knew must be reflected in her eyes.

  ‘You’re driving me crazy,’ he said, with such starkness her gaze flew back to him.

  Hunger. That was what she saw. His hunger for her.

  She was slipping into dangerous waters and had no idea how to navigate her way out, a task made harder by the fact that her body throbbed from head to toe. She knew if he were to touch her again she would respond with the same wantonness.

  How could she have allowed him to kiss her when she was keeping such a huge secret from him? Even if he knew about Toby it would be madness to think anything could happen between them. In a few months he would be searching for a bride. A royal bride.

  She was as far removed from his ideal of the perfect royal bride as possible.

  He held her gaze a beat longer before striding to the door and yanking it open.

  His eyes flashed as he said, ‘I suggest we leave now, because if you keep looking at me like that, I will not be responsible for the consequences.’

  Jo paused for far too long, desire waging war with common sense.

  Common sense clinched the victory.

  She held her breath as she slipped past him, then followed him in silence out into the clear spring evening.

  Her lips still burned from his kiss.

  When he’d made love to her on Illya he’d been drunk.

  This time he’d kissed her when he was sober. He desired her.

  It shouldn’t have made a difference.

  It made all the difference in the world.

  * * *

  That had been the journey from hell, Theseus thought as Nikos brought the car to a stop.

  What had he been thinking, kissing her like that?

  He hadn’t been thinking. At least not with his brain.

  It had been that expression in her eyes that had done it for him, that open, wide-eyed desire.

  Theos, how could any man look into those eyes and not want to drown in them?

  Sitting in the back of the car for twenty minutes with her so close had been tantamount to torture. They hadn’t exchanged a word.

  He ran through all the reasons why he couldn’t allow anything to happen between them. Or he tried to.

  He couldn’t think of one good reason why he shouldn’t make love to her when every ounce of his being burned for her touch...

  Because Jo wants more than you can ever give.

  His spine stiffened as he recalled the promise he’d made to her on Illya. The promise he’d broken. Try as he might to ignore it, the guilt ate at him.

  Jo wasn’t the type of woman to go in for casual flings. She just wasn’t. He’d known that five years ago but had allowed his desire and the emotions that had racked him that dark night to take over.

  He would not do it again, would not take advantage of a woman who needed more from a lover than a solitary night. He could never offer her anything more, especially not now, when marriage loomed ever closer.

  He might desire her, but he would control it.

  Whatever the night might bring.

  * * *

  Club Giroud was one of the best kept secrets on Agon, open twenty-four-seven and located in a deceptively shabby secluded stone building near the top of Agon’s highest mountain. No casual passer-by would guess that inside, at any one time, were dozens of the world’s richest people and a fleet of parked cars collectively worth millions of dollars.

  The interior was an entirely different matter.

  They were met at the door by the concierge, who’d been watching out for them. Puffed up with importance at one of the royal Princes paying the establishment a visit, the man led them through a cavernous golden-hued dining hall, filled with beautiful, thin, chic women and men of varying shapes and sizes, all of whom turned their heads to stare at them. The concierge took them past the sweeping staircase that led up to the club itself, and outside to the sprawling terrace.

  ‘I am totally underdressed,’ Jo hissed the moment the fawning concierge had left them alone. ‘All those women look as if they’ve just come off a catwalk.’

  ‘You look beautiful,’ he said simply, his eyes taking in every inch of her. Again.

  There was nothing wrong with looking. Nothing at all.

  ‘And don’t forget I’m a prince of this island. I could wear a sack and my guest a binliner and I’d still be treated like royalty.’

  ‘You are royalty,’ she said with a mock scowl, although her cheeks heightened with colour at his compliment.

  ‘Exactly. My presence gives the place a certain cache. It’s a secret club for the filthy rich—playboys and billionaires who moor their yachts in our harbour and like to dine and play somewhere elusive and exclusive.’

  ‘You like to come here?’ she asked doubtfully, as if she knew of his disdain for these people whose lives were consumed with money: how to make it and how to spend it.

  ‘If I were to take you anywhere else our picture would be all over the press by morning.’ He gave a rueful shrug. ‘I can always take you to Talos’s boxing gym, if you would prefer?’

  She raised her pretty red-brown eyebrows.

  ‘And here you get to see my island.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘If you look, you’ll see this is the best view in the whole of Agon.’

  He’d ensured she had the best seat at the table—one that looked out from the mountain over the villages and towns dotted in the distance, towards the palace in the thickets of trees on the adjacent mountain and the dark blue of the Mediterranean, where the sun blinked its last goodnight. In a couple of hours the moon would be high enough to illuminate the whole island. It was a sight he wanted her to see.

  It gave him enormous satisfaction to see she hadn’t paid the blindest bit of attention to the view. Since they’d been seated she’d only had eyes for him.

  He pointed. ‘Do you see that high, rocky mountain in the distance?’

  She nodded.


  ‘When we were teenagers, my brothers and I would have races to the top.’

  ‘You were allowed?’

  ‘Of course. Within the palace walls we were expected to behave like princes, but outside we were expected to be fighting fit.’

  ‘And who would win?’

  ‘Normally Talos. Helios and I were so intent on beating each other we always forgot what a mountain Talos was himself. We’d get to the top and find him already there.’ He smiled at the memories.

  Jo squinted as she took it all in, her features softening. She nodded in the direction of the palace. ‘Is that the maze all lit up?’

  ‘It is,’ he confirmed. ‘There must be a group doing an evening tour—there are night lights embedded in the hedges to light the way for them.’

  She gave a sigh of wonder. ‘I bet that’s a fabulous experience. Your maze is huge—much bigger than the one at Hampton Court Palace. I got lost in that on a school trip when I was twelve.’

  Her delight at the recollection of being lost in a maze made her whole face light up, whilst the mention of the British palace sparked a memory of his own. ‘Aren’t you distantly related to your royal family?’

  Surprise ringed her blue-grey eyes. ‘How can you remember that?’

  ‘I have an excellent memory.’

  The truth was his memories of those last few days on Illya were becoming clearer. The hazy details were crystallising.

  The night after he’d evicted those Americans from Marin’s Bar for their ill-treatment of her, he’d gone back there with his Scandinavian friends and invited Jo and her friends to join them again. Conversation had turned to everyone having to say one interesting fact about themselves. Jo’s had been that she was distantly related to the British royal family. She’d found it so amusing that she’d burst into laughter.

  It had been the first time he’d heard or seen her laugh—usually she was so shy. Her whole face had lit up, just as it was doing now. It had been the first time he’d noticed what a pretty face she had. It had been such a transformation that his interest had been well and truly piqued. He’d spent the rest of the evening talking to her, enchanted by this shy young woman who, once she got going, became witty and talkative.