‘Don’t want me to what?’
She didn’t want him standing on the other side of a curtain while she tried to cram her awkward-looking body into suitable clothes. She didn’t want to see the disbelieving faces of the sales assistants as they wondered what someone like him was doing with someone like her. Shopping for clothes was a nightmare experience at the best of times, but throwing the arrogant Alek into the mix would make it a million times worse. ‘Hang around outside the changing room,’ she said.
‘Why not?’
She shrugged. Why not tell him the truth? ‘I’m self-conscious about my body.’
He poured himself a cup of coffee. ‘Why?’
‘Because I am, that’s why.’ She glared at him. ‘Most women are—especially when they’re pregnant.’
His gaze slid over her navel, his expression suggesting he wasn’t used to looking at a woman in a way which wasn’t sexual. ‘I should have thought that my own reaction to your body would have been enough to reassure you that I find it very attractive indeed.’
‘That isn’t the point,’ she said, unwilling to point out that lately he hadn’t shown the slightest interest in her body, because wouldn’t that make her seem vulnerable? ‘I’m not willing to do a Cinderella transformation scene with you as an audience.’
He opened his mouth and then, shutting it again, he sighed. ‘Okay. So what if I act as your chauffeur for the day? I’ll drive you to a department store and park up somewhere and wait. And you can text me when you’re done. How does that sound?’
It sounded so reasonable that Ellie couldn’t come up with a single objection and soon she was seated beside him in the car as he negotiated the morning traffic. She was slightly terrified when he dropped her off outside the store, but she’d read enough magazines to know that she was perfectly entitled to request the services of a personal shopper. And it didn’t seem to matter that she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt or that her untrimmed fringe was flopping into her eyes like a sheepdog—because the elegant woman assigned to her made no judgements. She delicately enquired what Ellie’s upper price limit was. And although Ellie’s instinct was to go for the cheapest option, she knew Alek wouldn’t thank her for shopping on a budget. He’d once drawlingly told her that it was the dream of every woman to get her hands on his credit card, so why disappoint him? Why not try to become the woman that he and his fancy friends would obviously expect her to be?
She quickly discovered how easy shopping was when you had money. You could buy the best. You could complement your outfits with soft leather shoes and pick up a delicate twist of a silk scarf which echoed the detail in a fabric. And expensive clothes really could transform, she decided. The luscious fabrics seemed to flatter her shape, rather than highlight her defects.
The shopper persuaded her into the dresses she usually rejected on the grounds that jeans were more practical, and Ellie found she liked the swish of the delicate fabrics brushing against her skin. She bought all the basic clothes she needed and then picked out a silvery-white wedding gown which did amazing things for her eyes as well as her figure. On impulse, the personal shopper draped a scarlet pashmina around her shoulders—a stole so fine it was almost transparent, and it was that addition which brought glowing life to her skin. Ellie stared at herself in the long mirror.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said slowly.
By the time she emerged from the store wearing some of her purchases, she felt like a new woman.
She saw Alek’s face change as she approached the car, accompanied by two doormen who were weighed down with armfuls of packages. His arm brushed over her back with proprietary courtesy as he held open the car door for her and she stiffened, because just that brief touch felt as if he’d branded her with the heat of his flesh. Was that why he stiffened, too? Why his eyes narrowed and a nerve began to work at his temple? She thought he might be about to touch her again—and wasn’t she longing for him to do just that?—but some car had begun sounding its horn and the noise seemed to snap him out of his uncharacteristic hesitation.
He didn’t say much as they drove to Bond Street, not until they were standing in front of a jeweller’s window which was ablaze with the glitter of a thousand gems. And suddenly he turned to her and his face had that expression she’d seen once before, when all the cool arrogance which defined him had been replaced by a raw and naked hunger.
His finger wasn’t quite steady as it drifted a slow path down over her cheek and he must have felt her shiver in response, because his eyes narrowed.
‘You look...different,’ he said.
‘I thought that was the whole point of the exercise?’ she said, more archly than she had intended. ‘I have to look credible, don’t I, as the future Mrs Sarantos?’
‘But you don’t, Ellie—that’s the thing.’ He gave her an odd kind of smile. ‘You don’t look credible at all. Not with that uptight expression on your face. It’s not the look one might expect from a woman who is just about to marry one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. There’s no real joy or pleasure there, and I think we might have to remedy that. Shall we make a statement to the world about our relationship, poulaki mou? To show them we really do mean business?’
And before Ellie realised what was happening, he was kissing her. Kissing her in full view of the traffic and the security guard and all the upmarket shoppers who were passing them on the pavement. He had wrapped his arms tightly around her and was making her feel as if he owned her. The man who was so famously private was making a very public declaration. And even though her heart was pounding with joy, suddenly she felt like a possession. A woman he was putting his stamp on. His woman; his property.
She tried keeping her lips clamped shut to prevent his tongue from entering her mouth—to let him know that she was not a possession. That he couldn’t just pick her up and put her down when he felt like it. But there was only so much resistance she could put up when he was this determined. When he was splaying his fingers over the bare skin of her back and making it tingle. His hard body was so close that a cigarette paper couldn’t have come between them, and, beneath her delicate new bra, her breasts were growing heavy.
His lips were still brushing against hers and her eyelids fluttered to a close. She thought how crazy it was that so many emotions could be stimulated by a single kiss. Did he realise that she found being in his arms satisfying in all kinds of ways? Ways which were about so much more than sex? She felt safe and secure. Like nothing could ever hurt her while Alek was around. And it was his strength rather than his sensuality which finally melted the last of her reservations. She kissed him back with fervour and passion and, in the process, completely forgot where she was. Her hands reached up to frame his head and she moaned softly as she circled her hips against him, so that in the end it was Alek who pulled back—his eyes smouldering with blue fire.
‘Oh, my,’ he said softly, and a distinctive twang of North Atlantic entered his gravelly Greek accent. ‘Maybe I should have kissed you back at the apartment, if I’d known that this was the reaction I was going to get.’
His words broke the spell and Ellie jerked away with a bitter feeling of self-recrimination. She had allowed herself to be seduced again when this was nothing but a game to him. A stupid, meaningless game. He had kissed her to make a point and she wasn’t sure if it had been a demonstration of power, or just payback time for her expensive new wardrobe. But either way, she was going to get hurt if she wasn’t careful. Badly hurt. She rose up on tiptoe in her new leather pumps, placing her lips to his ear.
‘What was that all about?’ she hissed.
‘Want me to draw a diagram for you?’ he murmured back.
‘That won’t be necessary.’ She moved her mouth closer to his ear, tempted to take a nip at its perfect lobe. ‘Sex just complicates matters. That was the deal— remember?’
‘I think I might be prepa
red to overlook the deal in view of the response I just got.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t—and there’s something you’d better understand, Alek.’ She swallowed, trying to inject conviction into her voice. ‘Which is that I wouldn’t go to bed with you if you were the last man standing.’
He tipped his head back so that she was caught in the crossfire of his eyes, the darkened blue hue backlit by the definite glitter of amusement. He lifted his fingertip to her mouth and traced it thoughtfully along the line of her lips. ‘I don’t think that’s entirely true, do you, Ellie?’
‘Yes,’ she said fiercely, resisting the urge to bite his finger, afraid that if she did she might just start sucking it. ‘It’s true.’
He took her hand in his and she wanted to snatch it away like a sulky child. But the doorman was still watching them and she knew that if she was to play the part of fiancée convincingly, then she had no choice other than to let him carry on stroking her fingers like that and pretend it wasn’t turning her on.
‘Let’s go and buy your wedding ring,’ he said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE RING WAS a glittering band of diamonds and the silvery shoes which matched her wedding dress had racy scarlet soles. Ellie touched her fingertips to her professionally styled hair, which had been snipped and blow-dried. She looked like a bride, all right, but a magazine version of a bride—untraditional and slightly edgy. The silver dress and scarlet pashmina gave her a sophisticated patina she wasn’t used to and projected an image which wasn’t really her. But the unfamiliar sleekness of her appearance did nothing to subdue the butterflies which were swarming in her stomach. They’d been building in numbers ever since she and Alek had said their vows earlier, with Vasos and another Sarantos employee standing as their only witnesses.
Strange to believe they were now man and wife—and that fifty of Alek’s closest friends were assembling at the upmarket restaurant they’d chosen to stage their wedding party. And if it felt like a sham, that’s because it was.
And yet...
Yet...
She stared down at her sparkling wedding band. When he’d kissed her so passionately in Bond Street—hadn’t that felt like something? Even though she’d tried telling herself that he’d only done it to make a point, that hadn’t been enough to dull her reaction to him. She had nearly gone up in flames as sexual hunger had overpowered her and a wave of emotion had crashed over her with such force that she’d felt positively weak afterwards. It was as if the rest of the world hadn’t existed in those few minutes afterwards, and wasn’t that...dangerous?
The peremptory knock on her bedroom door broke into her thoughts and she opened it to find Alek standing there—broodingly handsome in his beautifully cut wedding suit, with a tie the colour of storm clouds.
‘Ready?’ he questioned.
She told herself she wasn’t waiting for him to comment on her appearance—but what else would account for the sudden plummeting of her heart? She’d blamed pre-wedding jitters for his failure to compliment her the first time he’d seen her in her wedding dress. But now that they were man and wife, surely he could have said something. Had she secretly been longing for his eyes to light up and him to tell her that she made a halfway passable bride? Or was she hoping he’d make another pass at her, only this time she might not get so angry with him? She might just let him carry on...and they could consummate their marriage and satisfy the law, as well as their hungry bodies.
She swallowed. Yes. If the truth be known, she had wanted exactly that. From the time they’d returned from that shopping trip right up to the brief civil ceremony this morning, she’d been like a cat on a hot tin roof. She’d been convinced he would try to renegotiate the separate bedrooms rule, but she had been wrong. Despite her feisty words, he must have known from the way she’d responded to his kiss that she’d changed her mind. That all he needed to do was to kiss her one more time and she would be his. But Alek wasn’t a man whose behaviour you could predict. It felt as if he had been deliberately keeping his distance from her ever since. Skirting around her as if she were some unexploded device he didn’t dare approach. Even when he’d put the ring on her finger this morning in front of the registrar, she had received nothing more than a cool and perfunctory kiss on each cheek.
She gave him her best waitress smile. ‘Yes, I’m ready.’
‘Then let’s go.’
She felt sick with nerves at the thought of meeting all his friends, especially since the only person she’d invited was Bridget, who wasn’t able to attend because the new assistant still wasn’t confident enough to be left on her own. Ellie picked up her handbag. She’d thought about inviting some of her New Forest friends, but how to go about explaining why she was marrying a man who was little more than a stranger to her? Wouldn’t one of her girlfriends quickly suss that it was odd not to be giggling and cuddling up to a man you were planning to spend the rest of your life with? No. She didn’t want pity or a well-meaning mate trying to talk her out of what was the only sensible solution to her predicament. She was going to have to go it alone. To be at her sparkling best and not let any of her insecurities show. She was going to have to make the marriage look as real as possible to his friends—and surely that wasn’t beyond her capabilities to play a convincing part in front of people who didn’t know her?
‘Remind me again who’s going,’ she said as their car began to slip through the early evening traffic.
‘Niccolò and Alannah—property tycoon and interior designer,’ he said. ‘Luis and Carly—he’s the ex world champion racing driver and she’s his medic wife. Oh, and Murat.’
Ellie forced a smile. Didn’t he know any normal people? ‘The Sultan?’
‘That’s right. And because of that, security will be tight.’
‘You mean, I’ll be frisked going into my own wedding party?’
He’d been staring out of the window and drumming his fingertips over one taut thigh and Ellie wished he’d say something equally flippant—anything to dispel this weird atmosphere between them. But when he spoke it was merely to resume a clipped tally of the guest list. ‘There are people flying in from Paris, New York, Rome, Sicily—’
‘And Greece, of course?’ she prompted.
He shook his head. ‘No. Not Greece.’
‘But...that’s where you come from.’
‘So what? I left there a long time ago, and rarely visit these days.’
‘But—’
‘Look, can we just dispense with the interrogation, Ellie?’ he interrupted coolly. ‘I’m not really inclined to answer any more questions and, anyway, we’re here.’
‘Of course,’ she said, quickly turning her head to look out of the window.
Alek felt a pang of guilt as he saw her silvery shoulders tense up. Okay, maybe he had been short with her but she needed to realise that being questioned like that wasn’t his idea of fun. His mouth flattened. But what had he expected? Wasn’t this what happened when you spent prolonged time with a woman? They felt it gave them the right to chip away at things. To quiz you about stuff you didn’t want to talk about, even when you made it clear that a subject was deliberately off limits.
He’d never lived with anyone before Ellie. He’d never given a home to a second toothbrush, nor had to clear out space in his closet. Even though they had their own rooms, sometimes it felt as if it were impossible to get away from her. And the stupid thing was that he didn’t want to get away from her. He wanted to get closer, even though instinct was telling him that was a bad idea. She was a constant temptation. She made him want her all the time, even though she didn’t flirt with him. And wasn’t even that a turn on? She was there in the morning before he left for work, all bright-eyed and smiling as she sat drinking her ginger tea. Just as she was there at night when he got home, offering to pour him a drink, telling him that she’d started experimenting
with cooking and would he like to try some? She’d asked him for tips on how to cook the aubergine dish and he had found himself leaning dangerously close to her while she stirred something in a pot, tempted to kiss the bare neck which was a few tempting inches away from him. Slowly and very subtly her presence was driving him mad. Mostly, it was driving him mad because he wanted her—and he had no one to blame but himself.
That hot-headed kiss outside the jewellers had been intended as nothing more than a distraction. If he was being honest, it had also been intended as an arrogant demonstration of his sexual mastery. To show her that he was boss and always would be. But somehow it had backfired on him. It had reactivated his desire and now he was stuck with a raging sexual hunger which kept him awake most nights, staring at the ceiling and imagining all the different things he wanted to do to her.
He knew there was nothing stopping him from acting on it. From stealing into her room when darkness had fallen. From pulling back a crisp sheet and finding her, what...naked? Or wearing some slinky little nightgown she might have bought at the same time as the killer heels and new clothes. Those occasional longing looks and accidental touches had reinforced what he’d already known...that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Physically, at least. He was confident enough to know he could be inside her in minutes if he put his mind to it, tangling his fingers in the soft spill of her pale hair and staring down at her beautiful pale curves.
And then what?
He felt another unwanted and unfamiliar stab of his conscience, which was enough to kill his desire stone-dead. Make her fall in love with him? Break her heart as he had broken so many in the past and leave her bitter and upset? Some good that would do when Ellie, above all others, was someone he needed to keep onside. She was carrying his baby and he needed her as a friend, not as a lover.
Because something inside him had changed. He’d imagined he would feel nothing about the new life growing inside her and that he would feel disconnected from her pregnancy. But he had been wrong. Hadn’t his heart clenched savagely in his chest the first time he’d seen her fingertips drift almost reflectively over her still-flat belly?
Carrying the Greek's Heir Page 9