One-Click Buy: November Harlequin Presents

by Susan Stephens

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’ she declared. ‘There is no man in my life but you!’

  It was what he most wanted to hear, so why did he sense something like the crawl of small, icy feet down his spine in spite of the heat?

  ‘Good,’ he said, reaching out to touch a hand to her cheek and hold her there, sea-coloured eyes locked with black. ‘Just make sure it stays that way. I have exclusive rights to my women. You’re mine and only mine…’

  Under the touch of his fingers her face jerked just once as if in rejection of his comment. Her eyes opened wide and that determined little chin lifted even higher.

  ‘You don’t have any rights to me—not yet.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Andreas agreed, a slow, appreciative smile curling his mouth. She was gorgeous when she was like this—wonderfully sexy with the mutinous spark that lit those fantastic eyes, the wash of colour that flooded her cheeks. ‘I know—we’re taking this slowly…being sensible.’

  He drawled out the word deliberately, putting every ounce of contempt he could into each syllable.

  ‘But not for long. I could make you forget about that need for caution you think is so important.’

  Another jerk of her chin, a lift of her smoothly arched brows, challenging the truth of his assertion, making his smile widen ever more.

  ‘You know I could,’ he murmured softly, leaning even closer so that his mouth was just inches away from the soft, rebellious pout of her lips. ‘It would only take a minute. Not even that.’

  She had frozen now, nothing moving but her eyes as they watched him warily, waiting to see what he would do next.

  ‘All I’d have to do is to lean forward, just the tiniest little bit…’

  He suited the action to the words, only just catching the tiny faint sound of her swiftly indrawn breath as he did so. Her eyes widened just a little bit more but she stayed where she was, though the pink tip of her tongue slid out and slicked over her lower lip in an uneasy, betraying gesture.

  The movement and the slight film of moisture it left on her mouth was a temptation that Andreas couldn’t resist. He’d waited too long for the taste of her mouth on his all over again. He wanted it again and he wanted it now.

  Reaching up a hand, he curled it round the back of her head, fingers sliding into the silky dark hair, cupping the fine bones of her skull as he drew her near to him and took her mouth. Her lips were as soft and delicious as they had been before and she yielded to him with a soft murmur that made his senses give a hard, painful kick in response.

  To hell with being sensible. This was what he wanted. What he needed. Her mouth opened under his and with a sense of triumph he moved in closer.

  And felt the faint, unmistakable shiver that ran through her body as she fought for control. It was there and gone again in the space of a heartbeat but he had felt it and recognised it for what it was.

  He could kiss her out of it, he knew that. It wouldn’t take much; she would be his if he only insisted, pressed a little more. But it was the fact that she had reacted in that way, that she still felt that restraint she talked about that stopped him dead in his tracks. She was still determined to keep him at arm’s length for her own personal reasons. And that realisation destroyed the sensual mood completely.

  With a savagely muttered curse in his own language he wrenched his mouth away from hers, pulling his head back to stare down into her dark, shocked eyes.

  ‘Andreas…’ Becca began and the shake on the sound of his name was the last straw.

  Swearing brutally, he tore himself away from her, taking several swift, strong and almost blind strides across the tiled surround of the pool and diving head first into the cool water, plunging way down into the clear blue depths, driving himself as hard and as far as he could.

  Becca watched him go through eyes that were blurred with sudden tears. She knew what had made him react like this, the tiny shudder of panic she hadn’t been able to control, but that didn’t mean that she understood quite what state of mind had influenced him. Was it fury—cold-blooded anger at the way that she was still determined to hold on to the idea of being sensible? Or was it an attempt to cool himself off literally?

  Whatever his feelings were, they were wild and fierce and he was having to fight to bring them under control. That much was obvious from the way he was powering down the swimming pool, face down, black hair clinging to his skull, muscular arms and legs pushing him through the clear water at a speed that gave Becca a momentary pang of concern for any possible after-effects from the accident. The bruises from his injuries might be fading, but was it safe for him to subject himself to such a physical test?

  But even as the worry crossed her mind she saw that Andreas was already slowing his furious pace. He eased up, continued to swim for a while but at a much more sedate speed and eventually came back to the side of the pool just beside where she stood. Slicking back his soaking black hair with a powerful hand, he supported himself on strong arms as he trod water, looking up into her watchful face, dark eyes narrowed against the sun.

  ‘And now I suppose you’re going to say that, as my nurse, you can’t approve of my behaviour just now?’ he commented cynically. ‘Isn’t this your cue to tell me that it wasn’t at all sensible—?’

  ‘I wouldn’t dare say anything of the sort!’ Becca flung back at him, the uncanny way that he had almost read her mind unsettling her even more. She might have been thinking it but she certainly wasn’t saying it, not knowing the reaction she would undoubtedly get.

  She just hoped that Andreas would believe that irritation was uppermost in her mind and so accept it as the explanation for the way her voice went up and down in the most embarrassing way. She had felt bad enough a moment earlier and the thought that he might recognise her response as one of purely physical awareness of the body floating lazily in the water, the tense muscles in the hard forearms, the glisten of water drops on the bronzed skin was more than she could handle right now. The drenched black hair clung so close to his scalp that it formed a severe frame for those devastating features, emphasising wide, carved cheekbones, the long, straight nose, hard jaw and almost shockingly softly sensual mouth. Her pulse was already racing in double time, making her heart catch tight in her throat. She couldn’t take another of his sensual onslaughts on her, any more of those devastating, breath-stealing, soul-destroying kisses.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Andreas retorted drily, hauling himself up onto the side of the pool and sitting on the edge with his long legs dangling over the side, feet in the water. ‘Because you seem so determined to revert to the nursing role that I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we ought to discuss your salary.’

  ‘I don’t want that!’

  Sheer horror and the knowledge of just what she was hiding pushed the words from Becca’s mouth in an urgent rush. Scrambling down beside him so that she was on a level with him, she caught hold of his arm, looking earnestly into his face.

  ‘You don’t have to pay me! After all, I’m not doing anything to earn it…’

  Her voice trailed off in shivering embarrassment as she felt a tide of heated blood flood her face, making her cheeks burn at the thought of the other way that her words might be interpreted.

  ‘I didn’t mean…You don’t have to pay me to…’

  Oh, hell, she was making matters so much worse. Her tongue seemed to have swollen to twice its size, tangling up in her mouth so that she couldn’t get another syllable out, either to explain or to apologise. And the lazy smile that crossed that hard-boned face only made matters worse, the laughter in his eyes mocking her confusion and embarrassment.

  ‘Not pay perhaps, but I have a reputation for generosity to my mistresses.’

  My mistresses.

  If he had fired an arrow straight at her heart, piercing it brutally, it couldn’t have had a more painful effect than just hearing him speak so casually.

  My mistresses.

  That was all he thought of her as; all she would ever be; all h
e wanted her to be. Andreas only thought of her as someone with whom he wanted a sexual relationship—a mistress, nothing more. And he had said mistresses—using the plural. Which meant that he thought in terms of more than one relationship, of women who had come before her and…Her throat closed up, making it difficult to breathe…Women who would come after her.

  And since their wedding day?

  There was the burn of hot tears at the backs of her eyes as she forced herself to face an even less bearable thought. The idea that once he had rejected her, he had replaced her with someone else—maybe more than one someone else. How soon after her broken-hearted departure had he brought a new woman into the house that was supposed to have been her marital home? How quickly had he found someone new to warm his bed, fill his days?

  How many of them had there been since she had been driven away from him?

  The tears that stung at her eyes welled up even more, fighting for release. And with grim determination Becca fought them back, struggling to force them down, refusing to let them fall. But she could only manage the control she needed by gritting her teeth, refusing to blink, swallowing as hard as she could.

  ‘Becca?’

  She wished she could say something—anything to make him look away. Preferably something light and throwaway that would distract him, make him laugh, direct that too intent, too searching scrutiny somewhere else. How could she recover her composure, get back her self-possession when he was watching her as if she was some particularly fascinating specimen under a microscope? One he wanted to dissect and analyse completely.

  She knew that her cheeks were burning painfully. The struggle to fight back the tears had added to the already embarrassed colour in her skin. Mortified beyond bearing, she lifted a hand and brushed it across her face, praying that the small gesture would at least break the focus of that concentrated stare.

  ‘You’re hot,’ Andreas said quietly, the note of concern in his words almost destroying her completely. ‘And no wonder when you’re wearing too much clothing.’

  If there had been the slightest trace of a sexual intonation in what he’d said, anything that had made her think that he was deliberately putting a double edge onto the phrase, then Becca knew she would have totally lost control. But the note of genuine concern destroyed her composure in a totally different way.

  ‘Why don’t you put on a swimming costume and spend some time in the pool? You’re clearly not used to this sort of heat and the water would cool you down.’

  It wasn’t the heat of the sun that was disturbing her, Becca admitted to herself. It was the subtler, more sensual warmth of his body so close to hers that she could smell the intimate, intensely personal scent of his skin, topped with the tang of the water that still clung to it. That and the heat of her own response, the honeyed sense of need that flooded her body, pooling moistly at the junction of her thighs.

  A swim would be just what she needed. It would ease the burn of hunger, soothe the ache in her body. But there was one very practical problem.

  ‘I don’t have a swimming costume,’ she managed, casting a longing glance at the cool, fresh water as it lapped against the clean blue tiles of the pool. ‘I—never thought that I would need one when I came here. And to be honest, I never thought I’d stay this long.’

  She could have bitten out her tongue as soon as she’d spoken, realising too late how close she’d come to giving away the truth that she was not really the person he’d believed her to be. But Andreas hadn’t noticed the slip, too intent on his own train of thought.

  ‘That’s not a problem. I can soon provide you with a costume. There’s one in the pool house over there.’

  A wave of his hand indicated the small stone-formed building that provided a changing room and a shower for those who used the pool.

  ‘I saw it hanging up there when I went in this morning. It should fit you. Why don’t you go and try it on?’

  And come back here, wearing it?

  Becca’s mind quailed at the thought. Just the idea of sitting here beside him, lying in the sun or swimming in the pool close to him in some sleek, close-fitting Lycra costume made the tingling worse, bringing it close to the sensation of an electrical shock running over her skin. If someone had left it here then it was probably one of those mistresses he had spoken of. In which case, was it likely that the costume was anything more than a few skimpy pieces of material, precariously held up by a couple of shoestring straps?

  And yet the idea of getting away for a moment, going into the pool house to be by herself, as she had hardly been at any moment over the last three days, except when she had retired to bed, suddenly seemed such an appealing idea. She could hide away there for a while, regain her composure, gather her strength. And then maybe she’d be able to cope much better than she had been doing until now.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ she said, fighting with herself to make sure that she got to her feet slowly, trying desperately not to make it look as if she was running away even though she knew deep in her heart that that was what she was doing.

  ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

  And the costume? she asked herself as she padded on bare feet across the stone-paved terrace, heading for the pool house. Well, if it fitted—and was in any way modest—then she might risk it.

  She’d make up her mind when she saw it.

  But when she saw the pale lavender swimming costume hanging on a peg in the small changing room the effect of it was like a sudden blow to her heart, stilling its beat and leaving her standing staring in blank and stunned disbelief, unable to think at all.

  It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be, was the phrase that repeated over and over inside her head, making the real world fade from her awareness into a buzzing, whirling haze in which the only real thing was the sleek, small item of clothing before her.

  ‘It can’t,’ she said, shaking her head in shock. ‘It can’t be.’

  Because the costume she now held in shaking hands was the one that she had worn herself on the single day she had spent in the villa as Andreas’ wife.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IT STILL fitted her.

  That was a shock. She knew she had lost weight in the ten and a half months since her wedding and that she was no longer the relaxed, happy-go-lucky person she had been before she had met and married Andreas Petrakos.

  But the lavender swimming costume still fitted almost perfectly. There was so much Lycra in the material that it clung to her new, more slender shape, the low neck exposing softer curves, the high-cut legs revealing slender hips and thighs that had been so much more rounded when she had first worn it.

  Looking at herself in the full-length mirror that hung on the wall of the changing room, Becca smoothed hands that were none too steady over the clinging material and tried to remember the Becca who had looked into the same mirror not quite a year before. Then her eyes had been sparkling with delight and the sensual satisfaction of having just made wild, abandoned, passionate love with her brand-new husband. And there had been a wide smile on her mouth that she had felt sure was going to be there for ever and that nothing would ever erase it.

  She couldn’t have been more wrong.

  Barely two hours later she had been on her way home, leaving her married life lying in pieces behind her.

  ‘Love!’ Andreas’ harsh voice, with its cruelly cynical emphasis on that vital word, echoed down from the past, sounding so loud and clear inside her thoughts that she almost believed for a moment that he had come into the room and thrown the word at her.

  ‘I don’t love anyone—least of all you! I doubt if I’m capable of the feeling…’

  They had arrived on the island late in the afternoon after the flight from England. Becca was still floating on a cloud of happiness after the delight of their wedding, the bliss of the thought of being Andreas’ wife. And she truly was his wife. He had wasted no time in making sure of that. They had been barely through the door before he had carried her upstairs to his b
edroom, stripped her of the elegant trouser suit she had worn for travelling and made passionate love to her with all the ardour and the heat of which he was capable.

  Later, when Andreas had reluctantly been obliged to go to his office to deal with a fax that had come through unexpectedly, Becca had changed into the lavender-coloured one-piece swimming costume and headed for the pool.

  ‘I’ll join you there as soon as I can,’ he’d promised.

  He was much longer than she had anticipated. She was tired and bored, and thinking of getting dressed again before he came back onto the terrace where he stood, hands on hips, his face almost white with some fierce emotion that made his eyes glitter like polished jet.

  ‘Get dressed.’

  It was an order, an autocratic command delivered with such savagery that her blood ran cold, icy pins and needles prickling her skin in spite of the heat of the day.

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  The words had barely left his lips before he turned on his heel and walked away, either not hearing or deliberately turning a deaf ear to her shaken question, her nervous request for an explanation as to his sudden change in mood.

  She hardly dared take the time to dry herself thoroughly, discarding the swimming costume and hauling on jeans and a T-shirt, pushing her feet into flip-flops, barely pausing for breath as she almost ran from the pool house and into the office, where Andreas was standing by the window, silhouetted against the setting sun, as he waited for her.

  ‘What’s happened? Is there something wrong?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  There was nothing of the ardent, caring husband in his tone; nothing of the passionate lover who had torn himself so reluctantly from her arms and from their bed just a short time before. What could have happened to have changed his mind and his mood so terribly?

  ‘Andreas? What’s happened? What’s this about?’

  ‘You tell me what it’s about. Tell me about Roy Stanton.’

  He flung the name at her like a weapon, watching through narrowed eyes so that he caught the way she flinched, the sudden step she took backwards in uncontrolled shock.