by Lynne Graham
They changed terminals and ended up in a small, plainly furnished waiting room. Ellie was still trembling. ‘Is it always like that for you?’
Dio shrugged a broad shoulder. Dark, deep-set awesomely beautiful eyes briefly touched her. ‘Yes…but I’m afraid I overlooked the more extreme interest your presence would excite.’
‘I hope to heaven I’m not going to be recognisable in any of those photos,’ Ellie confided tautly.
Dio said nothing.
‘What are we waiting for now?’
‘A flight out to the island where the burial will take place.’
Another flight. She suppressed a groan. The journey seemed endless. ‘The island?’ she queried.
‘Chindos. You really do know nothing about me,’ Dio remarked with a slight frown. ‘I’m not used to that.’
‘But I bet it’s good for you…puts a dent in your belief that you are the sun around which the entire world must turn,’ Ellie muttered, and then froze in dismay. She grimaced. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud!’
‘That disastrous lack of tact must get you into trouble.’ Dio surveyed her with a shadowy suspicion of a smile momentarily softening the hard line of his expressive mouth.
Ellie swallowed hard, grateful he hadn’t exploded. ‘It’s been known.’
‘Why are you always in search of a fight?’ Dio scanned her with penetrating eyes that tightened her very skin over her bones and made her shift uneasily on her seat. ‘You look so wonderfully feminine and delicate—’
Ellie winced. ‘Not delicate…please!’
‘Cute?’
‘Worse,’ she censured without hesitation. ‘Men refuse to take me seriously. It’s a big drawback being small and blonde—’
‘But you’re not blonde. Your hair is the colour of platinum. It’s extremely eye-catching,’ Dio informed her with definitive derision and the distinct air of a male unimpressed by her protest. ‘If you genuinely don’t want to invite that type of male attitude, you shouldn’t dye it that shade.’
Ellie dealt him the weary glance of a woman who had heard it all before. ‘My hair’s natural. My grandmother was Dutch, and very fair.’
‘Natural? I don’t believe you. Take your hat off,’ he urged, startling her.
After a moment’s hesitation, Ellie did so, and flung back her head as if she was challenging him. Her bright hair shone like heavy silver silk against the darkness of her jacket. ‘You see, not fake.’
His black eyes flared gold and lingered on that shimmering fall. The silence set in then, thick as a sheet of solid steel. She watched him covertly from beneath her lashes. So very tall, so exotically dark, so still and silent. Sheathed in a sensationally well-cut black double-breasted suit, he looked truly amazing. Stop it, stop it. What’s the matter with you? a shaken voice screamed inside her bemused head.
Perspiration beading her short upper lip, Ellie quivered, agonised by the awful reality that her own brain seemed to be romping out of control. In directions it had never gone in before. Even in the depths of infatuation at nineteen, with the latest and last of the users and abusers she’d seemed to attract, she hadn’t felt overwhelmed and taken over, her very thoughts no longer her own. And there hadn’t been this ghastly, utterly desperate sexual craving which flooded her every time she looked at Dio Alexiakis. She just could not cope with feeling like that around a man. It was so weak, so irrational, so humiliating…
‘What’s it like being a cleaner?’ Dio enquired with quite staggering abruptness.
‘Look, you don’t have to make conversation with me.’
‘It was a sincere question.’
‘OK…it’s very boring, repetitive and poorly paid,’ Ellie told him with a touch of defiance. ‘So if you’re expecting me to say I’m some weirdo who gets a real high out of dusting and polishing—well, sorry to disappoint you!’
‘So why are you doing it?’
‘The hours suit me and I’ve got nobody on my back. I don’t like being ordered around.’
‘I noticed. You should deal with that problem and then consider the possibility of more challenging employment. But perhaps you have no training for any other sphere.’
‘I’ve got plans of my own. I’m an ambitious woman in my own small way. I won’t be polishing your floors for much longer,’ Ellie told him with open mockery.
Dio studied her with hard black eyes. ‘In the situation you’re in, it’s not a good idea to drop hints of that variety. I never joke about business, Ellie.’
‘Neither do I. Business comes first and last in my life—’
‘Really?’
‘And you’re running up quite a bill already,’ Ellie informed him gently. ‘You do realise that I expect you to pay me for every hour of the last twelve?’
‘Naturally.’
‘Double time too,’ Ellie specified, tilting up her chin and ready to fight her corner. ‘I take a dim view of being starved, deprived of breaks and kept up until three in the morning.’
Grudging amusement stirred in his brilliant eyes. ‘You’re your own worst enemy,’ he murmured silkily. ‘I’d have paid one hell of a lot more if you had just kept quiet.’
‘I’m not greedy, and by the way, when I said I wouldn’t be working in the maintenance department for much longer, I wasn’t thinking about that stupid conversation I overheard,’ Ellie told him impatiently. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’
‘How could you have forgotten about it?’ Dio growled in disbelief.
‘Even if I did understand the importance of what you said in that office—which I don’t—I’m an honest person and I wouldn’t take advantage.’
‘Those who stress how honest they are, are almost always lying in their teeth,’ Dio countered crushingly.
Feeling oddly hurt that his barriers had gone up again, Ellie felt her beautiful face stiffen and flush. ‘Obviously you’re going to believe what you want to believe. Suit yourself!’
‘You can’t blame me for taking every possible precaution.’
That confident assertion filled Ellie with furious resentment. Who did he think he was kidding? Without hesitation, he had used his infinitely superior power like the weapon it was! The fact that she was endeavouring to make the best of a bad situation didn’t alter that brutal reality. ‘Don’t you dare try to justify yourself!’ she warned him. ‘Tell it like it is. If you weren’t who you are and I wasn’t who I am, I wouldn’t be here! If Meg and I didn’t need our jobs, I would have told you exactly where to go—’
‘I can imagine,’ Dio slotted in silkily.
‘And, you know, dragging me along on a trip like this…well, it’s not exactly a dream treat, is it? No offence or disrespect intended, but I’m not heavily into funerals,’ Ellie confided.
A disconcerting flare of amusement lit Dio’s steady scrutiny. ‘My father would have adored your irreverence!’
Her full mouth softened. ‘Was he one of the good guys?’
All his tension returned, his amusement fading as quickly as it had come. In silence, he slowly nodded, bronzed features setting hard. He swung away and she wished she had kept her stupid, clumsy mouth closed. Just for a little while he had emerged from his brooding reserve and contrived to forget what lay ahead of him.
A knock sounded on the door. It was time to move on again. Under the growing heat of the sun they walked out across the tarmac to board a small plane. A dream treat? Ellie cringed at the recollection. How could she have been that tactless? Now he was wishing she would vanish again! So why should it bother her that he felt like that? After all, how did she expect him to feel?
The plane flew out over the gleaming waters of the Aegean. In a silence filled only with monotonous engine noise, Ellie’s eyes grew heavier and heavier. She sank down lower in her seat and slid into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Feeling incredibly languid, Ellie took her time about waking up again. But she frowned in sleepy disorientation when she finally focused on her surroundings. She
was lying on the capacious back seat of an enormous limousine with tinted windows.
With a thick, expensive metal clunk, the passenger door opened. A black-haired young man backed by bright golden sunlight gaze down at her with patronising amusement. ‘So you’re Dio’s latest woman… I’ve got to hand it to my cousin. He’s got taste. No wonder he kept you out of the church. Some of his late mother’s relatives are pretty narrow-minded. I’m Lukas Varios.’
Tensing with annoyance under the earthy glide of the eyes trailing over the slender length of her exposed legs, Ellie pulled herself hurriedly upright and tugged down the skirt which had ridden up while she slept. ‘I am not Dio’s woman!’ she snapped.
‘Nice to have a piece of good news today.’ With a cocky grin on his handsome face, Lukas Varios slid in beside her and closed the door. ‘So, if you don’t belong to Dio, what are you doing waiting outside the cemetery for him?’
Ellie compressed her ripe pink mouth into a rigid line. ‘I just work for him…OK?’
‘Oh, it’s very much OK with me…’ Impervious to her frozen expression, Lukas stretched out a confident hand to finger the silvery fall of hair lying against her flushed cheekbone and murmured, ‘You are a real babe—’
The passenger door opened again, this time framing Dio. He took one look at the apparently intimate scene he had interrupted and smouldering fury blazed in his spectacular eyes. He reached in a powerful hand, closed it over the younger man’s shoulder and hauled him out of the limo to shoot a raw flood of guttural Greek down at him.
Lukas Varios backed off, struggling to reassert his cool by smoothing down his jacket, but his shaken face was red as fire. As Ellie sat there, immobilised by sheer shock at Dio’s extraordinary behaviour, Lukas sent her a fiercely accusing glance. ‘She said she wasn’t yours…do you think I’d have come on to her if she’d told me the truth?’
Lean, strong face cold and hard as bronze, Dio swung into the limo and slammed the door without another word. Black contemptuous eyes flamed over Ellie. ‘I didn’t bring you here to behave like a tramp!’ he told her with splintering derision.
CHAPTER THREE
ELLIE’S quick temper, already taxed to its limits by Lukas’s offensive familiarity, simply erupted.
Reacting on instinct alone, her hand flew up and she slapped Dio Alexiakis so hard across one cheekbone her fingers stung like mad. ‘No man calls me a tramp!’ she bit out in furious condemnation.
As the livid marks of that slap sprang up across one slashing cheekbone, Dio stared back at her with truly stunned black eyes.
Even though Ellie instantly knew that she had gone too far, she was far too angry to acknowledge her mistake. ‘And your conceited mega-ego of a cousin deserves the same!’ she launched in defiant addition. ‘Who does that little squirt think he is? Calling me a babe, and smirking and pawing my hair like I’m some kind of toy to be played with! And how dare you behave in such a way as to give him the impression that I would stoop to be something as utterly disgusting as your woman?’
‘Disgusting…?’ Dio gritted, not quite levelly, eyes now as scorching a gold as the heart of a bonfire.
‘Yes, disgusting!’ Ellie repeated with a feeling shudder. ‘Women do not belong like objects to men—’
‘I could persuade you to belong to me,’ Dio declared in a wrathful growl.
Ellie breathed in so deep on that staggering claim she was vaguely surprised that she didn’t explode. She studied him with scornful green eyes. ‘What with? A Stone Age hammer? Because let me tell you, knocking me out and dragging me by force back to the family cave would be the only way!’
Without the slightest warning, Dio reached for her with powerful hands that brooked no refusal. He brought his mouth crashing down hard on hers. Shock paralysed Ellie. But a far deeper level of shock awaited her. When that wide, sensual mouth possessed hers with hungry force, it was as if the world came to a sudden screeching halt and sent her flying off into the sun.
The surge of heat Dio ignited could have burned up an entire planet. Ellie’s head swam, all rational thought suspended beneath that shattering shower of instant sensation. As he hauled her into a crushing and deeply satisfying embrace, her blood pounded madly through her pliant body.
He tasted like water after a long summer drought. He created a thirst she had never known she had. She was so hooked on that electrifying excitement that she clung like a vine to a tree, moaning low in her throat as his tongue invaded the moist sensitivity of her mouth in an erotic invasion that drove her wild.
Dio dragged her back from him, his breathing fractured, his eyes blazing over her with a primitive satisfaction he couldn’t hide. ‘I wouldn’t need to use force with you, Ellie. You’d come back to the family cave like a little lamb,’ he contended thickly.
As the haze of intoxicating passion evaporated, Ellie gazed up into his darkly handsome features, aghast. Simultaneously, Dio stiffened, veiled his eyes and set her back from him. A boiling wave of hot embarrassment enveloped Ellie. She couldn’t believe that what had happened had happened. She couldn’t believe that she could possibly have felt what he had made her feel when she hadn’t wanted to feel anything. And the silence lay there, thick and treacherous as a swamp that neither of them wanted to risk trying to cross.
‘I…I…’ Ellie began unevenly, suddenly eager to give both of them an acceptable excuse. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you. I made you angry—’
‘Greek men don’t like having their masculinity challenged.’ Dio loosed a sardonic laugh and dealt her a bleak glance. ‘But I kissed you because I wanted to. As you said to me, tell it like it is.’
Taken aback by that blunt acknowledgement that the attraction playing havoc with her own self-discipline was not solely her problem, Ellie gazed at him in frank perplexity. Then she swiftly turned her head away.
‘Naturally we won’t be repeating the experiment,’ Dio completed with flat finality.
Ellie’s delicate profile tautened. Although he was only stating the obvious, only saying what she would have said herself, angry mortification still engulfed her. Conscious that she was being warned off, she felt humiliated. He had kissed her! Yet he still evidently saw a need to depress any foolish ideas she might be developing. Who the heck did he think he was?
Mr Totally Irresistible? Yes, she answered for herself. And that blazing confidence wasn’t vanity, she acknowledged with driven reluctance. He had it all. The looks, the money, the power. How often did Dio Alexiakis meet with rejection? How much more often must he meet with blatant encouragement?
But still Ellie felt the need to defend herself. ‘I lashed out because you were extremely ru—’
‘I don’t wish to discuss this any further,’ Dio interposed harshly. ‘I’m not myself today. My reactions are on a very short fuse.’
But in the space of a heartbeat he had blown Ellie’s belief that she wasn’t a very sexual person right out of the water. She could only cringe when she recalled the almost irresistible temptation to snatch him greedily back into her arms. She had never dreamt that any man could rouse her to that level of excitement, hunger and craving. That Dio Alexiakis had that power shook her to her very depths.
The limousine drove up the steep road at a stately crawl, other vehicles now falling in behind to follow in their wake. Above them, perched on the spectacular height of a cliff, the large domed roof of a pale building came into view. The higher they climbed, the bigger that building seemed to become. It couldn’t be called a villa, Ellie decided wide-eyed, it could only be called a palace.
‘Is this your home?’ she prompted tautly.
As the limo glided to a halt in front of the massive entrance, Dio gave a bleak nod of confirmation.
‘If you’re going to be socialising with friends and family now, just find me a room somewhere and lock the door. I don’t want to intrude—’
‘You’re staying with me,’ Dio countered steadily.
‘But what am I supposed to say if anyone speaks
to me?’ Ellie’s dismay was unhidden. ‘I don’t even know what your father was called!’
‘His name was Spiros. He was seventy-one and I was his only child,’ Dio framed, his accent thickening to roughen his vowel sounds, his jawline squaring. ‘He was one of those good guys you mentioned. He may have passed away peacefully in his sleep, but his death was both sudden and unexpected.’
‘You had no chance to say goodbye. That’s very hard to bear.’ As she had listened Ellie had paled, briefly plunged into her own memories of the loss of a loved and loving parent.
Dio sent her a flashing glance of pure disdain. ‘Spare me the platitudes,’ he derided harshly. ‘My father and I had been estranged for some time before his death.’
‘It wasn’t a platitude. Whose fault was it that you were…estranged?’ she dared to ask.
‘Mine…’ She watched his lean brown hands slowly clench into powerful fists and then carefully unclench again the instant he realised she had noticed that betraying gesture.
‘You couldn’t have known—’
‘This is none of your business!’ Dio ground out thunderously.
They climbed out of the car. Ellie stole a troubled glance up at Dio’s rigid profile and suppressed a rueful sigh, recognising the stoic, all-male but unnatural control he was determined to maintain. Maybe it was easier for women to let go emotionally, talk it out, forgive themselves. It was certainly wiser, she reckoned. Right now Dio Alexiakis was like a big simmering volcano, struggling to swallow back a surging lava flow. Hanging back, she let him stride ahead of her,.
A large cluster of staff were waiting in the huge, opulent entrance hall. Dio spoke a few words. Ellie hovered awkwardly in the centre of the marble floor, her attention roaming over statues in alcoves and magnificent paintings and then centring on the gorgeous brunette who had unexpectedly appeared in a doorway.