“No!” Her denial was instantaneous. “Apollo, that meant everything to me. What started off as opportunistic journalism very quickly became something else. I fell in love with you…”
“Stop.” He held a hand up to silence her and the defeatist expression she’d glimpsed earlier was long gone. He wore a mask of determined resolve now, a mask of constrained distance. “I meant what I said – I never wanted to see you again, and I still wish there was another way to handle this.”
“You could leave me here,” she said with a small shiver.
“Not wanting to see you again isn’t the same as wanting you to rot in a foreign prison,” he said with a shake of his head. “Though God only knows why I care.”
Eleanor’s heart turned over in her chest. “Where are we going?”
The engines began to hum and a soft beep sounded before a disembodied voice emerged from overhead: Mr Hernandes, we’re ready for take-off. If you take a seat, refreshments will be brought to you shortly.
He waited for the voice to cease and then dropped his attention back to Eleanor’s face.
“I told you: somewhere I can make sure you can’t cause any trouble. Or get into it, for that matter.”
*
It was madness, bringing her here. He looked out of the airplane window with a gut that was sinking in time with the plane’s descent over prâsino nìsi, his private island jewel in the Mediterranean. His bolthole.
He’d spent almost a year here after it had happened – running from his own part in his father’s death. Running from the fact that letting his guard down for the first time in his life, and opening up to someone, had directly led to Stavros’s heart attack.
Over time, he’d come to realise that Eleanor was some kind of witch – surely. Magical, enchanted, utterly terrifying – because when he was with her, he lost all sense of time, place, duty, responsibility. There was a reason he’d kept his father’s secrets for so long – a reason he’d kept those secrets even from his own sister, pushing her away with everything he had, protecting her from the shame of their father’s truth.
No one should have known what kind of man Stavros Heranedes was. Hell, if Apollo had had his way, he wouldn’t have known. But Stavros hadn’t only been a despotic, power-hungry billionaire with a twisted and insatiable sexual appetite: he’d been determined to indoctrinate Apollo into his lifestyle.
A hooker had been Stavros’s idea of the perfect fifteenth birthday present for Apollo – a beautiful, exclusive Manhattan call-girl, flown in for his ‘private use’. Apollo grimaced now, his reaction to the ‘surprise’ only natural given his hormonally-charged state. It had been years before he’d become enough of a man to refuse such gifts, to refuse to be groomed into the second-coming of Stavros Heranedes.
Oh, in business acumen he had always been pleased to take after the old man. Exceed, in fact, for Stavros had the skills of his father without the emotional ambivalence. He was smart, driven, ruthless, but could make decisions from the cold-place of certainty, rather than the heat of ego.
At least he could with everything except Eleanor.
Which brought him back to his first question: what the hell was he doing, bringing her to prâsino nìsi?
His eyes lifted of their own accord to the doorway that led to the rear of the plane. It was all too easy to imagine her in the bedroom. Lying down, that beautiful tangle of dark hair around her captivating face, eyes swept shut, so that only her long, dark lashes fanned her cheeks – cheeks that had been kissed by the sun often enough to birth a happy brigade of freckles across the bridge of her nose – appreciable only when you were close enough to kiss her.
Which he’d been often in the time they spent together.
He expelled a sigh borne of anger and frustration now.
Eleanor had seemed the very opposite of everything he was: the fast-paced lifestyle Stavros lived was full of wealth, glamour, beautiful women clamoring to become his mistress, women for whom sex was cheap and life was a rapid succession of parties and men. Eleanor had been the total opposite. So shy and nervous when they’d first met – a meeting which he now understood to have been a brilliant construct.
She’d studied him, to know where he grabbed a coffee after a jog each morning: she knew that he queued up at the Pret around the corner from his penthouse. She’d bumped into him, spilling both their coffees and he’d looked into those caramel eyes of hers and felt as though he’d been sucker-punched and reborn, all at once. In her eyes he saw the person he should have been, the man he might be, if only he could look into her eyes for long enough.
It had been a stupid romantic fantasy, but by the time he’d bought her a replacement coffee, he’d known he wouldn’t let her get away. He’d known that whatever fate had brought them together – literally – it was a fate that demanded he follow her to the ends of the earth.
Or, as it turned out, to his own destruction.
It wasn’t, after all, fate that had brought them together: it was her ruthless determination to uncover whatever she could about his family, using her face and body as temptations, drawing him close and keeping him there, enchanting him as his own Scheherezade, so that each night he found himself spinning more and more of himself out for her, until he’d been laid bare to her eyes.
And her notebook.
He made a sound of impatience and turned his gaze back on the window. The island was in view now – lush and verdant per its name “Green island” – floating in the midst of a pale blue ocean. The plane flew over the village first – not so much a village as a colony for the exclusive use of his staff. There were forty of them on the island, and their families, so roads had been built over time, to allow access to the remote parts of the land, and the airstrip. The plane dipped lower, low enough that he caught sight of his mansion, on the northern tip of the island, built right on the beach, with views that stretched for miles and the kind of privacy that Apollo found essential.
And now he’d brought a witch to his safe haven, and he had no clue how he was going to avoid being caught by her spells again – only he knew that he had to. One encounter with Eleanor Jones had almost destroyed him. A second would certainly finish the job.
CHAPTER THREE
AS SHE STEPPED OFF the plane, it was impossible not to be spellbound by the beauty that surrounded her. A runway had been carved into the ground, but trees surrounded it in all directions – thick and green, and there was a summery fragrance in the air, like citrus and vanilla and heaven all mixed together.
She breathed it in, her eyes chasing a bird across a sky that was as blue as it could be, before her gaze dropped lower, to the man who stood at the bottom of the steps. He was as impatient now as he’d been before, and more stomach-turningly handsome than she’d remembered.
Eleanor had ditched the headscarf mid-flight, for comfort, and Apollo seemed unable to look away from her hair, so that she lifted a hand to it self-consciously, wishing she’d at least finger-combed it into submission before preparing to face him again. He’d always loved her hair. He’d stared at it like that in the past, as though it were some kind of magic. Long and dark, he’d run his fingers through it as she’d fallen asleep, and held it in his fist when they’d made love. Worshipping it, adoring it. Adoring her.
“So far as prisons go,” she said drily, hiding her bundle of nerves behind the appearance of wry calm. “This is pretty nice.”
His answering smile was curt. “I’m glad you think so.” He nodded towards a car that was parked about a hundred metres from the jet. A man stood beside it, dressed in a grey suit, and as they got closer to the car, he opened the front passenger door.
Eleanor hovered, waiting for Apollo to take a seat but he walked around to the driver’s side. “Well?” He prompted sardonically, sliding into the car and speaking to her through the open passenger door. “Are you intending to walk to the villa?”
She pulled a face, embarrassment making her heart skip. And once more, to cover her true feelings, s
he hid behind a mask of sarcasm. “I’ve never seen you drive before, are you sure you know how?”
It was an absurd thing to say: Apollo was quintessentially good at everything he turned his hand to. Of course he could drive. Choosing not to drive wasn’t the same as being unable.
“I prefer to use my time to work,” he said with a shrug, as she seated herself beside him. “Nonetheless, you should buckle up. Just in case.”
Here, in this car, on an island that she supposed to have a minimal residential community, if the scarce amount of houses was anything to go by, Eleanor felt even more alone, even more crowded by her proximity to Apollo, so that she stared at him in the car for several long seconds without computing his words.
He muttered something under his breath and then reached across her, his fingers grabbing hold of the seatbelt and pulling it over her abdomen. She startled, but didn’t dare move. His hand brushed her hip as he clipped the belt in place, and her eyes stayed on his face the whole time, her cheeks infusing with pink, her eyes widening as feelings she thought she’d dealt with came roaring back to life inside of her.
The air around them hummed and cracked; awareness was as real in that car as lightning in a storm, flashing between them, arcing and fizzing demanding acknowledgement.
Eleanor’s breath was raspy and shallow when Apollo’s eyes jerked to hers. He was close, close from snapping her seatbelt in place, so that she could have pushed forward and kissed him – and if she’d been criminally insane, she might have. But one did not steal kisses from Apollo Heranedes, particularly not when he thought you were the scum of the earth.
Be that as it may, Eleanor couldn’t break away – her eyes held his and her breathing became shallower and harder to find, and her chest tingled so that her nipples peaked against the lace of her bra. She was grateful then for the dark colour of the servants’ uniform, grateful that she might at least be spared the disgrace of him seeing her reaction.
Only his eyes dropped downwards, first to her parted lips, then to her breast, and heat swirled out of her stomach, running rampant through her body like tight little fireworks.
For the briefest second, barely even a second, more like a slither of one instant, his eyes met hers and she saw a glimpse of helplessness in them – a look of lost desperation – and then he was Apollo Heranedes, world-dominating tycoon all over again. He turned away from her, a condescending smile on his face as he curled his fingers around the wheel of the car.
“I should warn you, Eleanor, if you’re planning on using your sex appeal to con your way out of this one, I’ve had my inoculations this time around. I’m immune to your charms, so don’t waste your energy.”
They’d never argued before. In the six weeks they’d spent dating, they hadn’t had a single disagreement over anything, until the very end, when he’d learned the truth and she’d tried to explain and he’d simply shut himself off from her. They hadn’t argued, and yet they’d peeled away the layers to one another’s souls until their inner-most truths were on display.
Eleanor knew Apollo like she knew how to breathe, and she knew that she had to hold onto her courage – that she couldn’t back down from him in an argument or he’d clean the floor with her. She’d abandoned that vital understanding – briefly – back in Ras el Kida, but now, with the benefit of a little time to recoup her perspective, she understood the importance of meeting his assault head on.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Apollo,” she said with an arch grimace. “I have no interest in rehashing the past.” The words hurt to say and she received no satisfaction from their issue.
“Really?” He drawled, his eyes dropping once more to her lips, so her cheeks flushed pink and the glare she shot him was pure mutiny.
“Really.” She folded her hands in her lap and stared resolutely through the windscreen. “Well?” She said after several seconds had passed. “Are we just going to sit here and enjoy the view?”
She didn’t see the way his lips quirked in sardonic acknowledgement but a moment later the car was moving, accelerating across the tarmac, nudging past the nose of the plane and the staff who were busy refueling it and moving up and down the ladder, presumably performing maintenance.
“We’re on an island?” She asked after a few minutes of silence had stretched so tautly between them that her nerve endings were at breaking point.
He turned to her briefly, his look laced with mockery but then he nodded, a curt shift of his head.
“What island? Where are we? We were only in the air for a few hours…”
“We’re in the Mediterranean,” he said.
“Your island. What’s it called again? Nisi…?”
Apollo’s nostrils flared as he exhaled. “Of course you would remember this detail. You made it your business to remember everything I shared with you.”
“I remember you describing it in a way that brought it to life for me. The name was beautiful – especially the way you said it.”
“Prâsino nìsi,” he muttered reluctantly.
“But it’s not a private island?”
“Why do you say that?”
She toyed with her fingers in her lap before she realized that the gesture might be betraying her anxiety to the one man she needed to hide it from. “Just idle curiosity.”
“I don’t believe you ever feel a curiosity that is purely idle.”
The jibe cut deep. “You don’t think it’s normal to want to know where I’m being held? How long do you intend to keep me here for, anyway?”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel until the knuckles glowed white through his tanned skin. “Until there is no possibility of you writing whatever damned article you went to Ras el Kida to research.”
Eleanor turned to face him, her expression pinched. “You can’t be serious?”
He arched a brow, and let out a soft laugh. “You think I’m not serious? Look at where we are, Eleanor, and ask yourself if I’d have gone to the trouble of bringing you – of all people – to this island, if I weren’t deadly serious.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“You need to ask that?” He demanded, turning the car onto a narrow road lined with what looked to be pomegranate trees on either side.
“Listen,” she tried another approach, sucking in a calming breath. “I get it. You’re mad with me. You have every right to feel that way --,”
“Oh, thank you so much,” he slid in sarcastically. “I’m so pleased I have your permission.”
“But if you’re going to keep snapping at me, you might as well turn around and put me back on your plane. I’m not staying here to be treated like some kind of criminal.”
“I don’t think you’re in a position to dictate terms to me,” he said, slowing down to cross a puddle in the middle of the road and then turning left. A house came into sight, and it was all Eleanor could do to hold onto her temper in the midst of something so utterly, perfectly, sublimely beautiful.
In all her fantasies, if she’d been asked to describe an idyllic Greek island home, it would have been this. White washed walls, rendered, curved, with large windows cut into the sides, the house was cubist, large, and somehow in total sync with the island. The roof of the house was made of terracotta tiles and red geraniums scrambled wildly against the wall they were approaching.
She blinked, clearing the beauty from her eyes and focusing on their conversation instead.
“You don’t think I have a right to be treated with a modicum of respect?”
“Am I failing to do that?” He demanded.
Eleanor frowned. “You’ve dragged me here under threat of prosecution, and now you’re making me your virtual prisoner. What do you think?”
He brought the car to a complete stop and pressed his head back against the seat of the car. “You’re not my virtual prisoner,” he said. “I’m keeping you here as a last resort. I can’t trust you, Eleanor, and I won’t have you hurt my sister. Not now, not now when she’s finally --
,”
“When she’s finally what?” Eleanor asked softly.
But his eyes were two hard, dismissive lumps of coal when he turned to face her. “It doesn’t matter. You aren’t writing the article. My family isn’t your personal fodder for career progression – no matter what you might have thought in the past.”
“Oh, come on, Apollo, I’m not the first person to have written about you, or your family. You’re fodder for everyone.”
“You were different,” he said, softly, and the words were so truthful, so strongly layered with his sense of betrayal that all the fight left her.
She blinked, nodding slightly, and then curved her hand around the car door.
“I understand how you feel, but you can’t keep me here indefinitely.”
“Not indefinitely,” he said with a shrug. “Let’s start with a week or two.”
He stepped out of the car before she could respond, and all she could do was stare. Stare at his powerful body as he strode around to her side and opened the door for her. Stare up at him as he waited for her to step out. Stare at him with a sensation of panic.
“But you can’t want me here,” she said incredulously.
His eyes followed her as she moved from the car; she was conscious of his gaze on her the whole time, and suddenly the servants’ outfit felt boxy and awkward.
“No,” he agreed with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I don’t. But it’s certainly the lesser of two evils.”
“Gee, thanks,” she snapped, putting her hands on her hips and turning away from him, looking at the house as though it held all of her attention.
“Do you want me to lie to you? To pretend something other than a desire to protect my sister from you is behind my reasoning? To act as though I’ve brought you here because I want to rekindle what we shared in the past?”
The Greek's Virgin Captive: She was wrong for him in every way but one... (Evermore Book 2) Page 3