by Lynne Graham
‘Yes,’ Maribel said gravely. ‘I’ll marry you.’
‘With reservations?’ he derided softly.
‘Plenty,’ she admitted without hesitation. ‘I’m a realist and you’re unpredictable.’
Leonidas studied her with brooding dark eyes that now glittered like ice crystals. ‘I want the wedding to take place in three weeks.’
Maribel blinked. ‘Only three weeks from now? For goodness’ sake, Leonidas—’
‘It’ll get it over with. My staff will make the arrangements.’
Maribel worried at the soft underside of her lower lip, her eloquent eyes veiled to hide her discomfiture. It’ll get it over with. She now knew all she needed to know about Leonidas’ view of marriage and it did nothing for her self-esteem.
‘I’m off to New York tomorrow,’ Leonidas imparted. ‘It’ll be at least two weeks before I’m back in the UK. I have other stuff to take care of. If you and Elias come to London today, I’ll be able to spend some time with him before I leave.’
‘Yes…all right.’ Her agreement was swift for she had never felt comfortable about keeping father and son apart.
‘You’ll be spending the night with me.’
Her soft lips parted as though she would have said something, but then finding her mind blank of inspiration, she closed her mouth again. For an instant, she thought he might just mean that she was to stay beneath the same roof, but there was an intimate light in his brilliant eyes that told her otherwise. A dulled flush of awareness illuminated her creamy skin. ‘Just like that?’
‘I’m not waiting for the wedding night,’ Leonidas told her with disdain.
But Maribel was rather confused, for she had reached the conclusion that the marriage he was suggesting was one of convenience alone. ‘A business arrangement that includes…er…sharing a bed?’
‘Think of it as a deal sweetener, hara mou.’ Leonidas advised, smooth as the most expensive silk. ‘Once you’ve shared my bed, I know you won’t back out on me.’
Maribel veiled her expressive gaze, lest he see the growing bewilderment etched there. A marriage that was a business arrangement—of the most intimate sort? And why would she back out? She was not in the habit of last minute changes of heart. For possibly the first time it dawned on her that Leonidas did not trust her either, and she was surprised by how hurtful she found that discovery.
Long brown fingers tipped up her chin. ‘Have we a deal?’
Hot enough to feel as though she were burning up, Maribel gave him a self-conscious nod of confirmation. He lifted her hand and she watched in surprise as he slid a magnificent ruby and diamond ring onto her engagement finger. The jewels shone with dazzling brilliance. ‘If I have to do this, I’ll respect the conventions,’ he breathed curtly. ‘This, like the wedding, is part of the surface show.’
Any thrill she might have received from the ring was swiftly squashed by that assurance. It did not even feel like a personal gift; it felt more like a prop she was being allowed to wear for the sake of appearances. ‘I’m amazed that you care about the conventions.’
‘But you do, and when I say I’ll do something, I do it right and I deliver on my side of the bargain.’ His keen, curiously forbidding gaze whipped over her taut and troubled face. ‘I hope you’re equally thorough in the wife stakes.’
Blue eyes sparkling violet at that challenge, Maribel suppressed her misgivings and murmured, ‘No doubt you’ll soon tell me if I’m not.’
Without warning an appreciative grin slashed his perfectly shaped masculine mouth, instantly putting to flight his icy aura of unapproachability. He bent his handsome dark head and, for a split-second, she actually thought he might be about to kiss her. But he frowned instead and checked his watch. ‘A helicopter will pick you up at home at two.’
Maribel nodded slowly. She was so stunned by the idea of marrying him that she was in a daze. ‘This doesn’t feel real yet.’
Leonidas dealt her a caustic appraisal. ‘It’ll feel real soon enough. A word of warning—I’ll make a lousy husband.’
With that attitude, Maribel believed that this was very probable and she wondered if she was mad to have agreed. After all, he was only willing to make that commitment for his son’s sake. The door flipped on his exit, only to be caught before it could close again. Her tutorial group trooped in. She spared a glance down at the enormous ring. It was really exquisite. But essentially meaningless, she reminded herself doggedly, determined not to succumb to any silly flights of fancy.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE penthouse apartment that Leonidas occupied in central London seemed gigantic to Maribel. A manservant led her across the vast limestone floor of the striking foyer and ushered her into an even bigger reception area.
In the doorway, she set Elias down on his feet. He looked adorable in pale blue cord trousers and a little cotton shirt. Before her eyes could adjust to the bright daylight that flooded in through the long run of windows that comprised the farthest wall, Elias loosed a squeal of excitement and yanked his fingers free of his mother’s grasp.
‘Daddy!’ he yelled, sturdy little legs carrying him across the room in seconds.
A vision of casual elegance in a loose beige linen shirt and chinos, Leonidas scooped the little boy up and closed both arms round him. He was startled by the tide of emotion coursing through him. Elias gave him a big soppy kiss and then struggled to get down again, eager to investigate the mysteries of a strange room.
‘He missed you. He asked for you a couple of times,’ Maribel admitted guiltily.
Leonidas studied her with keen attention. She had that refined quality of quintessential Englishness that he had always admired and never quite managed to define to his own satisfaction. Her lustrous chestnut hair was a shining frame for her delicately modelled features and, while her outfit was plain, her simple blue dress threw her violet eyes into amazing prominence. She had a subtle unusual beauty as authentic as her lush sex appeal and he could not understand why it had taken him so long to acknowledge the fact. After all, she had always had the most disturbing knack of immediately attracting his attention even in a crowd.
‘Why are you staring at me?’ Mirabel muttered uneasily, wondering if she should have used more make-up and put on fancier clothes
‘I like the dress, hara mou. Of course, I’ll like you even better out of it,’ Leonidas confided, his dark, rich drawl taking on a husky edge. ‘By the way, how has the boyfriend dealt with the relentless pursuit of the paparazzi?’
Her cheeks flaming at that unashamed reminder of the night ahead, Maribel veiled her gaze at that question and jerked a slim shoulder in silent dismissal. Sloan hadn’t phoned again and she didn’t blame him for the fact. The amount of press interest she was currently drawing, not to mention the exposure of her association with Leonidas, would have scared off the keenest of blokes. The last time she had seen Sloan, he had been gaping in horror at the spectacle of her trying to outrun the photographers to make a fast getaway in her car.
Leonidas got the message that the competition had been decimated and he returned his attention to Elias with a satisfied gleam in his dark gaze that would have chilled a block of ice. In the best of humour, he introduced Elias to the toy ride-on car he had bought for him. Elias was ecstatic and got straight into making noisy vroom-vroom sounds and punching the horn and an array of tempting buttons with vigour. While Leonidas was trying not to flinch at the racket, he found himself wondering if Maribel had slept with the boyfriend. He wondered in some bewilderment why he was wondering, but it was far from being the end of that disquieting thought-train, because he was soon wondering how many men there had been since she’d walked out on him two years and two months earlier. Although he continued to devote his attention to his son, all Leonidas’ relaxation and satisfaction had drained away.
Lounging back on a gilded sofa with her shoes kicked off for comfort a few hours later, Maribel watched Leonidas roll out a convoy of boats for his son’s bath-time entertainment
. For a Greek tycoon, whose fortune was based on a vast shipping empire, she supposed an entire fleet was a natural choice, and, certainly, Elias was impressed. Quite deliberately, Maribel was staying in the background. She had tried to leave father and son alone for a while, but Elias, for all his apparent confidence, still needed to check that his mother was present every so often. On the one occasion that Maribel had dared to rove out of sight, her son had shocked Leonidas by screaming the place down. Yet Leonidas was marvellous with Elias and comfortable playing with him. In fact, Leonidas was demonstrating a level of patience and calm with his son that Maribel had never dreamt he possessed.
She was in a guest bathroom large enough to run to several pieces of furniture in addition to the usual fixtures. A stray glimpse of herself in a mirror on the nearest wall made her tense. Her face was pink because she was warm, her hair tumbled, the illusion of straight, smooth locks destroyed by the damp atmosphere that was reviving her natural waves. She stared in dismay, thinking of how ordinary she looked against the grand backdrop, how incongruous a match she was for Leonidas with his jaw-dropping good looks. The idea that she had been fighting day and night since Hermione Stratton’s upsetting phone call crept in: Imogen would have looked so much more at home.
For a dangerous moment, Maribel pictured her late cousin, garbed in a designer frock and reclining along the same sofa. With her curtain of silvery blonde hair draped across one shoulder and a mocking smile on her beautiful face, Imogen would have maintained a flow of entertaining chatter. Amusing men had come naturally to her cousin. It was only thanks to Imogen that Maribel had ever met Leonidas Pallis, and if Leonidas had not decided he needed company after Imogen’s funeral, Elias would never have been conceived. A sharp pang of discomfiture and unhappiness attacked Maribel as she made herself confront those humiliating truths.
Springing upright, Leonidas hit the call button on the wall and opened the door to Diane, the nanny, whom he had summoned to take over. While Elias was distracted by the new arrival, Leonidas bent down to close a hand over Maribel’s and tug her off the sofa and out into the corridor.
Dragged without warning from her troubled thoughts and her comfortable seat, she spluttered, ‘I left my shoes in there—’
‘You won’t need shoes where you’re going,’ Leonidas told her bluntly.
‘But Elias—’
‘He’s falling asleep sitting upright! But if he kicks up a fuss, Diane will call us, hara mou.’ As Maribel hovered indecisively Leonidas scooped her up into his arms to forestall further protest.
As a manservant stepped back against the wall out of his employer’s path, Maribel felt totally annihilated by embarrassment. ‘Leonidas, it’s barely eight o’clock in the evening!’ she hissed in a frantic whisper.
‘I like to take my time.’ Coming to a halt in a spectacular bedroom, Leonidas slid her slowly down the length of his long, lean body.
Just as quickly, brought into lingering physical contact with his strong muscled frame, Maribel was intensely conscious of his potent masculinity. As her breasts rubbed against his broad chest their sensitive peaks tingled. Her stomach grazed the hard, flat slab of his abdomen and his big hands welded to the generous curve of her hips to bring her even closer. Registering the rampant evidence of his desire sent a wanton thrill of anticipation winging through her. Her cheeks flushed with fiery colour, she hid her face against his shirt. It was still damp from Elias’ antics in the bath, but Leonidas had the body heat of a furnace and the linen was drying fast. The hard-muscled warmth of his lithe, powerful form and the intrinsically familiar scent of his skin filled her with a sensual awareness that left her legs as weak as matchsticks.
Long fingers speared through her tumbled amber coloured hair to tug her head back. ‘I like your hair longer—the way you used to have it. Grow it for me,’ Leonidas instructed softly.
‘You can’t tell me how to wear my hair,’ Maribel told him tautly.
‘Why not?’ His level dark golden eyes didn’t leave hers for a single second. For emphasis he scored her cheekbone with a reproachful forefinger. ‘Don’t you want to please me?’
‘Do you want to please me?’ she dared.
‘Ne—yes, but I don’t need any pointers, mali mou.’
‘But you think that I do?’
‘You can’t learn if I don’t teach you,’ Leonidas countered soft and low, his tone eminently reasonable.
‘This doesn’t sound like much of an equal partnership.’
‘I’m a Greek. I have a traditional outlook. So you grow your hair again,’ Leonidas repeated, impervious to hints. ‘It will be charming.’
His powerful gaze held her as effectively as a chain round her ankle.
‘Is this, like, Lesson One in the How-to-be-a-good-little-Pallis-wife course?’ Maribel dared unsteadily.
‘If you want to think of it that way.’ Cupping her derrière, Leonidas lifted her against him. ‘But there haven’t been any good little wives in my immediate family for a long time.’
She was holding her breath even before he bent his handsome dark head and claimed a devouring kiss. Sensation ravished her senses. She found the taste of him utterly seductive. There was a delirious intimacy to the way he made love to her mouth. Tiny shivers darted up and down her spine. Her hands clenched as she held back out of pride from just grabbing him. With the tip of his tongue he explored and delved in the tender interior until she was pushing back against his lean, hard body in helpless, gasping response.
Leonidas pulled free, scanning her with hot golden eyes before he spun her round. He was struggling to rein back his desire, as it had naturally occurred to him that her walkout more than two years earlier might have been her understandable reaction to a less than successful introduction to sex. Although she had acted as though everything was amazing, he was uneasily aware of her predilection for politeness. That sliver of doubt that he had buried since their love-making was beginning to haunt him again because, if that was the problem, he wanted to know. He ran down the zip on her dress and skimmed it very slowly down over her arms while he used his expert mouth to trace a pattern across the tender skin at the nape of her neck.
‘Oh-h-h…’ Trembling, Maribel closed her eyes and let the tiny little shivers of delicious response ripple through her and gather momentum. At that instant, she could not find an ounce of decent resistance or restraint. Her knees were wobbling. She was melting from inside out.
‘I’ll make it spectacular, hara mou,’ Leonidas told her.
A surge of love laced with reluctant amusement overwhelmed Maribel: Leonidas would never knowingly undersell himself.
‘Maybe it wasn’t quite spectacular the last time,’ Leonidas breathed without warning.
Her dreamy eyes shot wide in surprise and she whispered uncertainly, ‘I never said that.’
Leonidas was tense. He noticed that she was not contradicting him and he wondered why the hell he had embarked on such a dialogue. It was not his style. ‘You were a virgin. It was unlikely to be perfect.’
Maribel flipped round in the circle of his arms and before she could think better of the impulse said, ‘I thought it was.’
Dense black lashes lifted on his tawny eyes. ‘The first time?’
Even that first times she realised helplessly, but she didn’t think he needed or deserved that ego-boosting information.
Leonidas saw no reason to enquire further. Perfect? That rare and very disturbing moment of sexual self-doubt evaporated like a bad dream. His tension banished, he crushed the rosy pouting curve of her lips under his and sent her dress shimmying down to her ankles in a superbly choreographed manoeuvre that came very naturally to a male of his extensive experience. Disposing of the band of lace covering her lush, creamy breasts, he backed her down onto the big bed before she had even registered it was gone.
‘You’re seriously good at this stuff,’ Maribel told him helplessly, feeling shamefully exposed and wonderfully decadent at one and the same time.
; Shedding his shirt, Leonidas sent her a wolfish smile that was pure provocation. She watched him stroll back to her and her breath tripped in her throat. He was beautifully built, with wide, bronzed shoulders, a hard, muscular chest and long, powerful legs. He paused to peel off his trousers. The aggressive bulge of his arousal was clearly delineated by his boxers and burning pink blossomed in her cheeks. She felt she should look away and she couldn’t. Tantalising heat tingled between her thighs and she pressed them together guiltily. That night, at Imogen’s house, she had not even seen him undress, for things had got out of hand incredibly fast after he’d kissed her. They had made love in the dark, on top of the bed, still half dressed, too wild with passion and impatience to take their time. Never in her life had she imagined she could be like that with a man, feel like that, or even behave like that. It was only now that she was even allowing herself to remember how it had been.
Leonidas studied Maribel with raw masculine appreciation. She was all creamy opulence and soft ripe curves. He noticed the abstracted look in her gaze. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘That night…er…at Imogen’s house.’ His unexpected question drew a more honest answer from her than she would have given, had she had forewarning.
‘You ripped my shirt off me, hara mou…’ His smouldering appraisal flamed reflective gold.
‘Did I?’ Maribel mumbled in a stifled tone, since she had hoped that he had long since forgotten that kind of detail.
‘It was mind-blowing…it was the hottest sex I ever had.’ After the unchallenged passage of that all-forgiving word, ‘perfect’, Leonidas was finally willing to concede that fact.
Cheeks fiery, Maribel studied her bare feet.
Leonidas came down beside her and pulled her close with a possessive hand. He lowered his tousled dark head to the inviting swell of her glorious breasts. He teased a straining rosy crest with his lips. He pressed her back and flicked his tongue skilfully over its twin to coax an ever stronger reaction from her. Her fingers sank into the silky black depths of his hair and she gasped, her throat extending. There was a throbbing pulse at the slick centre of her body, beating out the longing that she had suppressed since they were last together. Now her ability to hold back her hunger was being destroyed piece by piece.