The Greek Tycoon's Defiant Bride

by Lynne Graham

  ‘I want my tigress back, mali mou,’ Leonidas husked, nipping at the base of her ear with his even white teeth, guiding her hand down to the hot velvety length of his erection.

  Her slim fingers flexed round his hard male heat. A sense of vulnerability and the dread that she might be in danger of giving away too much warred with her desire. She truly loved touching him, and adored the intimacy and the thrill of sending him out of control. But, in the aftermath of the one night they had shared, she had also fallen victim to a whole host of humiliating fears. Had she been too bold? Too clumsy in her inexperience? Too keen?

  Leonidas groaned out loud. Hot pleasure was shot through with the sudden darkling suspicion that she might have been practising. Anger stirred and sharply disconcerted him, forcing him to shut out the thought. Even so, he slid out of reach of her ministrations.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Concerned eyes as purplish a blue as violets questioned him.

  ‘Nothing.’ But Leonidas was uneasy with the disturbingly irrational thoughts and responses assailing him. Highly intelligent and pragmatic by nature, he rejoiced in the benefits of cold logic. He had never felt possessive of a woman in his life.

  There was hurt and confusion in Maribel’s gaze now. With a stifled curse in Greek, Leonidas drove her reddened lips apart in a ravenous kiss that sent her anxiety flying like skittles out of sight and out of memory. Each plunge of his tongue only stoked her yearning higher. A little clenching frisson low in her pelvis made her press closer to him, seeking relief from the ache thrumming at the heart of her desire. She was quivering with that almost agonising awareness long before he removed her last garment to discover the damp, delicate folds beneath.

  ‘Se thelo…I want you, hara mou,’ he breathed in a driven undertone.

  ‘I want you too,’ she whispered feverishly.

  A whimper of sound halfway between protest and delight was wrenched from her when he stroked the most sensitive place of all. Very soon, she was lost in the dark, pulsing pleasure that he unleashed. Perspiration dampening her creamy skin, she writhed in moaning response to the flood of erotic sensation of which he was so much the master. She was caught up in the irresistible surge of exhilaration. Her blood was hammering through her veins, her heart pounding. Bewitched by his touch, in thrall to his strong sensuality, she was all liquid warmth and seething frustration. Her desire reached a bitter-sweet edge of torment for she could not bear to wait another moment for fulfilment.

  In that same instant, Leonidas slid between her thighs. Supplication in her passion-glazed eyes, she was shaking and shivering, pitched to an almost painful pinnacle of need. He entered her at the peak of that longing. Bold and powerful, he forged an entrance into her hot, wet sheath. A surge of ravishing sensation engulfed her for the feel of him within her melting flesh was exquisite. He kissed her and she responded with all the wild passion consuming her. He delved and teased her mouth with his tongue while he took her with long, hard thrusts. She was delirious with a pleasure beyond anything she had ever felt. Excitement flamed through her slim body like a ravenous fire that consumed every ounce of energy and thought.

  When she felt the urgent tightening at the very centre of her, she sobbed his name. A split second later she was flung from the whirlpool of passion over the edge into rapture. Dizzy and out of control, she tasted ecstasy and abandoned herself to the rippling tremors of shocking delight that seized her. It seemed like for ever before she felt earthbound again.

  ‘Leonidas,’ she mumbled, and in that period of quiet joy and respite all her barriers were down. She did what she wanted to do and gave way to the love she kept locked away inside her. She wrapped her arms round him and hugged him tight. She smoothed his damp hair, landed a kiss on just about every part of him within reach and sighed happily in blissful contentment.

  Engulfed in that flood-tide of appreciation, Leonidas froze for an instant, and then he almost laughed, for his son was equally affectionate. In a rather abrupt movement for one so graceful, he pressed his lips in a fleeting tribute to the corner of her mouth and rolled free of her. Almost immediately, however, he reached out across the space between them to close a hand over hers. She turned her head and gave him a huge smile.

  Familiarity tugged a cord of memory and his ebony brows pleated. ‘Do you know? Until this moment I didn’t realise that you resemble Imogen, but now I have seen the family likeness.’

  ‘Have you?’ Maribel was sharply disconcerted by that unexpected remark and very surprised, as it had never occurred to her that she was in the least like her cousin. Suddenly she felt as if a giant ice cube had settled in the warm pit of her belly and she lay very still and tense.

  ‘It’s not obvious,’ Leonidas added lazily. ‘I think it’s more a trick of expression. Your smile reminded me of her.’

  Maribel kept on bravely smiling at that news, even though she felt much more like crying. The coolness inside her was spreading like clammy shock through her limbs and chilling her to the bone. In what way could she possibly resemble the late and very beautiful Imogen? She scarcely needed to be told that it could only have been a trick of expression. After all, Imogen had been six inches taller with classic features, long blonde hair and a slender, perfect figure that looked fabulous in even the most unflattering outfit. When Hermione Stratton had pointed out that Maribel could not compare to her late daughter in looks or personality, she had only spoken the truth. Maribel had always accepted that reality. But she was totally devastated when the man she loved told her that she reminded him of Imogen. Had Leonidas slept with her the night that Elias was conceived, purely because of her elusive similarity to her late cousin? In short, had Leonidas been much more attached to Imogen than Maribel had ever been prepared to acknowledge? Slowly, she eased her limp fingers out of his.

  A silence stretched that was heavy and long and when the phone buzzed it sounded incredibly loud. Darkness having chasing the gold from his hard gaze, Leonidas sat up in an impatient movement and reached for it. He switched from English to French. ‘Josette?’

  Maribel also spoke fluent French and she had no trouble working out who the female caller was. Josette Dawnay, the supermodel, was, according to popular report, one of Leonidas’ long-term lovers. A gorgeous brunette with reputedly the longest legs on the catwalk, she had most recently accompanied Leonidas to the Cannes film festival. Her risqué reputation had only been heightened by her well-documented loathing of wearing undergarments with the very short skirts that she favoured.

  ‘At your apartment?’ Leonidas murmured sibilantly. ‘Why not? I won’t make it much before ten, though.’

  Maribel breathed in so deep, she felt light-headed. It did not clear the leaden sensation of nausea coiled in her sensitive tummy. She scrambled out of bed. She crawled over the floor, got her dress, forced her way into it and stood up, wriggling violently to do up the zip. All the while, Leonidas talked in idiomatic French and watched her with cool dark eyes as though she were the floor show put on to entertain him.

  As she straightened and walked round the side of the bed he murmured, ‘What are you doing now?’

  Maribel said nothing. She lifted the water decanter from the cabinet and upended it on his lap.

  With a growl of disbelief, Leonidas sprang out of the bed and finished his call. As magnificent naked as a bronzed Greek god, he shook off water and surveyed her with outrage. ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘You’ve had your deal sweetener and that’s as far as it goes. I think you could term this the cooling-off period. If you decide that you still want me to marry you, we need to get one fact straight beforehand,’ Maribel breathed with ringing scorn. ‘I will not sleep with you while you are sleeping with other women.’

  ‘Theos mou…you presume to dictate terms to me?’ Leonidas raked at her with sizzling bite.

  ‘Don’t be so prejudiced. This could well be the best offer you’ve ever had, so think long and hard before you refuse it,’ Maribel advised, violet eyes flashing with angry war
ning. ‘Let our marriage be platonic and I will ignore your affairs, because I will not consider you to be my husband. Insist on anything more intimate and I will watch your every move and make your life hell if you betray me!’

  ‘Even as my wife, you will not tell me what to do,’ Leonidas intoned with all the chilling assurance of his forceful, arrogant character. He stared at her as she reached for the door handle. ‘Walk out of this bedroom before morning and I will be angry with you, hara mou.’

  ‘Then you’re going to be angry.’ After listening to that dialogue with Josette Dawnay and having her every worst fear fulfilled, Maribel was too indignant and upset to linger beneath his shrewd scrutiny. ‘I’ll check on Elias and sleep in one of the other rooms. Goodnight.’

  ‘As you wish.’ His lean, darkly handsome face set in forbidding lines of condemnation, Leonidas made no further attempt to dissuade her from leaving.

  Maribel went in to see her son, who was slumbering peacefully in his cot. Exchanging a valiant smile with Diane, who had appeared in the doorway of the connecting room, she departed again. She chose a bedroom just across the corridor and closed the door behind her. She felt dead inside, but her mind was going crazy throwing up wounding thoughts and images.

  Reality had burst the bubble of her foolish illusions and she felt that she only had herself to blame. Hadn’t Leonidas been honest from the outset?

  For business arrangement, read marriage of convenience, she thought heavily. He would continue to have his casual mistresses—the stunning, sycophantic tribe of high-profile women who provided him with sexual variety in his travels round the world. Maribel would wear his ring and raise his son and pretend that it didn’t matter that she had nothing else. But just then she knew that what she didn’t have, what he wouldn’t give her, would matter very, very much to her…

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MARIBEL removed a petal from the flower. ‘I love him.’ That petal dropped like a little stone to the gravel below the stone seat. ‘I hate him,’ she breathed and several petals came off in unison and fluttered further afield in the breeze that was blowing across the rose garden. Mouse and Elias scampered past her, chasing along the elaborate maze of box-hedged paths with noisy enjoyment. Maribel ended her idle game with the flower on a note of hatred that made her superstitiously tear that final petal in half before she cast the stem aside.

  Nobody needed to tell Maribel that hatred was the dark side of love, but she could not have told a soul at the moment what was in her heart. Yet her wedding day was fast approaching. The event had been so pumped up by press speculation and excitement that she had been forced to take advantage of the privacy on offer at Heyward Park. At his father’s country house, Elias could at least play without the threat of a camera lens suddenly zooming out of the shrubbery. The level of curiosity about the most junior member of the Pallis family was alarmingly strong.

  Maribel was also virtually homeless since an attempted break-in at the empty farmhouse had left her with no choice but to agree to the removal of all her personal possessions. The university term had ended and she had cleared out her desk after handing in her notice. She was shaken by the speed at which her comfortable, quiet and secure life had been dismantled. Indeed, the pace of change engulfing her had left her more than a little shell-shocked and she was feeling the strain.

  In just three days’ time it would be too late to back out of becoming a Pallis, Maribel reflected fearfully. It was most unlike her, and she had never been a coward, but sometimes she just felt like scooping up Elias and running for her life. She covered her face with cool hands and breathed in slow and deep. She couldn’t do that to Leonidas; she couldn’t jilt him at the altar just because she was absolutely terrified that she might be making a very big mistake. He was so proud, he would never get over the insult. In any case, everything was organised to the nth degree, right down to the fabulous designer wedding dress and a string of little Greek flower-girls and page-boys selected from Leonidas’ extended family circle. Under pressure, Ginny had agreed to act as her matron of honour, and Maribel had felt forced to accept the offer of Imogen’s sisters, Amanda and Agatha, as bridesmaids. They were the only family she had left. Had she snubbed them, it would probably have caused embarrassing comment in the local papers and she knew she owed her aunt and uncle more than that.

  Ginny had accurately forecast how association with a billionaire might affect the people around Maribel. No sooner had word of the engagement been made public than the Strattons had landed en bloc on Maribel’s doorstep to mend fences. Her aunt had thought better of cutting off all contact with a niece on the brink of marrying one of the richest men in the world. But the Stratton family had decided to acknowledge Elias somewhat too late in the day to impress Maribel and she had felt horribly uncomfortable with such a calculating parade of insincerity.

  Her state of mind had not been helped by the fact that she had scarcely seen Leonidas. Since their mutually dissatisfied parting before his trip to New York, Leonidas had been colder than ice. He had spent most of the intervening weeks abroad and had only returned to the UK twice for fleeting visits to see Elias. She did not flatter herself that a desire to see her had figured on his agenda. His scrupulous politeness and reserve had warned her that marriage promised to be an even bigger challenge than she had feared, for he had the resistance of granite towards any attempt to change him. But, on balance, she did know that he very definitely wanted the wedding to go ahead. How did she know that? Well, certainly not by anything he had said, Maribel conceded ruefully.

  Every day, Maribel had scoured every magazine and newspaper and had failed to find a single photo of Leonidas with another woman. This was so highly unusual that she could not believe it was a coincidence. For the first time in his notoriously racy existence, Leonidas appeared to be embracing a low social profile. Even the gossip columns were commenting on his new discreet lifestyle and laying bets as to how long it would last. But Maribel could have given them the answer to that question: until after the wedding.

  It was her belief that Leonidas had decided not to rock the boat until they were safely married and he had finally acquired equal rights over the son he loved. That was surely why he had made the effort to phone her every day. He had also sent her gifts so lavish they took her breath away. On the phone he talked about Elias and did not deviate, even if she tried to throw in a tripwire. Anything more exciting than the weather got him off the phone fast, which she found counter-productive because even when she was furious with him she liked listening to the sound of his voice.

  On the gift front, however, she was doing very nicely indeed, and had riches been her sole motivation she would have been ecstatic and ready to sprint down the aisle. To date, she had acquired designer handbags, sunglasses, a watch, a fancy phone, fabulous luggage, a diamond pendant, a superb pearl necklace and matching earrings, two paintings, a sculpture, a jewelled collar for Mouse, a Mercedes car—with the promise of a personalised version to arrive in the near future—the latest books, sundry female outfits that caught his eye. No, Leonidas was not afraid to shop. And so it went on: the gift-giving that she saw as a substitute for what he would not or could not say. To be fair to him, he was very generous, but he was also accustomed to buying loyalty, soothing wounded feelings and pleasing people with the spoils of his wealth. Spending money cost him a lot less effort than other, more lasting and demanding responses.

  After all, Leonidas knew why she was angry with him, but he had yet to make the smallest attempt to explain himself or set her fears to rest. The evening she had known he would be with Josette Dawnay, Mirabel had lain awake all night in an absolute torment of anger, jealousy and hatred. She had tortured herself by surfing the net to scrutinise photos of the gorgeous model. A kind of terror of the future had gripped her when she had appreciated that if she married Leonidas and he insisted on his freedom, the torture she was undergoing would just go on and on and on with a series of different faces in the role of rival. Only, how could any
normal woman even consider trying to compete with such fantastically beautiful women?

  ‘Dr Greenaway? You have a visitor.’ A staff member appeared at the entrance to the rose garden and Maribel stood up in haste, since any distraction from her troubled thoughts was welcome. ‘Princess Hussein Al-Zafar is waiting in the drawing room.’

  For a moment, Maribel was confused by the impressive title and then a huge smile chased the tension from her soft mouth. Pausing only to gather up Elias and Mouse, she headed back into the mansion at speed. Tilda Crawford! Tilda and her husband, Crown Prince Rashad of Bakhar, had been the only names that appeared on both bride and groom’s guest lists. Maribel had been relieved and delighted when she had received an acceptance. Although Rashad remained one of Leonidas’ closest friends from his university days, Maribel was aware that Tilda and Leonidas had only ever mixed like oil and water.

  Maribel and Tilda had met when Tilda had come to one of Imogen’s parties and taken instant refuge in the kitchen when Leonidas had walked in. ‘Sorry, I can’t stand that Pallis guy,’ Tilda confided flatly. ‘I once dated a friend of his and, because I worked as a waitress, Leonidas treated me like a gold-digging tart.’

  Maribel had found that indifference to Leonidas’ status, spectacular good looks and wealth extremely attractive, and she and Tilda had become friends. Since Tilda had married her prince, however, and settled into royal family life abroad, the two women had had little contact. Maribel was guiltily aware that she was partially responsible for that, because the prospect of having to tell Tilda that Leonidas was her son’s father had seriously embarrassed her.