by Kendrick, Sharon; Lawrence, Kim; Crews, Caitlin; Milburne, Melanie
‘Keep it as a souvenir.’
‘The only souvenir I want from you is the word “goodbye”.’
His eyes held hers again in a spine-shuddering, resolve-melting lock. ‘The only way that’s going to happen is if I pull out of this business merger.’
‘I don’t care about the merger.’
‘Maybe not, but you should. It rests solely on your compliance with the terms of the deal.’
Terms? What terms?
Allegra disguised her unease by shaking her loose hair back behind her shoulders in a gesture of indifference. But she was far from indifferent. Something about his unwavering gaze made her feel he was toying with her, like a cat with a mouse it had cleverly cornered. What on earth could he want her compliance over?
Since that kiss years before, there had always been a climate of tension between them. A tug of war of wills. A power struggle that crackled the air when they were in the same room together. He was her enemy and she didn’t care who knew it. Hating him made it easier for her to forget how much she’d wanted him. Hating him kept her safe from her own traitorous hormones that were annoyingly, persistently, immune to every other man but him. ‘My father’s business affairs are of no concern to me. I am completely independent of him and have been for the last ten or so years.’
‘Independent financially, maybe, but you’re his only daughter. His only child. He paid for your stellar education. He gave you everything money could buy. Don’t you care he’s about to lose everything without my help?’ His deeply carved frown added to the grave delivery of his words.
Allegra wished she didn’t care. But the trouble was, she did. It was her Achilles’ heel—her weak spot, the raw, vulnerable part of her personality—the need to feel loved and valued by her only living parent. She had sought it all her life to no avail. In spite of her father’s shortcomings, inside she was still that small child looking for his approval. Pathetic, but true. ‘I fail to see what any of this has to do with me. I simply don’t care what state my father’s business is in.’ She knew she sounded cold and unfeeling but why should she care what Draco thought of her?
He studied her for a long moment. ‘I don’t believe you. You do care. Which is why you’ll agree to marry me to keep the business afloat.’
Shock hit her in the chest like a punch. Marry him? Allegra widened her eyes. Not saucer-wide. Not dinner-dish-wide. Platter-dish-wide. Surely he hadn’t just said that? The M word? Him and her? Married? To each other? She blinked and then laughed but even to her ears it sounded on the verge of hysterical. ‘If you think for one second I would marry anyone, let alone you, then you are even more of an egomaniac than I thought.’
Draco’s gaze continued to hold hers in an intractable lock that was a tantalising tickle to her girly bits. ‘You will do it, Allegra, or see your father’s business die a slow and painful death. It’s on life support as it is. I’ve been drip-feeding your father money for the last year. He hasn’t got the funds to repay me even if I waive the interest. No one will lend him anything now, not after the way things have panned out in our economy. I came up with this solution instead. This way everyone wins…in particular, you.’
Allegra couldn’t believe his arrogance. Did he really think she would agree to such a preposterous deal? She hated him with a passion. She couldn’t think of a single person she would less like to marry. Well, she could, given her line of work, but that wasn’t the point. He was a playboy. A fast-living Lothario who churned through women like a speed-reader churned through cheap paperbacks. Marriage to Draco would be emotional suicide, even if she didn’t hate him. ‘You’re unbelievable. What planet are you on that you would think I would see this as a win for me? Marriage isn’t a win for any woman. It’s a one-way ticket to serfdom, that’s what it is, and I won’t have a bar of it.’
‘You’ve been hanging around divorce courts way too long,’ he said. ‘Plenty of marriages work well for both parties. It could work for us. We have a lot in common.’
‘The only thing we have in common is we both breathe oxygen,’ Allegra said. ‘I dislike everything about you. Even if I were on the hunt for a husband, I would never consider someone like you. You’re the sort of man who would expect his pipe and slippers brought to him when he gets home. You don’t want a wife, you want a servant.’
His half-smile was back, making his impossibly black eyes twinkle. ‘I love you too, glykia mou.’
Allegra thinned her gaze to hairpin slits. ‘Read my lips. I am not marrying you. Not to save my father’s business. Not for any reason. No. No. No. No.’
Draco took a leisurely sip of his champagne and put the glass down on the coffee table with exacting precision. ‘Of course, you’ll have to commute between London and my home for work, but you can use my private jet—that is, if I’m not using it myself.’
Allegra clenched her hands into fists. ‘Are you listening to me? I said I am not marrying you.’
He sat on the sofa and leaned back with his hands behind his head, one ankle crossed over the other with indolent grace. ‘You haven’t got a choice. If you don’t marry me then your father will blame you for the collapse of his company. It’s a good company but it’s been badly run of late. That business manager your father appointed a couple of years ago when he had that health scare didn’t do him any favours. I can undo that damage and turn the business around so it’s profitable again. Your father will stay on the board and have a share of the profits I guarantee will be more than he has received in decades.’
Allegra bit down on her lip. It had been a worrying time when her father had had a cancer scare. She had flown back and forth as much as she could to help him through his bout of chemo and radiation. Not that he’d shown any great appreciation, of course. But to marry Draco to save her father from financial ruin? It was as if she had suddenly stepped into the pages of a Regency novel.
But her father needed her. Really needed her. There could have been worse men than Draco to offer for her, she had to admit. The sort of men she faced down in court. Mean men. Dangerous men. Men who had no respect for women and who used their children as weapons and pay-backs. Men who stalked, bullied, threatened and even killed to get their own way.
Draco might be arrogant but he wasn’t mean. Dangerous? Well, maybe to her senses, yes. Her senses went into a dazzled and dizzying frenzy when he came close. Which was a very good reason why she couldn’t marry him.
Wouldn’t marry him.
‘Why me?’ Allegra said. ‘Why would you possibly want me for a wife when you can have any woman you want?’
His eyes did a lazy sweep of her from head to foot and back again, sending a frisson through every cell in her body. ‘I want you.’
Those sexily drawled words should not have made her feminine core do a happy dance. She wasn’t vain but knew she was considered attractive in a classical sort of way. She had her mother’s English peaches-and-cream complexion, her dark blue eyes and slim build, but she had her father’s jet-black hair and drive to achieve.
But Draco dated super-models, starlets and nubile nymphets. Why would he want to shackle himself to a hard-nosed career woman like her, especially when they fought at every chance they got?
Over the years she had done her level best to hide her attraction to him. The Embarrassing Incident when she’d been sixteen was filed away in her mind in the drawer marked ‘Do Not Open’. These days she sneered instead of simpered. She derided instead of drooled. She flayed instead of flirted.
Falling in love with Draco Papandreou would be asking for the sort of trouble she helped other women extricate themselves from on a daily basis. Love did weird things to women. They got blindsided, hoodwinked, charmed into looking at their men through rosy love-tinted glasses that failed to show up their faults until it was too late.
Allegra wasn’t going to be one of those women—a victim of some man’s p
ower game, leaving her as vulnerable as a rain-soaked kitten. ‘Listen, I appreciate the compliment, such as it is, but I’m not in the marriage market. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to—’
‘The offer is for today and today only. After that I start asking for my money back. With interest.’
She sent her tongue over her lips but they felt as dry as the cardboard cover on one of her expert reports. The economic crisis in Greece was serious. So serious that many well-established companies had hit the wall like over-ripe peaches. She might have some issues with her father but not to the point where she wanted to see him ruined and publicly humiliated. Not now he had a wife and young baby to provide for. Allegra liked Elena. She hadn’t expected to, with Elena only being two years older than her, but she did. It some ways Elena reminded her of herself—trying too hard to please everyone in an effort to be loved and accepted.
But if she married Draco to save her father from financial destruction she would be exposing herself to the sort of sensual danger she could well do without. For years she’d kept her distance from him. After that mortifying encounter when she was sixteen, it was her only way of protecting herself. But how would she keep her distance if she were married to him? ‘This marriage you’re…erm…proposing…’ It was lowering to find her voice sounding so scratchy. ‘What do you get out of it?’
His eyes shone with a devilish gleam that made her inner thighs tingle as if he had stroked her intimately. No one else could do that to her. Turn her on with a look. Make her so hungry for him she had trouble keeping her hands off him. She would like nothing more than to run her hands all over that strong male body to see if it was as deliciously hard and virile as it looked. When had she not burned with lust for him? Ever since she’d been a teenager with newly awakened hormones he’d been her go-to fantasy guy. No one else came close. He had all but ruined her for anyone else and he hadn’t so much as touched her, other than incidentally, since that kiss. ‘I get a wife who’s hot for me. What more could a man want?’
Allegra kept her expression under tight control. ‘If you want a trophy wife then why not select one from your crowd of sexy little sycophants?’
‘I want a wife with a brain between her ears.’
‘Any woman with half a brain would steer clear of a man like you.’
Her insult only made his smile tilt further, as if he was enjoying himself at her expense. ‘And if you were to provide me with an heir…’
‘A…what?’ Allegra’s voice came out like a mouse’s squeak. ‘You’re expecting me to have…?’
‘Now that I think about it…’ He rose from the sofa with leonine agility. ‘An heir and a spare might be a good thing, ne?’
Was he teasing or was he serious? It was so hard to tell behind the sardonic screen of his gaze. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something? I don’t want children. I have a career I’m not prepared to sacrifice for a family.’
‘Lots of women say that but in most cases it’s not true. They say it as an insurance policy in case no one asks them to marry them.’
Allegra’s mouth dropped open so far, she thought her toenails would be bruised. ‘Are you for real? What jungle vine did you just swing down from? Women are not breeding machines. Nor are we waiting around with bated breath for some man to stick a ring on our finger and carry us off to be their domestic slave. We have just as much ambition and drive as men, sometimes even more so.’
‘I’m all for your drive.’ His eyes did that glinting thing again. ‘That’s another thing we have in common, ne?’
The less she thought about his sex drive, the better. No one oozed it more potently than him. He was the poster boy for pick-up sex. He moved from relationship to relationship faster than a driver late for an important appointment changed lanes. What had brought about this sudden desire to play family man? He was only thirty-four—three years older than her. Or was it his way of twisting her arm? The arm that was attached to her hormone-charged body that strangely—since that night six months ago in London—kept reminding her every time she had a period she was over thirty and childless. ‘I don’t know where you got the idea I would agree to this farcical plan. Did my father suggest it?’
‘No, it was entirely my idea.’
His idea? Allegra frowned. ‘But you don’t even like me.’
He came and stood in front of her, his superior height making her feel like a child’s rocking horse standing up to a Clydesdale stallion. He didn’t touch her but she could feel the magnetic pull of his body making every cell in hers gravitate towards him. She raised her eyes to his, momentarily losing herself in those bottomless pools of black with their fringe of thick lashes.
Why did he have to be so wickedly attractive? Why did her hormones jump up and down in ecstatic glee when he was close? Her gaze went to his mouth, drinking in the way his lips were both firm yet sensually supple, the lower one generous, the top one slimmer, but not enough to be considered cruel. It was a mouth always on the verge of a smile, as if he found life amusing rather than sad. Had she ever seen a more kissable male mouth?
‘We could be good together, agape mou. Very good.’
Allegra suppressed the shiver his provocative words evoked. His voice was deep and mellifluous and his Greek accent—so much stronger than the faint trace of it in her voice—never failed to make her skin prickle in delight.
He always spoke English to her because she had let her Greek slip after living so long in England. She understood it more than she could speak it but she could hardly describe herself as fluent. She had always spoken English to her Yorkshire-born mother and she suspected her neglect of her father’s language was a subconscious way to punish him for not being the father she longed for. ‘Look, Draco, this has to stop. All this talk of a marriage between us is pointless. I’m not—’
He took one of her hands and enfolded it in the cage of his. His fingers were warm and dry, the tensile strength in them making something in her stomach drop like a book falling from a shelf. Make that a dozen legal textbooks. Who knew her hand was so sensitive? It was as if every nerve was on the outside of her skin, tingling, making her aware of every pore of his. ‘Why are you so frightened of getting close to me?’
Allegra had to swallow a couple of times to find her voice. ‘I—I’m not frightened of you.’ I’m frightened of me. Of how you make me feel.
His thumb began a slow stroke of the fleshy base of hers. It was as light as a sable brush on a priceless canvas but it triggered an explosion of sensations that ricocheted through her body. Her heart picked up its pace as though she’d been given a shot of adrenalin with a crack chaser. Her brain was scrambled by his closeness, her resolve to keep her distance gone missing without leave.
His eyes searched hers for a long, pulsing moment. It was as if he was committing every one of her features to memory: the shape of her eyes, her nose, her cheeks, her mouth and the tiny beauty spot just above the right side of her top lip.
Allegra licked her lips, then realised what a blatant giveaway that was—the primary signal of attraction. It was as if her body was acting of its own accord. Her will, her determination to resist him, was overridden by a primal need to touch him, to have him touch her. To have him kiss her until she forgot about everything but how those firm, male lips felt on hers.
What are you doing?
The alarm bell of her conscience shattered the moment and she pushed against his chest and stepped back to create some distance between them. ‘Don’t even think about it, buddy.’
His mouth tilted in a knowing smile. ‘I’m a patient man. The longer I wait, the better the satisfaction.’
Allegra had a feeling there would be a heck of a lot of satisfaction going on if she were to submit to his passion. The sort of satisfaction that had mostly eluded her in her previous encounters. She wasn’t good at sex, or at least not with a partner. She could get th
ings working fairly well on her own, but with a partner she found it too distracting to orgasm. Dead embarrassing, but at least she had been able to fudge her way through it. So far.
But she suspected Draco wouldn’t be fooled.
Not for a minute.
Allegra refilled her glass for something to do with her hands. She was conscious of him watching her every move, his dark gaze resting on her like a caress. Her skin tingled, her pulse raced, her insides coiled tight with need. A need awakened by him. ‘I think it’s best if we forget we had this conversation. I don’t want anything to spoil Nico’s christening tomorrow.’
‘What will spoil it will be you refusing to marry me to save your father’s skin,’ Draco said. ‘You haven’t got a choice, Allegra. He needs you like he’s never needed you before.’
It was far more tempting than she wanted to admit. Not just because of how it would make her father finally appreciate her, but because she couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to be Draco’s wife. Sharing his life with him, sharing his luxury villa on his own private island. Sharing his body. Being pleasured by him, experiencing the full gamut of human passion. It was a dream come true for the gauche teenager she had once been.
However, she wasn’t that girl any more.
But then a thought dropped into her head. Had her father and Elena only asked her to be godmother to Nico because of Draco and his offer? Would they have asked her without the merger and the marriage condition? Wasn’t she good enough on her own to be Nico’s godmother? Why did she have to partner with her enemy? A man she loathed with the same passion she desired him.
Allegra twirled her glass and placed it back down on the tray next to the champagne bottle. ‘Here’s a hypothetical question for you. If I were to marry you then how long would you expect the marriage to last?’