by Dani Collins
That was a barb at her, but he had been attacking his task doggedly, seeming determined to complete on time. Yes, she had peered out at him regularly, and his relentless work ethic dented her perception of him as a useless philanderer, intriguing her.
“Shall I drive you?”
“Look.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, swore under his breath. “I don’t have insurance. And I can’t afford to pay for treatment. Okay?” He begrudged admitting it, she could tell. It wasn’t so much a blow to his pride, though. He was impatient. Exasperated.
She was surprised. Not that he resented admitting he was short on resources, but that he was down on his luck at all. He didn’t possess even a shred of humility and oozed a type of confidence she only saw in men with fountains of money, like Takis. Who was this man? What had happened to knock him off his keel?
“You think Ionnes will fire you if you make a work-injury claim? He’s not like that. But I’ll have them send the bill here. We can lump it in with the costs of the repair. My boss won’t mind.” Since she would pay it out of her own pocket.
She’d been at rock bottom once and Takis had saved her. She looked for chances to pay it forward. “I have to pick up a few groceries anyway.”
That was another white lie and she wasn’t sure why she tacked it on. Maybe to spare his pride because she knew what it was like to face losing self-esteem along with everything else.
Or because she wanted to spend time with this man, now her view of him was out of focus. She studied his stern visage only to have his attention narrow on her, like a predatory bird spotting an unsuspecting hare.
Why on earth had she thought he needed anything from her, least of all benevolence? That innate fierceness in his expression took him from handsome to all powerful. He was magnificent. She was spellbound, exactly as a bird’s prey might be. Frozen in fascinated horror as she stared into her own demise.
“Your boss?” Sexual tension swooped in on the wings of a speculative look to perch between them, impossible to ignore.
Her scalp prickled and her breasts felt constrained by her bra. Who was she kidding? The sexual awareness had only dissipated because she’d been hiding in the house for three days. Had she realized he had made the same assumption about her as everyone else did she might have let the fallacy continue, since it offered a type of protection.
She wanted to be annoyed. Furious. Hurt.
She was scared. Her heart battered the inside of her rib cage like a fist against a wall. She needed protection because that youthful indiscretion that had put all the wrong thoughts into all the smallest minds was still alive in her. She had buried it deep behind the rarely used dishes, but he’d found it. He was reaching into her, bringing it to the light, blowing away the dust and asking, What’s this?
With her stomach in knots and her blood moving like warm honey, she pretended ignorance. Indignation.
“Takis Karalis.” She clumsily shoved the gauze and scissors back into the first-aid kit. “The owner of this villa. I’m his housekeeper. Why? What did you think?”
His gaze flicked over her, reassessing. It should have insulted her, but it caused a bright heat to glow inside her. She wanted him to discover that hidden part of her. Play with it. Polish it and make it shine.
In that moment, she wanted to be his type, able to be casual about intimacy and physical delights. There was such promise in his eyes. Such pleasures untold.
But that way lay heartache of the most shattering kind. She knew it far too well. She had to remember that.
“You’re not the first to think I’m his mistress.” She hadn’t bothered fighting the perception because her reputation had been in ruins the day Takis offered her this job. What was one more snide remark behind her back?
She needed to hold this man off, though, or she might self-destruct all over again.
“That’s really sexist, you know, to assume that sleeping with the owner is the only reason I would be living here. Or to think I couldn’t own this house. Not when it sounds as though I’m a lot closer to affording it than you are.”
He didn’t move, but his silence blasted her, warning her to mind herself.
A power struggle with this man was deeply foolish. In fact, trying to keep him at a distance might be a lost cause.
That thought was so disturbing, she could only blurt, “I’ll meet you at the car.”
She charged—retreated—into the house where she quickly scraped the moussaka filling she’d just finished browning into a bowl. She set it in the fridge before collecting her keys and purse, hands shaking.
Outside, her car was blocked by the pallet of new tiles he had unloaded a few days ago, along with the bin of broken ones.
Damn. No way could she risk staining the convertible. She glanced at his makeshift bandage. That must be painful, but he was stoic about it.
“We’ll have to take the scooter.” She moved to the stall and reached for her helmet, offering him Ophelia’s. They were both pink, matching the Vespa.
“It’s too small,” he dismissed with a dry glance.
“I’m sure you’re right. Your big head would never fit.” Shut up, Calli. She set aside the helmet and paused before buckling on her own. “Do you want to go by yourself?”
“I don’t know where the clinic is, do I? I might bleed out before I find it. No, by all means, take me.”
He was being sarcastic, but his voice hit a velvety note with that last couple of words, causing a clench of heat in her. Her mind filled with imaginings she didn’t even want to acknowledge. Take me. She maneuvered the scooter out of its spot with a practiced wangle, started it and balanced it between her legs.
He took up twice the space Ophelia did and wasn’t shy about setting his hands on her hips. He guided her backside into a snug fit between his thighs.
She tried to stiffen and hold herself forward, but that only arched her tailbone into his groin. There was no escaping the surrounding heat off his bare, damp chest or rock-hard thighs shoved up against the outsides of hers. She wore shorts and a T-back sports cami. It was a lot of skin grazing skin. He let his hands fall to the tops of her legs, fingertips digging lightly into the crease at her hips.
She stopped breathing, held by an electrical current that stimulated all her pleasure points.
His growing beard of stubble scraped her bare shoulder and his breath heated the sensitive skin where her neck met her collarbone. “Shouldn’t you be speeding off to save my life?”
“I’m seriously debating whether it’s worth saving.”
He hitched forward, jamming her buttocks even tighter into the notch of his spread legs.
She took off in a small act of desperation, glad for the muffle of the helmet and the buzz of the motor so she didn’t hear his laugh, even though she felt it.
Honestly.
She sensed him turning his head this way and that as she took the shortcut over the top of the island, through the area with the very best views, between the extravagant mansions that dominated the peak of the hill. Then, as they came down the other side and the road wound toward the coast, the horizon appeared as a stark line between two shades of blue. They descended to where the land fell away in a steep cliff.
On the mountainside above them, stone fences kept sheep in their fields and hopefully off the roads. She kept her speed down just in case. The scent of blossoms in the lemon groves filled the morning air and she couldn’t help relax as the cool breeze stroked over her skin.
His thumbs moved on her and she grew tense in a different way. Tingles of anticipation raced up her rib cage, longing for his touch to rise and soothe, cup her aching breasts and draw her back into him more fully.
How did she even know what that would feel like enough to want it? Her sexuality had been flash frozen before it had had time to properly bloom. She didn’t want to want a man’s touch. It was self-destructive madness.
Descending the hairpin turns rocked her against him, driving her mad. She had come this way b
ecause it was quicker, but she usually avoided this route into the port town. It wasn’t the once-daily ferry traffic and swarm of fresh tourists that bothered her. This part of the island actually had the best beaches and the better shopping. Ophelia begged to come here and there were a handful of really great restaurants.
Unfortunately, this route took her directly past a kafenion where local men sat and watched the world go by. Her father was often among them and she braced herself as they approached, refusing to look, keeping her nose pointed forward as she passed.
Not that he would acknowledge her, especially with a man behind her. He would ignore her completely, exactly as she would ignore him. She just preferred not to set herself up for that blaze of layered pain.
They hit the melee of the village streets and she was glad they had the scooter. It allowed her to zigzag around traffic snarls and down narrow alleys, coming in the back way to the clinic where she parked next to staff cars.
“Who is Ophelia?” he asked as they dismounted.
“How—?” She followed his nod at the helmet she’d hung off the handlebars. “I forgot that was there.” She rubbed the small, faded words she’d written across the back of her helmet shortly after Takis had bought the scooter. Ophelia, stop that.
Calli was only nine years older than the girl and didn’t have any siblings. In a lot of ways, Ophelia felt like a little sister to her. In others, Calli’s feelings went much deeper, more maternal. She adored the girl and was going to miss her terribly, even though Ophelia could be a complete brat at times.
“She’s Takis’s daughter. I look after her. Takis travels a lot, but she just turned fourteen and has convinced him to send her to boarding school. She’s with her grandparents, shopping for everything she’ll need. She outgrew this island long ago.”
Takis hadn’t wanted to see it. Losing his wife had jaded him. He wanted to keep his daughter sheltered as long as possible. Unfortunately, that had meant the girl had chafed and acted out—for Calli, thanks very much.
He was finally allowing the girl to spread her wings, though, which loosened the complex grip of gratitude and genuine love that had kept Calli here, raising a child who needed her while yearning to find her own.
“So you’re a nanny.” He said it like he didn’t believe it.
“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Nanny, housekeeper, party planner. Whatever Takis needs me to be.” She started toward the clinic. “Barring what you suggested earlier.”
“Good.” He moved quicker than her, catching at the door to hold it for her, filling her vision with his contoured chest lightly sprinkled with fine black hair, his skin burnished bronze, his nipples dark brown. “I’m glad you’re single.”
“I intend to stay that way.” Her voice husked despite her attempt to sound haughty.
“Even better.”
A pained fist clenched behind her breastbone. Vacation. Playboy. She flipped her hair as she passed him. “I should have given you one of Takis’s old shirts. I’ll buy you something from the shop across the road. After I make arrangements to pay your bill.”
* * *
Stavros walked outside, pocketing a course of precautionary antibiotics, rolling his eyes at the primitive concoction he’d been given. He might have pointed out the far more effective class that had recently passed approval if he hadn’t already been skating so close to revealing his identity.
As he had wrapped his injury, he had realized he couldn’t use the global health insurance that covered Steve Michaels, heir to a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. Using his Greek surname for the admission form had been another gamble. The nurse, a woman approaching retirement, had eyed him, saying she had attended school with a local woman who had married a Stavros Xenakis. Any relation?
He had ducked raking over the past. It promised to be a lot worse than this dull ache in his shin. Besides, Antonio had managed to get through two weeks without blowing his cover. Stavros’s ego refused to fail where his friend had succeeded.
He spotted Calli standing in the shade near the Vespa. As he approached, her gaze took an admiring sweep over his still-naked torso, betraying that her disdain for him was an act even as she shook out a T-shirt and offered it to him with an expression on her face like an offended matron’s.
The shirt was imprinted with a subtle design of the Greek flag in stripes of white against the blue of the shirt, which was something he might have chosen for himself if he wore T-shirts with logos.
“I expected ‘Greece’ is the word.”
“I almost got the one that said ‘Made on Mount Olympus,’ but, you know, why state the obvious?”
“Careful, Calli. That sounds like you find me attractive.” He shrugged on the shirt, telling himself it was his competitive nature that made him provoke her. Pursue her. She was a nanny, for God’s sake. One who was snobbishly turning down the pool boy. That made her an amusing distraction, not someone worth obsessing about.
“Keep telling yourself that.” She turned to reach for her helmet.
“You are telling me.” He caught her arm, waiting for her gaze to flash up to his. “Every time you look at me.” He demonstrated by taking her other arm and gently pressing her elbows back, giving her plenty of opportunity to recoil, but she didn’t, not even when her breasts nudged his chest.
She caught her breath and set tense fingers on the sides of his rib cage, even notched her chin in a signal of defiance, but she didn’t tell him to stop. A fine quiver made her lashes tremble. Her pulse fluttered in her throat and she searched his gaze for his intention, but she wasn’t afraid. She was excited.
She was daring him.
This was why he was obsessing. A primitive, powerful hunger rose in him, answering the siren song she was singing.
“I know the signs of desire in a woman.” He looked down at where her nipples were hard beneath the soft cups of her bra. He wanted to bite at them through the fabric. “They’re painted all over you. Just as I’m sure you felt me hard against your ass the entire ride down here. We react to each other. Why fight it?”
He was hard again, steely and aching as he watched her lips part. His ears buzzed, awaiting her words, but she only let panting breaths whisper between them.
The compulsion to plunder her mouth nearly undid him, but he tasted the side of her neck first, liking the tiny cry of surprise that escaped her as he ran his hot tongue over salty skin that smelled of coconut and lavender. He delicately sucked, then nibbled his way up her neck. She melted with each incremental bite of his lips against her skin.
By the time he got to her mouth, she was making a delicious noise of helplessness, leaning her body into his, breasts pressing in soft cushions against his chest. Her lips were as plump and responsive as any he’d ever tasted. More. He was starving. Rapacious. She’d been driving him crazy, invading his dreams every night and now, finally, she was his.
Releasing her arms, he let one hand trail down to cup her ass and draw her soft belly into the ache pulsing between his thighs. His other hand went into her hair, tugging to pull her head back so he could feast on her throat again, loving the way it made her knees weaken so she twined her arms around his neck and hung helplessly against him, mons pushed against his straining erection.
He wanted to back her into the shade and take her against the wall of the clinic, but he could hear a car crunching on the gravel as it entered the lot behind them. He forced himself to lift his head and waited for her heavy eyelids to blink open, for her honey-gold eyes to focus.
“Did you want to make another remark about my finances now, to put me in my place?” He kept his tone light, but he never let anyone get away with insulting him. Screw Sebastien’s challenge. He was still a man and he wasn’t a weak one.
She paled beneath her golden tan and pushed out of his arms, gaze dropping with shame. “This was a punishment? Well, didn’t you teach me.”
The scrape of bitterness in her tone dug like talons into his gut. She covered her glossy black hair with the helmet,
avoiding his gaze, but he could see her thick lashes moving in rapid blinks.
He was used to sophisticated women who made the most of their attraction and offered themselves without ceremony. Lately, since his grandfather’s wish that he marry had become known, there had been an even bigger frenzy of pretty piranhas circling and luring, promising any carnal act he requested if he would only put a ring on a finger.
This one stood before him with her bare, fraught expression and mouth still pouted by their kiss, wearing an unassuming wardrobe over a body that looked fit from sporty exercise, rather than sculpted by starving herself and bankrolling a plastic surgeon. When she had kissed him back, it hadn’t been the toying provocation of a woman trying to lead a man by his organ. She’d been hot and wanton, completely swept away—as he had almost been.
He put his hand on her flat stomach, urging her to pause and look at him. “I kissed you because I wanted to.”
“You kissed me because you thought you were entitled to.” She snapped the buckle under her chin. “I knew what kind of man you were the day we met.” She grasped his finger, disdainfully peeling his hand away from her abdomen and discarding it. “I forgot once, but I won’t make that mistake again.”
“American?” The contempt curling her lips went into him like a blade, even sharper than the first time. “Not Greek enough for you?”
“A tomcat. Here for a good time, not a long time.”
* * *
Calli caught sight of a car, not her mother’s, but close enough to make her take the opposite direction out of town, not wanting to pass her father’s end again.
Besides, she found the southern end of the island more peaceful. Fishermen launched their small boats and grape growers eked out a living from the dry, rocky land. It was very desolate, but also very Greek. It was home.
She loved this island. She had stayed after her father threw her out for many reasons, money being the big one, at least at first. She hadn’t had the means to get off the island, let alone to New York, and hadn’t wanted to be exiled from her home along with losing everything else.
She hadn’t wanted to leave until she could go to America, but no matter how she tried, those goalposts kept moving. Takis had even tried to help her, but that had fallen apart. Meanwhile, he gave her a better job than anyone with her limited skill set could expect. The longer she stayed, the deeper her ties to him and Ophelia grew, rooting her here even more.