by Lynne Graham
‘You can’t possibly be getting tipsy on one glass,’ Xan said abruptly when she giggled like a drain at only the mildest of jokes.
‘It was topped up,’ she reminded him, holding her breath to try and kill the giggles that had foamed out of her in a spontaneous tide.
Long brown fingers twitched the glass from between her fingers and set it aside. ‘I want you sober,’ he told her.
‘I am,’ she insisted, leaning forward, bright blue eyes locked to his lean, strong features, pale white-blonde hair rippling round her heart-shaped face.
Xan shifted in his seat opposite her, raw arousal humming through his big powerful body with almost painful intensity. ‘Let’s be frank,’ he breathed in a driven undertone. ‘I want you any way I can have you—’
‘That can’t be true,’ Elvi responded uncomfortably. ‘I’m no show-stopper—’
‘You stop me in my tracks,’ Xan reasoned.
Colour drenched her cheeks but the strangest little spark of energy danced through her veins, quickening her heartbeat and her breathing pattern. Nobody had ever wanted her like that. She fed herself excuses about how she rarely got the opportunity to even meet men, but Xan had only seen her a handful of times in passing and he hadn’t forgotten her again. That made her feel important, special and infinitely less ordinary because she reckoned Xan could have any woman he wanted.
‘Ditto,’ she conceded in an awkward mutter when he appeared to be awaiting a response from her.
And Xan laughed and leapt upright without warning to simply lift her out of her seat and tumble her down on his lap as he sat down again. ‘Thought you were never going to admit that,’ he growled with unashamed satisfaction.
For once she didn’t begrudge him that satisfaction. ‘I don’t lie,’ she murmured with pride.
‘All women lie,’ Xan declared, lifting big brown hands to frame her face, brushing her hair back behind her small ears, his potent amber eyes hot and golden and bright with hunger.
‘No, we don’t—’
‘What weight are you?’ Xan shot back at her.
And she told him and he told her she couldn’t possibly be that weight, standing up to set her down on her feet and lifting her again with a very funny fake grunt of effort that made her giggle helplessly. Xan mock-collapsed back into his seat still gripping her tight before hoisting her up on her knees to sit facing astride him, disconcerting her, killing her giggling fit.
‘I wouldn’t admit to being that heavy if I wasn’t,’ she pointed out more circumspectly, barely able to catch her breath that close to him, uneasy at the sudden intimacy, wondering how to remove herself back to her own seat without making a production out of it.
Xan stared down at her ripe pink lips and surrendered to the inevitable without an ounce of concern. He teased at that full lower lip, pressed them softly apart, darted, delved with enthusiasm and felt every inch of her tighten and quiver with response against him. His fingers trailed up a slim silky thigh to the heart of her, teasing fingers sliding below her knickers to locate the most sensitive spot and dallying there to make her moan feverishly into his mouth.
Elvi knew she ought to tell him to stop but she couldn’t fight the seduction of sensation engulfing her in a shimmying surge of intense pleasure. She trembled over him, breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding inside her with electrifying anticipation. She squirmed as he stroked and teased and what she had believed she would never welcome again, she suddenly wanted with ferocious intensity. She buried her face against his shoulder, frantically breathing in the familiar scent of his skin, pressing her mouth against the strong brown column of his throat until his other hand caught into her hair to yank her head up. He drove her soft lips apart with a savage kiss of sizzling hunger at the same time as the tightening bands of tension in her pelvis sent her rocketing to her peak. Gasping, moaning, sobbing for breath, she came apart in his arms, shattered into so many pieces she barely recognised herself any more.
Xan settled her back into her seat and, although he was hugely aroused, his frustration was soothed by her explosive reaction to him. It was so honest, so real, like no connection he had ever had with a woman before and it excited him way beyond his experience. As Elvi focused on him in a daze of post-climactic bewilderment, as if she didn’t quite know what had happened to her, Xan awarded her a dazzling smile of appreciation.
‘Later, moli mou,’ he savoured with growly masculine satisfaction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared Elvi for the startling effect of Xan’s mother, Ariadne, whose temperament was so very different from her only child’s.
A helicopter had delivered Xan and Elvi to the huge sprawling white villa that overlooked a wooded cove on the island of Thira. As she climbed out a small woman accompanied by a pack of dogs stood up from a seat on the wide front terrace and came hurrying down the steps to eagerly greet them, dogs leaping and bouncing in concert. And from that moment, Elvi doubted that even Xan had managed to get a word in edgeways, for Ariadne talked in a constant stream, hopping confusingly from one topic to the next. She spoke fluent English, however, relieving Elvi’s main fear that Xan would be the only person around who understood her, and the older woman was both friendly and welcoming.
On the way through the opulent house, Elvi received a stream of information. Ariadne’s mother had been English and Ariadne did not normally live in the big villa, having her own home in the village by the harbour. But when Xan entertained the wider family, Ariadne always acted as his hostess.
‘First wife seniority!’ Ariadne joked. ‘Xan doesn’t like his stepmothers much but he accepts his brothers and sisters and, naturally, Delphina wanted her wedding staged here and her brother doing the service—’
‘Her brother’s a priest?’
‘Lukas is a Greek Orthodox priest and Tobias, the other son, is gay. Not that I’m criticising, but Xan did turn out more conventional than his brothers,’ Ariadne proclaimed with pride. ‘And it goes without saying that he’s the cleverest. Delphina’s a dear, you’ll love her. She and Takis fell in love at school, almost like Helios and me... Xan’s father, you know. But of course, Helios and I didn’t attend the same school. I was the village doctor’s daughter and we met when he went fishing. Like Xan, Helios was gorgeous.’ Ariadne loosed an extravagant sigh as if she was looking back in time before continuing briskly, ‘But he was also weak and unreliable and quite unable to keep his trousers zipped. Not very good at making money either. By the time Helios passed he had even mortgaged this house. Xan rescued all of us from penury.’
‘Xan’s...’ Elvi hesitated as the eyes of Xan’s mother locked with fixed attention to her face. ‘He’s quite a character,’ she pronounced lamely.
The older woman showed the way into a bedroom where confusion seemed to have broken out between two maids over Elvi’s luggage. Ariadne smiled even wider and rested a supervisory hand on Elvi’s arm to guide her away from the small domestic dispute they had interrupted. ‘Do you know how many years I’ve been waiting for my son to bring a woman home with him?’ she asked earnestly.
‘Oh...’ Elvi reddened. ‘Xan and I are not...er, serious or anything like that,’ she hastened to declare.
‘Xan doesn’t know how to do serious. Not after witnessing the sort of shenanigans he grew up with in this house...all those wives, the live-in lovers who didn’t make it to the altar, the screaming dramas,’ Ariadne told her with scorn. ‘All Helios’s children suffered but Xan was older and he endured the most.’
Elvi frowned. ‘He lived with his father, not you, after...er...the divorce?’
‘Helios refused to give up custody of his eldest son. I was distraught. Losing your husband to another woman and then losing your only child at almost the same time was a huge shock for me.’ Ariadne paused in the sunlit corridor lined with magnificent paintings, her rounded but still attractive face fu
ll of remembered pain and regret. ‘I was young and heartbroken but I was also selfish. I walked away to make a fresh start instead of staying on the island and accepting that I could only be a part-time mother to my son.’
Elvi was listening closely, deeply interested in what she was learning about Xan’s childhood. ‘Walked away?’ she encouraged, impatient to hear more.
But Ariadne, who had paused on the threshold of a much larger and more magnificent bedroom than she had previously shown to Elvi, was no longer looking at her. She was studying her son and she addressed him in Greek, her attitude one of humour while Xan stood there, his tall, powerful figure rigid, his bronzed face impassive, responding to the older woman with a non-committal shrug that nonetheless telegraphed a temper on a short fuse to Elvi’s increasingly observant eyes. Faint dark colour edged his killer cheekbones, a gleam of hot gold brightening his gaze.
‘I will leave you with your...friend.’ Xan’s mother laughed in emphasis, standing back as Elvi’s cases were brought in. ‘Dinner is in an hour.’
Xan strode out onto the balcony that overlooked the sea. The Aegean Sea, almost as blue as Elvi’s eyes, he brooded grimly, exasperated by his mother’s infantile game-playing.
‘So...’ Elvi hovered uncertainly by the glass doors. ‘What was that all about?’
Xan swung back, lithe as a jungle predator and as immaculate as he had been at dawn that morning, shirt still crisp and white, tie still straight. No, he badly needed a shave, she noted with relief, grateful he wasn’t quite perfect when the linen sundress she had worn from travelling was as creased as though she had slept in it and bore a coffee stain.
‘I haven’t brought a woman to the island with me before.’
‘I know. Your mother said.’
‘To prevent her from reading too much into your visit, I said you were just a friend—’
‘I said we weren’t serious,’ Elvi hastened to add.
‘But Ariadne called my bluff,’ Xan admitted, his beautiful stubborn mouth curling with annoyance. ‘She put you in another room and naturally I countermanded that instruction.’
Elvi inwardly cringed and her cheeks reddened with embarrassment. In a household with other guests, all of them presumably Xan’s relatives, staying in his room put her under the spotlight more than she would’ve liked, had she had a choice. And she didn’t have a choice, she reminded herself ruefully.
‘Ariadne’s desperate for me to get married and produce grandchildren for her,’ Xan revealed in an aggrieved undertone. ‘But I’m nowhere near ready for that step.’
Elvi shrugged a stiff shoulder. ‘Well, I imagine you’ll do exactly as you like anyway and she knows that.’
Always throwing oil on troubled waters, that was Elvi, Xan noted, and it was a novel approach to a man quick to impatience and anger, but rather soothing to be around, if you needed to be handled as though you were an unstable explosive device. Was that how she saw him? To his own surprise, he asked her that question.
‘Well, you’re naturally intolerant,’ Elvi pointed out almost apologetically, as if the unlovely trait of intolerance could not possibly be his own fault. ‘You are very precise in your expectations and accustomed to other people meeting those expectations, either because you’re paying them to do so or because you’re used to people going out of their way to please you.’
‘Both,’ Xan agreed, impressed by her honesty and her tact. He didn’t think he had ever been insulted or criticised so politely. ‘Are you planning to go out of your way to please me any time soon?’
Elvi stiffened, her cheeks flushing, her mouth compressing. ‘Probably not.’
Xan swung away to hide his smile because she would assume he was laughing at her and he wasn’t. She was teaching him almost as much as he was teaching her and by the time she learned and accepted that sex was merely sex, he would probably be bored, he told himself stubbornly, striving to ignore the reality that simply the thought of getting her into the same bed at the end of the tedious evening ahead sent a throbbing, stabbing pulse of raw erotic craving through him. She would have an enjoyable holiday on Thira and then he would send her home. She would be restored to happy-clappy positivity, merely a little less innocent and the sordid aspects of their original arrangement would be tidily airbrushed over into something more acceptable.
Unaware of Xan’s plans for her immediate future, Elvi smoothed down her dress, black, fitted with a lower neckline than she liked, but undeniably elegant.
‘Wear your diamonds,’ Xan advised, emerging from the bathroom in all his naked glory, so tall and bronzed with powerful pectorals and taut ropes of muscle visible across his flat abdomen.
With difficulty, Elvi dragged her eyes from that view, her body uncomfortably warm despite the air conditioning. ‘They’re not my diamonds—’
‘I bought them for you.’
‘I don’t want them.’
‘But you can wear them when I tell you to,’ Xan cut in, flipping open the jewel case to extract the necklace and anchor it round her throat while she struggled to lift her hair out of his path.
She had sworn she would not do as she was told but here she was doing it like everyone else around Xan, Elvi reflected angrily. ‘I’m leaving them behind when we part—’
Xan shrugged an indifferent shoulder. ‘And when do you think that might be?’
‘A week?’ Elvi looked at him hopefully.
And without warning, Xan felt a surge of rage splinter through him. It was that hopeful look that implied that she could not wait to regain her freedom and escape him. A woman had never ever shown Xan that expression before.
‘No chance,’ he countered succinctly, his attention involuntarily lingering on the voluptuous display of her breasts in the dress. It wasn’t so much that the neckline was too low as that she had rather more than could be easily contained.
‘My face is at this level,’ Elvi told him thinly, all too well aware of where his scrutiny had strayed.
‘Obviously I’m going to look... I love your curves,’ Xan retorted squarely. ‘But I think you should change into another dress. I don’t want anyone else looking.’
Thoroughly irritated by being asked to change when she was fully dressed, but disliking even more having her chest on display, Elvi stepped back into the built-in closet where her clothing had been hung to rifle through the selection for another option. She yanked out the blue dress she had worn for the party he had taken her to and dug out a different bra to go with it, disappearing into the bathroom for the exchange, tossing over her shoulder, ‘I don’t see why it should bother you if anyone did look!’
Xan compressed his wide sensual mouth while he thought about that. He didn’t know why the idea bothered him, but it did. Her glorious hourglass shape was eye-catching and he didn’t want to share it. Fortunately, she was not one of those women, and he had met quite a few, who deliberately exposed as much flesh as possible in the hope of attracting more male attention.
‘Much better,’ Xan pronounced when she reappeared, flushed and slightly tumbled, to settle exasperated eyes on him. ‘I hope the swimwear you have isn’t too revealing—’
Elvi rolled her eyes as she stepped through the doorway into the corridor ahead of him. Even the most modestly cut swimwear made her look like an old-style pin-up girl, a fact that had put her off swimming sessions at a young age. ‘So, interestingly, you have a prudish streak too,’ she remarked snidely.
Still insulted by her enthusiasm for leaving him to return to her workaday, poverty-stricken existence, Xan refused to rise to the bait.
Downstairs, a crowd of guests were enjoying pre-dinner drinks and Elvi was introduced to Xan’s relations. The bride-to-be, Delphina, was a pretty brunette with a ridiculously shy version of Xan’s eyes while her mother was a brassy blonde, who loosed a sarcastic laugh of disbelief when Elvi, asked what she did for a living, mentioned her most
recent employment in a craft shop.
‘You see, Callista,’ Xan murmured in the mildest of tones. ‘Some women do choose to work for a living.’
‘I would just have ignored her,’ Elvi whispered in reproof as they moved away.
‘I’m not a fan of turning the other cheek,’ Xan retorted crisply. ‘Callista lives off the rich men she sleeps with and she had no business sneering at you. It’s a wonder Delphina has turned out as well as she has.’
‘Sleeping with rich men to get by sounds very much like work to me,’ Elvi dared.
Xan froze and glanced down at her with a sudden frown.
‘Oh, I wasn’t getting at you,’ Elvi said with mock innocence. ‘After all, I did it to keep my mother out of prison and off drink, which is rather different.’
‘Skase!’ Xan shot down at her in a raw undertone.
‘Meaning?’
‘Shut up...drop the subject,’ Xan bit out furiously as he leant down to her level.
‘Well, you really can’t go around with that “one rule for me but a different rule for everyone else” take on everything,’ Elvi pointed out helplessly.
‘I can do whatever I like—’
‘And it’s thoroughly bad for you,’ Elvi told him firmly.
Xan swore under his breath, inflamed by her sheer nerve. Why didn’t she worry about offending him, as other women did? He stood by watching his mother introduce Elvi to his remaining sisters, noticing how animated the conversation between them all became. Of course, he should’ve expected that, he told himself calmingly. His sisters all lived in the real world, unlike his former stepmother, Callista. One sister was an engineer with her own company, another was a doctor, the third a happy housewife with four children, two of which were very cute five-year-old female twins. Another and stronger generation of his family, he labelled with satisfaction, for not one of his siblings exhibited the money-grabbing greed of his former stepmothers. Yes, he had bought them all houses and financed their business projects, but essentially his brothers and sisters were independent, falling back on his wealth only in times of misfortune.