Acquired by Her Greek Boss

by Chantelle Shaw

  He led her from the baking sun into the cool entrance hall of the house, where they were met by his housekeeper. ‘Maria will show you to your room,’ he told Sara. ‘Feel free to explore or use the pool and we’ll meet for dinner in an hour.’

  She took a small bottle of pills out of her bag and gave it to him. ‘You left your painkillers on your desk back in Athens. If I were you, I’d take the necessary dose and try to rest for a while.’

  Her soft voice washed over him like a mountain stream soothing his throbbing head and her gentle smile made something twist deep inside him. He wanted to lie on a bed with her and pillow his head on her breasts. But that was too needy, he thought grimly. Needing someone made you vulnerable.

  ‘Stop fussing—you sound like my mother.’

  ‘If I had been your mother when you were growing up, I would have sent you to your room until you’d learned some manners.’

  The softness had gone from her voice and Alekos heard a note of hurt that her cool tone couldn’t hide. Theos, what the hell was wrong with him that he couldn’t even be civil? As Sara turned to follow the housekeeper he caught hold of her arm.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He raked his hair off his brow. ‘I’m under a lot of strain, but that’s no excuse for me to take my bad mood out on you.’

  She held his gaze, and he had a feeling she knew his secret fear that his father had been right to doubt his abilities. ‘You’re a good chairman, Alekos, and I believe you will win the backing of the shareholders.’

  ‘Let’s hope you’re right,’ he said gruffly.

  * * *

  When Alekos woke it was dark, and a glance at the bedside clock showed it was ten p.m. Ten! He jerked upright and discovered that his headache had mercifully gone. After showering, he had taken Sara’s advice and swallowed a couple of painkillers before he’d stretched out on the bed for twenty minutes. That had been three hours ago. She must have thought he’d abandoned her—again.

  Leaving her on Artemis when he’d rushed off to Dubai had not been his finest hour, he acknowledged. He had been stunned to discover she was a virgin, but what had shaken him even more was the intensity of the emotional and physical connections he’d felt with her when they had made love.

  He stood up, thinking he should get dressed and go and find her. Maybe it was the painkillers that had caused his sleep to be fractured with unsettling dreams about his brother, but a more likely reason was his ever-present dread that he could lose GE, which should have been Dimitri’s by birthright.

  His trousers were on the chair by the window. He was about to put them on when he happened to glance at the beach. The full moon shone brightly on the sand and on Sara. Alekos frowned as he watched her walk along the shoreline. She was wearing a long floaty dress, and when a bigger wave swirled around her ankles she stumbled and fell. Theos, what was she doing going into the sea alone at night? He stared across the beach and his heart crashed into his ribs when he could no longer see her.

  Swearing, he tore out of his room and took the stairs two at a time. The back door was open and he ran outside and sprinted across the sand. ‘Sara, Sara...’ His breath rattled from his lungs when he saw something in the shallows. It was her dress. ‘Sara?’ He ploughed through the waves. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m here.’ She swam out from behind some rocks and stood up and waded towards him. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Her calm tone turned his fear to fury. ‘What the hell are you doing swimming on your own in the dark?’ he bellowed as he splashed through the water and grabbed hold of her arm. ‘You bloody fool. Don’t you have any common sense?’

  ‘Ow! Alekos, you’re hurting me. Why shouldn’t I swim? It’s not dark—there’s a full moon.’ She tried to pull free of him but he tightened his grip and dragged her behind him back to the shore. She kicked water at him. ‘Let go of me. You’re a control freak, do you know that?’

  He tugged her closer to him so that her breasts, barely covered by her wet bra, were pressed against his heaving chest. Alekos’s lungs burned as if he’d run a marathon. His dream about Dimitri was jumbled in his mind with the reality of seeing Sara disappear into the sea.

  ‘I won’t have another death by drowning on my conscience.’

  She stopped struggling and stared at him, her green eyes huge and dark in the moon shadow. ‘What do you mean?’

  He silently cursed his emotional outburst. He knew he should shrug it off and walk back to the house, but inexplicably he found he wanted to tell Sara the terrible secret that had haunted him since he was a teenager. He trusted her implicitly, but he did not want to think of the implications of that right now.

  He exhaled heavily. ‘My brother drowned in the sea.’ Sara drew a sharp breath as he continued. ‘He’d gone swimming alone at night and his body was discovered washed up on the beach the next day.’

  ‘Oh, God, how awful. Do you know how it happened? Maybe he had an attack of cramp.’

  ‘Dimitri was a strong swimmer and a superb athlete.’ Alekos released Sara’s arm and dropped down onto the sand where the waves rippled onto the beach. He loved the sea but he hated it too for taking his brother from him. He hated himself more for his failure. ‘It was my fault,’ he said harshly. ‘I could have saved Dimitri.’

  She sat down on the sand next to him. ‘Do you mean you were both swimming when your brother got into trouble? I know you would have done your best to save his life,’ she said softly.

  He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t with him. At the inquest his death was recorded as an accident. But...’ he swallowed hard ‘... I believe Dimitri took his own life.’

  Again she inhaled sharply. ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because he told me he wanted to die. My brother was heartbroken when he found out his girlfriend had cheated on him, and he said to me that he didn’t want to live without her.’ Alekos raked his hair off his brow with an unsteady hand as his mind flew back to the past. Aged fourteen, he hadn’t understood why Dimitri had cared so deeply for a woman.

  ‘You’ll understand when you fall in love,’ Dimitri had told him. ‘You’ll find out how love catches you when you least expect it and eats away at you until you can’t think or sleep or eat for thinking about the woman you love. And when you find out that she doesn’t love you, love destroys you.’

  Alekos had vowed when he was a teenager that love would never have a chance to destroy him like it had Dimitri. But for twenty years he’d felt guilty that he had not taken his brother’s threat to end his life seriously and he hadn’t sought help for Dimitri. His parents had been devastated by their oldest son’s death and Alekos hadn’t wanted to add to their grief by revealing that he believed Dimitri had committed suicide.

  ‘I had spoken to my brother earlier on the day that he died, and he told me he felt like walking into the sea and never coming back. But I didn’t take him seriously. I assumed he’d get over Nia and go back to being the fun, happy guy my brother was—until he fell in love.’

  Alekos’s jaw clenched. ‘Love destroyed him, and I did nothing to save him.’ He tensed when Sara put her hand on his arm. Her fingers were pale against his darkly tanned skin. She did not say anything but he sensed compassion in her silence and it helped to ease the raw feeling inside him.

  ‘My memories are of him laughing, always laughing,’ he said thickly. ‘But on that day I found him crying. I was shocked but I still didn’t do anything. I should have told my parents that Dimitri had suicidal thoughts. I didn’t understand how my amazing brother, who everyone loved, could really mean to throw away his life and hurt his family over a goddamned love affair.’

  ‘I don’t believe you could have done anything, if your brother was determined to take his life,’ Sara said gently. ‘He may have had other problems you didn’t know about. Young men in particular often find it hard to talk about things. But you don’t know for certain that he did commit suicide. Presumably he didn’t leave a note as the inquest recorded an accidental death.’

&nb
sp; ‘He told me what he intended to do but I’ve never confided to anyone what I’m convinced was the real reason for Dimitri’s death.’

  ‘And so you have kept your guilt a secret for years, even though you don’t know for sure that you have anything to feel guilty about. Dimitri’s death could have been an accident. But even if it wasn’t, you were in no way to blame, Alekos. You were young, and you were not responsible for your brother.’

  Sara stood up. ‘We should go back to the house. It must be late, and there is another meeting with shareholders tomorrow.’ She brushed sand from her legs. ‘I’m going for a quick swim to wash off the sand but I’ll stay close to the shore.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ He jumped up and followed her into the sea. The water was warm and its silken glide over his skin cleansed his body and his mind. The fact that Sara had not judged him and had tried to defend him helped him to view the past more rationally. Could it simply have been a terrible coincidence that Dimitri had died soon after confiding that he was depressed? Alekos had never considered the possibility before because he’d blamed himself when he was fourteen and he’d carried on blaming himself without questioning it.

  He swam across the bay and back again, once, twice, he lost count of how many times as he sought to exorcise his demons, cutting through the water with powerful strokes until finally he was out of breath.

  He watched Sara wading back to the beach. Her impromptu swim meant that she was in her underwear and her wet knickers were almost see-through so that he could make out the pale globes of her buttocks. When she turned to look for him, he saw in the moonlight her dark pink nipples through her wet, transparent bra.

  Desire coiled through him, hardening him instantly so that he was glad he was standing waist-deep in the water. But he couldn’t remain in the sea all night. He knew from her stifled gasp that she had noticed the bulge beneath his wet boxer shorts when he walked towards her. As he drew closer to her he watched her pupils dilate until they were dark pools, full of mystery and promise, and he asked the question that had been bugging him since the night they had spent together.

  ‘Why did you choose me to be your first lover?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  SARA KNEW THAT telling Alekos the truth was not an option. Even if she was brave enough, or foolish enough, to admit she loved him, the revelation was not something he would want to hear. She understood him better now that he had told her about the nature of his brother’s death. Living with the belief that Dimitri had taken his own life because of a failed love affair explained a lot about Alekos’s opinion of love.

  ‘Love is simply a sanitized word for lust,’ he’d once sneered. The truth was that he blamed love for his brother’s death as much as he blamed himself for not preventing Dimitri’s suicide—if it had been suicide.

  She frowned as she examined her own past that, like Alekos, she had allowed to influence her for far too long.

  ‘I grew up being told by my mother that men only want women for one thing. Mum never revealed who my father was but she made it clear that she blamed him for abandoning her when she fell pregnant with me.’

  She paused, remembering the brittle woman who she had called Mum and yet she’d never felt any kind of bond between them. Her mother’s unplanned pregnancy had resulted in an unwanted child, Sara thought painfully. When she’d been old enough to start dating she had never allowed things to go too far, and when guys had dropped her because she refused to sleep with them it had reinforced her mother’s warning that men only wanted sex. ‘I’m sure she had loved my father and I think she continued to love him up until her death. I’m certain she never had another relationship after Lionel went back to his wife.’

  She stirred the wet sand with her toes. Alekos was standing very close and she was agonisingly aware of him. The moonlight slanted over his broad shoulders and made the droplets of water clinging to his chest hairs sparkle. ‘When I finally met my father I realised that he wasn’t a bad person. He admitted he’d made a mistake when he’d had an affair with my mother. But she’d known he was married and so it was her mistake too.’

  Sara made herself look directly at Alekos. He still had to wear the eye patch and, with a day’s growth of dark stubble covering his jaw, he looked more like a pirate than ever. Dark, dangerous and devastatingly attractive. ‘I had sex with you because I wanted to. You didn’t coerce me or pretend that it meant anything to you—and that’s fine because it didn’t mean anything to me either.’

  ‘But why me?’ he persisted. ‘Why not Paul Eddis, for instance? You seemed pretty friendly with him at the board members’ dinner.’

  She shrugged. ‘Paul is a nice guy, but there was no spark between us like there was between you and me.’

  ‘Was?’ Alekos said softly. ‘I would not use the past tense.’ He curved his arm around her waist and tugged her into the heat of his body. The effect on her was electrifying and she was mortified, knowing he must feel the hard points of her nipples. Her brain urged her to step away from him but her body had other ideas and she was trapped by her longing for him when he lowered his head towards her.

  ‘Is this the spark you referred to?’ he growled. He kept her clamped against him while he ran his other hand down her spine and lower, sliding his fingers beneath the waistband of her knickers to caress her bare bottom. ‘Sexual chemistry enslaves both of us, Sara mou.’

  She couldn’t deny it, not when her body shook, betraying her need for him as he covered her mouth with his and kissed her deeply, hungrily, making the spark ignite and burn. He’d called it chemistry and she told herself that was all it was. His story about his brother had touched her heart, but it had also shown her that Alekos would not fall in love with her because he despised love and maybe he was afraid of it.

  She could end this now. But why deny herself what she so desperately wanted? Alekos was an incredible lover. True, she had no one to compare him to, but instinctively she knew that when they’d made love it had been magical for him too. She had already decided to leave her job and she had two weeks left to serve of the month’s notice period they had agreed on.

  Why shouldn’t she make the most of the time she had with him and then walk away with her head held high? Her mother had spent her life loving a man she couldn’t have. There was no way she was going to do the same, Sara vowed. Knowing that Alekos would never love her freed her from hope and expectation and allowed her to simply enjoy his skill as a wonderful lover.

  And so she kissed him back with a fervour that revealed her desire and made him groan into her mouth when she traced her fingertips over his chest and abdomen, following the arrow of black hairs down to where his wet boxer shorts moulded the burgeoning length of his arousal.

  His hands were equally busy as he unfastened her bra and peeled the sodden cups away from her breasts so that he could cradle their weight in his palms. ‘Beautiful,’ he muttered before he bent his head and took one nipple into his mouth, sucked hard until she cried out, and her cry echoed over the empty beach. Then he transferred his lips to her other nipple and flicked his tongue across the tender peak while simultaneously he slid his hand into the front of her knickers and pushed his finger into her molten heat.

  Her legs buckled and he tightened his arm around her waist and lowered her onto the sand, coming down on top of her so that his body covered hers. She was aware of him tugging her panties off and her excitement grew when he jerked his boxers down and his erection pushed into her belly. His ragged breaths filled her ears and his male scent swamped her senses. She licked his shoulder and tasted sea salt.

  ‘Open your legs,’ he said hoarsely.

  She wanted to feel his length inside her and she shared his impatience. But his voice broke through the sexual haze clouding her brain and she remembered something vital.

  ‘We can’t here. I’m not on the pill.’ Not even her overwhelming desire for Alekos was worth risking an unplanned pregnancy.

  He tensed and swore softly as he lifted himself
off her and pulled up his boxers before he held out his hand and drew her to her feet. ‘I can’t go back to the house naked,’ she muttered as he began to lead her up the beach. ‘One of the staff might see me.’

  ‘None of them sleep here. There is a small fishing village on the island and all the staff return to their own homes every evening.’ He scooped her up in his arms and strode across the sand. ‘So, are you going to sleep with me, Sara mou?’ His sensual smile did not disguise the serious tone of his voice.

  ‘I hope not.’ She grinned when he frowned. ‘I’ll be very disappointed if all we do is sleep.’

  Laughter rumbled in his big chest. ‘Do you know the punishment for being a tease?’ He proceeded to tell her exactly how he intended to punish her, so that by the time he carried her into his bedroom and laid her on the bed Sara was shivering with anticipation and a wild hunger that grew fiercer when he slid a protective sheath over his erection and positioned himself between her thighs.

  He drove into her with a powerful thrust that made her catch her breath as she discovered again his size and strength. He filled her, fitted her so perfectly as if he had been designed exclusively for her. She pushed away the dangerous thought and concentrated on learning every inch of his body, running her hands over his chest and shoulders, his long spine and smooth buttocks that rose and fell in a steady rhythm.

  She arched her hips to meet each thrust as he plunged deeper, harder, faster, taking her higher with every measured stroke. He was her joy and her delight, her master and tutor. Her love.

  Terrified she might say the words out loud, she cupped his face between her hands and kissed his mouth.

  ‘Ah, Sara.’ His voice sounded oddly shaken, as if he too felt a connection between them that was more than simply the joining of their mouths and bodies. Don’t look for things that are not there, Sara told herself. Enjoy this for what it is—fantastic sex.