Читать онлайн книгу «Kyriakis′s Innocent Mistress» автора Diana Hamilton
Kyriakis's Innocent Mistress
Diana Hamilton
He was everything a woman dreamed of. Male perfection. Tall, dark and handsome—and yet so much more. Toe-curlingly sexy. Formidable.
If he wanted to flirt with her—or more—then what was wrong with that? She could recall the way some of her colleagues boasted about holiday romances. Apparently it happened all the time.
Fun. Fun was all it was. And what was the harm in a few kisses? She craved his kisses.
Dimitri lowered the thick fringes of his sable lashes over the silver glint in his dark eyes.
His enemy had chosen his messenger well. A man less single-minded would have been putty in her hands, would have done anything—given up the secrets of his very soul—to possess such a woman.
He wasn’t immune—far from it. But putty in a woman’s hand—in anyone’s hand—he wasn’t. If she was offering, he wouldn’t be resisting.
How could he?
Diana Hamilton is a true romantic, and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairytale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But, despite an often chaotic lifestyle, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.
Recent titles by the same author:
VIRGIN: BEDDED AT THE ITALIAN’S COMMAND
THE MEDITERRANEAN BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET BABY
THE KOUVARIS BRIDE
THE ITALIAN’S PRICE
KYRIAKIS’S INNOCENT MISTRESS
BY
DIANA HAMILTON
MILLS & BOON
Pure reading pleasure™
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
PROLOGUE
DIMITRI KYRIAKIS stared fixedly at his father’s home and told himself he wasn’t overawed. No way. The villa—what he could see of it at the end of the straight tree-bordered drive—was immense: a gleaming white monument to wealth and power. No way could he walk up that driveway without knowledge of the correct sequence of numbers needed to activate the high-tech mechanism that would open the massive wrought-iron gates. And to attempt to climb them would without doubt bring security guards running.
But he’d find a way. He had to. For his mother’s sake, he had to.
She was owed.
He was fourteen years old. A man. Or almost. And he’d come to collect. No power on earth could keep him from what he had to do.
Straightening his bony shoulders, he set off, scouting the high perimeter wall of the estate, the hot Greek sun burning through the cheap white fabric of his best shirt. If his mother knew what he was doing she’d throw a fit. Or several.
He tried to smile at the mental image of the gentle, frail Eleni Kyriakis losing it, but the lump in his throat rose like a spike of hot lava and pushed any attempt out of existence.
Late last night she’d told him. Returning from his after-school stint dogsbodying in the sweltering kitchens of one of Athens’ most prestigious hotels—owned as he now knew by his father—to the mean, claustrophobic rooms they rented in a narrow back street, he’d found his mother bent over a pile of ironing. It was part of the one-woman laundry service she’d instigated several years before, to augment the money she earned from her daily cleaning work.
She had pushed a strand of greying hair from her forehead, and her smile had been as gently welcoming as ever, giving no clue to what was to come.
‘Sit with me, my son. I have something to tell you.’ She sighed softly. ‘Many times you’ve asked who your father is, and many times I’ve answered that I’d tell you all about him when you were older, when maturity has brought the wisdom to see things clearly without the fog of childish emotions. But circumstances have changed.’
Her eyes had glittered with rare tears and he’d known then that something was wrong. Very wrong.
He could still feel echoes of the stomach-looping, throat-clogging sensation that had weakened his bones as she’d told him that she’d been undergoing tests. There was something wrong with her heart. It could fail her at any moment. She’d smiled then, bravely, and it was a smile he’d remember for the rest of his life.
She had taken his hands. ‘But what do they know? I’m tough. I’ll prove them wrong—you’ll see! But just in case they’re right I must tell you about your father. He was so handsome, so magnetic, and I loved him very much.’
It had been then, as she’d given him the identity of the man who had sired him, that he’d seen his beloved mother with fresh eyes. As he’d taken in the lines of exhaustion on her once beautiful face, her sunken cheeks and the tell-tale blue of her lips, he’d known exactly what he had to do.
With the determined tightening of his young jaw that was to become habitual, he began to climb the wall, muscles straining as he sought foot and handholds, his tension released as he swung over the top and dropped silently onto the long grass.
Beyond the belt of trees, the seeding grasses, he could see the sweep of an immaculately manicured and watered lawn—could smell, from somewhere, the evocative scent of summer-flowering jasmine, and could hear distant voices. A male, clipped and harsh, a petulant female whine.
Emerging into the full, relentless beat of the sun, Dimitri saw them. The man wearing a cream linen suit was his father. His photograph was splashed across the financial pages often enough to be instantly recognisable. The woman—young, supple—was dressed in something that floated around her body with every shift of the breeze, with every movement. She was carrying a parasol, her blonde head turned slightly away from his father. He could see the icy glint of diamonds hanging from her ears. The amount the gems must cost would have meant his mother wouldn’t have had to work herself half to death for at least a couple of years.
So this had to be the second wife his mother had spoken of.
Resolve spurred him towards them, his long, gangling legs automatically taking him out into the open, where he could be seen. This wretched man, already married for the first time, with a young son, had seduced a servant in his employ and instantly dismissed her when she’d told him she was pregnant.
With him!
For that he would be made to pay!
He’d been seen; his intrusion had registered. Every nerve in Dimitri’s skinny body stretched and his mouth went dry. But his chin came up as the man who was his father walked towards him, leaving the woman who was his wife standing.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The voice carried the harshness of the despot he was, secure in his kingdom, the wealthy owner of cruise liners and swanky hotels. One hand, Dimitri noted, went to an inner jacket pocket. Did he carry a gun? he conjectured wildly. Did he mean to shoot the shabby peasant and claim self-defence? Or was he about to use some device to summon his security officers, have him tossed back over the wall with as much ceremony as the disposal of a bundle of unspeakable rubbish?
Refusing to let his tautened nerves get the better of him, he spoke, deploring the wretched highpitched squeak his breaking voice sometimes embarrassed him with. ‘I’m DimitriKyriakis, son of Eleni. Your son.’
Silence, thickening in the heat of the sun. His father’s hand slid back to his side. Empty.
A broad, stocky figure, black-suited, approached along a path that snaked from the villa. The woman began to move towards them. His father motioned them both back with an impatient arm movement. ‘An easy claim to make! And even easier to dismiss. What do you want with me?’
The handsome features were marred by what was doubtless a perpetual sneer. Dimitri reddened. He took insults from no one, but he had no pride where his mother’s wellbeing was concerned. She had worked her guts out to provide for them both, gone without food sometimes so that her son shouldn’t go hungry. Never complained.
He squared his bony shoulders. He was almost as tall as the older man. He willed his voice to remain steady. ‘You are Andreas Papadiamantis. Everyone knows how rich and powerful you are—all those fancy hotels and cruise liners. You have everything; my mother has nothing. Fifteen years ago Eleni Kyriakis worked here for you, as a domestic servant. You told her your marriage was finished. You seduced her. She was beautiful then and she was in love with you.’ His heart leaped when he saw the unmistakable flicker of recognition in his father’s eyes. He remembered her—remembered what had happened! It made what he had to say, ask, so much easier. ‘But she became pregnant, and when she told you you dismissed her. I guess you broke her heart.’
She hadn’t said as much, but Dimitri had sensed deep sadness when she spoke of what had happened all those years ago.
He met his father’s narrowed, contemptuous eyes and stated vehemently, ‘She doesn’t know I’m here, speaking to you. She would never ask for anything for herself. Ever. But I will. She is ill. Her heart is exhausted. She needs rest, decent food. I do what I can. At weekends and after school I work in the kitchens at one of your hotels here in Athens. It is some help, but it’s not enough.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All I ask is that you make her a small monthly allowance. Just enough to mean she doesn’t have to work to pay the rent and buy food.And only until I am able to provide for her myself. She needs to rest, to live without anxiety,’ he stressed, his voice cracking.
Rumoured to be one of the wealthiest men in Greece, Andreas Papadiamantis wouldn’t miss the outlay of a modest monthly allowance. He would probably spend more on an evening dining out with his beautiful second wife.
Refusing to let himself squirm under the relentless stare of his father’s hard black eyes, Dimitri blurted, ‘I want nothing for myself, and I will never ask anything else of you but this. A small allowance would mean little to you, but it would make the difference between life and an early death for my mother. Consult with her doctors if you don’t believe me!’
The man who was his father smiled then. A humourless twisting of his hard, handsome mouth. And his voice was harsh. ‘I don’t give in to blackmail—as smarter people than you have learned to their cost. Breathe one word of this to anyone else and I will squash you and your mother as if you were beetles beneath my feet. Even if your story is true, Eleni Kyriakis knew what she was doing when she opened her legs for me. And learn this and learn it well: dog eats dog in this world, and the weak go to the wall.’
An abrupt arm movement had the security guard advancing. He had hands like hams, Dimitri noted with the small part of his mind that wasn’t seething with impotent rage.
‘Spiro, see this person off my property.’ Not even looking at him, Andreas Papadiamantis turned and strolled back to the waiting woman, and Dimitri found himself ignominiously frogmarched to the main gates and tossed out onto the white dust of the road.
Hearing the gates clang shut, Dimitri hoisted himself back to his feet, his jaw set.
His mother had been insulted. He had been insulted. He hated the man who was his father. He would have his revenge. He brushed himself down and, his dark head held high, began the long trudge back to the city.
He would make his father pay for his callous insults. He would find a way.
His vow was strengthened when he discovered that there was to be no more work for him in the kitchens of his father’s hotel. The loss of his meagre pay was a spiteful act on his father’s part.
And the vow was set in impermeable stone when ten months later his mother died of a heart attack.
CHAPTER ONE
DIMITRI KYRIAKIS placed the unmarked buffcoloured envelope squarely in front of him on the gleaming expanse of the otherwise empty desktop and tried not to show his distaste as he dismissed the private investigator.
With the tips of his long fingers resting on the surface of the envelope he stared out of the huge floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, seeing nothing.
He had lived for thirty-six years, a driven man, with the last twenty-two of those years spent coldly and clinically exacting vengeance on the man who was his father for the way he’d flung unforgivable insults and flatly refused to help his gentle, loving mother when she’d needed financial help as much as she’d needed oxygen and he, her son, fourteen years old, had been impotent to provide it.
Years spent working, learning, planning, taking at first tentative steps and then giant strides towards his objective: the downfall of the arrogantly powerful Andreas Papadiamantis.
Already the Kyriakis fleet of eye-wateringly luxurious cruise liners had relegated his father’s dwindling fleet to scratching for the cut-price, downmarket, kiss-me-quick tourist business, and it was rumoured to be going out of business altogether.
And now his money men were working on the takeover of the last two of his father’s hotels. One in Paris, the other in London. The rest had been overshadowed by the Kyriakis chain, driven out of the top end of the market and eventually sold off at a loss.
But things had changed. His father had disappeared off the radar six months ago—none of the usual mentions in the press, no sightings at his head office in Athens—and the thought of the old lion crawling into his den to lick his wounds had been oddly unsettling to Dimitri. He needed his enemy to be in the ring, fighting.
Four months into his father’s apparent disappearance, his frustration and curiosity at fever-pitch, he had had the fabulous, sprawling white villa he’d only visited that once in his life watched. He had needed a clue to what was going on. To him, the spying exercise had been utterly distasteful. Ruthless in pursuit of his objectives he might be, but he was always up-front, his intentions open for anyone to see. It was the way he operated.
His dark-as-jet eyes focused at last on the panoramic view from the window: the expanse of deep blue ocean framed in the foreground by tall pines, the glimpse of the soft white sand of a rocky bay. Relaxing. Hypnotic. Or it should be. Always had been. Until today.
He came to his island retreat on average twice a year, to unwind, empty his mind. Not a fax machine, a computer, a landline in sight. But now his mind was churning with totally uncharacteristic and unwelcome indecision.
Had he done enough? Was the vendetta played out? Was it time to forget his father, let the planned takeover go? Time to allow the man who’d sired him to avoid the final humiliation? Time for Dimitri to move on, to turn his life in an entirely different direction? To turn his back on sporadic, ultradiscreet affairs, to marry, produce sons and daughters of his own—laughing, golden-limbed small people to give a gentler purpose to his life.
The black bars of his brows drew together as he finally remembered what lay beneath his fingertips. Broad shoulders tightening beneath the crisp white cotton of his custom-made shirt, he withdrew the photographs.
His father. On a terrace surrounding an immense outdoor swimming pool. Wearing his trademark cream linen suit, shades and—incongruously—a battered straw hat. The telephoto lens made him look strangely diminished. Not so the female he was touching.
He was touching the naked shoulder of arguably the most luscious blonde bimbo ever to wear a bikini. Caught in the act of turning to smile at the older man, her long silvery hair falling back from her gorgeous face, her voluptuous breasts seeming about to burst from the confines of the two scraps of dark blue fabric, she was sexual enticement on legs.
And what legs! Long, beautifully proportioned, smooth, tanned.
Abruptly he pushed the photographic images back in the envelope. He didn’t need to see the others. He’d already seen enough to knowthat the old lionwas on the hunt for a new wife to stir his ageing libido.
His father favoured blondes.
His mouth tightened to a hard, straight line as his mind swirled with the memory of that other time, that other blonde. His father’s second wife. With diamonds glittering at her ears, and her floaty designer dress a whole universe away from the cheap, second-hand stuff his mother had had to wear. And his father throwing him off his property, refusing to help, refusing the modest sum that would have assuredly gone a long way to making the life of the mother of his bastard son so much easier, in all probability extending it by several precious years.
So, no, while such coldly bitter memories still existed, it wasn’t over.
Andreas Papadiamantis was still unforgiven.
‘A girl could get used to this, sis!’
Bonnie Wade smiled warily at her sister. Lisa was sprawled out on a lounger, her honed, bikiniclad body still glistening from the pool, her cropped strawberry blonde hair slicked to her head.
‘My two blonde babies,’ her dad called them. ‘One strawberry, one champagne!’
‘Here—’Bonnie reached for the tube of sunblock from the marble-topped table at the side of the lounger and tossed it over. ‘You don’t want a dose of sunburn.’
At twenty-seven, two years Bonnie’s senior, Lisa had always been her best friend. Physically and temperamentally, they couldn’t be more different. Lisa was tough as old boot leather, and slim to the point of thinness, whereas Bonnie was soft as marshmallow and—to her private dismay—billowy. But they complemented each other, understood each other.
Their mum, the harrassed wife of a busy GP, had been heard to confide in her closest friend, the mother of three boisterous boys who seemed perpetually to be intent on causing grievous bodily harm to each other. ‘I don’t have that problem, thank heavens! Ever since little Bonnie learned to walk my two have been joined at the hip. Never a cross word!’
So, delighted as she had been to receive the seven a.m. call from the airport this morning, she still didn’t understand why Lisa was here.
‘I’ll talk to you about it later,’ the older girl had stated on the drive back to the villa. ‘And before you get your knickers in a twist, the Olds are fine. It’s nothing to worry about.’
Now, three hours later, she was none the wiser. As a fitness instructor to the rich and famous, Lisa usually took time off over the Christmas season, taking a three-week break and flying to where was hottest. But it seemed this year she had decided to take a week off during the summer, with a lastminute diversion to drop in on her sister on her way to Crete.
‘You’re sure the old guy doesn’t mind me being here?’ Lisa finished slapping sunblock on her legs.
‘Quite sure,’ Bonnie confirmed. ‘When I told him I needed time off to collect you at the airport he insisted Nico drive me, and wouldn’t hear of you finding a hotel.’ She tweaked the starched skirts of her white uniform dress. ‘So—give. Why the unexpected visit? What is there to talk about?’
Lisa hoisted herself up on one elbow. ‘OK. Look, why don’t you sit down—relax? I think I know how you’re going to take this, but I’m not sure, so, I thought I’d stop in as I was passing and talk to you face to face.’
Bonnie shifted on the flat soles of her white canvas shoes, as near to feeling exasperation with her sister as she’d ever been. ‘I’m on duty,’ she pointed out. A glance at her watch confirmed it. ‘Andreas is due for his exercise session in ten minutes.’
‘Fair enough. Here goes…But first, how much longer are you in this job?’
‘I’m supposed to sign off at the end of the week. Why?’
As a nurse, working through a highly respected agency, she specialised in remedial care. Sometimes, as now, she worked abroad, but mostly in the UK. She might be staying on longer to help this patient. Andreas Papadiamantis was a troubled man, and she’d promised to help him. But there was no time to go into that now—although the unexpected opportunity to confide in her sister later, during her off-duty hour after lunch, would be more than welcome.
‘Why?’ Lisa gave a wry, tight-lipped smile. ‘Because Troy went to see the Olds, that’s why. He says he wants you back.’
Bonnie felt her face crawl with colour. Anger, disbelief—she didn’t know which. Abruptly she sat on a vacant lounger. On the eve of their wedding he’d sent his best man to tell her that he couldn’t go through with it. Sorry. Would she arrange for the return of the wedding gifts? And she could keep the engagement ring.
She’d felt sorry for Brett, the bearer of the news. He’d been painfully embarrassed. Only with hindsight had she realised that she should have been feeling sorry for herself, broken-hearted. But she hadn’t been broken-hearted, and Troy’s supposedly magnanimous message that she could keep his ring was an insult she was still smarting over six months later.
The next morning, on what should have been her wedding day, she’d taken the ring and the unworn bridal gown to the nearest charity shop. Her parents, bless them, though alternately fussing over her and ranting at Troy’s perfidy, had made all the necessary cancellations and returned the gifts, and she had just gone ahead and got on with her life as if nothing had happened.
Which, also with the clarity of hindsight, she recognised meant that Troy had done her a favour. She couldn’t have been in love with him at all. He’d hurt her pride, her sense of self-worth, but, being of a cheerful, optimistic disposition she’d soon got over that.
‘Apparently,’ Lisa was saying, ‘he gave them a real sob story. He didn’t know what came over him. Burn-out, he guessed. He’d been working so hard. He’d never forgive himself for hurting you so badly, for messing up his own life, come to that. He loves you more than he thought possible, and just wants the chance to put things right. But he didn’t know where you were working, how to contact you—blah-blah-blah. And you know Mum. A soppy romantic if there ever was one. She went and got all dewy-eyed and sentimental and told him where you were, working with a cancer patient. And—this is more than a guess—I know he’ll be turning up any time now. As soon as he can fix time off from that supposedly mega-impressive job of his in the City. I wanted to warn you. I don’t think you’re the type to go all gooey when a guy gets down on his knees and begs forgiveness with crocodile tears in his eyes, but some women just might—’
‘Not this one!’ Bonnie got to her feet, a smile twitching at the corners of her expressive mouth. The nerve of the man! Though if Lisawas right, and Troy Frobisher didwant them to get back together, and she had been head over heels in love with him, then she might be deluded enough to believe whatever he said and spend the rest of her life regretting her gullibility.
She turned to her sister. ‘Thanks for the warning. We’ll talk more later—after lunch. Don’t worry, I won’t be taken in by him—or any man, come to that. And I’ve got something to tell you that’ll knock spots off the prospect of any sick-making visit from an exfiancé!’
Andreas Papadiamantis could be a charming companion when he wanted to be, and if ensuring that his surprise house-guest felt welcome and relaxed while she enjoyed the lavish hospitality of his home was his objective then he’d succeeded magnificently.
Over lunch at the polished stone-topped table in a cool, airy dining room, his gaunt, still-handsome features softened as he glanced between the sisters, smoothly switching subjects.
‘Touching on your amusing description of your need for strictness with your clients, I must tell you that my nurse—your sister—is also a formidable woman,’ he told Lisa. ‘When I was first diagnosed and taken in for treatment I insisted on a total news blackout. I am not the powerful business force I once was, but I still have assets—the remainder of a once dominant chain of luxury hotels. If the shareholders got wind of my possible demise the value could drop like a stone.
‘Bonnie was apprised of the situation when she took over my remedial care, and I tell you, although I employ a security staff, she made them look like amateurs! She was like a lioness defending her cub.’ He lifted his bony shoulders in a dismissive shrug. ‘I have lived with press interest for most of my life, but it has increased to intolerable proportions since my son set out to ruin me. She sent them flying—literally!’ He chuckled, his black eyes dancing. ‘She found one clinging to a tree that overhangs the perimeter wall on the far side of the estate. She knocked him off his perch with a handy stout stick!’
Bonnie blushed at the reminder. She’d felt dreadful afterwards, and had sent Spiro, one of the security men, out to discover if the snooper had been hurt. Thankfully there’d been no sign of the man or his camera.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ she told the grinning Lisa, and laid down her fork, her healthy appetite dwindling.
It disappeared altogether when her patient said, ‘Bonnie saved my life. I truly believe that. Oh, the doctors did their part, I don’t deny that, but mentally I had given up. Until Bonnie arrived and chivvied me out of it—taught me how to laugh, really laugh, for perhaps the first time in my life, to take things less seriously.’ His eyes clouded. ‘To take a long hard look at my life, recognise my mistakes and vow to do better. I know her agency will move her on to look after some other ailing creature when I get the final all-clear—’
‘Which you have,’ Bonnie put in, wanting to stop all this embarrassing stuff.
Andreas ignored her, explaining to Lisa, ‘I don’t want to lose her. Selfish I may be, but she has been so good for me.’ His quirky grin was self-mocking. ‘I even went so far as to ask her to marry me, but showing great wisdom she declined—much to an old man’s disappointment!’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘Now I must leave you both for my afternoon rest—as my good nurse insists.’
There was a heavy silence until the door closed behind Andreas, and then Lisa exploded, ‘What was all that about?’ She raised one arched brow. ‘Did he really pop the question?’
‘Come on.’ Bonnie rose from the table and brushed a stray crumb from the front of the white lawn sleeveless blouse she’d teamed with an apricotcoloured cotton skirt. ‘We’ll find somewhere to talk.’
It was the hottest part of the day, and usually she spent her off-duty hour in the pool, but today that pleasure would have to be deferred. She was intent on unburdening herself.
For the past week she’d been itching to do just that, but there’d been no one to confide in. Now, like a gift from above, Lisa had arrived. She couldn’t choose a better confidante than her sister—her best friend.
She led the way to one of the immense salons, elaborately furnished in the high baroque style. She privately thought it was more like a self-conscious museum than a comfy home. But at least the air-conditioning kept the interior of the villa pleasantly cool.
‘Grief!’ Lisa’s eyebrows arched up to her hairline. ‘Who did the Disney decor?’
‘The Sugar Plum Fairy?’ Bonnie grinned, plonking down on a stiffly upholstered two-seater settee and patting the space beside her.
A week ago, during her early-evening perambulation of the extensive grounds with her patient, Andreas had suggested they sit awhile in one of the strategically placed vine-covered arbours.
Concerned that the old man who had made such excellent progress was feeling unwell, she had been knocked speechless when he’d come out with, ‘Will you be my wife, Bonnie? I do not ask this lightly. You have brought optimism back into my life, given me hope where before there was only bleak emptiness. When I was at my weakest you gave me strength. I find I don’t want to be without your life-enhancing company, your warmth and strength. I have been lonely for too long.’
Bonnie had gulped. The pleading darkness of the old man’s eyes had made her feel terrible. She knew that patients often got—well, crushes, for want of a better word, on their nurses, and they just as soon got over them. But Andreas was, as he’d said, so lonely. He had no friends as far as she could tell, and no family. No one to visit with bunches of grapes, no one to phone for progress reports or even send get well cards. No one. Nothing.
Too flummoxed to think of anything sensible to say, Bonnie had felt her insides shrinking until her stomach felt like a particularly tough walnut.
‘It would be a marriage in name only,’ Andreas assured her. ‘I would make no sexual demands upon you. You would have the protection of my name—and my name still means something, even though my second son is crushing my various businesses into the ground. I have a personal fortune in a Swiss bank account—entirely separate from my business affairs. Upon our marriage it will be yours, to give you security for life. In return all I would ask of you would be your constant company and your promise to intercede with my son on my behalf.’
‘I didn’t know you had any sons!’ Bonnie blurted, seizing on the outrage she felt on his behalf at his offspring’s obvious uncaring neglect, in order to put off the moment when she would have to turn his marriage proposal down flat. And hadn’t he said something about this second son running his business into the ground? Coming from a close-knit, loving family herself, she couldn’t think of anything more chillingly vile!
‘I need to be frank with you.’ He took her hands. Her first instinct was to withdraw them, but the beginnings of pity took over as he confessed, ‘My near brush with death has made me take stock of my life. I have too many regrets. My first marriage was arranged. We didn’t love each other. At the time love wasn’t important, or so I thought. There was no room in my busy life for pointless emotion. I saw emotion as a weakness. Building up my business empire was all that mattered. She—Alexandrina—died shortly after giving birth to my firstborn son, Theo.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘I honestly think she died to get away from me—and that’s a heavy weight on my conscience.’
He paused, as if remembering something dark that had been buried for too long and then, his voice strengthening, continued, ‘I remarried within a year. A man in his prime has certain needs, and taking a mistress entails a certain expenditure of time and effort—time that could be more profitably spent on business concerns.’
‘And taking a wife doesn’t mean spending time and effort?’ asked Bonnie, appalled.
Andreas sighed deeply. ‘I am telling you this to showyou the man Iwas then. The type of man whose first unloved and unconsidered wife died to escape him, and whose second wife eventually ran off with another man. Whose firstborn son left home as soon as he hit eighteen because—as he said—I drove him too hard, expected too much, used criticism as our only mode of conversation. I never saw him again. He left my home, refused to join the business as I had planned since his birth, so I washed my hands of him. He died of a heroin overdose in Paris five years later.’
His hands tightened on hers. ‘I am not proud of what I was. I have been a failure as a husband, as a father. As a human being. I see all this now, and I cannot tell you how deeply I regret it all. Regret all that I was, all that I was not. But most of all I regret that I have not seen my second son since he was fourteen years old—and that he has made himselfmy enemy.’
He took a deep breath. Warm darkness was closing in, the great scarlet ball of the sun sinking low on the horizon. ‘That is why I would ask you, were you to agree to be my wife, to stand by my side and give me courage, to intercede with my remaining son on my behalf. I want to get to know him, make amends if I can. I dream of turning his enmity into friendship—or, if that cannot be managed, a sense of kinship. I don’t want to leave this life having no one of my blood to mourn my passing.’
Bonnie felt her throat tighten, felt moisture gather in her eyes. She was so sorry for him. Poor old guy! On the face of it, he’d deserved all he got. But hewas obviously truly repentant over his past deeply dreadful shortcomings. His recent near death experience had opened his eyes to his failures with shocking clarity.
Surely he deserved a second chance?
But she had to make one thing clear. Gently, she withdrew her hands from his. ‘Andreas,’ she began firmly, ‘I’m fond of you.’
And she was. They’d hit it off from the start. She always gave her patients the best care she could, even if they were real miseries! But Andreas had been different—responding positively to all her medical demands, never once complaining. She tried her best to like all her charges, even if they were impossible, but with this old guy she hadn’t had to try.
‘But I can’t marry you,’ she said softly. ‘It’s immensely flattering, but in my book marriage should be more than a contract, with money changing hands. Companionship comes into it, of course, but there has to be so much more. I will promise one thing. I’ll do my utmost to try and put things right between you and your son, but you must tell me how to go about it.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ Lisa had listened in total silence as Bonnie had recounted that conversation verbatim. ‘What are you going to say to this estranged son of his? It won’t be easy—but I guess you know that.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ Bonnie replied, with a confidence she was far from feeling.
Deep down she felt thiswas a no-win situation. On the one hand, the firstborn son’s reaction to his father’s harsh idea of parenting made it no surprise that the second-born should have followed suit. But surely that didn’t excuse his apparently ruthless drive to ruin his father?Aguy had to be really mean-minded to start out on that track, and by all accounts never give up.
Quite how she’d get through to him she had no idea. But she’d promised to do what she could, and she never went back on a promise.
CHAPTER TWO
‘STAVROS!’
The sharp call cut through the searing afternoon heat, a hollow boom as the sea surged against the base of the cliffs. Suddenly feeling insecure in her resting place, a handy shady niche among the high rocks, Bonnie listened to the following spate of Greek and understood not a word, only the tone. Whoever was issuing what she suspected were orders was a guy who expected to be obeyed smartish, no questions asked. Her mouth quirked wryly. She pitied this Stavros if he was neglecting some duty or other.
Holding on to the wall of the blisteringly hot rock face, Bonnie got gingerly to her feet, stowed herwater bottle, and hitched the leather strap of her canvas bag over her head and shoulder. At least there was someone around who could point her in the right direction.
Two days ago a workhorse of a ferry had deposited her and a load of what had looked like second-hand agricultural machinery on the quayside of this tiny harbour town, its pastel-coloured squat houses clustering around the deep water inlet, backed by hills thick with gnarled and ancient olive trees.
‘It is not a tourist destination. Only the occasional backpacker visits,’ Andreas had told her. ‘From what I gather it boasts only one road, a handful of basic shops and tavernas. The lifestyle is low-key and traditional, which is why the seriously wealthy build holiday homes there, attracted by the peace and quiet. My son is one of that select number. He is there now, and my feeling is that you may find him more approachable while he is in a relaxed mood.’
If she could find him!
The mention of Dimitri Kyriakis had been rewarded with blank stares from the locals, and the widow Athena Stephanides, with whom she was lodging, courtesy of Andreas’s deep purse, had merely shrugged. ‘Sorry. I know of no one with that name.’
The only option she had was to head south, to the area where the super-rich built their luxurious hideaways. Complete, so Athena had divulged with much raising of eyebrows, with helipads and swimming pools of Olympian proportions. Then she’d clammed up, as if regretting that she’d said that much.
It would appear that the locals guarded the privacy of their wealthy incomers. And in all fairness Bonnie couldn’t really blame them, because they obviously boosted the island economy, recruiting permanent and temporary staff from amongst the close-knit island families.
So she had no choice but to head down there and knock on doors—provided she could get past security fences and prowling guard dogs! She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she had promised Andreas. Besides, she wanted to help the poor old guy, because the mistakes he’d made in the past were now deeply regretted, were troubling him, and if she could help him put them right then she was up for it.
Her idea of following the coastline and then striking inland to the southern tip of the island where the secluded villas of the mega-wealthy were located didn’t seem as brilliant now as it had when she’d pored over a rudimentary map of the island after breakfast.
She might have made better progress if she had followed the long, dusty road that led over the high spine of the island. It might have been tedious in the extreme, but it wouldn’t have been as hairy as this coastal shortcut was proving to be.
Far too many feet below her, deep green translucent water swelled and subsided. It made her feel giddy. Telling herself she wouldn’t fall into the ocean, she wasn’t that stupid, she gritted her teeth and edged forward around the outcrop, heading for what her map had told her was a small horseshoeshaped bay. From there, as far as she could make out, an unmade track led further south, skirting the central rocky spine of the island.
Successfully negotiating the obstacle, she paused, expelled the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, then sucked in another, deeper gulp of air. The cove below her was idyllic, but even more spectacular was the man walking along the waterline carrying driftwood.
Tall, tanned, magnificently built, his sleek musculature of wide shoulders and deep chest narrowed down to lean hips clad in shabby, ragged-hemmed denim cut-offs.
Stavros?
His long, relaxed stride halted as he turned and stared out to sea. He hadn’t seen her, clinging to the rocks high above. Suddenly it seemed imperative that she get down to him. Only to ask him to point her in the right direction for the track that would take her to her objective, of course. Conversing, if only briefly, with such a gorgeous hunk would be a bonus!
Grinning at her very natural female folly, she began to scramble on, and caught her foot in a fissure. She let out a yelp of pain, and cursed herself roundly for not looking where she was going.
Clinging awkwardly to the rock, she bent to rub the offending ankle, a slippery hank of long silvery blonde hair falling over her face as it escaped the pins that had secured it in a knot on top of her head. A sob of frustration blocked her throat as she discovered that she couldn’t put her weight on the foot.
Now how was she going to get back? Get anywhere? There was no public transport on the tiny island, and even if she could hobble—or crawl!—to the only proper road some way inland she might have to wait hours before she could thumb a lift in some passing truck back to the small fishing port where she was based.
‘Stay where you are.’
Annoyance with herself, and frustration over her self-inflicted plight, had driven the stranger on the shore below right out of her mind. But now—well, he had abandoned the driftwood and was climbing up towards her, with a lithe efficiency that widened her smoky grey eyes with admiration and made her heart pump a little faster.
Close to, he was even more knee-tremblingly sensational than her first assessment had led her to believe. And as that first assessment had given him top marks plus in the eye candy category, all Bonnie could do was stare while her entire body went into melting jelly mode.
His face was as stunning as the rest of him. No pretty-boy good-looks these. Hard lines and an angular bone structure carried the stamp of the alpha adult male. Tough, darkly shadowed jawline, and silky black hair, eyes as dark as jet.
Her own eyes fell in a trembling heartbeat to a wide mouth that was a shattering mixture of the sensual and the ruthless.
Wordlessly, he was returning the shockingly intimate intentness of her visual assessment and Bonnie dropped her eyes, her face flaming as something like an electric charge skittered through her.
His bare feet were planted firmly apart on the rock as he finally spoke, his deep, only faintly accented voice sending ripples down her spine. ‘You are hurt. Will you trust me to get you down from this place?’
Pulling herself together, Bonnie found her voice. ‘Of course. Thank you. I’d be grateful.’ She attempted a smile. It wobbled. What was wrong with her? She had both her feet firmly on the ground—metaphorically, if not physically at this precise moment—and she wasn’t the air-headed type to go to pieces just because she’d happened across the most lip-smackingly gorgeous man to inhabit the planet.
She was a practical, down-to-earth qualified remedial nurse and—
Every last sensible thought was swept out of her head as the gorgeous stranger hoisted her, without apparent effort, into a fireman’s lift and carried her down the steep rocks with the surefootedness of a mountain goat.
Carefully depositing her on the soft white sand, he hunkered down in front of her, long, deft fingers gently exploring her injured foot.
His touch was magic. A lock of soft black hair fell forwards over his tanned forehead. She wanted to run her fingers through it.
Stupid woman!
She was shivering all over.
Merely the entirely natural after-effects of her hairy passage down from the cliffs!
Only she hadn’t felt scared. She’d felt safe—gloriously safe.
‘Just a slight sprain and a tiny cut,’ he pronounced, a smile playing at the corners of that devastating mouth. ‘I’ll take you to the house and clean the cut.’
Forcing herself out of the entirely unwelcome ditzy-schoolgirl-meets-pop-star mode, Bonnie located her best no-nonsense voice and used it. ‘You’ve been very kind already, but—Stavros, is it?—I don’t want to put you to any more trouble on my account. I’m sure that if I just rest a while I’ll be fine to go on.’
Dimitri Kyriakis didn’t correct her.
She must have heard him calling to his manservant/minder, to remind him to drive down to the port to collect the incoming mail that had been waiting for two days since the weekly ferry had docked.
The longer his father’s blonde, gold-digging bimbo remained in ignorance of his true identity the better.
His father had taste, though, he conceded grimly. The bimbo was even more enticingly sexy in the flesh than she’d appeared in the photograph. All that long, silky pale blonde hair, falling in a tousled touchable mass to well below her shoulders.
Pretty shoulders, sleek of skin, warm with tan, partially concealed by the turquoise-blue halter top that lovingly cradled truly superb full and shapely breasts. Her cropped top left her tanned midriff naked and tempting above a pair of skimpy shorts. And those legs—
‘It will be no trouble,’ Dimitri contradicted her truthfully. ‘It would be my pleasure to help you.’
Help you to unburden yourself, to tell me exactly what a woman with her eyes on the opportunity to marry an old man for his money is doing scrambling around on an island hardly anyone has heard about, out of her preferred milieu of fancy restaurants, swish hotels and designer boutiques.
Unless, of course, the old man was with her. It seemed unlikely. And did she know that Andreas Papadiamantis was facing a vastly reduced financial status? He guessed not.
She would run like a rabbit if he told her. There was only one reason a beautiful young woman would shack up with an old man, he decided, with the cynicism born of long experience of the female sex. Inform her of the non-existence of the bottomless pit of money and she’d take to her toes.
Yet there was a more entertaining way of depriving his enemy of his bed companion, he thought, staring into a pair of beguiling smoke-grey eyes.
He had never had any trouble in attracting the female sex. Quite the opposite. But he never knew whether his personality was the attraction or his massive wealth.
The latter, he suspected.
It cut both ways. On the few occasions when he’d taken a mistress, he had made it plain that he didn’t do long-term.
So what was new? Earlier he’d played with the idea of settling down, creating a family. Seeing the photograph of this blonde had had the idea taking a nosedive. Meeting the blonde in the flesh had killed it stone-dead. For a while. The fates had delivered another chance to take his revenge for what his father had done all those long years ago right into his lap.
Never one to lose an opportunity, Dimitri swept the delectable gift from the fates up into his arms. His smile as she wound her arms around his neck with a gaspy little sigh was grim. And satisfied.
He had her!
CHAPTER THREE
DIMITRI deposited her on a padded cane chair in the shadiest part of the vine-covered, granite-paved terrace. His heavy-lidded, lash-veiled eyes moved with lazy assessment over her body, taking in the tempting swell of her full breasts, tiny waist and voluptuous hips, resting finally on her wide, generous mouth.
Mistress material.
Quite definitely.
Yet as far as he knew—and he had tracked his enemy through the years with the dedication of a jungle cat stalking its prey—his father didn’t take high-maintenance mistresses. He’d come to know how the older man’s mind worked.
Too great an expenditure of time, effort and money was involved in establishing a mistress.
He would regard it as an unnecessary indulgence.
A wife was different. A wife could be safely ignored, treated as part of the furniture until he had need of her. His extra-marital adventures were furtive backstairs episodes, if his poor mother’s sorry experience was anything to go by.
This bimbo would be angling for a wedding ring. She was no wide-eyed innocent to be dazzled simply by the attentions of her lord and master—not the way she looked, she wasn’t!
Aware that he could be in danger of making assumptions, he mentally ran over the known facts. His father had been off the radar for several months, holed up in his luxurious villa. With this blonde?
Judging by that photograph, she had already got herself firmly embedded in his father’s villa, up close and personal, and an announcement in the press that Andreas Papadiamantis was to take wife number three would appear in the very near future. It was practically a certainty.
How his enemy would be congratulating himself that he had got such a luscious creature to warm his old bones and his bed, whenever he chose to avail himself of such comforts.
Unless he, Dimitri Kyriakis, stopped it.
And that could be fun, as well as turning the screw a little tighter.
Bonnie squirmed against the cushions. She could feel a blush spreading all over her. The way this Stavros guy was looking at her was seriously unsettling.
Everywhere his hot gaze wandered it felt as if he was actually touching her. Her heartbeat quickened and fire licked her skin, a languorous warmth spreading through her, hot and heady, making her breasts feel swollen and heavy, their tips standing to attention within the confines of her halter top. This rivetingly sexy guy could so easily make her forget she was a sensible adult woman, with her head firmly screwed on.
Once bitten twice shy, she reminded herself staunchly.
Though being nibbled by those strong white teeth would be no hardship at all!
Struggling to find something mundane to say, to break the spiralling sexual tension, Bonnie expelled a gusty sigh of relief when he came to her aid.
‘I’ll make that ankle more comfortable. Wait here.’ He disappeared through open, immense sliding glass doors into what she guessed to be his boss’s luxury home.
Stavros’s temporary absence gave Bonnie a much needed breathing space, and the opportunity to don her sensible hat again. So, OK, he was the most charismatic, sexy guy she’d ever come across. But better than that he was probably local, working for one of the island’s wealthy incomers. The chances were he would be able to tell her where to find the elusive Dimitri Kyriakis.
True, according to Andreas, his estranged son only used his island villa occasionally. But on the upside, in a small place like this everyone knew everyone else. It was a close-knit community, with the locals making a living as best they could from the sea and the land. The local grapevine would be buzzing with the doings, the to-ing and fro-ings, of the wealthy other half.
So her smile was radiantly expectant when he reappeared, carrying what appeared to be enough medical supplies to stock a medium-sized pharmacy.
‘I think you could help me,’ she opened, as he knelt in front of her and began to clean the cut on her ankle with cotton wool soaked in something really soothing.
Dimitri frowned. That smile of hers would light up a room. But what gave him pause was the complete lack of artifice. In his experience gold-diggers—and that included beautiful young women who would marry an old man for his money—had artifice oozing from every pore. ‘That is what I’m doing,’ he stated, dabbing the cut dry and applying a plaster.
‘No—I mean—yes. What I mean is—’ Bonnie tried quite desperately to ignore the fluttery feeling that had taken over her insides as soon as those long, cool fingers of his had touched her skin. Tried to stop wanting to run her fingers through the thick, silky black hair that fell in such intriguing disarray over his downbent head. She wanted to touch it so much it was almost a physical pain. ‘I mean—well, I’m trying to locate someone.’
‘Yes?’ Dimitri bound her ankle tightly, and deftly secured the bandage with a tiny pin. It seemed as if he was about to discover what his father’s woman was doing on the island. ‘That should support it adequately, though you’ll have to rest it for a couple of days. You were saying?’ he prompted coolly.
Bonnie blinked. Having this hunk kneeling at her feet took her breath away. No man, not even Troy—and she’d been on the brink of marrying him, for goodness’ sake!—had ever had this effect on her.
Wondering where her sensible hat had got to, she pushed on. ‘He’s got a villa somewhere around here. He doesn’t come often, but he’s here now. And, oh—how silly!—you don’t know who I’m talking about! His name’s Dimitri Kyriakis—have you heard of him? Do you know where his place is?’
Dimitri got to his feet, straightening his lean, powerful figure to its full six feet three inches. His narrowed eyes were darkly probing, and the shock of hearing his name on his father’s bimbo’s lips hardened his voice. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Very few people knew of his bolthole. No more than three. All of them were completely trusted, loyal employees who would die rather than disobey his orders. One of them being his manservant Stavros.
So it had to be down to his enemy. Andreas must have had his spies out, tracking him minutely even as he had tracked the older man through the years. It made sense. Dimitri’s brain clicked into overdrive. He didn’t like mysteries, and this one was solved in ten seconds flat.
He could think of at least two reasons why the old man had sent this woman to find him.
To push him over a cliff to get rid of him.
Or, and far more likely, to use every feminine wile and trick in the book to get close to him and learn of his future intentions via pillow talk.
Did the old man think he would be that indiscreet? That much of a sucker?
But it would be interesting to find out how far she was prepared to go…
Bonnie’s heart was busily sinking. For a moment there Stavros had looked really intimidating. And now draining disappointment had taken her over. Was he going to be the same as the other islanders? Button-lipped when it came to giving information about the revered wealthy part-time residents on whom a large part of the island economy depended? It certainly looked like it.
And there was no way she could answer his question. The reason Andreas wanted her to contact Dimitri Kyriakis was between him and his son—private, and not to be given out to the first stranger who asked. She felt utterly hopeless, and, as that was an emotion she had never encountered before, faintly queasy.
Then everything changed.
‘I will make enquiries for you.’
In receipt of the shatteringly charismatic smile that came her way, accompanied by that welcome and unexpected offer of help, Bonnie breathed, ‘Thank you! I’d be so grateful!’ and wondered why she sounded like a giddy schoolgirl instead of the sensible woman she knew herself to be.
Just how grateful? Dimitri wondered, marvelling at the tightening of his groin at the prospect of finding out—an instant physical reaction he hadn’t experienced since he was a teenager.
He leaned forward and took her hands. And as his fingers tightened around hers and he met her huge smoky eyes he knew that finding out would be no problem for either of them.
She oozed warm, womanly willingness from the hazy eyes, the parted pink lips and the hardening swell of her bounteous breasts, confined by the thin top she was wearing. She was hot for him. He would swear to it.
He discreetly screened his dark eyes beneath thickly fringing black lashes. Play it cool—see how far she would go. If she’d taken her orders from his father to seduce him into revealing his future plans, then she would have to work for the privilege of sharing his bed. Providing he could keep his amazingly rampant libido in check, it would amuse him to watch her at work.
And when he submitted, as he knew he eventually would—because why would he deny himself the undoubted pleasure?—she would learn nothing from him, have only failure to report.
He knew himself to be a past master at getting what he wanted with the least effort to himself. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.
He was still holding her hands. It felt more than good. He was a total stranger, and she knew nothing about him. But he made her feel safe. Because he’d come to her rescue when she’d been floundering around on those rocks? Had promised to help her locate the whereabouts of Andreas’s son? Or was there more to it than that?
‘By the harbour, with Athena—the widow Stephanides,’ she answered, her voice strangely thick, her mouth trembling just a little as he slid his hands until they rested beneath her elbows.
‘I know her.’ He helped her to stand on her uninjured foot, a supportive arm sliding around her small waist. ‘It is well known that she caters for the occasional backpacker who turns up on the island. But you are no backpacker.’
A thread of humour laced his voice as the pressure of his arm brought her lush body into closer contact with his. With his free hand he brushed the silvery fall of her hair away from her face with gentle fingers. ‘You are on a man-hunt, ne?’
Wild colour flooded Bonnie’s cheeks. Her lips parted but no sound emerged. Put like that, it sounded awful—full of wicked sexual connotations. And she felt wicked, she thought chaotically. Her body was straining against this half-naked man, his bare torso hot and hard against her tingling breasts, his naked thighs tangling with hers.
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Diana Hamilton
He was everything a woman dreamed of. Male perfection. Tall, dark and handsome—and yet so much more. Toe-curlingly sexy. Formidable.
If he wanted to flirt with her—or more—then what was wrong with that? She could recall the way some of her colleagues boasted about holiday romances. Apparently it happened all the time.
Fun. Fun was all it was. And what was the harm in a few kisses? She craved his kisses.
Dimitri lowered the thick fringes of his sable lashes over the silver glint in his dark eyes.
His enemy had chosen his messenger well. A man less single-minded would have been putty in her hands, would have done anything—given up the secrets of his very soul—to possess such a woman.
He wasn’t immune—far from it. But putty in a woman’s hand—in anyone’s hand—he wasn’t. If she was offering, he wouldn’t be resisting.
How could he?
Diana Hamilton is a true romantic, and fell in love with her husband at first sight. They still live in the fairytale Tudor house where they raised their three children. Now the idyll is shared with eight rescued cats and a puppy. But, despite an often chaotic lifestyle, ever since she learned to read and write Diana has had her nose in a book—either reading or writing one—and plans to go on doing just that for a very long time to come.
Recent titles by the same author:
VIRGIN: BEDDED AT THE ITALIAN’S COMMAND
THE MEDITERRANEAN BILLIONAIRE’S SECRET BABY
THE KOUVARIS BRIDE
THE ITALIAN’S PRICE
KYRIAKIS’S INNOCENT MISTRESS
BY
DIANA HAMILTON
MILLS & BOON
Pure reading pleasure™
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
PROLOGUE
DIMITRI KYRIAKIS stared fixedly at his father’s home and told himself he wasn’t overawed. No way. The villa—what he could see of it at the end of the straight tree-bordered drive—was immense: a gleaming white monument to wealth and power. No way could he walk up that driveway without knowledge of the correct sequence of numbers needed to activate the high-tech mechanism that would open the massive wrought-iron gates. And to attempt to climb them would without doubt bring security guards running.
But he’d find a way. He had to. For his mother’s sake, he had to.
She was owed.
He was fourteen years old. A man. Or almost. And he’d come to collect. No power on earth could keep him from what he had to do.
Straightening his bony shoulders, he set off, scouting the high perimeter wall of the estate, the hot Greek sun burning through the cheap white fabric of his best shirt. If his mother knew what he was doing she’d throw a fit. Or several.
He tried to smile at the mental image of the gentle, frail Eleni Kyriakis losing it, but the lump in his throat rose like a spike of hot lava and pushed any attempt out of existence.
Late last night she’d told him. Returning from his after-school stint dogsbodying in the sweltering kitchens of one of Athens’ most prestigious hotels—owned as he now knew by his father—to the mean, claustrophobic rooms they rented in a narrow back street, he’d found his mother bent over a pile of ironing. It was part of the one-woman laundry service she’d instigated several years before, to augment the money she earned from her daily cleaning work.
She had pushed a strand of greying hair from her forehead, and her smile had been as gently welcoming as ever, giving no clue to what was to come.
‘Sit with me, my son. I have something to tell you.’ She sighed softly. ‘Many times you’ve asked who your father is, and many times I’ve answered that I’d tell you all about him when you were older, when maturity has brought the wisdom to see things clearly without the fog of childish emotions. But circumstances have changed.’
Her eyes had glittered with rare tears and he’d known then that something was wrong. Very wrong.
He could still feel echoes of the stomach-looping, throat-clogging sensation that had weakened his bones as she’d told him that she’d been undergoing tests. There was something wrong with her heart. It could fail her at any moment. She’d smiled then, bravely, and it was a smile he’d remember for the rest of his life.
She had taken his hands. ‘But what do they know? I’m tough. I’ll prove them wrong—you’ll see! But just in case they’re right I must tell you about your father. He was so handsome, so magnetic, and I loved him very much.’
It had been then, as she’d given him the identity of the man who had sired him, that he’d seen his beloved mother with fresh eyes. As he’d taken in the lines of exhaustion on her once beautiful face, her sunken cheeks and the tell-tale blue of her lips, he’d known exactly what he had to do.
With the determined tightening of his young jaw that was to become habitual, he began to climb the wall, muscles straining as he sought foot and handholds, his tension released as he swung over the top and dropped silently onto the long grass.
Beyond the belt of trees, the seeding grasses, he could see the sweep of an immaculately manicured and watered lawn—could smell, from somewhere, the evocative scent of summer-flowering jasmine, and could hear distant voices. A male, clipped and harsh, a petulant female whine.
Emerging into the full, relentless beat of the sun, Dimitri saw them. The man wearing a cream linen suit was his father. His photograph was splashed across the financial pages often enough to be instantly recognisable. The woman—young, supple—was dressed in something that floated around her body with every shift of the breeze, with every movement. She was carrying a parasol, her blonde head turned slightly away from his father. He could see the icy glint of diamonds hanging from her ears. The amount the gems must cost would have meant his mother wouldn’t have had to work herself half to death for at least a couple of years.
So this had to be the second wife his mother had spoken of.
Resolve spurred him towards them, his long, gangling legs automatically taking him out into the open, where he could be seen. This wretched man, already married for the first time, with a young son, had seduced a servant in his employ and instantly dismissed her when she’d told him she was pregnant.
With him!
For that he would be made to pay!
He’d been seen; his intrusion had registered. Every nerve in Dimitri’s skinny body stretched and his mouth went dry. But his chin came up as the man who was his father walked towards him, leaving the woman who was his wife standing.
‘Who are you and what do you want?’ The voice carried the harshness of the despot he was, secure in his kingdom, the wealthy owner of cruise liners and swanky hotels. One hand, Dimitri noted, went to an inner jacket pocket. Did he carry a gun? he conjectured wildly. Did he mean to shoot the shabby peasant and claim self-defence? Or was he about to use some device to summon his security officers, have him tossed back over the wall with as much ceremony as the disposal of a bundle of unspeakable rubbish?
Refusing to let his tautened nerves get the better of him, he spoke, deploring the wretched highpitched squeak his breaking voice sometimes embarrassed him with. ‘I’m DimitriKyriakis, son of Eleni. Your son.’
Silence, thickening in the heat of the sun. His father’s hand slid back to his side. Empty.
A broad, stocky figure, black-suited, approached along a path that snaked from the villa. The woman began to move towards them. His father motioned them both back with an impatient arm movement. ‘An easy claim to make! And even easier to dismiss. What do you want with me?’
The handsome features were marred by what was doubtless a perpetual sneer. Dimitri reddened. He took insults from no one, but he had no pride where his mother’s wellbeing was concerned. She had worked her guts out to provide for them both, gone without food sometimes so that her son shouldn’t go hungry. Never complained.
He squared his bony shoulders. He was almost as tall as the older man. He willed his voice to remain steady. ‘You are Andreas Papadiamantis. Everyone knows how rich and powerful you are—all those fancy hotels and cruise liners. You have everything; my mother has nothing. Fifteen years ago Eleni Kyriakis worked here for you, as a domestic servant. You told her your marriage was finished. You seduced her. She was beautiful then and she was in love with you.’ His heart leaped when he saw the unmistakable flicker of recognition in his father’s eyes. He remembered her—remembered what had happened! It made what he had to say, ask, so much easier. ‘But she became pregnant, and when she told you you dismissed her. I guess you broke her heart.’
She hadn’t said as much, but Dimitri had sensed deep sadness when she spoke of what had happened all those years ago.
He met his father’s narrowed, contemptuous eyes and stated vehemently, ‘She doesn’t know I’m here, speaking to you. She would never ask for anything for herself. Ever. But I will. She is ill. Her heart is exhausted. She needs rest, decent food. I do what I can. At weekends and after school I work in the kitchens at one of your hotels here in Athens. It is some help, but it’s not enough.’ He took a deep breath. ‘All I ask is that you make her a small monthly allowance. Just enough to mean she doesn’t have to work to pay the rent and buy food.And only until I am able to provide for her myself. She needs to rest, to live without anxiety,’ he stressed, his voice cracking.
Rumoured to be one of the wealthiest men in Greece, Andreas Papadiamantis wouldn’t miss the outlay of a modest monthly allowance. He would probably spend more on an evening dining out with his beautiful second wife.
Refusing to let himself squirm under the relentless stare of his father’s hard black eyes, Dimitri blurted, ‘I want nothing for myself, and I will never ask anything else of you but this. A small allowance would mean little to you, but it would make the difference between life and an early death for my mother. Consult with her doctors if you don’t believe me!’
The man who was his father smiled then. A humourless twisting of his hard, handsome mouth. And his voice was harsh. ‘I don’t give in to blackmail—as smarter people than you have learned to their cost. Breathe one word of this to anyone else and I will squash you and your mother as if you were beetles beneath my feet. Even if your story is true, Eleni Kyriakis knew what she was doing when she opened her legs for me. And learn this and learn it well: dog eats dog in this world, and the weak go to the wall.’
An abrupt arm movement had the security guard advancing. He had hands like hams, Dimitri noted with the small part of his mind that wasn’t seething with impotent rage.
‘Spiro, see this person off my property.’ Not even looking at him, Andreas Papadiamantis turned and strolled back to the waiting woman, and Dimitri found himself ignominiously frogmarched to the main gates and tossed out onto the white dust of the road.
Hearing the gates clang shut, Dimitri hoisted himself back to his feet, his jaw set.
His mother had been insulted. He had been insulted. He hated the man who was his father. He would have his revenge. He brushed himself down and, his dark head held high, began the long trudge back to the city.
He would make his father pay for his callous insults. He would find a way.
His vow was strengthened when he discovered that there was to be no more work for him in the kitchens of his father’s hotel. The loss of his meagre pay was a spiteful act on his father’s part.
And the vow was set in impermeable stone when ten months later his mother died of a heart attack.
CHAPTER ONE
DIMITRI KYRIAKIS placed the unmarked buffcoloured envelope squarely in front of him on the gleaming expanse of the otherwise empty desktop and tried not to show his distaste as he dismissed the private investigator.
With the tips of his long fingers resting on the surface of the envelope he stared out of the huge floor-to-ceiling plate glass window, seeing nothing.
He had lived for thirty-six years, a driven man, with the last twenty-two of those years spent coldly and clinically exacting vengeance on the man who was his father for the way he’d flung unforgivable insults and flatly refused to help his gentle, loving mother when she’d needed financial help as much as she’d needed oxygen and he, her son, fourteen years old, had been impotent to provide it.
Years spent working, learning, planning, taking at first tentative steps and then giant strides towards his objective: the downfall of the arrogantly powerful Andreas Papadiamantis.
Already the Kyriakis fleet of eye-wateringly luxurious cruise liners had relegated his father’s dwindling fleet to scratching for the cut-price, downmarket, kiss-me-quick tourist business, and it was rumoured to be going out of business altogether.
And now his money men were working on the takeover of the last two of his father’s hotels. One in Paris, the other in London. The rest had been overshadowed by the Kyriakis chain, driven out of the top end of the market and eventually sold off at a loss.
But things had changed. His father had disappeared off the radar six months ago—none of the usual mentions in the press, no sightings at his head office in Athens—and the thought of the old lion crawling into his den to lick his wounds had been oddly unsettling to Dimitri. He needed his enemy to be in the ring, fighting.
Four months into his father’s apparent disappearance, his frustration and curiosity at fever-pitch, he had had the fabulous, sprawling white villa he’d only visited that once in his life watched. He had needed a clue to what was going on. To him, the spying exercise had been utterly distasteful. Ruthless in pursuit of his objectives he might be, but he was always up-front, his intentions open for anyone to see. It was the way he operated.
His dark-as-jet eyes focused at last on the panoramic view from the window: the expanse of deep blue ocean framed in the foreground by tall pines, the glimpse of the soft white sand of a rocky bay. Relaxing. Hypnotic. Or it should be. Always had been. Until today.
He came to his island retreat on average twice a year, to unwind, empty his mind. Not a fax machine, a computer, a landline in sight. But now his mind was churning with totally uncharacteristic and unwelcome indecision.
Had he done enough? Was the vendetta played out? Was it time to forget his father, let the planned takeover go? Time to allow the man who’d sired him to avoid the final humiliation? Time for Dimitri to move on, to turn his life in an entirely different direction? To turn his back on sporadic, ultradiscreet affairs, to marry, produce sons and daughters of his own—laughing, golden-limbed small people to give a gentler purpose to his life.
The black bars of his brows drew together as he finally remembered what lay beneath his fingertips. Broad shoulders tightening beneath the crisp white cotton of his custom-made shirt, he withdrew the photographs.
His father. On a terrace surrounding an immense outdoor swimming pool. Wearing his trademark cream linen suit, shades and—incongruously—a battered straw hat. The telephoto lens made him look strangely diminished. Not so the female he was touching.
He was touching the naked shoulder of arguably the most luscious blonde bimbo ever to wear a bikini. Caught in the act of turning to smile at the older man, her long silvery hair falling back from her gorgeous face, her voluptuous breasts seeming about to burst from the confines of the two scraps of dark blue fabric, she was sexual enticement on legs.
And what legs! Long, beautifully proportioned, smooth, tanned.
Abruptly he pushed the photographic images back in the envelope. He didn’t need to see the others. He’d already seen enough to knowthat the old lionwas on the hunt for a new wife to stir his ageing libido.
His father favoured blondes.
His mouth tightened to a hard, straight line as his mind swirled with the memory of that other time, that other blonde. His father’s second wife. With diamonds glittering at her ears, and her floaty designer dress a whole universe away from the cheap, second-hand stuff his mother had had to wear. And his father throwing him off his property, refusing to help, refusing the modest sum that would have assuredly gone a long way to making the life of the mother of his bastard son so much easier, in all probability extending it by several precious years.
So, no, while such coldly bitter memories still existed, it wasn’t over.
Andreas Papadiamantis was still unforgiven.
‘A girl could get used to this, sis!’
Bonnie Wade smiled warily at her sister. Lisa was sprawled out on a lounger, her honed, bikiniclad body still glistening from the pool, her cropped strawberry blonde hair slicked to her head.
‘My two blonde babies,’ her dad called them. ‘One strawberry, one champagne!’
‘Here—’Bonnie reached for the tube of sunblock from the marble-topped table at the side of the lounger and tossed it over. ‘You don’t want a dose of sunburn.’
At twenty-seven, two years Bonnie’s senior, Lisa had always been her best friend. Physically and temperamentally, they couldn’t be more different. Lisa was tough as old boot leather, and slim to the point of thinness, whereas Bonnie was soft as marshmallow and—to her private dismay—billowy. But they complemented each other, understood each other.
Their mum, the harrassed wife of a busy GP, had been heard to confide in her closest friend, the mother of three boisterous boys who seemed perpetually to be intent on causing grievous bodily harm to each other. ‘I don’t have that problem, thank heavens! Ever since little Bonnie learned to walk my two have been joined at the hip. Never a cross word!’
So, delighted as she had been to receive the seven a.m. call from the airport this morning, she still didn’t understand why Lisa was here.
‘I’ll talk to you about it later,’ the older girl had stated on the drive back to the villa. ‘And before you get your knickers in a twist, the Olds are fine. It’s nothing to worry about.’
Now, three hours later, she was none the wiser. As a fitness instructor to the rich and famous, Lisa usually took time off over the Christmas season, taking a three-week break and flying to where was hottest. But it seemed this year she had decided to take a week off during the summer, with a lastminute diversion to drop in on her sister on her way to Crete.
‘You’re sure the old guy doesn’t mind me being here?’ Lisa finished slapping sunblock on her legs.
‘Quite sure,’ Bonnie confirmed. ‘When I told him I needed time off to collect you at the airport he insisted Nico drive me, and wouldn’t hear of you finding a hotel.’ She tweaked the starched skirts of her white uniform dress. ‘So—give. Why the unexpected visit? What is there to talk about?’
Lisa hoisted herself up on one elbow. ‘OK. Look, why don’t you sit down—relax? I think I know how you’re going to take this, but I’m not sure, so, I thought I’d stop in as I was passing and talk to you face to face.’
Bonnie shifted on the flat soles of her white canvas shoes, as near to feeling exasperation with her sister as she’d ever been. ‘I’m on duty,’ she pointed out. A glance at her watch confirmed it. ‘Andreas is due for his exercise session in ten minutes.’
‘Fair enough. Here goes…But first, how much longer are you in this job?’
‘I’m supposed to sign off at the end of the week. Why?’
As a nurse, working through a highly respected agency, she specialised in remedial care. Sometimes, as now, she worked abroad, but mostly in the UK. She might be staying on longer to help this patient. Andreas Papadiamantis was a troubled man, and she’d promised to help him. But there was no time to go into that now—although the unexpected opportunity to confide in her sister later, during her off-duty hour after lunch, would be more than welcome.
‘Why?’ Lisa gave a wry, tight-lipped smile. ‘Because Troy went to see the Olds, that’s why. He says he wants you back.’
Bonnie felt her face crawl with colour. Anger, disbelief—she didn’t know which. Abruptly she sat on a vacant lounger. On the eve of their wedding he’d sent his best man to tell her that he couldn’t go through with it. Sorry. Would she arrange for the return of the wedding gifts? And she could keep the engagement ring.
She’d felt sorry for Brett, the bearer of the news. He’d been painfully embarrassed. Only with hindsight had she realised that she should have been feeling sorry for herself, broken-hearted. But she hadn’t been broken-hearted, and Troy’s supposedly magnanimous message that she could keep his ring was an insult she was still smarting over six months later.
The next morning, on what should have been her wedding day, she’d taken the ring and the unworn bridal gown to the nearest charity shop. Her parents, bless them, though alternately fussing over her and ranting at Troy’s perfidy, had made all the necessary cancellations and returned the gifts, and she had just gone ahead and got on with her life as if nothing had happened.
Which, also with the clarity of hindsight, she recognised meant that Troy had done her a favour. She couldn’t have been in love with him at all. He’d hurt her pride, her sense of self-worth, but, being of a cheerful, optimistic disposition she’d soon got over that.
‘Apparently,’ Lisa was saying, ‘he gave them a real sob story. He didn’t know what came over him. Burn-out, he guessed. He’d been working so hard. He’d never forgive himself for hurting you so badly, for messing up his own life, come to that. He loves you more than he thought possible, and just wants the chance to put things right. But he didn’t know where you were working, how to contact you—blah-blah-blah. And you know Mum. A soppy romantic if there ever was one. She went and got all dewy-eyed and sentimental and told him where you were, working with a cancer patient. And—this is more than a guess—I know he’ll be turning up any time now. As soon as he can fix time off from that supposedly mega-impressive job of his in the City. I wanted to warn you. I don’t think you’re the type to go all gooey when a guy gets down on his knees and begs forgiveness with crocodile tears in his eyes, but some women just might—’
‘Not this one!’ Bonnie got to her feet, a smile twitching at the corners of her expressive mouth. The nerve of the man! Though if Lisawas right, and Troy Frobisher didwant them to get back together, and she had been head over heels in love with him, then she might be deluded enough to believe whatever he said and spend the rest of her life regretting her gullibility.
She turned to her sister. ‘Thanks for the warning. We’ll talk more later—after lunch. Don’t worry, I won’t be taken in by him—or any man, come to that. And I’ve got something to tell you that’ll knock spots off the prospect of any sick-making visit from an exfiancé!’
Andreas Papadiamantis could be a charming companion when he wanted to be, and if ensuring that his surprise house-guest felt welcome and relaxed while she enjoyed the lavish hospitality of his home was his objective then he’d succeeded magnificently.
Over lunch at the polished stone-topped table in a cool, airy dining room, his gaunt, still-handsome features softened as he glanced between the sisters, smoothly switching subjects.
‘Touching on your amusing description of your need for strictness with your clients, I must tell you that my nurse—your sister—is also a formidable woman,’ he told Lisa. ‘When I was first diagnosed and taken in for treatment I insisted on a total news blackout. I am not the powerful business force I once was, but I still have assets—the remainder of a once dominant chain of luxury hotels. If the shareholders got wind of my possible demise the value could drop like a stone.
‘Bonnie was apprised of the situation when she took over my remedial care, and I tell you, although I employ a security staff, she made them look like amateurs! She was like a lioness defending her cub.’ He lifted his bony shoulders in a dismissive shrug. ‘I have lived with press interest for most of my life, but it has increased to intolerable proportions since my son set out to ruin me. She sent them flying—literally!’ He chuckled, his black eyes dancing. ‘She found one clinging to a tree that overhangs the perimeter wall on the far side of the estate. She knocked him off his perch with a handy stout stick!’
Bonnie blushed at the reminder. She’d felt dreadful afterwards, and had sent Spiro, one of the security men, out to discover if the snooper had been hurt. Thankfully there’d been no sign of the man or his camera.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of,’ she told the grinning Lisa, and laid down her fork, her healthy appetite dwindling.
It disappeared altogether when her patient said, ‘Bonnie saved my life. I truly believe that. Oh, the doctors did their part, I don’t deny that, but mentally I had given up. Until Bonnie arrived and chivvied me out of it—taught me how to laugh, really laugh, for perhaps the first time in my life, to take things less seriously.’ His eyes clouded. ‘To take a long hard look at my life, recognise my mistakes and vow to do better. I know her agency will move her on to look after some other ailing creature when I get the final all-clear—’
‘Which you have,’ Bonnie put in, wanting to stop all this embarrassing stuff.
Andreas ignored her, explaining to Lisa, ‘I don’t want to lose her. Selfish I may be, but she has been so good for me.’ His quirky grin was self-mocking. ‘I even went so far as to ask her to marry me, but showing great wisdom she declined—much to an old man’s disappointment!’ He dabbed his mouth with his napkin. ‘Now I must leave you both for my afternoon rest—as my good nurse insists.’
There was a heavy silence until the door closed behind Andreas, and then Lisa exploded, ‘What was all that about?’ She raised one arched brow. ‘Did he really pop the question?’
‘Come on.’ Bonnie rose from the table and brushed a stray crumb from the front of the white lawn sleeveless blouse she’d teamed with an apricotcoloured cotton skirt. ‘We’ll find somewhere to talk.’
It was the hottest part of the day, and usually she spent her off-duty hour in the pool, but today that pleasure would have to be deferred. She was intent on unburdening herself.
For the past week she’d been itching to do just that, but there’d been no one to confide in. Now, like a gift from above, Lisa had arrived. She couldn’t choose a better confidante than her sister—her best friend.
She led the way to one of the immense salons, elaborately furnished in the high baroque style. She privately thought it was more like a self-conscious museum than a comfy home. But at least the air-conditioning kept the interior of the villa pleasantly cool.
‘Grief!’ Lisa’s eyebrows arched up to her hairline. ‘Who did the Disney decor?’
‘The Sugar Plum Fairy?’ Bonnie grinned, plonking down on a stiffly upholstered two-seater settee and patting the space beside her.
A week ago, during her early-evening perambulation of the extensive grounds with her patient, Andreas had suggested they sit awhile in one of the strategically placed vine-covered arbours.
Concerned that the old man who had made such excellent progress was feeling unwell, she had been knocked speechless when he’d come out with, ‘Will you be my wife, Bonnie? I do not ask this lightly. You have brought optimism back into my life, given me hope where before there was only bleak emptiness. When I was at my weakest you gave me strength. I find I don’t want to be without your life-enhancing company, your warmth and strength. I have been lonely for too long.’
Bonnie had gulped. The pleading darkness of the old man’s eyes had made her feel terrible. She knew that patients often got—well, crushes, for want of a better word, on their nurses, and they just as soon got over them. But Andreas was, as he’d said, so lonely. He had no friends as far as she could tell, and no family. No one to visit with bunches of grapes, no one to phone for progress reports or even send get well cards. No one. Nothing.
Too flummoxed to think of anything sensible to say, Bonnie had felt her insides shrinking until her stomach felt like a particularly tough walnut.
‘It would be a marriage in name only,’ Andreas assured her. ‘I would make no sexual demands upon you. You would have the protection of my name—and my name still means something, even though my second son is crushing my various businesses into the ground. I have a personal fortune in a Swiss bank account—entirely separate from my business affairs. Upon our marriage it will be yours, to give you security for life. In return all I would ask of you would be your constant company and your promise to intercede with my son on my behalf.’
‘I didn’t know you had any sons!’ Bonnie blurted, seizing on the outrage she felt on his behalf at his offspring’s obvious uncaring neglect, in order to put off the moment when she would have to turn his marriage proposal down flat. And hadn’t he said something about this second son running his business into the ground? Coming from a close-knit, loving family herself, she couldn’t think of anything more chillingly vile!
‘I need to be frank with you.’ He took her hands. Her first instinct was to withdraw them, but the beginnings of pity took over as he confessed, ‘My near brush with death has made me take stock of my life. I have too many regrets. My first marriage was arranged. We didn’t love each other. At the time love wasn’t important, or so I thought. There was no room in my busy life for pointless emotion. I saw emotion as a weakness. Building up my business empire was all that mattered. She—Alexandrina—died shortly after giving birth to my firstborn son, Theo.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘I honestly think she died to get away from me—and that’s a heavy weight on my conscience.’
He paused, as if remembering something dark that had been buried for too long and then, his voice strengthening, continued, ‘I remarried within a year. A man in his prime has certain needs, and taking a mistress entails a certain expenditure of time and effort—time that could be more profitably spent on business concerns.’
‘And taking a wife doesn’t mean spending time and effort?’ asked Bonnie, appalled.
Andreas sighed deeply. ‘I am telling you this to showyou the man Iwas then. The type of man whose first unloved and unconsidered wife died to escape him, and whose second wife eventually ran off with another man. Whose firstborn son left home as soon as he hit eighteen because—as he said—I drove him too hard, expected too much, used criticism as our only mode of conversation. I never saw him again. He left my home, refused to join the business as I had planned since his birth, so I washed my hands of him. He died of a heroin overdose in Paris five years later.’
His hands tightened on hers. ‘I am not proud of what I was. I have been a failure as a husband, as a father. As a human being. I see all this now, and I cannot tell you how deeply I regret it all. Regret all that I was, all that I was not. But most of all I regret that I have not seen my second son since he was fourteen years old—and that he has made himselfmy enemy.’
He took a deep breath. Warm darkness was closing in, the great scarlet ball of the sun sinking low on the horizon. ‘That is why I would ask you, were you to agree to be my wife, to stand by my side and give me courage, to intercede with my remaining son on my behalf. I want to get to know him, make amends if I can. I dream of turning his enmity into friendship—or, if that cannot be managed, a sense of kinship. I don’t want to leave this life having no one of my blood to mourn my passing.’
Bonnie felt her throat tighten, felt moisture gather in her eyes. She was so sorry for him. Poor old guy! On the face of it, he’d deserved all he got. But hewas obviously truly repentant over his past deeply dreadful shortcomings. His recent near death experience had opened his eyes to his failures with shocking clarity.
Surely he deserved a second chance?
But she had to make one thing clear. Gently, she withdrew her hands from his. ‘Andreas,’ she began firmly, ‘I’m fond of you.’
And she was. They’d hit it off from the start. She always gave her patients the best care she could, even if they were real miseries! But Andreas had been different—responding positively to all her medical demands, never once complaining. She tried her best to like all her charges, even if they were impossible, but with this old guy she hadn’t had to try.
‘But I can’t marry you,’ she said softly. ‘It’s immensely flattering, but in my book marriage should be more than a contract, with money changing hands. Companionship comes into it, of course, but there has to be so much more. I will promise one thing. I’ll do my utmost to try and put things right between you and your son, but you must tell me how to go about it.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ Lisa had listened in total silence as Bonnie had recounted that conversation verbatim. ‘What are you going to say to this estranged son of his? It won’t be easy—but I guess you know that.’
‘I’ll think of something,’ Bonnie replied, with a confidence she was far from feeling.
Deep down she felt thiswas a no-win situation. On the one hand, the firstborn son’s reaction to his father’s harsh idea of parenting made it no surprise that the second-born should have followed suit. But surely that didn’t excuse his apparently ruthless drive to ruin his father?Aguy had to be really mean-minded to start out on that track, and by all accounts never give up.
Quite how she’d get through to him she had no idea. But she’d promised to do what she could, and she never went back on a promise.
CHAPTER TWO
‘STAVROS!’
The sharp call cut through the searing afternoon heat, a hollow boom as the sea surged against the base of the cliffs. Suddenly feeling insecure in her resting place, a handy shady niche among the high rocks, Bonnie listened to the following spate of Greek and understood not a word, only the tone. Whoever was issuing what she suspected were orders was a guy who expected to be obeyed smartish, no questions asked. Her mouth quirked wryly. She pitied this Stavros if he was neglecting some duty or other.
Holding on to the wall of the blisteringly hot rock face, Bonnie got gingerly to her feet, stowed herwater bottle, and hitched the leather strap of her canvas bag over her head and shoulder. At least there was someone around who could point her in the right direction.
Two days ago a workhorse of a ferry had deposited her and a load of what had looked like second-hand agricultural machinery on the quayside of this tiny harbour town, its pastel-coloured squat houses clustering around the deep water inlet, backed by hills thick with gnarled and ancient olive trees.
‘It is not a tourist destination. Only the occasional backpacker visits,’ Andreas had told her. ‘From what I gather it boasts only one road, a handful of basic shops and tavernas. The lifestyle is low-key and traditional, which is why the seriously wealthy build holiday homes there, attracted by the peace and quiet. My son is one of that select number. He is there now, and my feeling is that you may find him more approachable while he is in a relaxed mood.’
If she could find him!
The mention of Dimitri Kyriakis had been rewarded with blank stares from the locals, and the widow Athena Stephanides, with whom she was lodging, courtesy of Andreas’s deep purse, had merely shrugged. ‘Sorry. I know of no one with that name.’
The only option she had was to head south, to the area where the super-rich built their luxurious hideaways. Complete, so Athena had divulged with much raising of eyebrows, with helipads and swimming pools of Olympian proportions. Then she’d clammed up, as if regretting that she’d said that much.
It would appear that the locals guarded the privacy of their wealthy incomers. And in all fairness Bonnie couldn’t really blame them, because they obviously boosted the island economy, recruiting permanent and temporary staff from amongst the close-knit island families.
So she had no choice but to head down there and knock on doors—provided she could get past security fences and prowling guard dogs! She wasn’t looking forward to it, but she had promised Andreas. Besides, she wanted to help the poor old guy, because the mistakes he’d made in the past were now deeply regretted, were troubling him, and if she could help him put them right then she was up for it.
Her idea of following the coastline and then striking inland to the southern tip of the island where the secluded villas of the mega-wealthy were located didn’t seem as brilliant now as it had when she’d pored over a rudimentary map of the island after breakfast.
She might have made better progress if she had followed the long, dusty road that led over the high spine of the island. It might have been tedious in the extreme, but it wouldn’t have been as hairy as this coastal shortcut was proving to be.
Far too many feet below her, deep green translucent water swelled and subsided. It made her feel giddy. Telling herself she wouldn’t fall into the ocean, she wasn’t that stupid, she gritted her teeth and edged forward around the outcrop, heading for what her map had told her was a small horseshoeshaped bay. From there, as far as she could make out, an unmade track led further south, skirting the central rocky spine of the island.
Successfully negotiating the obstacle, she paused, expelled the breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, then sucked in another, deeper gulp of air. The cove below her was idyllic, but even more spectacular was the man walking along the waterline carrying driftwood.
Tall, tanned, magnificently built, his sleek musculature of wide shoulders and deep chest narrowed down to lean hips clad in shabby, ragged-hemmed denim cut-offs.
Stavros?
His long, relaxed stride halted as he turned and stared out to sea. He hadn’t seen her, clinging to the rocks high above. Suddenly it seemed imperative that she get down to him. Only to ask him to point her in the right direction for the track that would take her to her objective, of course. Conversing, if only briefly, with such a gorgeous hunk would be a bonus!
Grinning at her very natural female folly, she began to scramble on, and caught her foot in a fissure. She let out a yelp of pain, and cursed herself roundly for not looking where she was going.
Clinging awkwardly to the rock, she bent to rub the offending ankle, a slippery hank of long silvery blonde hair falling over her face as it escaped the pins that had secured it in a knot on top of her head. A sob of frustration blocked her throat as she discovered that she couldn’t put her weight on the foot.
Now how was she going to get back? Get anywhere? There was no public transport on the tiny island, and even if she could hobble—or crawl!—to the only proper road some way inland she might have to wait hours before she could thumb a lift in some passing truck back to the small fishing port where she was based.
‘Stay where you are.’
Annoyance with herself, and frustration over her self-inflicted plight, had driven the stranger on the shore below right out of her mind. But now—well, he had abandoned the driftwood and was climbing up towards her, with a lithe efficiency that widened her smoky grey eyes with admiration and made her heart pump a little faster.
Close to, he was even more knee-tremblingly sensational than her first assessment had led her to believe. And as that first assessment had given him top marks plus in the eye candy category, all Bonnie could do was stare while her entire body went into melting jelly mode.
His face was as stunning as the rest of him. No pretty-boy good-looks these. Hard lines and an angular bone structure carried the stamp of the alpha adult male. Tough, darkly shadowed jawline, and silky black hair, eyes as dark as jet.
Her own eyes fell in a trembling heartbeat to a wide mouth that was a shattering mixture of the sensual and the ruthless.
Wordlessly, he was returning the shockingly intimate intentness of her visual assessment and Bonnie dropped her eyes, her face flaming as something like an electric charge skittered through her.
His bare feet were planted firmly apart on the rock as he finally spoke, his deep, only faintly accented voice sending ripples down her spine. ‘You are hurt. Will you trust me to get you down from this place?’
Pulling herself together, Bonnie found her voice. ‘Of course. Thank you. I’d be grateful.’ She attempted a smile. It wobbled. What was wrong with her? She had both her feet firmly on the ground—metaphorically, if not physically at this precise moment—and she wasn’t the air-headed type to go to pieces just because she’d happened across the most lip-smackingly gorgeous man to inhabit the planet.
She was a practical, down-to-earth qualified remedial nurse and—
Every last sensible thought was swept out of her head as the gorgeous stranger hoisted her, without apparent effort, into a fireman’s lift and carried her down the steep rocks with the surefootedness of a mountain goat.
Carefully depositing her on the soft white sand, he hunkered down in front of her, long, deft fingers gently exploring her injured foot.
His touch was magic. A lock of soft black hair fell forwards over his tanned forehead. She wanted to run her fingers through it.
Stupid woman!
She was shivering all over.
Merely the entirely natural after-effects of her hairy passage down from the cliffs!
Only she hadn’t felt scared. She’d felt safe—gloriously safe.
‘Just a slight sprain and a tiny cut,’ he pronounced, a smile playing at the corners of that devastating mouth. ‘I’ll take you to the house and clean the cut.’
Forcing herself out of the entirely unwelcome ditzy-schoolgirl-meets-pop-star mode, Bonnie located her best no-nonsense voice and used it. ‘You’ve been very kind already, but—Stavros, is it?—I don’t want to put you to any more trouble on my account. I’m sure that if I just rest a while I’ll be fine to go on.’
Dimitri Kyriakis didn’t correct her.
She must have heard him calling to his manservant/minder, to remind him to drive down to the port to collect the incoming mail that had been waiting for two days since the weekly ferry had docked.
The longer his father’s blonde, gold-digging bimbo remained in ignorance of his true identity the better.
His father had taste, though, he conceded grimly. The bimbo was even more enticingly sexy in the flesh than she’d appeared in the photograph. All that long, silky pale blonde hair, falling in a tousled touchable mass to well below her shoulders.
Pretty shoulders, sleek of skin, warm with tan, partially concealed by the turquoise-blue halter top that lovingly cradled truly superb full and shapely breasts. Her cropped top left her tanned midriff naked and tempting above a pair of skimpy shorts. And those legs—
‘It will be no trouble,’ Dimitri contradicted her truthfully. ‘It would be my pleasure to help you.’
Help you to unburden yourself, to tell me exactly what a woman with her eyes on the opportunity to marry an old man for his money is doing scrambling around on an island hardly anyone has heard about, out of her preferred milieu of fancy restaurants, swish hotels and designer boutiques.
Unless, of course, the old man was with her. It seemed unlikely. And did she know that Andreas Papadiamantis was facing a vastly reduced financial status? He guessed not.
She would run like a rabbit if he told her. There was only one reason a beautiful young woman would shack up with an old man, he decided, with the cynicism born of long experience of the female sex. Inform her of the non-existence of the bottomless pit of money and she’d take to her toes.
Yet there was a more entertaining way of depriving his enemy of his bed companion, he thought, staring into a pair of beguiling smoke-grey eyes.
He had never had any trouble in attracting the female sex. Quite the opposite. But he never knew whether his personality was the attraction or his massive wealth.
The latter, he suspected.
It cut both ways. On the few occasions when he’d taken a mistress, he had made it plain that he didn’t do long-term.
So what was new? Earlier he’d played with the idea of settling down, creating a family. Seeing the photograph of this blonde had had the idea taking a nosedive. Meeting the blonde in the flesh had killed it stone-dead. For a while. The fates had delivered another chance to take his revenge for what his father had done all those long years ago right into his lap.
Never one to lose an opportunity, Dimitri swept the delectable gift from the fates up into his arms. His smile as she wound her arms around his neck with a gaspy little sigh was grim. And satisfied.
He had her!
CHAPTER THREE
DIMITRI deposited her on a padded cane chair in the shadiest part of the vine-covered, granite-paved terrace. His heavy-lidded, lash-veiled eyes moved with lazy assessment over her body, taking in the tempting swell of her full breasts, tiny waist and voluptuous hips, resting finally on her wide, generous mouth.
Mistress material.
Quite definitely.
Yet as far as he knew—and he had tracked his enemy through the years with the dedication of a jungle cat stalking its prey—his father didn’t take high-maintenance mistresses. He’d come to know how the older man’s mind worked.
Too great an expenditure of time, effort and money was involved in establishing a mistress.
He would regard it as an unnecessary indulgence.
A wife was different. A wife could be safely ignored, treated as part of the furniture until he had need of her. His extra-marital adventures were furtive backstairs episodes, if his poor mother’s sorry experience was anything to go by.
This bimbo would be angling for a wedding ring. She was no wide-eyed innocent to be dazzled simply by the attentions of her lord and master—not the way she looked, she wasn’t!
Aware that he could be in danger of making assumptions, he mentally ran over the known facts. His father had been off the radar for several months, holed up in his luxurious villa. With this blonde?
Judging by that photograph, she had already got herself firmly embedded in his father’s villa, up close and personal, and an announcement in the press that Andreas Papadiamantis was to take wife number three would appear in the very near future. It was practically a certainty.
How his enemy would be congratulating himself that he had got such a luscious creature to warm his old bones and his bed, whenever he chose to avail himself of such comforts.
Unless he, Dimitri Kyriakis, stopped it.
And that could be fun, as well as turning the screw a little tighter.
Bonnie squirmed against the cushions. She could feel a blush spreading all over her. The way this Stavros guy was looking at her was seriously unsettling.
Everywhere his hot gaze wandered it felt as if he was actually touching her. Her heartbeat quickened and fire licked her skin, a languorous warmth spreading through her, hot and heady, making her breasts feel swollen and heavy, their tips standing to attention within the confines of her halter top. This rivetingly sexy guy could so easily make her forget she was a sensible adult woman, with her head firmly screwed on.
Once bitten twice shy, she reminded herself staunchly.
Though being nibbled by those strong white teeth would be no hardship at all!
Struggling to find something mundane to say, to break the spiralling sexual tension, Bonnie expelled a gusty sigh of relief when he came to her aid.
‘I’ll make that ankle more comfortable. Wait here.’ He disappeared through open, immense sliding glass doors into what she guessed to be his boss’s luxury home.
Stavros’s temporary absence gave Bonnie a much needed breathing space, and the opportunity to don her sensible hat again. So, OK, he was the most charismatic, sexy guy she’d ever come across. But better than that he was probably local, working for one of the island’s wealthy incomers. The chances were he would be able to tell her where to find the elusive Dimitri Kyriakis.
True, according to Andreas, his estranged son only used his island villa occasionally. But on the upside, in a small place like this everyone knew everyone else. It was a close-knit community, with the locals making a living as best they could from the sea and the land. The local grapevine would be buzzing with the doings, the to-ing and fro-ings, of the wealthy other half.
So her smile was radiantly expectant when he reappeared, carrying what appeared to be enough medical supplies to stock a medium-sized pharmacy.
‘I think you could help me,’ she opened, as he knelt in front of her and began to clean the cut on her ankle with cotton wool soaked in something really soothing.
Dimitri frowned. That smile of hers would light up a room. But what gave him pause was the complete lack of artifice. In his experience gold-diggers—and that included beautiful young women who would marry an old man for his money—had artifice oozing from every pore. ‘That is what I’m doing,’ he stated, dabbing the cut dry and applying a plaster.
‘No—I mean—yes. What I mean is—’ Bonnie tried quite desperately to ignore the fluttery feeling that had taken over her insides as soon as those long, cool fingers of his had touched her skin. Tried to stop wanting to run her fingers through the thick, silky black hair that fell in such intriguing disarray over his downbent head. She wanted to touch it so much it was almost a physical pain. ‘I mean—well, I’m trying to locate someone.’
‘Yes?’ Dimitri bound her ankle tightly, and deftly secured the bandage with a tiny pin. It seemed as if he was about to discover what his father’s woman was doing on the island. ‘That should support it adequately, though you’ll have to rest it for a couple of days. You were saying?’ he prompted coolly.
Bonnie blinked. Having this hunk kneeling at her feet took her breath away. No man, not even Troy—and she’d been on the brink of marrying him, for goodness’ sake!—had ever had this effect on her.
Wondering where her sensible hat had got to, she pushed on. ‘He’s got a villa somewhere around here. He doesn’t come often, but he’s here now. And, oh—how silly!—you don’t know who I’m talking about! His name’s Dimitri Kyriakis—have you heard of him? Do you know where his place is?’
Dimitri got to his feet, straightening his lean, powerful figure to its full six feet three inches. His narrowed eyes were darkly probing, and the shock of hearing his name on his father’s bimbo’s lips hardened his voice. ‘Why do you want to know?’
Very few people knew of his bolthole. No more than three. All of them were completely trusted, loyal employees who would die rather than disobey his orders. One of them being his manservant Stavros.
So it had to be down to his enemy. Andreas must have had his spies out, tracking him minutely even as he had tracked the older man through the years. It made sense. Dimitri’s brain clicked into overdrive. He didn’t like mysteries, and this one was solved in ten seconds flat.
He could think of at least two reasons why the old man had sent this woman to find him.
To push him over a cliff to get rid of him.
Or, and far more likely, to use every feminine wile and trick in the book to get close to him and learn of his future intentions via pillow talk.
Did the old man think he would be that indiscreet? That much of a sucker?
But it would be interesting to find out how far she was prepared to go…
Bonnie’s heart was busily sinking. For a moment there Stavros had looked really intimidating. And now draining disappointment had taken her over. Was he going to be the same as the other islanders? Button-lipped when it came to giving information about the revered wealthy part-time residents on whom a large part of the island economy depended? It certainly looked like it.
And there was no way she could answer his question. The reason Andreas wanted her to contact Dimitri Kyriakis was between him and his son—private, and not to be given out to the first stranger who asked. She felt utterly hopeless, and, as that was an emotion she had never encountered before, faintly queasy.
Then everything changed.
‘I will make enquiries for you.’
In receipt of the shatteringly charismatic smile that came her way, accompanied by that welcome and unexpected offer of help, Bonnie breathed, ‘Thank you! I’d be so grateful!’ and wondered why she sounded like a giddy schoolgirl instead of the sensible woman she knew herself to be.
Just how grateful? Dimitri wondered, marvelling at the tightening of his groin at the prospect of finding out—an instant physical reaction he hadn’t experienced since he was a teenager.
He leaned forward and took her hands. And as his fingers tightened around hers and he met her huge smoky eyes he knew that finding out would be no problem for either of them.
She oozed warm, womanly willingness from the hazy eyes, the parted pink lips and the hardening swell of her bounteous breasts, confined by the thin top she was wearing. She was hot for him. He would swear to it.
He discreetly screened his dark eyes beneath thickly fringing black lashes. Play it cool—see how far she would go. If she’d taken her orders from his father to seduce him into revealing his future plans, then she would have to work for the privilege of sharing his bed. Providing he could keep his amazingly rampant libido in check, it would amuse him to watch her at work.
And when he submitted, as he knew he eventually would—because why would he deny himself the undoubted pleasure?—she would learn nothing from him, have only failure to report.
He knew himself to be a past master at getting what he wanted with the least effort to himself. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.
He was still holding her hands. It felt more than good. He was a total stranger, and she knew nothing about him. But he made her feel safe. Because he’d come to her rescue when she’d been floundering around on those rocks? Had promised to help her locate the whereabouts of Andreas’s son? Or was there more to it than that?
‘By the harbour, with Athena—the widow Stephanides,’ she answered, her voice strangely thick, her mouth trembling just a little as he slid his hands until they rested beneath her elbows.
‘I know her.’ He helped her to stand on her uninjured foot, a supportive arm sliding around her small waist. ‘It is well known that she caters for the occasional backpacker who turns up on the island. But you are no backpacker.’
A thread of humour laced his voice as the pressure of his arm brought her lush body into closer contact with his. With his free hand he brushed the silvery fall of her hair away from her face with gentle fingers. ‘You are on a man-hunt, ne?’
Wild colour flooded Bonnie’s cheeks. Her lips parted but no sound emerged. Put like that, it sounded awful—full of wicked sexual connotations. And she felt wicked, she thought chaotically. Her body was straining against this half-naked man, his bare torso hot and hard against her tingling breasts, his naked thighs tangling with hers.
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